Meanwhile...
It seems worth mentioning that the actually important news story of the week is almost certainly the shrine bombing in Iraq and the responses to it which seem to be further increasing sectarian tensions, complete with the odd massacre of Sunnis by Shiites militias and a further breakdown of the political process. I'm inclined to say that while these bombings were certainly a proximate cause of the ensuing chaos and further slide toward civil war that all this was really determined some time ago. It's been evident for some time now that Iraq was heading in this sort of direction, and it's inevitable that every so often something along these lines is going to happen to serve as a catalyst.
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I thought this was interesting: Iraq's major political and religious leaders issued urgent appeals for restraint, and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari called for a three-day mourning period in a televised address. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric, released an unusually strong statement in which he said, "If the government's security forces cannot provide the necessary protection, the believers will do it." Sistani's quoted statement doesn't really sound like an "urgent appeal for restraint."
February 23, 2006 7:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
matthew, shame on you: believing all that bad news the media is providing you. why, i tell you: 27M iraqis weren't killed yesterday. thousands of iraqi buildings weren't blown up. somewhere, a school was probably painted.
seriously, of course this was a predictable mess, and indeed, was so predicted. all i can say now is that i hope if the worst occurs - a truly ugly civil war rather than the low-grade version we've currently got - one of those many vaunted Pentagon contingency plans is how to get our personnel out quickly and safely....
February 23, 2006 1:16 PM | Reply | Permalink