US embraces Iraqi insurgents (and more)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL17Ak02.html

While US President George W Bush continued to claim a strategy for "victory" in Iraq in recent speeches, his administration has quietly renounced the goal of defeating the non-al-Qaeda, Sunni-armed organizations there.

The administration is evidently preparing for serious negotiations with the Sunni insurgents, whom it has started referring to as "nationalists", emphasizing their opposition to al-Qaeda's objectives.

The new policy has thus far gone unnoticed in the media, partly because it has only been articulated by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the spokesman for the US command in Baghdad.

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Thus the image of the insurgents had been transformed from "anti-Iraqi forces" to "nationalists". The conflicting objectives of the Sunni resistance groups and the al-Qaeda-connected terrorist network were now played up rather than ignored, as in the past.
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hhhmmmmm


a companion article:


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL17Ak01.html

Sunnis on hit list


A Shi'ite militia has drawn up plans to kill prominent Sunni leaders and eliminate a nascent Sunni political party, according to a document obtained by Asia Times Online from a person close to the Iraqi resistance.

The document, which has not been officially acknowledged, carries the letterhead of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the political party of which the Badr Organization is the armed wing. The SCIRI is headed by Shi'ite cleric Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, a leading contender to become Iraq's next premier. Recently, a secret prison allegedly run by elements in the Iraqi Interior Ministry loyal to the SCIRI was discovered.

-snip-

According to contacts that Asia Times Online spoke to in Iraq, the activities of the Badr Organization against Arab Sunnis started with the targeting of former Iraqi Air Force officers and pilots. Several of the pilots were assassinated, including some who had flown aircraft to Iran for safekeeping during the first Gulf War in 1991. A number of these Iraqi pilots and officers had been trained in Pakistan during the 1980s.
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all is not as it seems in Iraq

I guess there is only one word I can find to describe this.......FLIP-FLOP!!!!

.

Wasn't the right-wing just calling them foreign fighters a couple of months ago? And now they are nationalists?

Amazing...

Negotiate with the more reasonable Resistance groups & get them to stand down. Hopefully more a more tolerant government will be elected. With luck, the Iraqi voters didn't re-elect the UIA with its SCIRI faction.