There is an excellent story in a Canadian journal, called “MacLean’s” about Iraq. It is titled “How George Bush Became the New Saddam,” and sports a picture of Saddam with Bush’s face Photoshopped in. This has brought it to the attention of some liberal web sites, but that attention may be a bit shallow; the article is not a polemic against Bush, but rather a surprisingly in-depth, knowledgeable, and frank dissection of the current Iraqi social situation and its formation, from a reporter with a great amount of experience in and understanding of Iraq. The author, Patrick Graham, previously spent a year with resistance fighters there.

This is not to say that much in the article can’t be used to tear the Bush administration a new one; there is quite a lot of that, and I am not below doing so myself, as you’ll see below. But the article is not partisan, either; it jabs the American left as well, and though that part is given less attention, it is only insofar as the left is that much less involved in direct control over and administration of Iraq.

A reading of this article will give you much greater insight into the fundamental errors of the American occupation, the current state of Iraq from an on-the-ground view not generated or influenced by the U.S. PR machinery, and a better understanding of why Iraq will not be so easily won–or so easily left behind.

Early in the telling of the story, one understands much better why Iraq is not like an “Indiana marketplace in the summertime”:

Going back to Iraq is like sitting through a depressing Scheherazade, 10,001 Nights of Horror Stories. Everybody had them. Do you want to see a picture of someone’s 10-year-old boy, chopped up in pieces and put in a cooking pot because his parents couldn’t pay the Shia militia’s ransom? Here, look at the burns on my body, inflicted by the bodyguards of the Sunni politician who sold my eight-year-old son and me to al-Qaeda. Let me tell you about being kidnapped in Falluja by a gang that pretended to be al-Qaeda–they made me drink urine and had a fake beheading studio where they set up mock video executions to scare us into raising ransoms. … Sadly, these stories are true, while so much that is said about Iraq is myth and delusion. As the famous American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote about armed conflict, there is “the real war and the propaganda war.”

There may be areas of Iraq–especially in the northern Kurdish areas–where violence does not prevail, but not so in so many places in Iraq, and certainly not where it matters.

Graham explains how the country is falling apart politically, and how the current government has very little real chance of succeeding:

Certainly the notion of there being any cohesive central power in Iraq is a myth. Whatever is running the country, it’s not a government. Iraq’s body politic has some kind of autoimmune deficiency syndrome in which the antibodies designed to defend it have turned on its own organs. It’s a perfect environment for opportunistic parasites, in this case Iraq’s neighbours. So it seems almost unfair to criticize Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s failure to govern, as if somehow he was in charge of anything that could be called a state.

He also explains a very cogent reason why sectarian violence has fallen in some areas–and it’s not because of the effectiveness of the “Surge”:

By one estimate, Baghdad was once 65 per cent Sunni; today it is 75 per cent Shia. Deaths from sectarian killings are reportedly down, in large measure because there are few mixed neighbourhoods left. Almost the entire Sunni middle class lives in Jordan or Syria. If you are named Omar, a traditional Sunni name, chances are you are dead or living abroad.

He also points out that Iran really has little choice but to be involved in Iraq. It is not to say that Iran should be allowed to do what it is doing, that Americans should not take notice, or that Iran is warm & cuddly; it is simply to point out certain realities, and to understand that Iran has its reasons. Without understanding those reasons, one can hardly make sound judgments about what to do in the situation.

Iraq, Iran’s neighbour to the west, is Tehran’s self-declared security zone. Iran has already been attacked once from Iraq–by a then-American ally, Saddam–and won’t let it happen again. Nor do the Iranians want, as the West does, a secular Iraqi government that could destabilize their own theocracy. For them, Iraq is a survival issue. U.S.-led invasions have conquered not only Iraq but Afghanistan on Iran’s eastern flank. The U.S. Navy is floating off Iranian shores. Every few weeks, Washington debates whether to bomb Iran. How could Iran afford not to be involved in Iraq? Following the American example, the Iranians have learned that it’s better to fight the U.S. on the streets of Baghdad than the streets of Tehran.

Iran is hardly admirable, but one can easily see why they feel they need to be involved here. As it is with al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere, Iran’s involvement is very much the creation of the Bush administration’s handling of affairs in the region.

Graham points out another problem we now have to handle:

These days, though, the biggest concern on the highways of Baghdad is not Sunni insurgent bombs, but the explosively formed penetrators that fire a molten copper slug through even American heavy armour. According to U.S. intelligence, they are provided by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps to Shia militias. Of course, U.S. intelligence accusations are now as suspect as the Iranian government denials that they provoke.

This is a very real, and to me, a very worrying problem. Iran may well be a terrible threat. However, the Bush administration has turned America’s intelligence agencies into PR and propaganda arms of their administration. This is disastrously dangerous, as it impairs our ability to assess the real situation in Iraq and Iran–no doubt exactly what the administration wants. Without reliable information, we are blind–and the administration is the only source of guidance we have. Imagine being lost in a pitch-black cave deep underground, and your only hope of survival is to be led by the hand by a sociopath. That is effectively where we are right now.

The article also explains the nature of al Qaeda in Iraq, and America’s part in its creation. More and more, it is becoming apparent that al Qaeda was created as much as–or even more–by the United States as it was created by Osama bin Laden. This is true not just of al Qaeda in Iraq, but al Qaeda in general. The truth is, what we and now others call “al Qaeda” is a loose federation of various cliques who are in contact with each other. America generated the name “al Qaeda” and the specter of an ominous force; the cliques simply appropriated this very convenient and menacing name. As Graham put it: “America’s other main enemy is al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda what a cheap watch is to a Swiss timepiece–effective, easily reproduced, and disposable.”

The main value of this article, however, is how Graham does a good job of laying out the divisions and structure of Iraqi society. I say “lay out” instead of “clarify” because I am not so sure it can be “clarified,” being the jumbled mess it is.

And as I noted above, this is not a liberal screed; Graham paints the Democrats as being similarly clueless, just from a position of potential control rather than actual control:

As Visser points out, U.S. Democratic party supporters have found the argument for partition to be a convenient solution for a problem they have no clue how to solve, but which makes them sound less clueless and cruel than saying, “Forget the Iraqis, let’s leave.”

And, to continue the previous point and to sum up:

The discussion in Washington and New York has always drowned out the reality of Iraq. One of the terrifying aspects of the war is the monumental failure of analysis and action on the part of America’s political, military, journalistic and even business elites.

That problem may be systemic–the result of a “fact-based” America confronting a society it did not understand and simply making up an alternate reality, guns ablaze. So far, the Republicans have done an impressive job at failing in Iraq. Soon it may be the Democrats’ turn to fail, albeit in a different way. It’s a shame because Iraqi political parties are perfectly capable of doing that on their own. Indeed, they seem to be going out of their way to compete with the Americans on that score.

One down point of the article: I cannot see Graham making suggestions or arguments to fix the situation. Either he is as clueless as the rest of us on that problem, or he simply did not want to include his personal conclusions in contrast to the more objective reporting of the article.

Alas, the title and cover photo for the story are somewhat misleading; the article does not really focus too greatly on how Bush is equal to Saddam. One can come to such a conclusion obliquely, but Graham doesn’t really focus on it. However, it does become apparent through inference. If anything, Bush is actually worse then Hussein was. Like Hussein, he is playing factions within Iraq against each other; he is threatening war with Iran; he is running prisons with torture and rape rooms; he is killing of large portions of the populace. One can defend Bush by saying that these are not policies, but then again, Baathists could have tried to make the same claims about Saddam–yet another similarity.

In one way, however, Bush can be painted as even worse than Saddam: with the exception of the Kurds in the north, it can easily be said that life under Bush’s Iraq is even worse than it was under Hussein’s:

Arriving in Baghdad has always been a little weird. Under Saddam Hussein it was like going into an orderly morgue; when he ran off after the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003 put an end to his Baathist party regime, the city became a chaotic mess. I lived in Iraq for almost two years, but after three years away I wasn’t quite ready for just how deserted and worn down the place seemed in the early evening. It was as if some kind of mildew was slowly rotting away at the edges of things, breaking down the city into urban compost.

Welcome to Bush’s Iraq.