An interesting blog, thanks!
re: "Iraq is Yugoslavia done backwards: instead of letting the cleansing go on for years and then intervening to topple the dictator holding together the fake state, in Iraq we took down the dictator first and now find ourselves enduring that fake state's ongoing soft-but-bloody partition."
I hadn't considered the situation exactly that way, but it is probably useful as a thought experiment.
The important point to take away is that the Sunni/Shia, Arab/Persian, Kurd/Turkomen fires of conflict are yet far from exhausted, far from banked.
(And the US is not managing events well, events are managing *us*. Or, to put it another way, historical imperatives are playing out, and all sides are attempting to use Uncle Sam to advance their own agendas.)
re: "By releasing the Sunni-Shia dogs of war, we force Saudi Arabia and Iran to fish or cut bait. Whatever they choose, we save our troops' lives and our political will to remain engaged. That's not defeatism. That's keeping your eye on the prize: not some illusory "victory" in Iraq, but a region transformed--one way or another."
The 'Neo-Con' vision (the publicly expressed one, anyway), of a transformed Middle East, adopting Western-friendly changes such as Democracy, pluralism, and respect for secularism, has always been bold and admirable.
It has been the ridiculously stilted, impracticable, and unworldly TACTICS those babes-in-the-woods have resorted to that has given 'world changing' a bad name. :-( |
