Breaking News: Mass Slaugher in Baghdad
A string of car bombings in Sadr City and Kadhimiya (Shiite neighborhoods) wrought vast slaughter and destruction, leaving a death toll creeping toward 150 and over 200 wounded. Shiite guerrillas fired mortars at Sunni neighborhoods in response.
I just saw the news conference of President Jalal Talabani, Vice President Tariq Hashimi, and Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim on Aljazeera. They called for an end to this violence and a new vision. Hashimi, a Sunni, called on the Resistance to join the political process. They all looked dejected and bowed, reminding me more of prisoners on death row than vigorous leaders of a country. Hashimi was the least bowed.
You have to ask yourself, where is the US military? Where is the Iraqi Army? Where is the Iraqi police?
It is as though nobody was home except the Sunni Arab guerrillas, who seem to be closing in on a takeover of the Green Zone.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/23/2006 07:30:00 AM
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It is as though nobody was home except the Sunni Arab guerrillas, who seem to be closing in on a takeover of the Green Zone.
I have been wondering for several months about the possibility that the Green Zone might be pentrated. Doing so would surely require a very large number of attackers, as well as a lot of heavy munitions. I believe it would be difficult to put all that together without a significant staging area which might be detectable from the air. The only other possibility would be an attack with some significant inside help.
The fall of the heavily Green Zone would occasion a great loss of life on both sides, as well as U.S. calls for retaliation, and so forth. Although I lack any specific knowledge of the situation, I am skeptical that it could happen.
(If you think this comment delves too far into specifics, please remove it.)
CHICKENHAWK DUBYA
I noticed that George W. Bush does not feel that is safe enough to fly into Iraq to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki next week so they will meet in Jordan instead. Kind of the way George W. Bush avoided going to Vietnam during the Vietnam conflict. Dubya is a real chickenhawk.
I've long thought that the USA has few options in Iraq. Has the possibility of orderly withdrawal evaporated?
As per usual with dimwit Deputy Dubya Bush, he has things precisely backwards about American wars to reimpose a discredited colonialism long past its historic demise. In our War on Vietnam and current War on Iraq, we lost ourselves the day we started. Only when we quit did (and do) we win the opportunity to regain a little bit of our better selves again. Having never served in (or reflected upon) either post-colonial quagmire, Dubya's dysfunctional disquisitions about both richly deserve the derision they routinely receive.
As the legendary comedian W. C. Fields used to say about fanaticism: "If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it."
Alas, we have not only a Republican fool to fail us, but a Democratic flock of freelancing fowl foolishly funding the further "phasing" of his folly.
I'll tell you where the US military where Juan they were damn well helping the green zone government troops prevent ambulances from getting into Sadr city. Why not check out Aswat al-Iraq from time to time. They're not tied into any party.
Or are you of the impression that the US are the good guys? The US aren't the good guys. They're the bad guys. Who is worse Juan - the people fighting over Iraq or the people who set the fight up for their own "definitive domination" ends? Can you say immoral equivalence yet?
It's bigger than all that, Juan...
It’s the refugees stupid! To turn a phrase here might serve us all to keep our eyes on the wave that’s now cresting across the Fertile Crescent.
The migration, and potential migration, of untold hundreds of thousands (perhaps in the millions) of Iraqi refugees to Jordan and Syria (and Iran to a lesser extent) is the unspoken fulcrum for U.S. leverage to facilitate our rapid exit from Iraq.
Before I go on…I know some of you are wondering what about Saudi Arabia?…well that paleo-Sultanate will stay locked up tighter than a drum to in-migration (unless you count the sex-slave trade they are so adept at hiding), thus they will not be a player in the scenario I outline below.
Throughout history it is the transnational movement of sizeable refugee populations (those exodus that threaten a country’s national security and welfare) that provide the impetus for sovereign states to take regional risks. No rational player associated with the Fertile Crescent can ignore the likely refugee consequences of a U.S. withdrawal sans regional commitments to a stable Iraq.
Currently, it is money (usually dollars) that buys an Iraqi family passage into one of these neighboring countries. That will change very soon (if it has not already) as the human wave of Sunnis head West and the Shiites move East (or South), both running from each other and the militias fighting for control of center.
(Side Bar: Do not delude yourself that the militias are going to make a petrol-grab for the pipelines. They are well patrolled and too vital as spoils to the victor. Save that inferno for later.)
However, the second wave of refugees will not be the well-heeled, upper-crust, of Iraqi society. They will be the desperate and hungry, seeking to cross borders with all the motivation that fear, famine, and despair can muster. This movement will be huge. And, (take note here) it will be escorted by U.S. troops ordered to prevent genocide and mass starvations. Can you see it yet? The U.N. setting up colossal tent cities on the borders just inside Jordan and Syria? It does not take much imagination to picture such a ghastly scenario.
This pile of humanity is the fulcrum upon which our callous U.S. decision makers are now leveraging regional powers (and the U.N.). Watch the picture unfold in the next month. Our country is about to play a heartless (soulless) game of chicken within the region.
Just in case you are wondering why Dick Cheney is going to Saudi Arabia recently…it was to deliver a promise to the Sultans of Slavery that they would not be subjected to the flood. Redeployment, in this case, means: “Sure your Highness, we’ll guard your border.”
The presence of US troops is irrelevant. There is no mission plan you can develop to keep determined suicide bombers from striking inside their own turf. But that does point to the larger problem: what are US troops doing in Iraq? The fact is that whatever role they might have played has long since evaporated.
If Samarra was a turning point to the low intensity civil war, I wonder if historians will later crown this as marking the beginning of the hot phase. One thing is for sure, the situation is simple untenable. Support the troops, bring them home!
Asking vainly about the location of the American Army after almost four years of watching it lurch about in Iraq like a gargantuan chicken with its head cut off sounds almost too ... well ... I suppose I really shouldn't try to characterize it.
In reading this pathetic plea, I thought back to the opening days of the doomed occupation when America's vaunted legions stood around haplessly watching an entire society collapse in widespread looting all around them. I immediately thought of the operative epigrammatic quotation from Frances Fitzerald's Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. To wit:
"Like an Orwellian Army [the Americans] knew everything about military tactics, but nothing about where they were or who the enemy was." And, furthermore:
"There was a timeless quality to the American effort -- which is not to say that it was static but that it was constantly moving over the same ground."
From the very outset of 2003, Deputy Dubya's debacle in the desert has seemed like little more than a postcript footnote to Fitzerald's classic analysis of the [now-generic] "American War on ..." One should not even have to bother discoursing with defenders of the rapist whose case rests entirely on the fact that his victims had differently colored hair and wore different size dresses, et cetera.
Anyway, to vent my Groundhog Day frustration with another American government too stupid to stipulate, I began composing poems, one of which I have today updated because of the recurrent misunderstanding about what the American military presence in Iraq really means. Hence, once more into the Breach at Ascalon with the new, improved:
"Peace with Horror"
A leper knight rode into view
Astride his mangy steed
A harbinger of violence
A plague without a need
An apparition of discord
Upon which fear would feed
His unannounced arrival meant
He'd lost his leper's bell
And yet his ugly innocence
Could not conceal the smell
His good intentions only paved
Another road to Hell
With mace and lance and sword deployed
He vowed in peace to live
Through rotting lips he promised not
To take, but only give
He swore to only kill the ones
Whom he said shouldn't live
He did not speak the language and
He did not know the land
So why the healthy shrank from him
He could not understand
Why did they want the water when
He'd offered them the sand?
Committed to commitment he
Committed crimes galore
As steadfast in his loyalties
As any purchased whore
A mercenary madman like
His slogan: "Peace through War"
His slaying for salvation masked
An inner, grasping greed
A lust for living good and well
While looking past his deed
A dead man walking wakefully;
A graveyard gone to seed
He planned to leave in "phases," so
He said to those back home
Who'd heard some nasty rumors rife
From Babylon to Rome
Of murders in their name meant to
Exalt their sacred tome
But still he needed to "protect"
Some pilgrims on the road
Who for "protection" glumly paid
A portion of their load:
For this decaying derelict,
An object episode
When asked to give a summary
Of what he had achieved
He shifted to the future tense
The gains that he perceived
And spoke in the subjunctive mood
To those he had aggrieved
"The future life to come portends
More suffering than now
Only through me can you avoid
What I will disavow:
The promises I never made
While making, anyhow."
"I unsay things that I have said
And say I never did;
Then say them once again to pound
The meaning deeply hid,
Down where the lizard lives between
The ego and the id."
"I've given you catastrophe
And called it a success;
If you want other outcomes then
Step forward and confess
That you believed a pack of lies
With no strain, sweat, or stress."
"You know the meaning of my words
Lasts only just as long
As sound takes to decay in air
So that you take them wrong
If you assign significance
To my sly siren song."
"A 'propaganda catapult'
I've called myself, in fact;
A damning human document
Which I myself redact
At every opportunity
With no concern for tact."
"If you think what I've done before
Has caused me to repent
Or dream that I, in any way,
Might let up or relent
Then I've got wars for you to buy,
Or maybe just to rent."
"I've little time to live on earth,
So why should I reflect
Upon the dead and dying souls
Whose lives I've robbed and wrecked?
I care not if they hate, just so
They know to genuflect."
And thus the ruin of a world
Continued in its course
With witless workers waiting for
The great man on his horse
To give them bad to save them from
What they feared even worse
Then onward to Jerusalem
He staggered as he slew
In train with sack and booty that
He only thought his due
For spreading freedom's germs among
The last surviving few
Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2006
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