Friday, November 24, 2006

Why?

Am I missing something? Why are we still debating whether to "stay the course" or "cut and run"? Koffee Annan says that the U.S. cannot win in Iraq, nor can we leave. I say we should leave before we lose...more U.S. troops. We are clearly caught in the middle of a fight-to-the-finish religious civil war, Sunnis against Shias. We dare not arrest Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, but he's using Irani money and materiel to wage war on the Sunnis. In short, he's nothing but a terrorist. The situation is even more absurd when one considers the helplessness (or refusal) of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to end Shia militia violence and/or arrest al-Sadr. Maliki knows that his fragile coalition government (which is really a Shiite government with a few Sunnis and Kurds around to pick up the crumbs) could never survive a crack-down on the Shia clergy. Dissolution of the coalition would be the price to pay for getting rid of al-Sadr. It's ridiculous for military leaders, pundits, and pols to go on saying the situation is not yet a civil war when every indication is otherwise. I understand that the Shias are now claiming that the Sunni insurgents are backed by the U.S., understandable given the background of Shia-U.S. relations, and especially the Shia majority of Iran. With that kind of mistrust rampant in the majority of Iraqis, the idea that our presence is still welcome there is just plain stupid. The notion that leaving now will admit defeat and weaken us world-wide is simply ridiculous. When all of the phony, data-mined, cherry-picked "justifications" for going into Iraq turned out to be bogus, the administration claimed that regime change was sufficient reason to invade. OK, been there, done that. It's only a short time now before Saddam is hung. Now, let's get the fuck out. Who gives a damn whether the Sunnis and Shias slaughter each other? I'd rather redeploy the troops to the Sudan and stop the "ethnic cleansing" (read: genocide) in Darfur than try to help a bunch of ragheads whose religion is repugnant to me and who show no signs of being deserving of anything akin to democracy. Saddam may have slaughtered a lot of Shias and Kurds, but at least he kept order. Like Mussolini, he kept the trains running on time.

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