Slowly, reality seems to be sinking in.
4 thoughts on “See if Peter Jennings reports this”
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Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Slowly, reality seems to be sinking in.
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I doubt it will get picked up. Good news never is.
Instapundit had a lengthy post on this point yesterday.
One theory is that the Sunni leadership, facing a possible US draw-down of its forces next summer, is suddenly realizing that they are going to be alone in an empty room with the Kurds and Shias, who owe them big-time for decades of genocide. The Sunnis now know that if they don’t get some reasonable deal now from the Americans they are going to get ethnically cleansed. Bush and his team have managed to even extract political advantage from the timing and manner of our exit from Iraq. Pretty good for the un-subtle Texan. As usual.
–. Bush and his team have managed to even extract political advantage from the timing and manner of our exit from Iraq. Pretty good for the un-subtle Texan. As usual.–
Never play Texas-Hold ‘Em w/a Texan????
Lex,
The Iraqi Sunni have lost and America is going to win in Iraq. There has been very little doubt of that for the last couple of months since we got tough with the Sunni.
At this point, tribal leaders or no tribal leaders, it looks to me like we are not going to reconcile the Sunni with non-Sunni Democratic rule.
This will have consequences. What is happening now is the determination of how much the Iraqi Sunni have lost and how much more they can lose. The Sunni are going to continue to be obstreperous enough — thanks to the Ba’athists foreign backers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran — to keep the American military occupation in Iraq long enough to strip the Sunnis of all their stockpiled Ba’athist weapons and cash over the next 3-4 years. As soon as we leave Iraq — and we will eventually — the Shia and Kurds are going to ethnically cleanse the Sunni from ~ 15% of Iraq’s population to less than 5% of the population.
The Sunni have the cadre of ex-officers and NCOs to quickly create a militia army *NOW* to over run the rest of the country. However, without weapons or cash a few years from now, they will be in the same position as the Bosnian Muslims facing the Serbs in 1993. Tough for them. They can serve American interests either as either a good example or a horrible one.
Democrats are in a similar position in that they can’t acknowledge that America is not fighting overseas primarily for the benefit of foreigners, AKA foreign policy as social work, but strictly for the benefit of American national security. Democrats don’t believe in the latter. It’s against their secular religion.
The Democrats moving the goal posts for victory down field for Iraq — and the war on terrorism in general — is their reaction to this. Rather than ‘defining deviancy downward,’ as they do for domestic social policy, Democrats are instead ‘defining victory upward’ for American Foreign and National Security policy.
Like the Iraqi Sunni, we are going to see how far the Democrats want to throw good after bad before they acknowledge their political defeat in the War on Terrorism.