A Stephen Hadley Iraq Strategy: Be A Partner in Genocide with the Shiites

Laura Rozen writing in the L.A. Times tells us about an unpublicized two day meeting of Bush's national security team. She writes:

Numerous policy options were put forward at the meeting, which revolved around a strategy paper prepared by Hadley and drawn from his recent trip to Baghdad. One was the Shiite option. Participants were asked to consider whether the U.S. could really afford to keep fighting both the Sunni insurgency and Shiite militias — or whether it should instead focus its efforts on combating the Sunni insurgency exclusively, and even help empower the Shiites against the Sunnis.

To do so would be a reversal of Washington's strategy over the last two years of trying to coax the Sunnis into the political process, an effort led by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. It also would discount some U.S. military commanders' concerns that the Al Mahdi army, a Shiite militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, poses as great a threat to American interests as that presented by the Sunni insurgency centered in western Iraq's Al Anbar province.

So what's the logic behind the idea of "unleashing the Shiites"? It's the path of least resistance, according to its supporters, and it could help accelerate one side actually winning Iraq's sectarian conflict, thereby shortening the conflict, while reducing some of the critical security concerns driving Shiites to mobilize their own militias in the first place.

WTF???

Are they unaware of the massive human rights violations being committed by the Shiites? Acts that make Saddam almost seem like a novice. Indeed, our own Generals have described these acts as "ethnic cleansing."

One of the many fuck-ups in this whole Iraqi debacle is that we allowed the Shiite human rights abusers to become a large part of the Iraqi security forces specifically and the Iraqi government generally. Just as we should have never partnered with Saddam in the Eighties, we should not partner with the latest group of human rights abusers now.