It's Alive!

Let's Start here with a little film.

I begin this post with this clip because as I was thinking of the events to which I am writing I was reminded that the Awakening Council and the Sons of Iraq are the creation of government. Now, like Frankenstein's Monster, our creation has come back to haunt us.

"Honestly, we're worried about the future. If the government doesn't pay us and incorporate us into the security services, I swear, bad things will start happening here a month from now," he says. "We won't attack them, but the situation will deteriorate again." That was spoken by Mustafa Kamel, the Sons of Iraq leader in the Baghdad who commands 800 fighters. This after the arrest of a leader of the Awakening Council was arrested by the Iraqi government the other day. At least four people were killed and 21 wounded in the two days of fighting between government troops and the Awakening Council.

When the Awakening Council was formed it had as many as 80,000 members across Iraq. They were viewed as saviors in quelling the violence and turning back the tide of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Since 2005 they have been paid by the American military and the Iraqi government to lay down their arms against coalition forces, patrol neighborhoods, and to fight against other Sunni insurgents. The US military says the groups help it target Al-Qaeda in Iraq more precisely and avoid collateral damage.

Well it seems to me that the honeymoon is over and we are losing control over our monster. The Iraqi Defense Ministry has said that it plans to disband the Awakening groups so they do not become a separate military force. Well it seems that they are a bit late in that attempt. Back in 2007 we started to realize the implications of our creation and the possibility of what is happening today occurring.

It seems that we may not have learned from our past. We got the Shiites to rise up against Saddam at the end of the First Gulf War.. They did and we didn’t help them. They hated us for it. We helped create the Taliban then went on to attempt to destroy them. Now in Afghanistan we are offering money and such to get Taliban members to change their ways. Well, may work for a bit until we once again abandon them, like we are now doing to the Awakening Councils.

And Obama thinks we will leave Iraq and quell Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not if we keep creating monsters over and over and the abandoning them as our use of them is finished. I suppose we will see if the words quoted above are a prophecy or just more fear mongering. “…bad things will start happening here a month from now”

That’s my opinion and I am sticking to it…