Bleak prospects for Iraq?

Here are two people who think so. The first is Hassan Fattah, editor of Iraq Today:

For over a year now, people have been modeling Iraq's occupation after those of Germany and Japan. That may be the problem; neither model offers an appropriate sense of what is going wrong and why. In two decades' time, historians may instead compare Iraq to France, which after shaking off the royal family plunged into dark days of terror before emerging a true democracy. Such days may indeed be upon us in Iraq.

To be sure, the story of Iraq is filled with both good news and bad. With each new day, the good news gets better and the bad gets worse.
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The specter of civil war, talked up mainly in the foreign press, is being pushed by divisive politicians seeking political gain at the country's expense. Militias, the tools of those politicians, still hold sway and roam the streets. And rampant corruption, a hallmark of the former regime, has returned with a vengeance, even as the stakes rise higher than ever.

Cooling relations with the Coalition will are just as troublesome. Most Iraqis have given up on the American soldiers in their midst and now try to live around them. Kids rarely wave to passing convoys anymore, adults rarely engage the soldiers anymore. Coalition soldiers, rightly terrified and confused, are proving more trigger happy and more forceful in the countdown to June 30, feeding the spiraling cycle of resentment and revenge.
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If France is our model, there is hope of a day when liberty, egality and fraternity become Iraqi ideals. But most everyone agrees that things will only grow worse before they get better as every force operating in the country seeks to make its mark to divide and conquer. Hopefully this reign of terror will last much shorter.

(Via Rawblog.)

And Tim Burke, at Easily Distracted, considers whether the US-led Coalition might successfully ride out the current uprisings. He offers nine reasons, based on his research on British colonialism in Africa, for thinking it unlikely. His premise is that the current moment in Iraq 'is closer to the colonial past than any other moment since the 1960s'.

I have no quarrel with the use of historical analogies - post-Second World War Germany and Japan, post-revolutionary France, British colonialism in Africa - in helping us to try to fathom what may happen; and both writers are plainly aware that aspects of the situation in Iraq are sui generis and escape these analogies. But, in any event, a progressive democratic politics from here has to look towards preventing the outbreak of civil war and political terror, and to a post-war administration in Iraq that is not a return to the colonial past.