IRAQ: Despite Bush's boasts, the Shia-Sunni conflict has escalated into a veritable civil war, a fact not acknowledged by Washington, writes Lara Marlowe
President George W Bush said this year "will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East, and the history of freedom". Vice-president Dick Cheney told troops the US had "turned a corner," in Iraq and that 2005 "was in fact a watershed year". US leaders base the rash assertion that "we are winning the war in Iraq" on the successful organisation of three landmark polls: the election of a transitional assembly in January, the ratification of a constitution in October, and the election of a four-year, full-term parliament on December 15th. But there is no guarantee that this month's election will improve the situation. Senator Richard Lugar, who heads the foreign relations committee, predicts it could take until April 2006 for squabbling Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties to agree on a government. In the meantime, the insurgency is likely to thrive in the power vacuum, as it did in early 2005.
Despite the "democratic process", violence has worsened. Attacks on US troops increased to an average of 2,000 each month. Mr Bush admitted that 30,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion, though other estimates range much higher. More than 2,140 US servicemen have lost their lives in Iraq.
Washington is still backing Iyad Allawi, the former CIA and MI6 agent whom it appointed prime minister of the interim government in 2004. Although he is a Shia Muslim, the secular Mr Allawi is detested by the pro-Iranian Shia parties who probably won the largest share of the vote this month . Thanks to the US invasion, Iraq may be well on its way to becoming the first Shia Muslim state in the Arab world since the 10th century.
The Shia Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Dawa parties which won the January election were nurtured by Iran for the past 25 years. In the coming weeks, Washington will try to foster a coalition that would limit the power of the religious Shia. It's a Catch-22 situation: if the majority Shia feel robbed of their democratic victory, they will turn on US occupation forces. But the Sunni insurgency is unlikely to be quelled as long as Islamist Shia rule Iraq.
The Shia-Sunni conflict has escalated into a veritable civil war - a fact not acknowledged by Washington. The Shia are massacred by Sunni suicide bombers: 125 in Hilla in February; 98 by a suicide bomber in a fuel truck near Kerbala in July; 114 in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Kazamiya in September. The mere rumour of the presence of a suicide bomber led to the year's single worst loss of life: 965 Shia pilgrims drowned, suffocated or trampled to death in a stampede on a bridge on August 31st.
With the government - and especially the interior ministry - under their control, the Islamist Shia took revenge. Iyad Allawi told the Observer newspaper that human rights abuses in Iraq were now as bad or worse than they were under Saddam Hussein.
Scores of bodies of Sunni Muslim men were found dumped in ditches, fields and dry riverbeds, often handcuffed with bullets in the head, acid burns and holes from electric drills on their bodies. Their relatives said they were taken away by commandos under the control of the minister of the interior, Bayan Jabr Solagh, a high-ranking member of SCIRI who has brought members of SCIRI's militia, the Badr Brigades, into the ministry's forces.
On November 13th, US soldiers discovered 173 Sunni Muslim prisoners held by the interior ministry in an underground bunker in Jadriya. They were famished and had been badly beaten. On December 8th, the Iraqi government found 625 men held in terrible conditions in a second detention centre.
Late this year, Gen Muntazar al-Samarai, a special forces officer at the ministry of the interior, defected to Jordan because of torture and the infiltration of the ministry by Shia militias. "Every night there are Iraqi police raids in which people are pulled out of their beds to be tortured and often killed," Gen al-Samarai told the French journalist Nicolas Hénin. "American soldiers are present during these operations."
On the same day Bush said torture by Iraqi forces was "unacceptable" and promised that "an investigation has been launched, " his former envoy to Iraq, Robert Blackwill, told the Council on Foreign Relations that there were instances when torture may be appropriate. The US occupation of Iraq was further discredited by the Pentagon's admission on November 16th that it used white phosphorous, a burning agent that consumes flesh down to the bone, in the offensive on Falluja a year earlier.
Washington hopes the participation of large numbers of Sunni Muslims in this month's election will weaken the insurgency. But Sunni politicians and insurgents have made it clear they now intend to combine politics with armed "resistance".
The Sunnis voted with the goal of changing the constitution that was ratified in October. Iraqis could not reach a consensus on the charter and it was passed only on condition that it be renegotiated by the new parliament - another looming crisis.
The mainstay of President Bush's "Strategy for Victory" in Iraq is to strengthen Iraqi forces until they are able to take over from US troops. Lt Gen Martin Dempsey, who is in charge of training Iraqi forces, said: "When people say, 'When will Iraq take control of its own security?' the answer truly is it already has."
The claim is patently false: in September, top-ranking US generals said only 700 Iraqi troops were "combat ready" and US military intelligence is pessimistic that Iraqi forces will ever be capable of crushing the insurgency.
Saddam Hussein's long-awaited trial has been blighted by inconsistency, confusion and violence. The murder of two defence lawyers raised serious questions about the possibility of continuing the trial in Iraq.
By broadcasting the sessions with a half-hour delay, and sometimes blotting out the sound and picture with an image of the scales of justice, the court gave the impression that it was afraid of the fallen dictator, who raged at the judge this month: "Go to hell, you and your agents of America!"
Seven more westerners were kidnapped in Iraq in late November and early December. Thousands of Iraqis have been kidnapped since 2003, and some 60 Iraqi civilians are being killed every day.
British foreign secretary Jack Straw said in October that he was "optimistic" that Iraq could be "stabilised" within five to 10 years. To Iraqis, that sounds like a very long time.