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    fluffles and ker..., 2005-12-12 22:48:06 | Main | "can you believe the Wall Stre..., 2005-12-13 14:20:02

    they are at bottom about "vengeance.":

    no, not Max's stand on state executions. This blog is All Iraq All The Time these days:

    By just about every meaningful standard that can be applied -- the reference points of history, the research criteria of political science, the contemporaneous reporting of on-the-ground observers, the grim roll of civilian and combatant casualties -- Iraq is now well into the bloody sequence of civil war. Dispense with the tentative locution "on the verge of." An active, if not full-boil, civil war is already a reality. The principal combatants are drawn from the Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab communities, which together comprise about three-quarters of the Iraqi population of 26 million. In this picture, U.S.-led coalition forces tend to be viewed by "rejectionist" Sunni Arabs as protectors of the Shiites, who dominate the new, U.S.-backed, Iraqi government and who operate militias with close ties to the new Iraqi regime.

    The US is rather backing the Shi'ites (and the Kurds), so that's a reasonable conclusion for "rejectionist" Sunni Arabs to draw, I should say, nevermind anybody else who occasionally reads a newspaper. Likewise Iran is backing the Shi'ites - I don't know if anybody has much of an idea how much, surely not reaching into the billions a month though - hardly the first time in history there's been a confluence of US and Iranian policy to back a particular combatant in a three-sided religious and ethnic conflict.

    We learn that Iraq "at first looked like a classic anti-imperial or anti-occupier insurgency" that was "fanned by the flames of anti-American media coverage in the Arab world". Now, why would there be any "anti-American" media coverage in the Arab world? Hmmm. Lemme think, real hard.

    Let us address the following piece of idiocy:

    Perhaps the best judges of what might happen should the United States abruptly depart are the Iraqi people themselves. And on this score, their assessment is frightening. "I think you would get overwhelming assent from Iraqis that should American troops be precipitously withdrawn from the war, civil war and escalation of the sectarian conflict already under way would become virtually inevitable," John Burns, the Baghdad-based war correspondent for The New York Times, told PBS's Charlie Rose in a November 28 interview.

    Is Starobin fucking serious? To find out what Iraqis think he quotes the correspondant for the New York Times? Even before Abu Ghraib and the Sadrist uprising in Najaf, in April of '04, Iraqi opposition to the occupation was polling at 57% nationally, and has predictably risen in every poll conducted since then. Simply asking a few Iraqis ought to be sufficient to find out what "the best judges" think: "less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security".


:: posted by buermann @ 2005-12-13 11:23:16 CST | link





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