Two senators, one Republican, one Democrat, have proposed a plan to divide Iraq into three parts, no doubt still controlled by the United States.
Except, the plan is a hallucination and can’t work. The US is not in control there and hasn’t been for quite some time. Not that this matters to congress members in whose view the US must always be supreme, even if reality clearly contradicts this.
It’s important to note this imperialist plan to divide Iraq didn’t even bother to make a pretense of consulting Iraqis to get their view and is bipartisan.
Probably a divided but federal Iraq is the closest we’re going to get to a solution… but consult the Iraqis? Come on! Next YOU’LL be wanting a say in governance.
ABC is so worthless on reporting that it’s hard to know what to make of this story. My recollection of Biden’s article last year was that it should be presented as an option to the Iraqis. How it would go down is anybody’s guess, but the reporting on this story is so bad that you just can’t tell. At least somebody in Washington is thinking about a political solution instead of a strictly military one.
The major reason we should get out of Iraq now is that we’re entirely too stupid and ignorant to be able to manipulate it and are simply making things worse. It’s bizarre to think that the Americans could make a situation worse than the loathesome government of Saddam Hussein, but we sure seem to have done it, and the faster we get out, the better.
And I’m not entirely convinced that our leaving would not terrify the parties involved enough to bring them closer to a political solution on their own. The Shi’a majority certainly has no reason to want us out, because the Americans chase down the Sunni Ba’athists while the Shi’a militia can do their revenge and ethnic cleansing. What if they had to go up against the REAL armed Ba’athists? Gad!
People forgot that the genious Rumsfeld let 250 million tons of arms get looted from the arsenals after the invasion. That isn’t a bunch of loco locals breaking into a convenience store and escaping with a few cartons of cigarette. Getting heavy-duty arms and ammunition out takes effort and coordination…can you say, the fired Iraqi army, Paul Brenner? What a bunch of incompetents.
I suspect that HW Bush or Nixon could have bluffed their way through the situation and scared the Syrians and Iranians enough to bring about some kind of regional consensus that would help restore order. This administration is woefully out of its league in so doing, though, so we’re going to have to resign oursleves to the slaughter that the fools in DC have provoked. But who knows? Maybe faced with having to make REAL decisions, calmer and more frightened heads will prevail, and we won’t see a descent into the maelstrom.