Now the U.S. military is firing from the air on the militiamen it has backed since 2007.

Jeez, the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end?

Last April the Iraqi troops raided Sadr City with US backup troops. The Awakening group knew then that they would be the next target of Maliki’s goal to rid himself of any competing groups. When the US stopped paying the Awakening members and the Iraqi government did not start paying them (in October) that was their second sign that they were not going to be incorporated into the new government. Very few of them were given jobs which they had been promised. My guess is that Maliki is overconfident and expects the Sunnis to resign themselves. Maliki was overconfident before. Remember Basr?

The SOI and we were allies for a time. Now we’re not. Like our alliance with the Soviet Union during WWII, this one existed because it was beneficial to both sides. Now it’s not. Here’s a good essay on such a relationship in Iraq by Alex at Army of Dude.

Wars are like that. The crazy thing is that we got ourselves mixed up in this one in the first place.

Al-Maliki is playing with a double edged sword. I can see a coalition of al-Sadr’s people and other opposition groups in a power struggle with al-Maliki’s government. Al-Maliki is counting on US forces to protect his ass and keep him in power, part of the equation being foreign (read American) companies being granted 75% of oil profits. I doubt very seriously al-Sadr honouring any such deal. Keeping US forces in Irak is just delaying the violent power struggle that will erupt as soon as US forces have been drawn down enough to no longer be a threat to the opposition. With all the attention that air strikes are getting in the Muslim world we’re sure not winning many hearts or minds.

Well what an outcome! What a total surprise. Who would have thought….

The perception of the Rest of the World, is the US are fairweather friends at best. Unless it’s Isreal.

That’s the way they view us in England, isn’t it?

What we stopped paying protection money/tribute but thats the Secret of the Surge! Just what did they teach Gen Petraeus at West Point paying protection money to quiet things before an election and keeping the death rate low is a good idea?
This was John McCain’s plan to win the war? The Presidential Campaign is over John should tell us what his secret plan to win the war was…if it was paying protection money NOT GOOD!

or the middle of the beginning of the end

first you send Bremer to get rid of the Iraqi army later you hire them then later you shoot at them. I’m confused

I don’t see how this should come as any surprise, given recent history. Iraq isn’t really country in the US sense. It is a collection of nations in the Biblical sense–that is, a collection tribes. The Turks and British found the idea of Iraq convenient for administrative purposes. But it has never had any reality.

The Bush administration imposed the fiction of an “Iraqi people” on us as part of its elaborate justification for war, just as it has fed us the notion that their is such a thing as the “Iraqi government”. But they never did anything to try and make it real.

Instead, the commanders in Iraq were left trying to fit the facts to the story as best they can at any given moment. They made temporary alliances. They used the “Salvador Option” Shiite militias to get a temporary reprieve from the Baathist insurgents. They used Sunni tribesmen and Baathist insurgents reborn as “Sons of Iraq” to fight the jihadis. They used a Shiite militia called “the Iraqi Army” to beat back the Shiite Sadrists. They used Sunni Kurdish Peshmerga to fight Sunni Arabs and Arab Shiite guerillas to attack Iran, which angered pro-Iranian Kurds. There has never been anything like a real strategy–just a lot of treading water.

To make it worse, throughout it all, American commanders have been getting their advice from a menagerie of overt and covert Saudi, Israeli, Syrian, Turkish, and Iranian agents, all of whom are using us for their own purposes.

We need to just need to get out. The best we (and the Iraqis) can hope is that, once we are gone, a stable Kurdish state will manage to hold together without provoking the Turks and that Iran will step in to pacify the Shiite east. But we can’t make anything happen at thi point.

As someone wrote a week ago at FDL:

I kept trying to tell people during last year’s negotiations that Prime Minister Maliki’s goal wasn’t necessarily to force the Americans out, but rather to ensure that if they stayed, it would be on the Iraqi government’s terms.

By that, I mean that instead of supporting a (mythical) nascent democracy as it gains momentum, U.S. troops would more likely be subcontractors used by a partisan/sectarian regime to suppress its opponents.

I’d disagree with Southern Dragon (#4) in that I don’t think the US is going to get 75% oil profits at the end of the rainbow; instead, Maliki will milk the US for as much as he can (in terms of using our troops to suppress the opposition du jour), then leave us with as little as possible in exchange when those troops leave.

I’d also note that Sadr seems to be looking a re-allying with Maliki, albeit from a weaker position than before. In fact, perhaps the best way to understand what’s been going on in Iraq the past few years is to remember that when Maliki took office in 2006, he was universally seen as a weak compromise figure, doomed to be batted around by the strong factions vying for power in Iraq: Sadr, Hakim, the Kurdish parties, the insurgents in the Sunni provinces, and the United States.

Three years later, all of those factions have less (in most cases, far less) leverage now than they did in 2006. The only actor who has gained leverage is Maliki. And it’s safe to assume that he will do his best to apply that leverage toward making sure the trend continues.

Tell me how the ’surge’ was a success again…

1st ya bring in a gazzilion more American troops and then ya pay the out of work enemy a lot of money not to shoot at you or blow you up. Then ya get what might be considered a Pollyanna Peace. Except maybe when ya quit paying them. Then they hate your guts again. Kinda sounds like the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome all over again.