Like Father and Lyndon
November 24th, 2006Like father like son: some say that it’s better for the Boy in Washington to listen to the Man in exile, but I disagree, to a point, as the elder Bush is clearly too old to be of much worth to public policy – and as dishonest as he used to be too. Tigers don’t change their stripes just because they retire, and there’s no reason to listen to a senile feline. The President would be better suited talking to the King of Jordan and the Prime Minister of England than to his dad at this point. He might want to pull a Nixon and talk to the portraits (especially Truman’s), but he should avoid Lyndon Johnson’s altogether unless they get together to commiserate.
I’ve experienced a drastic change of heart on Iraq recently, with this news.
Shiite militiamen doused six Sunni Arabs with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and killed 19 other Sunnis in attacks on their mosques Friday, taking revenge for the previous day’s attack on a Sadr City slum. The mosque attacks came after the government, in a desperate attempt to avert civil war, imposed a sweeping curfew on the capital, shut down the international airport and closed the country’s main outlet to the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf.
The Mahdi Army militiamen, armed with machines guns and rocket-propelled grenades, swept through Hurriyah neighborhood near an Iraqi army post, burning four mosques and several homes, and attacking worshippers as they left Friday services, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein. Gunmen loyal to the radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had begun to take over the mixed neighborhood this summer and a majority of its Sunni residents had fled.
Sorry Iraqis, but you can’t “avert” the Civil War. It has begun, and it means that the American role should dwindle. Listen, it’s one thing to wage a war against a machine, like the Third Reich or North Korea. It’s another to fight against people who are fighting amongst themselves, like Vietnam. There is little we can do, militarily, to prevent the Iraqis from fighting at this point and not just because they want to, but because the US is Christian and the Iraqis are Muslims. They are fighting a Holy Civil War, and we can not possibly stop it militarily. If we step in, we will die in the crossfire; if we step out, the Iranians will take sole possession of Main Influenceurs in Iraq. It’s a situation as nasty as Vietnam’s for Johnson wherein he can stay and fight a War he knows he can’t win or leave and allow the possibility of Soviet/Chinese domination in the region.
What to do with the Iraq War now? It’s impossible to tell, but I think (though I hope I’m wrong) that the Iraqis will continue to fight and Americans will keep dying in the middle for years to come.