yep, anna missed, and that presumably is why this crisis occurs.

Posted by: somebody | Dec 31 2011 12:47 utc | 4

The wackos couldn’t fathom that creating chaos in Iraq would empower the Shia who are friends with the Iranians.And now they are reaching into their bag of tricks to re empower the
Sunnis,and look out Iraq,your dead are about to be increased,as the real radical monsters never sleep,and look to destablilize their self made enemies,and suck up more of our treasure in this Ziowacko enterprise.
And there is only one solution,people,Dr.Ron Paul and the exile of all these traitors from our government,and we will at last breathe free and easy.
It’s up to you!

Posted by: dahoit | Dec 31 2011 15:24 utc | 6

Nice videos, Don.
Iraq is, as Don says, a real defeat for the US. None of the long term objectives were achieved, whatever they might have been. And the cost was enormous, at least financial, in relation to the results achieved.
The US now has very little influence in Iraq, which is the pertinent point for this thread. It no longer matters what is said in the NYT.
Well, perhaps I was wrong. There is one issue where the US succeeded very well, following Israeli interests: Iraq is now a mess, unlikely to reunite for some time, and pose a problem to Israel. Divide and rule. The Samarra bombing worked very well. Very likely an American production. The modus operandi was totally different from anything al-Qa’ida has done before or since. (If I could add footnotes, I would explain in detail).
Maliki has turned out to be easy to spark on sectarian issues. He reacts in an irrational way. Accusing the Syrians of supporting bombings (before the present events in Syria), and now chasing Tariq al-Hashimi, the Sunni vice-president, for crimes he is unlikely to have committed, or at least to have done no worse than others have done. I doubt that it is a question of influence from Tehran.
Maliki is not alone. On the Sunni side, King Abdullah of Jordan, the Saudis, and the whole Gulf, particularly Bahrain, are thoroughly infected with fears of the Shi’a.
In that sense, US policy has succeeded. Not a very admirable policy, and who knows whether it was intended?

Posted by: alexno | Dec 31 2011 20:41 utc | 8

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2011/12/the-iraq-lie-that-needs-to-die-kill-it-kill-it-quick-before-someone-names-it.html
You will notice that Pat Lang runs Silverman’s plaint and tells commentor annamissed that the US effectively sold out the S o I and allowed the neocons to do a Shia religious dominant policy.
Silverman himself says
“….the Bush (43) Administration committed strategic malpractice by failing to allow our senior personnel on the ground in 2008 to work on civil society reforms and societal reconciliation and by instead pursuing provincial elections that were unnecessary at the time (their fetish over elections=democracy) and a ridiculously outsize SOFA agreement all within their ongoing misunderstanding of Iraq, its people, its society, and its politics Operation Iraq Freedom could not become anything but a strategic failure.”
Some wisdom here yet does b really believe it is anything more than imperialist presumption at best that American senior personnel could have successfully helped Iraqis reform and reconcile their civil society?
Having been banned from comment, I mailed Col Lang with the inquiry, what made the Sunnis who abandoned the insurgency believe they would NOT ultimately be betrayed by the US, what with its established record of WMD deceit and the abandonment of the Shia in the Persian Gulf War by Bush the father?

Posted by: Ken Hoop | Dec 31 2011 21:05 utc | 10

Not to be presumptuous here but, it been PL’s long standing opinion that the war in Iraq was predicated primarily on the naive and seriously dubious notion that the Iraqi’s would welcome the U.S. intervention, adopt whole cloth a western style democracy, late capitalist privatized economic order, and a neo-liberal modernist social order – as opposed to seeing the invasion as rationalized by the above as a cover for exploiting/stealing their resources and using the country as a neo-colony lily pad from which to physically project U.S. power. Seeing that this (the former explanation) is pretty much how it turned out, he’d be more right than wrong.
There’s quite a bit of information indicating that an Awakening/Sons of Iraq was advocated by both the U.S. troops and Sunni tribal shiekhs before the civil war erupted. It was rejected by the U.S. until the civil war was over, Baghdad ethnically cleansed, and 4 million (Sunni majority) sent fleeing the country. At that point what was left of the insurgency was willing to make a deal with the U.S. in exchange for rolling up al-Queda in Iraq – which they proceeded to accomplish with little fanfare, or reward. Unfortunately for them, this apparent capitulation was apparently seen as a sign of weakness (by Maliki) and telegraphed to the Shiite government that they could effectively be ignored. And they were – through Maliki’s refusal to integrate them (in substantial numbers) or even to continue the U.S. program of paying for their services in civil security police work.
Or in other words, they didn’t have many options left not to work out a deal with the U.S.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 1 2012 5:56 utc | 12

Some interesting stuff from Roads to Iraq (& other places), indicating that Maliki’s recent machinations might yet work. The understory might read as Maliki has gotten a chisel into his rival Iraqiya party’s weak spot and is applying leverage that may split the party into fragments. Apparently there has been a growing dissatisfaction with al-Allawi’s leadership and many are explicitly calling for his resignation, which will shatter the party (and its effectiveness) into smaller disconnected pieces.
This would bode well for Maliki’s Shiite centric consolidation initiative.
link –http://www.roadstoiraq.com/

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 2 2012 4:10 utc | 14

Talking about Base & Bunker Land, I couldn’t resist this…
It’s a large-scale graphical representation of the United States of (global) Military Bases from Canada’s (pro-Zionist) NatPo. It includes stats, factoids and bar-charts.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/10/28/graphic-mapping-a-superpower-sized-military/
To a pessimist it looks like a dominating octopus, but to an optimist it looks like an indefensible SNAFU. The US is fond of reminding us that it has as much military hardware as every other country on Earth combined. However, the subject of why they lose so many of the fake wars they perpetrate on pissant, lo-tech military nonentities, is hardly ever talked about by the Pentagoons.
The obvious reasons are that
they’re spread too thin
the hardware is irrelevant to victory
and they’re more concerned with creating illusions (and wishing they could have won WWII on their own) than learning something about combat discipline.
In the event of hostilities breaking out with a competent foe, with global clout, about half of these bases would be more of a strategic, supply-chain, and self-defense liability, than a combat asset, and would have to be sacrificed/abandoned.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Jan 2 2012 15:50 utc | 16

Pat Lang could use commnets from harder-line anti-interventionists of both the right and left to give him political cover to take the occasionally hard-hitting shots he takes. But he takes
things a little too personally for that.

Posted by: amspirnational | Jan 2 2012 22:25 utc | 18