Iraq is FUBAR

FUBAR: a military acronym meaning Fucked Up Beyond All Rehabilitation. It’s a good term. It’s happened to me a few times. Things just get screwed up and go south and all you can do is pack it in and move on. I’m not sure exactly when it dawned on me that Iraq was FUBAR, but it seems it was at least three years ago. I wish I would have written about it then.

I must confess the drop in violence in Iraq over the last year made me wonder whether the Surge might indeed be working, although I couldn’t see how since there still weren’t enough troops to follow the Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency of one troop per fifty natives, which would have meant sending about five hundred thousand troops to Iraq. As it turned out there were a couple of other factors that accounted for most of the drop in the killing.

First, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr had been observing a ceasefire. Second, the US had been paying off Sunnis and former Saddam Baathists not to shoot at Americans, along with the fact that a lot of Sunnis had gotten fed up with al-Qaeda and had gone after them already. Finally, most of the killing and violence was centered around the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and cities and by last year had pretty much been completed after going on for two or three years.

I thought it telling that just as John McCain was saying. “The surge is working. I don’t care what anyone says,” Maliki decides to attack Sadr in Basra and all hell breaks loose throughout the south of Iraq with hundreds of deaths and a sounding defeat of Maliki, and by extension, the Americans. What McBush won’t tell us is that the US is already defeated in Iraq. If we’ve been there five years and there is this much violence, you cannot say we won. I don’t know what planet McBush is living on.