Over at Cold Fury, Al has a great post that covers much ground in a small space. Here is the meat of it:
Of course the battle isn’t won. The couple hundred thousand Sunni clerics in Iraq are calling Zarqawi a jewish CIA agent, in order to get out the vote. But hey, that isn’t that much worse than calling Bush a lynch mob leader (which the NAACP did in 2000) or claiming that Bush had the N’awlins levees blown up because he hates black people, which Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) did last week in congressional hearings. So we’ve got a ways to go before we achieve a neat, orderly democratic process in Washington, much less in Iraq. But the future holds much promise.
Analysis: The U.S. does need to get out of Iraq because we are seen as a pain in the ass. Mainly a necessary pain in the ass, but still a pain. The Sunnis attack us to maintain credibility with their rank and file and to jockey for position and power, the Shiites ride our back because as a majority party they will fare well in a democracy, and because it’s the course of least resistance right now, and the Kurds are with us because we have been their steadfast protector against both Saddam, and bruised Turkey. In addition to acting as political lubricant, we are also acting as the foil, the invader, against which many of the parties can rail so as to rally their own people against… something, lower interest rates and inflation not being quite as high on the radar in a country with major crime and infrastructure problems. In other words, our mere presence probably encourages some of the violence and attacks, just as much as it prevents a slippage into anarchy or mullahocracy.
So we do need to pull out, but not before the Shiites and Sunnis have invested much in the political process, and not before the security forces have become more proficient, less sectarian managers of society’s bad elements. The Sunnis need to realize that if the U.S. pulls out too quick, the Kurds and Shiites will be coming with long knives, to pay them back for a half century of vicious repression. The Shiites need to realize that if the U.S. pulls out too quick, the Kurds and the Sunnis will break off thanks to the threat of Shiite retaliation and in the Kurds’ case, nationalist ambitions, and the Shiites might as well send Turkey and Iran engraved invitations to invade and partition the country. Rather like the U.S. in the post Civil War era, our various regions may not have liked each other that much, but the happenstances of history and geography threw us together, and we could do much better as a unitary whole than as two or three divided mini-nations.
But be sure to…well.. You know.
December 12th, 2005 | Global War On Terror, Liberty, Politics