This'll Go Over Big. Shiites Are Breaking Up the Sunni Militias That Have Been Working with Our Military, Helping to Calm Iraq. Some Members Have Been Arrested.

According to LA Time's Ned Parker in "Iraq seeks breakup of U.S.-funded Sunni fighters "

BAGHDAD -- An emboldened Iraqi government has launched an aggressive campaign to disband a U.S.-funded force of Sunni Arab fighters that has been key to Iraq's fragile peace, arresting prominent members and sending others into hiding or exile as their former patrons in the American military reluctantly stand by.

The Shiite Muslim-led government has long distrusted the fighters, many of whom are former insurgents. Senior Shiite politicians label some of the members murderers, and warn that there is no long-term obligation to employ them after their units are disbanded. 

Read rest of article at source, though you may want to tie some pillows around your cranium in case you give in to the temptation to start banging it on a wall.

   A huge program that predated the surge and brought much of the peace that Bush and McCain claim came from the surge is being stopped at the behest of the Iraqi government.  (The rest of hte calm mostly came from sectarian division forced by the actions of the  militias and actions of the Iraqi government and bolstered by walling off neighborhoods.) 

Yes, that's the Sunni awakening militia being disbanded.  Such Sunnis had defied al Qaeda to help stem unimaginable levels of violence in which people took their lives in their hands just to travel through the  regions governed by the Sunnis.

The former leaders of the militia fear the disbanded units may go back to al Qaeda or other violence, while some hope to work in politics though they are over whelmed by the numbers of Shiites in their nation.

OUr troops are acquiescing to this with misgivings. I'm sure they have orders from above as the Bush administration struggles to keep our forces in the nation to protect Exxon's oil rights.

And remember this has been going on since Spring without our knowledge.  Yet the Bush administration and Republicans pretend that we are getting accurate knowledge about how Iraq is more peaceful now.

I figure the blowback is already hitting the fan and we won't know about it until December.

It could be too late before we know that Iraq is a mess all over again.  

The real problem information-wise is that Iraq is too dangerous for journalists to travel in without being embedded and they get thrown out if they don't write what the military want them too.  Iraqi journalists are too afraid to go anywhere but their own neighborhoods and the green zone.  So the news system tends to just report "official" information until someone arrives back from Iraq apparently.  In otherwords we are fed mostly propaganda about the war in Iraq.  And interestingly, that's how we got into this crappy war in the first place.

tags: iraq  war  anbar awakening  sunnis  shiites  

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