Blanked Out

Via Raw Story - Ambassador Peter Galbraith claims that Bush didn’t know that there were two sects of Islam, Sunni and Shiite. This implies Bush was also ignorant of the history of Iraq underneath the British and Ottoman empires and the forces that would be unleashed once the war was over.

Some of us realized this early on - others are just now starting to appreciate the complexity of Iraq and the forces that are driving it toward civil war. A quote from a McClatchy article released yesterday: (emphasis added)

“It’s to the point of being irreconcilable; you know, we’ve found a lot of bodies, entire villages have been cleared out, we get reports of entire markets being gunned down - and if that’s not a marker of a civil war, I don’t know what is,” said Ramon, 33, of San Antonio, Texas.

Driving back to his base, Johnson watched a long line of trucks and cars go by, packed with families fleeing their homes with everything they could carry: mattresses, clothes, furniture, and, in the back of some trucks, bricks to build another home.

“Every morning that we head back to the patrol base, this is all we see,” Johnson said. “These are probably people who got threatened last night.”

In Taji, an area north of Baghdad, where the roads between Sunni and Shiite villages have become killing fields, many soldiers said they saw little chance that things would get better.

“I don’t think there’s any winning here. Victory for us is withdrawing,” said Sgt. James Ellis, 25, of Chicago. “In this part of the world they have been fighting for 3,000 years, and we’re not going to fix it in three.

We cannot begin to solve this problem unless we have wide recognition of what is going on in Iraq. If the Administration fails to recognize reality, Southern Iraq will become a proxy of Iran and Central Iraq willdissolvee into an anarchy similar to Somalia.

Meanwhile, I’m told “The Other Iraq” aka Kurdistan is “spectacular and peaceful” in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom and their own civil war.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 5th, 2006 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Iraq War, Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.