The wheat and the chaff
December 28, 2004
The violence that killed fifteen bodyguards of the top Shia candidate, Abdelaziz Hakim, has triggered two different reactions, whose trends are starting to be predictable, and unsurprising if not ironic. The Sunnis decide to back out of the election (reg’n required, sorry) while Hakim’s supporters throw a rally demanding that the elections push through on the set date (no link this late at night; it was mention on Fox News tonight though).
So. The people who are “supposed” to be freaked out by assassination attempts are further emboldened to fight for their freedom, and the ones who would gain the most political (if not institutionally political) capital in a failure of the elections in Iraq, are backing out, which in my mind is not a safety concern as it is their way to contribute to such failure. There has got to be some sort of strange irony in this all. Bin Laden appears on tape and the coward basically signed off his authority in Iraq to Zarqawi, the end of a power struggle that Venomous Kate observed long before any of us realized it. His tape threatening the people of Iraq isn’t going to help him much either; has that old coot not learned the lessons of the post–Bush-campaign era that he is not a boogeyman that would scare Iraqis (not Americans for sure) into cowering under their covers? On January 30th the people of Iraq will have a strong message for him: “Fuck him and the mountain goat he sleeps with.”
The wheat and the chaff, folks. The grain is tossing in the wind and we know who’s being blown away.
One Comment to The wheat and the chaff
Comments to this entry are closed. You can contact me by email, or you can write about it on your blog and link to this post. Pingbacks are always welcome.
Nice post Jay.
Abdel Aziz al-Hakim sounds determined when he makes statements such as this:
“We have chosen the path of non-violence and we will stick to it,” Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), told Reuters from his devastated compound. “The only ideology these people know is terror. We laid down our arms in favor of pluralism. If we wanted violence we would have responded a long time ago.”
The Shiites are expected to dominate the January elections…and have a long history of abuse from the old Saddam regime…What I find interesting is that the Iranian Foreign Ministry was in the news condemning the attack on Abdel Aziz al-Hakim before the smoke cleared. They know that an adversarial relationship with the new Iraqi leadership is going to embolden the Iranian people to make a similar challenge. Iran knows the elections will take place on time…and now they have damage control to contend with…In other words, they have to patronize the expected new leadership…Considering that Iran is a predominately Shiite nation…there are interesting times to come…
Cheers
IR