Last chance for Iraq? That sounds familiar.
Woohoohoo, Iraqis breaking those purple fingered deals. No kidding. If they're acting this way with US troops standing right there, what in the world are NK and Iran thinking.
Heard today: US influence has been declining since WWII or maybe it was sometime before. At any rate, I pinned it to the 70s when we became dependent on foreign sources of oil AKA compromised everything we were or might be for gasoline. We did have a kind of cultural reprieve under Clinton but that's been trashed all to hell.
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There's One Last Thing to Try
This past August and September were the two deadliest months on record for Iraqis, and October is set to exceed even those levels.
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek
Oct. 30, 2006 issue - American policy in Iraq over the past two and a half years has been a mixture of nation-building and counterinsurgency, neither with much success. But the United States is now facing an even more difficult task: ending a civil war.
"...The most disturbing recent event in Iraq—and there are many candidates for that designation—was the decision by Iraq's single largest political party, SCIRI, to push forward the process of creating a Shiite "super-region" in the South.
This was in flagrant defiance of the deal, brokered by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad before the January elections, that brought major Sunni groups into the political process and ensured Sunni participation in the voting. It is a frontal rebuke to President Bush, who made a rare personal appeal to SCIRI's leader, Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, on this issue.
Perhaps the most critical element of a deal to end Iraq's violence is a broad and comprehensive amnesty. Almost no civil war or sectarian strife has ever ended without one. And yet every time amnesty gets discussed, powerful Shiite voices veto it. (Congressional Democrats and Republicans also have engaged in demagoguery on the issue, compounding the problem.) Another is an oil-revenue-sharing agreement, along the lines advocated by Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb. This project moves forward and backward in fits and starts. Additionally, attempts at reversing, even modestly, the massive de-Baathification of Iraq have proved virtually impossible. Overwhelmingly, the evidence suggests that the major players in Iraq have neither the intention nor perhaps the capacity to forge a national compact.
Can the United States regain some leverage to force things forward? There is one last thing to try: privately but forcefully threaten a reduction of U.S. support for the current government. Nothing else—not the promise of aid, arm-twisting by the American ambassador, phone calls from President Bush—seems to have worked. It could be an honest conversation that explains to Iraq's governing coalition that American support cannot be unconditional. Without the American military, this Iraqi government would likely fall, and many of its members' lives might be in danger. Perhaps that will focus their minds...."
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