| May 2012 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
U.S. and Iraqi forces hammer terrorists in Iraq:
U.S. and Iraqi soldiers, backed by American warplanes, battled suspected insurgents for hours Tuesday in central Baghdad, and 50 militant fighters were killed, the Defense Ministry said.
...Al-Dabbagh said Iraqi forces had decided to wipe out "terrorist hide-outs" in the area once and for all. "God willing, Haifa Street will never threaten the Iraqi people again," he said.
Al-Dabbagh also said followers of Saddam Hussein were to blame for the violence.
"This would never have happened were it not for some groups who provided safe havens for these terrorists. And as everyone knows, the former Baathists provided safe haven and logistics for them to destabilize Iraq," he said.
Haifa Street has long been Sunni insurgent territory and housed many senior Baath Party members and officials during Saddam's rule.
Last month I posted an article titled "It's Not A 'Civil War' In Iraq, It's The Wrap-Up Of The Same War We Initiated When We Toppled Saddam:"
The Sunnis wouldn't go along with the new Democratic government. They decided to keep fighting via suicide bombing of civilians and IEDs used against U.S. troops. And now they're getting clobbered. And Iraqis who back the Shia-led government are doing most of the clobbering, which is what the U.S. wants - i.e. to turn control of the country and responsibility for security over to Iraqi forces.
The mantra of the MSM - that Iraq is involved in a "civil war," both sides of which are against a Democratic government - is nonsense.
(Read the whole article for additional detail).
At the time I posted it, given the MSM mantra that there is a "civil war" going on in Iraq, the position I supported seemed unorthodox. But articles have appeared since then (and no doubt before as well) expressing views similar to those I posted. In yesterday's LA Times, an op-ed piece by Yitzhak Nakash, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Brandeis University, noted:
...unlike Sunni militants who have declared jihad against the United States and the West, Shiites in the Middle East since the 1990s have by and large been seeking to mend fences with the west.
Also, in an article for the Gaurdian, Qassim Lotfi of The Big Pharaoh weblog has written that:
When it comes to reacting towards events in Iraq it's always helpful to remember a simple rule: Kurds, Shia Muslims and Kuwaitis are from Mars, the rest of the Arab/Muslim world is from Venus.
This rule helps explain the difference in how both camps reacted to the execution of the former Iraqi dictator. The former had suffered a lot at the hands of Saddam; the latter is preoccupied with America and sees everything through the prism of anti-Americanism.
It was not surprising to see Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi Shia Muslims, and Kuwaitis welcoming the execution of the man who caused so much agony to them. Iraqi Sunni Muslims however had no reason to celebrate.
Given that Iraq's new government is Shiite, this supports the position that the Shiites are fighting to support the new Democracy, and the Sunnis are fighting to destroy it.
Today's news, quoted at the top of this post, that U.S. and Iraqi forces are moving to wipe out another Sunni stronghold, shows that events continue to support this view:
