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?