On the first day after Christmas, a few more had to die:
Gunmen shot and killed five police officers at a checkpoint north of Baghdad on Monday, and six vehicle bombs exploded in the capital, leaving another five people dead and wounding more than 40. . . .
At least 19 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, a day after bloodshed claimed 18 lives, part of an increase in violence since a relative lull in attacks around the Dec. 15 vote.
A suicide car bomber slammed into a police patrol in the capital, leaving three dead, officials said, and a suicide motorcycle bomber rammed into a Shiite funeral ceremony, killing at least two people and wounding 26, said Maj. Falah Mohamadawi of the Interior Ministry.
Four other car bombs killed at least two people and wounded 15, officials said.
Gunmen killed five officers and wounded four at a police checkpoint 30 miles north of Baghdad, a morgue official in Baqouba said.
Nonetheless, Rummy says, what’s the hurry? We’ll leave — someday:
WASHINGTON — At every stop on his three-day tour of Iraq, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a similar message: the U.S. military is not rushing to get out, but it is getting out, nevertheless.
. . . Among small signs from Rumsfeld’s visit that point to increased confidence in security in Iraq: He spent two nights in the country.
Wow! He pulled an overnighter. That sure convinces me that everything is getting better all the time. Good to know Rummy sees us as leaving, eventually, though.
However, General Pace must not have gotten the memo that we’re pulling out of Iraq, or he wouldn’t have said this:
There’s more on the flip . . .
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said Sunday that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase next year, not decrease, if the insurgency continued.
Pace’s comments on “Fox News Sunday” suggested that the Pentagon’s plan to reduce the scale of American forces in Iraq, announced Friday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, depended on several variables. . . .
The four-star Marine general said that any decision to withdraw or deploy additional troops in Iraq would depend mostly on whether the insurgency continued to launch deadly attacks against U.S.-led forces and friendly elements of the fledgling Baghdad government.
“So if things go the way we expect them to, as more Iraqi units stand up, we’ll be able to bring our troops down and turn over that territory to the Iraqis,” Pace said on the Christmas Day edition of the talk show. “But on the other hand, the enemy has a vote in this, and if they were to cause some kind of problems that required more troops, then we would do exactly what we’ve done in the past, which is give the commanders on the ground what they need. And in that case, you could see troop level go up a little bit to handle that problem.”
As for the new Iraqi government, it seems Ayatollah Sistani is at least making noises of compromise in the wake of the protests against the election that brought the Shi’ite religious parties an unprecedented victory:
NAJAF, Iraq (AFP) – Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Saturday called for calm and the creation of a government of national unity in the wake of the December 15 general elections, a senior official said.
Sistani called on Shiite-based religious parties — victorious according to initial results — to “work with other components of the Iraqi people to set up a government of national unity representative of all the country’s main (political) families,” national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie said after meeting the ayatollah.
How sincere is he? Who knows. I can’t even predict American politics based on public statements from our politicians, so I won’t even try to venture a guess as to what Sistani really intends. But perhaps the demonstrations really did get his attention. However, even if Sistani is sincere in calling for compromise with the Sunnis, it remains to be seen how much influence he has over the victorious Shi’a religious parties at this point in time. We’ll have to wait and see if anything positive comes out of it.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to those peace activist hostages? Oh yeah — they’re still missing:
Mr Kember, from Pinner, north-west London, was seized in Baghdad on November 26, with Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, and American Tom Fox, 54 after travelling to Iraq with the Canadian-based Christian Peacemaker Team.
The Swords of Righteousness Brigade, which has claimed responsibility for the kidnappings, had threatened to kill the group by December 10 unless Iraqi prisoners were released.
That deadline had been extended by two days but there has been no news of the hostages since it expired.
All I can say, is that my prayers are with their families.
As to the hopes for religious freedom and tolerance in Iraq, I give you this story from the Times of London, online edition:
IRAQIS gathered for Christmas behind Kalashnikovs yesterday. Midnight Mass was cancelled because of bombing fears and curfews, but the country’s rapidly dwindling Christian minority turned out in their thousands for early morning services.
Protected under Saddam, Christians once numbered between 600,000 and 700,000 in Iraq, but church officials say that about half have now fled, especially from the south, where militias linked to Iraq’s ruling parties have waged a three-year campaign to Islamise the country at gunpoint.
The worst attacks were by insurgents in central and northern Iraq in August last year, when bomb attacks on four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul killed a dozen Christians during Sunday services.
Priests have been threatened and killed, women abused in the street for not wearing veils and three months ago the entire lay leadership of Iraq’s main Anglican church were ambushed and killed.
Not exactly the sort of news were likely to hear about back in BushWorld, is it?
You think it wouldn’t need to be said, but war doesn’t recognize Christmas.
I have a suggestion for Rumsfeld’s next visit: If Iraq is progressing so nicely as you assert, give advance warning of your visit, and see how things go.
I’ve said many times that the news media needs to stop calling these “unannounced visits”, as though it were something unusual. No major administration figure has ever made any other kind of visit to Iraq. And as far as I know, the “left-wing media” has never raised the issue even once.
Here’s what’s going on:
The Bush administration says it’s pulling tropps out, then the general says it may add troops. They are sending double messages because it is convenient to do so in order to manipulate public opinion.
They will only pull troops out before the elections in November at a time when it matters to Republicans running. There will be small withdrawals with much greater ones planned but the greater withdrawals will never occur.
The Iranians are the supporters of the current government in Iraq. The current government in Iraq is the enemy of the United States and Iran. It wants immediate withdrawal, but cannot say so.
Immediate withdrawal would allow the Iranians to take over against an insurgency that would shift to fighting Iranians instead of Americans and one that would be reduced as some insurgents are fighting simply against the American occupation more than anything else.
Sadaam Hussein was a more democratic leader than the current government and more democratic and less violent than the United States has been. His crimes have been exaggerated, while American crimes have been kept largely secret or left ambiguous. Crimes like using poison gas and chemical weapons against people in Fallujah, raping Iraqi women, torturing on a routine, authorized basis, displacing and dissaperaing people, killing up to 300,000 people for no apparent reason other than to put into power a government that is diametrically opposed to American Interests.
America has out Sadaamed Sadaam and gotten Iran to take over Irag.
Simply Astounding!
I meant to say above that Iran and Iraq are the mortal enemies of the United States even though the US is protecting the Iraqi government for the time being. Word is going to get out that Iran has taken over southern Iraq.
But the troop withdrawal thing is interesting. People hear that troops are being withdrawn and they become quiescent. They are quited down, then a general says they will go up. So the adminsitration can say later on whatever it want. This is a kind of Psyops war on the American Mind. Americans don’t give a damn by and large about anybody else…not in these times….it’s all about money. The worst qualities of America are in the forefront in these times.
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WMD Ahmed Chalabi received less than 1% of vote in Baghdad
CIA agent Iyad Allawi got a pitiful 14%
BAGHDAD (Asia Times) Dec. 23 — The Shi’ite religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) were the big winners – from 70% to 95% of the vote in the impoverished southern provinces; 59% in Baghdad; and nationally, well over 40% of the total. The Shi’te parties have won in nine of Iraq’s 18 provinces plus the capital Baghdad. It’s a relatively unexpected success considering the dreadful record of Ibrahim Jaafari’s Shi’ite-dominated government.
All those intimately allied with the US invasion and occupation were big losers. The Iraqi National List of US intelligence asset and former prime minister Iyad Allawi, also known as “Saddam without a moustache”, the man who endorsed the Pentagon bombing of the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf and Sunni Arab Fallujah – got a pitiful 14%.
Convicted fraudster and former Pentagon ally Ahmad Chalabi received less than 1% in Baghdad. The neo-conservatives of the American Enterprise Institute were predicting 5% for Chalabi (their overwhelming favorite) and 20% for Allawi; that’s proof enough they have no clue about what’s going on in Iraq.
Bush’s new Iraq is pro-Iran. It will not recognize Israel. And it wants the Americans out; one of the first measures of an emerging, powerful parliamentary alliance between roughly 38 Sadrists of Shi’ite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and roughly 50 Sunni Arabs will be to call for an immediate end of the occupation.
The details to be ironed out hinge on whether the UIA majority aligns itself with the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, or with both groups in a government of “national unity”. The National Unity government as called by the current vice president Abdel Mahdi (a free marketer) as well as current president Jalal Talabani, a Kurd.
Read shocking analysis …
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
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