"DarkMirror" probability-prophecy attempt of the week...

Going out on a not-too-thin prophetic limb here: ... my feeling is that no matter what Bush's electoral wishful thinking may be, I don't think the US will be able to start pulling its troops out for a long time now even if it wants to - useless as US troops are for most practical "Iraqi security" purposes due to lack of knowledge of local language, culture and social ins and outs - and despite growing hostility not only from Sunnis but from Shia too.. because the likelihood of Iraq degenerating into multi-sided strife aka civil war is way too high now , the situation has already degenerated too far for the US to have much chance of a) reversing it or b) significantly "unloading" the Iraqi quagmire onto other countries. And it won't be able to use them merely to man a comfy big US military base conveniently near the oil-fields... the troops will have to stay in where the "action" is, in other words keep in there as sitting targets for insurgents and other attackers, then keep rampaging in afterwards to try to repress the attacks... thereby breeding more hostility, more attacks and so on ad infinitum - plus having the totally "non-enviable" situation to look forward to of being caught as man -in-the-middle in ethnic/religious warfare... really dangerous peacekeeping on the ground being well known to be the US's LEAST favorite military exercise - but that's exactly what it's going to get.

UN involvement? Yeah yeah, keep whistling - theoretically yes, on humanitarian grounds, but in reality the UN has to depend entirely on troops supplied by other "willing" nations and WHO exactly is going to be so crazy at this point as to supply the requisite several hundred thousand troops at this stage, in this situation or worse? Ditto NATO, don't think any other countries will really be prepared to provide much more than token assistance.

So... George W. wanted a war ? Wanted to send his fellow-citizens off to foreign climes to get bombed and shot at? Well I'm afraid that's what they've got... and when it will end is anybody's guess but my guess is that it WON'T be all over by June this year... or next year... or the year after that... And pre-emptively destroying Iraq's own civil policing and army structures hasn't helped much either... it's very easy to destroy, very hard to rebuild.. and/or glue what you've shattered back into some kind of workable, usable shape.

Anyway, I think a few years of this situation will put the US off any more offshore "adventuring" into wars of choice, for several generations to come.. which currently seems to be the only "silver lining" in this very gloomy situation


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