Regarding Iraqi bloggers, there are just as many on the negative side. You’re being selective about who you read. As for someone else on the ground in Baghdad, try Back-to-iraq.com.

Regarding what can be done in Iraq. This is a small thing, but I think it would be helpful if movies from the Taliban era in Afghanistan were shown on tv. It’s one thing for the Iraqis to decide what type of govt they would like, but I think they may be more willing to give the jihadis the heave-ho if they had a better idea of just what the jihadis would like to implement. Show the movies of the gangs of 18 yr olds beating the elderly and women in the streets for some infraction. Show those gory soccer matches where beheadings and stonings took place at half time. I understand some of the Fallujans who originally invited the jihadis in are anxious to get rid of them as they are attempting to forbid music and tv, and generally take power from the local leaders. Although, with all the aerial bombing who really knows anymore.

Iraqi Kurdistan is in considerably worse state than it was 18 months ago, when it had a long term rapprochement between the DPK and the PUK,

I think you did….

I could have gone to Google News and just typed in “Mosul” or “Kirkuk” and had my pick of thousands of articles about the mess that Iraqi Kurdistan is at the moment.

Or better yet, you can read Iraqi blogs. News from the source beats a reporter holed up in Baghdad any day.

Look, be honest, with yourself if no-one else. Is what is happening in Iraq today really what you envisaged 18 months ago?

Honest about what? As I said, you and I don’t really know what Iraq is like, because we aren’t there. I said it ain’t roses but it’s not a disaster. Yes, that’s what I thought it would be, and probably will be for a while. You seem to be claiming it’s something on the order of Vietnam.

No you don’t. You understand what you want me to say. I didn’t say anything about PUK/KDP feuds, for example. To demonstrate you don’t understand what I’m saying…

Your funny. I have to mine an artical about Bagdad to find a reference to a soldier dying near Mosul, therefore disaster.

No, if I wanted to, I could have gone to Google News and just typed in “Mosul” or “Kirkuk” and had my pick of thousands of articles about the mess that Iraqi Kurdistan is at the moment. The point I was making was that violence is so common place in Iraqi Kurdistan that it often barely rates a mention.

Look, be honest, with yourself if no-one else. Is what is happening in Iraq today really what you envisaged 18 months ago?

DSW

I understand what your saying, I simply disagree.

If ‘tensions’ and ‘possibilities’ are your criteria for a disaster, then you should move to Utopia. By that standard Kosovo or Sarajevo is a disaster. You’d make a fabulous CBS reporter.

Your funny. I have to mine an artical about Bagdad to find a reference to a soldier dying near Mosul, therefore disaster.

Well, if you think truck drivers getting killed at random is, you know, normal and not a sign of a deteriorating situation, I’d hate to live where you do.

‘barely even rate a mention?’ Hilarious. Barely mentioned? [...] I also find it odd that one of your posts has nothing to do with Northern Iraq at all, but rather Baghdad.

Oh, for God’s sake that was the point. If you scroll down in the Guardian article about Baghdad, you’ll find in paragraph 13, you’ll find a reference to an American soldier dying near Mosul. Barely worth a mention, because, well obviously because Iraqi Kurdistan is such a happy peaceful place.

these things don’t get mentioned as often or as loud as you think they should for the same reason a mugging isn’t big news in New York.

This is my point!

In reference to the PDK and PUK blood fued that you find so worrisome…

No, that wasn’t what I was talking about at all, that’s ancient history, and none of the articles I linked to so much as mentioned it. I was talking about the incipient three cornered ethnic war over the future status of Kirkuk between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen and the possibility of straight out fight between the Arabs and Kurds in Mosul. But don’t you worry, just you deliberately misunderstand what I say and it’ll all go away.

No, I can read “gunshot wound” and “hospital morgue.” Iraqi’s don’t take their dead to the hospital to be put in a morque. They wash their dead and bury them. A hospital morque is for people who were taken to the hospital because they thought they could live and, alas, they died. So if a Baathist era thug takes my 5 sons, kills them, and throws them out with the trash, the hospital ain’t invovled. Besides, you’ve offered no proof of that statement.

And it’s not convenience, but fact. Shall we add the thousands murdered every year by Baathist thugs? Or the maimings and torture performed on countless people. Your right to fault American ‘performance’ on security in Iraq. But to claim the situation is ‘worse’ than Sadaam era thuggery is ridiculous. For that, I listen only to the Iraqi people.

As for the Saddam-era total, it would of course be convenient for you to include the 1988 and 1991 crushings of uprisings in a monthly average, even tough they happened before Saddam was contained as and with silent approval from Reagan and Papa Bush - only, we don’t know those numbers. 300,000 is widely claimed, but attesting to the extremely low priority the Occupation powers have given to the real tasks following from their rhetoric, only 5,000 were dug up from mass graves so far - most of them by untrained Iraqis just after the invasion, without any Bosnia-style forensic program…

…but this all is beside the point; since when is the threshold to measure the World’s Greatesst Democracy’s performance by the performance of one of the worse dictators of the 20th century?…

Kerry doesn’t present us with a solution. He may yet have a secret plan, but my impression is that he is just as oblivious to reality and the difficulties of the task as most of the US political elite, and seems more pre-occupied with lessening US troop numbers than about what’s best for the Iraqi people. To participate in a non-solution, would only serve to let it fester longer, making the forces the fear of which supposedly keeps us there only stronger. That is to say, the longer you stay the worse the aftermath.

So, Edward, what I think European politicians with foresight could do is to seek and build relations with every possible Iraqi group, and try to use these connections to pressure or to act as an intermediary whenever something happens once Iraq is left to its own, rather than following any grand strategy.