I like the picture you chose. Is that how you view the US military or were you trying to be funny? Too many view the military as a joke or something more sinister and deserving of hatred (and of being robbed to pay for social programs).

Lynx:

Meanwhile, neighbor Mexico is siding with the Catholics and smuggling arms into the country, along with sympathetic fighters through the porous borders almost impossible to control in part because much of it is desert wasteland.

A good partial description of Iran, but also a true possibility someday in our Southwest, with some on the far left (not limited to Reconquista-Aztlan activists) cheering it.

I’d like to progress more with this analogy and say that readers should consider partition. Oh, we know about the hatred expressed for the South — but some talked of seceding (only joking, but probably feeling good about the idea nevertheless) each time Bush was elected.

Be pragmatic, Bluesies, and just join Canada. That means New England (whose liberal politics are alien to this country; they are practically anti-matter to the USA), some Rust Belt Great Lakes states, and the Pacific Northwest (the core of “Cascadia”).

Of course, you’ll have to make some big territorial concessions (the states themselves may be partitioned if they are seceding), you’ll have to assume most of the current federal debt, and may owe the USA more, but if you do all you must, and you behave yourselves — well, it would be an interesting change to the map.

(Actually, this continent could easily and sensibly exist as a number of separate nations, 4-6 or so.)

You are quite right that Anbar is where the civil war started lo those many years ago, and it’s reassuring that striff there does indeed seems to have been tamped down for the moment. But the fact is that the civil war has spread far beyond Anbar and rages on.

Once again, I’ll take good news where I can find it, and the work that the Marine (and to an extent the Army) has done in Anbar is magnificent, but the round peg and square hole analogy doesn’t change.

Anbar, no matter what you’d like to believe, is important. It’s important because Anbar is where the civil war started. It was SVIED’s and various other insurgents that sortied from places like Falluja and bombed the UN, the Samarrah Mosque (last year) and conducted a genocidal campaign against any shiite they ran across and many Sunni’s for that matter (SVIED’s tend not to discriminate). The people who did this were all part of an umbrella group lead by AQI. These attacks were what lead several shiite groups to say, “f&*k this” and conduct an ethnic cleansing campaign of their own in Baghdad. Now, that Anbar umbrella group (at the time called the Mujahideen Shura Council, or just “Shura”) is dismantled and the local tribal leaders have reasserted their historic authority. Those tribal leaders were able to do this, because we protected them from Shura – who murdered those that did not actively help them. IOW, we are not “bribing”
tribal leaders per se (although culturally, bribery is acceptable and expected in Iraq), but the real reason is that we kept AQI from murdering them and their family. To understand the Anbar tribes and tribal systems in general, I suggest you read this. As a result of this effort, AQI is on the run and the Anbar “locals” are on our side. The remaining elements fled to – surprise, Diyala, where they now call themselves the “Islamic State of Iraq” and are in the process of getting their ass handed to them there through a similar strategy as what was practiced in Anbar.

Perhaps these successes are meaningless and too much water has passed under the bridge, but to say the removal the cancer in Anbar that begat the civil war we’re now experiencing was a meaningless enterprise is to really expose one’s fundamental ignorance of the complexities of this conflict.

A round peg that has been jimmied into a round hole that is Anbar, an all-Sunni region that represents but a small fraction of the Iraqi population, is not on its face going to fit into the square hole that is the rest of Iraq.

As I said, I’ll take good news where I can. Perhaps Bushco can defy the laws of nature and get that round peg into the square hole. He has a very short time to do so.

Meanwhile, neighbor Mexico is siding with the Catholics and smuggling arms into the country, along with sympathetic fighters through the porous borders almost impossible to control in part because much of it is desert wasteland. The EU keeps warning about “consequences” to this action and Mexico responds with a generalized “I double dog dare you” as it knows that the EU is perfectly aware that if it can barely control Washington DC, there’s no way they can handle Mexico DF as well.