Optimism about the future of Iraq has obviously decreased whether among Iraqis or their allies and conditions are seemingly taking a steep slope down to the worse.
There's a growing feeling here in Iraq and especially in Baghdad that things were much better say a year after the liberation than they are now.
How did this deterioration happen? For example when it comes to security…violence is increasing although the Iraqi police and army are steadily growing!
Moreover, chances for major reconstruction and economic development look poor amidst all the corruption and violence.
The people, in spite of their courage in challenging the extraordinary rough conditions and their amazing patience cannot afford now to pay attention for much beyond their personal safety and the people's concerns about their survival are increasingly replacing hopes and ambitions.
I want after this introduction to illustrate the reasons behind this grim reality.
Those reasons are numerous; local, regional and international, so in this post I will begin to identify the local Iraqi reasons and I will list them according to electoral weight of powers in question and their share of responsibility.
I will be talking only about leaderships, not the people because the latter expressed their choices in a civilized way but the leaderships led us to this unpleasant situation through a number of mistakes that I'm going to list one by one…
First is Sunni stupidity: The Sunni leaderships fell in the gravest mistakes the day they adopted the pan-Arab Baathist ideology of the past regime and stuck to the Saddamist ways without any consideration for the changes in the world in general and in Iraq in particular.
Sunni leaders dragged the Sunni body into a confrontation with a superpower and with other components of the Iraqi people, and happened despite the fact that Sunni communities hardly fired a bullet at the allied forces back during OIF and made an unconditional surrender.
The leaderships did not use the position to make something good out of it but instead used the collapsed organizations of the past regime to swim against the current in a suicidal stupid move blessed by Arab regimes awed by the fall of the idol.
Second is the treason of Shia leaderships; those are the ones who encouraged America to make the change and made all kinds of promises that they would contribute to leading the new Iraq in a way that plants the seeds of democracy and pluralism in the entire Middle East. In fact they were hiding their true intentions.
Those leaders pretended to be America's allies in the beginning but the Taqiyya soon faded away when those leaders seized offices and powers.
They went back to the laps of their primary sponsor replaced America's friendship with Iran's and abandoned the idea of a modern state for a stupid dream of building an Iran-style theocracy in Iraq.
Kurdish opportunism comes third. The closest friends and allies of America in Iraq let her down the day they put their plans for a separate Kurdish state above everything else and took advantage of the weaknesses of the center to make more gains for their project of an ethnic state.
So instead of having the Kurds and their pioneer experience as an element of stability for the rest of the country they became yet another element of instability and weakness. They presented the first chapter of ingratitude for America who was hoping the Kurdish experiment could become an example that can be reproduced and spread southwards.
Fourth and last of local reasons is the weakness, incompetence and confusion surrounding the liberal leaderships:
Those liberal leaders in spite of what they achieved in the beginning, allowed themselves to be infected with a very dangerous type of narcissistic selfishness.
They closed their ears, eyes and mouths to the then approaching theocratic threat.
Their selfishness and ego were the reason for many conflicts among liberal parties the thing that led to their collective lousy results in the elections.
Instead of joining their forces to stop the theocratic tide, liberal politicians like Allawi, Chalabi and the like were busy fighting each other at a so critical point in time.
Watching that happen, many secular politicians found themselves choosing to go under the umbrella of religious or ethnic blocs in order not to miss the chance to have a seat in the parliament.
Even worse, after two rounds of elections and winning a humble number of seats, they did not act like mature opposition and they did not take advantage of the poor performance of religious parties to improve their positions.
All they did was mostly to sit dumb and dull, adding nothing good to their record if not losing some points.
In my opinion these were the reasons from the Iraqi side of the equation. Next time I will talk about the American side.
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