From the indispensible site Watching America, there’s this translation of a piece from Germany’s Die Welt written by Richard Herzinger:
Once again Iraq is haunted by a wave of terror, which on Thursday [Aug. 31] alone took the lives of dozens of people. The focus of the violence is again the capitol city of Baghdad, where at least 43 people were killed and approximately 160 injured. Nevertheless, U.S. President Bush denied during a speech RealVideo in Salt Lake City that the country had descended into civil war. It concerns only a “small number of Iraqis” who are involved in religiously-motivated violence.
But the legitimacy of Bush’s Iraqi policies are coming under increasing domestic pressure. This is demonstrated by the way his rhetoric has flipped from offense to defense: Instead of praising the progress toward building a model democracy in the Middle East, he invokes the old 20th-century struggle against totalitarianism. In Iraq, the U.S. is confronting the decisive “ideological battle of the 21st century,” against the successors to the “fascists, Nazis and Communists.”
Herzinger notes, however, that in today’s Iraq the actual lines are not that clear. And, a bit further down, he writes this:
It’s strange that now, the world public hardly takes note of the bloodbath, since it’s no longer a simple matter of supposed “resistance” against the Americans. Muslims are butchering Muslims – which doesn’t quite fit the image of a “clash of cultures,” with the evil West on the one hand and persecuted Muslims on the other.
In actual fact, militant Shiite and Sunnis factions are not at all interested in the withdrawal of U.S.-led occupation troops. This is because only they guarantee that Iraq doesn’t collapse into complete chaos and descend into a larger civil war or even become the center of a greater Middle East war. Only the level of American operational readiness prevents the other interested powers in the region – the Arab powers as well as Iran, and in addition, Turkey – from becoming embroiled in the bloody Iraqi power play, or even carving pieces out of the disintegrating country for themselves.
In the shadow of American occupation forces, competing factions wrestle for influence and primacy, with the goal of bringing all of Iraq under their control. A prerequisite for achieving this is that Iraq remain intact. But to ensure this requires the Americans. Not least of those who believe this is Iran, which seeks to foment violence but doesn’t want the United States withdrawing from Iraq. In addition, as long as the Americans are tangled in Iraq’s bloody mess, they’ll scarcely be able to open a new military front against Iran over the nuclear standoff.
And the Iraqi mess is dragging the U.S. into an ever worsening dilemma, as Bush’s plan for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops by arming and training the Iraqi army and security forces to build a minimally dependable security infrastructure has failed.
And he doesn’t see too much to be optimistic about: he judges the new Iraqi government a failure and, in the end, he contends, the U.S. remains bogged down:
Much is at stake for the Bush Administration in Iraq. Its continuing involvement in the muddled situation increasingly impairs the superpower’s ability to act in the region. Some have already asked themselves, where do the Americans stand after the complicated negotiations to stabilize Lebanon? The answer is, in short: they’re in Iraq.
Read it in full.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.