The Expert In "Clouded Vision"

Here’s a test…

“Now, I know that the car bombs that take place tend to cloud people's vision.”

I don’t have to communicate to you the name of the person who uttered that brainless quote, do I?

Despite that, I’m actually going to look seriously for a minute or two at one of Dubya’s familiar refrains when he speaks in front of typically sympathetic audiences (or, in the case of some of our military, audiences who have no choice but to listen and go along with the blinkered musings of this intellectual pigmy).

That quote and other typical partisan nonsense (along with his typically lame attempts at humor and endless acknowledgements of his friends) can be found in the transcript of his speech at the Marriott Downtown in Philadelphia yesterday, but he also spoke about the apparent success that has transpired from “the splurge” in Anbar province.

This New York Times article confirms that the preznit has a little something to crow about here (of course, give him an inch and he’ll take a few miles), but it also notes the following…

The Anbar turnaround developed just as Mr. Bush was committing nearly 30,000 additional American troops to Iraq in a bid to regain control of Baghdad and the “belt” areas that surround it. The so-called troop surge reached full strength in mid-June, and the results so far have been mixed. In any case, the Pentagon has told American commanders it can be maintained only until next March, at the latest.

This has left commanders looking beyond the surge’s end, to a point when the trajectory of the war, increasingly, will be determined by decisions the Iraqis make for themselves. So the question is whether the Anbar experience can be “exported” to other combat zones, as Mr. Bush suggested, by arming tribally based local security forces and recruiting thousands of young Sunnis, including former members of Baathist insurgent groups, into Iraq’s army and police force.

Or is what has happened here possible only because of Anbar’s demographics? Were local sheiks able to rally against the extremist groups because Anbar’s population of 1.3 million is almost entirely Sunni — a population that does not have to guard Sunni unity in the face of the Shiite militias and death squads that have sprung up in Baghdad and other provinces in response to Sunni extremist attacks?

And there are the complexities of Baghdad politics to consider. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who leads the Shiite-dominated national government, has backed the tribal outreach in Anbar as a way to strengthen Sunni moderates against Sunni extremists there. But he has warned that replicating the pattern elsewhere could arm Sunni militias for use in a civil war with Shiites.

And this gives us more background into why Anbar has apparently turned into a “success” for Bushco…

The sheiks are not primarily fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq for revenge, but for the material benefits that flow from dominating the province. With US military assistance, they are eliminating their main rival for control over the extensive smuggling rackets that pass through Anbar to Syria and Jordan.

…

The attitude of the Sunni religious establishment toward the US-tribal alliance was expressed by the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, Harith al-Dhari, who has been driven into exile. Last month, he denounced the Anbar Salvation Council as “a band of thieves and bandits”.

More fundamentally, the elevation of petty tribal despots into power over an entire province is another demonstration of the neo-colonial agenda behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thousands of American troops are not in Iraq to assist some type of transition to democracy. They are there to erect a pliable puppet regime that will accept long-term US domination over the country and its resources. In the sheiks of Anbar, the Bush administration has found, at least for now, willing collaborators.

The only individual suffering from “clouded vision” is the person who uttered that phrase if he thinks that anything approximating “success” in the Iraq catastrophe can be built on payoffs, secret deals, and the in-all-likelihood-temporary compliance of some local benefactors in his scheme to plunder that country on behalf of his corporate handlers while he acts as their proxy.