Iraq in Fragments

• One Sunni minister in Parliament was arrested for ordering a hit on another minister.

• Even American military commanders now agree that Iraqis will not be able to hold any ground gains made by US troops during the surge. The culture of dependency that we've fostered over there leads to this reality. The Iraqis in the insurgency are fighting for their country; the ones in the Army are taking a paycheck. Big difference.

• Yet another suicide attack in Eastern Turkey by the Kurdish separatist group PKK. The Turkish air force responded with bombing raids. We're not going to be able to hold off a Turkish incursion into Kurdistan forever.

• Some really good analysis about what's really happening in Al Anbar:

The US is currently enrolling in Iraqi police and military units tribesmen who were, ten months ago, part of the insurgency. The loyalty of such individuals can hardly be taken for granted; the tribal elite may decide, six months from now, that they are no longer pleased with the US and shift against us.

Even if the tribal elites remain loyal, the alliance poses a larger problem for basic US war aims. The alliance with these tribes serves, necessarily, to strengthen them as political units. Strengthening the tribes invariably weakens the central government. As the tribes are also among the least progressive and least interested in democracy of any Iraqi political constituencies, strengthening them also helps undercut efforts towards democratization. So, to the extent that the US goal remains the creation of a strong, democratic central government, the deal with the Sunni tribal leaders is almost completely at odds with the end that we'd like to see.

The White House is, of course, doing it because they're so desperate to promote any semblance of victory that they don't care what kind of deals they make. Just like when they set conditions to put the theocratic Shiites in charge of the government in the first place.

Finally, this rationalization by Michael Gerson is disgusting, as well as one of those zombie lies that will never die. In explaining how we can never leave Iraq ever ever ever, he claims that antiwar liberals were to blame for the Khmer Rouge's slaughter of 3 million in Cambodia (funny, they always blame "al Qaeda" for their own failures, but when they want it to look like liberal failures, they go ahead and neglect the perprtrators themselves). This is transparently stupid:

Why yes, that is a sympathetic quote from Henry Kissinger about Cambodia. You know, the very nation that Kissinger had secretly bombed when he was the National Security Advisor during the Nixon Adminstration, which bombing so destablized the country that it led to the rise of the evil Pol Pot regime, which the US continued to prop up for years afterward. And yet Gerson treats Kissinger as some sort of Cambodian savior. Revisionist history, anyone?

Jeebus, are these people so utterly used to their subordinates taking marching orders that they think the rest of the world will ignore history altogether?

The answer, of course, is yes.