Bush sends 1,500 more troops to Iraq and dashes hopes of withdrawal
Hopes of an early withdrawal of troops from Iraq were dashed yesterday as George Bush ordered a further 1500 into the embattled region.
The soldiers from a reserve force based in Kuwait were deployed in Anbar province, an insurgent stronghold stretching from Baghdad to the Syrian border. The deployment was described officially as "short-term".
Military officials quoted anonymously yesterday said it should last no more than four months, but it was a blow to the Bush administration's hopes of bringing troops home after the formation of the new government in Baghdad. There were about 130,000 US troops in Iraq before the deployment and that figure is unlikely to change for several months, military officials said.
"The situation in al-Anbar province is currently a challenge but is not representative of the overall security situation in Iraq, which continues to improve as the Iraqi security forces increasingly take the lead," Lieutenant Colonel Michelle Martin-Hing said yesterday.
Meanwhile the violence in Iraq shown no sign of abating as a further 46 people were killed yesterday when two bombs exploded in Husseiniyah and Hillah.
The simple truth is that troops levels in Iraq is increasing at a time when one could expect the opposite to be happening. After all, both Bush and Blair have always claimed that the resistance was attempting to stop the formation of a new Iraqi government. Now that the government have been formed one would expect the violence to abate.
That it has not done so is simply another example of the size of the lie we were told.
The problem in Iraq is simple to describe, there is a Sunni minority that for many years held the reins of power who have suddenly been disenfranchised of that power and who fear that the majority are now going to punish them for their years of dominance.
Democracy does not deal with this problem, it exacerbates it, as the demographics ensure that democracy means the Sunnis will never again be in a dominant position.
This would not be the case were people to vote for candidates who would be best suited to run the country rather than candidates who shared their ethnicity, but this is the expected consequence when an outside power imposes democracy before a nation is ready for it.
The only realistic way to ensure that Iraq survives is to split it into three separate regions, Kurd, Sunni and Shia, and give all three states an equal share in Iraq's future oil wealth.
Sadly, this sensible solution is the very thing that the new Iraqi Constitution has gone to great lengths to avoid.
So we can expect troops to be there for a long while if we insist on remaining until the Iraqis can take over.
For when the mostly Shia army takes control of the streets, all hell will break loose.
Back story
Iraq has taken more troops to occupy than to invade. About 100,000 US soldiers and marines (alongside 26,000 British troops) entered in March 2001; neo-cons in Washington who pushed for the war assumed most would be home by the end of 2001. More than three years on, there are 130,000 US and 7,200 British troops in the country, and the insurgency shows no sign of waning after December's elections and last week's new government. However, the US is down from a peak of 150,000 troops in January last year.
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