THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

Quote:

Gloom descends on Iraqi leaders as civil war looms
Fri Jul 21, 2006 2:16 PM BST
Email This Article | Print This Article | RSS [-] Text [+] By Mariam Karouny

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi leaders have all but given up on holding the country together and, just two months after forming a national unity government, talk in private of "black days" of civil war ahead.

Signalling a dramatic abandonment of the U.S.-backed project for Iraq, there is even talk among them of pre-empting the worst bloodshed by agreeing to an east-west division of Baghdad into Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim zones, senior officials told Reuters.

Tens of thousands have already fled homes on either side.


"Iraq as a political project is finished," one senior government official said -- anonymously because the coalition under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki remains committed in public to the U.S.-sponsored constitution that preserves Iraq's unity.

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Turkey Announces Readiness for Iraq
Category: SOFTPEDIA NEWS :: World

If the US does nothing to fight Turkish Kurdish guerillas there
By: Ruxandra Adam, News Editor

Turkish officials announced today that their country is now fully prepared to go into Iraq, if American, as well as Iraqi, forces do not combat Turkish Kurdish guerilla troops in the area. However, many analysts have stated that such a political and military move would force Turkey to be at odds with the United States.

This decision comes amid growing pressure placed on Turkey to act according to the critical situation currently unfolding, after 15 soldiers, police officers and guards, had been killed in armed clashed with Kurdish guerilla troops in the southeastern part of Turkey in the past week. "The government is really in a bind. On the one hand, they don't want things to break down with the United States. On the other hand, the public is crying for action", Seyfi Tashan, director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Bilkent University in Ankara stated.

Experts calmed the increasingly aggressive statements released by Turkish diplomats, in order to appease the anger of the public opinion and apply pressure on the US and Iraq to do something against the Turkish guerillas. Turkish diplomats had stated that they would take the matter into their own hands should US and Iraq do nothing about it.

On the other hand, according to an American diplomat, who liked to keep his anonymity, US officials in Turkey and in Washington discussed the matter with Turkish representatives and military commanders in order to urge them to cooperate with the Washington administration in order to combat guerillas and not act alone. He added that the Turkish military department has had plans for fighting guerillas in the northern part of Iraq for a long time now and these include airstrikes on military bases, attacks carried by commando units and a larger-scale ground offensive.

However, US diplomats, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are against any military operations in northern Iraq, one of the stable areas in the country, without further prior joint discussions and consultations with US officials on the matter.

July 20, 2006
The Horrifying Reality Slowly Begins to Break Through
Story:

Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war. In the first half of this year, 14,338 Iraqi civilians died violent deaths, according to a new report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. Last month alone, 3,149 civilians were killed -- an average of more than 100 a day.

Ican

IBC sucks and is no where close to reality. Even the UN says it body count of 14,338 is undercounted. ...

cicerone imposter: Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 2:48 pm Post: 2130462 - wrote:

ican, ... it doesn't matter what I think; it matters a whole lot what Arabs/Muslims think. ...

I infer, cice, that you think:
(1) "it doesn't matter what [you] think";

(2) "it matters a whole lot what Arabs/Muslims think".

The UN "sucks and is no where close to reality." The UN's failure to implement its many resolutions about Iraq prior to the Iraq invasion, the UN's theft of food money from the Iraqi people in the Oil for Food scandal, the UN's rape of African girls and women while pretending to peace keep, the UN's support of its civil rights commission made up of representatives from civil rights abusing nations, the UN's exaggerated count of Iraqi civilian violent deaths in 2003, 2004, and 2005, et cetera, mark the UN an unreliable source of information -- that is, mark the UN an organization that "sucks."

IBC counts not only include deaths reported by various news agencies, but also include morgue counts that they obtain independently of news reports. Check back through daily listings at the end of several months and see for yourself. Even if IBC's counts are X% -- where X is whatever value less than 100% you favor -- of true counts, the IBC counts nonetheless reveal true trends in the monthly counts ... but you can't (or won't) understand that, can (or will) you. You are too much wedded to liebral pseudology to even entertain the possibility that I am right on this. You remind me of spouses who refuse to acknowledge even blatant evidence of their spouses criminal or otherwise dishonest behavior.

Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports and eyewitness accounts. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least two members of the Iraq Body Count project team in addition to the original compiler before publication.

For a source to be considered acceptable to this project it must comply with the following standards: (1) site updated at least daily; (2) all stories separately archived on the site, with a unique url (see Note 1 below); (3) source widely cited or referenced by other sources; (4) English Language site; (5) fully public (preferably free) web-access.

The project relies on the professional rigour of the approved reporting agencies. It is assumed that any agency that has attained a respected international status operates its own rigorous checks before publishing items (including, where possible, eye-witness and confidential sources). By requiring that two independent agencies publish a report before we are willing to add it to the count, we are premising our own count on the self-correcting nature of the increasingly inter-connected international media network.

Note 1. Some sites remove items after a given time period, change their urls, or place them in archives with inadequate search engines. For this reason it is project policy that urls of sources are NOT published on the iraqbodycount site.


Data extraction policy is based on 3 criteria, some of which work in opposite directions.

a. Sufficient information must be extracted to ensure that each incident is differentiated from proximate incidents with which it could be potentially confused.

b. Economy of data extraction is required, for efficiency of both production and public scrutiny.

c. Data extraction should be uniform, so that the same information is available for the vast majority of incidents. This is best guaranteed by restricting the number of items of information per incident to the core facts that most news reports tend to include.

The pragmatic tensions in the above have led to the decision to extract the following information only for each incident:
·Date of incident
·Time of incident
·Location of incident
·Target as stated by military sources
·Weapon (munitions or delivery vehicle)
·Minimum civilian deaths (see Note 2)
·Maximum civilian deaths (see Note 2)
·Sources (at least two sources from the list in section 2 above)

Reliability of data extraction will be increased by ensuring that each data extraction is checked and signed off by two further independent scrutineers prior to publication, and all data entries will be kept under review should further details become available at a later date.

Cafferty: While the media remains mesmerized by the fighting in Israel and Lebanon, more than a hundred people a day are being killed in Iraq…

Wolf: It is simply horrendous. The slaughter, the bloodshed that's continuing even as we monitor by and large what's happening elsewhere in the Middle East.

Cafferty: What's our plan? Do we have one for dealing with this? I mean it's degenerating into some sort of sub-human nightmare.

Cafferty: While the media remains mesmerized by the fighting in Israel and Lebanon, more than a hundred people a day are being killed in Iraq…

Wolf: It is simply horrendous. The slaughter, the bloodshed that's continuing even as we monitor by and large what's happening elsewhere in the Middle East.

Cafferty: What's our plan? Do we have one for dealing with this? I mean it's degenerating into some sort of sub-human nightmare.