Our Man In Baghdad

The Bush Administration has put a lot of faith in Nouri al-Maliki to hold up his end of the bargain in the new security plan for Iraq. The plan was supposed to deal with all militias similarly and try to bring unity to the government.

With Maliki, that will never work.

On Monday, a 20 year-old Sunni woman went on Al Jazeera to say that she had been raped at the hand of three Iraqi policeman the previous day (the police force is overwhelmingly Shiite). The incredibly rare spectacle in Iraq of a woman publicly and graphically describing her rape immediately turned the case into a major scandal. (The New York Times does a very good job of telling the story.) [...]

After initially issuing a statement promising a full investigation, Maliki suddenly issued a second statement a few hours later, declaring that the woman was a liar and a wanted criminal, and that the three officers were to be rewarded:

“It has been shown after medical examinations that the woman had not been subjected to any sexual attack whatsoever, and that there are three outstanding arrest warrants against her issued by security agencies.... After the allegations have been proven to be false, the prime minister has ordered that the officers accused be rewarded.”

So you're the head of a country, trying to hold together disparate factions. And in a high-profile event, you take sides with your on ethnic bretheren, reward officers accused of rape, claim that the woman is a propagandist, and obtain her private medical records in an attempt to prove it.

You also may have told your Shiite militiamen to go hide for a while until everything blows over:

The Iraqi Prime Minister advised the Mahdi Army leaders to hide in Iran, revealed a leaked letter from the office of the prime minister and posted online by the Kurdish website peyamner on Tuesday.

A letter issued by the office of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, with the coordination of the Iraqi National Security Advisor, Muwaffaq al-Rabii, advices Muqtada al-Sadir to hide the leaders of his militants, the Mahdi Army, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in case they are “arrested or killed by the American forces”. Al-Maliki, in his letter states, “The current situation requires to keep the leaders of the Mahdi Army, who are affiliated to the organisation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, away from the front line.”

The letter, dated 14 January 2007 and signed by Iraqi Prime Minister, is written after a telephone conversation between Muqtada al-Sadir and the Iraqi Prime Minister. The Iraqi National Security Advisor, Muwaffaq al-Rabii appears to be part of the operation. The letter is classified as confidential, private and immediate.

Riverbend has more on this rape, calling the victim "the bravest Iraqi woman ever" and predicting Maliki's response. She also adds this:

She’s just one of tens, possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons. She looks like cousins I have. She looks like friends. She looks like a neighbor I sometimes used to pause to gossip with in the street. Every Iraqi who looks at her will see a cousin, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt…

And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

We lost because we willed ourselves to believe in fantasies. Like the one that a Dawa Party loyalist like Maliki would be an honest broker. Like the fiction that there's anything resembling honor in this occupation. Like the misguided nonsense that Sunnis and Shiites would live together in peace, as they haven't for 1300 years.

We lost. The sooner we admit it the better.