Glad to see him go

Juan Cole has numerous choice words as Bush prepares to depart:

... W. was just another spoiled rich kid who refused to grow up and threw up on the shoes of the rest of us while singing the praises of brutal militarism and unrestrained capitalism.

...

W. is a frightful combination of ignorant, dull, and pigheaded when to succeed in the Middle East he needed to be well-informed, bright and intellectually agile.

Those were my stomping grounds; I knew them the way W. knows Houston. But when I objected to his policies at this little weblog, my mailbox was flooded with hate mail from people who thought W. knew best about the Middle East. As if you could get experience, knowledge and wisdom about the world from 20 years of bar hopping in Texas. Did the man even have a passport?

It is a rather wonderful, if dispiriting, tour of the Bush legacy. I believe we need to lay these word to heart.

We have the opportunity now, to choose truth over propaganda, responsibility over recklessness, compassion over brutality, altruism over self-interest, and ability over incompetence. We have the opportunity to repudiate the past 8 years, and to transcend them once and for all, to redeem ourselves as a nation.

Savor the writing by reading the whole thing here.

--the BB

Havng trouble tracking who's up to what?

Juan Cole does some untangling for us:

This fixation on Iran just doesn't make any sense to me. The poor slum kids and Marsh Arabs in Basra who follow Muqtada al-Sadr don't even like Iranians. The primary Iran-linked force in Basra is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq with its Badr Corps militia, which most Basrans code as Iranian puppets. One of my Iraqi correspondents told me that when the Badr Corps was fighting Marsh Arabs, local Basrans characterized it as 'Iranians fighting Iraqis.' The Badr Corps, according to the Iraqi press, fought alongside al-Maliki's 14th Division against the Mahdi Army. The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and it is alleged that many Badr Corps fighters are still on the Iranian payroll.

Iranians come through Basra on their way up to Karbala and Najaf on pilgrimage to sacred Shiite shrines, and a handful may have gotten caught up in the fighting. This sort of thing has happened before. [8,000 Iranian pilgrims caught in Iraq because of the fighting have just been recalled home, and a temporary halt on the pilgrimages has been called.) But that Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran deliberately sent Iranian troops or agents into Basra to undermine ISCI, Badr, and al-Maliki's Da'wa (Islamic Missionary) Party on behalf of the Sadr Movement just strikes me as daft. It flies in the face of everything else we know about the relationship of these groups with Iran.

In fact, the Iranian leadership benefits from a united Iraqi Shiite community and the head of the Expediency Council, Akbar Rafsanajani, expressed concern about the faction-fighting among Iraqi Shiites. Iran brokered the cease-fire. If it wanted Shiite on Shiite fighting, why would it do that?

Neither the US nor Britain any longer has good intelligence on what is happening in the slums of Basra. If Petraeus is getting his information from al-Maliki on all this, he should be careful. The Da'wa and ISCI are perfectly capable of doing propaganda to embroil the US in their fights. In fact, their lies helped draw the US in, in the first place. [Emphasis mine]

Note: nobody in Iraq seems more "Iranian" than the Badr Corps allied with Maliki (the guy the US is backing). So trying to raise an alarm over "Iranian" involvement is rather disingenuous at best and deliberately misleading no matter how you slice and dice it.
--the BB