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It just gets worse and worse... Why Exiting Iraq Won't Be Easy Iraqis may hate the occupation, but they fear U.S. withdrawal By Chris Toensing
Despite polls showing that majorities of Americans now believe the war was a mistake, Washington has no plans for ending the occupation of Iraq, either now or any time in the near future. Not one of the retired generals who came forth in mid-April to blast Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's mishandling of the war is calling for a pullout. And top Democrats, such as Senators John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, who are demanding a timetable, are still lonely voices in their own party.
While critics of the occupation focus their ire on Washington, there is similar paralysis at the top in Baghdad, despite widespread popular anger at the U.S. presence. Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser tied to the Shiite Dawa Party, is willing to talk about a "condition-based" withdrawal of some U.S. troops, but views a substantial U.S. military presence as the country's "insurance policy." His Sunni Arab counterparts in government agree. "Any withdrawal of the American forces now will lead the country into a civil war," says Tariq al-Hashimi, the leader of the Iraqi Islamist Party tapped to be a vice president in Iraq's new "national unity" government.
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"To a large extent the chaos is of U.S. making," says Iraqi scholar Isam al-Khafaji, who quit in disgust after serving two months in 2003 with the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, a group of returned expatriates who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). In the summer of 2003, the CPA dissolved the heavily Sunni Arab officer corps of the Iraqi army, just as the U.S. military was beginning the first of its indiscriminate sweeps in the "Sunni triangle." Together with the vengeful "debaathification" policies pushed by Ahmad Chalabi and other former exiles, these policies convinced Sunni Arabs that they would be treated as the enemy in post-Saddam Iraq.
The CPA made its most damaging decision in July, when it allocated seats in the Iraqi Governing Council to Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Turkmen and Christians according to estimates of their share of the population. For the first time, sectarian and ethnic affiliation became the formal organizing principle of Iraqi politics, exacerbating the tendency of Iraqi factions to pursue maximum benefits for their own community at the expense of Iraq as a nation. Sectarian and ethnic divisions deepened and widened with each "milestone" in the U.S.-sponsored transition to electoral democracy.
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The Shiite religious parties, in particular, prefer that the U.S. military stay until they consolidate their grip on the security apparatus. But even independent Iraqis, like Isam al-Khafaji, fear the intensified sectarian violence and the multi-sided melée of militias that might follow a U.S. pullout.
<... more> The main point of the article is that there is no good solution here. The only decisions we can make now are based on how much they can limit the body count. I think this is why Murtha didn't call for a complete pull-out... just a drawback of troops to the periphery of the country, which should force the internal powers in Iraq to make peace with each other. But this insurgency and other drivers of domestic violence in Iraq is not running out of steam. It'll be another 3-5 years before they finally get tired of killing.
Man, I hate this reality stuff
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