November 19, 2003

The death toll on both sides is rising and George Bush's push to withdraw troops threatens to tear the country apart.

Even as more Americans die and their Black Hawks are picked off like sparrows, Washington is hatching an exit strategy - an instant plan to cut US troop numbers in Iraq and to have Iraqis run their own country.

Lately, US President George Bush, who arrives in Britain this morning Sydney time for a state visit, has been spinning his wheels. He has slid from asking Americans to "support our troops", a cover for the questionable means by which he landed an army in Iraq, to talking about thousands of troops coming home in the northern spring, a foil for the realisation that Iraq is not an easy land to tame.

Last weekend Bush humiliated his proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, when he dumped the "seven steps to sovereignty" plan, where the combat-booted Bremer controlled Iraq for as long as it took to teach Iraqis about democracy, after which they would be allowed to elect their own government.

But there is a risk that Bush's plans for a quick getaway ahead of next year's US presidential election may set the scene for civil war in post-Saddam Iraq.

The Pentagon says it must be allowed to control Iraq's security forces, even with a provisional government in place. But fresh from the victory of Washington's cave-in, some members of the existing Iraqi Governing Council want a significantly reduced security brief for the US.

Council members believe the proposed provisional government, to be appointed by June next year, should control counter-insurgency. Some of its members argue that Iraqi Kurdish forces in the north and the Shiite militias in the south could be used to undermine the Sunni fighters from the centre.

Others insist the Americans be confined to guard duty on Iraq's border and at oil facilities.

All that sounds like the civil war Washington said would never happen during the fierce international debate that preceded its invasion of Iraq in March this year.

The Sunnis are already stirring the pot, claiming the Shiites want to impose an Iranian-style theocracy, and the Kurds are wary they might be caught by these two in a pincer grip.

The question now is to what the extent the US will be able to control the process if it surrenders power to a provisional government, changing its own status from that of all-powerful occupation force to mere invited guest.

The US may find itself confronted by a daunting prospect it has always been able to brush aside with Bremer's power to veto any decision the governing council makes he does not like - having to sit back as competing religious and ethnic groups tear each otherapart. The US will have the power of persuasion - massive firepower and billions to dole out for reconstruction. But it may find that the priorities of a new provisional government are inconsistent with its plans for Iraq to become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

The US is now listening to France, Germany and Russia, which want it to adopt the post-war model used in Afghanistan, where a provisional government is appointed to run the country while a new constitution is drafted ahead of elections in 2005-06.

Sadly, Afghanistan inspires little confidence. Despite all the Bush rhetoric, the US performance in Afghanistan suggests it is less interested in installing an enduring democracy than in defeating terrorists and bringing its troops home.

Just a couple of weeks ago Bremer was sticking to his seven steps, telling reporters in Baghdad: "Shortcutting the process would be dangerous."

But with more Americans dying in eight months in Iraq than in the first three years in Vietnam, Washington was becoming desperate.

As the insurgency ran amok, Bremer last week realised he had crashed into the brick wall of Iraqi politicking. Try as he might, he could not get the Iraqi Governing Council, hand-picked by Washington, to complete the simple task of appointing a panel to draft a national constitution.

The Shiites, a 60-plus per cent majority in Iraq, had dug in their heels, insisting that membership of the panel should be by election. Needless to say, they knew they had the numbers.

The American collapse was a staggering win for the Shiites, whose most revered leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has remained aloof from the political squabbling - with the powerful exception of a fatwah in which he decreed that the membership of any constitutional convention must be by popular election.

It seems that many of us who rated the exile-dominated council as ineffectual misjudged it - what was seen as an inability to transact any business now seems to have been a stubborn refusal, which has forced Bush and Bremer deeper into the dangerous "don't know" territory that has bedevilled their Iraq adventure.

Nothing happening in Iraq at present could inspire any sensible discussion about pulling US troops out - the CIA reports that the insurgency is bolder and more effective, but the Pentagon says that US troops could be reduced by about 30,000 to 100,000 by May next year.

Clearly Bush wants the imagery of thousands of troops coming home as a backdrop for his election campaign. But that would be a dangerous collision of his foreign and domestic agendas because in truth, the US is likely to be stuck in its Iraq quagmire - we can now call it that - for years to come.

For all that, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told reporters at the weekend that "it's got nothing to do with domestic politics". That's absurd.

The US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, insisted that "nothing has changed". That's absurd, too.

But now the word from Europe, reportedly from the lips of Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the European Union, is that after months of insisting on US control of the occupation forces in Iraq, the US now accepts that if it is to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it will have to allow international control of the forces.

Solana was quoted in the The Independent in London: "Everybody has moved, including the US, because the US has a real problem and when you have a real problem you need help. We'll see in the coming days decisions along these lines."

That's not so absurd.