It hasn’t gotten much attention, but Iraq was badly shaken by an incident that occurred Friday in Fallujah: security forces fired on a crowd of anti-government protesters, killing at least seven people. The people of Fallujah got their revenge by killing at least two soldiers and kidnapping three more. As press accounts note, mourners in Falluja shouted, “The blood of our people will not be lost in vain,” and they set fire to an army checkpoint.
This is, to put it mildly, a worrisome situation. Fallujah was one of the epicenters of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, more generally, of Sunni resistance to a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. Along with the rest of Anbar Province, it has been relatively peaceful since the “surge” of 2007-2008, when most Sunnis elected to join with the U.S. and its Iraqi allies, but the situation is now becoming volatile because of the vendetta that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is pursuing against senior Sunni politicians.
Unless Maliki does something concrete to placate Sunnis and convince them that he is not a Shiite sectarian, then the odds are that some incident–if not this one, then some future clash–could well set off a more general outbreak of civil war. And of course with U.S. troops entirely gone, there is no external stabilizing force. The Iraqis are on their own.
I'm sorry, but those of us who opposed intervention in Iraq –that is those of us who understood something of the ideology of Islam , its atmospherics , and what it inculcates in its adherents–will ultimately be vindicated by the inevitable events that will ensue in Iraq , or any other Muslim land for that matter. That inevitable being tribal ,sectarian ,and ethnic warfare. But unlike the Hagels and Kerrys of this world, who saw and see nothing menacing about Islam, it is precisely because of the menace Islam presents that we opposed wasting our blood and treasure in the fool's errand of Iraq. Like water, Muslim lands will seek their own level, and that level is not nationhood, but internecine warfare. This should have been understood by the Bush administration, but the naive Bush wanted to bring democracy and the good life to "ordinary Iraqi moms and dads." What Bush , and ,Obama for that matter, never seem to understand is there is no such thing as an "Iraqi people", or a "Syrian people", or a "Libyan people"- Just a grouping of quite disparate peoples who have been warring with each other-not to mention the infidels-for 1300 years ,and will continue to do so after the Westerners have long gone.
Rumsfeld didn't see Iraq as a nation, or an Islamic society or tribal kindling but as a local 7-11 whose management could be sent packing with minimal consequences–you bring in a new team, give them the uniform, show them how to unload the inventory off the delivery trucks and you're out of there…strangest thing. imo the whole democracy bit for DoD was window dressing. Power may be an aphrodisiac but there are side effects to drinking all that kool-aid. n nAll of this may have some passing relevance to why Israel never quite gets around to re-occupying Gaza and taking care of Hamas once and for all.
So what do you expect the US to do now? Remove Maliki if he doesn't placate the Sunnis? Or suppress the Sunnis when the revolt against Maliki? n nAnd the much vaunted surge was only necessary because Bush went into Iraq with no plan on how to occupy or pacify the country. Cheney predicted the war would be over in "six months, tops," and W's chief-of-staff Andy Card estimated a total cost for the war of $400 million. A screw-up right from the start. Mission accomplished, indeed.
Congratulations on your minus 113 rating. 37 worse than mine. n nYou must be doing something right.
the same but not the same.
I think we call support a French operation to retake Falluja…or something. Wait, I know, assassinate Diem!
Are we "better off now" in the Near East after our bloody frolic and detour in Iraq? n nTo ask the question is to answer it.
Definitely better off. The Islamofascists have spend a decade blowing up Bahdad instead of Kansas City.
The Kurds – the only party there worth supporting by the civilized people – can only benefit from a Sunni-Shiite war, so let them have one.
Absolutely right. The Shiite-Sunni rift is good for us infidels, and they will continue to have at it in any case. The only negative aspect of the Iran-Iraq war was that it ended and did not continue for generations.
Obama should issue an Executive Order that sends Andrew Cuomo and Martin O'Malley to Iraq to register and confiscate all guns to end the violence. n n
You are right; never should the US ever again try to nation-build in a Muslim land. It is a dumb as hell thing to do.
Correct. We should just blow it to hell and leave.
It is remarkable to observe a dozen posts attacking George Bush over his decision to depose Saddam Hussein yet see not a solitary syllable about the attacks of September 11, 2001. All the reasons arrayed here as to why Bush did what he did or what a mistake it was, for example, for the US to attempt to spread democracy, are spurious to the point of fantasy and can only be credited by someone who who was born after March, 2003. n nIt's tiresome to run this exercise yet again, yet it seems necessary in the face of an amnesia that has rarely been rivaled. n nThe primary reason for the invasion of Iraq, a reason cited again and again and again and again ad nauseam by the United States, Great Britain, and Spain (the most important members of the coalition in 2003) was the failure of Iraq to comply with 17 United Nations resolutions, virtually all of which dealt with a lack of transparency (or plain dishonesty) regarding Saddam's ultimate disposition of the weapons of mass destruction that, following the defection of his son-in-law in July, 1995, we knew existed and that, in fact, Iraq admitted HAD existed, but which they claimed to have destroyed, but concerning the destruction of which they could produce NO paperwork. n nThink about that just a second! A Stalinist police state that was not merely authoritarian but totalitarian, meaning a regime holding files in triplicate on every man, women, and camel in the country that somehow had not managed to record the fate of approximately 10,000—yes, that's right, 10,000!—one-liter cannisters of anthrax, VHX nerve gas, botulism, and other delicacies—the list had 23 items on it—all exceedingly deadly and all in the process of being weaponized. Yet you want to ridicule George Bush because you just know his decision to go to war had to do with something as foolish as establishing democracy in the Middle East. n nWere any of you at all conscious during the 1990s? If you were, you surely remember the weekly Kabuki dance starring Iraqis and UN Weapons inspectors. The last were the same collection of Sherlock Holmeses who, in 1991 after the first Gulf War, declared that they were "astonished" to learn that Iraq, the Israelis having destroyed the Osirak reactor, had evidently managed to design a fission bomb and to construct a delivery system without any anti-nuclear-proliferation inspectors (then led by Hans Blix, remember him?) noticing one thing amiss! Is any of that familiar to you? Do you think, after September 11th, that that record may have played a part in Bush's decision. Maybe just a little?? n nThe decision to frame the aims of the war for reasons other than uncertainty as to the whereabouts of an enormous WMD cache was a secondary, mostly after-the-fact decision. I say "mostly" because well before the invasion, Bush and men like Paul Wolfowitz were coming to view the problems in the Middle East as at bottom political and not military, so something like democracy promotion was always in the cards. But it was always secondary. George Bush made that clear a hundred times: "I will not trust Saddam Hussein," he said over and over again in one form or another. It was the overriding concern of Dick Cheney as well. They were in office when the attacks occurred, and they were resolved not to take ANY chances at all, not even if it were "one chance in a hundred," as the vice-president told the NSC. n nI repeat: No one (a) knew where the weapons that had preoccupied the US and the the UN for more than a decade were; (b) absent proof, believed the Iraqis claim to have destroyed them, and that included the United Nations that had passed those 17 resolutions, as well as crippling sanctions, precisely because they did not believe the Iraqis; (c) understood the relationship between the Iraqis and terrorists, such as bin Laden. n nThat last "unknown" is particularly salient. Neither Bush nor Cheney nor Rumsfeld ever accused Iraq of having had a hand in the attacks of 9/11. At the same time they were not, given the lack of any intelligence assets inside Iraq, for which we have the democrats to thank, going to give him the benefit of the doubt as did Democrats like Sen. Carl Levin who, while admitting into evidence the CIA reports of "19 contacts" between the Iraqi mukhabarat and Al Qaeda terrorists in the 10 years prior to September 11, 2001, somehow could still insist that "there was no operational connection." How in hell did he or even could he know that? It's not as if minutes were kept. n n(cont.)