Awakening 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?
Maliki also wants us out fast, in my opinion, because we will leave a lot of materiel on the ground for him to use instead of shipping it home for refurbishing. He better take a hard look though. When we bugged out of Iran, the last thing the supply and repair guys did was to take vital and irreplaceable parts out of the gear. It was oversized paperweights when the Revolutionary Council got to it. Then once the hostages were out, we blew the roof down on 300 madjlis. Sort of a ‘don’t do it again’ message.
Anyone who thought this would go any other way didn’t spend time studying Middle East politics. I can’t defend it and won’t try to. On the other hand, the fates of many of the British Loyalists after Cornwallis bugged out wasn’t pretty.
Blame this on Bush or McCain, but really, this is what the Arabs want to do to each other and we’ve been in their way. We are very bad as the Brits point out at understanding the family tribal relationships and how deadly they are when mixed with fundamental Islamic schisms that have their roots in the second generation of post-Mohammed faithful fighting over the tenets of the religion.
What SHOULD we do? Stay?
Maliki also wants us out fast, in my opinion, because we will leave a lot of materiel on the ground for him to use instead of shipping it home for refurbishing. He better take a hard look though. When we bugged out of Iran, the last thing the supply and repair guys did was to take vital and irreplaceable parts out of the gear. It was oversized paperweights when the Revolutionary Council got to it. Then once the hostages were out, we blew the roof down on 300 madjlis. Sort of a ‘don’t do it again’ message.
Anyone who thought this would go any other way didn’t spend time studying Middle East politics. I can’t defend it and won’t try to. On the other hand, the fates of many of the British Loyalists after Cornwallis bugged out wasn’t pretty.
Blame this on Bush or McCain, but really, this is what the Arabs want to do to each other and we’ve been in their way. We are very bad as the Brits point out at understanding the family tribal relationships and how deadly they are when mixed with fundamental Islamic schisms that have their roots in the second generation of post-Mohammed faithful fighting over the tenets of the religion.
What SHOULD we do? Stay?
Len- We can’t stay. What we should do in the next 12 months is put intense pressure on Maliki to bring the Sunnis into the government and into the Army. That pressure is part economic. They will have to spend their own treasury on reconstruction and weapons unless they get their act together.
Len- We can’t stay. What we should do in the next 12 months is put intense pressure on Maliki to bring the Sunnis into the government and into the Army. That pressure is part economic. They will have to spend their own treasury on reconstruction and weapons unless they get their act together.
When Allied forces marched on Berlin, they weren’t going there to ‘reconcile’ with Hitler, any more than the Enola Gay was sent to Hiroshima on a diplomatic mission. In both cases, as with Sherman’s march to the sea, military force was being used to end hostilities once and for all.
In this sense, the war in Iraq was a spectacular success, in that Saddam Hussein’s government will never threaten America again. We won.
The only problem is that he was never much of a threat to begin with. And now that we’ve demolished a sovereign nation that was home to millions of people in what was possibly the greatest over-reaction in living history, we’re looking like absolute idiots.
Which is why ‘winning’ is now a matter of making it look like the error never happened. Or, if it did, it’s all for the best, because it let to something good, and all’s well that ends well, right?
Only now we’re astonished to find that our ‘partners’ in this charade are just as unscrupulous as the administration officials who were trying to peddle the spin in the first place.
Wouldn’t it be better to simply admit that we made a colossal error by invading the wrong country for the wrong reason, holding the architects of this catastrophe to very public account, and concede that Iraq, for better of worse, is now a relic of history?
Indeed, what would happen if Obama came into office and stated, flat out, that he had no intention of advancing the Bush Administration’s Big Lie? If he said that he was actually going to hold the previous administration to account, and use his executive privileged to expose and punish criminal wrongdoing in the most severe manner allowable by law?
What would happen if he went on to classify the destruction of a sovereign nation that was home to millions of people as one of America’s greatest failures, right up there with slavery?
By ending the Big Lie, and punishing its tellers as the destroyers of Iraq, he would be making the tacit admission that Iraq is now a relic of history, and that, for better or worse, there’s no fixing it. Policy would move away from dependence on obviously untrustworthy partners, and towards partitioning the land into separate areas for each tribe.
At this point, each group would have a basis of existing sovereignty to work from, as opposed to the chimera of a single sovereign power that necessitates a fight to the death, least the other side get it, and use that power against their rivals.
I realize that this scenario involves whole constellations of problems, and is far from a happy outcome in so many ways, that it’s really impossible to count.
But here’s the reality: if you’re drunk, and you drive your car into a minivan full of kids, setting the entire thing on fire, and killing everyone inside, there’s no way to spin that, or fix it, or pretend it didn’t happen, or try to handle the consequences in a way that (a) keeps you from admitting fault and (b) is recognized as a ‘victory’ by society in general.
So given that ‘best’ is a relative term, and that ‘solutions’ range from bad to worse, wouldn’t it be prudent to deal honorably with the one thing you can control – your own integrity – and start by admitting fault?
Radical, I know, but also very cathartic, and an experience that could allow America to redefine the role of its military as the basic guarantors of our own territorial boundaries, and get out of the low, if not negative-margin global security business altogether.
This does not mean that the world would suddenly spin out of control. After all, we would still be free to demolish any governments that did violence to Americans on American soil, and to support, on a case-by-case basis, the defense of any of our economic allies against attacks on their own sovereignty, provided they’d maintained their own respect for the basic laws of human rights before calling on us for help, and were not using our support as a subsidy to enable their domestic industry to compete against American industry more effectively.
Indeed, the fiasco in Iraq would be like a reverse Reichstag Fire – a clear demonstration of empire’s limits, prompting a wholesale abandonment of empire as a worthy goal, and the century-old (and now, hopefully dead) idea that America has a moral right, and, indeed, an obligation to use force (if necessary) to spread its values, and that the only true peace that the world can know is the Pax Americana.
If one of this blog’s fundamental premises is correct, then shouldn’t that be to the absolute advantage of American citizens?
When Allied forces marched on Berlin, they weren’t going there to ‘reconcile’ with Hitler, any more than the Enola Gay was sent to Hiroshima on a diplomatic mission. In both cases, as with Sherman’s march to the sea, military force was being used to end hostilities once and for all.
In this sense, the war in Iraq was a spectacular success, in that Saddam Hussein’s government will never threaten America again. We won.
The only problem is that he was never much of a threat to begin with. And now that we’ve demolished a sovereign nation that was home to millions of people in what was possibly the greatest over-reaction in living history, we’re looking like absolute idiots.
Which is why ‘winning’ is now a matter of making it look like the error never happened. Or, if it did, it’s all for the best, because it let to something good, and all’s well that ends well, right?
Only now we’re astonished to find that our ‘partners’ in this charade are just as unscrupulous as the administration officials who were trying to peddle the spin in the first place.
Wouldn’t it be better to simply admit that we made a colossal error by invading the wrong country for the wrong reason, holding the architects of this catastrophe to very public account, and concede that Iraq, for better of worse, is now a relic of history?
Indeed, what would happen if Obama came into office and stated, flat out, that he had no intention of advancing the Bush Administration’s Big Lie? If he said that he was actually going to hold the previous administration to account, and use his executive privileged to expose and punish criminal wrongdoing in the most severe manner allowable by law?
What would happen if he went on to classify the destruction of a sovereign nation that was home to millions of people as one of America’s greatest failures, right up there with slavery?
By ending the Big Lie, and punishing its tellers as the destroyers of Iraq, he would be making the tacit admission that Iraq is now a relic of history, and that, for better or worse, there’s no fixing it. Policy would move away from dependence on obviously untrustworthy partners, and towards partitioning the land into separate areas for each tribe.
At this point, each group would have a basis of existing sovereignty to work from, as opposed to the chimera of a single sovereign power that necessitates a fight to the death, least the other side get it, and use that power against their rivals.
I realize that this scenario involves whole constellations of problems, and is far from a happy outcome in so many ways, that it’s really impossible to count.
But here’s the reality: if you’re drunk, and you drive your car into a minivan full of kids, setting the entire thing on fire, and killing everyone inside, there’s no way to spin that, or fix it, or pretend it didn’t happen, or try to handle the consequences in a way that (a) keeps you from admitting fault and (b) is recognized as a ‘victory’ by society in general.
So given that ‘best’ is a relative term, and that ‘solutions’ range from bad to worse, wouldn’t it be prudent to deal honorably with the one thing you can control – your own integrity – and start by admitting fault?
Radical, I know, but also very cathartic, and an experience that could allow America to redefine the role of its military as the basic guarantors of our own territorial boundaries, and get out of the low, if not negative-margin global security business altogether.
This does not mean that the world would suddenly spin out of control. After all, we would still be free to demolish any governments that did violence to Americans on American soil, and to support, on a case-by-case basis, the defense of any of our economic allies against attacks on their own sovereignty, provided they’d maintained their own respect for the basic laws of human rights before calling on us for help, and were not using our support as a subsidy to enable their domestic industry to compete against American industry more effectively.
Indeed, the fiasco in Iraq would be like a reverse Reichstag Fire – a clear demonstration of empire’s limits, prompting a wholesale abandonment of empire as a worthy goal, and the century-old (and now, hopefully dead) idea that America has a moral right, and, indeed, an obligation to use force (if necessary) to spread its values, and that the only true peace that the world can know is the Pax Americana.
If one of this blog’s fundamental premises is correct, then shouldn’t that be to the absolute advantage of American citizens?
Frankly, the more caught up in sectarian bullshit they are over there, the less likely it is that they have the time or the inclination to harass us. It would be like David Lynch’s cartoon, “Angriest Dog in the World” times two with the chains just long enough for the dogs to nip and bite one another but not us. Maybe every now and then the chains stretch a bit, and the dogs can do even more damage to one another.
Cynical? Yes. Practical? Maybe. Turns into a “Last Man Standing” scenario, and that last man is pretty worn out by the end of that chapter of world history.
Frankly, the more caught up in sectarian bullshit they are over there, the less likely it is that they have the time or the inclination to harass us. It would be like David Lynch’s cartoon, “Angriest Dog in the World” times two with the chains just long enough for the dogs to nip and bite one another but not us. Maybe every now and then the chains stretch a bit, and the dogs can do even more damage to one another.
Cynical? Yes. Practical? Maybe. Turns into a “Last Man Standing” scenario, and that last man is pretty worn out by the end of that chapter of world history.
Alex-I think your suggestion is rather cathartic and that may be just what the country needs. Perhaps our own Truth and Reconciliation commission?
Alex-I think your suggestion is rather cathartic and that may be just what the country needs. Perhaps our own Truth and Reconciliation commission?
Len,
Couldn’t agree with you more – we have no concept of tribalism, and how to mediate between those who organize their societies in this fashion.
We made the mistake of considering the Middle-East according to the framework established by Colonial powers. Had we looked at the landscape from a tribal perspective, we may have realized that national boundaries were simply markers in a much bigger, and longer running game.
From what I understand (limited, I admit) what we’ve really done is hand Persians a major victory over Arabs. That’s a done deal, a bell that isn’t going to un-ring itself, no matter how hard we try.
We got played.
Len,
Couldn’t agree with you more – we have no concept of tribalism, and how to mediate between those who organize their societies in this fashion.
We made the mistake of considering the Middle-East according to the framework established by Colonial powers. Had we looked at the landscape from a tribal perspective, we may have realized that national boundaries were simply markers in a much bigger, and longer running game.
From what I understand (limited, I admit) what we’ve really done is hand Persians a major victory over Arabs. That’s a done deal, a bell that isn’t going to un-ring itself, no matter how hard we try.
We got played.
@Jon: Agreed. That’s been my position for awhile. If they intend to go after each other, we may have to stand back and watch just as we did after VietNam. Hopefully, they’ll realize fast that enough blood is soaking in the sand and it will come down to something better than Lebanon. As to market, my prediction has been for several years that we would pull out, they’d have their civil war, then would sell oil to the Chinese who are pretty good at coming in and clearing the damage.
But US interests aside, I’d like to see them rebuild, regain their self-respect and decide to compete with the Saudis, but that is Western thinking and they’ll have to find their own way to something that works consonant with their heritage, culture, beliefs and ambitions.
Somewhere along the way, the whole “Death to the USA” meme has to stop. We have a lot of materiel that we never use because it is unacceptably harsh. Unless the Islamic societies pick a path away from hate and cycles of revenge, we will eventually change our minds about that. I’m not advocating it; but at some point, a generation will pass and it’s tough to predict what kind of adults our great-grandkids will be.
I want to come back to the collective action theme on another thread, and may do that from home. I have to be in Atlanta at a conference next week.
@Rick: Yes, the MP bar fight strategy: let them beat each other up then mop up the remains. I hope it doesn’t come to that because the superpowers have a habit of refreshing their materiel while they do that and keep their destructive capability right below the birth rate. The Brits played the Mughals for chumps like that for a long time and the Chinese. “Let’s you and him fight” is an old dodge in war profiteering.
@Jon: Agreed. That’s been my position for awhile. If they intend to go after each other, we may have to stand back and watch just as we did after VietNam. Hopefully, they’ll realize fast that enough blood is soaking in the sand and it will come down to something better than Lebanon. As to market, my prediction has been for several years that we would pull out, they’d have their civil war, then would sell oil to the Chinese who are pretty good at coming in and clearing the damage.
But US interests aside, I’d like to see them rebuild, regain their self-respect and decide to compete with the Saudis, but that is Western thinking and they’ll have to find their own way to something that works consonant with their heritage, culture, beliefs and ambitions.
Somewhere along the way, the whole “Death to the USA” meme has to stop. We have a lot of materiel that we never use because it is unacceptably harsh. Unless the Islamic societies pick a path away from hate and cycles of revenge, we will eventually change our minds about that. I’m not advocating it; but at some point, a generation will pass and it’s tough to predict what kind of adults our great-grandkids will be.
I want to come back to the collective action theme on another thread, and may do that from home. I have to be in Atlanta at a conference next week.
@Rick: Yes, the MP bar fight strategy: let them beat each other up then mop up the remains. I hope it doesn’t come to that because the superpowers have a habit of refreshing their materiel while they do that and keep their destructive capability right below the birth rate. The Brits played the Mughals for chumps like that for a long time and the Chinese. “Let’s you and him fight” is an old dodge in war profiteering.
Alex:
I’d vote for your brand of catharsis, but I doubt it’s on the ballot this year. A lot of what you said about Iraq was true of Vietnam, too. And to this day, there are tens of millions of Americans who are completely convinced that we just “didn’t try hard enough to win”.
Maybe we should appeal to Spain’s Audiencia National?
Alex:
I’d vote for your brand of catharsis, but I doubt it’s on the ballot this year. A lot of what you said about Iraq was true of Vietnam, too. And to this day, there are tens of millions of Americans who are completely convinced that we just “didn’t try hard enough to win”.
Maybe we should appeal to Spain’s Audiencia National?
I just discovered your blog. I’m glad I found someone else who thinks as I do. Maybe I’m not crazy after all. I look forward to reading all of your entries. Thank you for sharing your voice of reason and common sense.
I just discovered your blog. I’m glad I found someone else who thinks as I do. Maybe I’m not crazy after all. I look forward to reading all of your entries. Thank you for sharing your voice of reason and common sense.
Jon,
It’s the very last thing on Pelosi’s agenda. Blocking it is the first. Perhaps she’s just doing this until Obama is in office, and she’s confident that the whole thing won’t turn into another Gonzales fiasco.
I’d like to believe this. I really would. But I’m not holding my breath.
Jon,
It’s the very last thing on Pelosi’s agenda. Blocking it is the first. Perhaps she’s just doing this until Obama is in office, and she’s confident that the whole thing won’t turn into another Gonzales fiasco.
I’d like to believe this. I really would. But I’m not holding my breath.
STS,
All the more reason to let in the sunshine.
STS,
All the more reason to let in the sunshine.
@sts: In defense, we never lost a battle. There was no definition of winning. Powell and Schwartzkoff learned that bitter lesson and made sure Bush Senior hoed to it which he did because he remembered and did the right thing in the first gulf war.
Then Saddam tried to kill the elder Bush and the Younger went after him successfully for that purpose if stupidly for every other.
All Cheney, Rumsfield and the Shrub seemed to believe is those rotten media folks and the dirty hippies robbed us of morale.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming…”
And then we did it all again. Here are two blogs I wrote at the beginning of the debacle.
http://lamammals.blogspot.com/2004/08/911-commission-report-effective-means.html
http://lamammals.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Value+of+Our+Values
I went ballistic when Shrub announced the pre-emptive strike policy. We abandoned our most basic value
that had given us a scintilla of moral high ground. Those are linked blogs and a few years old now, but they go to the heart of values-oriented thinking, the value of values, and some hints about collective action both for the good it can do, and the bad.
One hint: the secret poobahs of the web have been using collective action for over a decade and before. There is the ‘make a big splash’ strategy for large but ultimately shallow effects, then there is the slow sustained actions that like the lagrange model, map out the tunnels through the gravity wells and values shared among a group of people who work their ways over time into the positions to make the changes.
Then you can change the world, but the power is in the value of your shared values. It doesn’t mean you don’t fight or disagree. It means you have evolved to share goals based on those values. And sometimes, we blew it badly. The birth of XML was not a pretty thing from some perspectives. I make them mad but I still consider it a successful burglary. Sperberg-McQueen and Bosak hate it when I say that, but it’s my personal opinion.
“To touch a stranger
Across Time and Space
Beyond all hope of union
Is the highest art
And the purest magic.”
The Kate Worlds – 1995-96
@sts: In defense, we never lost a battle. There was no definition of winning. Powell and Schwartzkoff learned that bitter lesson and made sure Bush Senior hoed to it which he did because he remembered and did the right thing in the first gulf war.
Then Saddam tried to kill the elder Bush and the Younger went after him successfully for that purpose if stupidly for every other.
All Cheney, Rumsfield and the Shrub seemed to believe is those rotten media folks and the dirty hippies robbed us of morale.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming…”
And then we did it all again. Here are two blogs I wrote at the beginning of the debacle.
http://lamammals.blogspot.com/2004/08/911-commission-report-effective-means.html
http://lamammals.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Value+of+Our+Values
I went ballistic when Shrub announced the pre-emptive strike policy. We abandoned our most basic value
that had given us a scintilla of moral high ground. Those are linked blogs and a few years old now, but they go to the heart of values-oriented thinking, the value of values, and some hints about collective action both for the good it can do, and the bad.
One hint: the secret poobahs of the web have been using collective action for over a decade and before. There is the ‘make a big splash’ strategy for large but ultimately shallow effects, then there is the slow sustained actions that like the lagrange model, map out the tunnels through the gravity wells and values shared among a group of people who work their ways over time into the positions to make the changes.
Then you can change the world, but the power is in the value of your shared values. It doesn’t mean you don’t fight or disagree. It means you have evolved to share goals based on those values. And sometimes, we blew it badly. The birth of XML was not a pretty thing from some perspectives. I make them mad but I still consider it a successful burglary. Sperberg-McQueen and Bosak hate it when I say that, but it’s my personal opinion.
“To touch a stranger
Across Time and Space
Beyond all hope of union
Is the highest art
And the purest magic.”
The Kate Worlds – 1995-96
Apologies. That URL won’t work.
http://lamammals.blogspot.com/2004/08/value-of-our-values.html
That will.
Apologies. That URL won’t work.
http://lamammals.blogspot.com/2004/08/value-of-our-values.html
That will.
Look at it this way: simmering hatred/rebellion by the Sunni Arabs (armed by the US) will justify US forces staying in Iraq long after the 2011 ‘leave’ date.
A bigger problem, IMO, is Kirkuk and the Kurds. They have it in law that a plebescite determining the city’s fate would be held by Dec 2007. They are angry at attempts to work out some sort of compromise. They have been ‘encouraging’ Arabs to leave the city, and inviting Kurds to go back there. They think they have the votes to win a vote that would put Kirkuk part of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, or whatever they call it.
The Kurds are waiting for that to happen in order to close off the border and declare independence. Since they have big friendly deals with International Oil Companies, and lots of pals among the neocons, Washington would probably let them, except…
Except that then the Kurds would seek rebellion and unification of Greater Kurdistan, including parts of Turkey (NATO ally, Washington wouldn’t like that) and Iran (hated and feared foe of Washington and Israel, so Washington would love that).
Meanwhile Iraqi Arabs, Sunni and Shiite, lose a big hunk of their oil wealth.
I don’t know how the water situation would work out, or how the oil gets out of Kurdistan if they are unfriendly with Iran, Turkey, and Iraq.
But that’s the real powderkeg: a civil war between regions that not even Washington could plausibly call ‘insurgency’ rather than ‘civil war.’
Look at it this way: simmering hatred/rebellion by the Sunni Arabs (armed by the US) will justify US forces staying in Iraq long after the 2011 ‘leave’ date.
A bigger problem, IMO, is Kirkuk and the Kurds. They have it in law that a plebescite determining the city’s fate would be held by Dec 2007. They are angry at attempts to work out some sort of compromise. They have been ‘encouraging’ Arabs to leave the city, and inviting Kurds to go back there. They think they have the votes to win a vote that would put Kirkuk part of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, or whatever they call it.
The Kurds are waiting for that to happen in order to close off the border and declare independence. Since they have big friendly deals with International Oil Companies, and lots of pals among the neocons, Washington would probably let them, except…
Except that then the Kurds would seek rebellion and unification of Greater Kurdistan, including parts of Turkey (NATO ally, Washington wouldn’t like that) and Iran (hated and feared foe of Washington and Israel, so Washington would love that).
Meanwhile Iraqi Arabs, Sunni and Shiite, lose a big hunk of their oil wealth.
I don’t know how the water situation would work out, or how the oil gets out of Kurdistan if they are unfriendly with Iran, Turkey, and Iraq.
But that’s the real powderkeg: a civil war between regions that not even Washington could plausibly call ‘insurgency’ rather than ‘civil war.’
So why would Maliki start this policy change now before the terms of any pullout have been worked out? What strategy but the neocon’s is served here? Keep things in doubt that’s the way to play a cold war hand. We have to stay but meanwhile a dictator we can support kills off his enemies.
I have been through a few of these takeover switchovers in the course of my life and they aren’t governable sequences of events, at least from the outside.
But inside, whereever the hell that is, people are really planning these moves and counter-moves no matter how random they may seem. Yeah, saying if I do this then so and such will happen, and then acting on it. And it happens.
BTB, isn’t this more proof that the CIA and other intelligence agencies do not/did not know what they are/were looking at or that they knew and didn’t care?
So why would Maliki start this policy change now before the terms of any pullout have been worked out? What strategy but the neocon’s is served here? Keep things in doubt that’s the way to play a cold war hand. We have to stay but meanwhile a dictator we can support kills off his enemies.
I have been through a few of these takeover switchovers in the course of my life and they aren’t governable sequences of events, at least from the outside.
But inside, whereever the hell that is, people are really planning these moves and counter-moves no matter how random they may seem. Yeah, saying if I do this then so and such will happen, and then acting on it. And it happens.
BTB, isn’t this more proof that the CIA and other intelligence agencies do not/did not know what they are/were looking at or that they knew and didn’t care?
Why indeed would he pick the current timing? Could be tied to the announcement of Bn’s in oil profits, and the desire to get them off the table before we decide to pay down our debt for ravaging the country by forcing them to reimburse for reconstructions project in process. (No citation or evidence, pure speculation on my part).
Or is the timing tied up in the Presidential election cycle? November is coming up fast, and the possibility of Obama may be unsettling to the Maliki regime. Get out, get out, so we can either strip the treasury and run, or get out, get out so we can consolidate our power and get on with the unfinished parts of ethnic cleansing.
Or could it just be that it’s time? You’ve done enough damage, now leave please so we can get on with setting up an oil oligarchy, and get rich like the Saudis.
Or
Why indeed would he pick the current timing? Could be tied to the announcement of Bn’s in oil profits, and the desire to get them off the table before we decide to pay down our debt for ravaging the country by forcing them to reimburse for reconstructions project in process. (No citation or evidence, pure speculation on my part).
Or is the timing tied up in the Presidential election cycle? November is coming up fast, and the possibility of Obama may be unsettling to the Maliki regime. Get out, get out, so we can either strip the treasury and run, or get out, get out so we can consolidate our power and get on with the unfinished parts of ethnic cleansing.
Or could it just be that it’s time? You’ve done enough damage, now leave please so we can get on with setting up an oil oligarchy, and get rich like the Saudis.
Or
I’m not sure this should come as a surprise to anyone. It’s been doubtful from the very first that Maliki had anyone’s interests at heart but his own.
It’s somewhat appropriate that the Bush exit strategy for Iraq should be as much of a shambles as the rest of the enterprise.
“Do not try to do too much with your own hands … It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.” – TE Lawrence, quoted in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s excellent ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City’.
I’m not sure this should come as a surprise to anyone. It’s been doubtful from the very first that Maliki had anyone’s interests at heart but his own.
It’s somewhat appropriate that the Bush exit strategy for Iraq should be as much of a shambles as the rest of the enterprise.
“Do not try to do too much with your own hands … It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.” – TE Lawrence, quoted in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s excellent ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City’.