Surge of Betrayal
The rationale of the Surge in American forces in Iraq, according to George Bush and John McCain, was to provide the security conditions to allow Iraqi political reconciliation. It now appears the Maliki government has betrayed both General Petraeus and the Sunni Awakening Councils, and has no interest in sectarian peace.
The Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is driving out many leaders of Sunni citizen patrols, the groups of former insurgents who joined the American payroll and have been a major pillar in the decline in violence around the nation.
One of the reasons Maliki is so insistent on getting U.S. Troops out of the cities and towns by next June is so the Shiites can consolidate their power over the Sunnis. Disarming the Awakening Councils and arresting their leaders is crucial to achieve that goal. Condoleeza Rice smiles while signing off on a death warrant for the Sunnis that made the current peace possible.
"Some people from the government encouraged us to fight against Al Qaeda, but it seems that now that Al Qaeda is finished they don't want us anymore," said Abu Marouf, who, according to American officials, was a powerful guerrilla leader in the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade west of Baghdad. "So how can you say I am not betrayed?"After he said he discovered his name on lists of 650 names that an Iraqi Army brigade was using to arrest Awakening members west of Baghdad, Abu Marouf fled south of Falluja. His men, he said, "sacrificed and fought against Al Qaeda, and now the government wants to catch them and arrest them."
Meanwhile, the U.S. commanders like Brigadier General David Perkins, who conceived and funded the Awakening Council plan and encouraged the Sunnis to turn against Al Qaeda, have to watch from the sidelines as their allies are hunted down and sent to Abu Ghraib.
And while American officials are insistent that the program to pay militia guards continue to operate, General Perkins said it was not yet clear what recourse the military would have to prevent the Iraqi government from ending the program once it took control. "We don't want this to be a dead-end, kick them to the curb kind of thing," he said.
Is this is John McCain's vision of victory, or a bitter betrayal and a prelude to a new civil war?
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/49538.html
August 22, 2008 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
August 22, 2008 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Forever.
August 22, 2008 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
We should stay. What we need to do is put pressure on Maliki to bring the Sunnis into the Army and the government in the next 12 months. Part of that pressure is economic. They have been letting us spend our treasury on reconstruction and armaments for their soldiers. This should no0t continue unless there is some political reconciliation
August 22, 2008 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Misstype. I meant "we should not stay"
August 22, 2008 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Taplin,
What you suggest should be done in the next twelve months amounts to a crash course of what the Iraq Study Group said should have been integral to the withdrawal itself.
The Bush administration did not take up the work required for such an outcome (or even a failed attempt to achieve it). It is so convenient when the requirements of policy formation can be deferred to military expertise.
So the problem has been handed off to the next U.S. administration. The presidential candidates are not far apart in their positions.
McCain will stay because he said he would and there is no reason to question his determination to do so.
Obama will stay because of the condition he placed upon his call for a quick withdrawal: If civil war breaks out, the U.S. will get involved again.
August 22, 2008 9:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
The curent move against Iraqi Sunnis is Iranian foreign policy in action. Shi'ite Maliki, his Badr brigade and the Iraqi army are all beholden to Shi'ite Iran, the real winner of Operation Iraqi Fiasco, other than all Bush's friends who have gotten very, very rich that is.
I suppose that if Obama pointed this out he'd be branded as a traitor.
Anyhow, looking ahead to June, and any talk of USit's all "conditions based," like and doesn't mean much.
August 22, 2008 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, I got posted in mid-composition.
Last sentence: Anyhow, looking ahead to June, and any talk of US withdrawal, it's all "conditions based," as it has been for five years, and doesn't mean much.
August 22, 2008 2:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
America doesn't have to do anything in Iraq. The Iraqis do. We Americans will leave Iraq and Afghanistan because we can't afford to stay i those remote reaches of our now defunct empire. The Iraqis and Afghans will stay where they have always lived because their countries belong to them and not us.
As with our monumental folly in Vietnam, however, the American imperial military bureaucracy has created pathetic foreign dependents that we cannot support indefinitely and who will turn on us, the foreign invader -- and against their own domestic enemies -- the minute it becomes more in their self-interest to ignore whatever we say or do. The minute we stop bribing the bad puppet to dance at the end of our string, what we say we want will mean nothing to the bad puppet who has always resented the string we hung on him and who sees no need to remain attached to it once it no longer pays him not to cut if off.
The Maliki Shiite government in the Baghdad Green Zone Castle has no intention of ever sharing power with the Sunni minority it fears and loathes. The Iranian-and-American-backed Shiite government of Iraq has rather effectively "cleansed" most Sunnis of any stature from the Iraqi government, police and military. Maliki and the Iranian-backed Shiite majority will now try and finish off the Sunnis while they still have the American military around to help them complete the job that the American military started for them in early 2003.
The corrupt Shiite banker and Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi played Deputy Dubya Bush and the Cheney/Rumsfeld innocents for patsies when he hoodwinked them into overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Sunni Baathist secular government of Iraq for him. Decades of "fighting Saddam from the casinos and nightclubs of Europe" never did the trick, but now that Maliki and the Shiites know that America can't possibly remain in Iraq without fomenting revolution back home, the long-suppressed Iraqi
Shiite resentment of the foreign infidel Americans will spill out into the open and Maliki will seek public political support by increasingly humilitating the Americans until they just pack up and go -- leaving all the money and military equipment behind, of course.
As with the long debacle in Southeast Asia, America has taken itself hostage with its own idiotic, bellicose rhetoric and as our precariously exposed remaining troops consolidate into ever-more-precarious and surrounded enclaves, the speed of America's withdrawal will accelerate. If President Obama has any good sense at all, he will have American troops out of Iraq long before any of these phony Owellian "aspirational timeline horizons" show up faintly over the ever-retreating horizon. I've still got letters some friends of mine sent me from Vietnam after I finally got out in January of 1972 and they fairly shriek of paranoia and distrust of our "little brown brothers" who supposedly would take over "security" once the Seawolf helicopter gunship detatchment departed our remote river outpost base and left the isolated remaining Amerians at the mercy of those locals we had used for our own purposes but now planned to abandon to save our own asses. The American military withdrawal from Vietnam conclued with alacrity soon after.
Like legions of Vietnam Veterans uninvolved in fat-assed VFW war-agitating for pandering republican politicians, I never doubted that this farce of Vietanam II in the Bay of Goats would finish in any way other than the way Vietnam I in Southeast Asia did. I concluded this long ago because although the Iraqi and Vietnamese victims differ in many ways from each other, the American Lunatic Leviathan looks and acts (one cannot use the misnomer "thinks") the same stupid way as ever.
The March of Folly stumbles on ... and on ... and on ... and ...
August 22, 2008 2:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's always risky to predict the future, but The Pentagon still has extensive bases in Germany and Japan, and elsewhere. The US has recently decided to make Korea an accompanied tour and will build new bases in South Korea with all the amenities that military families require.
Certainly affordability is never a restraint when it comes to outposting the empire in far-away places. Generally the US sends a bill to the host government for half of the expenses, and they pay up. That helps.
August 22, 2008 3:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
What on earth do Germany and Japan have to do with Iraq and Afghanistan? Two more ludicrous and specious comparisons one could not possibly imagine.
The Afghans have fought foreign invaders as a national sport from Alexander the Great through the British Empire through the Soviet Empire and now through the American Empire. The Afghans still remain Afghans in Afghanistan and the American-concocted North Afghanistan Threatening Operation has doom and disaster written all over it.
Iraq and Afghanistan cost the American taxpayer 10 to 12 billion dollars a month (if one can even take those obviously low-balled guestimates at face value) and the American government has no money in the bank to pay for many more months of this insane profligacy. Why, just the other night here in Southern Taiwan the Television featued a program about a group of weatly Taiwanese women (wives of doctors and CEOs) who had just returned from a shopping spree in America -- to buy up various mansions -- complete with gardeners, caretakers, and chauffers -- at distressed foreclosure prices.
Really. Americans don't have the first idea who has already bought their sorry, indebted asses -- or for how cheaply.
Predicting that America will withdraw from untenable and unaffordable imperial outposts halfway around the globe does not amount to "predicting the future" but only recapitulating a sorry and only-too-often-repeated past.
I lived through and survived all of this self-same Lunatic Leviathan bullshit in Southeast Asia thirty-five years ago. I do not dream of what still might happen. I only re-live nightmares of what already has. But I know the usual non-sequitur rebuttal. As my fellow Vietnam Veteran Daniel Ellsberg likes to say: "But in Iraq its a dry heat, and the language our military and diplomatic personnel don't speak is Arabic instead of Vietnamese." Distinctions without a difference add nothing to any analysis worth discussing.
August 22, 2008 4:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
In Germany and Japan the bad guys we fought had uniforms, and it wasn't Dubya's Holy Crusade.
Now that Bush and McCain have turned Iraq over to the Iranian backed SCIRI, The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, we should leave.
Let the Iraqi's, the Kuwaiti's or the Saudi's pony up to keep the peace in their neighborhood.
August 22, 2008 4:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Condoleeza Rice smiles while signing off on a death warrant for the Sunnis
Therein a certain ironic parity;the *Marsh Arabs will no doubt recognize the **sensation presently being experienced by the latest bunch of suckers who trusted us in matters of geopolitical conduct.
*Those, that is, who survived the George I enabled purge following our glorious restoration of the Kuwaiti Autocracy.
**Asshole to Brain:Attention, splintered broomstick entering; no lubrication evident.
August 23, 2008 1:09 AM | Reply | Permalink