i'm totally confused.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080408/ts_nm/iraq_dc;_ylt=AiYdQhUy.ZxdB29ophcCtaJZ.3QA

Iraq's Sadr threatens to scrap ceasefire By Ahmed Rasheed
1 hour, 6 minutes ago

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr threatened on Tuesday to end a truce he imposed on his militia last year, raising the prospect of worsening violence just hours before top U.S. officials testified on Iraq in Washington.

Sadr urged his Mehdi Army to "continue your jihad and resistance" against U.S. forces, although he did not spell out if this was an explicit call for attacks on American soldiers.

His warning came a day after Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki threatened to bar Sadr's movement from political life unless the anti-American cleric disbanded his militia.


****


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080407/ts_nm/iraq_dc

Iraq's Sadr to disband Mehdi Army if clerics order By Khaled Farhan
Mon Apr 7, 3:53 PM ET

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is ready to disband his militia if Shi'ite religious leaders demand it, his aides said on Monday, a surprising offer given renewed clashes between his fighters and security forces.


The news came after Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who launched a crackdown on Sadr's Mehdi Army late last month, ordered the cleric to disband his militia or face exclusion from the Iraqi political process.

If Sadr's Militia disbands it would mean an out and out defeat and defeat to jihad is not acceptable therefore I'm thinking that was a bluff.  A ceasefire is one thing (the Militia is still enacted) Disband is impossible.  The militia would have to be totally wiped out.

i'm totally confused.



But not as confused as McCain!
:D

Flip a coin every six hours.  Heads, Sadr's winning.  Tails, Maliki's winning.

I'm beginning to wonder if the whole thing isn't some sort of Muzzie kabuki theater.  As a Westerner, I think of war as something with winners and losers.  The winner presses his advantage until the loser either surrenders or is exterminated.  When the white flag goes up, a treaty gets signed, and peace breaks out because, win or lose, both sides agree that the unpleasant game is over.

Maybe they don't look at war the same way we do -- war's something you do to save face.  When you start winning, you cut a deal with the loser so as to appear gracious in victory.  (When you're losing, you offer a deal with the intention of backstabbing the winner at the next opportunity.)  When the white flag goes up, the treaty gets signed, but neither side expects it to last until the ink dries, because the game is never over.

Western cultures have traditionally fought for objectives; when the objective is achieved, the fight ends.  Once the chase is on, either the lion eats the gazelle, and is satiated.  Or the gazelle escapes and sleeps comfortably that night while the lion starves on the plains.  Tomorrow, the lion goes after a zebra, and the gazelle's 20 miles away worrying about that tiger off in the distance.  Western war's like boxing -- you want the knockout, and even a stalemate eventually goes to the judges, but eventually it's supposed to be over.

Maybe tribal cultures view it as a continual test for dominance.  Mountain goats butt heads at every possible opportunity to see who's king of the mountain and who gets to mate tonight.  It's aggressive and bloody, but nobody dies, and the same players come back to butt heads again tomorrow.  No permanent winners and losers, just a continual game of posturing to see who gets laid tonight.  Muslim war seems more like pro wrestling -- a lot of chest-thumping, and as soon as the bell rings, everyone goes backstage to talk smack about old rivalries while posture in front of the cameras, and tune in next week for Tribalmania CLXVII.

(I'm not arguing that one mode of war's more right/wrong/civilized than the other.  I'm merely pondering what war's for.  Maybe it serves a completely different purpose in the Middle East than it does here, and that's the root of our problems -- we want/expect wars to end, and they don't.  We're as confused by their randomly-shifting allegiances as they are by our dogged insistence that they collectively pick a side and end it.)

(I'm not arguing that one mode of war's more right/wrong/civilized than the other.  I'm merely pondering what war's for.  Maybe it serves a completely different purpose in the Middle East than it does here, and that's the root of our problems -- we want/expect wars to end, and they don't.  We're as confused by their randomly-shifting allegiances as they are by our dogged insistence that they collectively pick a side and end it.)

As an assessment, that makes a lot more sense than anything else I can think of.. with the added complication that it's cultural rather than religious - the religious divide is one of the factors that mean the enmity is always there; the cultural one overlays a style of combat that means nothing is ever permantently resolved.

And then you get us Westerners blundering in without understanding either the local cultures or the religion.  Why the hell did we do it? Though after Blair's recent outing himself as even more of a religious headcase than we formerly thought, it's starting to seem even more like a religious war :(.

anyone who knows me knows i'm the furthest thing from the PC police but i didn't actually see the word "muzzie" on this thread, did i? that's a disgusting term.

i'm not so convinced that we DO want wars to end. first i'm not clear who the "we" is. there are a lot of people with domestic civilian jobs that depend on the war. war ends, they run the risk of layoffs. they don't want the war to ever end, and have said as much. plus i think there's something about this whole ritual a lot of people quite like -- slapping flags on the car, getting that vicarious sense of purpose, getting to tell people one doesn't like that they're unpatriotic, and most of all oozing pious truisms about how nobody likes war. ever hear of a book called "war is a force that gives us meaning"?

anyway, for a country that doesn't like war and wants them to end quickly we certainly do seem to start quite a lot of them and drag them out quite often -- in order to have "peace with honor" or make sure that those who died already won't have died in vain. in other words... to save face.

anyone who knows me knows i'm the furthest thing from the PC police but i didn't actually see the word "muzzie" on this thread, did i? that's a disgusting term.


Fair 'nuff.  Consider it duly noted and retracted.  (I'll leave the original post unedited so that other readers can see what you were talking about.)

I was going to go for "Arab", but then we've got the Iranians into it, and they're Persians, not Arabs.  I went with "Muzzie" over "Muslim" since there are plenty of Muslims who aren't interested in permanent war for the hell of it, and "Islamofascist" is both too politically-loaded and too strong -- there's plenty of folks in Iraq and Iran who just want to take advantage of the power vaccuum when we're gone, but don't hate us enough to attempt to genocide all 300 million of us.  (The Sunnis and Shiites probably hate each other enough for genocide, but at least that won't be our problem...)


i'm not so convinced that we DO want wars to end. first i'm not clear who the "we" is. there are a lot of people with domestic civilian jobs that depend on the war.

To clarify:  by "we", I meant Joe Sixpack who's sick and tired of seeing the economy swirling around the bowl (or G.I. Joe who's sick and tired of getting shot at) while we accomplish no recognizable military objectives.  (Obviously, defense contractors have different views. Good for business - they get to beta-test all the stuff they're going to be selling to local police departments over the next 20 years.)


i think there's something about this whole ritual a lot of people quite like -- slapping flags on the car, getting that vicarious sense of purpose, getting to tell people one doesn't like that they're unpatriotic, and most of all oozing pious truisms about how nobody likes war. ever hear of a book called "war is a force that gives us meaning"?

anyway, for a country that doesn't like war and wants them to end quickly we certainly do seem to start quite a lot of them and drag them out quite often -- in order to have "peace with honor" or make sure that those who died already won't have died in vain. in other words... to save face.


From 1941-1945, we (with a little help from some friends who took some hard knocks in 1939 and 1940) took over an entire continent in less time than it's taken us to take over an area the size of California.

We didn't just have civililan fuel rationing, we had civilian food rationing.  We threw 30% of GNP into that war.  Talk about a force that gives us meaning?  Never mind feeling smug about slapping a sticker on the car, how about if you wanted fresh veggies (so you'd have enough points left over for roast beef), you grew 'em yourself in your own back yard.

The frustrating thing is that we could still end this war by next Tuesday with a push of a button.  Unlike Vietnam, the Russians and Chinese care... but they don't care enough to actually stop us.  It probably wouldn't even do much more harm to our international reputation than's already been done.  Careful what you wish for -- the day the flag-waving crowd stops being bored with this war and decides that it's tired of it is the day that it ends. 

I've recently re-read Ender's Game, and Card's hierarchy of alienness has been on my mind.  Most of the enemies we've fought (Germans, Russians) have been framling: people just like us who happen to be wearing a different piece of cloth.  Japan was a notable exception for a few years, but after a couple of nukes to snap them out of it (and a long reconstruction process, during which we snapped out of it), we grew to regard each other first as ramen, and then (due to the Cold War) as framling.

As long as the combatants in the middle east regard each other as varelse, no communication is possible.  They don't know why we've stuck around as long as we have.  We don't know why they prefer shooting each other to pumping oil and selling it to us.  So it goes...

well, i dont think there's any point in mentioning world war ii in any context related to this particular war. in world war ii we had a manufacturing-based economy, we were a surplus oil-exporting nation (and really you can't viably fight a sustained war without that, because otherwise keeping the tanks full becomes a massive exercise in debt generation) and it was an all-out war against a rival industrial power, which this war most decidedly is not, nor is it meant to be. that's why bush told us to keep shopping, because this is really a low-intensity conflict other than war, it's an occupation involving massive funding but not that many people so most of us dont really have to give up anything.

there's one place where the wwii analogy is right, though. if the right-wingers push the button in the middle east, which i dont put past em, no, i think the thing to worry about isn't the opposition from russia and china but the opposition from decent nations around the world. i think if something like that goes down they'll start seeing the US, rightly, as a threat to the continued survival of the human race and if they're smart, they'll start mobilizing to unseat the US government the way the free world mobilized to fight the nazis. although actually the US could probably be brought down with economic warfare, this economy is very, very vulnerable.

anyway, yeah, if something like that happened i'd side with the EU and the free nations against the US. a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the ME and i'd wash my hands of this country's government for good, and it would become the priority of every free-thinking citizen of the world to overthrow it.

Yeah, this war comes down to a corporate welfare state.  Will the next generation of technological marvels come out of all these contractor pay-offs?  I don't see it happening.  I see lots of half-assed weapons idled in warehouses. 

This isn't really a war anyway.  Congress did not declare war.  It's an imperialist occupation.  Congress could end this horrorshow this year if they had the stones to cut off funding, but nobody wants to get accused of "not supporting our troops," and how many in congress are on the military-industrial gravy train?
::)

Yeah, this war comes down to a corporate welfare state.  Will the next generation of technological marvels come out of all these contractor pay-offs?  I don't see it happening.  I see lots of half-assed weapons idled in warehouses. 

This isn't really a war anyway.  Congress did not declare war.  It's an imperialist occupation.  Congress could end this horrorshow this year if they had the stones to cut off funding, but nobody wants to get accused of "not supporting our troops," and how many in congress are on the military-industrial gravy train?
::)


The weapons that they do have they've haven't really used because it would horrify the American public.  Haliburton has been connected to everyone from the Vice-President to Hillary Clinton. 

Yeah, this war comes down to a corporate welfare state.  Will the next generation of technological marvels come out of all these contractor pay-offs?  I don't see it happening.  I see lots of half-assed weapons idled in warehouses. 


You see lots of half-assed weapons in warehouses.

I see beta testing and lots of inventory ready for sale to a hungry domestic market.

Tomato! Tomato!
Ptatoe! Potato!
Too late to call the whole thing off.