NOW THERE'S A REALIST:

An Old Bush Hand Takes on a New Role on the Iraq War (STEVEN R. WEISMAN, 10/21/06, NY Times)

For years, James A. Baker III was asked to explain why the first President Bush, whom he served as secretary of state, did not oust Saddam Hussein in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf war.

“Guess what?” Mr. Baker says these days. “Nobody asks me that anymore.”

Long path to Iraq's sectarian split (David Gritten, BBC News)

For more than 1,000 years, Iraq has served as a battleground for many of the events that have defined the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

In more recent decades, the political and economic dominance of Iraq's minority Sunni Arabs and their persecution of the country's Shia majority have only served to stoke sectarian tensions.

The US-led invasion in 2003, in which the nominally secular Baath government of Saddam Hussein was overthrown, finally gave Iraq's Shias an opportunity to seek redress and end the imbalance of power.

Of course, Mr. Baker tried keeping the USSR together too. The Realists just prefer stability to liberty. Meanwhile, it's because of Mr. Baker and his cohorts in the first Bush adminstration that the Shi'a were so justifiably ambivalent about the '03 war.

MORE:
IRAQ: UNITING AGAINST THE JIHADIS (AMIR TAHERI, October 20, 2006, NY post)

TALK to Iraqis these days, and you'll likely hear one thing: What are the Americans and Brits up to? The worry is that the U.S. and U.K. political mainstreams now regard the Iraq project as a disaster, with cut-and-run, or whistle-and-walk-away, the only options.

Most Iraqis regard the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the dismantling of his machinery of war and oppression and the introduction of pluralist politics to Iraq as an historic success. The issue is how to consolidate that victory, not to snatch defeat from its jaw. Those challenging this historic victory are enemies of both the Western democracies and the Iraqi people.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 21, 2006 11:01 AM