Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Al Anbar Deception

For a good summary of how the charade of hearings in Washington last week is all smoke and mirrors, take a look at this article in Asia Times. The Sunni sheiks in Al Anbar have no interest whatever in propping up the Al Malaki government. They hate the Shiites, and they hate the Americans. It's a brief marriage of convenience, based largely on bribes and hyped to death by Petraeus and Crocker. It has no relevance to establishing stability in Baghdad or anywhere else in Iraq.

What's interesting about the hearings is the depressing fact that not one Democrat, including several who want to be President, asked a probing question or tried seriously to expose the shallowness of Petraeus's claims. As Frank Rich points out in today's New York Times, the only Senator to score a valid hit on Bush's puppets was Republican John Warner, who asked whether the occupation of Iraq had made America any safer. When Petraeus was unable to insist that it had, that told us all we need to know.

As bloggers and journalists all around the world have told us, Bush has no strategy. All he plans to do is keep the occupation going and dump it in the lap of whoever succeeds him. How many Americans have to die to while he denies his colossal error? How many Iraqis?

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