Things are going from bad to worse in Iraq, and the moves to create a new Iraqi interim government are being met with skepticism, at best.
According to a report by Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle, an e-mail from Baghdad suggests that the Iraqi public's concern about the lack of progress in reconstruction is now more important to them than politics. "The frequent electricity blackouts, mile-long gas station lines, high unemployment, rampant crime and frequent guerilla attacks have confounded hopes that the American occupation would bring prosperity," Collier writes.
A Baghdad resident wrote, "Concerning the new government, I can assure you that very few people are looking at what is going on (in politics) because the situation is becoming worse than it was before. The electricity-cutting hours are more these days, there is a shortage of fuel, the long lines of cars on gas stations are getting more and more everyday, the bombings are more these days, particularly today, there have been many explosions today. People think that since the selected president is from the Governing Council, so nothing has been changed."
Writing in the New Standard, Dahr Jamail writes, "Widespread skepticism seems to stem from the disastrous security situation, continuing economic turmoil, the lingering lack of infrastructure reconstruction in Iraq under U.S. occupation, and the limited amount of power (new interim government president) Al-Yawer's office will be granted."
He adds that "the presidential role to be filled by Al-Yawer is ironically an all but powerless one under the mandate of the interim government, rendering one of the only politicians for whom Iraqis express significant respect a mere figurehead with no real ability to affect the changes to which they aspire."
Meanwhile, according to a report in the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Falluja and other parts of the country where the U.S. military has given over control to local policing forces. In Falluja last month, this came the U.S.'s preferred alternative to a U.S.-led military cleansing of the City. But under the current conditions, the city has become a mini-Islamic state, reverting to Taliban-like repression. "There are whippings for selling liquor, and hair shavings for long-haired young men," according to the report.
So, while President Bush has undertaken to deliver a total of six major addresses to garner support for the June 30 transfer of power in Iraq, the second of which he delivered on Memorial Day, things are hardly going as well as he would propose, even apart from the continuing violent insurgency and attacks on U.S. and coalition forces.
Of course, Bush makes it clear that U.S. military presence in Iraq will remain for a long time, including for the construction of 14 permanent U.S. bases there.
As long as the U.S. is a occupying military force, any transfer of power will be cosmetic, at best, in the eyes of the Iraqi people, who've been through all this before early in the 20th century with an eventually-failed occupation there by the British.
Tamim al-Barghouti writing in the Beirut Daily Star wonders why the U.S. never bothered to learn the lessons of the earlier British fiasco in Iraq. From that history lesson, he notes, the current plan to transfer political power is doomed to failure.
The new government, he notes, are merely "accepting the colonial redefinition of Iraq, the Iraq created by the American occupation...They want to take control of it, to perform the same function the Americans would have performed, only in Iraqi hands."
"The men and women on the Iraqi governing council should know that they cannot play the British game again, precisely because it has already been played before," he writes. "Their verbal attacks against the American occupation should fool no one, they do not oppose the occupation because they are the occupation's enemies, rather, they oppose it because they compete with it and they think they should be the ones to occupy Iraq instead of the Americans, but it would still be an occupation."
The new government "is unlikely to be seen by most Iraqis as a legitimate government because it wasn't elected by anybody, and I don't think anybody will view it as independent," Juan Cole, professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan told the Robert Collier. "Having an old-time CIA asset be the prime minister seems a recipe for derision." He was referring to Iyad Allawi, whose tenure on the Governing Council was "has prompted widespread rumors of corruption and influence peddling, Collier wrote, adding that the 25-member governing body is "viewed by a wide spectrum of Iraqis as American puppets."