Bottoms Up!

It looks like the Bush/Petraeus plan to compensate for the failure of the surge to accomplish its goal by aiming instead for "bottom-up reconciliation" is running into the wee hurdle that "bottom-up reconciliation" isn't a kind of reconciliation at all and the Shiite-dominated government doesn't want to incorporate American-trained anti-government Sunni insurgents into its security forces.

What a surprise! There's a reason, after all, why national reconciliation was postulated as the surge's goal -- absent reconciliation, there's nothing useful we can do. Unfortunately, when the surge failed to accomplish its purpose, instead of abandoning the strategy we abandoned the goal in favor of this nonsensical one.

Comments

alternatively, we could say the goal was consistent - stall out the remainder of bush's term and dump the problem on his successor - and only the rhetoric changed.

Posted by howard | November 12, 2007 11:51 AM

As advocated by Israeli strategist Oded Yinon, fomenting civil wars in Israel's enemies is easy to do and obviously benefits Israel. Thus the neocons minipulated intelligence to drive us to war wherein we replaced Saddam's Sunni Ba'ath regime and were then attacked by Sunni Ba'athist insurgents, Al Qaeda,(which wasn't there before), and Shiite militias who hate foreign occupiers. Currently we're paying the former Sunni insurgents to fight Al Qaeda, and paying the Shiite government army to fight everyone,(except those we're paying to fight someone else). Stranded in this multifaceted civil war, we can't leave because those we are currently paying will then fight each other. Winners: Israel, war-profiteers,would-be oil looters. Losers: the American people and the Iraqi people.

Posted by Sabine Wales | November 12, 2007 1:08 PM

"The British army has had to go through some of the painful and rather distasteful things that you have to do in order to reach accommodations with people who until very recently were actually killing your soldiers," Maj. Gen. Paul Newton said.

Bill Kristol informed us back in 2003 that "We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together." In the light of his insight, we can predict that the Shiites won't have any problem forgiving and forgetting. It's not as though the concept of revenge killing was important in their culture, or as though there were lasting enmity between the oppressor and the oppressed. The Sunnis have learned their lesson and have given up any notion of restoring their domination over Shiites by violence.

Yeah, that might happen. If it doesn't, what's Plan B?

Right. Run out the clock and blame it on a Democrat.

"Oh, come now! Let's not bicker and argue about 'oo killed 'oo!" from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

Posted by cowalker | November 12, 2007 1:16 PM

Bottoms up?

I think the Shiites are the lady with the ruler:

http://s217.photobucket.com/albums/cc170/moron256/?action=view¤t=reconciliation.jpg

In case you hadn't guessed... the kid with the bottom up is... us.

Posted by moron | November 12, 2007 2:07 PM

So, let me get this straight.

It's surprising to some people that the formerly evil and objectively pro-liberal Sunni Insurgents have stopped killing US troops when;

a) They're being funded and armed by the US, either directly or through Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

b) The US is openly planning to start a war with Iran that will turn the Shia population of Iraq into their New Enemy, making the formerly evil and objectively pro-liberal Sunni Insurgents their New Bestest Friends.

No, what's surprising is that the Sunni ever bothered to beat the crap out of the US in the first place. If they'd just strewn the streets with ponies and lollipops as they were supposed to, the White House could have gotten on with it's 'Drive to the East' all the sooner and avoided all the waste of the last few years.

I blame Saddam. Clearly, he should have just invaded Iran back in 2003 and become a wingnut hero.

Posted by Tony J | November 12, 2007 3:17 PM

Now if we can only get the casualty figures to go up again, pretend oil revenues aren't being shared, and keep repeating Code Pink mantras, maybe we really will be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Nice work!

Posted by Robert Powell | November 12, 2007 5:14 PM

I do have to admit, this does not look good.

Posted by Robert Powel | November 12, 2007 6:08 PM

robert, we won't even waste our time with your nonsense about oil revenues being shared and Code Pink mantras: we'll simply ask - what frickin' victory are you talking about? we'd really like to know what we "won."

it's amazing the extent to which right-wing thought is rooted in the notion that international relations can all be reduced to the level of a college football rivalry.

Posted by howard | November 12, 2007 6:49 PM

"it's amazing the extent to which right-wing thought is rooted in the notion that international relations can all be reduced to the level of a college football rivalry."

That's because sports fans are morons, and right wingers are morons.

See how simple that is?

An acquaintance of mine from back in my college days once said that if we nuked the college stadium, we'd get rid of most of the morons in town.

The amusing thing about the article is that with unemployment at something like 80% in Iraq, people are surprised that a bunch of guys want to enlist for $300 a month in some sort of military force.

This isn't an army, it's a fucking welfare program. These guys are never going to be trained well enough to do a job against the former Baath Iraqi military now in the insurgency, or the Shia militias that were trained in Iran.

If the US wants to do something, tell the Iraqi government we're pulling out, but we'll pay the $10 billion a month we're spending in Iraq directly to all Iraqi citizens through fucking Paypal or something...start a US welfare program for Iraq. With the population reduced by ten or fifteen percent due to the war, the civil war, the refugees and the like, we should be able to afford to pay everybody in Iraq a living wage for $10 billion a month...We could pay $300 a month for 10 million people for only $3 billion, so $10 billion ought to cover 30 million - more than Iraq's population.

The whole thing is turning into a circus.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 12, 2007 7:30 PM

Attempting to reduce political disagreements, especially on complex foreign policy issues, to a kind of "left=good guys, right=bad guys" formula is at least as stupid as college football rivalies, and a lot more damaging to our national interests.

There is no "left" or "right" position on Iraq. If anything, Bush's policies have been much more consistent with liberal history. Attempting to spread democracy to places that have never known it with a gigantic and fabulously expensive government effort may be many things, but "conservative" is clearly not one of them.

It is evident from even a casual look at the history of our involvement in Iraq that it has been overwhelmingly bi-partisan for at least the last twenty years, if not since WWII. It has usually been marked by, shall we say, less than complete success. Currently, re-establishing a state in any of several possible configurations that is reasonably pro-Western, reasonably stable, not working on wmd's, at peace with its neighbors, and pumping oil, would represent a success for American interests without regard to political party. And the thing most likely to impede such an outcome is blinkered partisanship in the US.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 14, 2007 5:17 AM