S-2,
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This story indicates a local truce arising from an unanticipated bounty. The intel came to us from a sunni civil militia- not JAM elements. We've smartly negotiated a brief visitation. The circumstances here don't indicate anything but expediency on both sides though I freely acknowledge that surprising in-roads are actually being made separating shia villages from JAM.
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i meant the first story in this thread, in which JAM's unpopularity is going up.
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If we're gonna see this partition, then why the desire to take down JAM as a military organization? Kurdistan won't give up it's PESHMERGA to the nat'l gov't. Why should a Shiastan surrender the military foundation of it's regional gov't? Do the Badr brigades inherit that mantle? If so, why?
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depends on how much we succeed. i would submit that as a baseline we should be like to replace JAM with a less fanatical set of people in which the cult of personality doesn't play such a large role. also one that isn't so explicitly tied to iran. that would probably be the badr brigades, as bad as they are. if we- or rather, the iraqis here- succeed in more than this baseline, hopefully replacing these militias with a real national gov't instead, and a national army.
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Your last comments are the most interesting. A very LARGE part of me would love to use those conditions as they exist now to declare victory and split. Maybe even dump on the Kurds and be gone. I do not want the American public funding some arbitration council with uniforms and guns for the next fifteen years. At this pace, it'll be that long before McDonald's shows up.
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like it or not, the US army will soon be forced to draw down simply from lack of replacements, and the lack of desire to continue extending deployments. most likely, we're going to be looking at anywhere from 50K-75K troops deployed in iraq throughout the next presidency: the scenario which pentagon planners were looking at as an alternative to the surge. so we'll try to wring as much tactical advantage as we can out of this, and hopefully a well-conducted withdrawal will allow us to avoid the mistake of over-coddling.
it's a damn hard rope-walk here.