'Entropy is the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder'
-- JR Newman. (Webster's Third New International Dictionary)
It's become impossible to write about Iraq without a wearying sense of deja vu. So much of what's happening now was predicted in this column - and not only in this column, of course - months, even years ago; so much of the news out of Iraq simply extends the graph of a country descending into anarchy and civil war (while those who intemperately threw America's imperial legions into harm's way prepare to pull them out), one is tempted to an unsustainable, quiet fury.
It's one thing to denounce the criminality of a superpower's unprovoked attack upon a sovereign nation, with all its potential for the murder of scores of thousands of innocent people and the destruction of that nation. Even the likes of the late John Paul II, after all, warned that invading Iraq would violate Catholic moral teaching and threaten 'the fate of humanity'.
(Indeed, even the current Pope, well to the political right of John Paul, has said there were 'not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq'.) But it's quite another thing to have to watch that ugly scenario play itself out over time, one predictable, bloody step after another.
On November 27, eg, this column opined that the Bush administration was going to withdraw the bulk of its forces from Iraq and try to cover that retreat with 'greatly increased air and tank strikes, in the course of which, unfortunately, many, many more Iraqi civilians will be killed'.
The following week, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh seconded that. 'A key element of the drawdown plans,' Hersh wrote, 'is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower.The danger, military experts have told me, is that while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the overall level of violence and the number of Iraqi casualties would increase.'
We were just in time to anticipate news stories like 'US air raid kills 14 in Iraqi family'.
('A US air strike killed 14 members of one family in the oil refining town of Baiji in northern Iraq...US forces have used air power increasingly throughout the past year; official military data show the average in the first quarter was five strikes per month compared to over 50 in the last quarter.')
Or take the high turnout in Iraq's December elections, touted ad nauseam by Mr Bush as proof of the success of the democracy he and Mr Cheney were bringing to Iraq (indeed, to the Middle East!).
It didn't take a rocket scientist to see that - as this column and others repeatedly pointed out - real democracy in Iraq would immediately result in the ascendancy of the oil-rich Shiite south, leading in effect to the creation of (1) a Greater Iran, and (2) a paupered and powerless Sunni heartland, in effect, a failed demi-state: what bin Laden called in a new audiotape aired last Thursday - just when western commentators had again begun to indulge the pleasantly exciting fantasy that he was dead - 'a centre of gravity and a recruiting ground for qualified (mujahideen)'.
And so it came to pass. In the wake of the December 15 elections, the senior US operational commander in Iraq noted that 'the vote is reported to be primarily along sectarian lines, which is not particularly heartening' - that's a euphemism for 'disastrous', by the way - and warned that 'sectarian rivalries' were threatening to turn the Iraqi security forces, with the complicity of the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, into 'militias or armed gangs'.
And so it came to pass, next, that, even while Mr Bush was crowing about Iraqi democracy, his ambassador to Baghdad was scrambling to thwart 'the will of the people', twisting Shiite arms to get the Sunni minority a disproportionately large role in the new government. (The idea is that if the Sunni leadership can thus be bought off, the Sunni insurgency will wither. The other idea is a despairing toss at trying to dilute the decisive influence of Iran on the new Iraq.)
Alas: as US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been discovering of late, the US, hamstrung by its own cynical 'democracy' rhetoric, has little real power left in Iraq. About all it can do is donate its mighty armed forces to act as bodyguards for the democratically-elected Shiites - soon to be the US's mortal enemy. (Remember, you read it here first.)
And so it was that, a fortnight ago, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq - the most powerful Shiite party and a close ally of Iran - calmly tore up the clause in last October's constitution that allowed for major future changes to it.
Personally brokered by Khalilzad, that clause was a last-ditch American attempt to entice Sunnis to support the Constitution. The latter was ratified in a nail-biting rush - for domestic political reasons, Bush had been trumpeting a deadline for its adoption - and the inclusion of that clause left the document so porous that, as this column remarked at the time, it was a constitution only in name.
Even so, al-Hakim's contemptuous discarding of the clause was a startling slap in the face of the American occupation; it signalled unmistakably that, to the Shiite leader at least, the day of the US imposing its will on Iraq was over.
(Not surprisingly, the New York Times reacted to Hakim's little piece of real politik with alarm. 'Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician has just dealt a huge blow to American-backed efforts to avoid civil war through the creation of a new, nationally inclusive constitutional order. In particular, he defends the current provisions allowing substantial autonomy for the oil-rich Shiite southeast. Mr Hakim's latest position is a prescription for a national breakup and an endless civil war. It is also a provocative challenge to Washington.' And so on.
A week later, al-Hakim - fervently feared by Sunnis, who have seen many of his Badr militia infiltrated into the government's security forces, from where they've begun operating as death squads against the Sunnis - was back in the news, demanding that the US turn Iraqi forces, and his own Interior Ministry, loose against the insurgency.
The NYT at least understands what's coming (though, typically, the paper took refuge in the future conditional). 'A radically decentralised Iraq would leave the Sunnis impoverished, aggrieved and desperate, driving them into the arms of radical Sunni groups in neighbouring lands.
Although Sunnis are a minority in Iraq, they are an overwhelming majority in the Arab world. An irreconcilable split between Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis would leave the Shiites even more dependent than they are now on Iran and American troops.' (My italics, the point being the comical situation in which the US president has landed himself.)
Mr Bush had better be careful. In its desperation, his administration has been wooing the Sunnis so hard of late - and not just Sunni politicians but the insurgents as well - that a day may well arrive when the US president finds himself pressured to spare the life of the Iraqi ex-dictator as a goodwill gesture to those reluctant virgins, the Baathists and Saddam loyalists. At which point, the last remaining realisable goal of Mr Bush's real goals in invading Iraq - killing Saddam - will have eluded him.
(As it is, Saddam's showcase trial is in considerable disarray. First, the chief judge - in whose image-building CNN et al had obediently invested considerable resources - resigned, citing political pressures.
(The White House thought he was giving Saddam too much leeway to 'play himself' in court.) Then, last Thursday - three days after he was appointed - the new chief judge was denounced as a Baathist by the head of an Iraqi commission trying to smoke out Baathists in positions of power.)
Probably breaking the camel's back, Karl Rove has evidently decided that the president in his politically weakened state cannot afford to be seen to be throwing more good money after bad: the Washington Post recently reported that the Bush Administration will ask for no new reconstruction money from Congress when the current $18.4 billion package runs out in a few months' time.
In 'America's waning clout in Iraq' (Christian Science Monitor), the authors warn that while the US's current loss of influence in Iraq was inevitable, 'the speed of the retreat' threatens the last prospects for stability in that (quite ruined) country.
Even from this distance, the ongoing deterioration of the situation on the ground can be gleaned from a couple indices. Over the Christmas season, the US State Department began issuing travel warnings re Iraq that cited not only the danger of travel overland but of travel by air as well.
(Sure enough, two US army helicopters were brought down by insurgent firepower shortly afterwards. The cause of the crash of a third, which killed all 12 Americans on board, has not yet been made public.)
Then, in December, Iraq's oil exports hit their lowest level since Mr Bush's 'Shock and Awe' moment: 1.1 million barrels a day - about half the level it achieved during sanctions under Saddam, and just over a third of its capacity minus insurgent attacks on pipelines and refineries. The reader may recall then Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz's blithe assurance that Iraqi oil would pay to rebuild the country his government was about to destroy.
Reported Reuters on January 2nd: 'Sabotage is damaging plants and blocking investment, keeping exports at a fraction of targets officials say should be met if Iraq's vast reserves are to provide its people with the prosperity that might draw the sting of civil conflict.'
And so on.
And Mr Bush's latest spin on the barrelling destruction he so cavalierly unleashed on an unsuspecting people?
Well, said the ol' GW 'Heck-of-a-job-Brownie' Bush, last week - haplessly paraphrasing the ol' Don 'Stuff-happens' Rumsfelt's infamous 'Freedom is a messy business' - 'We should welcome this [turmoil] for what it is: freedom in action.'
The president said that at the end of a five-day spell in which 200 Iraqis and 16 US troops were killed.