Tuesday, May 01, 2007

The Iraqi Government

We keep hearing about how the Iraqi government is this or that, is doing or not doing something or other, and how critical their success will be in getting our troops out of there and back home.

That has got me to wondering. What success... And where?

How much control of the country does this government we are propping up have? It's pretty hard to get any feel for it from our news outlets, it is apparently a taboo subject.

Seems to me all the Iraqi "government" controls is the green zone in Bagdad, but not all of Bagdad, and none of the rest of Iraq. To top it off, they govern this green zone only because we let them. It's the one place where the majority of American diplomatic and non-military presence is and needs to be defended, not by the Iraqis, but by us, and that's where this supposed Iraqi government huddles on a daily basis.

The rest of the country--with the exception of this "green zone" portion of Bagdad--is run and controlled by Shite or Sunni factions and their militias, which we occasionally raid to keep things stirred up. The fight for Iraq is no such thing. It's a fight to protect the green zone.

It appears that the Iraqi government is not a national government, it is a lot like a group of American supported politicans pretending to be somethihg they are not.

For President Bush to say that the removal of our troops is conditional on the successful conduct of this "government" is not a sane statement... he ignores the reality that Iraq has no national government at all.

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