Not according to this report in today’s New York Times:
BASRA, Iraq — Politics, once seen as a solution to the problems of a society broken by years of brutal single-party rule, has paralyzed the heart of Iraq’s south. […]
Police reports from the past five months read like war chronicles: Eight oil company employees murdered. Twenty caches of Russian rockets discovered, including a pile in the back of an ambulance. A tank of stolen oil found in a fake mosque. Shootouts reported between a politician’s militia and the police, and between police officers.
Now, after two years of relative calm, Basra has a soaring murder rate (the 85 killings in May were nearly triple the number in January), a tattered oil industry and a terrified population.
(cont.)
It seems that Basra has become a city up from grabs between competing Shi’ite militias, gangsters and corrupt officials. Government institutions that once maintained order have disintegrated, and no coherent force has arisen to take their place. Instead, there’s a hodgepodge of competing factions, each seeking to gain the upper hand, and the benefits that would flow from control of Iraq’s principle port for the shipment of its oil wealth overseas.
Basra and its surrounding environs are home to the richest oil fields in Iraq, and the only infrastructure capable at this point of consistently delivering that oil to foreign buyers. It’s the biggest pearl lying in the muck of the pigpen created by our flawed occupation of Iraq.
For a long while the British, whose forces are the primary coalition force in the region had an easy go of it. Basra was the stable part of Iraq. Unlike Anbar province which has been torn apart by the Sunni insurgency, Basra with it’s predominant Shi’a population was relatively peaceful. But all that has now changed as the Shi’ite political factions and their armed militias wage a bloody private war within a war. The goal? Domination of the richest region of the country. In other words, it’s all about the oil:
Qadim al-Muqdadi, a professor in Baghdad University’s media college, explained: “Each political party believes he is better than the other at running the country. They don’t rely on the power of thought; they rely on the power of the gun and the tribe.”
At the heart of much of the fighting is oil. The fields in this province are the richest in Iraq, and the crude oil they pump makes up all of Iraq’s current exports, which in turn pay civil servants’ salaries. Officials in Baghdad say the parties and their militias play a major role in rampant theft. […]
Few in Basra would agree to speak openly about oil, and the industry has been impenetrable to Western officials in Basra, who said they could not even identify the major players.
“It’s not just one party, so everyone keeps silent,” said a provincial council member, who asked for anonymity out of concern for his safety. “If you tell about me, I tell about you.”
Not surprisingly, much of the blame for the current situation can be traced to mismanagement by the Coalition. George Bush once said he wasn’t in the nation building business. Truer words were never spoken. It seems that much of the violence has been exacerbated by the rush to create a police force in Basra to handle security. In their hurry to create a viable Iraqi police force in Basra, corners were cut, and the competing Shi’a militias were able to pack the force with their own members without any effective oversight by the British. Now those mistakes are coming back to haunt them:
One result is a force that has 37,000 members, 50 percent more than authorized, spread across the four provinces patrolled by the British in southeast Iraq, according to Col. Sundey Sunderland, who is in charge of logistics planning for the British military. (Also, the Facilities Protection Service, which guards schools, oil rigs and mosques and has been heavily infiltrated by militias, numbers 25,000.)
There have been skirmishes among corrupt police units, particularly those dealing with major crimes, internal affairs and criminal investigations.
Some of those forces captured and held two British officers last fall, and the British military has begun to purge them. “They were assassins going around killing people,” said Laszlo Szomoru, a British senior police adviser in Basra. […]
The police have also apparently done nothing in the face of sectarian killings of Sunni Arabs, whose portion of the population has shrunk rapidly over the past year. Some Sunnis suspect the police of carrying out most of the killings. […]
The province has also sunk into political paralysis as the governor, Muhammad al-Waeli, tried but failed to fire General Saad, the police chief. The provincial council has tried, also unsuccessfully, to remove Mr. Waeli, but has not been able to garner the two-thirds majority it needs. The only thing they could all agree on, it seemed, was to refuse all contact with the British.
The parties’ power inside the police complicates law enforcement for the British. In January, for example, they identified several men suspected of running death squads, siphoning oil and shooting at British soldiers. . . .
In short, chaos. Yet, the administration goes blithely on, concentrating its attention on the Sunni insurgency, and puffing itself up about killing Zarqawi, while essentially ignoring the forces of instability among the Shi’ites in the southern portion of the country. It makes you wonder if anyone has bothered to inform President Bush about these “developments.” We know how he much prefers “good news” to bad when it comes to Iraq. I suspect he either hasn’t been informed at all, received only a limited, and slanted, report on Basra’s factional strife, or he has deliberately ignored accurate reports about the situation on the ground there whenever the subject has been broached.
Well he’s having a big conference on Iraq over the next few days. Who knows. Maybe someone will have the guts to speak the truth about our failures, including Basra’s slide into violence and despair.
Maybe. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
