- Feb 3, 2003
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A few pieces...
Paints a rather rosey situation in Iraq doesn't it? Heads need to start rolling in the pentagon and whitehouse for causing this debacle.
Refereeing in Hell
"If the Americans leave, there will definitely be a civil war," says Sheik Nadhim Khalil, 25, who has no great love for U.S. troops.
Khalil, who made a quick trip from Dholoiya to Baghdad a few days after the raid, says he has joined the shura. If his attitude is any sign of what the group's members think, the cause of national unity is in deep trouble. Khalil makes no secret of his contempt for Iraq's Shiite majority. In his Friday sermons he has called for the creation of Sunni militias to challenge the Shiites' 10,000 or so Iranian-trained paramilitary fighters and the Kurds' roughly 70,000 battle-hardened peshmerga fighters. "We are willing to sacrifice our sons and fathers to stop the rule of black turbans," he says, using a Sunni term of disparagement for Shiites. "Being ruled by Shiites would be the same as being ruled by Iran. This is unacceptable." Attendance at his mosque has doubled in recent months.
Iraq's neighbors are saying prayers of their own as they watch what's happening next door. They have all had their share of ethnic problems with Kurds and other minorities, but their concern goes deeper than that. When the WMD searches came up empty, Bush aides began claiming that the invasion was actually a way of planting the seeds of democracy in Arab lands. Now the fear is that Iraq's collapse could destabilize the entire region.
Paints a rather rosey situation in Iraq doesn't it? Heads need to start rolling in the pentagon and whitehouse for causing this debacle.
Refereeing in Hell
