This Space for Rent

Oh, I’m sure this will work out well

It's not just telling the puppet government that they should write a constitution that converts Iraq into the Taliban lite, complete with converting women (and whatever other people the local conservatives disapprove of) into second class citizens that men are free to rape and murder without legal restraint. But it's also standing approvingly by as that puppet government just leaves people out of the process of drafting that "constitution" when they object to some of the unappealing parts of it.

A potentially more intractable problem in the long run was the disaffection of Sunni leaders, who have been largely excluded from the deliberations during the past week. The constitution has been written almost entirely by Shiite and Kurdish leaders, who said they had decided to leave the Sunnis out because they were being too inflexible.

And it's not as if the fundamentalist kookooheads haven't been taking full advantage of the hell on earth that post-"liberation" Iraq has become, either; no, it's just that the Shiite leadership from the south (and the Kurdish leadership, which really really wants their own separate state and are willing to put up just about any indignity that's inflicted on someone else to get it) with wants it all, and they're happy to borrow the "Don't negotiate with unbelievers" page from the Evil Party playbook.

Why, it just keeps getting better and better. Is the United States now doing the foreign policy equivalent of sacking Carthage with the Iraqi Sunnis and Sufis taking the place of the Carthaginians, or are we simple accepting a perpetual civil war in the hopes that Syria and Turkey will start shipping weapons in to the Sunni minority and thus give us an excuse for an aggressive war against them?