Word: shi'a
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...them down. Third, this is no longer an insurgency; it's a civil war. Counterinsurgency tactics are designed to help a credible indigenous government fight a guerrilla opponent. The idea that Nouri al-Maliki's government is responsible is laughable: it's little more than a fig leaf for Shi'ite militias. Finally, as Mosul shows, these tactics require lots of time. I asked a leading active-duty Army counterinsurgency expert how long it would take before we knew if the surge had succeeded. "Ten years," he said. That's not a surge. It's a glacier...
...them down. Third, this is no longer an insurgency; it's a civil war. Counterinsurgency tactics are designed to help a credible indigenous government fight a guerrilla opponent. The idea that Nouri al-Maliki's government is responsible is laughable: it's little more than a fig leaf for Shi'ite militias. Finally, as Mosul shows, these tactics require lots of time. I asked a leading active-duty Army counterinsurgency expert how long it would take before we knew if the surge had succeeded. "Ten years," he said. That's not a surge. It's a glacier...
...which the Kurds claim as their own. Under the new law those revenues - like those from elsewhere - will flow into a new national Oil Fund and then be carved up among each region in proportion to its population. Since only the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the south produce oil, that ensures Sunni areas around central Iraq - coyly termed "non-producing provinces" in the law - aren't left out of the deal, potentially deepening Iraq's ethnic divide...
...Among Maliki's major political assets were his ties to Moqtada al-Sadr. The argument was that Maliki could help moderate the fiery Shi'ite militia leader. And so, when sectarian violence began escalating dramatically in February 2006, U.S. forces repeatedly held back from a major confrontation with the Madhi Army at Maliki's behest. But there has been no sign of moderation on Sadr's part. Indeed, in November, Sadr ordered the 30 parliamentarians and four ranking government officials of his political bloc to end participation in the government in protest of Maliki's meeting with President Bush. Meanwhile...
...Here's the problem: the person who did most of the interfering, arguably, was al-Maliki himself. Although he nominally heads an all-party, national unity government, al-Maliki is a Shi'ite partisan, and he has pursued a blatantly sectarian course in the eight months since he was sworn in, antagonizing Sunnis and allowing Shi'ite militias to run amok. His main political backing comes from Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand leader of the most dangerous militia, the Mahdi Army. In his speeches, al-Maliki routinely promises to deal firmly with the militias, but in practice, he has always...