Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has put the last piece of straw on the poor camel called Iraq. And its back is about to break. …
… After that snake Ahmed Chalabi talked to him, he has put the word out that he will not back the de-Baathification program (this NYT article explains it best). That means Sunnis will not get the stable jobs that would give them an incentive to join the Iraqi government. That means they will feel alienated and fight back against a government that completely excludes them. The insurgency will grow. The civil war which has already begun will now spiral out of control.
The Sunnis no longer have any incentive to make a deal. The only place where they think they might make gains is on the battlefield (I believe they are also sorely mistaken in that belief). So, it’s on. Iraq no longer exists.
By the way, in case you missed it — yes, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani makes the most important decisions in Iraq. The real power in Iraq runs through Sistani. He decided who would be elected to the Iraqi government in the first place when he selected the religious Shiite bloc that won the 2005 elections. George Bush handed Iraq over to a Grand Ayatollah. Brilliant work. Genius. Is it possible to be more incompetent?
So, now the rest of this will play out predictably. The Sunni insurgency will not let up at all. At some point, either we will start to withdraw and be replaced by Shiite militia (by the way, where is the Iraqi army, do they still exist?). That’s the best case scenario.
Expect the MSM “pundits” to figure this out in six to eight months.
All this and “Operation Bite” is about to go down.
I hope it’s a hoax or “disinformation”.
I heard a joke – not too funny, but appropriate.
How do you tell a dead Suni victim in Baghdad from a dead Shiite victim in Bachdad?
Answer: The Suni victim is the one with the drill holes.
We will soon pass the point where we can claim with any shread of credability, that we are not supplying (figuratively) the drill bits. The ‘democratic’ governement in the Green Zone is going to turn out to be a despotism as wicked as any we have seen in many decades. And we are going to prop it up because we made this Frankenstein.
That means Sunnis will not get the stable jobs that would give them an incentive to join the Iraqi government
Sorry, but the first thing of thought of when I read “stable jobs” is shoveling camel dung… which is probably their only real prospect now.
Didn’t Bremer get a Freedom Medal? Heck of a job,Bremer!
I guess this is part of the “some mistakes” that Condi and Georgie mentioned casually in passing. What’s the big deal about flipping an entire nation’s civil service structure on its head? But the bible says, you don’t put new wine in old wineskins. Nation building is hard!
I just checked the definition of surge and one definition was:
a strong, wavelike, forward movement, rush, or sweep.
How can anything that takes a full six months be a surge? How many months before had it been in the news that he was planning a surge? I thought in military parlance something like a surge would work better if it were a surprise. And, then, of course, it has been repeatedly discussed that adding 20,000-25,000 troops wasn’t really a large number for a significant surge–particularly when the commanders of the war wanted more troops than they got (who’s telling the commanders how to run the war?) in the beginning. Confusing . . .
Cenk Uygur asks: Is it possible to be more incompetent?
I was reading John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience last night, and came across his supremely ironic observation, that Bush the Dumber made his moves deliberately ignoring his father’s vast foreign policy expertise.
It’s one thing to be incompetent at something – many of us are- it’s quite another to be incompetent and deliberately refuse experienced, well respected advice from someone you know intimately.
I’m not a historian, but I suspect George W Bush will go down as having plumbed entirely new levels of incompetence, dragging the whole nation down with him.