Shiite Rebellion a Campaign Tactic?
I guess it’s about time we had an enemy in Iraq. Makes it feel like a war, finally. While it’s tempting to ascribe the recent uprising and coalescing of shiites and sunnis to an ignorance and hubris permeating the Bush administration, this article from the Guardian posits that the administration may be eliciting the resistance on purpose:
Make no mistake: this is not the “civil war” that Washington has been predicting will break out between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Rather, it is a war provoked by the US occupation authority and waged by its forces against the growing number of Shia who support Moqtada al-Sadr.
On the surface, this chain of events is mystifying. With the so-called Sunni triangle in flames after the gruesome Falluja attacks, why is Bremer pushing the comparatively calm Shia south into battle?
Here’s one possible answer: Washington has given up on its plans to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, and is creating the chaos it needs to declare the handover impossible. A continued occupation will be bad news for George Bush on the campaign trail, but not as bad as if the hand-over happens and the country erupts, an increasingly likely scenario given the widespread rejection of the legitimacy of the interim constitution and the US- appointed governing council.
While this gives the administration credit for more strategic intelligence than one would like, it’s not implausible that a war whose buildup and execution was a purely political exercise would be extended and exacerbated as a campaign tactic as well. But it still seems to be an acknowledgement that our two choices are to leave now in failure, or leave later in failure.
