[yesman065]

Hopefully soon ...

Bread and a Circus

Originally Posted by Michael Yon

Sunni and Shia actually get along well in many places. Many neighborhoods are mixed, families are mixed. They do not react hypergolically. They are not anti-matter and matter meeting for the first time. Military units are often mixed and work well together. But of course there would not be so much talk about the sectarian divide and there would not be all the mosques blowing up and so forth if there were not great truth in those words.

Arrowhead Ripper had ripped out the heart of al Qaeda in Baqubah, but not before they had successfully deepened a rift between Shia and Sunni. What would it look like in Arab press outside of Iraq? Perhaps, “Shia-Dominated Government Declines Food Request for Sunnis in Iraq.” Al Qaeda would win another media victory partly because they play the media like a Stradivarius. Then, driving that wedge just that extra smidgen forward, they might say Moqtada al Sadr himself controlled the food (and he probably does to some extent).

The new plan actually seems to be working despite the hysterical reporting back home. We need more Tontos in Hollywood, in the media and in the Congress. We’ve got plenty in the military.

And so we started with 16 trucks, but before it was all over, they had sent 94 trucks of food to Baqubah. There was enough food, according to our Army, to feed 200,000 people for 30 days.

I recalled one of the bureaucrat’s comments, upon hearing that al Qaeda had scattered like rabbits out of Baqubah. He seemed at first not to believe that news, but once he got confirmation, he made a point to tell us what that news actually meant: if al Qaeda was done in Baqubah, al Qaeda was done in Iraq.