3 Marines Killed
Dozens of Bodies found
3 US troops were announced killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas on Friday. At least 22 bodies were found in Baghdad. A prominent Iraqi politician and clan leader, Muhsin al-Kanan, an elected member of the Basra provincial council, was shot down on Friday.
On Thursday, dozens of people were kidnapped in Baghdad by persons dressed as police, then 25 or 30 were released, mainly Shiites. There was nothing more about this story on Friday and Saturday. Some 45 bodies were reported found on Thursday, including some in Wasit province, a Shiite area south of Baghdad. The Vice President of Iraq, Adil Abdul Mahdi, was almost assassinated.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki will launch a new initiative during the inauguration of the Reconciliation conference, aimed at bringing ex-Baathist Sunnis in from the cold. He will rehabilitate ex-Baathists against whom no civil cases have been filed.
Carne Ross, who was the UK point man on Iraq at the UN 1998-2002 says that the Blair government's and the Bush administration's sudden charges against Iraq concerning weapons of mass destruction were trumped up and came as a surprise to him.
' "During my posting, at no time did HMG [her majesty's government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests," Mr Ross wrote in evidence submitted to the Butler inquiry in June 2004.
"It was the commonly held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained." Mr Ross said when the United States raised the topic of regime change.
He and others would argue against such a move, "primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos", he said in written testimony given to an inquiry into the run-up to the March 2003 conflict.
"With the exception of some unaccounted-for Scud missiles, there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical weapons], BW [biological weapons] or nuclear material," the official said. '
Ross's testimony was secret until recently, under Britain's Official Secrets Act, but a parliamentary committee has now released it with the acquiescence of the foreign office.
Oregon has a better way of replacing senators who quit or become incapacitated in the middle of their 6-year terms. They hold a snap bi-election, so that the public rather than the governor gets to decide on the successor.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/16/2006 12:31:00 AM
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Dear Professor Cole
I thought it might be useful to post from Sun Zu, in case the "Napoleon of the Age" needs a hint.
In warfare, there are flight, insubordination, deterioration, collapse, chaos, and setback.
These six situations are not caused by Heaven or Ground, but by the general.
If the forces are equal, and one attacks ten, this is called flight.
If the troops are strong but the officers weak, this is called insubordination.
If the officers are strong but the troops weak, this is called deterioration.
If the officers are angry and insubordinate, doing battle with the enemy under anger and insubordination, and the general does not know their abilities, this is called collapse.
If the general is weak and not disciplined, his instructions not clear, the officers and troops lack discipline and their formation in disarray, this is called chaos.
If the general cannot calculate his enemy, and uses a small number against a large number, his weak attacking the strong, and has no selected vanguard, this is called setback.
These are the six Ways of defeat.
They are the general's responsibility, and must be examined.
Evevyone in Western governments and parliaments knew that Iraq did not have WMD:
The original UN inspectors spent three years destroying and verifying the destruction of the pre-1991 programs. Nikita Smidovitch and his team conducted a final check from the end of September 1993, and declared at the ennd of October 1993:"The findings are that we have not found any prohibited items".
The USA accpeted that, but asked for the sanctions to continue for around six months while they install video cameras in the dual-use sites! In a coup de tat the replaced the whole team with Anglo-Saxons already groomed for the endless inspection using the time-honoured scam of proving a negative: prove beyond any shaddow of a doubt that you do not have any unknown weapons anywhere in the nearly half a million square kilometers of Iraq [same as prove you are not a Communist; possessed by the Devil, secretly a Catholic ..etc]
An even bigger proof came with the defection of Hussein Kamel, the head of the Iraqi weapons programs, in August 1995: he told the CIA and others that Iraq had destroyed everything in 1991, but that revelation was kept secret until after the invasion.
The new UN team, despite making mountains of accusations: the Palaces being used for storage; unproven traces of nerve gas etc etc, never actually found anything real for nearly 14 years! That must tell you something.
The American were thinking, as Mr Blair put it, that they were bound to find some leftovers, however small, to pin the WMD on Iraq, or else say they were smuggled out (imagine getting rid of your most powerful weapons when you are being invaded, some ordinary Americans did!)
The biggest shock was the refusal of the 1000 strong American team to play along, despite huge pressure from the administration. Remember when Bush said the Hydrogen weather balloons were the WMD they cam for?
In any case, if Iraq did have WMD, the USA would have been the least threatened by them being so powerful and on the other side of the globe. All the countries in the region were against the US aggression except the "kill the Arabs" Israeli and American Zionist wackos.
The entire US Congress had access to all the information, and anyone who says that he/she was deceived is lying. The main issue was whether they could frame Iraq or not.
If Ross's testimony were ever going to come to light its not surprising that it should happen now.
On 9/11 one government official in the UK trasport department famously opined to colleagues that it would be a good day to "bury" bad news, so that any embarrasing figures and the like, that would have had to have come out anyway, should be released whilst the WTC was still smouldering and people were still focused on that. It gave a small insight into New Labour's manipulative, cynical methods.
This past week we've seen the same principle in action. On Thursday, three stories came out simultaneously:
1/ the report into the death of Princess Diana. Not damaging to the government of course, but a large enough minority here are obsessed with royalty and the ludicrous conspiracy theories surrounding Diana's death for it to clog up a good chunk of the headlines, leaving less space for.......
2/ The Attorney General's announcement that an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into massive bribes paid to lubricate an arms deal between Britiain and the vicious Saudi government would be called off because "the wider public interest" as defined by the government "outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law". You Americans understand democratic constitutions better than we do (you've got one at least) so the gravity of this needs no comment from me.
3/ Tony Blair became the first serving prime minister to be interviewed as part of a criminal investigation when police quizzed him - at a time agreed with his office - over allegations that his party effectively sold seats in Parliament to any millionaire prepared to help fund the Labour Party. I should explain. While you have the quaint notion of having elections for both your congressional houses, our second chamber is, rather more sensibly, populated with appointees, the descendents of people appointed by Blair's predecessors as far back as the middle ages, a few bishops, that sort of thing. We gave democracy to the world you know. Anyway, its illegal to be so uncouth as to actually appoint people as a straightforward reward for giving you money - that would be undemocratic - but the police are investigating allegations that Labour did just that.
Now of course if Carne Ross's testimony had come out on Thursday government spin would itself have been the story, but as it was they just about got away with a few suspicions that they'd chosen Thursday to bury as much bad news as possible. But releasing his testimony straight afterwards, when the media is still digesting the first 3 stories, plus the hunt for a suspected serial killer in Ipswich, can hardly be a coincidence. There are after all no depths to which this British Government will not stoop, as we saw with the faked concern over Iraq's fictional WMD threat, now exposed to a minority of an effectively distracted public.
David Wearing
The Democrat's Diary
Readers may wish to consider the possibility that the emerging intention to send more troops to Iraq is a) meant to prevent a ?i?n Biên Ph? and b) facilitate the logistics of abandoning a number of bases.
The plain truth may be that the military lacks the evacuation and medical capacity to support any substantial sustained increase in combat operations. For the most part, the casualty rate has been in the hands of planners on the ground: If they reduce the number of patrols and operations, the rate goes down. If they increase them, it goes up.
The fatality record appears to show that while the level of danger to troops has risen steadily throughout the war, the response has been more and more frequent retreats in the sense of reducing exposure for a few days or more. While there may be a variety of reasons, one lurking in the background is the actual capacity to accept losses to units and to evacuate and treat injured and sick soldiers. If they were to exceed this capacity, we would end up hearing reports of troops dying waiting for transport and treatment.
By all accounts, the emergency medical treatment during this war has been exceptionally good. This does not happen by accident: It takes a great deal of planning and coordination to achieve these kinds of results—everything has to be in place. We take this kind of readiness in our civilian world for granted but even there it does not happen by magic: Ambulances are always on call and emergency rooms are ready and staffed 24/7.
An increase in troop levels may not necessarily mean a higher fatality and non-morbid casualty rate for US troops. However, it may mean a higher rate of Iraqi casualties that arise from low-risk operations involving air power.
If we do start to see a permanent increase in the US fatality rate, it seems appropriate to assume that a higher rate has been approved at the highest levels of command. The last really permanent increase was in April 2004.
Minor orthographical quibble
That would be a "by-election", unless we're talking about an election in which only bisexuals are allowed to participate.
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