Must Read on The Surge
Tom Englehardt has been consistently writing good dispatches on the post 9/11 world. You need to read his alternative narrative to the current MSM, “Iraq is Stabilizing” story.
Given the situation of Iraq more than five years after the invasion, to speak of this urge to surge and its results as “success” or as “good news” is essentially obscene. Think of Iraq instead as a cocked gun. It’s loaded, it’s held to your head, and things are improving only to the extent that, recently, it hasn’t gone off.
Iraq itself is wreckage beyond anything that could have been imagined back in March 2003; liberation is, by now, a black joke; the Bush administration’s “benchmarks” for Iraqi success remain largely unmet, and still we keep “liberating” that land, still we keep killing Iraqis in prodigious numbers. A Vietnam-style body count, once banished by an administration that wanted no reminders of the last disastrous American counterinsurgency war, is now back with a vengeance, even if violence is down. These days, in its statements, the U.S. military is counting scalps almost everywhere there’s fighting in Iraq.
Also a must read (Tom recommends it at the end):
http://www.juancole.com/2008/06/real-state-of-iraq.html
Also a must read (Tom recommends it at the end):
http://www.juancole.com/2008/06/real-state-of-iraq.html
I’ve been reading The Economist lately, and last week they ran a section on how things are starting to get better in Iraq. The op-ed slant clearly wants to believe that we’ve turned the corner in Iraq, but they have to keep hedging their bets by saying that the improvements are still quite recent, Sadr is still out there, inscrutable as always, only 16% of Sunnis think things are going well (up from a mere 2%!), Baghdad still gets only about an average of 7 hours of electricity a day, which is better than anywhere else, the Kurds still want Kirkuk and are saying privately that they will not take no for an answer, more neighborhoods are peaceful now only because ethnic cleansing is complete, 5 million Iraqis are still dislocated or expatriated, and the Iraqi army is still sorely in need of competent leadership.
After more than five years.
There was also a good article in, I think, World Affairs in their May/June issue that expounded on the fragility of things over there.
I don’t know what will happen in Iraq (unlike the iron-hard certainty of some people) but things don’t look too promising to me.
I’ve been reading The Economist lately, and last week they ran a section on how things are starting to get better in Iraq. The op-ed slant clearly wants to believe that we’ve turned the corner in Iraq, but they have to keep hedging their bets by saying that the improvements are still quite recent, Sadr is still out there, inscrutable as always, only 16% of Sunnis think things are going well (up from a mere 2%!), Baghdad still gets only about an average of 7 hours of electricity a day, which is better than anywhere else, the Kurds still want Kirkuk and are saying privately that they will not take no for an answer, more neighborhoods are peaceful now only because ethnic cleansing is complete, 5 million Iraqis are still dislocated or expatriated, and the Iraqi army is still sorely in need of competent leadership.
After more than five years.
There was also a good article in, I think, World Affairs in their May/June issue that expounded on the fragility of things over there.
I don’t know what will happen in Iraq (unlike the iron-hard certainty of some people) but things don’t look too promising to me.