Bang and Blame (The Hidden Friedman)

Tom Friedman gives the GeoGreen push a rest and looks to the political unrest in Iraq in his Friday column, The Big Question (requires Times Select subscription for full access):

One thing that covering the Lebanese civil war taught me was this: once sectarian militias take root, they develop their own interests and are very hard to uproot. "Militias are the infrastructure of civil war, and the basis of warlordism," the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told The Washington Post.

This did not have to be. The Bush team repeatedly declared that it had enough troops in Iraq and that no one on the ground was asking for more. Totally untrue. As Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. civilian administration in Iraq, reveals in his new book, "My Year in Iraq," he repeatedly asked for more troops, but was ignored.

Mr. Bremer confesses in his book: "Coalition forces were spread too thin on the ground. During my morning intelligence briefings, I would sometimes picture an understrength fire crew racing from one blaze to another." He writes that he told Condoleezza Rice in 2003, "The coalition's got about half the number of soldiers we need here, and we run a real risk of having this thing go south on us."

Mr. Bremer describes this in 2004: "On May 18, I gave Rice a heads-up that I intended to send Secretary Rumsfeld a very private message suggesting that the coalition needed more troops. ... That afternoon I sent my message. ... I noted that the deterioration of the security situation since April had made it clear, to me at least, that we were trying to cover too many fronts with too few resources." But, Mr. Bremer writes of Mr. Rumsfeld, "I did not hear back from him."

Because the U.S. never deployed enough troops, America alone cannot establish order in Iraq today. We don't have a way to do that. And Iraq's Army, no matter how well trained, will never have enough will — without a broad political consensus. So we're down to the last hope, and it's a mighty thin reed. The only people who can produce a decent outcome now are Iraq's new leaders — by coming together, burying their hatchets, forging a real national unity government and getting their followers to follow.

This is the season of decision. We have an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi-written constitution. Either the elected Iraqi leaders will heroically come together and forge a national unity government — and save Iraq — or they will divide Iraq. Our job was to help them decide in a reasonably secure environment, not in a shooting gallery. We failed in that task, but they will have to decide nevertheless.

Well, it looks like the political parties are indeed uniting (via the WaPo):

Political parties in Iraq stepped up their efforts Thursday to derail the selection of the ruling Shiite Muslim coalition's nominee for prime minister, threatening to prolong the process of forming a new government but perhaps laying the ground for a more inclusive and widely acceptable one.

Kurdish political parties sent a letter to Shiite coalition leaders Thursday asking them to withdraw their nomination of transitional Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari to retain his post in Iraq's next government, according to Mahmoud Othman, an independent member of parliament representing the Kurdish coalition. Tariq al-Hashimi, a member of the Sunni Arab bloc, said the Sunnis supported the Kurdish position, while a spokesman for the secular party of former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a Shiite, said his group was still studying the issue.

[...]

Some politicians said the continuing violence was partly to blame for the erosion of Jafari's support. The prime minister did not have strong backing to begin with, and his performance since the Samarra mosque bombing has weakened his standing further, they said.

Even some Shiites have accused Jafari of ignoring reports of serious security threats to holy sites before the Samarra blast and criticized him for leaving Iraq to visit neighboring Turkey six days after the bombing, as sectarian violence exploded.