"The most dangerous error in the Middle East today is to believe that the Shia communities in Iraq and Lebanon are pawns of Iran."

This article, combined with much informed analysis I've been watching on tv in the last couple of days, underscores the fact that the Shia are a far less homogeous community than I had understood, and that Iran has less chance of establishing regional hegemony. Additionally, some Israeli security analysts were reported in another piece I read yesterday as having decided that Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would represent a strategic parity in the region rather than a stark and immediate existential threat to Israel.

This perspective is critically important, it seems to me, and if the broad American and Canadian public (and Steven Harper) are ignorant of it, even greater military catastrophes are more likely to occur.

.. edited to try get a working link..

[ 29 November 2006: Message edited by: Brett Mann ]

http://tinyurl.com/uho9o

Off to read the article, will be back.

[ 29 November 2006: Message edited by: sidra ]

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The picture Blair paints of Iraq seldom touches reality at any point. For instance he says Iraqis 'voted or an explicitly non-sectarian government,' but every Iraqi knows that the vote in two parliamentary elections in 2005 went wholly along sectarian and ethnic lines. The polls were the starting pistol for the start of the civil war.

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Why does not Blair touch on reality?

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President Bush and Tony Blair show a unique inability to learn from their mistakes, largely because they do not want to admit having committed any errors in the first place.

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What is really sad, aside from the incredible violence, is the families of Sunnis andd Shias that have intermarriage are forcing divorce upon their children, thereby stigmatizing the children from these unions, where do they belong being half of each, as the Sunnis and Shias are saying these marriages are an offense to God?

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Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were married to each other. These mixed couples are now being compelled to divorce by their families. "I love my husband, but my family has forced me to divorce him because we are Shi'ite and he is Sunni," said Hiba Sami, the mother of four, to a UN official. "My family say they [the husband's family] are insurgents and that living with him is an offence to God." Members of mixed marriages set up an association to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.

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What rules the day there? An interesting point by the author:

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Everything in Iraq is dominated by what in Belfast we used to call "the politics of the last atrocity".

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Too bad people were not listening whebn the progressives of the world spoke out against this and now they are forced too:

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Previous supporters of the war are showing embarrassing haste in recanting past convictions and becoming born again critics of the White House.

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In the path of a storm, vets protest war March 19, 2006

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On Thursday, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, the marchers were camped deep in the wrecked bayou country east of New Orleans and the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain. In a clearing by a brackish creek, among a forest of dry, ashen-colored, half-toppled pine trees, the vets listened to the stories of local residents who spoke from a small plywood stage about the horrors of the storm and the abandonment that followed. Bereft of state or federal aid, many of the people there were still in bare survival mode.

A local man named Raymond Couture broke down in tears as he told his story of finding thirty-four corpses in a local nursing home. "They ain't done nothing for us here yet, so I know they ain't done nothing for them people in Iraq." Then the vets and military families spoke. Tina Garnanez, a young Navajo, lesbian and vet, spoke of her experiences in Iraq. She described the track record of lies, broken promises and rising violence in Iraq as mirroring the history of broken treaties, genocide and poverty that shape reservation life in the United States.

Dinner in the broken forest was alligator gumbo; the IVAW kids partied out and then slept under the stars.

Later, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Demond Mullins, who returned from heavy combat in Iraq only five months ago, looked out at the ravaged, filthy wreckage in a quiet fury. "I can't believe this. This is worse than Baghdad. What my country has become sickens me."

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As a matter of military tactics, it must be hard to be the last 1000 soldiers in a country surrounded by 20 million hostile people, 2 million of whom are in arms.