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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Friday, February 02, 2007

Through a sectarian lens, darkly

Look at how the "cult" battle story in Najaf is spinning out within the sectarian politics of Iraq. It's the Sunnis fault.

In Friday prayers,
Shiite cleric Sadralddin al-Qubanji, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said the cult leader was a member of Saddam Hussein's feared security agency, the Mukhabarat.....

"What happened in Najaf represented an attempt to bring down the new situation in Iraq by occupying and bringing down the religious capital," al-Qubanji said during his Friday sermon in Najaf. "The Baath Party has been saving this person in order to create a Shiite-Shiite sedition."

Also: Reports of another US helicopter down in Iraq near Taji.

posted by mikevotes at 8:17 AM

3 Comments:

  • This touches on my concern that the Bush administration keeps talking about "the" enemy. In reality there are many enemies. But one man's enemy is another man's ally, and in Iraq -- in a land of multi-threaded civil, sectarian war -- this enemy-ally paradox becomes maddening. We kill one "enemy," we offend the Shia; we kill another "enemy," we offend the Sunni; kill a third and the the Kurds feel threatened.

    In a land of so many enemies, we are left shooting at phantoms, and each phantom, each "evil-doer" is somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's martyred freedom fighter. How do we win a war for the Iraqi's when all the enemies are Iraqi?

    Let's skip that moral dilemma and just pretend it's all al Qeda. Al Queda and Iran. Yeah, that's the ticket.

    By Blogger -epm, at 9:35 AM  

  • That's what they were trying to do. America will respond to a villain, but faced with a complex problem, they will generally punt.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 10:49 AM  

  • For some reason, I'm reminded of the vaudevillian clown who bends down to pick up his hat, only to kick it a little farther down the road. Each time he gets close to his prize, and bends over to get it, he kicks it out of reach again. And that's how I see this administration; no matter how often they repeat the same failed behavior, they doggedly persist in kicking the hat down the road.

    Only they continually blame everyone but themselves for their failure to pick up the hat.

    By Blogger -epm, at 12:05 PM  

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