Republican Candidates for Staying the Course;
Tal Afar Bombing Kills 25;
60 Bodies found Near Baquba;
190,000 Guns Unaccounted for by Pentagon
Republican candidates on Iraq Sunday:
“They are making progress, and we are winning on the ground,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona. “We must win. And we will not set a date for surrender, as the Democrats want us to do.” . .
“The reality is that you do not achieve peace through weakness and appeasement,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York. . .
Mr. Romney said: “I think we’re pretty much in the same place. It is critical for us to win this conflict. It is essential, and that’s why we’re going to continue to pursue this effort.”
Could they please define "win this conflict"? What would that look like? Whose ox would they gore to achieve it? How exactly would they pull it off?
A suicide bomber hit a Shiite neighborhood in the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar Monday morning. Initial reports gave the death toll as 25 and the wounded as 22, but the tolls are expected to rise.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani denied that Iran is supporting Shiite militias in Iraq, saying that the idea was probably based on old intelligence.
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Talabani met with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, along with Shiite vice president Adil Abdul Mahdi. Talabani says he had had a conversation with George W. Bush and was instructed to impress on al-Maliki that Bush's support is for the general political process in Iraq, not for any one individual. Talabani said that the implication is that al-Maliki is to blame for the current political crisis in which over a dozen ministers and the parties they represent have withdrawn from his government. Sunni VP Tariq al-Hashimi did not attend the meeting, since his party is among those who withdrew from the government. Al-Maliki declined to accept the Sunnis' resignations, leaving the door open to reconciliation. Talabani is pursuing talks with the Sunni Arabs.
Al-Maliki's government is clearly teetering and may fall.
[At the group blog, A. Richard Norton comments on Sunday's outcome in the Lebanese by-election. Also some info on the situation in Afghanistan.]
The Bush administration cannot account for 190,000 AK 47 machine guns and pistols it gave Iraqi security forces in 04 and 05. Actually, I think it is pretty obvious where some of them went.
Reuters reports that Iraqi police say they discovered 60 decomposing bodies in a field near Baqubah. The city is a prize in the ongoing fight between Sunni Arabs (the majority in the city) and the Shiite militias (from whom the local police are recruited).
In Baghdad, Police found 18 corpses in the streets, victims of sectarian death squads.
Guerrillas used mortars to target civilians in a Shiite Baghdad market, killing 11.
Reuters adds, "The bodies of three people were found shot and tortured on Saturday in the town of Mahaweel, 75 km (50 miles) south of Baghdad, police said."
In Mosul, Iraqi guards had to call in US troops to help put down a major riot at Badoush prison involving over 60 inmates, leaving one dead and two wounded.
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/06/2007 12:38:00 AM
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11 Comments:
LOL & LOL & LOL, looks like the surge working!!! The surge in cash transfer out of Iraq to Dubai that is.
Strange & absurd more than the surge strategy, just reading this latest post, all the attacks is either in Shia area or at Shia in Iraqi towns all over. Yet, we get daily ration of accusation that Shia Iran is behind the trouble in Iraq. When the U.S. is going to have a security chat with the real culprits of this mass murder, the Saudis?
I thought you were going to tell us today that the al-Qa'ida operative Haitham al-Badri responsible for the Askari shrine bombing has been killed and body identified.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6931862.stm
I am glad you didn't bother. It would have been a waste of time.
It could well be the case that someone called Haitham al-Badri has been killed, and he may even have had so-called al-Qa'ida connections.
But if there is one thing that is certain about the bombing(s) of the Askari shrine, and can be demonstrated, it is that it was not carried out by local people, and therefore the person killed was not the one that bombed the shrine. In any case, the Samarra sheikhs did a long time ago what the Anbar sheikhs are now being lauded for, and got rid of al-Qa'ida. A lot of good it did them, by the way, as we can see from the latest offensive at Samarra.
ref : “Could they please define "win this conflict" ?”
indeed; but note : “We must win. And we will not set a date for surrender, as [they] the Democrats want us to do.”
...clearly by "we" they speak neither for the American people, nor of the Iraqi people.
Clearly by "we" these cynical politicians are talking about we, the Republican Party must ‘win’ something in IRAQ ~ the soldiers and civilians now dying and being damaged by their hellish Occupation sans raison, be damned!
"winning" may remain as undefined to the American electorate as "The Mission" is a mystery to most American soldiers ~ but there is nothing ambiguous about who "we" is, oui?
The Bush administration cannot account for 190,000 AK 47 machine guns and pistols it gave Iraqi security forces in 04 and 05. Actually, I think it is pretty obvious where some of them went.
Is this in addition to the 250,000 AK-47s that went missing a year or so ago courtesy of a Bosnian air transport company contracted by the Pentagon and still held unaccountable?
I've always expected those to show up at the Iran-Iraq border, placed & found by the SOG/SAS groups operating over the border in Iran ostensibly looking for weapons smuggling, and claimed to be an insurgent cache supplied by Iran.
No serial numbers will be checked or reported by the Western media of course. Americans don't care about all of those pesky details before their 'leaders' make illegal wars...
US in Secret Gun Deal
By Ian Traynor
The Guardian UK
Friday 12 May 2006
Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq "go missing" as Pentagon uses dealers.
The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.
According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.
Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.
A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war.
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Link
As Andrew Bacevich trenchantly observed in "The New American Militarism", the militarization of our foreign policy is bipartisan. However, the GOP is now almost wholly given over to the militarists. The current GOP candidates are channeling Podhoretz and Kristol, not even Reagan, much Bush I, Ford, Nixon, Eisenhower or Taft. The retreat of "Main Street Republicanism", embodied by Senator Taft, is now complete as the corporatist interests (represented by the Bush clan), have now made full allegiance with the crusader internationalists, born out of neoconism.
"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" How about, "where have you gone Ike, Taft, Michel, etc." I have no illusions about the corporatist leanings of these former GOP stalwarts, but at least their policies were leavened with something of an understanding of the limits of power. The current crop of GOP candidates believe that the military is the principal (and for some, only) tool of our foreign policy.
More wars to come. (BTW, a bipartisan predeliction, as illustrated by the pro-interventionist op-ed in today's Washington Post by Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder).
Republican candidate Ron Paul, as usual, was forthright in his opposition to the war.
I can't understand why so many folks on the left, like Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, persist in ignoring him. Paul not only repeatedly attacked the neoconservative takeover but said: "We're losing this one. We shouldn't be there. We ought to just come home."
"Could they please define "win this conflict"? What would that look like? Whose ox would they gore to achieve it? How exactly would they pull it off?"
For what it's worth here is my take. By making al-Qaeda and Iran the bad guys, a declaration of victory is easy (under the assumption that 90% of the public believe this to be the case).
The victory announcement would go something like this:
- We have now determined that our efforts have reduced the number of foreign fighters in Iraq, the backbone of al Qaeda, to several hundred. The Iraqi security forces can easily defeat this meager remnant of a once powerful menace.
(This claim can be made at any time since the numbers are essentially correct - although the mass media and the public will accept the notion that al Qaeda has been recently castrated.)
- Iran is no longer the threat to Iraq's stability that it once was. This is thanks to our multi-front effort to convince Iran that their enterprise held great risk for the future of their country. Unfortunately the details of our actions must remain secret because of extreme geo-political sensitivty. (Since Iran is not the BIG threat its made out to be, the mass media can accept and promulgate the statement with little examination.)
- We have determined that much of the current violence is attributable to criminal activities, and localized vendettas. This violence can only be controlled by the Iraqi security forces and Iraqi society. (a mass media plausibe "What, me worry?" statement.)
- Mission accomplished.
-- what does it matter? the pols in DC just caved to bush on the most important civil liberties issue of our generation. as for the guns, isn't it the NRA dictum of nationbuilding that everyone will be safer once everyone has an AK-47?
- fluffy
I've blogged the missing weapons story with a slightly different spin:
Are The U.S. Government & The Pentagon Protecting A Bosnian Air Carrier Responsible For The Disappearance Of 200,000 AK-47s?
I don't have the answer, but I'm eager to find out... especially 'why'... because my basic sentiment is reflected by this excerpt:
Could these folks have been involved
with running Osama bin-Laden’s KLA
buddies around Central Asia at the
CIA’s behest just a decade or so ago?
Questions Questions Questions…
In Full
190,000 weapons missing?! It looks like the NRA has taken over the distribution of guns in Iraq. Anybody can get one. Anybody can conceal one. No tracking system needed or wanted. Shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. Everyone can be armed to the teeth, and shoot at anything that moves. Iraq would be Hog Heaven to the NRA. It certaily is to anyone in Iraq with mayhem on their mind. It sounds like guns have been tossed about like confetti.
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