So the election's over, back to the same old grind: assassinations, car bombings, regular airplane bombings, attempted overruns of Iraqi army and police posts. Tom Lasseter has the must-read articles of the day, though, as he interviews Iraqi Army units in northern Iraq and finds out (surprise!) they're pretty much just rebadged peshmerga militia fighters who owe their primary loyalty to Kurdistan as opposed to Iraq:
Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
...The Iraqi army's 2nd Division, which oversees the Irbil-Mosul area, has some 12,000 soldiers, and at least 90 percent of them are Kurds, according to the division's executive officer.
Of the 3,000 Iraqi soldiers in Irbil, some 2,500 were together in a Peshmerga unit previously based in the city. An entire brigade in Mosul, about 3,000 soldiers, is composed of three battalions that were transferred almost intact from former Peshmerga units, with many of the same soldiers and officers in the same positions.
Lasseter and Knight-Ridder have documented pretty much the same situation with Iraqi Army units in the south, which are dominated by Shia militias loyal to the Hawza religious establishment in Najaf. Meanwhile Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army extends its control throughout the Iraqi police, including the special commando units, while SCIRI's Badr Brigades run the Interior Ministry.
Given the current situation, can someone please explain to me why supposedly smart people think that the Iraqi elections would convince the Sunnis to lay down their guns? Why would you do that when all the other players are loading for bear?
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