Thanks to the RNC, Polimom’s pleased to share good news with folks this morning: things are looking good in Iraq! (.pdf here)
No, really! They’ve helpfully assembled some media coverage that demonstrates that we’re on the right track… that the market economy is ready to roll, and Iraqi’s are happy with the job al-Maliki’s doing. They even provided some helpful photos of happy people: an Iraqi couple smiling into one another’s eyes, a smiling boy giving a “thumbs up”. It’s all good, right?
I guess these folks didn’t get the memo:
The shift is subtle, but Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war.
C’mon, now. Ya think?
Hogwash and poppycock. Things have been spiralling down the toilet for months, and while we can try to label the situation as “sectarian strife” til we’re blue in the face, at some point somebody’s going to have to face the words “civil war”.
Last week, House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a statement hailing the turnover of Iraq’s Muthanna province to Iraqi security forces under the headline “Progress in Iraq . . . Despite Doomsday Democrats.”
On Tuesday, there was little talk of progress as he insisted that the rising sectarian violence was “nowhere close to civil war.”
Sigh….
Polimom takes zero pleasure in having called this way back in March… so now what? Cuz there’s no chance we can stand in the face of full-blown internal disintegration, regardless of how many troops we send.
“Look, you have got one of two options,” Boehner said. “We can pull out, walk away and watch everything that we’ve worked for and the Iraqis worked for fall apart and watch pure civil war break out, or we can stay the course. . . . As difficult as the problems are on the ground, it is either one of two options.”
Bleak as that is, he’s pretty close to right, but it’s more than worrying that everything will go up in smoke. There’s rather a lot more at risk than the administration would like to admit. And as for staying the course… do you mean the one we’re on? It looks to me as if both roads lead to the same destination: anarchy and chaos in Iraq.
I don’t see a way out of this trap, frankly, and Polimom’s truly ticked that this is self-inflicted. America has truly been hoist on the PNAC petard.
We can’t find the exit door for the same reason the situation blew up in our faces. Power abhors a vacuum, and if (more like… when) the US pulls out of Iraq, who do you think will fill the gaping hole when the government falls?
The US is locked in a struggle for regional power with…. wait for it…. Iran.
Polimom’s pretty pessimistic this morning, obviously, but true to my recently declared desire to rise above these depressing scenarios, I did manage to come up a couple of slightly more optimistic thoughts. (Heavy emphasis on slightly…)
For instance – There is (as is often the case) a third possibility in Iraq: split the country into two (or three). Would Iran swoop in and get the Shi’ite partition organized? Of course they would. Would the Middle East convulse into a regional war? It’s likely, but that’s not nearly the obvious end we’re facing now.
The really bright end to this post, though, is that I’m just another blogger, reading and agonizing in my pajamas — far removed from events on the ground or places of power. I really have no idea what I’m talking about (as any number of people are about to tell me).
I’m good with that… cuz I’d really rather be wrong. Ya know?
I’m curious, when u say “spiraling” out of control, does that mean that the situation has really been getting worse? By a spiral motion I picture a gradual negative turn. To me, it isn’t getting any worse, its just not getting better, or better overall. For any improvement that seems to happen here and there, something degenerates somewhere else. The Iraqis are still exploding (with democracy of course) despite our rebuiliding of and mainting a major infrastructure.
We’re really good at maintaining the status quo over there, but that isn’t where we want to be or feel safe enough to leave it.
Calling what is going on over there a civil war seems like an easy rationalization of the continued violence. Its an easy explanation of what someone is trying to achieve. But it makes the assumption that some group is trying to take over the other’s control of the government. There are too many reasons for the various acts done to “simplify” it to a civil war. Some of the attacks on us are just because someone wants us gone, they feel occupied and want a foreign military to leave. Some of the acts are from anarchists who wouldn’t be satisified with any government, some are from groups that want their section of the country to be independent, to not be part of the current government at all. And how can we even rule out that certain attacks are obviously placed to stoke the fire between two types of religious groups? Groups that hate each other all over the middle east, not just in Iraq. If it is a regional hatred, that isn’t really a civil war issue isolated to a single country.
Hi Jack — Up until pretty recently, I agreed with you that things had held at about the same level for some time. But when the violence started turning more and more internal (rather than just the insurgents targeting the Americans), my view of things started to change. (That’s when I wrote the “civil war” post linked above.)
What actually laid the mental foundation for this particular post, though, is this article from the Telegraph: Mortars let fly as Iraq draws first front line of civil war. For the last couple of months, but most particularly in the last two weeks, it looks much different there to me.
Of course, to say it “looks” like anything is misleading, since I’m not there, but here. Even Stratfor, though — as impartial an analysis source as I know, has been projecting fewer positive possibilities lately. All by itself, that would have worried me.
After this post went up yesterday, al-Sistani finally called upon the Shi’ite death squads to stop killing Sunnis. The Sunnis themselves, of course, are also locked in the “revenge killing” cycle. It’s potentially very helpful that the call to cease has finally gone out; let’s hope it puts some breaks on the situation.
To me, PNAC petard is working to find the belly of the beast.
We are in year five, according to “our side’s” calculations, of a war that’s expected to last a minimum of 13 years, more probably 25 years.
Hard to see the big picture when you’re transfixed by the signature in the corner.