THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

37 US Troops Dead, Other Americans Wounded
Large numbers of Iraqis Killed, Wounded by Car Bombs at Polling Stations, Party HQs

AP reports the worst news the US has had in Iraq ever:


A U.S. helicopter crashed in a desert sandstorm in the early morning darkness yesterday, killing the 30 Marines and one Navy sailor aboard . . . Six other troops died in insurgent ambushes in the deadliest day for Americans since the Iraq invasion began nearly two years ago. Only days before Iraq's crucial elections on Sunday, Muslim terrorists set off at least eight car bombs that killed 13 persons and injured almost 40 others, including 11 Americans.



Al-Zaman reports that 13 polling stations and 4 party offices have been attacked since Tuesday evening in Baghdad and to its north. Guerrillas kidnapped 2 election workers in Mosul, and 15 persons were killed and 30 wounded when a car bomb went off in front of the Kurdistan Democratic Party HQ in the city of Sinjar.

In his appearances on Wednesday, President Bush said that it was a positive that Iraqis are even having elections, since three years ago it would have seemed out of the question. You know, if all you have to boast about is that you are better than Saddam Hussein, it isn't actually a good sign. Can you imagine what would have happened to the Republican Party if its reply to Kerry's criticisms of last summer had been, "Well, the American Republican Party is a damn sight more progressive than Hitler was." Saddam was overthrown on April 9, 2003. It is 2005, and the US has been running Iraq for nearly two years. Now the question is, how does the situation in Iraq compare to the Philippines, or India, or Turkey. Answer: It sucks. There is little security, people are killed daily, there is a massive crime wave, and elections are being held in which most of the candidates cannot be identified for fear of their lives. So the conclusion is that the Bush administration has done a worse job in Iraq than the Congress Party does in India, or the AK Party does in Turkey. That's the standard of comparison once Saddam was gone. And, by the way, veteran NYT journalist John Burns, who is nobody's fool, told Tina Brown last Friday that he was taken aback when an Iraqi told him recently that he wished Saddam were back. This was an Iraqi who really had been delighted at the American invasion. So Bush should drop the cute sound bite about being better than Saddam.

Nice to know that people are staying positive. But the flaw in the thinking is here:

Quote:

We are doing fine. It's just a small, a small amount of people out there causing the problems. I mean, it is a small number, and we're killing them."

This convienently ignores the fact that the number of insurgents is MUCH larger than it used to be. Much larger. Therefore, how can one say that they are being 'killed off?' At what point does it become obvious that our presence is creating new terrorists and insurgents faster than we can kill them? Is our goal to kill every man and child in Iraq who resists US occupation? Does anyone even consider this a viable plan?

Optimisim is nice, but it's nicer when it's based on reality and not false hope.

Cycloptichorn

Iraqi insurgents now outnumber coalition forces
By James Hider

The head of intelligence services in Baghdad says that there are more than 200,000 fighters

IRAQ'S rapidly swelling insurgency numbers 200,000 fighters and active supporters and outnumbers the United States-led coalition forces, the head of the country's intelligence service said yesterday.
The number is far higher than the US military has so far admitted and paints a much grimmer picture of the challenge facing the Iraqi authorities and their British and American backers as elections loom in four weeks.

"I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people," General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq's new intelligence services, said.

"I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people," General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq's new intelligence services, said.

The Hollywood lefties are on their way over there to act as human shields for the voters.

I have no doubt the insurgents are pulling in reinforcements Cyclops. But use more than one source to verify your figures and you'll see that the presumption that the insurgents outnumber the U.S. forces is ludicrous.

Nice to know that people are staying positive.

....
Cycloptichorn

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been "diminish the agency." I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can't win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone" right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said, "Welcome to Stalingrad." We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.

We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, "Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it," as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, "well, we don't do torture." We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what's happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven "bad seeds", enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They've gotten away with it.

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in "macro" in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Nice to know that people are staying positive.

....
Cycloptichorn

Can you honestly say you hope the vote goes well in Iraq? That you want the new democracy to take hold? Or, do you hope it is a miserable failure? Do you put freedom and a democratically elected government in Iraq above or below your hope that Bush fails? I'm afraid I know the answer, but I'll await your response.

When did you become a fan of optimism? You (well, not just you ... you and most of the other anti-war liberals on this thread) are typically a fount of negativity. (Which, as I keep reading, you seem to acknowledge.)

Can you honestly say you hope the vote goes well in Iraq? That you want the new democracy to take hold? Or, do you hope it is a miserable failure? Do you put freedom and a democratically elected government in Iraq above or below your hope that Bush fails? I'm afraid I know the answer, but I'll await your response.

great ! will the hollywood righties be doing the same to help bring about democracy, freedom and liberty to the grateful iraqi people ?