Michael Yon There are many aspects to war, and some of them don’t involve fighting and killing, yet, as Michael Yon shows us in Bread and a Circus, Part I of II, they are no less, and in some cases, far more important.

The sectarian divide here was not manufactured by al Qaeda. Most countries have societal fissures that can be exploited, and the Sunni-Shia divide is like a tectonic plate. It’s actually somewhat stable, except for al Qaeda stuffing bombs in the cracks. The new government in Iraq is Shia dominated, and the Food Warehouse is in Sadr City, basically dead-center for Shia-land. Baqubah, on the other hand, is a Ba’athist haven. And so there you have it: Al Qaeda drove a multi-dimensional wedge using the food as one of those quiet bombs that never popped up on the radar, but nonetheless had a real impact on this war.

Because the one thing that definitely can run us out of here is the civil war, it follows that disrupting al Qaeda is like taking the blowtorch off the curtains. And for the beleaguered people of Baqubah, something nearly every family could see instantly as a positive sign would be the renewal of regular food distribution. There are many other shortages and problems for military and civilian leaders to sort through, but a food shortage is something that could be immediately ameliorated. Iraq is a breadbasket: there’s plenty of food here, it only takes trucks to move it around.

That, as it turned out, was just one part of the problem.

Like always with Michael Yon posts, there is much more and you really owe it to yourself to go and read it all — teaser notwithstanding . . .

Technorati Tags: al Qaeda, Baqubah, Michael Yon

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