Word: sunni
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That does not sit well for officers like Captain Joel Brown, in charge of Eagle company for the 2-2 Styker Cavalry Regiment. For him, money spent bankrolling the Sunni al-Sahwa ("Awakening") movement is money well spent. Al-Sahwa patrols neighborhoods in his area and effectively works as a local muscle, beating back insurgents and keeping the peace where local law enforcement has long since abandoned. When Brown's company arrived in southern Baghdad in August they found 50 roadside bombs in one day; they would sometime engage in two or three firefights daily. Now he pays nine Sunni...
...spirit of cooperation," Rice said. But a telling reflection of Baghdad's continuing dysfunction came in the vote on the law: roughly half the parliament didn't show. Moreover, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki still faces a boycott by the country's largest Sunni bloc, the Accordance Front, and followers of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr...
...address one of the Sunnis' key grievances, but will it really help bring the violently opposed sides closer together? Early signs are not good. Salim Abdullah al-Jubori, a parliamentarian and Accordance Front spokesman, said the issue of tens of thousands of Sunni prisoners held without trial remains a major division. "Unfortunately, we are not seeing any kind of flexibility from the government," he said. And right on cue, shortly after Rice left the Green Zone, a volley of mortars went flying in. No one was sure who fired them...
...fighting al-Qaeda and, to a lesser extent, the Iranians. We are "succeeding," he says. "Al-Qaeda is on the run, but it is not defeated." But Iraq's future is complicated and has little to do with the Islamic terrorists, who are rapidly losing their stranglehold on the Sunni population. It has everything to do with whether the Shi'ites will accept the 80,000 newly armed Sunnis as part of a unified security structure and also be able to resolve their own differences in places like Basra, where a three-way gang war is taking place; and whether...
Bush's latest strategy involves trying to contain Iran by arming Sunni counterweights in the region, like Saudi Arabia and other gulf states. Such a strategy is rooted in the cold war mantra that even if a regime was a "son of a bitch," it should be supported as long as it was "our son of a bitch." It doesn't work. Washington supported both Osama bin Laden and Saddam in the 1980s on precisely this logic, but after 9/11, Bush himself acknowledged that coddling the enemies of our enemies had not made them friends; instead it had helped...