Is This a 'Victory'? "We hear again and again from Washington that we have turned a corner in Iraq and are on the path to victory. If so, it is a strange victory."
posted by homunculus
on Sep 28, 2008 -
52 comments
The military surge in Iraq is failing. Sure, violence in the country is down significantly, but that's as much due to the
Sunni Awakening, which
began significantly before the surge got going in
2007. Unfortunately, everyone, particularly the McCain campaign, seems to have forgotten that the goal of the surge was to provide political stability, and it
totally hasn't.
[more inside]
posted by Caduceus
on Sep 10, 2008 -
32 comments
the "Second Liberation of Baghdad" --coming soon, in which we act as "enforcers", providing "protection" --
...American and Iraqi troops would move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, leaving behind Sweat teams — an acronym for “sewage, water, electricity and trash” — to improve living conditions by upgrading clinics, schools, rubbish collection, water and electricity supplies.
Sunni insurgent strongholds are almost certain to be the first targets, although the Shi’ite militias such as the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical cleric, and the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade would need to be contained. ... Will we be greeted with candy and flowers again as well?
posted by amberglow
on Apr 16, 2006 -
65 comments
Civil war. Surely this is an adjectival misnomer of the first rank. Of all of the various types of war, civil war -- that is, a violent conflict waged between opposing sides within a society -- has generally been the least mannerly and the most savage... By just about every meaningful standard that can be applied -- the reference points of history, the research criteria of political science, the contemporaneous reporting of on-the-ground observers, the grim roll of civilian and combatant casualties -- Iraq is now well into the bloody sequence of civil war. Dispense with the tentative locution "on the verge of." An active, if not full-boil, civil war is already a reality.
Shattering IraqSee also
Iraq: see no evil, hear no evil
Iran gaining influence, power in Iraq through militia
Bush's Strategy, Iraq's New Army Challenged by Ethnic Militias Outside View: Iraq's Grim Lessons
More Inside
posted by y2karl
on Dec 14, 2005 -
93 comments
"White Muslim." Converting to
which Islam? Most of the new Muslims I read about in the usual media feel impelled to join the
"orthodox" Sunni (if not outright
Wahhabi) variety, as if there is no other. But, as many of you no doubt already know, a non-negligible minority of the world's Muslims are
Shi'ite, whose biggest
"Twelver" branch was made famous by this
Ayatollah.
To further refute the image of "monolithic" Islam,within the Shia minority are a minority known as
"Seveners" or
Ismailis , whose
biggest branch is run by this
gentleman , whose
conception of Islam as
"a thinking, spiritual faith, one that teaches compassion and tolerance" seems more congenial to the self-selected strata inclined to, oh, post to MetaFilter, perhaps especially to "Secular Humanist" atheists like me. (I'll bet some of you can even relate to his
divorce.) Further reading from these links (perhaps with Google's help) should further belie much of the dumbed-down propaganda "mainstream" Americans are spoon-fed about Islam, showing the kaleidoscopic nature of one of today's One True Faiths. (And then there are the almost Zen-like
Sufis, and ....)
posted by davy
on Dec 7, 2004 -
58 comments
The battle the US wants to provoke Make no mistake: this is not the "civil war" that Washington has been predicting will break out between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Rather, it is a war provoked by the US occupation authority and waged by its forces against the growing number of Shia who support Moqtada al-Sadr (by Naomi Klein in Baghdad).
posted by acrobat
on Apr 6, 2004 -
49 comments
