The Daily Background

Iraq is not in complete and utter chaos. But parts of the embattled country are sliding towards it extremely quickly.

Yesterday, the NYT reported that “Hundreds of British and Iraqi soldiers assaulted a police station in the southern city of Basra.” Who was in the police station? Iraqi police officers. Police officers who, according to according to officials, were torturing and executing prisoners at random. Of the prisoners rescued, the Times writes:

A significant number showed signs of torture. Some had crushed hands and feet, Major Burbridge said, while others had cigarette and electrical burns and a significant number had gunshot wounds to their legs and knees.

The fetid dungeon was another example of abuses by the Iraqi security forces. The discovery highlighted the continuing struggle to combat the infiltration of the police and army by militias and criminal elements — even in a Shiite city like Basra, where there has been no sectarian violence.

As recently as October, the Iraqi government suspended an entire police brigade in Baghdad on suspicion of participation in death squads. The raid on Monday also raised echoes of the infamous Baghdad prison run by the Interior Ministry, known as Site 4, where more than 1,400 prisoners were subjected to systematic abuse and torture.

Imagine having to wage siege on a police station, and arrest- or kill- all the cops who had been charged with protecting you.

According to a poll taken in fall of 2006, Iraqis are losing however much confidence they had in their government to keep them safe. Even Iraqis living in relatively calm areas are losing faith in their government. Below is a graphic (stolen shamelessly from the up-and-coming Iraq blog Iraqslogger.com) which illustrates the results of the survey, taken at two points- once in August, and again in October.

As can be see in the chart, confidence in the Iraqi government in the northeast and south was largely respectable. In October however, confidence was swept away by the increasing tide of violence. Note that in one sector of the country, the Sulaimaniya province in the northeast went from a dark green, indicating high confidence (100%) to a bright red, indicating extremely low confidence (between 10% and 20%) in two months. Every single province in Iraq (except for the Dhiqar province in the south) has gotten worse or stayed the extremely bad, in terms of confidence in the Iraqi government.

President Bush has always said that he is more interested in what “the people on the ground” think than the public opinion of us back home (what do we matter- we’re only the ones paying for his war). He also says that he has great confidence that the Iraqi government. I wonder where the hell he gets this confidence from, after all, the “people on the ground”- average Iraqis don’t even have confidence that the Iraqi government will protect them or their families- much less succeed in serving as a sovereign role model which will begin some miraculous influx of western democracy to the middle east like President Bush has said he believes it will.

Of course, if President Bush really listened to “the people on the ground,” and really put stake in what they had to say, then we’d be welcoming back soldiers right now, because the vast majority of Iraqis wants foreign troops out of the country, and believes that we are responsible for most of the violence. But that’s another issue altogether.

My question for you, dear blog readers, is how far away is Iraq from true chaos? And is the slide towards chaos reversible? Anybody have an answer?

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog