Militants attacks 2 Sunni mosques: Defying a government curfew, Shiite militiamen stormed Sunni mosques in Baghdad and a nearby city on Friday, shooting guards and burning down buildings in apparent retaliation for the devastating bombings that killed more than 200 people the day before in the capitals largest Shiite district, residents and police officials said. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/world/middleeast/25iraq.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/world/middleeast/25iraq.html>
Despite all the evidence, this NY Times article reports that President in a Bubble doesnt BELIEVE there is civil war. So, hes waiting for God to tell him? I dont believe that Im over 50, but that perception doesnt change my reality. Repeating that Im just 49 wont work, either. What we need is divine intervention or shock therapy. This crossed over from incompetence and denial long ago. We deserve better than the private realm of complicated father-son relationships, rescue team or no rescue team. Dr. K is wrong, again: we shouldnt have gone there in the first place, especially if the motive was to set an example and invade Iraq as a demonstration model in the post-9/11 quest for revenge. Because Afghanistan wasnt enough, Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. And we need to humiliate them. in order to make a point that were not going to live in this world that they want for us. If you need more evidence of that so-called brilliance, read quotes in Mark Danners review in the New York Review of Books, which Ill be posting later. War of Imagination: Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq warhow it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakesmust see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720> Straight talk from CNNs Michael Ware in Iraq: for the people living on the streets, for Iraqis in their homes, if this is not civil war, or a form of it, then they do not want to see what one really looks like. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about Sunni neighborhoods shelling Shia neighborhoods, and Shia neighborhoods shelling back. We're having Sunni communities dig fighting positions to protect their streets. We're seeing Sunni extremists plunging car bombs into heavily-populated Shia marketplaces. We're seeing institutionalized Shia death squads in legitimate police and national police commando uniforms going in, systematically, to Sunni homes in the middle of the night and dragging them out, never to be seen again. I mean, if this is not civil war, where there is, on average, 40 to 50 tortured, mutilated, executed bodies showing up on the capital streets each morning, where we have thousands of unaccounted for dead bodies mounting up every month, and where the list of those who have simply disappeared for the sake of the fact that they have the wrong name, a name that is either Sunni or Shia, so much so that we have people getting dual identity cards, where parents cannot send their children to school, because they have to cross a sectarian line, then, goodness, me, I don't want to see what a civil war looks like either if this isn't one. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/24/ldt.01.html <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0611/24/ldt.01.html> LA Times does the same, no longer pretending there is any doubt: Wave of Retaliation Hits Iraq: Iraq's civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. A main Shiite political faction threatened to quit the government, a move that probably would cause its collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray. The massacre Thursday in Sadr City a stronghold of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr and his Al Mahdi militia sparked attacks around the country, reinforced doubts about the effectiveness of the Iraqi government and U.S. military and emboldened Shiite vigilantes. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq25nov25,0,7116269,fu ll.story?coll=la-home-headlines <http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq25nov25,0,7116269,f ull.story?coll=la-home-headlines> TIME Iraqs Violence Spins Beyond Anyones Control: It has been clear for some time that the US is not in control of events in Iraq. But the latest sectarian bloodshed suggests that even help from Iran and Syria may not be enough to stop the slide into chaos. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1562867,00.html <http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1562867,00.html> 112506 Al Sadr loyalists take over radio station, issues what appeared to be a call to arms. The 2-hour broadcast from a community gathering in the heart of the Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City included 3 members of al-Sadr's parliamentary bloc, who took questions from outraged residents demanding revenge for a series of car bombings that killed some 200 people Thursday. With Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki relegated to the sidelines, brazen Sunni-Shiite attacks continue unchecked despite a 24-hour curfew over Baghdad. Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia now controls wide swaths of the capital, his politicians are the backbone of the Cabinet, and his followers deeply entrenched in the Iraqi security forces. Sectarian violence has spun so rapidly out of control since the Sadr City blasts, however, that it's not clear whether even al-Sadr has the authority - or the will - to stop the cycle of bloodshed. http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/160920 45.htm <http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/16092 045.htm> 112606 Mortars hit US post east of Baghdad http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2679997 <http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2679997> WaPost military reporter Walter Pincus, 1000 Iraqis a day flee: "We pretend there is a national government, but it's a coalition in which ministries have been divided among the political parties," according to Anthony H. Cordesman, an intelligence specialist who holds the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Ministries have become spoils, and since there is no civil service they hardly run at all," Cordesman said in an interview after a recent trip to Iraq. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR2006112301 014.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR200611230 1014.html> On the Bush43 highway to changing the course in the Middle East, Iraq is the exit to hell.
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
