What the Colonel Says!

You really do have to wonder who in the hell we think we are. I thought that Iraq was a “Sovereign Country.” What does the U.S. Senate have to say about how Iraq should be organized? Oh, yes, that’s right after March 2003 it is clear just who we think we are: in Charge of Everything.

Col. Lang has a few choice thoughts in this post:

Iraq and the US Senate

""The government and its Premier [Nuri al-Maliki] reject this vote," said government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. "It is the Iraqis who decide these sorts of issues, no one else," Dabbagh said on state-run Al-Iraqiyya television. "The Iraqi Parliament too should express its total rejection of this plan." The plan, touted by backers as the sole hope of forging a federal state out of sectarian strife, was approved by the US Senate Wednesday in a 75-23 vote. The nonbinding resolution would provide for decentralizing Iraq in a federal system to stop the country from falling deeper into civil war. It proposes to separate Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni entities, with a federal government in Baghdad in charge of border security and oil revenues. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on Friday condemned the resolution, saying it would complicate matters further in the war-torn country. The Bosnia-style plan "would add new complications to the already difficult Iraqi situation," GCC chief Abdel-Rahman al-Attiyah said in a statement. "Instead of calling for division, the causes that led to the current situation should be addressed. These include the [US-led] occupation, the sectarian and ethnic quota system, absence of law and security and the paralysed administration."" The Daily Star - Beirut

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(IRONY ALERT! NOT EVERY WORD THAT FOLLOWS SHOULD BE READ LITERALLY)

The US Senate has voted to "soft-partition" Iraq? Well as a famous TV "talk man" said a few weeks ago - "Who runs that place, us or them?" I guess we think that we do..

The Bush/Cheney Collective ("resistance is futile") is notably made up of ideologues who proclaim their devotion to revolutionary social change in the Islamic (and other) World(s). Their adherents are various. There are first and foremost their brethren and sisteren in the "crusade" for secular righteousness. Then there are the Mayberry Machiavellians who were imported from Texas. Those have thinned out lately. Then there are the simpletons who still can't tell you what the difference is between a Sunni and a Shia and who don't think it matters. There are many, many of those and they are not reading this. There was a back-bencher congressman from the Southwest on TV this week who simply refused to accept the idea that the war in Iraq was about anything but a kind of Manichean division of humanity into the forces of good and the forces of evil, the children of light and the children of darkness. He would not discuss the war situation in any other terms. I suppose that he thinks that the Lord Jesus enters into it somewhere as well, and maybe the pope ,although I doubt if he thinks that Benedict plays on the "good guys'" team.

Now, I know how much a lot of you feel vindicated by Greenspan's pronouncement on the causes of the present mess, but I have to tell you that he does not impress me as a savant on the subject of the peoples of the Middle East, or on the neocons either. So far as I know they never thought well of his ideas about anything but interest rates and he was never one of their counselors.

Those Arabs (Sunni, Shia and Christian) are pesky people. They have the "gall" to think for themselves. The US Senate has now pronounced itself on the subject of how Iraq should be organized. They don't accept that? Who the hell are they to resist when it is futile? The "greatest deliberative body in the world" has delivered itself of "the word." What more is there to say?

Those pesky Arabs are also infested with "oldthink." This is an expression from the early phases of the Cheney/Bush Collective's revolution. The poor fools (Arabs) don't think that federalism is a good idea. (They think they have tried it many times) They like UNITY (tawhiid). They think that diversity is weakness. They think that federalism will inevitably lead either to a final complete dissolution of the state of Iraq or a weakened state so enfeebled as to be a shadow of its former self. Those poor foolish Arabs are the product of a modern cultural and educational development which caused them to believe that a unified Iraq is good, but a federal Iraq is or will be a disaster. They have always felt that way in the modern state of Iraq.

Now, the Kurds may secretly want something else but they will be very careful how they express that secret desire.

The Senate resolution on this matter? It is DOA, and we lack the power to inflict anything like that on the Iraqis or anyone else in the Middle East. Note the GCC reaction.

Down at the bottom of this article, some general or other opines (used to be a good Army word) that AQ may decide to cuts its losses in Iraq. That might be true, but, contrary to the opinion of the congressman from the Southwest, it will not solve the situation that the Iraqis find themselves in. A "post AQ intervention" Iraq will still be a "beached whale" beset with savage and unrelenting internal struggle and numerous wars over power and wealth in what was a moderately well integrated state before 2003. Unfortunately, our departure won't fix that either. pl

I always listen to him as he has been so right so many times.