Time for a Change

wants to and is able to get the job done. Most of Iraq is doing fine, it's just Bagdad that is having the problems.

Don't have such little faith in our military and our leaders. It's a tough job and we were told early on that it would be a long slog. We don't want to get out and have to go back again in another 10 years or so.

The EU and UN are worthless. UN soldiers have been accused of raping children in the Congo.

The Iraqi government is. We cannot create a stable Iraq when the Iraqi government as a whole is fomenting sectarian strife. Until this execution (and reading a lot of analysis on it), I thought that the best approach would be to actively target the Madhi Army, the Badr Brigades, etc. unless they dispanded and simply suggest that those retaining private militias would recieve opposition rather than protection from the US army.

However, the problem is that Al'Maliki has shown that the policy of his government is to inflame sectarian strife. By hanging Saddam on the first day of a Sunni holiday (but one that the Shiites start a day later), he has proven to be as much our enemy as the insurgents.

If Saddam's sentence had been carried out just a week later, we would not be having this discussion.

Our military can be the best in the world and in fact it is, but it alone is not enough. For Iraq to be able to govern itself, there has to be a government in place committed to inclusion of the various major ethnic and religious groups, and one which can thus build credibility with the Iraqi people. In my view, the only way this will happen is if we start seeing this not as an insurgency but a civil war on which both sides have proven themselves the enemies of a stable Iraq.