W0rd

An editorial which gets to the heart of things in Iraq

The Bush administration disputes the "civil war" moniker. And it's not a semantic argument. Just Tuesday, The New York Times reported that "the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militias led by Moktada al-Sadr." It's not the only outside influence.


Such a proxy war is not a civil war. Neither is it unreasonable or naive to believe that sans those proxies, Iraq might not be the hellhole it now is. Nonetheless, this remains a matter for the Iraqis to settle.

And yet we want IRAN to help us stop the conflict

and here is another

Such advice is worse than wrong-headed, it is a denial of reality. Iran and Syria have one primary interest — U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and ultimately out of the entire Middle East. So much is clear from the daily pronouncements of the Terhran Mullahs, led by the Iranian strongman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the long-standing refusal of the Baathist regime controlling Syria to stop expediting the inflow of foreign fighters to Iraq to kill Americans and foment civil unrest between Iraq’s Sunni minority and the Shiite majority. The only stability Iran seeks in Iraq is the kind made possible by the sort of puppet regime Ahmadinejad wants in Baghdad. This is why Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told Iraq’s President Jalal Talibani yesterday that Iran will send troops if requested to do so by Iraq.

There is another crucially important denial of reality akin to the “managing defeat” syndrome. Evidence is rapidly accumulating that major Western media organizations are being had on a daily basis by the propaganda efforts of the Jihadist insurgency. A frequently appearing source in Iraq stories from AP, Reuters and other mainline news organizations is “Capt. Jemil Hussein” of the Iraqi police. Hussein was the main source in the Nov. 24 story claiming six Iraqi civilians were burned alive by insurgents outside a mosque. Hussein is one of 14 questionable sources with Middle Eastern names identified by the U.S. military in news stories from Baghdad reporting growing chaos and allegations of U.S. atrocities.

and we expect Iran and Syria to help us.

And some folks expect media accuracy

So will Bush sell out the Iraqi people?