Murtha Urges Limited Funding Bombing

Murtha Urges Limited Funding
Bombing Kills 10 in Shiite Sadr City

Iraqi guerrillas killed 3 US troops and wounded 2 on Wednesday.

Guerrilla violence killed some 85 persons in Iraq on Wednesday. Reuters reports:

‘ BAGHDAD – A car bomb killed 10 people and wounded 35 near a police station in the Baghdad Shi’ite stronghold of Sadr City, police said. . .

BAGHDAD – Thirty bodies have been found around Baghdad in the past 24 hours, police said. All had been shot.

BAGHDAD – Several mortar rounds landed in Abu Dshir, a residential district in southern Baghdad, killing three people and wounding eight, police said.

Ten bodies were found in Baquba.

John Edwards argues in his campaign commercials that the best response to Bush’s veto of the supplemental spending bill on Iraq and the failure on Wednesday of Congress to overturn it, is to keep sending the same bill back to Bush.

It is satisfying to say so, but it probably isn’t good political tactics. When Newt Gingrich played politics with the budget under Clinton and even shut down DC, it was Congress that took the hit in the polls. Just being obstreperous isn’t very attractive.

Murtha is suggesting that they don’t fund a whole year, maybe only two months. That sort of conditionality, whatever its mechanism, seems right to me.

Foreign ministers from the region and the world are gathering in Sharm El Sheikh for a conference on Iraq.

Condi Rice and the Iranians will conduct some bilateral talks at that conference, which could prove momentous.

The former chair of the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq, Michael Bell, tells the NYT that Iraq reconstruction are doomed to failure as long as the lack of security continues. The article also points out that it is hard to scare up donors who will give billions when they see what has happened to the projects that went before.

This point is one reply we should make to those who argue that that bombings in Iraq are just for show and only mimic a real war without being one. They hve real world consequences on things like whether billions flow in to the government or not. (Not to mention that it is a stupid argument in the first place. Bombs that kill hundreds are war, not just its simulacrum.)

Iraq is now on the list of countries where there isn’t sufficient religious freedom.

The British are only now figuring out that they were Cheney’d! Blair would reach an understanding with Bush, and then mysteriously it would be overturned when he got back to the White House. Dick apparently keeps W. on a short leash.

An author of the Iraq oil bill has now turned against it.