I'm not sure that a lot of AlQ are in Iraq. I guess it's mostly local insurrection with an Islamic Jihad flavour.
Yeah.. Just watched John Murtha ramble off a bunch of statistics about there only being 1,000 AQIZ in Iraq...
I wonder how many Al Qai'da were in Afghanistan when we decided to invade there??
And what he didn't mention were the number of Ansar Al Sunnah and Umar Brigade members are in Iraq, because they are directly linked to Al Qai'da and share the same militant religious beliefs.
What clear is the Bush administration has done a piss-poor job in explaining the facts about what's going in Iraq, good and bad.
But Murtha also tried to make the compariaon that 38,000 Americans died in Vietnam's "civil war" after the first election there in 1967, yet he FAILED to mention that after 1968 the war had transitioned from a internal civil war within S. Vietnam to a direct invasion by the North against the South. And the North enjoyed TREMENDOUS economic and military support from the Soviets and China, while we opted to pull out and leave the RVN on their own.
Vietnam was partitioned and Ho Chi Minh claimed (despite having agreed to the partitioning) that he was fighting to unify the Vietnamese and remove foreign occupiers.
Iraq is still a whole country and that strikes as a bit of a difference between Vietnam and Iraq. Leaving Iraq prematurely would undermine that unity and potentially lead to the partitioning of Iraq.
Where I think Murtha has a point, and I believe the Bush administration is finally impressing upon the Iraqis more forcefully, is that US troops are not going to choose sides in a civil war and that we may even move troops out if they don't get their collective act together within the next couple of months.
We should not permit US troop presence to be taken for granted by the Iraqi leadership. But neither should we act unilaterally to leave, unless we see the Iraqis reflecting continued intransigence against creating a viable government of unity.
But Murtha should not be directing his criticism towards Bush, but towards the Iraqi leadership. We should be unified in pressuring that leadership to take charge of their country, be accountable to ALL of their people's interests, and stop this petty power stuggle.
Let's face it.. Iraq has tremendous economic resources, both from oil and agriculture. They have tremendous growth potential and they need to stop this bickering and think about their combined national interests and not their religious and tribal differences.
Hawk |
