Monsters and Critics is carrying a story on the Iraq situation. See Eye on Iraq: What is going wrong in Iraq? which includes the following statement:
For it was those elections so eagerly pushed and hyped by the White House that gave the Sunni insurgents in central Iraq the great strategic goal for which they had previously been striving in vain for more than two-and-a-half years. It was those elections that transformed the Iraq conflict from a limited insurgency supported by a relatively small minority within an ethnic minority of only 5 million Sunni Iraqis — less than 20 percent of the total population — into a burgeoning full scale civil war between the two largest religious groups in the country comprising 80 percent of the population, or 22.4 million people between them.
For the elections led to a consolidation of Shiite political power in Baghdad and then to the empowering of Shiite militias by Shiite political parties dominating the new parliament. Shiite militia influence within the new Iraqi police and army rapidly grew.
Well today, the Shiite insurgency captured and took over an entire city, a provincial capital nonetheless. The NY Times reports on the situation in Attack on Iraqi City Shows Militia’s Power.
What’s wrong in Iraq is that we are there. What’s wrong is that we are powerless to stop the on-going civil war. What’s wrong is that the British, the national police, and the U.S. cannot stop a militia from doing these sorts of things.
It cannot be fixed, nor will it be right, so the very least we can do is to extricate ourselves, the sooner the better.
Vietnam again indeed… Another war skillfully avoided by George W. Bush.
