13 Dead, 33 Wounded; GI killed
Bali Bombers Sought Revenge for Iraq
An armed group raided a prison at Tikrit north of the capital and killed an inmate. (Presumably to keep him from saying what he knew about the other guerrillas.) There were more bombings in Baghdad, with that and other violence leaving a 13 or so persons dead and 33 wounded. Six corpses were found in the streets of the capital, victims of faith-based reprisal killings.
A US soldier was killed in south Baghdad.
One in three Iraqi children is malnourished and underweight.
The British military in the southern port city of Basra, according to Con Coughlin (the Judy Miller of the UK) " . . . now finds itself virtually confined to barracks, fearful that its presence on the streets will provoke further violent assaults."
The Kurdistan regional confederacy has formed a unified government. Somehow, the Turks don't seem to be celebrating.
The terrorists who carried out the Bali bombings say that they were seeking revenge for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, among other things.
Families displaced by the March-April, 2003, American invasion of Iraq are mostly still homeless, according to Reuters. Their plight has received much less attention than that of the Iraqis displaced in the past two months because of the faith-based civil war.
Residents of Wasit in the Shiite south staged a small demonstration against corruption and the way it creates fuel shortages and high prices.
US troops in the western city of Ramadi mostly cannot tell friend from foe. Since opinion polls in Anbar province show that over 80 percent of the population thinks it is all right to attack US troops, I'd say they could just assume that mostly they are seeing foe.
Iraq, once one of the more progressive Arab countries on women's rights, is becoming among the more repressive.
South Korea will withdraw 1000 troops from Irbil this year, a third of its total force. Since Kurdistan is actually patrolled militarily by the highly competent peshmerga militia, South Korean troops have not actually had much of a military mission, and mostly did peace corps kinds of work (probably the most valuable kind). They are there so that Seoul can please Washington, and perhaps to nail down economic opportunities for S. Korean firms in future, not because they are needed militarily. That even they are being withdrawn shows how unwilling Bush's coalition has become.
Light sweet crude is almost $70 a barrel. Analysts are saying that about 10 percent of that is jitters over the articifical Iran crisis. That is, Americans should know that everytime Bush and Rice make threats against Iran, you pay $3.00 a gallon instead of $2.70 a gallon for your gasoline. Think about that when you're filling up.
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/09/2006 12:35:00 AM
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/nolavconsole/ifs_news/hi?redirect=st.stm&news=1&bbram=1&bbwm=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&nol_storyid=4750911
This clip shows british troops patrolling the streets of Basra on foot without helmets.
Some of the filming is shot next to Saturday's crash site.
From this is can be seen that british troops are not confined to barracks.
The New Anatolian article on "western romantic liberal" support for Kurdish independence was quite chilling. It pretty clearly states that if the Kurds appeal to the West for protection (against Turkey, Iran, Syria or perhaps a central government in Iraq), they will be considered as betraying their neighbors, and under the doctrine of self-interest, the neighboring states can feel justified to punish them just short of a Bosnia or Darfur-style campaign of ethnic cleansing, because then, and only then, will the West respond. Onder Aytac is probably right about that, but this kind of mindset explains why the Turkish government is so hated by its own Kurdish population. I spend a lot of time in SE Turkey, and although many people oppose the excesses of the PKK, the undercurrent of anger and cynicism toward the Turkish government is far greater.
I agree that Barzani is corrupt and that he and his cronies (especially Nechirvan Barzani and Fadhil Mirani) diminish the possibility of reasonable, joint PUK-KDP governance in Iraqi Kurdistan. However, what Rubin and Aytac both neglect to mention is that Kamel Sayed Qadir was rapidly released from prison after his "conviction". To call Barzani's KDP the equivalent of a "fascist regime", as some have done, is perhaps hyperbole. I see a lot more similarities with Jordan, to be honest. In Jordan, you mess with the King's financial interests and tribal patronage network at your peril. However, in both Jordan and Kurdistan, there is a relatively wide latitude for criticism within certain bounds, and considerable press freedom. Certainly Iraqi Kurdistan has a far more open press and civil society than across the border in SE Turkey, or Ankara for that matter, which makes Aytac's article a bit ironic.
I see plenty of corruption, stupidity and bad faith within the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq. I'm not a "Western romantic liberal" who sees the KRG with unvarnished admiration. However, I would gladly settle for a similar degree of personal freedom and human services in any of the neighboring countries. I'm neutral on eventual independence, although Turkey would do well to look at the situation of Kosovo when thinking about the future of Iraqi Kurdistan. There is no more hope of forcing the Kurds back into a nation dominated by Muqtada al-Sadr (who seems to be gradually winning out over SCIRI) than there is of forcing the Kosovars back into Yugoslavia. Turkey and the West are better advised to take no extreme actions, and invest while pretending that Kurdistan doesn't exist. Give the Kurds another 15 years of ambiguous self-rule, and maybe they will work it out.
It is unsettling that our oil-soaked president can so easily manipulate the price of oil. How much is he benefiting from a 10% hike in the value of oil without any real increase in production cost? How much does it benefit his patrons?
Many people are saying that this war might not have been about oil after all. It certainly wasn't only about oil. But, I think the oil industry had two desirable outcomes: 1) own/control the Iraqi oil, or 2) halt the flow. Commodity businesses generally like predictability. Both of those options are stable and predictable. The one that wouldn't have been was a Saddam that came clean enough to be allowed to sell oil freely. Given the huge and long-term cost in developing hard-to-reach oil reserves, the oil-baron's nightmare is that he will get half way into a project that will be profitable at $60 a barrel and find that somebody cranks up production and he now has to sell at $55. Looks like that won't happen now. And, hey, if it does, just call the hatchet man and get him to threaten Iran...
The link to the Jakarta Post article (about the Bali bombers) now goes to a report on a multilateral summit in Bali. I believe I've seen Jakarta Post articles reshuffle themselves in this fashion before; I don't know if it's editorial politics or just bad databasing. In any case, the original article can be found here (and the headline to search for, if that goes missing, is "Bali bombings to avenge Muslim deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan").
I'd also point out that this refers to the 2005 Bali bombings. The 2002 bombings occurred before the invasion, a month after Bush's first UN speech on Iraq.
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