DAWN OF THE DEAD: IRAQ

IRAQ IS DEAD and a new dawn finds the new dead walking.  Women’s rights are gone, lost to Shari’a and the religious law the Bush geniuses either didn’t see coming or didn’t care about.  The Kurds will keep their oil, the Shias will have their dominance, and the Sunnis who once had everything will now have nothing.  Something slouches toward Baghdad, but it doesn’t look like freedom on the march.

THE FOOLS WHO TOLD US IRAQ would be a cakewalk tell us U.S. withdrawal cannot have a timetable. With the Iraqi Constitution, though, everything is on the table so Bush can meet his schedule.  Something is on the march in Iraq and it looks like it’s headed toward hell.

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[DARK WRAITH/UNCAPITALIST] The Balkanization of Iraq is already well underway. All the Americans and the British want at this point is documentary veneer that gives the legal appearance that a sovereign state called "Iraq" still exists, despite the concept having been a dog from the very start, requiring as it did a brutish and repressive central government to keep it together.

[PSEUDO-ADRIENNE/ALAS A BLOG] With some even more bad news about the war in Iraq, thanks to The New York Times, top Army officials have openly spoken of the possibility of American troops staying over in Iraq for four more years. Joy. And the body-bag count will just keep rising and the billions will keep being flushed down the toilet. So much for the "once the Iraqis draft their constitution we'll be out of there in a jiffy" rhetoric.

[ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES] The usually unspoken argument of those who find women's social rights unimportant for democracy is that democracy in places like Iraq can take a different form: one limited to men only, because democracy elsewhere, including in the United States, once assigned equal rights to only some people, such as white men.

[JUAN COLE] DEXTER FILKINS OF THE NY TIMES reveals some of the details about which the constitution drafting committee has been arguing. One is whether clerics will sit on the Supreme Court (they do in Afghanistan). Apparently one plan would give them 4 of 9 seats. You can only imagine what US law would look like if 4 of the Supreme Court seats were set aside for Cardinals and televangelists. We'd all have 12 kids and they would be taught "intelligent design" in state schools.
A compromise is being suggested on the issue of whether provinces can confederate, according to Vice-Premier Ahmad Chalabi. He says it is being proposed that no more than 3 provinces can form a confederation together. This step would forestall the emergence of a huge Shiite confederation in the south, of 9 provinces. But Chalabi is typically dismissive of Sunni concerns. "How many votes have they got?" he sneered. Chalabi's commitment to deep debaathification helped persuade the Americans to dissolve the Iraqi army and exclude most Sunnis from public life (since most of them had been Baath Party members at some times in their lives). This exclusion and marginalization has helped push the Sunni Arabs into a deadly guerrilla war against the Shiites, Kurds and Americans.

[WAPO]Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) broke with his party leadership last week to become the first senator to call for all troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by a specific deadline. Feingold proposed Dec. 31, 2006. In delivering the Democrats' weekly radio address yesterday, former senator Max Cleland (Ga.), a war hero who lost three limbs in Vietnam, declared that "it's time for a strategy to win in Iraq or a strategy to get out."
Although critical of Bush, the party's establishment figures -- including Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) -- all reject the Feingold approach, reasoning that success in Iraq at this point is too important for the country.

[MEDIA MATTERS] LATimes columnist Ron Brownstein wrote in an August 22 op-ed that both Democrats and Republicans face a "problem" in determining how to respond to Iraq, even if the Democratic divisions have been more public. He cited Republicans besides Hagel who have diverged from the Bush administration by advocating either increased troop levels or some level of disengagement, and he noted that "[m]any insiders say that in private, more elected Republicans are growing uneasy about the war"

[WAPO]"I don't see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here," said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Bethnahrain, which has offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats.
Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. "Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore," she said. "Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shiites. No one else has any rights."

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Comments

[Agi T. Prop]

What a scary movie Heretik. If only it were'nt true...

Cheney is the perfect zombie. He feeds off the blood of the living by sacrificing our troops in Iraq for his own personal gain.

[Roxanne]

That photo is completely creepy.

[Fred Dawes]

Oh yes, I can see that land of the dead, and with this I say, dawn of the dead women's rights out The door and lost to what i said but the bush and beheadings for the dollar i say.
religious rule has come with bush you see and his ways, and the dead do cry why me?

and mothers are called by an insane government nothing but fools and dead do cry why me?

but the kurds do keep the oil you see, to be sold on the open market to china and bush will make a-lot of money and the dead do cry why me?

[Night Bird]

I would concur with what Roxanne said about the photo. I am sure glad I don't have to wake up to that every morning.

[Donna]

Iraq, what a place! It's at the top of my list for places I want to vacation. Are Feingold and Hagel the only two senators with a clue?

[Night Bird]

Is it my imagination or is that photo changing??