Iraq War News

As I said earlier watch the hawks not the doves to see which way the wind is blowing in Iraq. Once again there is an example from Andrew Sullivan. Sully is one unhappy and demoralized hawk.

LOST? John Burns has been a pretty reliable guide to reality in Iraq. His piece today makes sobering reading. The next phase looks messy, but not necessarily more disastrous than what has happened up till now. (Yeah, I know that's not exactly a high standard). I'm hanging in there with David Brooks. It's not intellectually easy to continue supporting a war when you've lost faith in the honesty and competence of the president who's leading it, but what choice do we have? There are other good people struggling to make this work: Casey, Rice, Khalilzad, McCain; and the thousands of troops who are risking their lives in this project. They key is to grasp how little we know, how badly we've screwed up, but also not to throw in the towel when, in fact, there is still a chance for leveraging the current situation to our and to Iraqis' advantage. One thing I wish were more insisted upon. It's not just that we have no interest in seeing Iraq degenerate into a brutal civil and possibly regional war. By removing Saddam, we created this vacuum. We own it. We have a moral responsibility to see this through.

That sure as hell sounds like one hawk that's real close to throwing in the towel. He mentions David Brooks; now I don't get to read BoBo anymore because he's behind the wall and Truthout doesn't supply his columns for free. But judging from this post by David Corn he's not a happy camper either.

"And what also drives violence in Iraq is that the Shiites have responded to Sunni supremacy by turning ultrachauvinist themselves. In the vacuum of security caused by the botched American occupation, these ethnic tensions have turned into a low-grade civil war."

The subject of the Corn post is if Zarqawi is dead (again) will it help Bush or make any difference in Iraq? He quotes an email from Larry Johnson who says that al-Queda is a minor part of the problem in Iraq now and that the real problem is the strife between the Shias and the Sunnis. (Go read the entire thing for the details.) The most Bush might get is a temporary uptick in the polls but that would dissolve when things didn't improve. In addition he would no longer have Zarqaqwi to blame everything on.

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Zarqawi, Iraq, Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks