Worser and worser

AP/Adam Hadei

The Washington Post has the details on the latest stupidity coming out of the Bush government, U.S. Considers Ending Outreach to Insurgents.

The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S. reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the government, according to U.S. officials.

The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni dissidents has failed.

snip

Some insiders call the proposal the "80 percent" solution, a term that makes other parties to the White House policy review cringe. Sunni Arabs make up about 20 percent of Iraq's 26 million people.

Until now, the thrust of U.S. policy has been to build a unified government and society out of Iraq's three fractious communities. U.S. officials say they would not be abandoning this goal but would instead leave leadership of the thorny task of reconciliation to the Iraqis. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the deliberations.

Let's call this what it is. We're going to take sides, and we're going to side with the group that has already fielded death squads and is actively engaged in ethnic cleansing. As Kevin Drum notes:

The alternative being mooted here would put us directly on the Shiite side, and we'd be viewed as actively cooperating with a massacre of the Sunni minority no matter how hard we protested otherwise. It's hard to imagine a more disastrous end to a disastrous war.

For that reason, I suspect this proposal will be adopted.

What a clusterfuck. Let me just add that bullshit ideas like these are a direct result of bushco's purging of the professional ranks at State with their ideologically correct stooges. The entire world, not to mention those out of luck 20 percenter Sunnis, will be paying for Bush's policies for at least a generation.

The photo, BTW, is of some of those anonymous bodies found every morning in and around Baghdad, full of bullet holes and bearing signs of torture. We can expect to see a lot more of this.