Hi michael97123; Re: "I am hoping that we can gain control of the situation in the Sunni triangle but after seeing the dancing saddamite kids at the downing of the chinook and imagining the dancing fundamentalists, I am far less confident than I was when I stopped posting several months ago."
It is defections (to reality) like this that will eventually force us to leave Iraq. We can remain only as long as a majority of our citizens live in dreamland.
Re: "If there is a three way split, the big question becomes how to contain the new Baath controlled rump state after the US and GB pull out--imo that should fall to Turkey and Iran. I am a believer in an evolving iran, so ten years down the road things may not be as bad as we imagine under this scenario. Again this is a first stab at an alternate reality so be patient with the thinking process behind it."
Getting back to realistic power diplomacy, you can forget about the Turks helping out. The "Governing Council" has already rejected the idea. If anyone is going to help us in Iraq it will have to be Arab, as anyone else will be treated the same way we are.
And Iran has its connections to the fundamentalists. If they suppress the Baathists, it will only be to help the Islamic fundies who are the ally of Osama bin Laden.
The situation in Iraq is ugly. What Bush did was to trade a situation where we could bomb the locals into a pretty good version of submission from 50,000 feet while remaining immune to their attacks, for a situation where they can bomb our soldiers with IEDs, mortars, and SAMs while remaining relatively immune to our counterattacks.
What we need to do is to work back to our prewar situation, where the military advantage was with us rather than them. If that leaves Iraq ungovernable, or governed by people who hate us, then what the hell. The country whose citizens were responsible for destroying the WTC was Saudi Arabia, a country with which our relations are the best.
Probably the worst thing that could happen to us, as far as the war on terror goes, is to convert Iraq into an "ally" like Saudi Arabia, where the government is nominally an ally, but the people hate us and are, in fact, our true enemy.
-- Carl |
