Some Quotes From the "Bush is Saddam" Article

Oh, there are some killer lines:

"During the congressional hearings about the surge, I kept thinking of Tattoo on Fantasy Island, half expecting Ambassador Crocker to tug on Gen. Petraeus's sleeve and say, "Look, boss, da plane.""

"At least US$10 billion has been embezzled, according to Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, which is itself underfunded (12 of its members have been murdered). After a U.S. report surfaced detailing how the prime minister blocked the commission's investigations of corrupt officials, Maliki accused the head of the commission of corruption and threatened him with arrest. Luckily the man was already out of the country."

"I spent a lot of 2003 and 2004 around Falluja and Ramadi, getting to know a group of insurgents fighting the U.S. occupation. I'm fairly certain that if the tribal militias had been intelligently treated -- i.e. paid US$10 each per day the way they are now -- and the U.S. Army hadn't driven around Ramadi and Falluja shooting wildly in the spring of 2003, many would have been American allies from the beginning."

"Senior Iraqi army officers complain that when they organize raids on Shia militias, they are stopped on orders from the prime minister's office."

"By one estimate, Baghdad was once 65 per cent Sunni; today it is 75 per cent Shia. Deaths from sectarian killings are reportedly down, in large measure because there are few mixed neighbourhoods left. Almost the entire Sunni middle class lives in Jordan or Syria. If you are named Omar, a traditional Sunni name, chances are you are dead or living abroad. Under Saddam, no one on the streets of the capital ever uttered the word mukhabarat, meaning the feared security police. Today, no one says maktab, meaning "office," but in fact referring to radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army's bases from which members control neighbourhoods. Their preferred method of torture is the electric drill."

"Thanks to the Americans, al-Qaeda in Iraq became the Greenpeace of the jihadi world."

(Listen up, Joe Biden:)

"An enduring myth about Iraq is that it can be split into "nation" states based on ethnicity or sectarian differences, with a Shia south, a Sunni middle and a Kurdish north. But Arab Iraqis are far more nationalistic than you would guess from all the discussions of "ethno-sectarian" differences. ... for the most part, the vast majority of Arab Iraqis see Iraq as a strongly unified state. Shias and Sunnis may be chauvinists, violently so in some cases, but that doesn't mean they don't see Iraq as a nation."

"The much-repeated line that Iraq is a phony country made up by colonial powers is itself a myth. Indeed, I'm always amazed by the extent of Iraqi nationalism in Arab Iraq, a nationalism that coexists with sectarian suspicions but which is very real."

"So far, the Republicans have done an impressive job at failing in Iraq. Soon it may be the Democrats' turn to fail, albeit in a different way. It's a shame because Iraqi political parties are perfectly capable of doing that on their own."