Back to plan “A”

No, I’m not sure whose plan “A” it is, given the apparent “surge” in violence in Iraq after a downturn of late, particularly after a Shiite group (naturally, the official story is that it is backed by bogeyman du jour Iran) appears to have admitted responsibility for a bombing in Central Baghdad that killed at least 15. Interestingly, the target was in a largely Shiite area, and had been previously attacked by Sunni insurgents; the current Shia on Shia attack was supposedly a misdirection to get the Shia residents to turn to their friendly neighborhood Shiite death squads for assistance.
Certainly, things in Iraq were starting to look… a little different. I heard a BBC report, for example, that many refugees were returning to Iraq from Syria. In (small) part, this was because of a perception that things were less violent in Iraq, though it appears that most of the counter-exodus is the result of Syria tightening things up, by making visas harder to renew and because many Iraqis fear running out of money in Syria (and, I suppose, other unstated factors about things not being comfortable in Syria; of note, there is no counter-exodus from Jordan, which leads me to this conclusion).
And of course, the usual suspects had been touting supposed “improvement” in the Iraqi security situation (“violence down 55%”), whatever that means, doubtless as a result of The SurgeTM, though, of course, this has come at the expense of American treasure, and of course, American blood, as 2007 has been the bloodiest year yet of this bloody war.
So… WTF is happening? In part, it may be that Cheney and the Dead-Ender Neocons are still hoping to get us in an insanely suicidal war with Iran at all costs, and need to undermine even the “success story” of reduced violence in Iraq in order to blame it on Iran. Or perhaps, there is less violence because large swathes of Iraq have already been ethnically cleansed as it is– Shiite death squads can’t kill any Sunnis if they’ve already killed or driven them away as it is. Or perhaps all sides are biding their time until we leave to make their actual intents clear. And as is made crystal clear in this fabulously well-thought out series of pieces from Mother Jones (newest and most overdue entrant to the newslinks on the sidebar), leave we will [barring our military having an infinite capacity, which it does not, and our electorate standing for a draft, which it will not], the only question is how and when we get out, and whether we have actually thought about doing it on our own terms and with an actual strategy, or whether we get out in as half-assed a manner as we got in.
Which takes us back to plan “A”. The President’s “plan A” will simply be to keep the mirth and merriment going for another 423 days, until whatever happens then can be blamed on his successor, presumably a Democrat (any Democrat)!
General Petraeus’s “Plan A” will be to tell us that no matter what he may have said before, we are winning (and always have been). The insurgents seem to have a number of “Plan A’s” working… our intelligence is still somewhat problematic on this… perhaps, if we hadn’t sacked all the Arabic translators for being gay, we might be in a better position to know wtf was happening on the ground there… hey, who knows, really?
I certainly don’t. I don’t even pretend to. This has been… Back to plan “A”.