Word: cordesman
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...Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East military expert and former national security aide to John McCain , says London's drawdown only cements Shi'ite power in southern Iraq. Shi'ite police in the region have been conducting sometimes deadly sect-based operations against Sunni residents for months, he says, and local politics have devolved into "a fractured mess" delinked from national political parties. "The coming British cuts in many ways reflect the political reality that the British `lost' the south more than a year ago," Cordesman, who has traveled to the region frequently, writes in a Wednesday analysis from his office...
...fact, Cordesman fears that the brutal Shi'ite control of Basra and southern Iraq will spread to greater Baghdad and make the already bad situation there that much worse. Shi'ite militias in the capital appear to be standing down and not challenging U.S. and Iraqi forces as they attempt to quell the bombings and bloodshed that have gripped the city for the past year. That leaves insurgent Sunnis as the main target of the effort. "In effect," Cordesman says, "both the U.K. and the U.S. may end up acting to expand Shi'ite influence in very different ways." That...
...situation on the ground in Iraq grows uglier, Washington increasingly seems willing to blame the downturn on Maliki's lack of clout and the poor performance of the Iraqi military. This strikes Anthony Cordesman, an expert on the war with the Center for Security and Strategic Studies, as a bit dubious. He said, Wednesday, "The idea that when you send the bull in to liberate a china shop, [and then] you blame the china shop for breaking the china is, shall we say, somewhat ingenuous, and probably misleading." But it may reflect a growing desire among many in Washington...
...Mideast analyst, Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center of Strategic and International Studies, said in a report this morning that the death was a clear "political and propaganda victory" for the U.S. and Iraqi governments. But he added that its lasting importance depends on two things: "the overall resilience of the insurgency in Iraq, and how well the new Iraqi government can follow up with actions that a build a national consensus and defeat and undermine all the elements of the insurgency...
Background Good background information on the election is available at the Council on Foreign Relations, while the penetrating analyses of Dr. Anthony Cordesman, available in PDF downloads from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offer some of the best informed perspectives on the security and political outlook for the U.S. mission in Iraq. One of the best election map briefings available online can be found at the Sydney Morning Herald...