Trouble in Paradise
One major cause of the reduction in casualty rates among American soldiers is that we succeeded in convincing a substantial swathe of the Sunni insurgency to stop attacking U.S. troops and instead start taking money from U.S. troops. That turnabout, however, never really convinced the now-former insurgents to reconcile themselves to Shiite majority rule. And at the same time, the Shiite government viewed the new U.S.-sponsored Sunni militia groups with considerable suspicion. Back, say, nine months ago I was pretty certain this situation was due for an imminent collapse. Clearly, it didn’t happen that way and General Petraeus’ new strategy held together. Consequently, the whole underlying issue here has kind of fallen out of view.
But now Richard Oppel reports for The New York Times that things are changing and the Iraqi government, feeling newly confident, is in the midst of a crackdown with senior leaders of the awakening movement getting arrested.
22 Responses to “Trouble in Paradise”
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August 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 am
When the leaders of the Awakenings were on top of their game and bragging on how they defeated al-Qaeda, there were quotes from them as to how they would drive the Shiite government out of Baghdad after the US left. Looks like Maliki remembers and wants to defang them before 2011.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:37 am
I’ve said all along that “bottom up” reconciliation is a myth. It sounds good to American ears – all grass rootsy and common folk coming together while the pols in Baghdad argue about the shape of the table. When in fact those pols in Baghdad have been busy gathering the power to root out what they see as snakes in the grass. The current situation was as inevitable as the rising sun.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
As long as it holds together long enough for us to get out. But these groups will always be a headache for the Iraq government. Either the low level civil war will continue indefinitely or the central government will succeed in oppressing these groups. Sadly, the latter is the best of two bad outcomes to hope for.
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Why bother oppressing them? I’d been under the impression that most of the natural resources were in Shi’ite and Kurdish regions, so why wouldn’t the central government just be willing to lop that whole section of the country off. Plus it would create a convenient location to ship people if they decide to ramp up the ethnic cleansing again.
August 22nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
On the other hand, McCain was a POW.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I sent Matt an article on that some time ago.
The fun part now is that Matt’s email address on the right there (Contact Me) —>
gives me a “no such user” from Yahoo email and qmail bounces the email. Matt apparently doesn’t exist.
So now Matt can stay ignorant about everything he blogs about. Nice goin’. Matt!
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