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January 13, 2007
Isolated or Changing Dynamics: Iraq, Sunni Arab, Sunni Shia and the Americans
An interesting article from The Guardian, which focuses on the journo's interviews with some Sunni insurgents, highlighting the nastiness of the evolving civil war, and the queer evolution of interests, such that some of the insurgents interviewed were looking to the Americans for potential support and protection agains the Shia death squads. This is surely a real evolution as other reporting has indicated that in Iraq it is the Sunni community in and around Baghdad that is most favourable to an American "surge."
It rather bodes ill for the bizarre American taste to take on Iranian interests in Iraq - which given the militias on the Shia side are relatively synonymous with Shia militias in Iraq. It is not hard to forsee the Americans having no friends (where friend means "not enemy") in Iraq at all - and worse, the US government not realising nor understanding.
Regardless, the dynamic described in the article (and it should be kept in mind it is but one article, for all that it rather confirms via anectdote other data), is precisely that of Lebanon in the 1980s. Sectarian self-defence, the civil war becoming a business in and of itself, the flight of even neutrals into the camp of the sectarian militia as the only source of security.
There is simply nothing the Americans can do about this. Not without hundreds of thousands of troops to say the least.
Posted by The Lounsbury at January 13, 2007 02:25 PM
Filed Under:
Iraq
,
Politics - US FP
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