Yes, Lindsey Graham really did say the following.
Closer to home, Graham predicted that any Senate effort to withdraw troops would fail. “Now is the time to pour it on and not withdraw – more of the same. More political, economic, military support will affect dramatically the outcome in Iraq.”
Nir Rosen, via Steve Clemons, has something to say about more of the same.
TOM FOREMAN, CNN ANCHOR, THIS WEEK AT WAR: Nir, let me start with you. Who is running the show in Baghdad? Or is anyone?
NIR ROSEN, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION: Well it depends where you are. As it has been since April 9, 2003, when Baghdad fell to the Americans, militias have been running the show. Whoever has power in the given neighborhoods, whatever local warlord, he’s the one running the show. The government is basically a theater. Whatever happens in the green zone doesn’t matter. It’s always been militia leaders, political leaders at the party level who control the various militias and the ministers, not the prime minister and not the Americans, certainly. it is various militias.
FOREMAN: Nir, based on what you are saying though the problem is there is no credible alternative is there?
ROSEN: There is no government to begin with. It’s a collection of militias. And indeed, there is no alternative. The whole focus on the government in Baghdad is the — problem is that — in everybody’s approach. In Iraq it used to be you could have a coup replace the government and the whole country followed. But now Iraqi is a collection of city states, Baghdad, Tikrit, Kirkuk, Mosul, Basra, Erbil, each one with its own warlords. They don’t answer to Baghdad. Baghdad has no control over them. When we overthrew Saddam, we imposed one dictator after another. We didn’t like Prime Minister Jaafari so we got rid of him and we put in his close ally, Maliki. And now the occupier is once again upset that the occupied people are not being sufficiently obedient. But it doesn’t matter. We are past that stage. Iraq doesn’t exist as a state anymore. The government has never existed. It has never brought in any services. Even the most fundamental service the government can provide, a monopoly over the use of violence, it doesn’t provide that because it has never controlled the militias and militias are the ones that control the police and the army.
FOREMAN: So Nir, we keep hearing reports, though, nonetheless out of Baghdad. People saying that give us time, we are trying to get this government worked out. We are going to make some progress. Do you see any way that can happen?
ROSEN: No. This has been the case for the past would two years at least. There is no hope. There is no government. Neither side is interested in compromise and why should they? The Shias control Baghdad. They have removed the Sunnis from Baghdad, from Iraq’s political future.
FOREMAN: What’s going to change that if anything?
ROSEN: Nothing is going to change that. The Shias have actually expelled most of the Sunnis from Baghdad. It went from being a majority Sunni city. Now it is a majority Shia city. The last few pockets of Sunnis are slowly being purged by the police and the Mehdi army. It’s now irrevocably a Shia city and Sunnis are just out. Unfortunately, Iraq has been completely remade and it is time to be honest. It is time for the American leaders to be honest and American military to be honest with their people.
There can be no reconciliation. This does — the latest show we had a few days ago where they brought a few leaders together and pretended like they were going to reconcile, the Sunnis are still out of the government and they remain so and why should they be? They have been expelled from Iraq. The majority of the three million refugees that we have from the region, from Iraq are Sunni. The majority being internally displaced are Sunni. Of course, whatever agreement were to be reached, parliament would never ratify it anyway.
Newsweek more than confirms Rosen’s analysis.
It was their last stand. Kamal and a handful of his neighbors were hunkered down on the roof of a dun-colored house in southwest Baghdad two weeks ago as bullets zinged overhead. In the streets below, fighters from Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army fanned out and blasted away with AK-47s and PKC heavy machine guns. Kamal is a chubby 44-year-old with two young sons, and he and his friends, all Sunnis, had been fighting similar battles against Shiite militiamen in the Amel neighborhood for months. They jumped awkwardly from rooftop to rooftop, returning fire. Within minutes, however, dozens of uniformed Iraqi policemen poured into the street to support the militiamen. Kamal ditched his AK on a rooftop and snuck away through nearby alleys. He left Amel the next day. “I lost my house, my documents and my future,” says Kamal, whose name and that of other Iraqis in this story have been changed for their safety. “I’m never going back.”
Read it all. It’s a dose of reality.
Iraq is a total loss. There is no hope. The Shi’a are not going to stop cleansing Baghdad. The Sunni neighbors are not going to help prop up a government that is giving them more refugees every day.
We can’t fix this. We have to leave.
Permanent chaos, permanent war! Next stop Iran! This has been the plan from the beginning! All the talk about incompetence has been a diversion. Yes there’s certainly scads of incompetence, but, for the neocons driving this atrocity, it has been deliberate ‘bungling’ all along.
Is there a single Democrat or Republican leader, or a singly news/media organization who will lead an exit out of this insanity? No!
I think the only way to lead us out is to have the decision making power. It’s too easy to distort our best policy options into cowardice or lack of patriotism, or even recklessness.
Really, I can’t do my usual activism thing on this
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2369001.ece
simply because beyond the virus crippling of my information,link and contact laden Windoze 98 machine my ISP has also sent me on a whirlwind chase of email doesn’t work bullshit. Seven times already and I still can’t send emails, I really thing it’s just because I am me, it conflicts with their corporate interests and they know it.
Is there even one candidate from either party who has a chance of winning the presidency who you think would implement the decision to withdraw our combat forces from the Middle East? Frankly I don’t see one.
hey! ya all hear about the latest garbage from the mouth of george? If things stay the way they appear to be the there might be a chance that we can reduce the number of troops and keep the security pretty good. Now of coure the lying bastard is not telling anyone that if ya reduce the troop level which means to the level that it was before the surge then that can then be touted as a dramatic reduction!
You all know about that- its the sam as the fucker saying that he is going to help 80000 mortgage holders that are in trouble. Of course 80,000 is not even a drop in the 2,000,000 plusw that are the numbers that are in trouble!
What a goddamned liar! There’s your president folks.
In all his dry drunkin glory!
I remember it as, if Iraq improves, we can leave.
OK, George. Iraq is wonderful. It’s a shining beacon on the hill. Can we leave now?
It’s very difficult to think through the worst-case scenario, when every case seems worse than the last, and worse than you ever thought the worst would be. We as a nation are terribly guilty of what we did to the people of that country, and there can be and will be no forgiveness. Payback time is coming.
I’m reminded of the ThinkGeek “Motivational Poster” on Consulting which reads:
“If You’re Not A Part Of The Solution, There’s Good Money To Be Made In Prolonging The Problem.”
And if that isn’t Iraq in a nutshell, I don’t know what is. Only with Iraq, it’s not just money, but political power, all the trappings of empire, a near-dictatorship at home and another war and the opportunity to exponentially multiply ALL of that evil possibly only a few months off.
We’re at the crossroads. The last time America made that choice, we took the dark path. We’re still paying for it, and we will be for a generation. If we make the wrong choice again this time, all of this will seem a fond memory in comparison.