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Price Of Failure In Iraq Bob Dreyfuss

Juan Cole 05/10/2005

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The Price of Failure in Iraq

Bob Dreyfuss writes in Rolling Stone:

If it comes to civil war, the disintegration of Iraq will be extremely bloody. “The breakup of Iraq would be nearly as bad as the breakup of India in 1947,” says David Mack, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state with wide experience in the Arab world. “The Kurds can’t count on us to come in and save their bacon. Do they think we are going to mount an air bridge on their behalf?” Israel might support the Kurds, but Iran would intervene heavily in support of the Shiites with men, arms and money, while Arab countries would back their fellow Sunnis. “You’d see Jordan, Saudi Arabia, even Egypt intervening with everything they’ve got — tanks, heavy weapons, lots of money, even troops,” says White, the former State Department official. “If they see the Sunnis getting beaten up by the Shiites, there will be extensive Arab support,” agrees a U.S. Army officer. “There will be no holds barred.”

The full horror of it has been expertly laid out here by Dreyfuss, with an acumen and imagination one doesn’t see often in the MSM.

We live in a bizarro America where Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and Rolling Stone are the venues for the real news, while the major cable news networks have confused themselves with the sort of thing the local tv stations out in places like Peoria do at 5:17 pm for their human interest segments.

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires



Click here to Buy Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam


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