saboteurs of hope
I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on in Iraq. It’s such a strange occurrence that terrorist acts are going unclaimed. Even the most atrocious suicide bombings in Israel tend to have several claimants. The Pentagon has painted the terrorist and guerillas all to be former Ba’athist. This might well be true, but this is also the most convenient excuse for the Pentagon, so I am more than a bit skeptical.
It’s very difficult fighting an anonymous enemy. Though this enemies name might be a mystery, its motives are revealed through its tactics. The tactics have been blatant use of force against infrastructures designed to make life easier on common Iraqi’s. Oil pipelines have been by and large kept down and unusable through persistent attack. This prevents oil money from entering the country through the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The United Nations and now the Red Cross have been suicide bombed, the UN twice. Other NGO’s and IGO’s are fleeing as well because of this –including Doctors Without Borders, one of my favorite charities. Those who work with the CPA, particularly Iraqi Police, are being targeted.
All of this has one clear aim: make life miserable for the occupiers and the occupied. Unfortunately, the secular Ba’athist and militant Islamists, as well as regional governments, have reason to want the Iraqi’s to shrug off the Americans or the Americans to shrug off the Iraqi’s. I don’t know that this means that they are working in tandem though.
These attacks are only getting worse, and I imagine they will sustain at their current level if nothing else. What this means is that American’s must have a stomach to weather through this storm. Unfortunately, August 19th and October 28th don’t quite carry the same national resolve as September the Eleventh. Bush must work to set clear and reasonable goals, considering the reality of the situation, to provide a timeline and/or conditions of a return of Iraqi national sovereignty.
I don’t know what an appropriate exit strategy at this point is. I do feel that if Bush chooses to not leave before squashing this rebellion, we might well be there past is potential second term as President expires. Unless a new counter-insurgency doctrine makes it’s way from West Point or Washington think tanks to the Pentagon in the next few months, we ought not expect an end to this resistance against us or the sovereign Iraqi government for quite some time. We ought also to weigh how much our continued overt presence only helps the attacks by encouraging alienated and despondent Iraqis to abed these saboteurs of hope. Even through all it’s shortcomings, our involvement in Afghanistan perhaps ought to be the framework in Iraq as well.
Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency
