Murtha and Common sense on Iraq

Saw this post over at Huffington Post today. Am placing it here in toto, sense it is a statement by a congressman:"

Situation in Iraq Is Civil War

According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, the definition of a civil war is a "war between political factions or regions within the same country." That is exactly what is going on in Iraq, not a global war on terrorism, as the President continues to portray it. 93 percent of those fighting in Iraq are Iraqis. A very small percentage of the fighting is being done by foreign fighters. Our troops are caught in between the fighting. 80 percent of Iraqis want us out of there and 45 percent think it is justified to kill American troops. Iraqis went to the polls in droves on December 15th and rejected the secular, pro-democracy candidates and those who the Administration in Washington propped up. Preliminary vote results indicate that Iyad Allawi, the pro-American Prime Minister, received about 8 percent of the vote and Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's current Oil Minister and close associate of the U.S. Iraq war planners, received less than 1 percent. According to General Vines, the top operational commander in Iraq, "the vote is reported to be primarily along sectarian lines, which is not particularly heartening." The new government he said "must be a government by and for Iraqis, not sects." The ethnic and religious strife in Iraq has been going on, not for decades or centuries, but for millennia. These particular explosive hatreds and tensions will be there if our troops leave in six months, six years or six decades. It is time to re-deploy our troops and to re-focus our attention on the real threats posed by global terrorism."

As I pointed out in a post back during the summer, a reading of books on the history of Iraq reveals that the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Kurds, have all been living in this area for good or ill, for the last 900 years. It is the March of Folly(cf. Tuchman) to think that US Military can get them to get along any better than they have been getting along over the span of a millennia.

Now the Neocons may have dreams of an Iraq safe for Halliburton, Bechtel, and US oil companies, but it looks like by voting for the Islamic list, the Iraqis have their own ideas about what they want to see happen in their own country.

And once US troops finally do leave they can hardly be targets for Al- Zarqawi and his suicide bombers. In other words if 45 % of the Iraqi public think it is okay to kill US troops, Iraq just may not be the place to fight Al-Qaeda, or the Jordanian mishmosh version of it.