Letter to Feingold 2008 Yahoo Group:
What is the result of the Iraq Disaster?
7/24/06


What we are witnessing in Iraq is a full blown civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.  The ethnic cleansing in villages such as Haswa and cities like Samarra is testimony to this reality, as are the horrible deaths in car bombings.  Indeed, Patrick Cockburn reported yesterday that city of Baghdad is "breaking up", that the population is more terrified than he has seen them in all the time he has been going to Iraq since 1978, and that few shops are open and the ones that are are having fire sales.

Junior Bush has opened up a Pandora¹s box of death, misery, suffering. and bloodshed.  And our young men and women in the armed forces are tragically caught in the middle.

A very few here seem to believe that somehow the Iraq war may not yet have been fought in vain, that the U.S. could still get something positive out of this terrible misadventure.  I believe that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the politics of the Middle East.  In an effort at nation-building and in the name of transformation of the region into democratic states, Junior Bush went to war.

The Result?  The empowerment of the Shiites of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam's Baathist regime has been to change Iraq from the bulwark against Shiite Iran into a Shiite neighbor.  And Iran¹s support of Hezbollah has made it heroic in the eyes of the Arab street, in opposition to Arab leaders who fear Iran.  Too the "war" has quite possibly engendered the creation of a radical "Shiite Crescent" at odds with United States national interest.


As Martin Walker has written, "The geography of the Shiite sect of Islam run swest from its Persian heartland in Iran and into the Arab world through southern Iraq, through Jordan and into Lebanon. It runs south to the sullen Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia, concentrated along the Persian Gulf coast where the oil happens to lie, into the island of Bahrain that houses the U.S. naval base. And it runs west into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"It does not take much imagination to see the potential for the emergence of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and looking to the 'liberation' of its Long-suffering co-religionists in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf."  This is what is called the 'Shiite Crescent.'  To the Sunni rulers, their cause has suffered a historical defeat, and its implications are being measured in blood in Afgan and Pakistani cities as the Shiite crescent takes ominous shape.

In other words, because of the stupidity of the Bush administration, the balance of power in the Middle East has become terribly unbalanced.  The region is unstable, the opposite of Junior¹s stated goal of promoting Stability there.   The utter failure, the amateurism, the breathtaking incompetence of the Neo Cons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice defies the imagination. The rise of Iran to great power and influence, thanks to the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq, has important economic implications. Flynt Leverett is quoted in  the 7/23 edition of the "New York Times" as stating, "If Iran emerges as a more powerful state, it will make other states in the region, and external powers like Russia and China, more willing to cooperate with Iran on energy despite U.S. objections."

More importantly, perhaps, in the process of destabilizing the Middle East, accompanied by the murder of unknown thousands of Iraqis, the Bush Administration has laid a foundation of Hatred For the United States that will be our children's horrible legacy.  If a Shiite Empire, dominated by the most fanatical Ayatollahs, does emerge, as seems quite possible, Junior Bush will have cemented his legacy as the Worst President In U.S. History.  Junior's grand strategy of regional transformation in the Middle East has collapsed and has drained the United States of blood and treasure. Let us hope that Junior's supporters will also be in a state of collapse after this year's congressional elections.