Word: crockers
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...military success against al-Qaeda in Anbar province has led to a certain incoherence in U.S. policy. We are working bottom up, from the tribal grass roots, with the Sunnis ... but top down, and not very successfully, with the Shi'ite majority. According to Crocker, tribes aren't as important among the Shi'ites, who tend to organize themselves in larger structures, especially around two dominant political families, the Sadrs and the Hakims. Each family has a militia. The Sadrs have the Mahdi Army, and the Hakims have the Badr Corps, and these two forces are now at war with...
...slightly violent high. The conservative Weekly Standard scurrilously announced that it had helped dash the "hope" of war opponents that Iraq was lost. The op-ed will be cited continually in the discussion of the war that will accompany the September reports of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Which is too bad, because it is fundamentally misleading about the next stage...
...been clear for months that Nouri al-Maliki's National Unity government is, as a senior U.S. official said, "none of the above." Senator Carl Levin called for it to be replaced after his and Senator John Warner's mid-August Iraq jaunt. And Ambassador Ryan Crocker told me, "The fall of the Maliki government, when it happens, might be a good thing." But replace it with what? The consensus in the U.S. intelligence community is that there's going to be lots of bloodshed, including fighting among the Shi'ites, before a credible Iraqi government emerges. It also seems...
...military in the dispute there. The British are leaving, and the intra-Shi'ite battle is ramping up. The Iranians are trying to play all sides. "Under a different set of circumstances, you might argue - as some are now doing - that we need a Basra surge," Crocker told me. "But you'd need a fairly large force, and we don't have the troops. And if we even proposed it, the political element in the U.S. would go nuts...
...Crocker, at least, is still holding out hope, despite his rather grim take on the current circumstances. The fact that the talks are even happening, he says, is a sign that Iraq's leaders are committed to working together to find solutions that may yield some political advances ahead of the September progress report he and top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus are to deliver in Washington. "We do expect results, as do the Iraqi people," said Crocker. Expectations in Iraq, however, have a four-year history now of turning into disappointments...