This man is laughing.
It's not a happy laugh, but it is from way down deep and it shivers the stones.
You want to know why?
Read on (all emphasis added by me)...
From Joe Klein at "Time Magazine" a few days ago:
"Victory" in Iraq
Posted by Joe Klein Friday, October 1, 2010 at 8:05 pm
It now appears that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is going to form a new government--with the support of none other than Muqtada Sadr, who is always called a "radical cleric" by the western media and whose Mahdi Army militia inflicted some of the worst losses on the U.S. military during the recent war. Sadr is a curious figure--a populist nationalist who is intermittently close to Iran (right now he's in a 'close' phase). He spent the last several years in Iran, studying in Qom, the religious center of Shi'ism. His long-term plan probably doesn't involve civilian government, but perhaps religious authority on the order of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most revered figure in both Iraq and Qom. Some say Sadr doesn't have the chops to be an ayatollah; he does have the family roots, however--both his father and uncle were revered figures, murdered by Saddam Hussein.
The Maliki-Sadr deal raises an absolutely crucial question: what about the Sunnis? This is precisely the government that the Sunni minority feared; they backed secularist Ayad Allawi, the top vote getting in last spring's elections, who will now be firmly shut out of power. This may see a revival of the Sunni insurgency that David Petraeus quelled with cash in 2007.
And what about, well...us? It is not certain that the Maliki-Sadr alliance will tilt toward Iran. Sadr has been anti-outsiders of all sorts in the past. But this does look like something less than the "victory" that John McCain and others were noisily touting last month. It looks, in fact, like an ongoing mess
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Pretty fucking dire, no? But hey, war is a complicated thing, and Iraq is a complicated country with a long and omnipresent history.
I mean, its not like anyone could have predicted or cautioned against any of this, right?
From the late Steve Gilliard (pictured above), damn near four years ago:
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Ethnic Cleansing in Baghdad
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Please. If he can't control the execution of Saddam, people better realize what this plan really is, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and breaking the Sunni blockade of the city. The US will be assisting Sadr in gaining control of the Baghdad region. Because someone better realize that the Saddam execution and the Sistani quashing of the coup means the last man standing is the guy with the funny teeth and black turban.
Bush is so clueless and desperate that he doesn't realize he's being coopted into assisting ethnic cleansing. At the end of this, Sadr will be in near total control of most of Iraq's population.
Petraeus should know better. While US troops are getting killed killing Sunnis, Sadr will increase his control over the military and police. He thinks they're going to disarm the Mahdi Army? Hell no. The Mahdi Army are the real protectors of the Shia population, they have won support on the ground by saving lives and feeding people. The government is subordinate to Sadr and his supporters, and Sistani made that happen.
Bush and his supporters live in a cloud cuckoo land where they don't understand how they have been manuvered into this mess. Americans troops are being asked to die to establish a Shia theocracy in Iraq.
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And ... from six-and-one-half years ago, during one of Gilly's routine excoriations of pro-war liberals (A spectrum which contained the likes of Peter Beinart, the aforementioned "Jokeline" Joe Klein and Joe Lieberman...all whom, the Alert Reader will notice, despite having been stubbornly and spec-tac-u-lar-ly wrong for years, have never missed a meal or an hour out of the spotlight.)
Why supporting the war was wrong
Sunday, April 18, 2004
The idea among the pro-war liberals that we could save the brown people from themselves is as deeply racist and ingrained as belief in the Super Bowl as a national holiday. They listened to exiled Iraqis talk about how they would do better than nasty, evil Saddam and how we could enlighten the whole region, let women drive and have the vote.
What they missed, of course, was that Iraq under Saddam had granted more rights to women than any subsequent government would. They would never admit that they thought what those wogs needed was a little enlightenment. They thought the average Iraqi was like Kenan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear, the first popular book on Saddam and the reign of terror which was the Baath Party.
A lot of liberals recoiled when faced with the culture of the Arab world and thought a chance to remake it would bring their values to that part of the world. They can say now that they didn't want Bush to screw it up, but to be fair, George Marshall would have screwed it up. What pro-war liberals wanted was nothing less than a new culture to be implanted in Iraq, one which would meet their goals, and one which had no historical support.
For over a year, Kos and I wrote, repeatedly, that this wasn't going to happen. Societies faced with radical political change can go in many ways, some quite reactionary. What stunned me was the way that the pro-war liberals thought Iraqis would embrace our ideas of what their country should be with acceptance. After all, they listened to the same exiles who only knew the Iraq of their childhood, not the Iraq of war and privation.
No implantation, whether done by the inept Bush or a competent administration, would have worked, because Iraqis have their own history and culture. ...
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