Newsweek: Real and Surreal (Condi's visit to Iraq highlights disconnect)

[Pirate Smile]

Real and Surreal

Condoleezza Rice went to Baghdad to tell the Iraqis to ‘get governing.’ What she did was highlight the disconnect between the Green Zone and the rest of the country.



Web-Exclusive Commentary
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 11:57 a.m. ET April 3, 2006

April 3, 2006 - There’s nothing like roaring into Baghdad aboard a Rhino. A Rhino is a giant, heavily-armored bus that can withstand IEDs (small ones), and it is now the favored means of keeping Western visitors from getting blown to bits by these homemade bombs on the dangerous road between Baghdad International Airport and the secure Green Zone at the city’s center. “Rhino” is an appropriately Disney-ish name for these wheeled monstrosities, adding to the surreal feeling one gets in moving from the howling chaos outside the Green Zone into the theme park-like confines within. You drive through several checkpoints, leaving behind tracts of litter and rubble and the desperate, dark faces of ordinary Iraqis trying to earn a few dinars. There, behind high concrete blast walls and razor wire, you find quiet streets and the heart of the American occupation: a double-sized Olympic pool with a palm-fretted patio restaurant, food courts and a giant coffee lounge where lessons in belly dancing and martial arts are offered. All these are huge improvements from the last time I was in Baghdad, two years ago. And all are intended for the Westerners who dwell in increasing comfort here.

The Green Zone, a vast secure, American area plunked down in the heart of the Baghdad (imagine foreign occupiers taking over the Mall in Washington, D. C.), was supposed to have been temporary. Like the occupation itself, it was an interim phase, a set of training wheels for the New Iraq. But as those of us who accompanied Condoleezza Rice on her surprise visit to Iraq learned this week, the lines between the real and surreal in Iraq—between what’s happening outside the Green Zone and within—are only hardening. They are getting bolder and clearer, rather than more blurred. Outside the Green Zone the sectarian violence is worsening—ensuring future dysfunction, if perhaps not outright civil war or breakup of the country. Inside the Green Zone a few Iraqi politicians live in splendor and permanent American structures are going up—including a new U.S. embassy that did not await the OK of the new government-to-come—and it’s hard to find an ordinary Iraqi anywhere. In fact, several people remarked that speaking Spanish is more useful than Arabic when making one’s way through the palatial embassy grounds.

Secretary of State Rice came here to bring the surreal and the real closer into contact. Acting on the orders of an increasingly anxious George W. Bush (so she admitted under questioning), she and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw spent a day reading the riot act to the bickering Iraqi politicians and telling them to “get governing,” as Bush put it. She and Straw, sensing like everyone that their historical reputations are on the line (as are those of Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair), are hoping to break the stalemate that has kept the leading Iraqi political parties from forming a unity government for nearly four months. But again, reflecting the Green Zone prism, Rice and Straw seemed not to understand that a genteel coalition government, as designed by U.S. authorities, may not be what Iraq needs right now. What Iraq needs is strong leadership.

For Washington, the biggest problem is that despite increasing American desperation to pull out, the U.S. presence is gradually getting woven into the very fabric of the new Iraq, much as the Green Zone (now euphemistically called the “international zone”) is getting a permanent look. Picture NATO troops in Bosnia—there more than a decade and counting—and then multiply that pathological dependence several times over. So terrified are most Shia leaders of Sunni insurgents that they regularly blanch when faced with the prospect of U.S. withdrawal. So terrified are the Sunnis of Shiite militias that they insist on having Americans accompany any Iraqi military units that move into their towns. Absent U.S. guidance and advisors, the Iraqi army will become a Shiite Army, and the Sunni community will become a sea for the insurgency to swim in once again. When the war started, some observers worried that Iraq might become America’s “51st state,” a virtual protectorate of Washington’s. Today the worry is that America has become Iraq’s 19th province—and the most important one in the country.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12132994/site/newsweek/

[Inland]

1. "Iraq needs strong leadership". Hmmmm. nt

[snowbear]

2. ---> Look at this news coming out in the morning !!!!

It's just UN-FREAKEN-BELIEVABLE !!!!!

*** They are literally taking one step foward, THREE STEPS BACK !! ***

Iraq's interior ministry refusing to deploy US-trained police

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1746233,00.html?gusrc=rss

[Pirate Smile]

3. They want their loyal militias, not the US-trained police. What a

disaster - again.

[Neil Lisst]

4. Condi is a wind up doll. Pull her string and talking points come out.

WE'RE CONCERNED WITH THE PROCESS.

WE'RE MAKING PROGRESS.

THE PRESIDENT'S VISION IS A FREE AND DEMOCRATIC IRAQ.