Says Robert Dreyfuss at TomPaine.com:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/08/iraqs_reality_sinks_in.phpSeptember 08, 2006
President Bush strutted confidently last year in advance of the December Iraqi elections, brashly predicting that U.S. victory is just around the corner. Then, in the spring, after the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra, the president shifted to a kind of gritted-teeth forced optimism as the shaky government of Prime Minister Maliki took shape amid intensifying sectarian violence. Now, as Iraqi deaths mount at the rate of 3,000 per month, Bush has all but abandoned talk of victory and is reduced to issuing scary pronouncements about what failure#in Iraq would mean. But most of what the president warns is wrong.
Bush’s argument that Iraq would fall into the clutches of al-Qaida, in particular, is utterly stupid: first, because al-Qaida is only a tiny part of the Sunni-led Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation; and second, because the Shiites and the Kurds, who make up perhaps three-quarters of Iraq’s population, would never allow what Dick Cheney calls “al-Qaida types” to seize control of Iraq.
The president’s dire warnings on Iraq come far too late to matter. He might, or he might not, be able to scare voters. But he isn’t scaring the establishment.
What’s happening in Washington now is that the establishment political class—and that includes the military, moderate Republican and Democratic members of Congress, the jabbering pundits and op-ed writers, and the bulk of the thinktank denizens—are coming to grips with the stark fact that the war in Iraq is over. And that the United States has lost. It’s beginning to sink in, but it won’t be confronted directly by the political class until after the November elections. After that, all hell is going to break loose. If the Democrats win back Congress, it will happen faster—but even if the Republicans hang on, the gusting winds on Iraq now buffeting the White House will gather strength to become a full-fledged, Category 5 hurricane.
There was an inkling of that impending doom in the 66-page report released by the Defense Department last week, called “Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq.”
"The security situation is at its most complex state since the initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom"—meaning since the invasion of March, 2003—according to the Pentagon report. The United States is facing both the continuing Sunni insurgency, which it described as “potent and viable,” and a proliferation of sectarian militias and ethnic killings. In a stunning indictment of its ability to provide security and economic stability, the Defense Department added: “Local illegal armed groups are seen as the primary providers of security and basic social services.” These groups, it said, have become “entrenched” in both east (Shiite) and west (Sunni) Baghdad. And it concluded: “Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq.”
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