THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

And a happy new year to you; but I suspect you're always happy there, in your secure environment.

What do you think Mr Bush is going to tell us now? More troops?

Baghdad Burning

... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Sunday, December 31, 2006

A Lynching...

It's official. Maliki and his people are psychopaths. This really is a new low. It's outrageous- an execution during Eid. Muslims all over the world (with the exception of Iran) are outraged. Eid is a time of peace, of putting aside quarrels and anger- at least for the duration of Eid.

This does not bode well for the coming year. No one imagined the madmen would actually do it during a religious holiday. It is religiously unacceptable and before, it was constitutionally illegal. We thought we'd at least get a few days of peace and some time to enjoy the Eid holiday, which coincides with the New Year this year. We've spent the first two days of a holy holiday watching bits and pieces of a sordid lynching.

America the savior… After nearly four years and Bush's biggest achievement in Iraq has been a lynching. Bravo Americans.

Maliki has made the mistake of his life. His signature and unhidden glee at the whole execution, especially on the first day of Eid Al Adha (the Eid where millions of Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca), will only do more to damage his already tattered reputation. He's like a vulture in a suit (or a balding weasel). It's almost embarrassing. I kept expecting Muwafaq Al Rubaii to run over and wipe the drool from the corner of his mouth as he signed for the execution. Are these the people who represent the New Iraq? We're in so much more trouble than I ever thought.

And no- not the celebrations BBC are claiming. With the exception of a few areas, the streets are empty.

Now we come to CNN. Shame on you CNN journalists- you're getting lazy. The least you can do is get the last words correct when you write a story about an execution. Your articles are read the world over and will go down in history as references. You people are the biggest news network in the world- the least you can do is spend some money on a decent translator. Saddam's last words were NOT "Muqtada Al Sadr" as Munir Haddad claimed, according to the article below. If anyone had seen at least part of the video they showed on TV, you'd know that.

"A witness, Iraqi Judge Munir Haddad, said that one of the executioners told Hussein that the former dictator had destroyed Iraq, which sparked an argument that was joined by several government officials in the room.

As a noose was tightened around Hussein's neck, one of the executioners yelled "long live Muqtada al-Sadr," Haddad said, referring to the powerful anti-American Shiite religious leader.

Hussein, a Sunni, uttered one last phrase before he died, saying "Muqtada al-Sadr" in a mocking tone, according to Haddad's account."

From the video that was leaked, it was not an executioner who yelled "long live Muqtada al-Sadr". See, this is another low the Maliki government sunk to- they had some hecklers conveniently standing by during the execution. Maliki claimed they were "some witnesses from the trial", but they were, very obviously, hecklers. The moment the noose was around Saddam's neck, they began chanting, in unison, "God's prayers be on Mohamed and on Mohamed's family…" Something else I didn't quite catch (but it was very coordinated), and then "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada!" One of them called out to Saddam, "Go to hell…" (in Arabic). Saddam looked down disdainfully and answered "Heya hay il marjala…?" which is basically saying, "Is this your manhood…?".

Someone half-heartedly called out to the hecklers, "I beg you, I beg you- the man is being executed!" They were slightly quieter and then Saddam stood and said, "Ashadu an la ilaha ila Allah, wa ashhadu ana Mohammedun rasool Allah…" Which means, "I witness there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is His messenger." These are the words a Muslim (Sunnis and Shia alike) should say on their deathbed. He repeated this one more time, very clearly, but before he could finish it, he was lynched.

So, no, CNN, his last words were not "Muqtada Al Sadr" in a mocking tone- just thought someone should clear that up. (Really people, six of you contributed to that article!)

Then again, one could argue that it was a judge who gave them that false information. A judge on the Iraqi appeals court- one of the judges who ratified the execution order. Everyone knows Iraqi judges under American tutelage never lie- that explains CNN's confusion.

Muwafaq Al Rubai was said he was "weak and frightened". Apparently, Rubai saw a different lynching because according to the video they leaked, he didn't look frightened at all. His voice didn't shake and he refused to put on the black hood. He looked resigned to his fate, and during the heckling he looked as defiant as ever. (It's quite a contrast to Muhsin Abdul Hameed's public hysterics last year when the Americans raided his home.)

It's one thing to have militias participating in killings. This is allegedly the democracy the Americans flaunt. Is this how bloodthirsty and frightening we've become? Is this what Iraq stands for now? Executions? I'm sure the rest of the Arab countries will be impressed.

One of the most advanced countries in the world did not help to reconstruct Iraq, they didn't even help produce a decent constitution. They did, however, contribute nicely to a kangaroo court and a lynching. A lynching shall go down in history as America's biggest accomplishment in Iraq. So who's next? Who hangs for the hundreds of thousands who've died as a direct result of this war and occupation? Bush? Blair? Maliki? Jaffari? Allawi? Chalabi?

2006 has definitely been representative of Maliki and his government- killings like never before and a lynching to end it properly. Death and destruction everywhere. I'm so tired of all of this…

McTag wrote:

And a happy new year to you; but I suspect you're always happy there, in your secure environment.

What do you think Mr Bush is going to tell us now? More troops?

What constitutes a secure environment? What constitutes an insecure environent?

I don't even have a guess about what Mr. Bush is going to tell us.

What do you guess Mr. Bush is going to tell us?

The important Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha was due to begin over the weekend. For Sunnis it began on Saturday the 30th of December. For Shias it begins on Sunday the 31st. According to tradition in Mecca, battles are suspended during the Hajj period so that pilgrims can safely march to Mecca. This practice even predated Islam and Muslims preserved this tradition, calling this period 'Al Ashur al Hurm,' or the months of truce. By hanging Saddam on the Sunni Eid the Americans and the Iraqi government were in effect saying that only the Shia Eid had legitimacy. Sunnis were irate that Shia traditions were given primacy (as they are more and more in Iraq these days) and that Shias disrespected the tradition and killed Saddam on this day. Because the Iraqi constitution itself prohibits executions from being carried out on Eid, the Iraqi government had to officially declare that Eid did not begin until Sunday the 31st. It was a striking decision, virtually declaring that Iraq is now a Shia state. Eid al Adha is the festival of the sacrifice of the sheep. Some may perceive it as the day Saddam was sacrificed.

The UK Sunday Times
31 December 2006

Deluded to the last

Saddam did not have to end on the gallows. He was the tyrant who
simply failed to comprehend anything outside his own brutal world,
writes Fouad Ajami, America's foremost Arab academic


It was inevitable that the man condemned to the gallows would speak
of his imminent death in religious terms. It has always been like this
with Saddam Hussein.

The quintessential secularist who had terrorised the Shi'ite
seminarians of Najaf and the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood with equal
brutality fell back on religious symbolism whenever calamity struck.
There was that time, in 1991, in that uneven battle with an
American-led military coalition, when he told his commanders that
"angels of mercy" would come to the aid of Iraq's army and that thus
they would emerge victorious over the infidels. He had lost his air
force, his army was surrendering in droves, but there remained the
outward piety.

There was the moment, in the aftermath of that war, when the Islamic
invocation Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) was added to Iraq's flag,
and there was the fitting spectacle, during his long trial, of Saddam
the steadfast believer turning up at court with a copy of the Koran
to face the victor's justice.

He had risen through the underground, and through the intensely
secular Ba'ath party, only to end it all with an appeal to the
"merciful God who helps those who take refuge in him and who will
never disappoint any honest believer".

Curiously, it did not have to end this way for Saddam Hussein.

THE Tikriti upstart took apart a turbulent country and reduced it to
silence and obedience. He also mastered, by all appearances, the rules
of his neighbourhood. He was once, in the 1980s, an enforcer of the
Sunni Arab order of power, its gendarme against the hurricane of the
Iranian revolution from the east.

A child of destitution and petty crimes, he befriended the emirs and
sultans of the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf. He took up his sword
against the "fire-worshipping" Persians, and gave himself the task of
quarantining the revolutionary brigades of Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Arabs needed swagger, and the Tikriti adventurer supplied it. They
had been haunted by their technological inferiority, and this new
order on the Tigris that came into its own a quarter-century ago held
out the promise of a regime at home with modern weapons.

Grant the man from Tikrit his due; he had a keen sense for the mood of
the crowd and of "the street". He had come into a void: Egypt had
walked away from its pan-Arab burdens, and the perennial hunger of a
thwarted culture for a would-be redeemer gave Saddam his moment in
the sun.

The role that had been Gamal Abdel Nasser's in the 1950s and 1960s was
there for Saddam to claim. In the way of a neighbourhood enforcer he
was shrewd and cunning: he walked with the rulers of Arab lands,
partook of their summits, but the menace was never far away.

The man who dispatched his forces to Kuwait on the morning of August
2, 1990, played by his own rules. A principality with a long settled
history of its own was declared the "19th province" of the man's
dominion. He had been strapped for cash and he came to collect it. He
had fought for the Arabs against Iran, and the conquest of Kuwait
was, by his lights, the payoff due him for being Saif al-Arab, the
sword of the Arabs.

He was rebuffed and thrown back across an international frontier; his
scheme had backfired. The avenger of the Arabs, their standard-bearer,
made legitimate a big western military presence in the lands and sea
lanes of the region.

Even before the Anglo-American war of 2003 decapitated his regime, the
country he had put forth as a Prussia of the Arabs, destined to unite
them, lay prostrate at the mercy of the Powers, its oil and trade
subject to an international regime, its air space and a good chunk of
its land mass under the control and supervision of outsiders. And on
Iraq's borders those "brotherly" regimes he had sought to herd into
his sphere of influence had scurried for cover in search of western
protection. "The knight of Arabism" had delivered the Arabs into a
new season of tutelage and dependence.

THE paradox of this man is easy to see: had he been possessed of a
scant measure of introspection, Saddam might have wondered at the
ironic turn of fate that has made his country — and a good deal of
the region around it — a battleground between the Pax Americana and
Persian power.

He loathed both America and the Iranians. In his moments of hubris he
thought of himself as a worthy challenger of the Pax Americana; he was
convinced that America was a declining power, that he could position
himself as a master of the Persian Gulf, and that powers beyond would
sue for an accord on his terms.

It had been understood for several decades that American imperial
power had marked the Saudi realm as a place apart, inviolate and a
vital interest of its imperium. Yet Saddam all but ignored those red
lines.

He hadn't thought much of the Saudis, and he set out to overturn the
American security doctrine in the oil lands. Nor did he give the
Iranian state next door the regard owed it by virtue of its
demography and weight in the scales of power.

There can be no better illustration of the man's obtuseness than the
virtual absence today of the Arabs from the contest of nations. From
Iraq and the Gulf to Beirut and the Mediterranean, the Arabs now seem
spectators to their destiny as the battle unfolds between Pax
Americana and the Persians. This, in small measure, was the harvest
of what Saddam had sown in the years of blind and clumsy terror.
No one in the Arab world was able to rein him in. His fellow monarchs
and rulers were in no position to stand up to him. No Arab cavalry
was set to ride to the rescue of his Shi'ite and Kurdish victims. The
regime he had put together worked skilfully with the hidden atavisms
of the Arab world.

He presented his dominion, and the terror at its heart, as a pan-Arab
secular enterprise. But Arab nationalism had been, for decades, covert
Sunni hegemony, and the ruler in Baghdad had going for him the silent
acquiescence of his world. No League of Arab States operatives ever
threatened Saddam Hussein, and the circle of brutal men around him,
with moral and political censure.

He assassinated or put to death great Shi'ite men of letters and
jurisprudence. But the Shi'ites were strangers to the Arab courts and
to the intellectual class alike. They were the Arab world's
stepchildren.

In the most cruel of historical swindles, Saddam "Persianised" his
Shi'ite countrymen, even though Shi'ism in Iraq was Arab through and
through, its adherents bedouin Arabs who had converted to Shi'ism at
the hands of clerics in the trading towns of Najaf and Karbala.

No Arabs of note stepped forth to contest this forgery; the bigotry of
the man was but an extreme version of the bigotry of his world. In
the same vein, the terror unleashed against the Kurds in the 1980s
took place against the background of a wider Arab silence.

That petty tyrant in Baghdad did not descend from the sky. He emerged
out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission. It is no
surprise today that Arab rulers — Egypt's master in particular —
speak with dread of Saddam's execution.

He ruled alone, he hoarded public treasure; he gave every sign that he
had in mind a dynastic succession for one of his sons after him; he
made a mockery of national elections. In all this he was at one with
his neighbourhood.

"You go not till I set you up a glass, where you see the inmost part
of you," Hamlet says to his mother. In his years at the helm of
political power, and in those shameless protests in the Palestinian
territories and in Jordan that have erupted now and then in support
of this terrible man, Saddam Hussein has held up a mirror for the
Arabs. And the image in the mirror has never been pretty.

IT IS the luck of Saddam's victims that he was so unusually brazen,
and that he never read the balance of forces in the world beyond
Iraq, Iran and the Arab order of states.

It was never fated or maktoob (written), as the Arabs would say, that
Saddam would be flushed out of a spider hole by American soldiers, and
that he would be condemned to "execution by hanging until death", as
the appeal court in his country ruled. Had he let well enough alone,
had he read America's mood after September 11, 2001, he might have
been able to stay out of harm's way.

On Saddam's western border, his nemesis Hafez Assad, like him a man
who had risen from obscurity and poverty to the commanding heights of
political power, and very much in Saddam's mould in his attitude
toward authority and dissent, died in power, a natural death. Syria
gave Assad a grand funeral and had no choice but to acquiesce to the
succession of his son.

The Syrian despot had been careful not to offend the Powers. He had
all but erased an international frontier, stripped the small Lebanese
republic of much of its independence. But he had done it over the
course of two long decades, and he had done it, it has to be sadly
admitted, with a green light granted him by the Pax Americana in
1990-91, a reward for riding with the posse that Bush the Elder had
assembled to evict Saddam from Kuwait.

Assad's caution may have been the temper of the man. Conceivably, it
was also the caution of his community of Alawites, an esoteric faith
of the insular Syrian mountains.

Saddam lacked the guile that might have spared him. His military
machine was all rust and decay, but he swaggered and let the world
think that he had perfected a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction.

A great military expedition was being readied against him in
Washington and London, but he gambled to the bitter end that the
American leader would not pull the trigger. It never dawned on him
that the mood had darkened in Washington after 9/11, and that the
military response that had begun in Kabul was heading his way.

It did not really matter that Saddam Hussein had not been directly
implicated in the terrors of 9/11, and that those terrors had had
their origins in the political cultures of Egypt and the Arabian
peninsula. Truth be told, Saddam had drawn the short straw.
Kabul and the Taliban had not sufficed, the campaign against radical
Islamism had to make its way to the Arab wellsprings of jihadism.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia were off limits; they lay within the American
orbit. Saddam's regime was the perfect target of opportunity —
menacing but in reality weak and isolated. He was a Wizard of Oz;
behind the curtain his realm was a domain of make-believe.

The Iraq war may now be an orphan in the court of American opinion.
But on the eve of it well over 70% of the American public favoured
upending Saddam's regime.

In retrospect, the scaffolding of the war would come under steady
attack, and the critics would maintain that there had been no
operational links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. But those fine
distinctions had no standing and no force in the countdown to war. It
was Saddam's fault that he drew attention, and fire, when ducking for
cover would have been the better part of wisdom.

It will be said on the "Arab street" and by the critics of the Iraq
war worldwide, that this verdict, and the entire judicial process
that issued the death sentence, were an affair of the American
occupation, cut to America's political needs. Iraqis from Kurdistan
to Basra will pay these quibbles no heed.

If it took a foreign war to bring about this justice, and to introduce
into Arab politics the principle of political accountability, so be
it.

So much of the political and economic life of the Arabs today — the
satellite television channels railing against the West, the
intellectuals who condemn the West in perfectly good western idiom,
the oil industry that sustains practically all that plays out in the
region — has its origins in western lands.

Nuremberg, too, was the victor's justice. The Iraqis who endured the
tyranny while the world averted its gaze from their suffering are owed
their moment of satisfaction.

Fouad Ajami is the author of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the
Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University

The Volunteers
Cut-and-run is not in their vocabulary.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
OpinionJournal
Friday, December 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

If someone this weekend says "Happy New Year" in Iraq or Afghanistan, would anyone in the world hear it? For many, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan have become like trees falling in an empty forest. The world doesn't want to hear it. Indeed, the one apparent accomplishment of the Baker-Hamilton report is that it freed people to say that Iraq is a "failure." Afghanistan, with fewer suicide bombings, never became much of a story in our domestic political wars, and so has largely receded into the mists.

It is ironic that despite the years of our daily engagement in these places, the "information age" has brought us so little knowledge about the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologically, much of America has already cut and run from these two countries.

Some Americans, though, simply won't.

In April 2004, this column told the story of Spirit of America, organized by Jim Hake, to provide citizen-supported aid to the troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then in May 2005 this space was given over to an account of American businesswomen working to help women in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Here in the U.S., the political new year will fill up fast enough with politicians and pundits offering ways to unwind and spindle the commitments America made to Iraq and Afghanistan. So this seemed a good moment to revisit the folks running Spirit of America and the Business Council for Peace. They're not going to leave.
Spirit of America's experience in Iraq has followed the same rugged timeline of events as the war. Recall that in April 2004 it raised sufficient monies to rebuild TV stations in Al Anbar province, staffed by Iraqis, to counterbalance propaganda from the likes of al-Jazeera. Those TV stations were built. And they have been destroyed. A sewing center for Iraqi women was similarly destroyed.

This past year, the group got a request from the Army 451st Battalion to help restore the medical facilities at the Najaf Teaching Hospital. The Mahdi militia had occupied it for a time. Spirit of America sent seven cardiac monitors to the hospital's director, Safaa Hamedi. In October, gunmen killed Dr. Hamedi outside his home.

Still, requests from the Marines and Army continue to arrive at Spirit of America. An Army captain in Afghanistan's Parwan province asked for medical textbooks for local doctors. SoA sent bee serum to inoculate honey bees at a business in Iraq's Diyala region. Marine Lt. Jim Wilmott got camping equipment for 200 Iraqi Boy Scouts. At the request of U.S. Embassy personnel, SoA has sent clothing and school supplies for orphans in Baghdad and Basra. They've sent thousands of kids' backpacks and school supplies requested by soldiers around the country. With the SonoSite ultrasound company, SoA delivered handheld ultrasound machines to the primary hospital in Al Qaim, Iraq, near the Syrian border. "Before this," said Mr. Hake, "they were using seashells to listen to the sounds of a pregnant mother and baby; the Marines couldn't believe it."

Jim Hake says Spirit of America's contributions have fallen off since 2004 owing to general fatigue with Iraq, "but under the circumstances people continue to be quite generous." An end-of-the-year funding request raised more than $150,000. "The emails we send to donors are not a good-news operation," says Mr. Hake. "We don't want to put a happy face on it. But the information is more encouraging than what they typically hear. The destroyed projects are hardly good news, but there are lots of guys and gals in the military there who are not just marking time, who want to see this work."

It was about 19 months ago to the day that 13 women from Afghanistan were looking out the windows of the 29th floor of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan, brought there by a group of American businesswomen who call themselves the Business Council for Peace (Bpeace). One of the women remarked that New York looked "very new." The idea was to expose the Afghans, most of them college graduates, to basic business know-how. Bpeace had identified the Afghans as "fast runners," women with entrepreneurial instincts. Kate Bruggeln, a Council member and retailing specialist, just returned from Kabul, her fourth trip there. Three other Bpeace women were with her.
"These trips to Afghanistan always stagger you in the best way," she said this week. "Afghanistan is a longer road than our election cycle can endure, but these women are the future of Afghanistan. This isn't a replay of the last decade. Our group's been working with them for almost two years. They are making progress."

The big event on this trip was the preparations to open Rangeen Kaman Artisans, a for-profit cooperative run by 10 of the Bpeace "associates." Another associate, Afifa, has opened a fitness center for women; it shares electrical power with the RKA store. The Americans are also working with the Afghan Women's Business Federation to create a business-formation curriculum across the country.

"The thing Afghans fear most is that we're going to leave," Ms. Brugelln says. "Not only do they fear it, they predict it, because everyone has done it before. This fourth trip by our group was profoundly meaningful to them. In the face of all the instability, we showed up again. Bpeace won't be part of the downward spiral."

Could this determination be a variant of the much-mocked "stay the course"? It is at least an interesting irony that the people who have had their faces deepest in Iraq and Afghanistan the longest, as soldiers or volunteers like these, are the ones inclined to stick it out; while many here whose experience comes off the bloody front page every day are the ones looking for a way to--there is no other phrase--cut and run.

Groups such as the Spirit of America and the Business Council for Peace may yet be driven out. It is to this country's credit that early on, they voted with their feet to go in, and regret nothing.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

How come all the Shia do not call it a lynching?

Quote:

How come all the Shia do not call it a lynching?

Because they were the ones doing the lynching?

Cycloptichorn

lynch: to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction

Militia blamed for taunts at Saddam's execution

Iraqi officials claim militia infiltrated Saddam Hussein's execution team withthe intent to inflame sectarian tensions

4 January 2007

Iraqi officials claim Saddam Hussein's execution was infiltrated by outsiders bent on inflaming sectarian tensions.

Authorities are questioning a guard at the prison where the hanging took place. They are trying to find out who filmed the event on a cellphone, and leaked the video.

The footage of the former dictator being taunted by Shi'ites as he stood on the gallows has sparked outrage across the Arab world.

Iraq's National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie admits things did not go to plan.

Another Iraqi official says the hanging was supposed to be carried out by hangmen employed by the Interior Ministry, but that militias infiltrated the executioners' team.

The US military says it would have handled the execution of Saddam Hussein differently.

However, US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell says all American responsibility for the former Iraqi leader ended when he was handed over earlier in the day.

He says the security measures at Saddam's hanging were the responsibility of the Iraqi government.

© 2007 NZCity, NewsTalkZB

Iran-Iraq parliamentary friendship group says Saddam's death, end of dark era
Tehran, Jan 3, IRNA
Iran-Iraq-Majlis

Iran-Iraq Parliamentary Friendship Group said in a statement on Wednesday that Saddam's death put "an end to a dark era" in Iraqi history.

Putting to death of the Iraqi dictator was "the end of a dark era filled with agony for the Iraqi nation," said the statement.

It expressed hope that "a new chapter would open at Iraq's history" in the post-Saddam era and that "peace and security would be restored" in the war-torn country.

Referring to the dictator's massive crimes against innocent people of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait and the use of weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons in particular, on his order, the statement said that Saddam was not alone in his crimes against defenseless civilians.

"The Iraqi dictator could have never been able to commit such crimes without the all-out economic and military help of his international supporters, specially the US," stressed the statement.

It added that Saddam's execution would not exclude his accomplices from the roles they had played in the dictator's crimes.

The statement called for continuation of investigations over Saddam's crimes, particularly those committed against Iranian nation with the support and green light of the US and its allies.

It was the Reagan administration that helped Saddam create his WMD's. They were used against Iran with the Reagan's administration knowledge and aid. Is it not strange the monsters we create and have to come back and destroy. I wonder what monster our incompetence is creating now in Iraq. We obviously do not have control of the situation.(my comment)

"People and the government of Iran will insist on their demand for continuation of investigations over Saddam's war crimes and his acts against humanity, particularly his massive use of chemical weapons against Iranian nation," stressed the statement.

It referred to the new plot of Saddam's backers, the US in particular, to fuel sectarian and ethnic struggles in Iraq, the statement said "The plot is doomed to failure due to the vigilance and unity of the Iraqi people and its government."

It stressed those behind such conspiracies would become disgraced soon.

It takes real genius to create a martyr out of Saddam Hussein. Here is a man dyed deep with the blood of his own people who refused to fight for him during the United States - led invasion 3 1/2 years ago. His tomb in his home village of Awja is already becoming a place of pilgramage for the five million Sunni Arabs of Iraq who are at the core of the uprising.

...The myth put about by Republican neoconservatives that large party of Iraq enjoyed pastoral calm post-war but were ignored by the liberal media was always a fiction. None of the neocons who claim that the good news from Iraq was being suppressed ever made any effort to visit those iraqi provinces which they claimed were at peace.

...Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. It was not inevitable that the country should revert to Hobbesian anarchy. At first USUK did not care what the Iraqis thought. Their victory over the Iraq2i army - aand earlier ovr the taliban in Afghanistan - had been too eay. They installed a semi colonial regime. By the time they realised that the guerilla war was serious it was too late.

...An attack on the Shia militia men of the Mehdi Army could finally lead to the collapse of Iraq into total anarchy. Saddam must already be laughing in his grave.

Quote:

How come all the Shia do not call it a lynching?

Because they were the ones doing the lynching?

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Quote:

How come all the Shia do not call it a lynching?

Because they were the ones doing the lynching?

Cycloptichorn

ALL THE SHIA DID THE LYNCHING? I don't think so.

It wasn't a lynching! So none of the Shia did the lynching.

Quote:

lynch: to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction

Whoa there--I must make a better effort to remember!

Whatever George Sorose says, is true. Right? George Soros says it was a lynching with or without legal sanction. Therefore, it was a lynching with or without legal sanction. So naturally the atheistic collectivists that George Soros owns also say it was a lynching with or without legal sanction. And, naturally those who worship or are followers of either George Soros or one or more of the atheistic collectivists George Soros owns, also say it was a lynching with or without legal sanction.

Yes, it was a lynching.

Militia blamed for taunts at Saddam's execution

Doesn't say much for Iraqi security or the IM. It's very heavly infiltrated by Shiite militia.

This may very well be the last thing I say on the Iraq debacle. I'm unilaterally pulling out, just as our troops will when Brown becomes PM. I'm sorry but there you have it. We supported you shoulder to shoulder but American idoicy has led us into disaster.
...

KNOWING THE ENEMY
by GEORGE PACKER
Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?
New Yorker
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11

[Posted here previously by me in 7 parts because of its length]

Part 1

In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display about Indonesia's war, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, against a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam. "I had never heard of this conflict," Kilcullen told me recently. "It's hardly known in the West. The Indonesian government won, hands down. And I was fascinated by how it managed to pull off such a successful counterinsurgency campaign."

Kilcullen, the son of two left-leaning academics, had studied counterinsurgency as a cadet at Duntroon, the Australian West Point, and he decided to pursue a doctorate in political anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He chose as his dissertation subject the Darul Islam conflict, conducting research over tea with former guerrillas while continuing to serve in the Australian Army. The rebel movement, he said, was bigger than the Malayan Emergency--the twelve-year Communist revolt against British rule, which was finally put down in 1960, and which has become a major point of reference in the military doctrine of counterinsurgency. During the years that Kilcullen worked on his dissertation, two events in Indonesia deeply affected his thinking. The first was the rise--in the same region that had given birth to Darul Islam, and among some of the same families--of a more extreme Islamist movement called Jemaah Islamiya, which became a Southeast Asian affiliate of Al Qaeda. The second was East Timor's successful struggle for independence from Indonesia. Kilcullen witnessed the former as he was carrying out his field work; he participated in the latter as an infantry-company commander in a United Nations intervention force. The experiences shaped the conclusions about counter-insurgency in his dissertation, which he finished in 2001, just as a new war was about to begin.

"I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor," he said. "After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, 'The problem is Islam,' I was thinking, It's something deeper than that. It's about human social networks and the way that they operate." In West Java, elements of the failed Darul Islam insurgency--a local separatist movement with mystical leanings--had resumed fighting as Jemaah Islamiya, whose outlook was Salafist and global. Kilcullen said, "What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it's not about theology." He went on, "There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what's happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not 'Islamic behavior.' " Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, "People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks." He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

How is your pulling out rather than helping us return to rationality, going to serve your interests? You appear at greater risk from the currently rapidly growing high density of jihadist nut cases in the midst of your population than we do from same in our midst.