Posted by
Dawnsblood on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 7:43:12 PM
I had heard about
the Kurdish General but 12,000+ Peshmerga? That is news. Yes, Kurds are primarily Sunni but they don't identify with either Iraqi sect really. If this is really happening... I mean a fairly neutral Iraqi fighting force in Baghdad?
It sounds like a fantastic idea.
President Bush will shortly propose a "new
direction" for the United States in Iraq. It is widely believed that
part of this new direction will be the deployment of an additional
20,000 or more US troops. That would bring the US forces in Iraq to
160,000 or more.
The New York Times reports that the Iraqi prime minister
"agreed…to match the American troop increase, made up of five combat
brigades…by sending three more Iraqi brigades to Baghdad." The Times
went on, "They [American officials] said two-thirds of the promised
Iraq force would consist of Kurdish pesh merga units to be sent from
northern Iraq, and they said some doubts remained about whether they
would show up in Baghdad and were truly committed to quelling sectarian
fighting."
I Know the former mayor doesn't approve.
The jurisdiction of the national Iraqi government
does not operate in the Kurdish area, where residents hate and fear
both Shia and Sunni. While I pretend no expertise on the ability of the
Iraqi army to fight to keep peace in any part of Iraq, it seems
unlikely that Iraqi forces who are religiously at odds with the
residents of the area that they seek to subdue would be effective. The
introduction of Kurdish troops into the areas of Baghdad currently
under the control of the forces of Moktada al-Sadr can only inflame the
sectarian strife and civil war. What are needed are Shi'ite soldiers
willing to arrest and kill if necessary the al-Sadr led militants.
He prefers we try to blackmail our other non-Iraqi allies.
We should immediately issue the ultimatum that I
have urged over the last year, warning our allies that if they don't
come in now, we are out -- now. If the president won't do this, the
Congress should use its power to end our presence in Iraq by directing
that the expenditures of funds authorized by the Congress may not be
used to send additional troops to Iraq. All monies authorized should be
used to protect US soldiers in place and for their exiting the country.
I'll take armed peshmerga forces from a people that once declared "We can become your 51st state and provide you with oil".
There are no insurgents
in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the
Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place
since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road
heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked.
Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road.
Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by
crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.
The second line of defense
is the Kurds themselves. Out of desperate necessity, they have forged one of
the most vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Anyone who doesn’t
speak Kurdish as their native language—and Iraq’s troublemakers overwhelmingly
fall into this category—stands out among the general population. There is no
friendly sea of the people, to borrow Mao’s formulation, that insurgents can
freely swim in. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate the area are
hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society does a better job
rooting out and keeping out Islamist killers than the U.S. military can manage
in the kinda sorta halfway “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad.