Professor Juan Cole has all the gory details on his blog. The “highlights”? Well, for starters, it looks like the country we invaded a few years ago is on the verge of erupting into a civil war. Yes, journalists and pundits have been warning about this threat for almost two years, but the latest violence appears to be both widespread (over 1300 killed in the past week) and being committed on a secterian (religious) basis.
The details are just too disturbing for me to report on in detail, so if you’re interested in seeing how our efforts at democracy building in the Middle East art going, visit Professor’s blog.
Interestingly, he links to a Los Angeles Times article that in the wake of this violence, some Neocons in the Pentagon and various right wing think tanks (i.e. the AEI) are arguing that now is not the time for us to draw down our troop levels. This of course makes no sense, as the Professor notes:
Someone should explain to me why last week’s events are an argument for keeping US troops in Iraq. What did they do? Did we hear about any US military units guarding Sunni mosques as they were being attacked by Shiite mobs? The LA Times reports on how US troops were caught between two sides in the rioting, and because they could not enter mosques, were often not able to investigate violent attacks against them.
Even my kitten knows the situation in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster, and our troop presence is not succeeding in combatting foreign terrorists or the home-grown insurgency. The simplistic and deranged “if we leave, we lose” argument is all the poor, deluded neoconservative chickenhawks have left. Of course, following this wisdom would entail our utterly demoralized troops staying in Iraq for a generation, and at this rate hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead.
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