Why call not it a 'Petraeus Village'?

[unhappycamper]

Why call not it a 'Petraeus Village'?
By Spengler
Oct 19, 2010

"May his name be blotted out!" declares the most terrible Hebrew curse. History has devised a curse more terrible still, that is, to have one's memory blotted out, all except for a name that popular usage links to disaster.

Schoolchildren no longer learn about King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who won battles against Rome at such heavy cost that he lost the war, but everyone knows that a "Pyrrhic victory" is to be avoided. Few remember Grigory Potyomkin (1739-1791), Catherine the Great's statesman and lover, but everyone knows the idiom "Potemkin Village", a facade constructed to deceive passing inspection.

~snip~

When Petraeus held the Iraq command, he put over 100,000 Sunni gunmen on the American payroll, offering them money and weapons to lie low for the interim. That arrangement lasted until the government of Nuri al-Maliki invited the Iranian-backed party of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to join his government - the same Muqtada whose Mahdi Army battled American forces for control of Sadr City in 2004. News reports on October 15 cited unnamed Washington sources saying that the Obama administration would end its support for Maliki if he allied with Muqtada, although it is not clear what that might entail.

Sectarian war is playing out in the predictable way, and America will have nothing to show for a trillion dollars' worth of "nation-building" and several thousand dead soldiers except a civil war much bloodier than might have occurred without America's provision of money and guns to the Sunni Awakening. In May, I reviewed this likelihood in an essay titled General Petraeus' Thirty Years War (Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010.)

The "surge" turns out to be the facade of a Potemkin - or perhaps we should say Petraeus - village, a facade like the old Hollywood Western sets, behind which prospective combatants oil their weapons and refill their magazines.

[SpiralHawk]

1. The cemetery should be called Commander AWOL Bush Republicon Acres

[SpiralHawk]

2. The cemetery should be called Commander AWOL Bush Republicon Acres

[saigon68]

3. "Bring Em On" shouted the AWOL CHIMPANZEE

[stray cat]

4. It's Americas war even if most of us sit back in arrogant comfort and blog opinions