Iraq was probably the biggest issue in the 2004 elections and it almost assuredly was the biggest issue in the 2006 elections. The American public wants us out of Iraq and the troops want us out of Iraq and the Iraqis want us out of Iraq, however the one problem is that the President, Vice President and many many people in congress want us to stay in Iraq.
Energy issues are probably the main reason why we are staying, but in any case I thought we could at least take a look at what is going on in Iraq.
I try to read about Iraq as often as I can and one thing that I discovered is that we are not fighting Al Quada in Iraq, but we are actually fighting what was the 4th or 5th largest military in the world.
Prior to our invasion of Iraq, Saddam had put together what was the fourth or fifth largest military in the world and that military is still fighting us to this day. I read somewhere that approximately 98% of all attacks on US forces were carried out by the Ba'th led insurgency. Furthermore, foreign fighters are estimated to only be between 3% - 5% of the "resistence" in Iraq and represent just 1% of the prisoners in Iraq according to the US military.
If you are looking for informed commentary on Iraq I recommend Juan Cole as a great source of information.
In reading Juan Cole today he had a summary of a Ba'th party "press release". Juan Cole
In the statement, the Ba'th Party wants to reemphasize what it has issued about the oil of Iraq previously, especially in light of the recent events about the all-important issue of oil.
First, control of the oil of Iraq was "one of the most important objectives" behind the US occupation of Iraq, not only to steal more other nations natural resources, but also in order that the United States uses oil as a means to "intimidate" the whole world, particularly the major powers, and "establish the global American dictatorship."
Second, the "securing" of Iraqi oil and maintaining it under the control of the Iraqi people is one of the most important goals of the Ba'th Party and the armed Iraqi resistance.
Third, "our party warns" that anyone who attempts to hand the oil industry to the United States under the prevailing "oil law," especially members of the so-called Council of Representatives, will be charged with "great national treason." This includes those who may vote against the law, because their presence in that body alone will make them party to surrendering the oil to the occupiers.
Fourth, the Ba'th Party and the Iraqi armed resistance also warn Western companies, especially Norwegian ones, against "concluding deals" with the agent gangs that collaborate with the occupiers in northern Iraq, since northern Iraq is an indivisible part of Iraq.
Fifth, the so-called oil law, is an "obvious new indicator" that the occupation has failed finally, and that, before its withdrawal and through political pressure, the occupier is "looking for a major prize" to substitute for what it cannot achieve through military means. The party wants to assure all Arabs and Iraqis that keeping Iraqi oil under the sovereign control of the people of Iraq will be the best indicator of the independence of Iraq. When the "military liberation" of Iraq is accomplished, it only will be complete when the oil is liberated and returned to the people of Iraq.
The "agent gangs" would be the Peshmerga paramilitary forces of the Kurds that have engaged in terrorist attacks against Turks and who up to this point just about provoked a military strike from Turkey.
Basically, what we have is a US war against the old Iraqi Ba'th military for control of the country and we are loosing largely because the Sunni population is with the Ba'th party and in many cases has joined forces with the Ba'th as part of a larger nationalist resistance.
The Shi'ite majority in the South largely police their own territories by way of militias. The Mahdi militia is in Sadr City, parts of Baghdad and Basra; the SCIRI militia (BADR brigade) controls other areas of the south. The Iraqi government is largerly made up of Shi'ite's and Kurds with some Sunnis participating. However, it is important to note that just within the last week or so the Sunni coalition left the government and maybe permanently. Check it out
Check it out
In the dramatic political development, the Iraqi Accordance Front, which has six Cabinet seats and 44 of 275 in parliament, gave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki a week to meet its demands or see ministers quit the 14-month-old government.
The suspension was only the latest challenge to al-Maliki's dwindling ability to govern the country and promote national reconciliation.
In April, five ministers loyal to radical Shi'ite Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr quit the government over al-Maliki's refusal to set a timeline for American forces to leave Iraq.
Should the Accordance Front Ministers quit, al-Maliki's so-called national unity government would be limping along with more than a fourth of the 38 cabinet posts vacated by protest resignations.
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Adnan Al-Dulaimi, who serves as chairman of the Accordance Front, told The Associated Press that the action was meant as a message not only to al-Maliki.
"We wanted to tell the whole world including the Arab world, the US, Britain and the European Union ... that the al-Maliki government is sectarian and does not respond to the needs of others," he said.
Here is a map of Iraq:
map Iraq
In Iraq you have three major groups and they are the Sunni's, Shi'ite's and Kurds. There is no civil war in Iraq, but a war between the US and Iraqi security forces and the largely Sunni Ba'th party military and Iraqi nationalists with the Shi'ite's largely staying out of it and wanting us to leave.
If you want to know how well military operations are going in Iraq, here is a good article.
There were also deaths caused by the reckless behavior of military convoys. Sgt Kelly Dougherty of the Colorado National Guard described a hit-and-run in which a military convoy ran over a 10-year-old boy and his three donkeys, killing them all. "Judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down. But, I mean... your order is that you never stop."
The worst abuses seem to have been during raids on private homes when soldiers were hunting insurgents. Thousands of such raids have taken place, usually at dead of night. The veterans point out that most are futile and serve only to terrify the civilians, while generating sympathy for the resistance.
Sgt John Bruhns, 29, of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Armoured Division, described a typical raid. "You want to catch them off guard," he explained. "You want to catch them in their sleep ... You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall... Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds. You'll ask 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda?'
"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sgt Bruhns said. "So you'll take his sofa cushions and dump them. You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it." And at the end, if the soldiers don't find anything, they depart with a "Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening".
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'It would always happen. We always got the wrong house...'
"People would make jokes about it, even before we'd go into a raid, like, 'Oh fuck, we're gonna get the wrong house'. Cause it would always happen. We always got the wrong house."
One of the other big issues of note is the infrastructure problems in Iraq. Electricity is a big problem in Iraq and it not surprising and maybe fitting since the Bush administration seems to have nothing to offer the people of Iraq but darkness. There is nothing darker than our illegal detention practices.
WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.
But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.
Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.
Hopefully, I have given you a flavor of what is going on in Iraq that helps put the bigger picture together for you. The wild card in my view is the Mahdi militia led by Muqtada al-Sadr. If the Mahdi militia pulls out of the government along with the Sunnis the government may collapse. Al-Sadr is also known for organizing marches with Sunnis where they chant "no Sunni no Shi'ite only Iraqi".
From what I have read it seems that if our troops left Iraq the most likely scenario is not a "civil war", but in fact a true reconciliation that leads to a more unified country with the Shi'ite's controlling the south and the Sunni's controlling the middle and the Kurds the north.
Here is a piece on Al-Sadr
Almost from the day American troops entered Iraq, the mercurial al-Sadr has confounded American and Iraqi politicians alike. He quickly rallied impoverished Shi'ites in peaceful displays of Shi'ite strength, as had his father, a prominent cleric. When the Sunni Arab insurgency gained momentum, he raised a Shi'ite insurgency in direct opposition to the American-backed Iraqi government that had excluded him.
His basic tenets are widely shared. Like most Iraqis, he opposes the American military presence and wants a timetable for departure - if only to attain some certainty that the Americans will leave eventually. He wants the country to stay unified and opposes the efforts of those Shi'ites who have had close ties to Iran to create a semi-autonomous Shi'ite region in southern Iraq.
After his Mahdi militia was defeated in a battle against American forces in Najaf in 2004, al-Sadr established himself as a political player, using the votes of loyal parliament members to give Nouri Kamal al-Maliki the margin needed to win the post of prime minister.
Now that the leadership is in poor repute, al-Sadr has shifted once again. His six ministers in the Cabinet and 30 lawmakers in parliament have been boycotting sessions. They returned last week, but it is not clear if they will stay for long.
The latest stance by the more conventional political parties is to keep him at arm's length. The two major Shi'ite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, along with the two Kurdish parties, have been negotiating to form a new moderate coalition. Al-Sadr's political leaders were told he was welcome to join, but the invitation came belatedly, after the other groups had all but completed their discussions. Al-Sadr's lieutenants announced that he had no interest in joining.
Experts in Shi'ite politics believe that efforts to isolate al-Sadr are bound to fail.
"Sadr holds the political centre in Iraq," said Joost Hiltermann, the director of the International Crisis Group's office in Amman, Jordan. "They are nationalist, they want to hold the country together and they are the only political organization that has popular support among the Shias. If you try to exclude him from any alliance, well, it's a nutty idea, it's unwise."
The Sadrists exhibit a quiet confidence, and are pulling ever more supporters into their ranks. "The Sadr movement cannot be marginalized; it is the popular base," said Sheikh Salah al-Obaidi, the chief spokesman and a senior strategist for al-Sadr's movement in Najaf.
While it is complicated in Iraq it cannot be denied that our presence fuels the Ba'th led insurgency as well as support for it. The Iraqi's want us out and it is highly probable that the Iraqi's will reconcile their differences once we leave. The best thing that could happen to Iraq at this point seems to be a full orderly US withdrawal.