Fight or flight

The question of Iraq hangs over the world like a dark cloud. Saddam has managed to get the ball rolling on a cycle of endless violence through his subordinates, proxies and enemies all while preaching unity. His execution warrant is only a week away but his fate still hangs in the balance.

One of the problems with executing the Butcher has always been the mayhem that might result, but really, what does it matter now? Things could always get worse, yet it's hard to imagine they could from the perspective of the American media. They've been so 'fair and balanced' that lately we've witnessed the bizarre sight of American government officials and their wives, asking American journalists whether they even want us to win this thing.

The American press isn't trying to help the terrorists on purpose, it's simply a byproduct of their collective ideology mixed with an incessant need to be seen as objective and fair. But in a war situation one must take sides. The failure to do so makes them look like tools. The AQ media war is well-documented and unimpeded by the MSM.

Expanding on that, former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer thinks a Democrat victory in November would be a tremendous boon to the terrorist-propagandists. Unfortunately he's correct--unfortunately being said only because it's rotten when either American side is viewed as helpful to our enemies. Scheuer has certainly proven he's a man who can rise above the fray when it comes to matters of great importance, but now he'll be childishly labeled a neocon.

Still, nobody on either side seems to know what to do. Even some Iraqis are at a loss:

I saw Wamidh again a week later, and the question had lingered with him. "I sometimes wonder what I would do if I were the Americans," he said over a traditional Ramadan dinner. His answer seemed to hurt him. "I have no idea, really."

The triparte option being hawked by Joe Biden and Harold Ford (slicing up Iraq into three religious based countries) seems wrong, since as Bob Corker said in the debate Saturday, "if we can't cause a country to come together in one, I know we can't do it dividing it in three." The tensions created by such a breakup would surely evoke chaos down the line. Everybody knows Turkey has had their finger on the trigger over the Kurds since before the invasion, and there's simply no way Saudi Arabia will let Iran seize Iraq's oilfields, nor will we.

The London Sunday Times says the division is already happening, offering up a pretty glum assessment of the grassroots sectarian division of Baghdad. But there are encouraging pockets of resistance. This quote simply cannot be missed, as it brings into focus part of the inate nonsense driving this entire War on Terror:

And then there is the bravest ice cream seller in Baghdad, a Sunni. When Sunni militants demanded he close because there had been no ice cream in the time of the prophet Muhammad, he told them: “I’ll stop selling ice cream when you ride up on camels to threaten me. There were no BMWs in the time of prophet Muhammad either.”

Outstanding comeback and the kind of smart defiance that must be done en-masse within the Islamic community if we're to win this. Yet such instances are few. Instead we see cracks all over, such as the ongoing intifada in Paris. Wonder if anyone has a plan for dividing up France to solve their quagmire? John Kerry, perhaps?

In their zeal to score political points somehow the dems have managed to demonize the phrase "stay the course" into some kind of bastardized Vietnamization, as if remaining steadfast against an mortal enemy is somehow wrong. That's exactly what bin Laden, Saddam, al Qaeda in Iraq and their minions are doing in both Iraq and Afghanistan despite their large casualties, but in the west any casualty equals failure and let's get out so we can all watch football and Paris Hilton.

In other words, we've been driven back to the importance issue again. If the outcome doesn't matter and the whole thing was a mistake due to bad intel, with our presence now just about saving face, then Bush should set the course for an immediate exit stage left and be done with it.

But if the results of our withdrawal would produce anything near the propaganda already flowing from AQ now, before anything is even decided, then staying the course is mandatory and Bush should drive the point home with vigor while making it crystal clear this is not our daddy's war. After all, if someone in Baghdad can 'get the flick' surely the president can find a way to project it.

MORE 10/29/06

Which story came first, this one, or this one?

Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's tribal lawyer, recently issued a letter overtly threatening George W. Bush that the war in Iraq might suddenely become even more uncivil should his client be given his just rewards. Quite a bold statement, even for a lawyer.

As if by cue another story popped up simultaneously proclaiminng that the prosecution might not hand down a verdict on November 5th after all. It might take a few more weeks of shuffling papers, perhaps.

Meanwhile his lawyer is trying to gin up a controversy. He claims that 1400+ pages of documents pertaining to the Anfal gassing trial have been damaged while sitting in his legal offices located in the US protected Green Zone.

The smart money says this is another cheap stunt by Saddam's team designed to stall the trial, just like when they murdered their own lawyers and blew up the Golden Mosque. It's depressing to think the CIA would have been involved with anything as sloppy as this.

Perhaps Ramsey Clark will claim these damaged docs were the smoking guns that tied Cheney and Rummy to the sale of chemical components used in the gassing, a story made in heaven for CNN and Reuters just a week before the election. And don't think the election doesn't weigh hard on both sides here. Scheduling a verdict two days before the election was possibly a way to sidestep any fallout from a democrat victory or perhaps influence a republican one. Al-Dulaimi's threat now makes that option less attractive, it would seem.

The bothersome thing is the lurid realization that sometimes governments do tacky underhanded things in the name of international peace and security, things that are better left outside the light of history. Don't know if we're seeing that here or whether we're paying the price for something done long ago, but it sure looks like team Butcher is still holding a few cards. More than they should.