By all accounts, Wednesday's bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra and the retaliatory attacks that followed it marked an extremely serious setback to efforts by U.S. Amb. Zalmay Khalilzad to negotiate an agreement among the major parties for the creation of a new government that will satisfy the minimum demands - particularly for security - of the Sunni population.(Of all the AEI crowd - AEI is Neocon Central - Gerecht is one of the most worth listening to.)
"I think this is probably the most dangerous event that has occurred since the fall of Saddam Hussein," Marc Reuel Gerecht, a Gulf specialist at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute [AEI], told CNN. "It risks our entire enterprise in Iraq."
Our friends in Iraq's Shi'a government don't seem to be liking us very much these days.
Lobe discusses how the US had been trying to apply pressure to the Shi'a government to restrain its partisan military activity and broaden the government to include Sunnis:
Indeed, on the eve of the bombing of the Golden Mosque, Khalilzad suggested publicly that Washington was prepared withdraw its "billions of dollars" in support to Iraq's security forces, declaring, "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian."Robert Dreyfuss just wrote, "If the current crisis doesn’t spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will."
That warning, in particular, provoked bitter reactions among Shiite leaders after the bombing. SCIRI's powerful leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who has long complained about U.S. efforts to curb the Badr Brigade, charged that Khalilzad had "contributed to greater pressure (on the Shiites) and gave a green light to terrorist groups, and he therefore bears a part of the responsibility."
"It's very clear that the Shiites are interpreting this chain of events as evidence that the Americans are weak and can't protect Shiite interests," Cole told IPS. "And now Americans are having to come back to the Shiites and ask them to be magnanimous and give away a lot of what they've won in elections."
"It was always going to be a very hard sell, but now it's an impossible argument; Shiites aren't going to give away any power at all at this point," he said, adding that, given the mathematics of putting together a government, "it's possible that there could be a hung parliament, the government would collapse, and you'd have to go to new elections. And that would be a disaster in the present circumstances."
Col. John Waghelstein (Army, ret.) wrote in the Jan-Feb edition of the Army's journal Military Review, "We have every reason to believe we will lose in Iraq unless we do everything we possibly can - and quickly - by applying lessons learned about winning small wars", i.e., counterinsurgency wars. If "quickly" meant before something happened like the attack on the Shi'a shrine this week, we can probably shorten that now to, "We have every reason to believe we will lose in Iraq".
Rummy, Dubya, Dark Lord Cheney - y'all are doing a heckuva job in Iraq!
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