Ohfercrissake!

Sometimes you gotta call a spade a spade. Sometimes you gotta call it a fucking shovel:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates will meet Iraqi leaders for talks in Baghdad on Saturday after criticizing what he called their disappointing progress in passing laws Washington views as critical to ending violence.

Gates, who flew into Baghdad on Friday night, met U.S. military commanders on Saturday to assess a troop build-up designed to buy time for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government to win over disaffected Sunni Arabs, who form the backbone of the four-year-old insurgency.

His visit and frank criticism was a sign Washington is growing increasingly worried about what U.S. officials see as foot-dragging on laws on distributing oil revenues, control of regional oil fields and holding provincial elections.

Does anyone see an oil field anywhere in this picture? Does anyone see a voting booth in this picture?

As gun mongers are quick to point out, it's not the lack of laws, it's the lack of enforcement. From a certain point of view, they're right: you can pass all the laws you want, impose all the curfews you want, but unless you've got the people capable of rooting out those who would violate them, you got nothing.

The simple fact is, sending more American troops to Iraq was a failed policy from the start. One could have made the case that an additional 20,000 (now thirty thousand) troops sent in support of our forces already there might have made sense if the job was to secure strongholds that American forces could expand into larger areas, to then protect civilians, but more important, to train replacements.

It's clear that the now-concluded surge has merely made more American troops targets, despite its limited success in some regions of Baghdad. Naturally, the administration response to this is, "give it more time," that the troops need to be integrated into combat. Oh, and to blame the Iraqis.

Some of those troops have been there since February. That's more than three months. Seems to me they should have received better training here before rushing them over there. If you're going to take a long view of victory, then there's no reason to scurry to implement an escalation, particularly since your stated aim is to fall back and secure your holdings. You rush troops into battle because you feel time is an element in victory.

As to the second point, blaming the Iraqis, it also seems clear that this is a way to buy time for Bush to figure out Plan B, but on its face, it's pretty stupid. Yes, revenue sharing and oil rights are important to Iraq and a way of sharing them needs to be discovered (personally, I think they should do what Alaska does and hand out a stipend to the people directly, but what do I know?), but there are far larger issues to be addressed. Throwing money at this problem was never a real solution in a country that was used to being fairly well-off financially for centuries.

This is blood-warfare, kanly to you Dune fans, will not go away anytime soon, ay any price. Look at our own history. The Civil War effectively ended what had been a near one hunded year struggle by the South to impose its will on the nation, and yet the Civil War never really ended. It echoes even today with the Rebel flag controversies, with the glee that secessionists view how "liberal policies and East Coast elitists" have been severly hampered by their obstructionist, reactionary, recessive-gene-induced efforts. Kanly, indeed.

But not defeated. It wouldn't be a civil war if only one side fought, of course. That Sunni, Shi'a and Kurd have come to blows is not surprising, given the tumultuous history of Iraq in the 20th and 21st centuries. That things will only get worse is a no-brainer.

But then I forget who's running this country...as an added bonus, Iraqis also have the chance to perform kanly on any American they see.

Laws about oil revenues will not stop the conflict. Our best hope for peace in Iraq is to turn it into the Koreas, and that will involve a commitment of fifty plus years (and counting), tens of thousands of troops, and the stomach to make one man's egregious blunder a national commitment.

And who the hell wants the Bush family to suck even more money from the national teat? We ought to declare kanly on the House of Bush.

Why You Need To Give A Shi'ite

Two stories, seemingly only tangentially related, share something in common:

GAZA (Reuters) - Hamas Islamist gunmen pressed on with their Gaza offensive on Wednesday, killing eight fighters loyal to Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas in a Palestinian supremacy struggle escalating steadily into civil war.

"What is happening in Gaza is madness," Abbas, the Fatah leader, told reporters in the occupied West Bank after meeting a foreign diplomat.

...and...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Suspected al Qaeda militants blew up two minarets of a revered Shi'ite mosque in the Iraqi city of Samarra on Wednesday, targeting a shrine bombed last year in an attack that unleashed a wave of sectarian killing.

Fearing renewed bloodshed, Iraq's government imposed an indefinite curfew in Baghdad as Shi'ite and Sunni political and religious leaders called on their followers to remain calm.

A grim mood descended on the capital as people hurried home before the start of the curfew. Police said gunmen set fire to a Sunni mosque in Baghdad's southwestern Bayaa district.

The internal struggle in Gaza (Palestinian) and the internal conflict in Iraq are both pitting Sunni versus Shia. Hamas is Sunni. Abbas, and by extension, Fatah (which despite being led by terrorists in its own right, is considered moderate) is also Sunni, but is more tolerant of Shi'a, having been educated mostly in Syria and Egypt with large Shi'a and Sufi populations.

And of course, the Iraqi attacks yesterday hearken back to a year ago, when another mosque in Samarra, the Al Askari mosque, was devastated by Sunni attackers, setting off the sectarian violence of the past year.

We here in America have long been focused on the internal conflict between Sunni and Shi'a in Iraq (the Kurds have been fortunately content to sit and wait it all out), but the trouble in Gaza, as well as last year's siege by Israel of Lebanon, speak of a broadening of this internal religious struggle into a full-blown regional war.

Good for the US? Maybe, but probably not. Remember, we still have Israel to protect for its strategic value as a toehold in the Middle East (especially now that Iraq is disintegrating before our eyes), Saudi Arabia would undoubtedly be called upon to reinforce the Sunni side, being very strict Sunni Wahabists. Iran would then be forced to shore up the Shi'a forces, putting Iran in conflict with Saudi Arabia, effectively cutting off Middle Eastern oil to the west by closing down the Persian Gulf.

Hm. Not good. We would at the very least be called into to keep the combatants apart, and more likely, take on Iran directly as proxy for the Sauds.

Really not good.

A year ago, I might have suggested that cooler heads will prevail, but with the cracked and broken US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the failure of the Army to meet already pretty liberal recruiting goals even before Gates implements his increase in the size of the army, we're pretty fresh out of manpower to fight Iran, and Iran knows this. We might still be able to stem the tide diplomatically.

If we actually had an administration that had a diplomat available.

Tits On A Bull

There have been some overtures made in Iraq to form a general coalition against a certain terror network:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi officials are in contact with representatives of some Sunni Arab insurgent groups to build an alliance against al Qaeda in Iraq, the outgoing U.S. ambassador said on Monday.

Zalmay Khalilzad also said he was cautiously optimistic that "success is possible" in Iraq, but urged leaders to act fast if they were to maintain the support of the impatient U.S. people amid growing pressure for a timetable to withdraw troops.

At his final news conference in Baghdad, he confirmed reports that U.S. embassy and military staff as well as Iraqi government officials had met representatives of insurgent-linked groups on several occasions.

Now, I'm all for jaw, jaw, jaw as opposed to war, war, war, as Churchill would have it, but the aim of those talks is ludicrous: Al Qaeda, although it would exploit the opportunity if presented, has no interest in doing anything in Iraq except foment trouble. This isn't about nation-building for them, ironically.

You see, they already have one: Talibanistan

The residents of Dara Adam Khel, a gunsmiths' village 30 miles south of Peshawar, Pakistan, awoke one morning last month to find their streets littered with pamphlets demanding that they observe Islamic law. Women were instructed to wear all-enveloping burqas and men to grow their beards. Music and television were banned. Then the jihadists really got serious. These days, dawn is often accompanied by the wailing of women as another beheaded corpse is found by the side of the road, a note pinned to the chest claiming that the victim was a spy for either the Americans or the Pakistani government. Beheadings are recorded and sold on DVD in the area's bazaars. "It's the knife that terrifies me," says Hafizullah, 40, a local arms smith. "Before they kill you, they sharpen the knife in front of you. They are worse than butchers."

Stories like these are being repeated across the tribal region of Pakistan, a rugged no-man's-land that forms the country's border with Afghanistan--and that is rapidly becoming home base for a new generation of potential terrorists. Fueled by zealotry and hardened by war, young religious extremists have overrun scores of towns and villages in the border areas, with the intention of imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on a population unable to fight back. Like the Taliban in the late 1990s in Afghanistan, the jihadists are believed to be providing leaders of al-Qaeda with the protection they need to regroup and train new operatives. U.S. intelligence officials think that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may have found refuge in these environs. And though 49,000 U.S. and NATO troops are stationed just across the border in Afghanistan, they aren't authorized to operate on the Pakistani side. Remote, tribal and deeply conservative, the border region is less a part of either country than a world unto itself, a lawless frontier so beyond the control of the West and its allies that it has earned a name of its own: Talibanistan.

This is why I've long felt that the US has played footsie with the wrong dictatorship in South Asia...I'd rather they didn't play footsie with ANY dictatorship, but situational ethics comes into play here.

The Time article goes on to talk about how Dick Cheney gave President Musharraf a stern talking to (although no wrist slap, you'll notice) about this territory and it's strategic significance to the "war on terror". It also points out that Musahrraf's hands are tied by the political minefield that is domestic Pakistani governance: he already has large factions very angry at him for siding with the US and his reliance on more moderate groups is slipping as he tightens his fist around Pakistan (all but disbanding the judiciary of the country). All he can really rely on is the Pakistani army, who support the Taliban (and by extension, Al Qaeda).

What's a dictator to do? I'll have more to say on this topic when I make my HUGEST ANNOUNCEMENT EVER in a few days.

Told you it would be huge. But I digress.

To create a coalition against Al Qaeda In Iraq at this point smacks of make-work, the kind of thing you do when you really need a vacation from yourself, but can't be seen away from your desk. You know, like filing.

It might provide an opening for a unifying conference for Sunni, Shi'a and Kurd factions to begin to form a nation, but in my recollection throughout history, those kind of collaborative governments rarely work without an overarching external threat (like, say, England during our revolution). Some loose confederations remain intact, like Indonesia, but there's a different kettle of fish involved: boundaries are fairly well-defined and more important, separate.

Still, I suppose we should be thankful they can find any common ground with the insurgency. Al Qaeda In Iraq was never particularly popular with the citizen-soldiers of the Iraqi insurgency, Sunni division, although there's much to be said of the "enemy of my enemy." Perhaps this will dissuade the Sunni insurgency in toto.

Then again, monkeys may fly out of my butt...

Pakistan
Iraq
Iraqi insurgents
Al Qaeda
Sunni
Shi'a