Baghdad: Ground Zero

The military side of the war in Iraq was wrapped up in three weeks; but a year after the war began, its termination in any reasonably peaceful manner is far from reality. US casualties to resistance fighters, fidayeen bombers and random killers, have certainly come down. But the overall violence shows signs of increasing, especially with Iraqi police and law enforcement system — recreated by the US-led coalition — being targeted. The Moharram massacre of Shias would continue to haunt the country and its rulers for a long time.

Given the nature of the contradictory pulls and pressures that exist in the Iraq of today, the agreement on the interim constitution is clearly a positive development. But given the contradictions in Iraq from earlier times, and the new ones generated by the war especially in terms of ethno-sectarian tensions, this would obviously remain transitional. The US has backed off from its earlier plan of indirect elections and it is reasonably certain that direct elections would have to be held by the end of this year to draft the new constitution which will result in increased demands to transform Iraq from a traditionally plural, secular society and state into an “Islamic” one. One can only hope at this stage that ethno-political tensions would not create unmanageable centrifugal tendencies.

At the broader level, the war and its aftermath has had a profound influence on the nature of relations between the western alliance — making it far less aligned than what it was two years ago. The Iraq war and the immediate needs for stabilisation of post-war Iraq had certainly slowed down the US war on terrorism, especially against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, which have managed to regroup, thus compounding the problems for stabilisation of Afghanistan and normalisation of Pakistan. The the current US-Pakistani combined offensive has yet to produce telling results. Islamic jihad has already influenced the outcome of elections in Spain and its commitment to troops in Iraq. This marks an expansion of terrorism’s gains and goals that had been unanticipated thus far.