The Common Ills: Verdicts (or just gas baggery) are being rendered

Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Verdicts (or just gas baggery) are being rendered

Hasan Kanbolat (Today's Zaman) offers a dire prediction:

Life is over for Sunni Arabs and Turkmens in Iraq. The Sunni Arabs and Turkmens who live in the north, the west and the center of Iraq have been forced to pick either the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
In the south of Iraq, they face Shiite pressure. ISIL is a Sunni organization; but because it is based on a hybrid Salafi ideology, it is against Sunni-Hanafi and Sunni Shafi interpretations of Islam. For ISIL, Iraqi Sunnis are enemies that should be destroyed. The cultural and religious past and identity of Iraqi Sunnis is being eradicated. For this reason, ISIL destroys all tombs and shrines. Daily life is becoming ever harder for Iraqi Sunnis. They are forced to live under the domination of others. There is no longer stability and security. The future is entirely bleak.

Meanwhile Thomas E. Ricks (Foreign Policy) insists:

The surge did not win the war, but it did achieve a truce. Had Shiite leadersused that truce to reach out to Sunnis and try to chart a generous course forward, they might have emerged in triumph. Obviously, easier said than done. And I know that Shiite elements might have reacted murderously to anyone attempting this sort of outreach. But this sort of difficult reconciliation has been achieved in other countries in the past.
Instead, Iraq’s leaders, whenever faced with a decision in recent years, have chosen the narrower, exclusionary way forward. Rather than try to create a new Iraq, they seem to have gone with old ways and allied with Iran.

What did they expect to happen as a result? I don’t know, but the current dismal situation seems to be the natural result of what the leaders of the Shiites have done.

We should probably explain, as someone does, that this a re-post from a May post by Ricks because his blog "is in summer reruns."

Summer reruns don't really exist the way they did when Ricks was a small boy -- well, when he was a boy.

He's taken the summer off in an apparent effort to compete in Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest. He was hoping to win this July 4th but they disqualified him since he was swallowing the dogs whole and not chewing them.

Depressed, he's wandered the eastern seaboard ever since waiting for the end of summer and the hope that no one, after Labor Day, would ask him, "Hey, fat ass, did you win that contest?"

At any rate, we've got one person fretting the end of Iraq for Sunnis and Turkmen and another insisting that whatever's taking place in Iraq -- whatever it is -- it's the fault of the Shi'ites and (check the headline to Tommy Trash's piece) not the fault of Barack.

Those pesky Iraqis! Failing the world like that!

But, question, how did the Shi'ites get in charge?

Because they weren't voted in.

Who, in Iraq, would be rushing to vote for one of the many cowards who fled the country and stayed away for ten years or more, only returning after the US-led invasion of 2003?

I mean, in California, if some coward fled the state while we were under siege and we managed without him only to see him return after the tyrant (or Ahnuld) was overthrown, I wouldn't vote them into leadership. I'd probably point to them with scorn and as a cautionary tale of what not to do.

But all the Shi'ite cowards returned.

With US protection.

And instead of trusting native Iraqis who'd chosen to stay, the US rewarded these cowards -- many of whom, unable to fight for Iraq themselves, fed the US government lies to get it to fight for them -- by putting them in government positions.

Thomas Ricks is amazed that a group would seek revenge.

What else do cowards do?

They are cowards who fled the country and now that the US puts them in charge, they want revenge and (mis)use the power the US has given them to do just that.

It's not surprising.

Nor is it the fault of Iraqis.

It is the fault of Bully Boy Bush.

And, yes, Tommy's beau Barack Obama.

Bully Boy Bush insisted Nouri al-Maliki become the prime minister in 2006.

The 2010 elections were supposed to -- by their results -- push Nouri out of the post of prime minister. He retained it because Barack wanted him to.

The position of the White House was that Iraq needed a "strongman" (thug).

And Nouri did fit that criteria.

Emma Sky, Gen Ray Odierno and others argued against it.

But that's what the White House wanted.

So it's a bit hard to figure how Barack's not to blame.

Thomas E. Ricks clearly mastered his gag reflex but it's a shame facts still challenge him.

AFP reports, "Gunmen kidnapped at least 18 Turkish employees of a company building a football stadium in Baghdad on Wednesday, officials said, but it was not immediately clear who was holding them."

And, of course and no surprise, First Post adds of the assailants, "Masked men in military uniforms kidnapped 18 Turkish employees of an Ankara-based construction company in Baghdad early Wednesday, bundling them into several SUVs and speeding away, Iraqi and Turkish officials said."

But never accuse the military or the militia in Iraq -- not even when it turns out it was them. Ignore that fact in every subsequent report and just continue to pretend there's a mad tailor in Baghdad churning out impostor uniforms.

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