Tony Cordesman, the most prolific analyst on Iraq there is, has a piece up at CSIS on Iraq. Excerpt:
This is a civil war ...The realiity is that the drift towards a major civil war has become steadily more serious ub Kirkuk, and Basra, and in Ninewa, Salah al-Din, and Diyala Provinces. ... In fact, the [Defense Deaprtment] report notes that "sectarian violance is gradualyl spreading north into Diyala Province and Kirkuk as Sunni, Shi'a and Kurdish groups compete for provincial influence ... In the Southern, predominantly Shi'a region of the country, political and tribal rivalries are a growing motive behind the violence, particularly in Basra, with limited anti-Coalition forces, attacks are likely undertake by rogue Shi'a militia."
If you don't read the whole report, just look at the charts.
Comments (3)
Oh, come on. I begin to feel like Jon Stewart when the General said Aghanistan was sliding away from us and gave it six months. Iraq has been sliding into civil war for too long now, but no one, including the generals who want to keep their jobs, will admit it. As Jon might say, Naw, it's closer to five months and three days and two hours. Afghanistan is lost, completely lost, already; so is Iraq. We can put more cannon fodder in there; start a draft; maybe that will wake people up to the fact that we've botched it. The next President will now have to handle it, and I grieve for any of you readers who are of draft age or have children who will be eligible for the draft. Vote, at least, for Democrats to replace these clowns; they may be wimpy and they may turn corrupt, but at least they'll give us a breather and some fresh thinking.
Posted by OCPatriot | October 16, 2006 5:07 PM
Posted on October 16, 2006 17:07
Cordesman ridicules the Lancet study on page 1, saying: "...either this one study is right or MNF-I, the Iraqi government, and every reporter actually in Iraq is radically wrong."
Four pages later he points out that the US military tried to mislead the press by not counting mass attacks, and that no casualties were reported in Anbar in July because of "data collection difficulties."
If Cordesman thinks the Lancet authors falsified their data, he should present his evidence. Otherwise, he should shut up and take a course in statistics.
Posted by Cal | October 21, 2006 6:53 AM
Posted on October 21, 2006 06:53
"As went Diem, so goes Maliki...(or maybe Sukarno is the better analogy)"
Personally I support a coup. If it installs pro-Baathists, fine. The end state the administration wanted to see in Iraq was a secularist government committed to a unified Iraq. Its unfortunate that the Neo-Cons' muddled instructions to Bremer comparing the Ba'ath Party to the Nazis, prompting CPA General Orders 1 and 2, led to the insurgency and the unholy alliance between excluded Baathists and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, allowing Iran's proxies to fill the power vacuum.
Back to the basics; stability, a competant Counterinsurgency we can support, and a government who we can support as a bulwark against Iran.
Posted by Realpolitik | October 22, 2006 4:00 PM
Posted on October 22, 2006 16:00