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January 07, 2007
Despite the shift in power in Washington, it looks as if President Bush will go with the neo-con's surge option to stablise Baghdad. Iraq is now immersed in bloodshed from sectarian violence. Now some neocon's have jumped ship saying that George Bush was a hopeless President surrounded by incompetent advisers, that Iraq is lost and that the consequences for America and the world will be dire.
However, victory is still possible says Frederick W. Kagan at the American Economic Institute:
Victory in Iraq is vital to America’s security. Defeat will likely lead to regional conflict, humanitarian catastrophe, and increased global terrorism.Iraq has reached a critical point. The strategy of relying on a political process to eliminate the insurgency has failed. Rising sectarian violence threatens to break America’s will to fight. This violence will destroy the Iraqi government, armed forces, and people if it is not rapidly controlled.Victory in Iraq is still possible at an acceptable level of effort. We must adopt a new approach to the war and implement it quickly and decisively.
What is the game plan, when Irag is control led by Shi’ite Islamists in unstable coalition with Kurdish separatists with Iraq heading towards ethinic regional autonomy, and around 150,000 US troops in Iraq have been thwarted by a small insurgency drawn from Iraq's minority population of Sunnis?
Will the extra troops in Baghdad spend their time defending surviving Sunni enclaves from Shi’ite ethnic cleansing now pushing west across Baghdad? Does that mean the US will attack the Shi'ite militias while fighting a Sunni insurgency? It begins to look like it.
Simon Jenkins in The Times says that:
Iraq’s next chapter must be written by Iraqis alone. Outsiders have made this country a byword for arrogant and incompetent interventionism. The West’s 2003 assault on Iraq was unprovoked and justified by no overriding threat to western interests. It was a ghastly, gigantic whim, one to which the British government fully subscribed.
Maybe it was less a whim and more a case of the US military aiming to subdue Arabs to create space for Israel to expand? Was not the neocons' original plan to give Israel hegemony in the Middle East by using the US military to overthrow Iraq, Iran, and Syria? Has not the failure of US forces to subdue Iraq led to a new neocon plan to give Israel hegemony in the region by spreading sectarian conflict among Muslims throughout the region?
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I am pretty sure this scenario was not on Top Gun's mind when he jetted onto that aircraft carrier, what seems like decades ago. What a disaster and not much upside potential in the short term. I just do not understand why there is not more "holding to account". Very ugly.