Losing at poker? Double down!
Juan Cole wrote several good posts this week, while I was busy elsewhere. He had some posts a few years ago about Iraq that look pretty insightful today, and I suspect this section from today’s post about recent comments from our President will age quite well too:
Bush says US troops are authorized to “kill or capture” suspected Iranian intelligence agents operating in Iraq. Thousands of Iranians go in and out of Iraq as pilgrims to the Shiite holy sites, so personally I’m skeptical you can know which ones are spies. And, like, it wouldn’t be good to kill the pilgrims. Might cast the US in a bad light with the Shiites and all that. I’d say this man is looking for a pretext for another war.
Plus, when you look at where US troops are being killed, it is in Sunni Arab al-Anbar Province, and Sunni Arab Salahuddin, Diyal, Mosul, and West Baghdad. Those Sunni guerrillas are not being helped by Iran. They are being helped by Sunnis in countries allied to the US.
And then, the US hold over 10,000 prisoners swept up on suspicion of insurgent activity in Iraq. What number of them is Iranians? Slim to none. More Syrians and Jordanians and Saudis by far than Iranians.
So if 99 percent of the problem is with the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, why all this big talk about Shiite Iran?
Because this man is looking for a pretext for another war.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 11:20 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
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