When you don’t have a clue, make a few calls
Two articles on Iraq in today’s press, one from the Iraqi street and one coming out of the White House:
First, the real world,
While Baghdad and three other Iraqi provinces are supposed to be under security lockdown, Shiite militias are roaming the streets among and alongside Iraq’s police and army, attacking and occupying dozens of Sunni mosques — and reflagging some as Shiite — and detaining and killing worshipers. Residents of several Baghdad neighborhoods have reported seeing pickup trucks barreling through otherwise empty streets, bearing militia members armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Ostensibly outlawed, private militias maintain thousands of foot soldiers across Iraq. Members of two Shiite militias — the Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization, which is affiliated with the country’s dominant Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq — dominate the ranks of Iraq’s police and army. Ethnic Kurds also have a huge armed force whose members, called pesh merga , are arrayed throughout the Kurdish-populated north. But Sunni Arabs, who make up the bulk of Iraq’s insurgency, lack their own formal militia and have blamed the Shiite militias for recent kidnappings and assassinations, allegedly committed by men wearing uniforms of the security forces.
And coming out of the White House,
Bombs and gunfire killed about 60 people as another daytime curfew Saturday failed to halt violence that has claimed nearly 200 lives since the destruction of a Shiite shrine set off a wave of retribution against Sunnis and pushed Iraq toward civil war.
In an unusual round of telephone diplomacy, President Bush spoke with seven leaders of Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political parties in a bid to defuse the sectarian crisis unleashed by the bombing of the Shiites’ Askariya shrine in Samarra.
Bush “encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq’s communities,” said Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council.
The wheels are coming off in the streets, so make a few calls to Iraqi politicians with little influence on the real players. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
February 26th, 2006 at 9:34 am
I just read an article in LATimes about Bush’s “telephone diplomacy”.
Yep, that’s their style, kinda like like the Federal E-Mail Management Agency after Katrina.
February 26th, 2006 at 9:44 am
cause and effect - Mr. Bush doesn’t like to read so i guess he doesn’t know, what this physical principle means
so maybe someone should have read the Pupil in Magic to him or took him to Walt Disney’s movie Fantasia with the best-known sequence “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”:
Lord and master hear me call!
Ever seems the flood to fill, -
Ah, he’s coming! see,
great is my dismay!
Spirits raised by me
vainly would I lay!
bad luck, not to know the consequences of your actions…
February 26th, 2006 at 9:58 am
I wonder what he said that caused the Sunnis to get back to the table?
He probably threatened to drop “a heck of a bomb” on them if they didn’t put their rosegarden-colored lenses back on.
“Civil War! Shmivil War! We make our own reality”
Or maybe I’m way off base and he didn’t use a stick at all, but a carrot.
Maybe Cheney offered to take them all out partying followed by a little quail hunt, no wait, that wouldn’t be a carrot, that would be another stick.
Do these guys have any carrots?
Oh yeah, maybe he offered to lease them the ports in Texas!
February 26th, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Probably wasn’t Bush making the calls or doing the talking either, just someone assigned to the task, probably one of Chenney’s flunkies.