Do you see Kissingerish fingerprints all over the Big Surge escalation?

Mother Jones:
"There may well be a much more sinister game at play here. That centers around the emergence of Henry Kissinger over the last year as an outside advisor to Bush and other top officials in Washington.

Gareth Porter, the historian who ran the Indochina Resource Center in the early 70s, points out in a January 11 article on Asia Online that "although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis and Shi'ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the illusion of victory, even though the US position in the war is actually weak and unstable.""

[snip]

"So, it's quite possible that Bush will plunge into a counterinsurgency operation in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, and then amidst mass civilian carnage, declare victory and announce negotiations. Sooner or later there will have to be negotiations, and this may be his ploy.

But things aren't going to be so easy for Bush because American troops yesterday in the Haifa Street firefight in Baghdad appear to have fallen into an ongoing ethnic cleansing operation by Shia militia.

GIs call Haifa Street "grenade alley." As Juan Cole points out, Haifa Street has become a fixture of the civil war, twisting and turning in one pacification effort after another. In July 2004 there was Operation Haifa Street involving 3,000 American troops. A police station got blown up in a big bombing there. In March 2005 reports had things calming down a bit. Some said the tide had turned. Today it is once again called a terrorist stronghold and there is a fresh pacification effort. Now things are ever more complicated since at least one report in Arabic claims Shia invaded the area Sunday, killed residents, and threw their bodies into the street. "In this context, some Sunni Arabs see the US as having been duped by the Shiites to join in the ethnic cleansing of the Karkh district," says Cole.

And now there are reports the Shia are worming their way into the Green Zone, a feat long attempted unsuccessfully by the Sunnis."