Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Full circle

Iraqi news-site AlMelaf.com reports:
Our correspondent in Baghdad learned from an official in the Interior Ministry that that ministry has obtained information on the existence of an American plan to send recruits from Sunni tribes to certain Baghdad areas. Our correspondent said there are four brigades being trained and equipped in preparation for assignment to Baghdad. He added that these bridages will be under the direct supervision and leadership of the American army, and they will be participating in military operations together with the American forces. And there is information to the effect the initial assignments will be to [the district of] Palestine Street, Waziriya, and two other districts not yet known.
Iraqslogger correctly notes that this would represent an escalation in tensions between the Iraqi government and the Americans, on the question of who controls military/security operations.

The implicit point is that this would represent US alliance with Sunni forces in areas where the main issues tend to be Sunni versus Shiia (and not Sunni versus AlQaeda). And in that way the coming full circle of what Iraqi nationalists have always said is essence of the American strategy: First, alliance with Shiite militias to persecute Sunnis (and Baathists in particular) in the post 2003 period; and now switching to alliance with Sunni fighters to persecute Shiites (and Sadrists in particular) to finish the job of reducing Iraq to a collection of walled-off cantons.

8 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

love the blog, but why no RSS feed? or am i blind?

7:20 AM  
Blogger badger said...

what an rss feed ?

7:47 AM  
Blogger badger said...

there was this in the settings tab:

Select Full to syndicate the full content of your post. Select Short if you only wish to syndicate the first paragraph, or approximately 255 characters, whichever is shorter. This setting will be applied to each type of feed (Post, comment and per-post comment feed).

And I didn't know what it meant, so of the three choices full, short, and none, I picked the middle one, short.

8:05 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

try this:
http://arablinks.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

1:39 PM  
Blogger badger said...

Magic. I did that and I "subscribed" so there's a toolbar (I have Firefox 2) with an icon for missing links that lets me see the first 250 words of whatever has been posted and you can click on any item to read the whole thing. And the next thing I found is that (also in Firefox 2), if you once go to arablinks and then click on the orange square at the right-hand side of the address bar, it opens a window where you can "subscribe" in this way. Is there other stuff I should do ? Maybe this doesn't work except in Firefox 2?

3:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Firefox provides a built in RSS reader, which they refer to as "Live Bookmarks" but there are other independent RSS readers like "RssReader.
The Link the first anonymous provided ( who isn't me ) is the link you need to add the blogs feed to an RSS reader or you can use this one alternatively ( http://arablinks.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default). It should be shown as an icon somewhere on your blog; but that isn't the case because your blog template is pretty old and simple.
You could add it by yourself though by adding a link to the sidebar in the links section under your profile and naming it "RSS Feed" it would be more obvious to those who don't use firefox :).

8:26 PM  
Blogger badger said...

Thank you both. I'm educated. But for now at least, I think I'll leave it that you can get an rss feed if you use Firefox (which is ridiculously simple to obtain and install, you don't really have to do anything but hit "download" and then "install"). I tried some dicking around with the other rss gizmos yesterday, and immediately something strange happened, so I'm off that for a while...

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