"That unpopularity also taints the American-appointed Governing Council, which makes the council's announcement yesterday of the selection of Iyad Alawi, one of its most prominent members, as interim prime minister disheartening. The choice of Mr. Alawi, a Shiite exile with close ties to former Baathist generals and to the Central Intelligence Agency, hardly signals a fresh start. The manner of his designation raises questions about the authority of the United Nations' special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi. Paul Bremer III, Washington's proconsul, didn't even give Mr. Brahimi time to announce his support for Mr. Alawi before striding into the council's meeting to offer congratulations.
<snip>
The United States is handing the interim government a deteriorating military situation. American commanders, desperate to avoid clashes heading into the June 30 transfer, have granted dangerous concessions to Sunni and Shiite insurgents, greatly strengthening the hand of sectarian militias answerable neither to Baghdad nor to Washington.
The latest deal, reached on Thursday in Najaf, handed a partial victory to an anti-American Shiite firebrand, Moktada al-Sadr. The arrest order against him has been "suspended," and he has been allowed to keep his Mahdi Army intact. In return, Mr. Sadr agreed to pull his fighters off the streets of Najaf, and most American soldiers will leave Najaf as well. Mr. Sadr offered a similar deal in mid-April, but Washington turned him down. In the ensuing weeks, relations with Iraq's Shiite majority grew increasingly — and, it now appears, unnecessarily — strained as American fire pressed ever closer to Najaf's sacred sites.
The climb-down in Najaf seems like a repeat of the cynical deal American commanders cut four weeks ago with Sunni rebels in Falluja, effectively turning the city over to former Baathist commanders acceptable to the insurgents. If America's military role is now reduced to partnering with the best-armed insurgents, it is doing nothing to make Iraq more governable by its future elected leaders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/29/opinion/29SAT1.html?pagewanted=print&position=(subscription needed)
So they're propping up a stooge and at the same time letting their two biggest troublemakers get away with a moral victory. It's the perfect recipe for disaster. Fallujah has become a city state looking more like Taliban V2.0 than anything and now Sadr, who has support of 35% OF Shiites according to a recent poll is also left standing a lot taller than before the U.S. decided to mess with him.
The more I see, the more certain I am that this will have a bad ending. The Americans are doing nothing right (check out the Looting story in LBN) and I can see Iraq eventually descending into a post-Tito like Yugoslavia. Heaven help us then, because once that happens this shitstorm crossed over into the surrounding countries.
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