The State of Iraq

With my brief hiatus last week, I haven't been keeping abreast of events in Iraq like normal. I'm now catching up, and it's not pleasant ....

Swopa, who has done great blogging on the Iraq war, has a very nice summary post of recent events. It's a very good read if you want more detail.

The short version is that there are a couple of significant events unfolding. First, al Maliki let it leak that he and Petraeus are not exactly good friends. It seems that Maliki would like to put pressure on the U.S. to remove the general. Of course the Bush family needs Petraeus to have any hope of a fig leaf come September.

Why does is Maliki balking at Petraeus? Well, it seems that the new American strategy is the arm every Sunni that asks for a weapon or a uniform. In our neverending fight against the ghost army of al Qaeda and in an attempt to win friends and influence enemies by buying them off, the American military has apparently decided to join the Sunni side of the war to counter-balance Iranian influence. Of course the Maliki government is mainly Shiite and Iran leaning and thus not real happy at having Sunni's given arms, uniforms and training by Americans.

The final piece of the puzzle was the announcement of a quite large arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Swopa is of the opinion that the Saudi's have laid down the law to the Bush family. The shift in the direction to "team Sunni" is the result.

Of course this strategy can't end well. But no strategy will end well for Iraq and the region. The Shiite/Sunni war, at some level, is inevitable. The question continues to be how many American lives will be lost in "fixing" the unfixable.