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Edited on Wed Jan-09-08 03:48 PM by loindelrio
I am getting a sense that things are about to start going south again. The lull in violence has been just that, a lull. Also known as rearm and regroup. Heres just one article he linked to today. http://www.juancole.com/Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi Accord Front has expressed severe anxiety about the return of violence to Baghdad neighborhoods, the targeting of members of the Awakening Councils, and the failure of the Nuri al-Maliki government to provide the latter with sufficient security.Heres another: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2237433,00.htmlWho would have believed it? When George Bush arrives in Jerusalem today to salvage something from the wreckage of his attempt to impose a new pax Americana on the Middle East, there will at least be one ray of sunshine in an otherwise grim presidential vista. Iran may be resurgent, Hizbullah unbroken, the prospect of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement more remote than ever. But, as far as the US administration is concerned, things are at last coming good in Iraq. Its people are "reclaiming a normal society", Bush has declared, a theme echoed enthusiastically across the US and wider western media. American casualties are down, economic growth is up, refugees are returning home, and people can once again walk the streets of Baghdad in safety, the story goes.
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Then there is the six-month ceasefire called by Moqtada al-Sadr's anti-occupation Mahdi army, the most powerful Shia militia in the country. And lastly, there has been the impact of the surge in US troop numbers and the change of tactics orchestrated by its architect, General Petraeus, including the carving up of cities such as Baghdad into ethnically cleansed security zones behind Israeli-style walls, barriers and checkpoints. Iraqis also report that US troops have sharply reduced their patrols and operations in the last couple of months in Baghdad and elsewhere, with fewer clashes as a result.
But already, the upsurge in bombings, assassinations and attacks on US forces in the last couple of weeks - including the first killing of American troops by an Iraqi soldier - should be a warning to those now talking up the success of the surge. Here are four reasons why the lull in violence is highly unlikely to hold. First, the occupation-funded awakening councils, which are now getting on for 80,000-strong, are an unstable mishmash of groups with different agendas, created in the teeth of opposition from the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government, which have already been drawn into sectarian clashes with Shia militias. To solve one problem, the US has created another.
Second, the surge was only ever a temporary fix, and US troop numbers are already being reduced. Third, violence has been increasing in Shia areas and is likely to continue to do so, both as militias vie for power and as they come into conflict with US forces now tilting towards Sunni interests - or as a result of the clash between the US and Iran. But perhaps most important, there hasn't been the slightest move to a political settlement for which the surge was meant to buy time. The government barely exists, parliament rarely manages a quorum, and there has been no change in the fundamental issue which drives armed resistance: the foreign occupation of the country against the will of its people.
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