- Peace Garden: Gaining Insights About General Betray Us

Gaining Insights About General Betray Us

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

He's back For More

Having assumed command of all U.S. forces in Iraq earlier this year, Petraeus warns the war is not “going to be resolved in a year or even two years.” In fact, he predicts that the counterinsurgency effort could last “at least nine or 10 years.”
Petraeus is green-lighting the funding and arming of Sunni militias in strife-wracked Al Anbar province for the stated purpose of routing Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. But it is also part of the Bush administration’s overall Middle East strategy. Petraeus and the White House are forming Sunni militias apparently as a counterweight to Shiite militias and parties that it helped bring to power in Iraq and which they see as an Iranian fifth column.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told Seymour Hersh, “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq… It’s doubling the bet across the region.” Hersh writes that this amounts to a “new strategy” termed a “redirection.” It’s bringing “the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.” He adds, “A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”
It's a frightening game we play (yesterday's enemies are today's allies and tomorrow's enemy). So where are the calls to stop the madness?
None of this would be possible if the home front were not blissed out on shopping and celebrities. With the Democrats’ capitulation to Bush and Cindy Sheehan’s bitter exit, there is little left of a national antiwar movement. Bush may only have 18 more months to go, but the domestic disconnect — why oppose Bush’s wars when he’s headed out the door? — gives the administration freedom to fan the flames of war in the Middle East.
I hope we can prove this writer wrong. I hope that the masses will rise and oppose the continuation of this war and the start of a new one. If they don't....



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