today’s diary is dedicated to all who are speaking out on behalf of those who suffer because of war and other disasters
cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.
image and poem below the fold
Iranian anti-riot police officers march during a parade ceremony of armed
forces, marking the 25th anniversary of the outset of the Iran-Iraq war
(1980-1988), in front of the mausoleum of the late revolutionary founder
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, just outside Tehran, Iran, Thursday Sept. 22, 2005.
(AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
An Iraqi soldier walks past a burning crude oil-transporting pipeline, some 35 kilometres (20 miles) northwest of the oil-producing town of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. Several crude oil-transporting pipelines in northern Iraq were burning fiercely following an attack, an oil installation protection force official told AFP.
(AFP/Marwan Ibrahim)
An Iraqi woman walks past a memorial to the Iraq-Iran War in Baghdad September
22, 2005. Saddam Hussein can no longer force Iraqis to celebrate ‘victory’ in
the war with Iran but they are still haunted by the conflict 25 years to the day
after it started.
(Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters)
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan (C) speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC,
September 21, 2005 urging Congress and President George W. Bush to remove U.S.
troops from Iraq. Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq is currently touring the
U.S. trying to gain support for the anti-war movement.
REUTERS/Chris Kleponis
War Song of the Saracens
by James Elroy Flecker
We are they who come faster than fate: we are they who ride early or late:
We storm at your ivory gate: Pale Kings of the Sunset, beware!
Not on silk nor in samet we lie, not in curtained solemnity die
Among women who chatter and cry, and children who mumble a prayer.
But we sleep by the ropes of the camp, and we rise with a shout, and we tramp
With the sun or the moon for a lamp, and the spray of the wind in our hair.
From the lands, where the elephants are, to the forts of Merou and Balghar,
Our steel we have brought and our star to shine on the ruins of Rum.
We have marched from the Indus to Spain, and by God we will go there again;
We have stood on the shore of the plain where the Waters of Destiny boom.
A mart of destruction we made at Jalula where men were afraid,
For death was a difficult trade, and the sword was a broker of doom;
And the Spear was a Desert Physician who cured not a few of ambition,
And drave not a few to perdition with medicine bitter and strong:
And the shield was a grief to the fool and as bright as a desolate pool,
And as straight as the rock of Stamboul when their cavalry thundered along:
For the coward was drowned with the brave when our battle sheered up like a
wave,
And the dead to the desert we gave, and the glory to God in our song.
– – –
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support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
Leonard Clark’s blog has been taken down
witness every day
.
I have updated my diary with excellent article published today ::
▼ ▼ ▼ MUST READ MY DIARY
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Supporters of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr hold his pictures and cheer during a speech at Friday prayers in the southern Iraqi city of Basra today. Imam Asaad al-Nasiri, a representative of Sadr from Najaf, told the crowd that British troops should release Iraqi militia members detained last week and return two British soldiers to the Iraqi police. REUTERS/Atef HassanBAGHDAD, Iraq – British troops in the tense southern city of Basra greatly reduced their presence in the streets, apparently responding to a provincial governor’s call to sever cooperation until London apologized for storming a police station to free two of its soldiers.
For the second day, no British forces were seen accompanying Iraqi police on patrols of Basra, as they routinely had in the past.
Elsewhere in Iraq
Near the northern city of Kirkuk, a bomb damaged an oil pipeline, sending plumes of black smoke and fire up into the air, officials said.
Unidentified men in a speeding car wielding machine guns killed local police commander Col. Fadil Mahmoud Mohammed and his driver Thursday morning near Baquba, north of Baghdad, police said.
Six people were killed in the capital, including a man and two of his sons whose home in the New Baghdad area was raided by about 25 gunmen dressed in police uniforms and black masks, said police Col. Ahmed Abod. A second son was kidnapped. Abod said the father, Muhsin Akmosh Al-Timimi, had been working with foreign companies operating in Iraq.
Two policemen patrolling northeast Baghdad were killed in a separate drive-by shooting, police Col. Ahmed al-Alawi said.
Compounding impending disaster Iraq’s ‘Viceroy’ Paul Bremer, isolated in his Palace, closed the newspaper of Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, mistakenly dismissing him as a firebrand with little following. It is unlikely that if he had little following, the vast teeming Shia are of Baghdad’s Saddam City would have unanimously been renamed Sadr City, to honour his family of whose esteem, he is to many now the mantle holder. The paper – Al Hawza – had just ten thousand print run in twenty five million population, hardly likely to cause great problems. But its censorship did. Saddam methods: Bremer has long been a new Saddam to Iraqis.
Now Najav and Kerbala are surrounded by US troops avowed to capture Sadr: ‘dead or alive’ – back in Wild West mode in the ‘Cradle of Civilisation’. Either options, or violation of these revered, sacred cities and shrines will make Viet Nam a tea party. Further, hordes of Saudis and Iranians and others, for whom the cities are equally sacrosanct will flood in to fight the invaders, over Iraq’s now unsecured borders. Blood bath comes to mind.
U.S.Forces tore down posters in publicof Muqtada Al Sadr and made arrests of
citizens displaying his poster in their home.
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The firebrand cleric’s violent challenge can’t be tolerated by the U.S. But a fight to the finish could imperil Washington’s exit strategy.
Apr. 05, 2004 — As if Fallujah wasn’t bad enough, the U.S. military in Iraq suddenly finds itself fighting on a second, far more dangerous front. Even as hundreds of Marines prepared to enter the restive Sunni triangle town where four U.S. security men were killed last week, a Shiite uprising over the weekend saw Coalition troops under fire in Baghdad, Najaf, Kufa, Nasiriyah, Amara and Basra.
Eight Americans and one allied soldier were killed in the fighting and 36 were wounded; the death toll among Iraqis was almost 50, with hundreds wounded. Fighting raged on in Baghdad as U.S. troops clashed with militiamen loyal to the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The new uprising would not be tolerated and would be suppressed, warned U.S. viceroy J. Paul Bremer on Monday. Hours later, the Coalition announced an arrest warrant had been issued for Sadr. But the cleric had already told his supporters that the time for peaceful protest had passed, urging them to “terrorize” the Americans and their allies.
"An Iraqi man is interrogated after posters of Muqtada al-Sadr were found in his car at a traffic checkpoint on the outskirts of Najaf, Iraq." Friday April 16, 2004▼ ▼ ▼
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Peace?
President Bush receives a briefing on national policy issues from VP Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard B. Myers, U.S. Air Force, at the Pentagon.AP Photo/Department of Defense, Tech. Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald, U.S. Air Force
Rather than being a tragic reminder of past Cold War conflicts, confined to a remote and barbarous country, Angola’s present condition is an example of the handiwork of men like Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, who strenuously lobbied for the removal of Congressional barriers on arming anti-government forces in the mid-1970s, Dick Cheney, a tireless supporter of UNITA, and George Bush senior, who both as president and head of the CIA prosecuted the war.
In claiming that the Angolan war was the result of super-power rivalry, the U.S. press is echoing the words of Henry Kissinger.
A. Membe at Peace Talks in The Hague
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Good one Rob…thanks…