It Depends On What Your Definition Of "Is" Is....

Of all the idiotic things for the campaigns to suddenly get bogged down in, this has to rank right up there:

Senator John McCain was chiding Senator Barack Obama for “a false depiction of what actually happened” in Iraq in a television interview this week. But in giving his chronology of events in Iraq, Mr. McCain gave what critics said was his own false depiction.

OK, not so bad in its own right, but...

“I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened,” Mr. McCain told Katie Couric, noting that the Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni sheik teamed up with Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army brigade there.

[...] The Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the troop escalation strategy, which became known as the surge.

Seriously, anyone who has paid attention to the Bush administration realizes that it is absurd to think that the surge started after he announced it.

Think about it: on September 12, 2001, the Bushies were already planning to hit Saddam Hussein. Even during the surge, we were warned that the limit of 20,000 additional troops would be breached and it turned out to be nearly 50% higher.

Who is going to believe that Bush had not already very quietly shifted troops deployments and rushed stop-loss orders to inflate the number of troops in what was admittedly already a tenuous and crucial province in the invasion aftermath?

Too, one has to look at the "off-sheet" military, the mercenaries, who were far easier to deploy with little to no announcement. Think of it as a transfer to a branch office.

So Obama's criticism here might be better off muted. It's a silly nitpick, and sounds somewhat desperate. This is a criticism that would be better levelled at Bush, if he makes an incredulous statement like McCain did.

The bigger issue, the one both Obama and McCain seem reluctant to discuss, is whether the surge worked. There's the meat of the debate, and naturally, the basic premise of the entire invasion rests on how effective our military strategies for restoring Iraq have been.

As a military strategy, it seems pretty clear it worked, at least the way a bug bomb works: throw enough materiel quickly at the pests, and you have a lot of dead and dying bugs.

But it's not preventative, and here I think is where the surge breaks down: the political will of the Iraqi people is not focused on defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq or the other insurgent groups, but in getting the real irritant (irritant, in this sense, meaning that which incites violence) out.

Meaning us. That Maliki's government is nearly unanimous in their praise of Obama's stated withdrawal plan-- I still don't trust him to put it into play. His big financial backers have too much at stake.-- is indicative that their focus lies elsewhere.

Getting to the bottom of that is the key to "winning" this invasion.

Cold Hard Facts

One recent trope of right wingers and Republicans recently is that we've seen a decline in the violence in Iraq, that things are getting better, that Sunni and Shi'ite are meeting and might be reaching agreements to cool things out.

It's possible that exhaustion has set in, and that Iraqis have had enough.

Possible. And possibly not:

A suicide car bomb has exploded at a bus terminus in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 20. [...]

In Baghdad, gunmen abducted nine tribal leaders who recently formed a mixed Shia and Sunni group to fight al-Qaeda.

Or then there's this:

[A]t least 27 people died in a suicide bomb attack on a police headquarters in Baquba, north of Baghdad, according to police.

At least 20 people were hurt. Most victims were police recruits.

Correspondents say the attack bears the hallmarks of the al-Qaeda in Iraq militants, who often target recruits.

What most right wingers forget in their crowing about reductions in civilian deaths and civil violence is, Ramadan this year was about two weeks earlier than last year. Yes, it's true: Sunnis and Shi'ites have reached out across the table to try to get a handle on what to do with this mess, but as Joe Klein points out:

[T]here is a missing player in all this hugging and goat eating (ed. note: think of it as a barbecue). He is Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army militia and, quite possibly, the most popular Shi'ite political figure in the country. Al-Sadr is less accessible, a fuzzier figure than al-Hakim. The U.S. intelligence community has only a vague sense of how much control he has over his disparate movement, which includes everything from Iranian-trained guerrillas, referred to as "special groups," to ragtag teenage criminal street gangs who claim the Mahdi mantle. He has been spending a lot of time in Iran lately, where he is said to be receiving advanced religious training. The future of Iraq is likely to be decided by the struggle for power between the Hakim and Sadr families. That struggle could easily turn very lethal. Indeed, in recent days there have been battles between the Sadr and Hakim forces in Karbala and Basra.

So we have Sadr forces and Hakim forces tearing the Shi'ites apart, a renewed front opened up by Al Qaeda, and now Turkey is crossing over into Kurdish Iraq to rout out Kurdish rebels, triggering suicide bombings.

Much like the recent forest fires in Southern California, this civil war is not going to go away easily, and is not easily contained. Clearly, the surge has some small effect in pushing the violence out of the Baghdad region (particularly the Green Zone, but hey! Who cares if Iraqis end up dead, right? *snark*) and other places where the troops were deployed, but in truth, it may only have been a lull.

The real nitty gritty is yet to come.

Free Markets, Iraqi Style

Welcome to capitalism, Baghdad!

Many Iraqis say basic services are at their worst level in decades. More than four years of war has crippled infrastructure while unrelenting violence has hobbled reconstruction efforts.

To make matters worse, summer temperatures can remain above 40 degrees centigrade (104 degrees Fahrenheit) even at night.

Some residents say they get electricity in Baghdad and other provinces for around two hours a day, while water supplies are often cut for days at a time. Motorists sometimes queue for half a day to get petrol.[...]

"I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see the situation with fuel in a country that sits on a sea of oil," [Taxi driver Mustafa al-Zubaidi] said, before edging closer to the petrol station.

Mr. al-Zubaidi, here's a reason for that. From an article on the BBC website dated March 17, 2005:

Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".

"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.

The official story is somewhat different, of course:

Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani told lawmakers that acts of sabotage by insurgents and people drilling holes in fuel pipelines to steal refined oil products were a major reason for petrol shortages.

"In just one stretch of pipeline between Baghdad and Baiji, we found 1,488 holes," he said, referring to a key pipeline running from a refinery in the city of Baiji, 180 km (112 mile) south to the capital. "It doesn't function as a pipeline ... it's more like a sieve."

An excuse which is ludicrous on its face. Where is an average Iraqi citizen going to go with refined petroleum, which needs still further processing to turn it into usable oil products? Insurgents popping pipelines, while certainly a possibility, run into allied patrols regularly, as nearly all of our "temporary bases" are strung along oil pipelines, and one of the first things the Bush administration secured in the invasion were oil production and transport facilities.

Nonetheless, the insurgents have reason to blow up as much of the oil infrastructure as they can: to prevent the aforementioned privatization plans by foreigners hellbent on exploiting Iraqis. Which sort of makes them less insurgents and more patriots, in this limited instance. Think of this aspect of the struggle as the Boston Tea Party, if you need an historical framework.

It's not just the energy and electricity services that are down and out. Basic services like water supply, heavily dependent in a desert country like Iraq on electricity (which of course, requires oil to fuel it and cabling to deliver it), is failing badly, as well as food delivery systems.

These people would be happy for a bath and a cool night's sleep. Is it any wonder that, the longer we keep troops in Iraq, the more insurgents we're generating? That's about ALL that's being generated in Iraq right now.

Redrawing The Battle Lines

There are a couple of elements to this story which I had to ponder as I read it:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic leaders vowed Friday to keep up the pressure on President George W. Bush to end the Iraq war with more votes next month on withdrawing U.S. troops.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would seek a vote on legislation instructing the Pentagon to begin pulling out U.S. troops within 120 days, similar to a provision Bush vetoed in the first version of a war spending bill Congress sent to him in May.

A comparable provision also is expected to come to the floor of the Senate in July. So far this year, Senate Democrats have been unable to get the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles to proposals to start a pullout from Iraq.

So far, pretty straightforward. Obviously, Pelosi, Reid, & Co decided that they caved a little too easily with Bush on the war funding bill, and heard about it from both the left wing ideologues but also from mainstream Americans who elected them in large part to end this national nightmare. Too, that Senators Richard Lugar and George Voinovich, not exactly firebreathing lefties, came out strongly against the war this week gives them some political cover to reintroduce this withdrawal timetable.

Bbut here's the intriguing bit:

But Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted legislation from Congress called for progress reports on Iraq in July and September and suggested those should determine any decisions.

"It seems to me that Congress has laid out a sensible timetable and we ought to adhere to it," he told reporters at the Pentagon.

Huh? Is Secretary Gates suggesting, or at least, leaving the door open, to a troop withdrawal this year? After all, those "progress reports" to be delivered by General Petraeus, will show that the surge has had minimal success (the Anbar region is raised continually as a beacon of hope, which neglects the truth that the Anbar region was relatively peaceful right up until the surge) and that the general benchmarks it will report on-- oil revenue sharing, suppression of the sectaraian violence, and regional elections-- will fall woefully short, mostly due to the Iraqi parliament's lack of...passion...in passing legislation.

Meaning the Democrats in Congress will have a field day at Bush's expense.

If in fact, this was the game plan, to give the surge the summer and then cut off funding anyway, then it concerns me that the Democrats would play this so cynically. Hundreds of Americans would have died to gain an incremental political position of giving in one last time and letting the baby have his bottle.

I Wonder If They've Herd Of This?

As a subscriber to National Geographic magazine, I get the new issue each month about a week ahead of the newsstand release. I say all this because I can't link to the article I'm going to use today, but as I was reading the news this morning, I came across a story that suddenly made it all very relevant.

You're aware that many animals engage in "swarm mentality." Ants and bees are of course the best known swarming creatures. Ants swarm to find food, bees swarm to find food and new nesting locations. Many small birds flock, small fish school, even larger animals like zebras and wildebeest swarm in order to minimize the ability of predators to attack. Swarms and herds present confusing, swirling targets. Indeed, some animals have taken it to an art form, such that they will have some animals lag a little, like the threads off a worn curtain, then collapse those threads into the herd again, leaving the predator gasping for breath as he can't quite focus his efforts on one beast.

An individual animal is dumb, but collectively, animals can be pretty intelligent, right down to the ants that can create bridges across a chasm in order to attain food.

I could go into the mechanisms behind this but that would be plagiarism and probably boring. Suffice it to say that a man is smart, but people are dumb, and you get a sense of how swarm behavior doesn't really work for people. Let a hungry lion loose in a crowd of humans, and he'll eat his fill.

There was one notable swarm behavior scenario that gets little notice in the media, but was wildly successful when it occured: during the demonstrations at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle a few years back, a relatively small number of protestors were littered throughout the crowds with walkie-talkies and cell phones, and were able to apprise groups ahead of time of police countermeasures and forces, so that they could disperse and regroup elsehwere.

Swarm mentality relies on reliable communication, you see. Word of mouth, well, you've played the game "Telephone," I'm sure.

There's the backdrop to my morning, and I find this article waiting for me at Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military deployed 10,000 soldiers backed by attack helicopters in a big offensive against al Qaeda north of Baghdad on Tuesday as a truck bomber struck in the capital, killing 75 people near a Shi'ite mosque.

The offensive against al Qaeda around the city of Baquba in Diyala province, a stronghold of the Sunni Islamist group, is partly aimed at taking down car bomb networks that cause carnage in Baghdad and other regions of Iraq. It is one of the biggest military operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

One witness said a suicide bomber driving a truck rammed his vehicle into the Shi'ite Khilani mosque in Baghdad, destroying one of its walls and badly damaging the rest of the structure.

Send 10,000. Send 100,000. It won't matter, so long as the replacement rate of terrorists exceeds the kill rate.

Using the swarming model, if a school of baitfish senses a shark, say, nearby, it will automatically go into swarming behavior, creating a tight baitball. So long as it is able to maintain the baitball at a critical mass, the school as a whole will survive.

One shark will not succeed in decimating the school, nor two sharks. Add some dolphins, seals, and seagulls to the mix, and you've got a chance, but even then, enough baitfish will get away to propagate their DNA.

Similarly, Al Qaeda and the other terrorist groups in Iraq have been working a similar strategy: make the allies chase them all over Iraq, exhausting supplies, manpower and wasting energy chasing them where they used to be. When the allies move in on one town, the insurgents pack up quickly and scatter, picking yet another place to open up shop.

In other words, this car bomb shop in Baquba is long gone already. The insurgents, no doubt, left enough people behind to fight a rear guard action, and to keep the allied troops engaged long enough for them to resettle someplace else. Meanwhile, hundreds more Iraqis will die, and dozens more American troops.

To be precise about all this, there are only two ways to stop the insurgency. First, we can realize that we're pushing a boulder up an eternal hill, sit down and talk things out with them. Second, find out how they are communicating, and put an end to that.

10,000 troops will never accomplish that. Nor will torturing hundreds of random Iraqis in the hopes you'll find one person with knowledge. And given this administration's blatant incompetence in the intelligence arena, their bumbling, blind mishandling of all things intel, I don't see where they will engage the one tool that will allow them to infiltrate Al Qaeda, or at least its footsoldiers in Iraq.

This will require leadership, and Bush is fighting his own rear guard action.

I've Had My Fill Of Patience!

The trope that Bush used to veto the funding bill (and deny our troops the armor and ammunition they need) was that to set a date certain would give our adversaries comfort, and allow them to withdraw until we leave. "All the terrorists would have to do is mark their calendars and gather their strength and begin plotting how to overthrow the government and take control of the country of Iraq," he said.

Possibly true, although they don't seem to care all that much. This war isn't about "us v. them" as much as it's about "them v. them" and we're just occupying space. But an article at Reuters today made me formulate something that has been bugging me for a while now:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wearied by steady losses and few tangible signs of progress in the war in Iraq, the U.S. public is running out of one resource America's enemies appear to have in abundance -- patience.

Impatience with the war, now in its fifth year, was reflected in the elections that drove President George W. Bush's Republicans out of power in Congress in November. Since then, Bush named a new secretary of defense and new military commander in Iraq charged with implementing a new strategy.

But despite repeated appeals from Bush for patience while more troops arrive in Iraq to carry out the new strategy, opinion polls show that pessimism runs deep and most Americans favor a deadline for the withdrawal of troops.

Now, Bush has always said he doesn't govern by polls (despite the numerous flipflops that his administration has done based at least in part on, well, polling), and that might be an admirable trait for someone who has a grasp of reality.

But here's the truth: the insurgents, Al Qaeda, Iran, Syria, Sunnis and Kurds all DO read the newspapers, Mr. President, and believe it or not, they actually own calendars!

They know two things:

1) The American people stand three-quarters of the way out of the door of Iraq.

2) In 626 days, the next administration will take over. No one, despite what people are saying on the campaign trail to pander for right wing votes, will continue this war of yours much beyond that date, and that's assuming Congress hasn't figured out a way to take the widdle cap gun out of your hands and drag you home for supper, young man!

So they figure, "Eh! In 627 days, there will be another 3,000 American killed. No biggie. Then the fun begins anyway."

Judging from Islamic fundamentalist Web sites, there is no shortage of patience on the side of America's enemies. The insurgents appear confident they can draw on a seemingly endless supply of new recruits.

"Although ... we have killed some huge number of enemy combatants (perhaps 20,000+), without fail the armed insurgents, militia and Al Qaeda in Iraq apparently regenerate both leadership cadres and foot soldiers," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey wrote in a memorandum to U.S. military leaders after a visit to Iraq in spring.

See where I'm going with this?

It doesn't matter if we set a date certain or not, the insurgents and the occupied are perfectly willing to wait us out. They know the American people won't allow you unlimited use of force, they know the army that's there already is exhausted, and worse, they know you're losing allies by the day.

My sense is that Bush is terrified. He's like the kid who got a failing grade in history, who doesn't want to show his dad the report card because he knows he'll be beaten (I should know the feeling; I was that kid...nevermind that I got the grade because some girl cheated off my test). So rather than own up to his mistakes and admit there has to be a better way, he's going to stubbornly stick to a path that can only lead to further death and destruction, hoping that some exit presents itself.

Praying the problem goes away, in other words.

There are plenty of plans on the table now that allow us to take some of the pressure off our troops, while protecting those precious few areas of Iraq that seem to be in pretty good shape, like the Kurdish north. For example, the Iraq Study Group, the Baker-Hamilton report, suggested perhaps partitioning the country into three autonomous regions, with equal shares of the national oil revenues going to all three. We could modify this to include American troops in the Kurdish north, allied troops in the Shi'a south, and the middle would effectively be labelled a "no-fight" zone, where we would enforce peace only when we had to, lightning fast strikes and back out. No more occupation.

Oops! I forgot. That was one of my "NotPresident" policies that I wasn't going to announce until I became NotPresident...

I Dig A Pony

The Beatles "I Dig A Pony", in honor of Sen. John McCain

McCain said arguably the dumbest thing a politician has said all year (don't click the link, I'll copy excerpts over...it's a link to the chief cheesehead of right wing bloggers, the self-inflatable Cap'n Ed Morrison):

I took part in a blogger conference on my lunchbreak today with Senator John McCain on the topic of Iraq. McCain, who gave a speech on Iraq at the Virginia Military Institute earlier today, wanted to reach out to New Media sources for his perspective on the progress of the war, the critical nature of our effort there, and the need to persevere until we succeed.[...]

I asked the Senator whether Moqtada al-Sadr's new orders for the Mahdi Army to attack American forces could cause a collapse of the Maliki government. McCain thinks Sadr is mostly bluffing; he waited too long and has not made a personal appearance for too long, and a defeat at the hands of the American and Iraqi forces would finish him. Joking that he was "digging for the pony here," he predicted that Sadr would back down as he has in the past rather than take that big of a gamble.

We will know within a few months whether the surge will succeed, McCain told us. By that time, we can see whether Maliki has the political strength and will to make the necessary adjustments. If the US cannot succeed in Iraq, McCain believes that David Petraeus has the strength of character to tell that to the President and then to the American people. Petraeus believes we can prevail, McCain told us, and that we must.

OK, a couple of observations here....

First, Cap'n Cheetos, when your "lunchbreak" lasts eight hours and includes mass quantities of alcohol, I think you really ought to reclassify it as a "job." And you might ponder applying to the NEA for a grant as performance artist.

Second, the most remarkable part of this amazing mess of a "briefing" is that the White Ring bloggers didn't point out a very glaring little piece of reality: April 12 was the day of this circle jerk-off. Here's what happened on April 11:

Najaf - Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi'as burned and trampled on US flags in the holy city of Najaf on Monday at an anti-American rally called by firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Large crowds of men, women and children holding Iraqi flags and anti-US banners massed in Najaf and the nearby city of Kufa to protest against what they said was an American occupation of Iraq.

The rally is seen as a show of strength for the cleric who has not been seen for more than two months, since the launch of a security crackdown in Baghdad aimed largely at reining in his militiamen accused of killing Sunni Arabs.

Now, that doesn't sound like much of a "backing down." If anything, it sounds like a rally one might hold in advance of the return of one's leader, a saviour or messiah perhaps.

All that was missing were the palm fronds from the Shi'a.

It's true, al-Sadr left Baghdad in advance of the surge. After all, who's to know if President Dumbya really, really meant it this time? He's failed so many times before in his "progress in Iraq" attempts. Al Sadr probably figured, correctly, that like so many things in BizarroBushWorld, it would have the opposite effect: "Me send more troops in, help make fight bigger!"

Who wants to hang around a town where hundreds were already dying each week, and things looked like they could get worse? He might get hit with, you know, body parts, and unless you're a cast member of CSI, you sort of want to stay away from that sort of debacle.

And in truth, despite an initial adjustment period by the insurgents, things look to be getting worse in Baghdad. Already, some of the allegedly safest buildings in Iraq are being bombed again., and the insurgency seems to be spreading its terror to outlying cities like Karbala.

Ironically, making Bush's surge bigger. And I mean that in a totally nonsexual way, get your mind out of the gutter.

As with so many things this President has said, there's not only been a backlash that has played into his hands, but also a deepening anxiety across this country that, in fact, he's never intended for anything but a permanent military presence in that country (feel free to spout conspiracy theories long held in comments). And truthfully, many of his moves have been questionable for someone who's stated goal was to seek revenge on Al Qaeda, fight terorrism, destroy weapons of mass destruction, remove a dictator and bring democracy to a people long oppressed.

Moqtada Al Sadr, make no mistake about it, didn't run from the surge so much as run from the distinct possibility that he might get killed accidentally in the crossfire (or not so accidentally). My suspicion is that Al Sadr has been in talks with Ayatollah Al Sistani about getting religious cover for a renewed and up front assault on the coalitin forces occupying his country. Clearly the negotiations we heard about weeks ago between the US and insurgents has broken down.

It's going to get really ugly this summer.

Oh...the "dig for the pony" note...Apparently, that other "cut and run" Republican, Ronald Reagan, once joked that he had to shovel so much shit, he kept digging because there "must be a pony in there."

Yea. That ought to inform you of the kind of people we're dealing with here. They revel in their stupidities...and you'll note McCain's rather cynical view of his past denialist lunacies when it comes to supporting this war.

tags technorati : Bush snarky snarcasm snarkasm Moqtada al Sadr Iraq John McCain

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