Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria has come to be American’s most reasonable voice on Middle East foreign policy. The totality of his most recent article is how General Patraeus has managed to make the surge work by playing to different Iranian sects and tribes to get things done. But the paragraph below tells the Iraq story best.
This Won’t Be The Iraq Election
Fareed Zakaria
NewsweekThis Won’t Be The Iraq Election
Petraeus’s new strategy is working, though not exactly for the reasons initially advertised.
Nov 12, 2007 IssueBack in Washington, President Bush continues to talk about Iraq’s shining democracy in speeches that seem utterly detached from reality. This is a nation where 4.5 million people have fled their homes, ethnic cleansing has transformed whole cities and religious fanatics have imposed a theocratic rule that is often more extreme than in Iran. In much of the country, thugs rule the streets. The police chief of Basra told the Iraqi newspaper Al-Sabah last week, "Most of Basra’s ports, especially Umm Qasr, are under the control of militia gangs. The police force is incapable of executing its duties because its members report to the militias." The central government is barely functioning. Half of the cabinet ministries are either vacant or nonfunctional. Iraq’s oil production is down this year. Sectarian divisions are, in some ways, getting worse.
Take that paragraph and add to it:
Bringing Democracy to Palestine which gave us Hamas in power.
Israel and Syria at war.
A soon to come preemptive bombing of Iran.
Turkey amassing along their Iraq border planning invasion.
Nuclear Pakistan under Marshall Law with rioting in the streets.
Most of the world hates us.
Health care unfordable to most Americans.
Oil is $100 a barrel.
The DOW went down 350 points yesterday.
Which all brings us back to that now lost political cartoon from 2002 showing little Georgie Bush whacking a hornet’s nest with a stick.
George W. Bush, the immaculate failure, leaves the Republican Party with only one issue they can win on. Saving America by blaming it all on poor hard working Mexican families without papers. And sady, not only is it working across the board, but if Democrats point out the Emperor has no clothes, they can every well lose this election they have in the bag.
So Democrats had best start funding higher walls and more concentration camps than the Republicans if they want to win next November.