US Soldier Killed;
US Second to Eurozone;
I can still remember, as a child, the other children on the playground boasting that the US was the greatest country in the world, and the pride we all took from that. Predictably, George H. W. Bush's cokehead son has managed to reduce the US to the second largest economy after the eurozone. Bush was second best all his life, and has managed to make America second best.
Warren Strobel of McClatchy considers all the ways that the Iraq War has hurt US prestige abroad.
Another US soldier was killed on Saturday, in southwestern Baghdad.
Thousands of protesters rallied in Los Angeles, London, Glasgow and elsewhere against the Iraq War on Saturday, as the fifth anniversary of the invasion approaches. A few thousand Canadians in Toronto and Montreal protested against that country's involvement in the Afghanistan War.
Patrick Cockburn says that Iraq is no longer a country in any ordinary sense of the word.
The Aljazeera English discussion of the current situation in Iraq, below, is excellent. It includes Imad Khadduri, a former nuclear physicist from Iraq; Najeeb Nuaimi; my teacher Saad Eddin Ibrahim; and a US embassy spokesperson. The two Iraqis are very well informed and recite horrifying statistics. Saad Eddin (who was imprisoned by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak for his human rights work) reveals that he advised Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush administration officials about the reality in Iraq but was not listened to. He said he met Wolfowitz a year later, and the deputy secretary of defense admitted he wished they had listened to Saad Eddin.
And Part 2:
Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Saturday:
' BAGHDAD - One U.S. soldier was killed by small arms fire in southwestern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD - Two bodies were found in different areas of Baghdad in the past 24 hours, police said.
KIRKUK - Five policemen were wounded by a roadside bomb in Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, Nineveh province police spokesman Brigadier-General Khaled Abdul Sattar said.
MOSUL - Three civilians were wounded when a car exploded near Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, Nineveh province police spokesman Brigadier-General Khaled Abdul Sattar said.
ISKANDARIYA - One man was killed when gunmen wearing Iraqi Army uniforms attacked a house in Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. The man's son and brother were kidnapped.
SAMARRA - U.S. soldiers killed two suspected al Qaeda militants near Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Friday, the U.S. military said.
HILLA - Eight Iraqi civilians were wounded when 29 Katyusha rockets damaged three houses and a school near a U.S. embassy regional office in Hilla, 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, on Friday, the U.S. military said. Iraqi police said one woman was killed.
TAL AFAR - Iraqi security forces killed three suspected militants in Tal Afar, 420 km (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad, police said. Two of those killed were wearing belts packed with explosives.
RABIYA - A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed an interpreter in an attack on a border checkpoint at Rabiya on the Iraq-Syria border in Iraq's northwest on Friday, the U.S. military said. Two U.S. soldiers, two U.S. Department of the Army personnel and two customs guards were wounded. . .
NUMANIYA - One body was found in a field in Numaniya, 120 km (75 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. '
McClatchy adds:
' Baghdad
- Around 6:30 a.m. a bomb targeted a group of construction workers in Al Wathiq square, injuring 9 people. . .
Diyala
- A roadside bomb targeted police vehicle in Baladruz, injuring two policemen.
- Mortar shells missed police station and hit near by homes in Al Salam town near Baquba, injuring 3 citizens.
- Police found three dead bodies throughout Diyala. . .
Wasit
- Two athletes were killed and 9 others were injured due to hand grenade explosion in their bus in Al Hai town south of Kut yesterday. Police said one of the team members was playing with the grenade and it exploded.
- A parked motorcycle bomb targeted civilians in a market in Al Sweera, killing one civilian and injuring 10 others. . .
- Gunmen attacked police patrol west of Kut yesterday, killing one police man and injuring 8 others.
- Gunmen killed Hussein Awda, a civilian, in random shooting in west Kut.
- Gunmen attacked police forces in different areas in Kut injuring three policemen today.
- A mortar shell slammed into Al Hawra neighborhood in Kut today, injuring two men and one woman.'
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/16/2008 06:30:00 AM
18 Comments:
Wolfowitz must be pleased that a major Muslim Arab country has been destroyed, with so many killed and millions of refugees flooding other Arab countries.
He would have been even more happy if Iraq's oil became an American run 'trust', and the AEI-appointed Zionists were still running Iraq as they did in 2003 to 2005. But that would have been the icing on the cake.
The destruction of Iraq had been a long-running dream of the Zionist neo-cons, and now it is a reality. It cost them nothing to do, and their friends made lots of money out of it. That's pretty good, is it not?
I follow international political developments closely; economic developments, less so. My two favorite bloggers are Juan Cole and Dean Baker, who provides economic analyses that are both rigorous and sympathetic to the concerns of working class Americans. According to Baker, the fall in the dollar is both inevitable and desireable because its value was greatly inflated by Clinton's 'high dollar policy,' which basically subsidized imports to the detriment of US exports, and substantially contributed to the current trade deficit that is responsible for the loss of many decent-paying manufacturing jobs. I'm no economist, but I have read his arguments, and they seem perfectly sound to me -- almost to the point of being self-evident. A lot of Bush's policies are morally bankrupt and self-destructive, but the fall in the dollar described in the economics article you cite might not be bad in the long run, and frankly, I'm not sure if maintaining America's economic hegemony should be a concern to American progressives.
I managed to find it without great difficulty but would you like to put a link to part two of that discussion?
MB
"Predictably, George H. W. Bush's cokehead son has managed to reduce the US to the second largest economy after the eurozone."
Maybe now we'll try harder.
Any substance to that tidbit I came across a few days ago claiming that Cheney invested several million in Eurobonds in 2002? If so, that - like his stock options in Haliburton - which from being worthless prior to the war were, thanks to the war, extremely valuable - if so, that Eurobond "investment" was one of the great financial moves of the last 50 years.
I wonder - if it is true - how many of his struggling compatriots know about it - and how they'd feel about it?
' Patrick Cockburn says that Iraq is no longer a country in any ordinary sense of the word. '
And that is wonderful according to the Neocons.
There's a very important item in today's WSJ--America Recieves a Margin Call, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120554473788438679.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news --being commented upon by Jerome a Paris at http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3740
As might be expected, the discussion is quite lively and very revealing about the USA's future direction. The real root of our economic crisis is much deeper than W's failed policies, which are essentially the extension of the root--Reaganomics. But even Reaganomics is rooted in longstanding US Imperial policy goals, most of which were upgraded after WW2, of which corporate globalization is the most recent.
When the FED drops rates again this week, expect the dollar to go into freefall and commodities led by oil to soar. The reason is basic: The US Dollar is no longer a store of value.
I think the best way to characterize the strength of the the US is to call it "The Worlds Most Heavily Armed Nation".
Drop the military segment and you have a nation that is gravely dependent on foreign resources, has disassembled much of its industrial might, lives by borrowing, is led at the federal level by ceaselessly warring unproductive factions, has a mass media obsessed with sex, personality, and violence, can't switch to the metric system (I think we stand with Jamaica on that singularity), and can't transition to a coin dollar. (Not a complete list.)
It's hard to miss the point of the "Blood for Oil" Web site. It features one poster of an American flag with "Blood for Oil?" in white block letters where the stars should be and two dripping red handprints across the stripes. Another shows a photo of president bush with a thin black line on his upper lip. "Got Oil?" the headline asks wryly.
Five years after the United States invaded Iraq, plenty of people believe that the war was waged chiefly to secure us petroleum supplies and to make Iraq safe - and lucrative - for the us oil industry.
We may not know the real motivations behind the Iraq war for years, but it remains difficult to distill oil from all the possibilities. That's because our society and economy have been nursed on cheap oil, and the idea that oil security is a right as well as a necessity has become part of our foreign policy DNA, handed down from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush. And the war and its untidy aftermath have, in fact, swelled the coffers of the world's biggest oil companies.
But it hasn't happened in the way anyone might have imagined.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/14/AR2008031403677.html
John Burns of the NYT has a 3-page "Five Years On" column today which, like all the other "5 years later" columns is interesting, however, I was very much struck by the following:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16jburns.html
They know, too, through coverage in this newspaper and others, of the deep fissures, of ethnicity, sect and tribe, that were camouflaged by the quarter-century of Mr. Hussein’s totalitarian rule. As much as America’s policy failures, it has been these factors that have contributed to the Iraqi quagmire. Properly weighed, in time, they might have given cause for second thoughts about the wisdom of the invasion. What seems certain is that those entrusted with the task of fulfilling the American mission were confronted, from the beginning, by an odds-against calculus. Iraq, in 2003, could scarcely have been less prepared than it was to embrace democracy, dependent as that is, everywhere, on a minimum of popular consent and trust.
My recollection is somewhat different. I question this suggestion of inevitability. I remember for the first two to three years the Iraqis insisted there would be no civil war because they had lived together in peace, intermarried extensively, and the Sunni/Shiia differences were, like, religious... they were all Moslem.
After the invasion, in the chaos, early on, yes, there were some retribution killings and there was some anti-occupation violence, most attributed to a small number of Saddam loyalists, Baathists, ex-army, "dead-enders."
De-Baathification, which threw lots of ordinary people professionals and others out of work, irrc, followed disbanding the military. That party membership was a common requirement of employment and did not necessarily represent personal sentiment was not considered. (They remain largly out of work, I believe.)
That long Allawi summer eventually gave way to the elections that were held (and boycotted by the Sunni). That those election were held "anyway" and those "winners" certified was another turning point I suspect. This parliament then engaged in the protracted, highly disputed "writing the constitution" process, the result of which was shotgunned through despite being incomplete and unacceptable to many.
All along in there, the sectarian use of the police and new Iraqi army destroyed the credibility of the new government for many. Negreponte death squads echoed Saddam era brutality. But, the coup de grace was the lack of security and services which empowered the militias on both sides. Every citizen needed the help of these gangs; there was no one else to turn to. Yes, foreign Sunni sympathizers made their way to Iraq to help out. Yes, the massive bombs targeting mass Shiia casualties radicalized the Shiia organized response. (I've seen few accounting of the reasons behind the daily litter of dead bodies, sectarian or just lawlessness, sectarian or interpersonal or revenge killinsg, sectarian or plain-oldfashioned crime?)
IOW, it wasn't "centuries old animosties" ... It evolved in modern time as a result of the virtual anarchy and lack of services, just like gangs and militias evolve in a power vacuum the world over.
There's no way to know what MIGHT have happened if things had been handled differently, but I found Burn's characterization a disappointing responsibility-shunning revision of the events as I remember them, insisting somehow, it was THEIR fault they couldn't/wouldn't get along.
How do you remember this?
"Second best" Juan? Surely you are over-estimating Dubya, and the USA too.
The second biggest economy in the world is not necessarily "second best"! On a qualitative scale, any economy dependent on a massive military industrial complex is surely near the bottom of the global rankings. Not just for ethical reasons, either, but for structural, economic ones too.
US nears 4,000 KIA / 30,000 WIA in Iraq
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080316/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq4000_dead;_ylt=Ap2fAp49s0FxixV84Otk9NNvaA8F
still no WMD found.
Dr. Cole
"Bush was second best all his life, and has managed to make America second best."
Second best? That's really really being generous. This guy was never even on the map until the rethuglican political machinery forced him upon us.
NY Times also has retrospectives of 5 Neocons (and some loyal Americans) on what surprised them about the Iraq train wreck.
Only Danielle Pletka admitted to any mistake,
and hers was to have too much faith in the Iraqi people.
Op-Ed: Reflections on the Invasion of Iraq
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/16intro.html
Avid Student
Burns works for our Ministry of Truth, so what he wrote should be anticipated.
Wolfowitz was the one who admitted it was all for oil, and was seconded by Greenspan. Bush again agitated for Iraq to pass the US written "Oil Law."
We do have a dollar coin. It contains a metal value of 6.8 cents, which is less than the nickel's 7.25 cents, http://www.coinflation.com/
' Bush was second best all his life, and has managed to make America second best. '
Yeah, but America loved him five yeas ago. The media beat up anyone who disagreed with him. He smirked, he swaggered. "Bring 'em on!" And Americans ate it up.
It wasn't this one little man who made America second rate. It was all of us Americans who gave the keys to the car, to use the American idiom, to the Neocons behind him, both Republicrat and Demoblican, and still have not looked back.
The International Comittee of the Red Cross has just issued its annual report on the actual situation in Iraq and it is awful. Extract :
Iraq: no let-up in the humanitarian crisis
Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of economic sanctions.
Many families include people who have been forced by the conflict to flee their homes, leaving those left behind with the daily struggle of trying to make ends meet. A sustained economic crisis marked by high unemployment further aggravates their plight.
If you have the stomatch to learn more about the plights which the US invasion brought to the Iraqi, you can read the full report here in pdf format . It is a rather short report of 15 pages, probably intended for a large public of donators. So it's an easy reading.
Look, the destruction of Iraq as a functioning state was an intent, not a byproduct, of the policy of invasion.
The same is being considered for iran and Syria, both functioning states.
It is the purpose. Keep the Arabs and Persians divided and weak.
Supporting the totalitarian regimes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia has the same goal.
Call it a sphere of influence, call it colonialism, restraining the enemy, containment, call it what you want, but its a goal, not a surprising outcome.
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