8 Killed, 44 wounded in Karbala Bombing
Sunni Guerrillas break off Talks with US
First-rate Iraq historian Sarah Shields argues that Iraq is not having a civil war so much as it is living through the consequences of the US having destroyed its functioning state. I agree with her that the framework for the fighting was set by Rumsfeld/Cheney/Bush policies in Iraq. But you could say that and still admit that they are now fighting a civil war. The latter is a social science question, not a moral judgment. Avoiding the appearance of a moral judgment of a negative sort that might attach also to the US effort is also the reason that the Right won't call it a civil war.
Alissa J. Rubin of the LA Times argues that Iran has won the Iraq War in a big way, and is now feeling invulnerable as a result of the ISG report.
(See my piece on this issue at Salon.com from July, 2005.)
Iran's foreign minister offered to help the US in Iraq, as long as the US leaves Iraq. Well, somebody should see us off when we go.
The London Times says that secret US talks with leaders of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, who have inflicted substantial damage on the US military, have been broken off by the guerrillas. That is really too bad. Only successful parleys with the enemy can end a war short of military victory, which seems pretty elusive.
The Iraqi government is putting the final touches on petroleum legislation, which will allow contracts to be signed by the oil majors. Up until now, legal uncertainties kept them away. My guess is that James Baker crafted the Iraq Study Group report so as to have the least possible negative impact on such petroleum negotiations.
The NYT has done another story about how the Iraqi military is selling the weapons given it by the US on the black market, basically helping arm the guerrillas.
On Sunday morning, according to Reuters, sectarian violence got off to a good start:
' BAGHDAD - Shi'ite militias attacked Sunni homes in Baghdad's religiously mixed Hurriya district on Saturday, Interior Ministry officials and witnesses said. More than 30 families fled after the militias torched homes and killed at least one person, witnesses and officials said.
BAGHDAD - A total of 40 bodies -- many of them shot and tortured -- were found across Baghdad on Saturday, an Interior Ministry source said.
'
Read the whole report.
On Saturday, 8 people were killed and 44 wounded when a car bomb was detonated in a market in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.
Reuters reports that on Saturday:
' BAGHDAD - Mortar rounds killed two people and wounded at least three when they landed on Baghdad's Shi'ite district of Kadhimiya, police sources said. '
Karbala is a prime religious symbol for Shiites, and we have already seen what the destruction of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra has done to promote sectarian violence on a vast scale. Bombings in Karbala are very, very scary.
Now we have an Iraq syndrome. These syndromes would not be necessary if US political elites could just remember one simple rule: No long drawn-out Asian land wars, please.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/10/2006 12:31:00 AM
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6 Comments:
Re. Your item. The London Times says (...) have been broken off by the guerrillas.
Not (entirely) correct. The end of the article verbatim
The final blow to the negotiations came in mid-March when Khalilzad said that he would be willing to talk to Iran about resolving the conflict in Iraq. The news came as a bombshell to the Sunni insurgents, who complained to the ambassador at their final meeting.
Shortly afterwards the government of Nouri al-Maliki was formed with the support of pro-Iranian elements. The Sunni insurgents responded by sending a memo to Khalilzad — now tipped to become US ambassador to the United Nations — suspending all meetings and accusing the Americans of “dishonesty”.
According to one commander, the insurgent groups were told: “Place your faith in Allah, the gloves are off. Carry on with your resistance.”
Iran "feeling invulnerable", and Syria for that matter, is A Good Thing.
The people of Iran, like Iraq before the invasion, give their government a lot of support merely to help it defend the country against the American threat to destroy it.
If the threat diminishes, the Iranian people will turn their attention to the rampant corruption and the abuses of both the state and the Republican Guard gangsters.
The fear of Iranian regional hegemony
are exaggerate. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt alone are more than enough to counter balance it - and there is always the threat of massive US air strikes in the background.
The Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work, but the Americans will do well to empathize with their legitimate fears from a lawless USA.
Very worthy but I've a better version I think you'll agree.
for: "No long drawn-out Asian land wars, please.
please read: "No more American colonialist wars, please - anywhere and that includes South and Central America.
Wow Iran won?!?!?!?!
Enuf to make a growed up man cry...
We do not yet have a so-called "Iraq Syndrome," professor, and I will thank you to not fall into the trap of popularizing one by uncritically accepting reactionary terminology and broadcasting it as accepted, if not "necessary," fact.
The issue involves a deliberate -- and highly successful over the generations -- propaganda program by the right-wing political and military "elites" in America who like their Warfare Welfare and Make-Work Militarism gravy trains just fine, thank you, and have no intention of standing by passively while the American people learn to see through the facade to the ugly truth it hides. As the late, great historian Barbar Tuchman put it in her classic March of Folly:
"The American government reacted not to the Chinese upheaval or to Vietnamese nationalism per se, but to intimidation by the rabid right at home and to the public dread of Communism that this played on and reflected. [In the] social and psychological sources of that dread ... lie the roots of American policy in Vietnam."
It matters what we call things or refuse to call things; and so whether we call it reactionary panic, mystical dread, abstract angst, or just plain fear itself, political intimidation of the relatively powerless Emmanuel Goldstein "liberals" by the rabid right at home in America -- what H. L. Menken called the (rather one-sided) "strife of the parties at Washington" -- accounts for the source of self-interested "syndrome" flogging by the fascists. We need to defeat this program by (1) exposing it and (2) refusing to play along by parroting its nomenclature.
America tragically suffered through the Republican Party's "Who lost China?" McCartyism in the nineteen-fifties, and in their foolish attempt to appease this cynical fearmongering by the rabid right, the liberal "Best and the Brightest" in the Democratic Party of the early nineteen-sixties fell for the trap and -- much as the "Worst and the Dullest" have done today in Iraq -- sought to live down the libel by essentially joining up with whatever militant anti-[XXXX]-ism prevailed at the time. Interchange "Terror" for "Communist" and Iraq for Vietnam, of course, and you can see the sources of social and psychological dread that incipient fascism in America "plays on and reflects." The self-styled (chicken) "hawks" of today's Democratic Party foolishly succumb to the same pathetic "Who Lost IraqNam?" paranoia when they suppose they can prove their "toughness" by essentially doing the Republicans' dirty work for them instead of standing up against it and putting it down hard.
Some in my generation of Vietnam Veterans have consoled ourselves over the years that we suffered what we did so that our country would learn a form of wisdom that would keep it from doing anything so bloody stupid again. Unfortunately, as anyone can see now, we failed to teach anything. In fact, those who sought to stigmatize our wisdom as a "syndrome," or "symptom of a disease" won the propaganda battle; and anti-intellectual America, always suspicious of education and learning, chose the same stupidity all over again. There lies the true sickness.
Anyway, if America ever begins to see wisdom as a healthy sign and not a "syndrome" of illness, then veterans like me won't have to write poems like "Syndromes of Wisdom."
http://themisfortuneteller.blogspot.com/2006/12/syndromes-of-wisdom.html
The Sunni Baathists, 20% of Iraq's population, could only maintain their rule over the 80% Shiite/Kurd majority by means of a brutal police state. Similar to Afrikaaners/South Africa.
The majority Shiites now exercise power by virtue of the new Iraqi constitution. Where is their self interest in negotiating with the Baathist insurgency if the US leaves? Where is the Baath/Sunni self interest in negotiating with the Shiites given the huge disaprity in numbers between the two populations?
And isn't the Sunni professional middleclass already recognising the facts on the ground by leaving in droves for the neighbouring Sunni Arab states?
It would be good to have these issues addressed.
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