BAGHDAD — We may have dodged the bul­let.
Read­ers of this blog in recent days know that I’ve been very alarmed about the vio­lence going around me. I don’t live in the Green Zone, so I’m not insu­lated from it as much as they are, and I don’t give much heed to diplo­matic happy talk. But so far today, it seems quiet around Iraq and politi­cians seem — for the moment, at least — to have con­vinced their fol­low­ers to stand down. The Sun­nis have made noises about com­ing back to the nego­ti­at­ing table and that’s a good sign. There also was no evi­dence of any con­flict between var­i­ous parts of the secu­rity forces, which was a chief con­cern of mine, con­sid­er­ing how deeply embed­ded the var­i­ous mili­tias are to the police, Army, etc.
But still… The cur­few is due to lift tomor­row morn­ing at 6 a.m. Bagh­dad and its sur­round­ing towns are still piano-wire tense. The poten­tial for may­hem remains high. That said, I hope we won’t see a resump­tion of vio­lence tomor­row, despite the car­nage of the past four days.
It is as yet impos­si­ble to tally up the death and destruc­tion, but many (mostly Sunni) shrines and mosques have been either occu­pied and reded­i­cated, dam­aged or destroyed. At least 200 peo­ple have been killed across the coun­try and it’s prob­a­bly higher. I sim­ply don’t believe the Iraqi “government’s” asser­tions that only a few mosques were dam­aged and the loss of life much less than reported in the “exag­ger­at­ing” media. The track record for truth-telling by Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s “gov­ern­ment” is too tar­nished to take their sooth­ing words too seri­ously.
But, as I said, per­haps we dodged a bul­let on this. I said in an ear­lier post that we would be very, very lucky to avoid a civil war. Well, we may have got­ten so lucky.
This time.

BAGHDAD — It’s Sat­ur­day night in Bagh­dad, and it’s been a busy day. The funeral of a well-known jour­nal­ist was attacked west of Bagh­dad and one per­son was killed and four peo­ple injured. On the way back to town, the funeral pro­ces­sion hit an IED, which destroyed a car or two. An unknown num­ber of peo­ple were injured, but no one (else) was killed, thank good­ness.
In Kar­bala, a car bomb exploded at a police check­point on the out­skirts of the Shi’ite holy city, killing sev­eral police­men and an unknown num­ber of civil­ians. Weirdly, a man was appre­hended nearby who allegedly det­o­nated the bomb via remote con­trol. Reports are that he said the real tar­get was the shrine to Imam Hus­sayn in Kar­bala, which holier than the Askariya shrine destroyed in Samarra.
One of my staff mem­bers reports that there is fight­ing on his street tonight, and sev­eral neigh­bors have already been killed. He lives in a pri­mar­ily Sunni neigh­bor­hood in west Bagh­dad.
The cur­few was extended today to 6 p.m., but it is to be lifted tomor­row at 6 a.m. We’ll see what hap­pens. Right now, there’s a feel­ing that the ten­sion has eased some­what, but that may be false secu­rity. Shi’ite mili­ti­a­men, prob­a­bly Mahdi Army, and Sunni gun­men fought pitched bat­tles in the streets of south­ern Bagh­dad yes­ter­day and today, while the Iraqi police and Army — praised by the Amer­i­cans and the Iraqi “gov­ern­ment” for their pro­fes­sion­al­ism and effi­cacy — stood by and watched. Dur­ing the Lebanese Civil War (1975−1990), the Lebanese Army sat out much of the con­flict there, allow­ing mili­tias free reign. The same is hap­pen­ing here in Bagh­dad today.
It’s clear the author­i­ties, at least the ones who appear on tele­vi­sion with titles such as “Defense Min­is­ter” and “U.S. Ambas­sador,” have no clue what to do. Their strat­egy seems mainly to con­sist of bet­ting that Moq­tada al-Sadr and the hard­line Sunni group, the Mus­lim Cler­ics Asso­ci­a­tion, “really will make nice”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18278442%255E1702,00.html. Four sheikhs asso­ci­ated with al-Sadr and MCA spokesman Abdel Salam al-Qubasi pub­licly pledged a “pact of honor” and promised to end attacks. That’s nice. While these men were on tele­vi­sion play­ing polit­i­cal foot­sie, we had reports that their fol­low­ers were still try­ing to kill each other. There’s a real his­tory here of say­ing one thing and doing another. We’ll have to see.
More balder­dash from the Amer­i­cans, of course. U.S. Ambas­sador Zal­may Khalilzad gave another press con­fer­ence tonight in which he said the Iraqi “gov­ern­ment” was hold­ing lots of meet­ings, and that was good. Also, the Iraqi “gov­ern­ment” has decided to ban peo­ple “who should not have arms” from patrolling the streets. “I think the gov­ern­ment deci­sion to ban that was a good thing,” he said.
Well, sure. But in my expe­ri­ence, men with guns in their fists and rage in their hearts don’t wait around for their weapons license to come through when there’s killing to be done. And who is going to enforce this ban? The police? Badr Brigade mem­bers con­trol the police of most of the south­ern cities. An entire Pub­lic Order Bat­tal­ion in Bagh­dad is com­posed of Mahdi Army. In Anbar, most of the Army units are Shi’ites and Kurds. What hap­pens when Mahdi mili­ti­a­men run into a squad of their broth­ers in the police? Do you think they’ll turn in their guns? Or what hap­pens in Anbar, where many of the police forces in the cities are now local (Sunni Arab) guys? Do you think they’ll con­fis­cate the AK-47s of their _mujahideen_ broth­ers off to fight the Shi’ite mem­bers of the 1^st Divi­sion down the road?
I don’t.
We have reached a point where the facade of the “polit­i­cal process” has been shred­ded. The real power lies — and has always lain — in the hands of the sheikhs, the cler­ics — espe­cially Moq­tada — and the gun­men. The politi­cians in Bagh­dad can con­tinue their silly lit­tle exer­cise in gov­ern­ment build­ing and the Amer­i­cans and the for­eign diplo­matic corps can tell their audi­ences in their home coun­tries how much progress Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is mak­ing at build­ing bridges with Saleh Mut­lak. But we on the ground know the truth. We’re on the edge of a hot knife, and it’s get­ting hot­ter. There may be a pause now, but only for now. And we might have pulled back from the abyss just in time. This might end soon after all and my doom-saying will be proven wrong.
But I don’t think so. If there’s another bomb­ing of a Shi’ite shrine, or some other mas­sacre of Sun­nis, then all bets are off. Sis­tani has already instructed his fol­low­ers to take mat­ters into their own hands if the gov­ern­ment can’t keep them safe. For Iraqis, their fate appears to lie with the scruffy young men stand­ing at the ends of their streets, not with the politi­cians in the Green Zone.

Unbe­liev­able:

In Wash­ing­ton, the State Depart­ment insisted that US pol­icy in Iraq was suc­ceed­ing and denied that polit­i­cal nego­ti­a­tions had col­lapsed, only that they had paused. “Come on, let’s not blow this out of pro­por­tion,” said spokesman Adam Ereli. He denied reports of wide­spread vio­lence, speak­ing of “some incidents”.

Look, I’m really sorry real­ity is intrud­ing on your lit­tle fan­tasy but a lot of peo­ple are prob­a­bly going to die in the com­ing days and weeks because of the idea that if you just repeat some­thing enough times, it will come true.
Enough already. Shut your mouths; you peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton have caused enough dam­age already.

BAGHDAD — In an omi­nous sign rem­i­nis­cent of the atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in the Balkan Wars, the funeral of “Atwar Bah­jat, an al-Arabiya jour­nal­ist killed Wednesday”:http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1655859, is under attack right now in a west­ern sub­urb of Bagh­dad.
As I watched the cov­er­age this morn­ing, a cor­re­spon­dent trav­el­ing with the funeral party called into al-Arabiya, say­ing the funeral pro­ces­sion was under attack by gun­men in the neigh­bor­hood of al-Haswah, a Sunni area. The sound of gun­shots could clearly be heard around the cor­re­spon­dent and there was a note of panic in his voice. Four peo­ple have been injured and one killed, so far.
The funeral pro­ces­sion was a mixed Sunni and Shi’a affair, because Bahiat, a styl­ish 26-year-old female cor­re­spon­dent for al-Arabiya who was killed Wednes­day in Samarra as she was cov­er­ing the bomb­ing there, came from a mixed fam­ily. The funeral pro­ces­sion had police cars on either end of it, and this may have caused the inhab­i­tants of al-Haswah to believe the pro­ces­sion was led by Shi’as com­ing to attack them with gov­ern­ment sup­port.
Ten­sions here are so high that any no one should think of mov­ing between neigh­bor­hoods, or within a mixed neigh­bor­hood. The Amer­i­cans have been almost invis­i­ble, except for an air pres­ence. Apaches and Black­hawks buzz the city, snarling by over­head as their pilots watch the city’s mil­i­tants entrench them­selves for a bat­tle that, from the ground, seems inevitable.