3 GIs, 4 British Killed
Guerrillas Slay over 100
al-Maliki shuffles Cabinet
The Democratic Congress will pass a resolution in January asking that troops start coming home by mid-2007 in a phased withdrawal.
Three US troops were announced killed in Iraq on Sunday, some dying of wounds incurred earlier.
Shiite guerrillas, most likely, used an improvised explosive device (IED) placed along the Shatt al-Arab waterway to attack a British ship patrolling those waters. They killed 4 and seriously wounded 3. The attack was especially poignant, coming on Remembrance Day, as the UK public memorialized their war dead.
AP reports well over 100 deaths in Iraq on Sunday from political violence. The worst single incident came when two suicide bombers detonated their bomb belts in the midst of a crowd of police recruits, killing 35 and wounding dozens. Another 25 bodies were found in Baghdad, victims of the sectarian civil war. In Baquba, some 40 bodies that had accumulated at the morgue in recent weeks were buried. Inhabitants in Baquba reported that a large number of bodies, up to 50, were strewn behind an electricity plant, but police could only find 5. Well, I shouldn't say only. I think the two distinct reports got conflated somehow.
AP says of the big bombing:
' n Sunday morning's bombing targeting police recruits, two men detonated explosives strapped to their bodies simultaneously, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq said. The attack, killing 35 men outside the police station near western Baghdad's Nissur Square, was one of several blasts in the capital.' '
Dozens of other assassinations and bombings are reported by Reuters, including the discovery of 12 bodies in Mosul.
AP also reports that Prime Minister Nuri al-Malik addressed a closed session of parliament on Sunday in which he pledged a shake-up of his cabinet and pressed his plan to have US troops withdraw to garrisons to be called on only in emergencies. He wants to deploy Iraqi troops more actively instead. His defense minister, Abdul-Qadir al-Obaidi, however, demurred that Iraqi troops are not sufficiently well trained to take a more active role yet. Note to al-Obaidi: You commit your troops to battle and you'd be surprised how fast they get "trained."
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that al-Maliki also criticized parliamentarians whose parties have gun-toting paramilitaries, as well as those who have threatened to resign from parliament if they don't get their way, calling both "irresponsible".
His reference to threats to resign concerned the Sunni religious party, the Iraqi Accord Front, one of the spokesmen for which threatened to resign last Wednesday if it were not given more of a say in how Iraq is run.
Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naef said Sunday that Iraq has become a major base for terrorism. He expressed concern about Saudi young men being seduced to go fight there [i.e. against Americans and Shiites].
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/13/2006 12:25:00 AM
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6 Comments:
ASKING THAT, King Canute?
JC: The Democratic Congress will pass a resolution in January asking that troops start coming home by mid-2007 in a phased withdrawal.
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Surely this news is either too much or too little from pretty well anybody's standpoint? The alleged January resolvers could have stayed home and "asked" for the same thing without the wear-and-tear of running for office. They would not have obtained it from the Crawfordite faction by that method, to be sure, but their chances of obtaining what they pray for by this method are scarcely any brighter, as far as I can see. The President had a very bad day last Wednesday, his sudden and nation-embarrassing collapse took me by surprise and even cost me twenty-five cents (payable on demand), but he's recovered stoutly since, in less than a week, and by next January, he'll be even more stoutly recovered still, as I expect. The Democratic Congress may resolve what it likes next year, but probably the Crawfordite Executive Branch is going to keep on executing what it likes undeterred by election results, or humble prayers from Capitol Hill, or by any other obstruction short of a solid brick wall.
The President and his Gonzaleses and his Kmiecs and his Yoos all agree that THE EXECUTIVE has a Constitutional right to behave like that, and even more so "at war."
Moreover, the President learned his big-management style at the Harvard Business School, and that clue points in the same direction: always talk down kindly to the shareholders in the Annual Report about "your company," but never confuse Annual Report language with how a modern corporation really gets big-managed from day to day, let alone go even a single step of your way to listen to ignorant and silly suggestions from the inframanagerial classes! One is always to manage one's corporation for the owners' ultimate benefit, as one learned to conceive "benefit" back at HBS, of course -- one is not some Marxist straw man or a Daddy Warbucks cartoon, after all.
But foolishly to allow mere owners to dictate "their company"'s corporate policy? What sense would that make? What good would that do? Throw the clamourous mob a Rumsfeld or a Barabbas when they clamour so loudly that they seem to be on the brink of rebelling aganst Big Management altogether, if you must, but never think of such an isolated and extorted exception as anything but exceptional, for Pete's sake! To grant a prayer in violation of Big Management's best unilateral and preëmptive judgments simply because the petitioners are pompously called "The Congress of the United States of America," would that be wise? Would that be safe? Most important of all, would that be any sort of proper and respectable and executive Management at all?
Look before you leap, guys!
There is one element that absolutely nobody is mentioning and the silence is creeping me out. What is Jeb Bush going to do now that he is term limited? It is not coincidence that Daddy Bush has finally put his foot down so that the Iraq mess can be cleaned up in time for Jeb. I suspect there will be a timetable for leaving Iraq and it will be based on getting George's numbers up to "hero" status by 2008. Cheney will resign in the not too distant future. Who will replace him? Condi? It is all called "horse trading."
I don't understand this cagey language, "redeployment". Does that mean bring the troops home or redeploy to super-bases and Kuwait?
So, now that some (or maybe many) Democrats want to usher the troops home, will Prof. Cole now shift to the side of the White House? Won't the withdrawal of US forces bring a de facto gravitation of influence to the militias and insurgents? Will they be the inevitable "new order," as forecast by Odom and Polk, or the advent of a Ruwanda on the Euphrates? Is there a middle way? Or is it only a wishful fairy tale construct? As is often said, hope is not a policy nor even a very convincing apology.
Zogby denounces "forced" partition, but is it any less bloodless to force unity? If the native police are powerless or complicit, how is the US supposed to stop the killings and "cleansings"?
Well, your headline is a bit inaccurate -- Maliki hasn't actually reshuffled his cabinet yet. On the other hand, he's threatened/promised to do so at least four times in the past three months or so, and nothing has ever come of it. The fact is, the cabinet is the product of horse trading among the factions, and Maliki can't make changes without either going back and retrading horses, or throwing factions (presumably armed) off the bus, whereupon they will respond as they see fit. So I'll believe it when I see it.
As the jaded Vietnamese bar girls used to taunt the broke and hard-up GIs on Saigon's Tu Do Street: "No Money, No Honey!"
Many years ago, the resolute Republican Congress "resolved" not to declare war on Yugoslavia. Then, that same resolute Republican Congress "resolved" again to deny President Bill Clinton any legal authority to bomb Yugoslavia. Then, those same resolute resolvers coughed up all the money President Clinton needed for his unilateral, unauthorized bombing of Yugoslavia. Then, in complete and cavalier disregard of all the resolute Republican resolving, Democratic President Bill Clinton forthwith blew up the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade -- target co-ordinates supplied by the CIA's ineffable George "Slam Dunk" Tenet.
Princes and Presidents do not care what Parliaments or Congresses "resolve." Princes and Presidents only care about what Parliaments and Congresses will fund. The first dime of additional funding appropriated for Deputy Dubya Bush's bungle in Bagdhad will place the new Democratic Congress's fingerprints all over this disaster and provide its Republican perpetrators with all the political cover they need to string this mess out until the planned handoff to a sucker/successor in January of 2009.
Alexander Hamilton and his founding brothers unfortunately bequeathed the Power of the Purse to a pusillanimous posterity too pathetically pompous to practice employing it for the intended purposes of constraining princely presidents and their predictable grab for ever more political power through military misadventurism abroad.
History departments in high schools and universities all over America should just quietly dissolve themselves in humble admission of their abject failure to teach Americans anything of value about the world and the country in which they so blissfully and ignorantly live.
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