Iraq: The Worst Is Yet to Come

Analysis: Iraq's dark realities
By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- The intense wave of killings and bombings that have swept Iraq this week comes as a shock awakening, or hangover, following the unrealistically high expectations and self-congratulations in the administration that surrounded the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections and their immediate aftermath.

The decision of the Sunni Muslim insurgents in central Iraq to largely restrain their forces during the election campaign and the voting period could easily be misconstrued as a weakening of will or loss of morale on their part. But, as was clear even at the time, it was no such thing. Like the Irish Republican Army of two decades ago, the insurgents had not forsaken the bullet for the ballot box. Instead, in the manner of sophisticated -- and all too often, successful -- insurgencies throughout the 20th century, they were following a sophisticated strategy of bullets and ballots.

Nor did the ballot box fail them. On the contrary, it was the failure of the dominant "5-5'5" Shiite coalition that now dominates Iraq with U.S. support, backed by its Kurdish allies in the north of the country, to seek to include the Sunnis in political power that played into the hands of the insurgents.

As Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy warned last year, the very success of the Dec. 15 elections now threatens to backfire by dramatically boosting the popularity and recruitment potential for the insurgents. Its outcome was like pouring gasoline on a burning fire. And this week the fire exploded.

http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060106-113859-3850r
via:http://www.antiwar.com/

... and it would have been accurate.

As I've said many times on this forum before, this was all predicted. But the people who predicted it were told to shut up, attacked, and ignored by the "mainstream" corporate press and most of the American public.

Looks like the Iraqi voters aren't happy, with the Florida style vote counting in Baghdad, after all.

The "Election" is just another in the long list of things we were promised about Iraq, that has turned out to be just more faulty intelligence,(bullsh*t)trickling down from the white boys in the White House. A long list of things, that were billed as sure fire "turning points," that would bring All the killing to an end, but we lost as many Americans in Iraq this week, as we had killed in WV digging coal in an unsafe, scab coal mine. Bush is depopulating Iraq so fast, that the birth rate will never catch up. Liberating Iraq from it's population and it's oil, were the Goals of the GOPers all along I guess, because Bush and Cheney keep beating their chests on TV and saying we are "getting GREAT things done" in Iraq. "Things really are just dandy in Iraq," if you are the ones making a killing, on the killing.

...and they come looking for revenge.

Yes, The worst is yet to come.

their oil and will do anything to get it. You can't blame them for wanting their country back, hell I want mine back. The worst things get the more the little bastards pats themselves on the back.

Sorry. I don't mean to be disrespectful. Just thought this needed some comparison. We could have spent our energy on something worthwhile.