Re: Great Idea re Voting to Stay in Iraq
[QUOTE=superdave;526680]Btw, that moveon.org ad against the General was out of line. [/QUOTE]
Agreed on that point. Totally unnecessary.
[QUOTE=superdave;526680]No denying there is progress in Iraq. [/QUOTE]
Well, that's true, but there is significant blurring about the "why" of that progress. There's all this discussion of whether or not the "surge" is working, and there is also talk about all the progress in the Anbar province, where Sunnis are now fighting against Al Qaeda forces. The conclusion Bush and the advocates of the war hope you'll draw is that the two are connected.
The reality, however, is that the change in the Anbar province began pre-surge and was a result of our troops taking a step back and giving the Sunnis some ownership of their own region. Once it was apparent to the Sunnis that they were fighting for their own territory, they wanted to oust the Al Qaeda forces from it, too. It was not the presence of more troops in Anbar that did the trick, it was actually having [B]less[/B] troops in that particular region, with US troops playing more of a supporting role. Accordingly, not only does the progress in Anbar not support the argument for preserving the surge, it actually supports the opposite strategy.
It is important to remember, though, that Sunnis are not fighting Al Qaeda because they want Al Qaeda out of Iraq. They are fighting Al Qaeda because they want Al Qaeda out of Anbar, a Sunni-controlled region of The Region Formally Known As Iraq. There is no Iraq, there is just a region with three autonomous factions. Partitioning the country into regions that these groups give a rip about and are willing to fight for is the only way we're ever going to see an end to this conflict. Maybe you have a loose, centralized government to handle things of mutual concern (read: oil profits), but continuing to pretend that "success" is with them living together in one happy country is one of the major sources of the problem, IMO.