January 15, 2007LOSING BY WINNING?....Fareed Zakaria argues that the most worrisome possibility of George Bush's surge is not that it might fail,
but that it might work:
If the 20,000 additional American troops being sent to the Iraqi capital focus primarily on Sunni insurgents, there's a chance the Shiite militias might get bolder. Colonel Duke puts it bluntly: " is sitting on the 50-yard line eating popcorn, watching us do their work for them."
So what will happen if Bush's new plan "succeeds" militarily over the next six months? Sunnis will become more insecure as their militias are dismantled. Shiite militias will lower their profile on the streets and remain as they are now, ensconced within the Iraqi Army and police. That will surely make Sunnis less likely to support the new Iraq. Shiite political leaders, on the other hand, will be emboldened.
....The greatest danger of Bush's new strategy, then, isn't that it won't work but that it will -- and thereby push the country one step further along the road to all-out civil war....The U.S. Army will be actively aiding and assisting in the largest program of ethnic cleansing since Bosnia. Is that the model Bush wanted for the Middle East?
The
New York Times has more on
why this might -- or might not -- happen.
Fareed Zakaria was one of the journalists at the
secret Iraq meeting By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer
January 15, 2007
AMMAN, JORDAN — President Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq has inflamed passions among the restive Sunni Arab minority, bringing new recruits to insurgent cells and outpourings of popular anger toward the U.S., the spokesman for the country's most hard-line Sunni clerical group declared Sunday.
"Iraq is like a fire," said Mohammed Bashar Faidi, spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn. "Instead of putting water on the fire, Bush is pouring gasoline."
The association, which says it represents thousands of clerics throughout Iraq, shares the aims of the Sunni Arab insurgency. But it also reflects the views of a significant segment of the Sunni Arab population, which has largely turned to Islamic political ideologies since the downfall of the secular Arab nationalism represented by Saddam Hussein's regime.
During a 90-minute interview in his Amman office, Faidi voiced views that illustrated the seemingly unbridgeable gulfs between Iraq's Shiite Muslim-led government, the Sunni guerrilla movement fighting it and the U.S., which in the long term hopes to draw down its troops without permitting Iraq to slip further into sectarian civil war.
more... Inside Baghdad's civil war
As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changedSaturday January 13, 2007
The Guardian
One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents.
Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the US invasion. "I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya
- all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad."
Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money.
more...