Well, “next”…who knows; I mean the Kurds are getting into it with Turkey, al-Sadr may turn his militias loose at any moment, the Green Zone is getting shelled….But Basra has not gotten the concern it deserves…here’s why:
The Brits are trying to withdraw from Iraq, and that means Basra will be left to the militias and whatever US unit dares to enter. It has been a hellhole since the beginning of the war, but has been somewhat under the US media radar. And it may continue that way, since no US correspondent in his right mind would leave the Green Zone to go to Basra, unless they were basically suicidal. Recent events threaten even a semblance of government control.
So will Basra just fester along? not exactly. Basically, all Iraqi oil now flows through Basra. The pipelines in the north, in the Kurdish regions, have already been extensively and repeatedly disrupted.
About a third of the oil flowing through Basra gets hijacked, diverted, stolen, looted, tapped, and sold on the black market. A great racket, but great rackets have a way of attracting interlopers, especially when law enforcement is next to non-existent. Will insurgents sabotage the pipelines as they have in the north? or will more of it be stolen? how will the US respond? how can it respond?
It is also worth remembering that the US military is largely supplied from Kuwait, along routes that run through the Basra region. Without British troops present, the US must detail units to guard their line of supply.
It goes without saying that Basra is very close to Iran, geographically as well as religiously. That has already heightened tensions there, as the Brits have joined the chorus claiming that Iran is supplying explosive devices responsible for the deaths of British soldiers.
And lastly, a member of the British royal family serving in Basra would be about the stupidest thing the Brits have done since taxation without representation.
We just don’t have enough troops to enforce any sort of general control in Iraq, and Basra is just one more example. It doesn’t matter what your political persuasion is, you can’t just dream up another 200,000 troops to send to Iraq on a continuous basis. We don’t have them. Can’t be done. The hypocrisy of Bush, Cheney and the like is astonishing: beating the drums because Iraq is so crucial to America, conjuring up all sorts of terrible outcomes if we leave, yet unwilling to institute the draft to accomplish “victory.”
So our kids just get chewed up day after day, week after week, year after year. Iraqis die, get killed, starve, have no services, and eventually the middle class leaves the country. Two million. A whole generation of men has been lost. And there we sit, trying cover up reality while presuming to tell the Iraqi parliament to give us their oil.
It’s a sham and a disgrace.
2 Comments
July 3, 2009 at 10:12 pm
yeah
great conspiracy out there
July 4, 2009 at 4:53 pm
over a million dead, 2 million widows and orphans, 4 million refugees.