Fareed Zakaria sez "Washington can warn the ruling coalition that unless certain conditions are met [we'll] quit providing basic security on the streets of Iraq". The US military has just spent three months proving thoroughly that it is utterly incapable of providing anything remotely resembling basic security on the streets of Baghdad. They can provide security on a block by block basis, making neighboring blocks worse, for a net gain of 0. I'm trying to figure out what Zakaria actually means when translated from punditry into english, and all I can think of is "kick the Iraqi 'government' out of the Green Zone".
But we're already bossing the ruling coalition around. The problem is we're not letting them boss us around. How does it help their threadbare credibility if they cave to US pressure? If shoring up the Iraqi government and preventing a civil war had ever actually been US policy then nothing we've done has made any sense: we would have been pressuring the government to ask us to leave years ago instead of waiting until last Spring to pressure them against it. OTOH if our policy actually were to
"
blackmail the Saudis, use Iraq as a military base and terrify Muslims"
you can sort of see the logic.
:: posted by buermann @ 2006-11-20 09:48:32 CST |
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