IRAQ: A LOVE STORY

THE END DRAWS NEAR As in all affairs of love and war, one side knows it far earlier than the other.  Little clues are offered and unheeded.  The loved one has no need of the lover.  The lover loses the loved, but before that all sense of reality roams far from the lover’s grasp.  The lover clutches the loved in the savage way age old.  Beneath the talon, blood spurts.  Crimson sprays across the air.  The blood of the lover and the loved pools together, forever mingled on a common earth.  As the loved one flies off, the lover cries out with certainty about who flew off first.  We are left watching. This earth we fight over even as the sky belongs to us all.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE The Heretik was reading Juan Cole yesterday who has a great rundown as always  on Iraq. Down in the post he points to how “secure” Iraq is.  Read it for all its goodness.

LARGE AREAS OF IRAQ SECURE? Bush bases much of his sales job on the war to the American public on this position.  The religious minority Sunni areas are the problem, not parts of Iraq dominated by Iraq.  Najaf, home of the Shia shrine The Dome of Ali, is secure and has had only one bombing a month we are told.

But even here, in the southern Shiite heartland that is largely free of sectarian tensions, the American enterprise still faces steep hurdles, ones that are more subtle but no less subversive than the Sunni-led insurgency.

AN ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON  A FORMER PRIME MINISTER qualifies as a hurdle, but perhaps our problems are taking care of themselves. The Iraqi are going after  . . . the Iraqis.

A crowd of angry men, some wielding knives, others throwing shoes or bricks, attacked an entourage led by former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf on Sunday, as gunfire echoed in the area. Allawi later described the melee as an "assassination attempt."
Allawi was not hurt, according to Abdulal Wahid Esawi, secretary general of Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party.

YES, IRAQ IS “SECURE.”  Security like this next time will get you killed. Juan Cole  has more on this here today.

FEELING FEAVERISH The story behind the Bush Naval Academy speech  gets hotter when you realize how “feaverish” it is.  Bush who doesn’t listen to polls hired this Duke University pollster in case he decided to look at polls or something beside Bush himself in the mirror to tell him how to act on Iraq.  Feaver’s view for a long time has been that Americans will accept continuing casualties so long as they think the war can be won. Feaver has data no one else accepts.  How like Bush himself.  When Bush wants a new view on Iraq, when he finally listens to a pollster, he hires one who sees things . . . exactly like Bush. Pathetic.  Digby has more.

IN VIETNAM IRAQ TODAY The war can be won if we don’t give in to defeatists. Or something.  Bush’s essential idea that Iraq is the central front in the Global War on Everything Terror is taking a beating  . . .
from the mouths of Bush’s own generals:

Iraqis, rather than foreign fighters, now form the vast majority of the insurgents who are waging a ferocious guerrilla war against United States forces in Sunni western Iraq, American commanders have revealed.
Their conclusion, disclosed to the Sunday Telegraph in interviews over 10 days in battle-torn Anbar province, contradicts the White House message that outsiders are the principal enemy in Iraq.
Of 1,300 suspected insurgents arrested over the past five months in and around Ramadi, none has been a foreigner. Col John Gronski, senior officer in the town, Anbar's provincial capital, said that almost all insurgent fighting there was by Iraqis. Foreigners provided only money and logistical support.
"The foreign fighters are staying north of the [Euphrates] river, training and advising, like the Soviets were doing in Vietnam," he said.

PSST, NIXON GEORGE Vietnam Iraq is right next to Cambodia and Laos Syria and Iran.  Whatever you are doing while you are withdrawing winning peace with honor winning the war in Vietnam Iraq, don’t expand the war don't give in to defeatists.

WHAT’S NEXT?  Love will keep us together.  Or something Via  Jeanne at Body and Soul The Heretik was led to Helena Cobban who has quite a bit on Tonkin and Iraq connection and concludes:

In the aftermath of a US withdrawal from Iraq, we need to recognize that the whole structure of the relationship between the US and the other 96% of the world's people has to be radically restructured.

THE HERETIK SAYS whether we withdraw or not, a radical restructuring of viewpoint is needed here in the United States.
The situation in Vietnam in its time was looked at in just the dire terms that the saddest, darkest scenarios in Iraq now envision. The world will be simply doomed if *we* do not "stay the course."  Or something.
The world survives, with our help or without, and sometimes thrives.

THIS WILL COME AS A SHOCK to the likes of Patrick Buchanan.  As in Vietnam and now in regard to Iraq, the rest of the world has a difficulty understanding why the United States feels it is so much more "right" than the rest of the world.

WHETHER IT IS LIES about pre war intelligence or overblown doomsday fantasies, the fiasco our fears create blow up in the faces of the rest of the world as well as our own. Now we find ourselves in a jungle of animals and we believe clearly one animal is more equal than others. 

ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDED READING 

RUMSFELD'S HAPPY TALK of the day: Be optimistic.[transcript]

HELENA COBBAN'S HIT OF THE DAY The US and Iran in Iraq plus bonus Geopolitics of the Gulf 201 and Geopolitics of the Gulf 201

Comments

[blogenfreude]

Tart has a quote from Howard Zinn over at Shakespeare's Sister that dovetails well:

"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism...Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under the sand, we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children...

In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth the American people need to hear."