While You Weren't Looking … They lost the war

[reprehensor]

Caution: Antiwar.com is actually a Pat Buchanan front; but Raimondo can very worth while reading.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3562

by Justin Raimondo

Perhaps you're paying attention to the increasingly annoying presidential campaign, in which the nearly lost art of distinguishing typewriter fonts may prove decisive, and it just didn't register; or maybe you were too focused on the latest developments in the Scott Peterson murder trial, and it slipped beneath your radar. My theory is that Zell Miller's speech to the Republican national convention reached such heights of inspired demagoguery that it blew mental circuits nationwide, resulting in collective brain damage of frightening proportions. In any case, while hardly anyone was looking, the U.S. lost Iraq to the rebels. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, along with Juan Cole and Pat Buchanan, were among the few who noticed.

Ramadi and Samarra are lost. Fallujah was never taken, and neither was the teeming ghetto of Shi'ite Muslims loyal to Muqtada Sadr, just outside Baghdad, known as "Sadr City." The alleged "transfer" of sovereignty to the "interim" Iraqi government has gone well beyond farce, all the way to pastiche. The present script reads like David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, retold in the style of The Simpsons.

The Sunni Triangle is a de facto independent state, with absolute control of Fallujah, for example, ceded to something that calls itself the "Mujahideen Shura Council," which executes "American spies" (30-plus so far), collects the garbage, and rules according to the many strictures of Islamic law.

The leader of the Shura, Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi, is a conservative Sunni cleric who opposes the American occupation on the grounds that the famed "weapons of mass destruction" proved nonexistent, and hence the American presence has no legitimacy. Although the Bushies are still sticking to the line that the principal armed opposition to the occupation is engineered by "Saddamites," Sheik Abdullah was banned from making speeches in the mosques in the old days for predicting that Saddam was provoking an American invasion. This administration used the plight of people like him to tout the invasion as a "liberation," but the Sheik's answer to them, recorded in this recent interview, is sternly matter of fact.

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