No Improvement On The Horizon

by Steve

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We now have more soldiers in Baghdad than ever before, in an effort to secure the city so that the current strategy of building security outward from the capital can take effect. And yet the number of attacks upon Americans has significantly increased, and dozens of bodies show up in the streets of Baghdad seemingly every day. The message is quite clear: the Americans can make any show of force that they want, and the sectarian militias will simply generate more victims to prove how impotent we are, and how much our presence is contributing to the spiraling violence rather than stopping it. What exactly do the administration’s keyboard commanding supporters suggest be done to stop this violence and the death squads? Double the number of American troops in Baghdad? Triple them? And where will those troops come from? South Korea? Afghanistan?

Note the pushback from NBC News Baghdad correspondent Jane Arraf against a troll or Green Zone weenie, who tries to tell Arraf that the media fails to report how great things are really going in Baghdad, and who tried to spew the right wing talking point that things are no worse in Baghdad than any large American city.

There is no administration plan to secure the country except to hope that Baghdad can be secured first with more American troops. But the administration isn’t talking about sealing the borders; calling a regional security conference; talking directly with the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Saudis about investing in them responsibility for making this work; or ramping up a vastly better-equipped and better-paid Iraqi army to deal with militias that decline to join the government. Nor is the administration talking about making Baghdad an open city with clearly defined spheres of local control. Nor does the administration want to talk about the one eventual outcome of their catastrophic, willful negligence: a partitioned country that would undermine Cheney’s plan for the oil.

And until the United States government seriously considers those things after the Iraq Study Group recommendations are out, and a new Democratic congress is in position to dictate a change in course to this cabal, there will be no improvement in Iraq.