[jimmydean]

I just wonder how many more Americans need to die there before they have a real problem of getting recruits. There are already reports of soliders not returning to duty and heading to Canada.

Is a draft on the horizon? With Bush in power it's definitely possible. 1600+ American soldiers died so far. I frequently watch McNeil Lehrer News Hour and that's the only show that at least posts some pictures of these kids that died for oil. These kids are mainly 19-28'ish years old!

[Tyler_JC]

We can't leave Iraq. We aren't going to leave Iraq. No one in any position of American powers is considering leaving Iraq and to suggest otherwise is foolhardy. (I'm using "we" in the USA national sense)

We are setting up permenant military bases in Iraq and are attempting to set it up as as future base for American interests in the region. Iraq is the perfect platform to control the Middle East. When OPEC controls the majority of the world's oil, we can't afford to be far away. We couldn't allow a non-friendly dictator to control a vital resource. For the continued prosperity of the United States and for the continued security of our energy supply...we had to liberate Iraq-or so is the thinking of The Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

[linlithgowoil]

what a mess. i wouldnt have a clue what to do right now if i was the US. pull out and face humiliation and no strategic presence in the middle east? no way will the US do this. the US has a 'can-do' attitude which means that, if you want something bad enough, it will magically come true.

i just wish all these politicians would send their own children into battle. they'd soon be clamoring for the war to end then. instead, they use the children of the poor. its unbelievable really - sending poor slaves to die to protect those who are filthy rich. this is upposed to be the 21st century, not the middle ages.

[EnemyCombatant]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('RG73', 'P')eople invariabley lose me when they throw this anti-Semetic drivel out there. Bush and his administration has not done a single thing favorable to Israel during his tenure in office.

[OilsNotWell]

This is one of better explanations of what may really be going on in Iraq right now...US now seeing no easy victory, secures control through fomenting civil war leading to regional control (the divide and conquer tactic):
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'U')S Iraq Exit strategy: Civil war By Pepe Escobar
06/10/05 "Asia Times" - - As Shi'ites and Kurds fought for three months to come up with an Iraqi cabinet, it is emerging from Baghdad that soon a broad front will emerge on the political scene composed of politicians, religious leaders, clan and tribal sheikhs - basically Sunni but with Shi'ite participation - with a single-minded agenda: the end of the US-led occupation.

This front will include, among others, what we have termed the Sinn Fein component of the resistance, the powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) and the Sadrists. It will refuse any kind of dialogue with new Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and his government unless there's a definite timetable for the complete withdrawal of the occupation forces. Even the top Marine in Iraq, Major General Stephen Johnson, has admitted, "There will be no progress as long as the insurgents are not implicated in a political process."

But the proliferation of what many moderate Sunnis and Shi'ites suspect as being Pentagon-organized black ops is putting the emergence of this front in jeopardy. This is obvious when we see Harith al-Dhari - the AMS leader - blaming the Badr Brigades (the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution - SCIRI - in Iraq, a major partner in the government) for the killing of Sunni Arab clerics.

Breaking up Iraq: Several Iranian websites have widely reported a plan to break up Iraq into three Shi'ite southern mini-states, two Kurdish mini-states and one Sunni mini-state - with Baghdad as the seat of a federal government. Each mini-state would be in charge of law and order and the economy within its own borders, with Baghdad in charge of foreign policy and military coordination. The plan was allegedly conceived by David Philip, a former White House adviser working for the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC). The AFPC is financed by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has also funded both the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century and American Enterprise Institute. ...

[OilsNotWell]

This was also interesting:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')ho gets the oil?
Sunni Arabs and Kurds are virtually on the brink of civil war in northern Iraq: the daily situation in both Kirkuk and Mosul is explosive - ambushes, assassinations, car bombings - but scarce information filters south to Baghdad and to the outside world. Kirkuk is nominally under Kurd control. But what the Kurds want most of all is to control Northern Oil - part of the Iraqi National Oil Co, in charge of the oilfields west of Kirkuk. Sunni Arabs say "over our dead bodies". No wonder the key local battlefield is the oil pipeline crossing Kirkuk province: it was blown up again this Wednesday.

Mosul, a big city of almost 1.8 million people on the banks of the Tigris, is still controlled by Sunni Arabs (70% of the population) and remains the epicenter of Arab nationalism and a major guerrilla base. Kurds there maintain the lowest of profiles. Both the guerrillas and the police come from the very powerful Sunni Shammar tribe. The Pentagon favors the Kurds - helplessly, one might say: they are the only US allies. US intelligence in Mosul depends on Kurdish intelligence: one more recipe for civil war. As if this was not enough, most Shi'ites - 60% of Iraq's population - now firmly believe they are facing a Machiavellian plot by the US, the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs or all of the above to rob the Shi'ites of political power.

[OilsNotWell]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')nce again this is classic divide and rule: the objective is the perpetuation of Arab disunity. Call it Iraqification; what it actually means is sectarian fever translated into civil war. Operation Lightning - the highly publicized counter-insurgency tour de force with its 40,000 mostly Shi'ite troops rounding up Sunni Arabs - can be read as the first salvo of the civil war. Vice President Dick Cheney all but admitted the whole plan on CNN, confidently predicting that "the fighting will end before the Bush administration leaves office".

[Colorado-Valley]

Cheney just makes up stuff as he goes. I've never seen anyone with such a track record for lying about matters of life and death to thousands of people.

[bobcousins]

The problem with this theory is that it assumes the US admin knows what they are doing, in reality THEY HAVE NO F**KING CLUE. They don't know now, they didn't before the war, and they won't in the future. "What if the new democratic government is not friendly to the US?" "Then we keep changing it until it is" The Americans play poker, everyone else is playing chess.

[TheSupplyGuy]

Sad, yet true with the current administration. Myself and others may say bad things about Bush, but I like him a whole lot better than if Dick Cheney somehow became president.

[BabyPeanut]

Hmm, if they get civil war then the Iraqi's will help kill themselves. We could just pull out a while and then come back and fight what's left.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/25/news/baghdad.php
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')y John F. Burns The New York Times

The first signs that top U.S. officials in Iraq were revising their thinking about what they might accomplish in Iraq came a year ago. As Iraq resumed its sovereignty, the new American team that arrived then, headed by John Negroponte as ambassador, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer 3rd.

The new team called the departing Americans "the illusionists," for their conviction that the United States could create a Jeffersonian democracy on the ruins of Saddam Hussein's medieval brutalism.

One U.S. military commander began his first encounter with American reporters by asking, "Well, gentlemen, tell me: Do you think that events here afford us the luxury of hope?"

It seemed clear then that the Bush administration, for all its public optimism, had begun substituting more modest goals for the idealists' conception of Iraq. Just how much more modest has become clearer in the 12 months since.

From the moment U.S. troops crossed the border 28 months ago, the specter hanging over the enterprise here has been that Iraq, freed from Saddam's tyranny, might prove to be so fractured - by politics and religion, by culture and geography, and by the suspicion and enmity sown by Saddam's years of repression - that it would spiral inexorably into civil war.

If it did, opponents of the invasion warned, U.S. troops could get caught in the crossfire between Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Turkmens, secularists and believers - reduced, in the grimmest circumstances, to the common target of contending militias.

Now, events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true. Recent weeks have seen the insurgency reach new heights of sustained brutality. The violence is ever more centered on sectarian killings, with Sunni insurgents targeting hundreds of Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. There are reports that Shiite death squads, some with links to the Interior Ministry, are retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni clerics and community leaders.

The recent quickening of these killings, particularly by the insurgents, has led many Iraqis to say that the civil war has already begun.

That at least some senior officials in Washington understand the gravity of the situation seems clear from remarks made at the Foreign Press Center there two weeks ago by Zalmay Khalilzad, Negroponte's successor as ambassador. In his remarks, Khalilzad abandoned a convention that had bound senior U.S. officials when speaking of Iraq: To talk of civil war only if reporters raised it first and then only to dismiss it as a beyond-the-fringe possibility.

Using the term twice in one paragraph, he spoke of civil war as something the United States must do everything to avoid.

"Iraq is poised at the crossroads between two starkly different visions," he said. "The foreign terrorists and hardline Baathist insurgents want Iraq to fall into a civil war."

The new ambassador struck a positive chord, to be sure, saying that "Iraqis of all communities and sects, like people everywhere, want to establish peace and create prosperity." Still, his coda remained one of caution: "I do not underestimate the difficulty of the present situation."

One measure of the doubts afflicting U.S. officials here has been a hedging in the upbeat military assessments that generals usually offer, coupled with a resort to statistics carefully groomed to show progress in curbing the insurgents that seems divorced from realities on the ground.

One example of the new "metrics" has been a rush of figures on the buildup of Iraq's army and police force, a program known to many reporters who have been embedded on joint operations as one beset by inadequate training, poor leadership, inadequate weaponry and poor morale.

The war's wider pattern has always held the seeds of an all-out sectarian conflict, of the kind that largely destroyed Lebanon. The insurgency has been rooted in the Sunni Arab minority dispossessed by the toppling of Saddam, and most of its victims have been Shiites, the majority community who have been the main political beneficiaries of Saddam's ouster.

Shiites have died in countless hundreds at mosques and marketplaces, victims of ambushes and bombs.

Now there have been persistent reports, mostly in Baghdad, that Shiite death squads in police uniforms are abducting, torturing and killing Sunni Arab clerics, community leaders and others.

[The_Virginian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ow, events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true. Recent weeks have seen the insurgency reach new heights of sustained brutality. The violence is ever more centered on sectarian killings, with Sunni insurgents targeting hundreds of Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. There are reports that Shiite death squads, some with links to the Interior Ministry, are retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni clerics and community leaders.

[MicroHydro]

Dismemberment of Iraq works fine for the US. Israel gets the oil from Kurdistan as their own private gas tank. Iran takes Shiite southern Iraq and its oil, and becomes a US puppet after regime change. The Sunnis get the western desert and death.

[FoxV]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MicroHydro', 'D')ismemberment of Iraq works fine for the US.

[The_Virginian]

SAUDI Arabia, IRAN, and Kuwait all have a more homogenous population than "Iraq".

Iraq basicly always had a three way split ethnicaly. Amore conservative ruler in SA would quiet the Madras/Mujahadin, and a more conservative one appears to be on the table soon.

Even if the Saudi Gov. looses control to "radicals" (whomever really backs them) the main oil feilds are seperated form the indigenous population enough that "intervention" by the USA may be "Bin Ladens" biggest mission to date. (in other words the fields can be protected and pumped easier than Iraq....Iraq was about the PETRO DOLLAR, not the amount of actual oil.)

[seldom_seen]

The way I see it, the whole ME has been one big civil war for the last 1600 years or so. It's what they do over there.

They're going to be killing each other whether the US is there or not.

They love to kill Americans, Israelis or Europeans (extra points for infidels). If none of them are around though, they gladly turn on each other.

[rs]

And we help them. When it suits the western governments we give them arms and military training. Then they do something we don't like so we give their enemies arms and military training. Then we act all surprised when we become their enemy.

And don't forget why we are all here on this board - Peak Oil. And where is most of the oil, the Middle East.

This mess is not going to go away, it is going to get worse and worse. Everything is interconnected. Anyone who believes sticking people in their own countries is going to solve all the world's problems and let us live happily ever after is delusional.

[cube]

I personnally wouldn't give this "civil war" theory too much credibility. Remember the US must keep on inventing some new reason why we're over there. So far the WMD theory is a distant memory. Even the democracy argument isn't being used anymore. A democracy means Iraq gets to choose it's own future and make decisions that will not necessarily be in the US interest. In other words they get to act like France. You're not going to tell me that's why we went over there.

So far the buzz word of the day is "security". We're there to prevent Iraq from falling into a civil war or so that's what is being fed to us on the mainstream news. Is that true? I doubt it.

And even if it was true shouldn't every nation have a right to choose it's own destiny even if it means a civil war? Lets not forget the US also had it's own civil war. I don't remember Britain or any other nation sticking their nose in our business. Now imagine if Britain sided with the Confederates just to give them yankees a hard time. Wouldn't that be "interesting".

[seldom_seen]

Just heard a guy on coast to coast make the argument that the insurgency in iraq is good for business.

General chaos and attacks on oil infrastructure keeps Iraq oil off market.

Winners: The Saudis, Iran and other oil exporters, as well of course big oil and their puppets in the whitehouse.

Losers: Iraqi's, US soldiers

Never heard it spun like that, but made sense to me...

[turmoil]

And most Iraqis don't give a shit because they pay $0.05/gallon.

And most Americans don't give a shit (losing confidence doesn't mean anything) because we're too busy trying to figure out how to deal with rising costs of everything.

All is going according to plan I guess...