The Real 'New Iraq'

From Tuesday's New York Times: "Conditions have been especially bleak for Christians in Basra, the southern city that is dominated by radical Shiite militias. Christian women there often wear Muslim head scarves to avoid harassment from religious zealots trying to impose a strict Islamic dress code." An Iraqi woman who attends the country's only Anglican church told the Times that she wears a head scarf anytime she goes outside her neighborhood. "I am afraid of being attacked," she said.

A priest was beheaded last week. A bomb blast at a Baghdad church killed two worshipers recently. From this mayhem, however, the Bush administration averts its gaze.

But the truth has been present all along for those who would dare to see it.

Within months of the U.S. invasion in 2003, The Post's Anthony Shadid and Rajiv Chandrasekaran were reporting on religious fissures in Iraq. The deepening divisions among Iraq's principal religious and ethnic groups were a regular theme in their writing.

But the White House and its cheerleaders would have had us think otherwise -- that the source of trouble was solely foreign infiltrators and remnants of Hussein's Baathist Party.

There is a new Iraq emerging before our eyes.

It is an Iraq that torments Christians, that indulges in unrelenting sectarian bloodbaths, that cheers for Hezbollah, that is no more a friend to Israel than is Iran, all despite the lies sold to the White House and Pentagon by self-serving, power-hungry Iraqi expatriates.

The new Iraq is not what George W. Bush talks about. But that's the Iraq he's got. And, worst of all, that's the Iraq we are in.

kingc@washpost.com