National stress in Iraq

National stress in Iraq
By H.D.S. Greenway | August 21, 2007


~snip~

National stress has come to Iraq in spades. The chaos and mutual hatreds that America has unleashed cannot be stuffed back into Pandora's box with a David Petraeus surge, no matter how the Bush administration might wish it.

~snip~

The Kurds retain the fiction of a united Iraq to suit their purposes of the moment, but no one believes for a second that the Kurds will ever again be willingly controlled by Arabs.

The Shia want the power they have always been denied, and which the Americans handed to them in a free election. Now the Americans are unhappy with what they have wrought, and want to blame Iranians for arming their coreligionists.

In the meantime the Sunni Arab states, some of them our allies, arm their Iraqi coreligionists. And all are destined to disagree on the division of the Iraqi spoils.

Into this emotional and highly charged mix, Americans are still hoping to bring back the order they lost in the first moments of their occupation by a pathetically feeble escalation.

They seem to have no conception of the forces they have unleashed, or that throwing a few thousand more soldiers into the breach will not make up for the damage already done. Neither the Sunnis, the Shia nor the Kurds really want them around, and the evils which were once imprisoned but not asphyxiated will continue to multiply. If General Petraeus is honest, his upcoming report will reflect that.

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