Irak 21

Nieuws van het front: Robert Dreyfuss schrijft in Tom Pain.com: 'While Bush reinforces his Zarqawi myth and Dems call lamely for more armor, the battle lines for civil war in Iraq are being drawn. The Iraq that exists in President Bush’s imagination and the real Iraq, the one in which 160,000 U.S. troops occupy a nation sliding into civil war, have never seemed further apart. Bush’s Iraq is a fantastical one in which American forces are battling the enemy that struck us on 9/11. Yet on the ground, in the real Iraq, more than six weeks have passed since Iraq’s election, and battle lines for civil war are being drawn up. There are multiple parties to that civil war: militant Iraqi fundamentalist Shiites tied to Iran, well-armed Kurdish warlords planning to grab Kirkuk and its oil, powerful Sunni tribal and religious forces bitterly opposed to the Shiite-Kurdish bloc and a Baathist-military resistance movement that has strong support among the Sunnis. None of those forces, however, want anything to do with Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. By all accounts, Zarqawi’s forces in Iraq are fast becoming nearly invisible on the canvas of Iraq’s battle map. And certainly neither bin Laden nor Zarqawi have a prayer of seizing control of Iraq whether U.S. forces stay in Iraq or not. Let us first take a look at the enemy that President Bush says we are fighting, and then at the real Iraq… in the real Iraq, things are going from bad to worse. Last week, I reported here that the Arab League reconciliation effort on Iraq had collapsed in the wake of the Dec. 15 election. That effort was backed by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the U.N., Russia and the European Union. But ultimately, it was put in the deep freeze because the Shiite fundamentalist parties in Iraq—the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Al Dawa and Muqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army—utterly refused to compromise with mainstream Sunnis and ruled out talks with the Sunni-led resistance. Yet, as Hamlet’s uncle, King Claudius, said, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”' Lees verder:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20060203/washingtons_iraq_blindness.php