What Iraqi Government? 0

As I drove to Paoli this morning, I was musing on how to address just this issue.

I come home to find that Andrew Sullivan beat me to it:

The premise of the speech, and of the strategy, is that there is a national democratic government in Baghdad, defending itself against Jihadist attacks. The task, in the president’s mind, is therefore to send more troops to defend such a government. But the reality facing us each day is a starkly different one from the scenario assumed by the president. The government of which Bush speaks, to put it bluntly, does not exist. The reality illumined by the lynching of Saddam is that the Maliki government is a front for Shiite factions and dependent for its future on Shiite death squads. U.S. support for the government is not, therefore, a defense of democracy in a unified country, whatever our intentions. It is putting the lives of American soldiers in defense of the Shiite side in an increasingly brutal civil war.

References to the Iraqi government in much of the discussion of what to do seems to assume that Iraq is an independent nation that petitioned the United States for assistance. Witness this discussion on Here and Now. (The portion involving Richard Perle is particulary interesting.)

Yet, the Iraqi government is the creation–an unruly creation, perhaps, and obviously an impotent one–of the Current Federal Administration.

And, frankly, the Current Federal Administration blew it.

Big time.

And keeps looking for some way to get out of the quicksand without admitting that it ever stepped in quicksand to begin with, let alone charged into it full tilt with guns a-blazin’ even as by-standers shouted out warnings.

Meanwhile, Professor Cole weighs in on the merits of the Bushite plan:

The answer to “al-Qaeda’s” occupation of neighborhoods in Baghdad and the cities of al-Anbar is then, Bush says, to send in more US troops to “clear and hold” these neighborhoods.

But is that really the big problem in Iraq? Bush is thinking in terms of a conventional war, where armies fight to hold territory. But if a nimble guerrilla group can come out at night and set off a bomb at the base of a large tenement building in a Shiite neighborhood, they can keep the sectarian civil war going. They work by provoking reprisals. They like to hold territory if they can. But as we saw with Fallujah and Tal Afar, if they cannot they just scatter and blow things up elsewhere.

And the main problem is not “al-Qaeda,” which is small and probably not that important, and anyway is not really Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. They are just Salafi jihadis who appropriated the name. When their leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed, it didn’t cause the insurgency to miss a beat. Conclusion: “al-Qaeda” is not central to the struggle. Izzat Ibrahim Duri and the Baath Party are probably the center of gravity of the resistance.

How many more lives get sacrified to delusion?

Dick Polman thinks he has the answer

By announcing to his dwindling Republican base that he is sending 20,000 more troops to help shore up what he persists in calling the “young democracy” – indeed, the Republican base was his intended TV audience, since relatively few others support him on Iraq anymore – Bush signaled that the expenditure of American blood and money will continue until the day that he packs up and moves out.

In other words, lots more will die for a lie.