Hope?

Bush will release his new Iraq strategy tonight. Apparently he's been reading my blog, either that or he got the message that I left for him with the White House comment line.

The plan is to send a little more than 20,000 more troops to Iraq, with the vast majority of them going straight into Baghdad, with the remainder being filtered into Al Anbar province, the so called "Sunni Triangle". The big news, and what may be the biggest help of it all is a promise in a change to the rules of engagement for our men and women over there.

The new rules will not play into the bitter infighting and politics of the Iraqi government, and will show no prejudice over any militia regardless of their political and religious ties. Hopefully this will give us a chance to finally deal with Muqtada's militias in the manner that they deserve.

I hope that 20,000 troops will be enough. I stated before that we needed more troops, but at this point it might be too late to send a significant amount into the country, and the most feasible option would be to send them into Baghdad only. So we will see if anything I said was right. This is supposed to also be coupled with an influx of Iraqi troops from other parts of the country, so there should be a major presence on the streets of Baghdad.

It is yet to be seen where these troops will come from, hopefully not all of them will come in from the Shi'a dominated south. Hopefully what Bush has promised about the rules of engagement is not only true, but will be upheld by Maliki, who seems to be in al-Sadr's back pocket. If we secured Baghdad, where most of the violence comes from, we could scale back our presence there and allow more Iraqi control, leaving our troops to deal with the insurgency still rocking the area west of Baghdad.

Which brings up an interesting thought to me, and one that I have no answer for. Why is it that that the armed groups are labelled differently depending on where they come from? Why is it the Sunni Insurgency, and the Shi'a Militia? That boggles my mind, and seems to give a certain amount of legitimacy to the Shi'a movement. Militia doesn't sound as anti-establishment as insurgency.

By definition, and Insurgency works to overthrow a government, while a Militia is "a group of civilians who drill regularly and can be called up in an emergency". But is it not the Shi'a militias very aim to institute a government based on the Irani model of theocracy and Shari'ah, thereby overthrowing their government? They are both insurgencies. The Shi'a do the same horrible things that the Sunna do; assassinations, death squads, forcing people out of neighborhoods, IED's, killing Iraqi and American Soldiers. They are not a peacekeeping force, and they are not protecting civilians. They are protecting Shi'a, and Muqtada's interests.