Paran Balakrishnan: Najaf and its defenders

MY WORD!

This must be what disciplinarians call tough love. The United States is determined that democracy must triumph in Iraq. To that end, hundreds of people were either dead or injured after mass-scale bombing attacks this week. And Najaf, a city known mainly to devout Shias till a year ago, was the scene of a giant street fight.

What sparked the fresh fighting in Najaf, where a shaky truce took hold overnight Thursday? Was it a retaliatory firefight that has spun out of control after a US patrol turned up at the home of Moktada Al-Sadr, optimistically hoping to arrest the rabble-rousing cleric who is reported to have been hit by shrapnel in the battle?

Or, was the assault on Najaf a meticulously planned, deliberate attempt to up the ante and demonstrate that the United States can take on Iraq's toughest and give them a bloody nose?

That throws up a bigger imponderable. Was the United States hoping to score a victory in Najaf so that it could then begin a slow and steady retreat from the Iraqi quagmire? Or, is it hoping for a decisive win that will enable it to stay put for the foreseeable future?

There are faint signals that the Americans are looking for an exit strategy. It made the transfer of power""symbolic though it may have been""two days before time and its pro-consul Paul Bremer left the country almost under cover of darkness. What's more, the Americans have been less hostile to the United Nations and its Nato allies in recent months.

Balanced against that is the fact that President Bush hasn't talked about withdrawing from Iraq even as his popularity rankings slip and the presidential election approaches. "He has not decreased troops in an election year. He has not offered the American people a plan for getting out this year or next year or offered any timetable at all," says William Kristol of the Weekly Standard.

Even more importantly, don't forget that Bush's ideologue friends have an entirely different view of the coming decades. From the early days of the conflict, Bush's neo-conservative backers like Kristol and Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute have scoffed at talk about an "exit strategy". There should, said Kristol, be, "no exit strategy, only a victory strategy".

Kristol has an apocalyptic vision of the future if the US pulls out of Iraq""a sort of Domino Theory for the Arab world. "(If) we lose Iraq, Iran becomes an incredibly empowered nation; Syria becomes more emboldened; Turkey, an Islamic government, seeing a failed state on their border, becomes more radicalized; Iran, surrounded by the failed states of Iraq and Afghanistan, puts in jeopardy the very existence of Pakistan."

But Kristol's worldview is mild, almost lily-livered compared to the ultra-tough, pugnacious Donnelly, a key backer of the Project for the New American Century. The supporters of the New American Century have argued that a unipolar world (the US, of course, being its big boss) is the best bet for peace and stability.

Donnelly argues that the United States needs to remake the Middle East and that the hunt for Osama bin Laden merely provided cover for that goal. And now that the US has moved its troops into place it must not leave the region.

"To have focused on Afghanistan and/or the ever-more-intricate global manhunt for Osama bin Laden would have been to relinquish the strategic initiative. Given that our purpose is to revolutionize the political status quo in the region, the price of 'stability' is a longer, harder slog."

The ideologues like Donnelly""and vice-president Dick Cheney""always saw the invasion of Iraq as the first move in a global game. This way the oil-producing nations are constantly off balance, knowing that American soldiers are only a few hundred miles away in Iraq.

Also, there's the greater game of securing Israel's future against all-comers. Even with oil prices hitting new highs, they aren't about to throw these ambitions away unless the pressure becomes unbearable.