Inside Kirkuk

First, apologies for the thinness of updates this week. For some as-yet undiscovered reason, the Internet has died a sudden and unexpected death in my apartment. I'm typing this from one of Hamra's many cafes.

Moving on. If you have a half-hour to kill, check out Michael Totten's latest report from Kirkuk. He covers a lot of ground, so make sure you're comfortable before starting in. Let me cherry-pick one point, and respectfully take issue with Michael:

"The vast majority of the violence, according to my Kurdish sources, is committed by Baathists and old Baathists under new names. Failure to identify Iraq’s principal terrorist organizations and treat them accordingly is the number one reason why Iraq is such a catastrophe. At least this is what I have been told. Kurdish officials I’ve met who try to explain this to the Americans are dismissed out of hand and ignored utterly."[Emphasis Mine]

I'm not an expert on Iraq, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt. However, this comment seems to miss the point. Ba'athists in Iraq are the same as die-hard loyalists to Saddam Hussein -- any ideology that the Ba'athists used to stand for has been a dead letter for ages. With Hussein dead, being a Ba'athist means fighting for a return to the days where the Sunni majority maintained supremacy, by force, over the other ethnicities in Iraq.

Iraq can't be explained as a battle between the Ba'athists vs. everyone else, but as a power struggle between the various religions and ethnicities. Simply put -- the groups have radically different opinions on how to organize society, and do not believe the other groups should have an equal vote in the course of the country. Totten simplifies and trivializes Iraq's problems by blaming the entire war on Ba'athist "dead-enders."