Our Own Private Syriana

With all the 24/7 coverage of the carnage in Lebanon and Israel, not much attention has been paid to the deepening disaster in Iraq. An LA Times article describes the escalating, cold-blooded violence that took another 100 lives in Iraq on Sunday alone:

Victims of the Sadr City bombing, which residents attributed to a suicide bomber, included poor Shiite teenagers who operate vending stands selling groceries to support their families during summer break. Officials said 70 people were wounded in the bombing.

... Many U.S. and Iraqi officials say Shiite militias, many with ties to the highest echelons of political power, represent a greater danger to Iraqi security than Sunni insurgents. At least 21 bodies of men believed to be Sunni Arabs were discovered in western and central Baghdad on Sunday, all of them shot in the head and bearing signs of torture in the style attributed to Shiite militiamen with possible ties to the Interior Ministry.

This is how a Reuters story describes the rapidly deteriorating situation:

Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead. Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.

... Broadly speaking Iraq could split in three: a Shi'ite south, Kurdish north and Sunni Arab west. But there could be fierce fighting between Arabs and Kurds for Mosul and for Kirkuk's oil as well as urban war in Baghdad, resembling Beirut in the 1970s.

If anyone can figure out what's in the minds of Bush and the neocons other than a pathological hunger for some sort of demented, nihilistic oil empire that flourishes amid total cultural breakdown, let me know.

Think: the utter destruction we've caused in Iraq has unleashed the Shi'ite militias there, yet we're making emergency shipments of bunker buster bombs to the Israeli military to drop on Shi'ite neighborhoods in Lebanon. We're allegedly seeking to construct democracies by winning hearts and minds, yet every strategy we pursue seems designed to stir up more anti-American fervor and radicalize even moderates. Nothing is being built except American military bases. Stability in the region decreases with each passing day. Hatred is suckled. Order is deconstructed. There are needless and brutal deaths on all sides.

More and more, Bush's complicated weaving of various strains of corruption, chaos, cold-blooded opportunism and wreckless violence into an ugly patchwork quilt of aggression and greed resembles the portrait of oil mongering insanity presented in the movie "Syriana."

We watched it this weekend and thought it captured the deadly and confusing madness of the Bush era to a tee. The shots of George Clooney in Beirut were especially jarring given recent events. Have you seen it? The film's blurbs: This is about our interests in the region. Oil is running out and 90% of what's left is in the Middle East. This is a fight to the death. Everything is connected."