There was a piece in the Telegraph on the weekend that tells us a lot about the state of play in Iraq.
The most influential moderate Shia leader in Iraq has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting that there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war.Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.
"I will not be a political leader any more," he told aides. "I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters."
Red Tory points us to that piece and says The Game is Up. I agree except that I think the game has been up for at least two years.
I'm going to quibble with one part of Red Tory's post.
Since the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Sistani has been a crucial ally of the United States...
No, al-Sistani was never an ally of the United States. If their goals appeared to align at times, it was purely coincidental. Al-Sistani has done what he's done for his own reasons. But it's true that he was a moderating influence on his followers and that he supported the attempt at a democratic process in Iraq. In fact, it was closer to democracy because of his influence than it would have been had the Bush administration been left to its own devices.
But the real influence among Iraq's Shiites now is al-Sadr and he's a different animal. Notice how Bush's War on Terror™ has had exactly the wrong outcome: the (relative) moderate has been sidelined and the radical has been strengthened.
"Notice how Bush's War on Terror™ has had exactly the wrong outcome: the (relative) moderate has been sidelined and the radical has been strengthened."
Exactly.
Here's a good article on how the Bush Administration should be approaching Iran, Syria and an emboldened Hezbollah.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11859
I read that piece a while back and this may be how that phrase got into my brain:
The piece is certainly worth a read if only to see Bush get raked over the coals by someone who appears to have fond memories of Henry Kissinger. I remember how I found it, too. It was the subject of a post by digby who wrote:
I often suspected that civil war and continued chaos somehow served the bush II regime. It would "justify" an ongoing US presence, and oil sabotage would keep the price of oil high and benefit Texas oilmen and etc., ... plenty of padded repair bills for gasping Haliburton, etc., ... but lately, watching the inept bush II grasping at straws about the need for "staying the course" (note: they claim they never said this, but they did repeatedly!) and Rumsfeld's pathetic yammering about "appeasement" and "fascism," make me think that, no, they've just really screwed up.
Unless they don't care about the opinion polls because they'll just use Diebold and other means to steal yet another election.
I refuse to miss Henry Kissinger, although that is a pretty dramatic measure of how bad things have got, isn't it?
Al-Sistani no doubt wanted to save his own country, which he would not be configuring in the same way that the Washington crowd were, but they were stupid not to follow his lead. They always are, though. I don't know what will ever beat that out of Washington elites.
thwap's question is an interesting puzzle. Just how much chaos can the Bush administration take before they are bothered, given how profitable chaos is for them? If it bothered them at all, would they be making warlike noises at Iran?
Rumsfeld effectively took what's left of his career and, in that speech, crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket.
As to missing Henry Kissinger--it reminds me of a discussion in a Dilbert book of the difference between the old way of doing management and the modern way.
In the old days, he said, you'd have managers who had been promoted to their level of incompetence. They'd been good at their job and promoted until they got to a job they sucked at.
Whereas nowadays, managers were people who either were promoted because they were incompetent enough not to be needed in their original jobs, or had never held an actual job before they became managers--they just had credentials and/or were related to the right people. He said it was surprising how much one missed being bossed by people who had at some point been good at something.
Whereas nowadays, managers were people who either were promoted because they were incompetent enough not to be needed in their original jobs, or had never held an actual job before they became managers
In the case of the Bush administration, it's worse than that. People are judged on their fealty to the Grover Norquist School of Economics and their loyalty to Dear Leader. Competence is never even considered. You may recall the way people were hired to fill positions in the bureaucracy that oversaw the occupation of Iraq for so long: they took the people who had applied for jobs with the Heritage Foundation and sent them to Iraq.
Whenever push comes to shove, whether from the right or the left, the result is always the same: the first to the wall are the moderates: teachers, trade unionists, social democrats and liberal religious leaders. "The Centre cannot hold.... mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world"!