In his view, the administration has deluded itself into thinking that Abu Risha represented Sunnis' willingness to engage in "bottom-up reconciliation" with the Shia regime when in fact, the Sunni community remains as unreconciled as ever.
"Abu Risha's murder demonstrates the strategic naivete of [the administration's] arguments," according to Lynch."
Why do they believe that "bottom-up reconciliation" corresponds to overall statewide reconciliation? Suppose the Repugs in Arkansas swore to vote for Democrats if they got their every wish. Who would give them their every wish? Not the US federal government as it is tapped out. Why would the Democrats in Arkansas help the Repugs? Money is tight everywhere. Suppose, for argument sake that the Arkansas Democrats did help GOP members in their state. These Arkansas GOP members could conceivably feel grateful to the Arkansas Democrats not the US federal government. Maybe they'd vote for Arkansas Democrats but who would know? The same applies to the Iraqi Sunnis. They don't give a flying "expletive deleted" about anyone other than themselves. They'll look us in the eye and smile as we help them, but talk is cheap. We can't have anyway of monitoring their use of the US military equipment we have donated to them free of charge. When the immediate enemy, the Al Qaeda villains, are vanquished they will go back to killing our boys and girls-with better equipment. Look, years ago even bin laden warned the vile Al Qaeda in Iraq that they were killing too many Muslims. It was just a matter of time that the Sunnis, who had been protecting them--even though they were enforcing extremist policies and killing fellow Muslim the extremist labeled as being takfirs, would turn against AIQ. This development doesn't help the sectarian violence in any way.
But everything is going swimmingly well for W's Iraq theatre of GWOT except that Petraeus' boss thinks W's latest go-to guy is lying suck-up and since the start, as the appropriately title article "U.S.-IRAQ: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge" at
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39235
states "In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.
Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior....
Fallon was strongly opposed to Petraeus's role as pitch man for the surge policy in Iraq adopted by Bush in December as putting his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia -- the area for which Fallon's CENTCOM is responsible.
The CENTCOM commander believed the United States should be withdrawing troops from Iraq urgently, largely because he saw greater dangers elsewhere in the region. "He is very focused on Pakistan," said a source familiar with Fallon's thinking, "and trying to maintain a difficult status quo with Iran."
By the time Fallon took command of CENTCOM in March, Pakistan had become the main safe haven for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda to plan and carry out its worldwide operations, as well as being an extremely unstable state with both nuclear weapons and the world's largest population of Islamic extremists.
Plans for continued high troop levels in Iraq would leave no troops available for other contingencies in the region."
Wolfie of Arabia's "swimming" in oil rationale was abandoned. Alan Greenspan, after only a few days of talking about the fact that this Iraq war was initiated for oil, is backing away from the honesty. Petraeus has betrayed us and his plans are doomed to failure and his boss has accused him of exactly that. W embraced a former Sunni insurgent and within days the courageous Sunni was dead as a result of W's "kiss of death"!
Related articles:
"Wolfowitz: Iraq War Was About Oil" at
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/060503A.shtml
"A nasty slip on Iraqi oil"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,973940,00.html
"A look at the next attorney general."
http://www.slate.com/id/2174045/nav/fix/
"Sheikh's Killing a Blow to Bush" at
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=39259
"U.S.-IRAQ: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge"
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39235
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