And We'll Be Having This Argument In 2018

Does this sound like someone interested in reconciliation to you?

[Al-Arab al-Yawm] You talk about terrorism while you are under occupation. What does this mean?

[Al-Abdallah] There are two types of occupation now in Iraq, the American and the Iranian; both are using groups from outside Iraq under the names of Al-Qa'idah or terrorism. Sometimes, these sides are managed by both parties and conduct activities inside Iraq. For this reason, the Iraqis are confronting them, because the features of the third party are not known. It tries to kill Iraqis, nothing more. It is not actually resisting the Americans or the Iranians, but targeting the Iraqis only [...]

[Al-Arab al-Yawm] Is Iraq heading towards division?

[Al-Abdallah] We are against division, and we have great hopes that division will not be the ultimate fate of Iraq. But, so long as there is a sectarian government in Iraq, it is highly likely that it will seek to divide the country. However, we have pledged to our God and people that we will oppose this scheme.

This guy's the head of Al-Anbar reconstruction and close to the Awakening Council. We may be paying him off not to kill us, but he doesn't exactly seem ready to head into a unity government. But this doesn't stop useful idiots like Bill Kristol from continuing to push the same myth of progress in Iraq he's been pushing for the last five years, despite the fact that his own paper contradicted him on this propaganda.

Kristol relies on an uninformed public, particularly about international relations, to spread his nonsense. Those who wish to scratch the surface find the real anger between the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. They find the ongoing extermination of intellectuals, which is crippling to a civil society that needs to rebuild. They find people still dying. They find that Iraqi government spending on reconstruction has slowed to a crawl, and that the saintly Gen. Petraeus and the Administration falsified records to Congress highlighting the opposite. They find a real mess in Kirkuk, which threatens to open another front in the civil war:

The president of Iraq's Kurdish region warned Monday that Kurdish leaders would resist efforts to scrap plans for a referendum on the fate of the multiethnic city of Kirkuk. His tough comments came a day after nearly a dozen political parties in Baghdad challenged Kurdish designs by calling for the central government to impose a solution.

Iraqi Kurdistan leader Massoud Barzani fired back at his Arab opponents who argued that Kirkuk -- a home to Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens -- is no longer subject to an article in the Iraqi Constitution calling for a general referendum on disputed territories to be held by the end of 2007.

"There is no turning back," Barzani said in Irbil. "The referendum must be conducted in the next six months."

The oil-rich city of Kirkuk is too important to the Kurds to be papered over with some kind of fig leaf. There's going to be a deep fight for Kirkuk and it has a strong chance of being violent.

As a blogger on the Internets, I really can only take this so far. Until the Democratic Presidential candidates and the Congress end their silence on Iraq, the country will only get the wrong side of the story. Apparently, yesterday Hillary Clinton had Barack Obama sign on to her bill to stop a permanent status of forces agreement from being signed between Bush and the Iraqis. That's a defensive move at best, and a half-hearted one at that (I'll bet they'd love to have Iraq forced off the table for them).