Letters to the Editor
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Here's another Kagan clip from report
Sectarian Cleansing. One of the persistent myths about the reasons for the success of coalition efforts
in 2007 is that the killing stopped because the sectarian
cleansing was completed. This myth is
absolutely false. Baghdad remains a mixed city. The
traditionally Sunni neighborhoods of Adhamiya,
Mansour, and Rashid remain predominantly Sunni,
and Shiite enclaves in East Rashid remain Shiite. Shia
have moved into some parts of the Sunni neighborhoods,
and many sub-districts within neighborhoods
that had been mixed are now much more homogeneous.
But the key components of a mixed Baghdad
remain.--page 9
The competing claims regarding 'sectarian cleansing' are frustrating. Is it a factor, or not? It would be great if someone like Juan Cole could respond to Kagan.
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Derbig, I agree. a little cute Mooser?
How guppies the 'righties' can be.
It's Approximately Darn Past bedtime.
Derbig Moose gulps huckleberries.
Dem damn guppies slurp fly scat.
`
gads. silly. speechless. shad up. okay.
fish chum. bait. waste. scurrilous. scum.
stooped! but what are low bush creeps?
murderous. lies. fraudulent. wrong. huh.
It's truth. Ask real people? 'Um say, "goo."
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"The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans..."
This article says the fighting is more over the future face of Iraq than sectarian.
There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is collapsing. "The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans," one militiaman loyal to al-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor's Sam Dagher by telephone from Sadr City. Dagher added that the "same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store."
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/80580/
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@ Glenn
We all know everything bad in the world is Iran's fault. Did the supreme Iraq expert Fred Kagan anticipate that this would happen?
Of course this is ludicrous, but it is also a fact that we have been doing this to Iran since before the revolution, conducting war by proxy. We did it with the Qashqai and others after the Shah was deposed and we do it today with the Baluchis in Pakistan, as well as Iranian-Kurdish tribes and others who are opposed to the current Iranian regime. We have been attempting to destabilize that regime for years. There are rules and the Soviets knew we did it and we knew they did it and since we both had nukes it was safer to play the game with proxies than a face to face confrontation. Iran has no nukes so they are not allowed to do anything but sit back and be accused of doing the very thing we are doing to them. Very unfair, but it isn't supposed to be fair. It's war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_war
WASHINGTON: As the drumbeat for war with Iran grows more insistent, the search for a "casus belli" compelling enough to calm a newly assertive Congress and convince an increasingly questioning American public intensifies. Themes of justification for such a war fluctuate between fears of a nuclear-armed Tehran and the "smoking gun" of Iranian involvement in America's misadventure in Iraq.
But before Americans get sent off to a third war in a Muslim country, it is worth recalling that in the past century, no nation that has started a major war has ended up winning it. Moreover, in the last 50 years, no nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation has lost -- a lesson that I learned personally when, beginning in 1986, I found myself in Pakistan, managing the CIA effort to aid Afghan resistance fighters battling Soviet troops.
This point is best illustrated by looking at the wars the Cold War enemies waged by proxy in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
(...)
The same rules applied in Southeast Asia, where the supply lines to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had their origins in China and the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that there was a Soviet or Chinese hand in American casualties, Washington never seriously considered striking back at either nation. America lost more than 58,000 killed in Vietnam in its continuing proxy battle with China and the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the tables were turned. President Jimmy Carter ordered the CIA to provide assistance to the Afghan resistance, who were fighting Soviet forces with little more than their trusty Enfield rifles. The CIA organized a coalition that included Britain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the People's Republic of China -- yes, the Chinese were only too happy this time around to provide the ordnance to kill Soviet troops instead of Americans. Literally every AK-47 round, mortar round, rocket-propelled grenade, or anti-aircraft missile fired at the Soviet forces passed through CIA's pipeline. (Nevertheless, the Soviets -- aside from a few sneering threats by KGB officers I ran across in Pakistan � never seriously considered striking back at the external supporters of the Afghan resistance.)
(...)
The rules of proxy warfare that were developed during these conflicts point to another lesson, perhaps the ultimate one regarding America's rising confrontation with Iran: If there has to be war, better let the other side start it.
The Bush administration might dismiss the need to negotiate with Iran's blustering president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over Tehran's nuclear aspirations and the proxy wars it is accused of waging in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. But Washington should nevertheless remember that the modern nation of Iran traces its roots back to ancient Persia and that beneath every Iranian lies a Persian who views his country in the context of "Greater Iran." Even before Rome conquered the Western world, the lands controlled by a series of Persian empires stretched from the Caucasus to the Indus River, a cultural and sometimes political arc that not so long ago contained Iraq and Afghanistan and much, much more.
It is delusional to suggest that Iran would remain a spectator to a foreign invasion of a part of "Greater Iran." Iran's current meddling in the region is a re-asserted Persian version of America's Monroe Doctrine, which unilaterally put the world on notice that outside interference in the affairs of the American hemisphere would not be tolerated.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/06/opinion/edbearden.php