"The most painful stab in the back of the Shiites in Iraq by the Iranian regime has been its shameful abuse of Shiite religion to achieve its ominous end," the sheiks said a statement. "The only solution and hopeful prospect for Iraq, and in particular the southern provinces, is the eviction of the Iranian regime from our homeland."
The campaign echoes repeated pronouncements by U.S. officials that Iran has been instigating violence in Iraq and allowing weapons to flow across the border, though U.S. officials have said in recent weeks that Iran appeared to be honoring a pledge to clamp down on weapons smuggling.
The Iraqi's are tired of trying to rebuild their country just to have Iranian proxies try to destroy it by fomenting violence and religious divisions within.
It also shows that they understand that their "neighbor" is not above using those divisions against Iraq itself for no other reason that to cause further divisions within our own country and our politicians.
In the meantime, while congress has been on their anything but relaxing vacation, we have shown and unprecedented amount of good news from Iraq media coverage from NYT, Wapo, AP, LA Times, IBD, and Newsweek, followed up the day after I wrote that with two Times Online articles, Wapo, Aviation Week, BBC, Financial Times and Sun Post.
Yet the Democratic politicians, unable to admit they were wrong and living in a complete state of denial, are still trying to "change course" from success and progress to defeat and failure.
How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks -- mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government -- that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation.
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But does the absence of this deus ex machina invalidate our hard-won gains? Why does this mean that we cannot achieve success by other means?
Sure, there is no oil law. But the central government is nonetheless distributing oil revenue to the provinces, where the funds are being used for reconstruction.
Sure, the de-Baathification law has not been modified. But the whole purpose of modification was to entice Sunni insurgents to give up the insurgency and join the new order. This is already happening on a widening scale all over the country in the absence of a relaxed de-Baathification law.
As for federalism, the Kurds are running their own region, the Sunni sheiks in Anbar and elsewhere are exercising not just autonomy but control of their own security, and the southern Shiites are essentially governing themselves, the British having withdrawn in all but name.
Yes, a provincial powers law would be nice because it would allow for provincial elections. We should push hard for it. But we already have effective provincial and tribal autonomy in pivotal regions of the country.
I have often said that an independent and Democratic Iraq will not and should not look like America, after all, our own Congress and Senate cannot get anything done and we work with a two party system and I would hope that the Iraqis would study the incompetence that our politicians have shown and learn from our mistakes.
With the recent success and progress in Iraq, now is the time for us to speak up and start making some phone calls to our Democratic politicians to let them know that punishing our troops for succeeding will not be tolerated and their state of denial is not being shared by those of us capable of seeing the reality of the amazing turnaround in Iraq and their political games are being noticed..... our troops are too important to let our politicians play political football with their lives and their funds.
At the link above it will show you exactly how our troops are going to suffer because of the Democratic incompetence and I have also listed the names of the politicians that have refused to fund our troops without arbitrary timelines and a method to contact them either via online contact forms or phone numbers.
It is time for us to tell Congress to get their heads out of the sand and start supporting our troops in the field.
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