Pay No Attention…
…To the Mullah behind the curtain. Mohammed at Iraq the Model is seeing the hand of Iran in the events in Iraq right now. He describes the problems that local "reconciliation initiatives" inside Baghdad present.
Let me put it this way, this Hussein has no problem with that Bakir and that Omar has no problem with this Haider; we share streets and neighborhoods and markets and we marry from different sects and we work together in the hospital, office or shop.
The attempt of the sectarian parties to drag the ordinary people to the catastrophe of civil war will not appeal to the simple citizen who seeks peace by nature and let's not forget that arm-bearers and violence inciters are always a minority.What caught my attention these days is the phenomenon of localized reconciliation initiatives being organized between certain districts in Baghdad. These try to give the wrong impression that the division is between the people and makes the fighting parties look like the peace mediators.
Such practices have increased recently and taking the form of basically meetings between community leaders and tribal sheikhs of often adjacent sectors with difference in sectarian distribution where those participants would sign an honor code to stop killings and forced displacement.For example, there are now talks and meetings between Sadr city, Azamiya and several other districts in north-eastern Baghdad similar to the so far more or less successful reconciliation that took place in other parts of central eastern Baghdad districts last week. This example of neighborhoods peace talks is echoing in Baghdad recently even that I heard yesterday that the clashes there were going on in Haifa street and adjacent streets were the result of residents from a Sunni district and a Shia one joining forces to confront a death squad disguised as police commandos.
No one knows for sure what happened but this is what people here are saying.In one way or another I see this to confirm what was said above, that people need no reconciliation and the apparent success of the meetings supports this idea.
Still I believe such meetings between districts are necessary to clear the misunderstanding created by the fighting sectarian parties.
So if it is not the people themselves who need reconciliation, who is it – and why are they doing it? The answer may lie, Mohammed suspects, in who exactly is carrying the guns and what they want:
But again, why would they seek truce with all the deeply rooted differences between them?
Well the unpleasant scenario I'm expecting is basically that these parties want this truce to fix one front and pave the way for the beginning of a Sunni-Shia joint Islamic insurgency against the US and the UK in Iraq, and I call it Islamic because that's how the planning party wants it to look like to persuade militants of the other sect to join them in their next mischief or at least to guarantee that the other sect would remain neutral during the conflict they are planning to spark.
This is not a good scenario, and Mohammed lays the blame firmly at the feet of the Mullahs. I have long been noting that Iran's hand appears to be suspiciously nearby to far too many of the hotspots right now. And with North Korea also acting up, we are approaching a perfect storm. With the assistance of the useful idiots of the Western left, we are getting far too close to an eruption.
By Andrew, July 26, 2006 @ 9:06 pm
Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock. There is a race going on in the world today, one that holds everyone’s fate in the balance, and it is good to see Israel and the U.S. engaged. As we have seen in North Korea and Iran and Pakistan, the world’s most dangerous nations are rapidly moving closer to a situation where whoever wants a nuclear arsenal needs only to have the right friends or a little cash (oil). A little more time and another weak U.S. administration (think Clinton with North Korea) and the proliferators will have won the race. The most powerful nation in the world will become that nation with a single nuclear weapon and the will to use it. We have precious little time to shape the world before this happens, hence the emergence of “neo-cons” a while back, the few who have acknowledged the danger. Any peace initiative, call for withdrawal of troops, or call for Israel to stand down needs to be evaluated in terms of this race. This is as real as it gets; all the monsters of the past had limited technology to inflict their judgements on the people of the world, but very soon, the monsters of today and tomorrow will not be so constrained.