50 Kidnapped Violently
AMS Pulls out of Reconciliation Conference
Megan Stack* poignantly describes the scene where 50 Iraqis were brazenly kidnapped by men in camouflage uniforms at a bus station in Baghdad on Monday. The wealthy among them will be identified and held for ransom. Some persons kidnapped eventually are released, others are killed.
One Italian soldier was killed and 3 wounded, one very seriously, when their vehicle was bombed in southern Iraq. Italian withdrawal from Iraq is top on the agenda of a meeting of PM Prodi with British PM Blair.
Reuters reports 10 Iraqis killed around the country, some of them guerrillas, in the ongoing war.
It does not mention another 10, reported by al-Zaman. These were university students shot down in the Dora district of Baghdad.
Al-Zaman also reports the assassination of a municipal council member in Mansur, a district of Baghdad.
I count 26 or so dead in political violence on Monday.
Al-Zaman says that the deputy governor of Najaf, Abdul Husain Aytan, has imprisoned hundreds of former members of the Baath Party during the past two weeks. Aytan is a member of the Badr Corps Shiite paramilitary.
The US military in Ramadi fired four artillery shells at the train station, attempting to take out guerrillas who were off-loading weaponry there. AP says, "A hospital official, Dr. Omar al-Duleimi, said American forces killed five civilians and wounded 15. The U.S. military said the mission had "positive effects on the target," but it denied that civilians were killed or injured in the city west of the capital. " I suppose 5 persons are dead and 15 are wounded, but that it is unclear if they were civilians or guerrillas. Anyway, that guerrillas might even think they could openly offload weaponry at the train station in Ramadi tells me all I need to know about the state of security in the city.
The Association of Muslim Scholars again warned the Maliki government not to launch a major Fallujah-style assault on Ramadi.
The Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard line Sunni religious group, says it will not participate in the Arab League-sponsored national reconciliation conference to be held on June 20. This withdrawal is very bad news if the point of the conference is to reach out to the persuadable in the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, since the AMS clerics appear to have lines of communication into that group. The Arab League is pushing for the conference.
The 24,000 Palestinians in Baghdad, who lost their own homeland in 1948, are being targeted and forced to flee once more. Almost all Sunni Arabs supported the Baath at one time, so if that is the reason for targeting the Palestinians, then most Sunni Iraqis and large numbers of Shiites should be targeted, as well. The dilemma of the Palestinians, who labor under continued Israeli occupation in the West Bank and often in refugee camps elsewhere, seems never to end.
Doug Thompson maintains that field commanders are telling the Pentagon brass that the Iraq War is lost, and that they cannot contain the civil violence leaving some 1000 Iraqis dead per month.
The terrible stress of fighting in Iraq may help explain the rage and loss of control among US troops that led to the Haditha massacres.
This lyrical exploration of the geopolitical implications of the renewed militarism, and friendship for Bush, of Japan's Prime Minister Koizumi is well worth reading.
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Initially by mistake misattributed to Borzou Daragahi. Apologies to Ms. Stack.
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/06/2006 12:30:00 AM
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5 Comments:
"I suppose 5 persons are dead and 15 are wounded, but that it is unclear if they were civilians or guerrillas"
Iraqi Freedom Dictionary:
guerilla / guer•il•la / g&-'ri-l& / noun. / 1. Saadamist dead-ender. 2. foreign fighter from Syria or Iran. 3. Person killed or wounded by U.S. fire.
AMS does not give a clear reason why it refuses to participate in the reconciliation talks sponsored by the Arab League. An AMS spokesperson cites failure to observe provisions of earlier Cairo talks, but does not say what they were. Exactly what does AMS want that the AL talks would not put on the table? Are objective principles at stake? Or is it a matter of personalities and money? Does AMS have any fixed manifesto or plan of government? Do AMS communiqués refer to al-Maliki as "Iraqi Prime Minister" or by some distinctly less polite title?
Juan, Doug Thompson (Capitol Hill Blue) is a fabulist. He makes up a worst-case scenerio story, and then reports it as though he had sources. He's notorious for it.
Mind you, with the current administration the worst-case scenerio often turns out to be true -- maybe field commanders are indeed saying that the war is lost. But Thompson has no sources for that except his imagination.
"The terrible stress of fighting in Iraq may help explain the rage and loss of control among US troops that led to the Haditha massacres."
And it even better explains why the Iraqis are full of rage and losing control also, although all the western world seems to overlook it. Somehow, just because the violence is all around you, and your neighbors and friends and relatives are being killed, your social structure and job and business and electricity and water and god-knows-what-else are gone, and when you send your children off to school you don't know if they will return alive - somehow, in spite of all that - Americans think the well-armored US troops and well-armed US troops are the ones under the most stress.
The US troops level stress is nothing compared to the level of stress for the Iraqi people. It is negligible indeed.
THEREFORE, THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR AUTROCITIES BY US TROOPS. They don't belong there, never did, agreed to go along with illegal orders that violate their own constitution that the took an oath to defend. In view of the fact that they are volunteers and not innocents and not even upholding their own oaths, there is NO EXCUSE for their behavior.
So, we currently have a military that is not protecting the USA and causing a great deal of death and suffering in Iraq. Clearly a lose/lose situation. And one only the Americans can stop, now matter how many troops the insurgents/terrorists/civilians pick off.
I really think though that Americans won't turn their back on war-mongering and war-making and warrior worship and excusing US troops behavior until this country goes through what German went through in the 1940's. It is sad that people have to have such painful lessons to learn how to behave, and ever sadder that the innocent suffer the most.
This is a long comment, but it pertains to the myths regarding combat, and gnorance regarding combat stress:
It has been the staple mantra of the Bushiites that all stories of abuse by U.S. sldiers are false, and that Iraqis killed in such incidents are insurgents, terrorists or human shields, but a number of such incidents are now snowballing into the MSM reporting...
In a historical sense, the episode reflects on the MSM amnesia during the exposing of the My Lai massacre... As author Phillip Knightley has noted in his analysis of the media at war, "The First Casualty," the MSM ignored My Lai at first, treating it as a story of American victory over hundreds of enemy fighters (which is what initial Pentagon reports to the news media said about My Lai)...
When the truth regarding the My Lai massacre and the military's secret internal investigatins came out, the MSM kept repeating the claim that My Lai was a singular exceptional incident... It was not.
As Knightley points out in his book, there had been many previous reports of torture and massacres and killing of civilians, but most editors had refused to run these stories as they usually involved a low number of casualties... My Lai, with its hundreds of casualties, was such a big story that it could not be ignored...
Here is my take on the whole situation:
There is a very simple and unavoidable truth to what happens to a human brain in combat... If a machine is inundated with extraordinary stress then even the most awesome structure of steel and micropchips will crumble under assault... The human mind is no different...
Within three weeks of exposure to intense psychological pressure, such as that faced by soldiers heading into ambushes, IED attacks and terrorist bombings every day, the human brain simply starts malfunctioning... Anyone exposed to three weeks or more of such stress will almost certainly register some type of a deformity in brain functioning...
The most basic of animal impulses is to fight or flee... As soldiers can not flee, their animal instincts turn to fighting off threats - the more the stress, the greater the brain damage, the higher the amount of force used for the least perception of threat...
Heightened threat perception is a plus for soldiers, but only to a certain point... After that, it turns into paranoia, which is easily justifiable in combat until soldiers start mowing down people at the drop of a hat...
Revenge Motivation is also an indicator of collapse of normal mental activity... The insane idea that killing civilians will, somehow, stop enemy activity becomes a fairly logical conclusion for people under tremendous combat stress...
In the next level of stress induced insanity come the superstitions and the taking of lucky charms - soldiers mutilate their victims and carry their body parts as some sort of a superhuman cloak... There is no evidence that soldiers have degenerated to such conduct in Iraq yet, but there was plenty of evidence of such a level of insanity in Vietnam...
The final level of stress induced insanity results in fragging - the deliberate killing of one's own superior officers or troops that are not down with the program... In Vietnam there were numerous episodes of soldiers throwing grenades into the tents of the officers who pushed them too far, or conspiring to intimidate and shun other soldiers who would not play ball in the commission of war crimes...
Soldiers are quicky identifiable when this stage of mental disorder kicks in, because now they are violent toward their own... When the insanity crosses these boundaries, the soldiers are either shipped off to mental asylums, or sent home to die alone with their madness - Many of them simply can not reconcile to civilian life, slip into alcoholism and drug abuse, seek out adrenaline rushes through crime, and some commit suicide...
Let's hope that the Bush War in Iraq does not last long enough for any soldiers to slip into that final stage of insanity.
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