A while ago I wrote about Matt Duss being one of the most insightful and important emerging progressive voices on Iraq and national security, and much to the benefit of progressive infrastructure and wonkery, he's ended up with a job at the Center for American Progress, working for a special election-based offshoot of ThinkProgress and adding his substantial brain power to a place that already has some of the best thinkers on Iraq (Brian Katulis) and the military (Larry Korb).
Matt continues to do a tremendous job breaking through the spin on Iraq issues especially, and his recent post on Sadr gets to the heart of US strategic failures when it comes to the politics of Iraq and its neighbors. As he explains in a recent Wonk Room post:
The Bush administration has consistently tried to blame outside actors for violence in Iraq in order to avoid facing the unpleasant truth that the U.S. occupation is opposed by a substantial majority of the population who the U.S. is ostensibly there to support. In seeking to defend a continued U.S. presence in Iraq, the administration and its supporters have drawn a deeply distorted picture of the political struggles currently taking place within various Iraqi communities.
To put it simply, the U.S. is opposing Sadr because he opposes the U.S. occupation, and the U.S. is supporting ISCI because ISCI supports the occupation. As Brian Katulis and I noted in an op-ed several weeks ago, the irony of this strategy is that it has allied the United States with Iran’s primary proxy in the Iraqi government, against what is arguably the most potent nationalist political force in the country.
As a result of this myopic strategy, the US continues to contort itself when it comes to an actual political effort in Iraq. And of course this isn't some intellectual exercise; the results of such continued failures are borne by the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the suffering of millions more.
