WaPo: Basra Melts Down as UK Leaves
by Wintermute
Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 09:50:45 AM PDT
I checked if this had been diaried, and it was by xofferson, but this story deserves much greater recognition. Here's why...
- Wintermute's diary :: ::
What this shows is that it is not only or even primarily the Sunni vs Shia vs Kurd conflicts that most jeopardize the stability of Iraq (much less its evolution into an American style capitalist democracy).
No, in fact, it is the battling within the Shiite community:
Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.
So it is not al Qaeda we need to be worried about. No, what will keep our boys dying over there indefinitely is this:
"it's hard now to paint Basra as a success story," said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces.
<snip>
"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.
We have a leg with gangrene that is threatening to kill us. Cut it off.
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