Hair-raising comment at Juan Cole today. This is from an email he received from someone he identifies only as "a professional who used to be in Iraq but now is in a nearby country" but it should scare the crap out of...well, just about anybody. The correspondent talks first about the fact that there are now no neurosurgeons or cardiac surgeons in Iraq because they have either been killed or fled the country. That"s pretty damn scary in itself considering the numbers of people wounded who might need such services. Then comes the part that scares me, and is no doubt keeping the military folks kinda occupied too:

Another friend, a Sunni sheikh of the Shammar tribe noted to me that thousands of former officers are prepared to assault the G[reen] Z[one]. It is no longer a matter of can they do it, they are only mulling over the timing. The breach of the Green Zone security the other day was a test of their ability to get in, and not a real attempt at a coup, though it is reported as such. Every Iraqi I talk to says unambiguously that the resistance attached to the former regime would take out the Shiite militias with barely a fight, but that the resistance will not commit wholesale revenge against the Shiite population. They just want to get rid of the "carpet baggers" from Iran. '

We will be leaving Iraq sooner than all the blatherers with their "Timetables! No, timetables send a bad message, but benchmarks are okay! No, no, timetables and benchmarks would destabilize the Iraqi government, we must...." blah blah blah ad insignificant infinititum, would like you to believe.

We will be leaving Iraq when one of the most brilliant guerilla campaigns ever waged--anybody recall who those "thousands of former officers" used to work for? And how we sneered because they "wouldn't stand and fight during the invasion, but just melted away"? Yeah, them--comes to a head.

Considering that this assault on Sadr City--in the heart of Baghdad, which our current strategy has as the center of the American effort to "stabilize" it before moving out to cover the rest of the country--took place on the American holiday of Thanksgiving. And assault it most definitely was, in a war where the car bomb has replaced the tank as the vehicle of military assault.

Isnt' it an Arabic saying that goes "Better a thousand years of tyranny than a day of anarchy"? The Shia are more numerous but, thanks to the colonian legacy, the Sunnis have the experience in organization needed to run a modern nation state. You see the same thing around the world--in fact if you go to Google News right now and put in "Civil War", hit a space, then a dash, then Iraq, the numbers go like this: Stories from the last 30 days that include the words "Civil War": 32,100 Same number minus stories containing the word "Iraq": 17,000 (by way of comparison the same numbers for Nov. 15 were Civil War total, 26,200, minus Iraq 13,900. Things are warming up a bit all over).

The point of this is to note that while stories about the Iraqi Civil War constitute about half the total, the rest of the world is right in there pitching too. The neocon project to send a wave of democracy around the planet may need some retweaking.