"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
Even here on the reality-based side of FOX News, there actually is some good news coming out of Iraq.
Gareth Porter asks, Iraq: Was Cairo Meet First Step Toward Peace Talks? by Gareth Porter Inter Press Service 11/28/05 (at CommonDreams.org 11/29/05). Porter analyzes the diplomatic meaning of the results of the recent Cairo Conference:
The surprising agreement between the Sunnis and government representatives on setting a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and the legitimacy of "resistance" to the occupation was the result of a carefully crafted compromise between factions that remain bitter rivals with different visions of how the war should end.
The language on the withdrawal of coalition forces, for example, cleverly combined the Sunni demand for a timetable for withdrawal with the Shiite and Kurdish insistence on increasing the nation's ability to "get control of the security situation". The key sentence in the communiqué begins, "We demand the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with a timetable" - certainly a major concession to the Sunnis.
The Sunnis, in turn, made a concession to the Shiites and Kurds by supporting their insistence on adequate Iraqi forces. Specifically, they accepted a demand for "the establishment of an immediate national programme for rebuilding the armed forces through drills, preparation and being armed, on a sound basis that will allow it to guard Iraq's borders and to get control of the security situation..."
Porter also makes this important point about the insurgents:
The biggest surprise, therefore, was the acceptance by Kurdish and Shiite representatives of the statement that "resistance is a legitimate right for all people", which implies recognition that the Sunni resistance is legitimate politically. The Sunnis agreed that "terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance", and that attacks on non-military targets are indeed "terrorism".
That statement is an obvious jab at the foreign jihadists who have routinely targeted civilians, particularly Shiites. The communiqué also condemned "takfir" - the practice of declaring some Iraqis to be "infidels".
Shiite leaders apparently saw Sunni approval of those positions as a political victory, clearly dividing them from the al Qaeda organisation in Iraq. But in fact the Sunni insurgent organisations have never hidden their opposition to the tactics and ideology of the foreign jihadists in the country. Evidence of strained relations between the largely secular insurgents and the al Qaeda-led groups has continued to grow ever since the insurgency took shape.
Of course, this doesn't mean that "peace is at hand", to borrow one of Henry Kissinger's most (in)famous sayings. Also from Inter Press Service, Jim Lobe looks at the sectarian divisions among the Iraqi security forces that the Republicans have to claim are performing brilliantly to justify any plan to draw down US forces below the 135-140,000 mark: Iraq: Armed Forces Sinking into Sectarian Chaos 11/29/05. Lobe writes:
In any case, the repression that is now directed against the Sunni community by the police and commandos and their sectarian auxiliaries threatens the Bush administration's newly-touted plans to reduce the U.S. military presence from nearly 160,000 to less than 100,000 troops over the next year by rapidly expanding the size and capabilities of Iraq's security forces to fight the largely Sunni insurgency on their own.
If the official security forces are in fact heavily infilitrated by or to a large extent controlled by sectarian parties, they are likely to escalate the violence and most likely block any distant chance of a near-term peaceful settlement with the guerrillas, as Lobe explains:
The problem itself is not a new one, particularly after U.S. forces began conducting "joint" operations with Iraqi forces - which had been largely purged of Baathists by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - in 2004. The newly constituted Iraqi forces consisted largely of units recruited from Kurdish peshmerga or Shiite militias. Their operations in the so-called "Sunni Triangle" - combined with and often following those of U.S. forces - clearly helped fuel the insurgency.
While U.S. commanders have tried to remedy this problem - in part by ending the Iraqi Army's ban on recruiting most former Baathist junior officers in early November and paying tribal militias to maintain order - the SCIRI-controlled Interior Ministry has been more resistant, even after the discovery of the secret prison. While Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari promised that the incident would be fully investigated and those responsible punished, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a former leader of the Badr militia, played down the abuses.
But it now appears that the prison was just the tip of the iceberg of anti-Sunni operations conducted by the police and commandos and their auxiliaries, as hundreds of bodies of Sunni males, many with their hands still bound by police handcuffs, have turned up in garbage dumps, rivers, and alongside roads in recent months, according to the newspaper reports. In many cases, the victims had been abducted, sometimes in groups of a dozen or more, by individuals who identified themselves as police or commandos.
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
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