George McGovern is calling for Bush and Cheney to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, including ordering hundreds of warrantless wiretaps on US citizens. Good for him. Even if a plan is impractical, if it is just it should be broached.
Guerrillas detonated four deadly bombs in Baghdad on Sunday. One guerrilla struck soldiers at an Army Day celebration, killing 11 and wounding 17. AP’s photographer saw the event:
‘ Afterward, he said, the street was littered with bodies, weapons and shoes. Dazed soldiers and policemen carried their bloodied colleagues to nearby pickup trucks that whisked them to a hospital. “There was a severed head on the street and some of the soldiers that I was photographing earlier were dead. Those who survived panicked, pulling back from the scene and shooting in the air,” said the 40-year-old Mizban. ‘
Another bomb killed a US soldier on Sunday in Baghdad (and another had died in Diyala that way on Saturday). AP adds, “In other violence, a parked car bomb exploded and four mortars landed near a bus terminal in eastern Baghdad, killing a civilian, police said. In northeastern Baghdad, a parked car bomb exploded outside a popular restaurant, killing a policeman and two civilians, police said.”
In the northern city of Mosul, guerrillas targeted Christian churches with a series of bombings. Some church-goers were injured and there was damage to buildings. The number of Christians in Iraq has probably been halved, from 800,000, by the war.
A clan elder and 13 of his relatives were kidnapped in Diyala Province by Sunni Arab guerrillas on Sunday.
Ben Lando of UPI reports on the perilous situations in Basra and Kirkuk, Iraq’s two essential petroleum-producing regions, over which ethnic and religious militias are battling.
FT’s Steve Negus points to the problem that the Iraqi state is essentially a failed state and that sectarian reconciliation has, to say the least, made no progress, despite a decline in violence spurred in part by the US troop escalation.
More from the CSM on the foreign jihadis in Iraq, based on a West Point study. They are predominantly either Saudi or from North Africa.
Chalmers Johnson weighs in on ‘Charlie Wilson’s War.’ The focus on this low-level congressman elides the activities of the CIA director, of the Reagan National Security Council, of the Saudis, and other high-level actors, thus falsifying history by omission.