Monday, October 16, 2006

Iraq's Sectarian Carnage

"Militias allied with Iraq's Shiite-led government roamed roads north of Baghdad, seeking out and attacking Sunni Arab targets Sunday...." (WaPo)

As "Dozens of Iraqis Killed in Reprisals," reports, there is outrage over this situation as voiced by a Sunni farmer searching for the body of his nephew reportedly killed in the violence around Balad.... "This has pushed us to the point that we must stop this sectarian government."

"This sectarian government" is the Bush administration's creation. Bush has committed the lives of our brave troops and the treasure of our country to his ideologically-driven war of choice, and put in place an ineffectual government that has plunged Iraq into civil war.... not the brink of civil war as the Bush spinners want us to believe.... but civil war, bloody anarchy.

As an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies summed it up, "...trying to declare there isn't a civil war borders on the absurd." Even the U.S. Department of Defense admitted in August that there were "10 times as many sectarian attacks in July as there were in January in Iraq."

Having stirred up this hornet's nest, the Bush administration has turned a blind "stay-the-course-" eye to the inability of the Shiite-led sectarian government to govern, and into this void "....al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups declared a new Islamic republic in the western and central" parts of Iraq.

Even from his jail cell, Saddam smells the turmoil,.... "Saddam Says Iraq 'Liberation is at Hand'," .... challenging in a three-page letter for "Iraqis to set aside sectarian and ethnic differences and focus instead on driving the U.S. forces out of Iraq,".... and urging Sunni and Shiites to unite "as God's soldiers." (WaPo)

Having placed us in this costly carnage of a no-win situation, Bush robotically labels criticism of his war as unpatriotic, and challenges his critics to fix things.

Some things can't be fixed. But they can be faced and radically redirected.

November.....

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