Every time I hear someone in the administration or the media touting our success in Anbar, my skin crawls.

Cut through the bullshit and Anbar amounts to this: we're backing Sunni thugs over Al Qaeda thugs. The Sunnis are in bed with us because they need us to consolidate their power in Anbar and back their eventual play against Muqtada al Sadr and the other Shiite militia.

We are going to back Sunni killers against Shiite killers because in the long run we need Iraq to play off against Iran.

Remember the last time we did that? Remember what we got?

Scroll ahead ten years and the likely state of play is: a rump Sunni state financed by Saudi Arabia and armed by us, in a near-constant state of war with a Shiite state allied to Iran. Kurdistan goes on being Kurdistan, but with some version of the PKK turning its Semtex against Iran rather than Turkey. Instead of the line being the Shatt al Arab, it'll be the Euphrates.

That's not democracy. That's not anything like democracy. It's not what Americans died for. It's not what taxpayers paid for. It's not what we were promised. It is, in fact, worse than we had with Saddam.

This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on Monday, September 10, 2007. You can leave your response.