A surprising op-ed piece "Iraq's woes stem from Bush administration's toppling of Sunni rule" in Australia's The Age newspaper by an avowed and well known Conservative commentator on whose to blame for the crisis in Iraq. Stand up George Bush, Dick Cheney and their acolytes Tony Blair and John Howard!
"But the overriding point here is that American neoconservatives, like most supporters of the decision to invade Iraq, still can't acknowledge the taproot of today's disaster: the toppling of Sunni rule that led to the Shiite ascendancy in Baghdad."
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"But the unintended consequences of the war were not just the costs in blood, treasure and prestige for the US, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi civilians."
*****
"Now the chickens are coming home to roost. The Iraqi state, as the world has known it since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, is coming apart. Portraits of Iran's late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei litter central Baghdad. And the only group capable of liberating Sunni strongholds from Sunni jihadists are the Iranian-backed Shiite militias who scare the living bejesus out of the marginalised Sunnis.
In hindsight, the war was bound to be so messy and so dangerous that it was not worth so much blood and treasure. This was a point well made by (of all people) Dick Cheney. That's right: a decade before the 2003 invasion, the future vice-president believed that toppling Saddam Hussein's regime would not be worth it.
As Cheney put it in 1994: "Once you got to Iraq and took down Saddam Hussein's government, what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world. You take down the central government in Iraq and you can easily see pieces of Iraq fly off ... It's a quagmire."
Quagmire indeed."
"But the overriding point here is that American neoconservatives, like most supporters of the decision to invade Iraq, still can't acknowledge the taproot of today's disaster: the toppling of Sunni rule that led to the Shiite ascendancy in Baghdad."
****
"But the unintended consequences of the war were not just the costs in blood, treasure and prestige for the US, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi civilians."
*****
"Now the chickens are coming home to roost. The Iraqi state, as the world has known it since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire nearly a century ago, is coming apart. Portraits of Iran's late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei litter central Baghdad. And the only group capable of liberating Sunni strongholds from Sunni jihadists are the Iranian-backed Shiite militias who scare the living bejesus out of the marginalised Sunnis.
In hindsight, the war was bound to be so messy and so dangerous that it was not worth so much blood and treasure. This was a point well made by (of all people) Dick Cheney. That's right: a decade before the 2003 invasion, the future vice-president believed that toppling Saddam Hussein's regime would not be worth it.
As Cheney put it in 1994: "Once you got to Iraq and took down Saddam Hussein's government, what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world. You take down the central government in Iraq and you can easily see pieces of Iraq fly off ... It's a quagmire."
Quagmire indeed."
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