You've got one little thing to hang your hat on; Anbar, and you fail to understand the significance of that development.
It's like the soldier standing in front of a firing squad. If the squad locks and loads and one of the guns jams, should the target find any joy in the fact that he'll be hit by one less bullet? Look around in Iraq and ask yourself whether the Sunni rejection of Al Queda in Anbar has any long term significance in the Shiite/Sunni/anit-US wave of violence that has consumed Iraq?
And even in Anbar you fail to grasp the significance of the developments because your analysis of what happened is too eagerly simplistic. The truth is that the Sunni cooperation with US forces to oppose Al Queda is actually a ploy that threatens to bust Iraq apart, and one that may well succeed.
I say that because the Shiites are not our friends, have never been our friends and will not, in the near future, be our friends. They are culturally, religiously and politically opposed to almost everything we've been trying to shove down their throats; everything from a constitution that's secular and purports to secure the rights of women, to the concept of a fair and balanced society that will protect the rights of the Kurdish and Sunni minorities.
In spite of that we've been willing dupes in their complex game. In the name of arming and training what we foolishly term an "Iraqi National Army," we've been training and arming a "Shiite secular army." While doing so we've been targeting and killing Sunnis, a sect consisting of people who understands that if they don't fight against our concept of a majority ruled Iraq they are doomed.
Early on Bush recognized that the entire country would go up in flames on his watch if he didn't toady to the Shiite demands, or maybe he was so stupid he didn't realize what he was doing. Since that time he has sent our soldiers to be the Shiite's mercenary force to suppress their historic enemies, and our soldiers have been dying and killing and we've been spending our fortune in the process.
In Anbar the Sunnis finally got smart. Why not take a page out of the Shiite playbook and enlist the "help" of the US in terms of training, arms, and payola by asking for US aid in fighting the "great" Al Queda terrorists. Never mind that the Sunnis are a tough, competent force that could identify the foreign Al Queda forces easily and kill them at will. Why not let the Americans do it and, at the same time, get arms and get the Americans off their backs?
It was a win/win. We get to claim that the Sunnis are coming over to the "right side" and they get us off their back and get all that war material.
But it's not a win/win for the Shiites. On the balance sheet of the Shiites its moving the arrow to the "the infidels are no longer useful" side of the ledger. If it moves too far they'll kick us out because our money, our blood and our "help" will no longer be enough of a carrot to stand in the way of their desire to move toward a Shiite state opposed to the West.
So we're walking a thin line in Anbar. How long can we pay off the Iraqis? How long can we delay the inevitable outbreak of widespread civil war? How much longer can we clueless, clumsy infidels be tolerated? If we continue to arm and train Sunnis, the answer may well be "not much longer" and the house of cards will collapse.
So Nadine, the "progress" you cite when you refer to the "success" in Anbar province, if it is expanded, holds the seeds of our final humiliation and retreat from Iraq.
But you don't understand that because you don't want to think about what it is about the Iraqi culture, religions and history that make the whole occupation and democratization of Iraq the most foolish foreign policy blunder this country has ever experienced,and the most readily predictable. Ed |
