Maybe, but I’m not sure it’for everyone….

The news I heard recently on the elimination of Al Qaeda in the western provinces claimed that the tribal leaders had basically told our military to provide them with weapons and stay out of the way. We did and they got rid of most of Al Qaeda. Now, what will those Sunni tribesmen, who all want our occuaption to end, do with the weapons we helpfully provided them?

Then there’s this news from the AP today “Largest Sunni bloc leaves Iraq government.” That means the only ‘coalition’ left in Bush’s Iraqi government are the Shia and the Kurds, and the Kurds want independence. Yep, the surge is working — to make things worse.

Tom on O’Hanlan and Pollack (emphasis added by me):

“Their carefully cobbled together formula for where it might take American forces went like this: It had “the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”…Of course, O’Hanlon’s and Pollack’s ideas about what “Iraqis could live with” and Iraqi ideas on the subject may turn out to differ somewhat.” [Thank you, Tom! That was my first reaction, too, to their incredible presumption in deciding on behalf of the Iraqis what the Iraqis could live with without actually consulting a single one of the Iraqis who would have to live with it (the opportunists, quislings, collaborators, and wannabes living in up in the Green Zone do not count as part of "the Iraqis" in this case). This awareness is one of the reasons I love Tom Englehardt!]

“On the day of the O’Hanlon/Pollack op-ed, a summary report on the humanitarian situation in Iraq by the international aid group Oxfam and about 80 other aid agencies, gave the concept of ‘sustainable stability’ some grim meaning. In fact, the report — which the administration did not rush to pass out to a single reporter — added up to a functional definition of Iraq as a land in a state of unsustainable instability, a ‘nation’ in which an estimated one million families are now headed by widows. From child malnutrition to ‘absolute poverty,’ large-scale unemployment to an almost blanket lack of effective sanitation, the Iraqis O’Hanlon and Pollack didn’t meet with are in a hell on Earth. The Oxfam report estimates that almost one-third of the Iraqi population is ‘in need of emergency aid.’”

“…while Pollack and O’Hanlon met with the “known knowns” in the equivalent of Green Zone Iraq, a brave French reporter, Anne Nivat, spent two weeks living as an Iraqi in a Shiite neighborhood in “Red Zone” Baghdad.”

“From Nivat, you get a very different picture of “sustainable” Iraq, a place, it turns out, where you’re lucky to get 1-2 hours of electricity delivered a day, while the temperatures soar to 130 degrees…”

“The Shiite man, who took Nivat around for her two weeks in Baghdad…told her: ‘My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam’s regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam’s feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them!‘”

“In the meantime, of course, the Bush administration — with a helping hand from O’Hanlon and Pollack — continues along a path guaranteed not to create a newly sustainable Iraq, but to prolong Iraq’s unsustainable instability for endless months, or years, or even decades to come.“

Sometimes I think it’s a sin
When I feel like I’m winnin’
When I’m losin’ again.

Of course that’s more eloquent than these fools deserve.