On 10/26/06, Mark Lause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm not sure I'd buy into any timetable for a likely US withdrawal from
Iraq. Any president who would do it--or go along with it, in the case of
the Congress--would make tremendous enemies of the Insane Fifth or Insane
Quarter of the presently active civil population and a like number that
defers to the Insane. All whipped into a madness by the people who'd now
love to get out. I can't imagine a Democrat with the guts to do it.
My guess (and it's only that) is that the US will try to de-escalate the
conflict to something like the level of Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin.
Most likely, the more they try, the more the insurgents will take a globally
embarrassing toll on them.
So, I think that the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are likely to last
for some time.
One option for Washington is to retreat into the Iraqi Kurdish region
in Iraq, for the Kurdish leaders can't have their fiefdom without
Washington and therefore welcome Washington's presence in it, and to
foist much of Afghanistan on Canadians and Europeans, who will hang
around doing nothing and watching the Taliban, the FARC of Afghanistan
allied with opium farmers, retake much of the country unlike FARC in
Colombia.
The rest of Iraq may possibly break down into a Sunni region and a
Shi'i region. If it does, Tehran's foreign policy of courting all
factions of Shi'is from the Islamic Dawa Party, the Mahdi Army, to the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq makes sense; it is
hedging its bets, so whoever will take the Shi'i South, where much of
Iraq's oil is, won't be simply in Washington's pockets and won't make
the region a staging ground for another invasion of Iran.
If Washington lets Tehran sell out, it can have a kind of joint
dominion over the Shi'i South in Iraq with Tehran. But to do so
Washington has to shaft Tel Aviv and Riyadh, which it won't.
So, whatever Khamenei, Rafsanjani, and the reformist faction think,
Washington will probably remain on a collision course with Tehran. As
long as Washington can't stomach the idea of Tehran taking the Shi'i
South, though, it will have to stay in Iraq, no matter how costly or
bloody.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
