Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs



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Topic: Politics > Politics-USA
User: "GW Chimpzilla"
Date: 02 Jan 2006 04:28:05 PM
Object: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs
Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.
AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at a
gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a Sunni
mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a market
in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a dozen
gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding three
policemen, police said."
The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it, the
Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on. The
guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make them
afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the Baghdad
capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against a tripling
of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4 protesters
(they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).
A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.
Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday with
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one in
principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries, and
nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were announced.
Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral from
the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that SCIRI
candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.
Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of
the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not boycott
parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he
opposes loose federalism).
The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract in
Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is not
a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that Muslims
do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American Islam." All
the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni reformers to
get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be assumed to be on
the take.
The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that manufactured
much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've never
seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the language; he
is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted to
smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've tried to
unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well, apparently it would
take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic Right. Laura Rozen,
who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with him at her blog.
Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute for
comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone
besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a word
of Arabic?
The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts diverted
to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend to ask for
any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration intentions. If
the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to make a
significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite the
bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush administration is
throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough electricity really isn't
its problem any more.
The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any credit
for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about them),
and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting the
services functioning and the oil flowing freely.
There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do more
than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it was
less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it can't
just be rounded up.
Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).
The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.
US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort of
flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before the
elections.
More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.
The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9 Shiites,
including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last week,
as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to leave
their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has produced rage
throughout the Shiite south.
I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up about
IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that of her
husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a great
deal to me.
http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html
.

User: "Jtm"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 05:45:53 PM
"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:VNhuf.674308$_o.43823@attbi_s71...

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did
not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.

All this bad news made your day didn't it?


AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at
a
gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a Sunni
mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a market
in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a dozen
gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding three
policemen, police said."


The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it,
the
Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on.
The
guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make them
afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the Baghdad
capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against a
tripling
of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4 protesters
(they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday with
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one in
principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries, and
nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral
from
the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that SCIRI
candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of
the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not
boycott
parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract
in
Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is
not
a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that Muslims
do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American Islam." All
the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni reformers to
get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be assumed to be on
the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that
manufactured
much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've never
seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the language;
he
is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted to
smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've tried to
unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well, apparently it would
take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic Right. Laura Rozen,
who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with him at her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute
for
comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone
besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a
word
of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts diverted
to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend to ask for
any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration intentions. If
the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to make a
significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite the
bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush administration is
throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough electricity really
isn't
its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any
credit
for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about them),
and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting the
services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do more
than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it was
less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it
can't
just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort of
flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before the
elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9
Shiites,
including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last week,
as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to leave
their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has produced rage
throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up about
IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that of her
husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a great
deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html

.
User: "GW Chimpzilla"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 05:57:33 PM
Jtm wrote:


"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:VNhuf.674308$_o.43823@attbi_s71...

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that
left at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did
not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.


All this bad news made your day didn't it?

Your neocon utopia is fucked up. You can't stand the truth, just keep listenling
to your master's voice and pretty soon you'll understand what a terrible
mistake conservatism is.



AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at
a
gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a
Sunni mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a
market in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a
dozen gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding
three policemen, police said."


The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it,
the
Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on.
The
guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make them
afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the
Baghdad capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against
a tripling
of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4 protesters
(they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday
with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one
in principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries,
and nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were
announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral
from
the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that
SCIRI candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi
of the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not
boycott
parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract
in
Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is
not
a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that
Muslims do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American
Islam." All the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni
reformers to get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be
assumed to be on the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that
manufactured
much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've never
seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the language;
he
is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted
to smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've
tried to unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well, apparently
it would take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic Right.
Laura Rozen, who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with him at
her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute
for
comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone
besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a
word
of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts
diverted to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend
to ask for any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration
intentions. If the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to
make a significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite
the bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush
administration is throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough
electricity really isn't
its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any
credit
for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about them),
and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting the
services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do
more than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it
was less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it
can't
just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort
of flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before
the elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9
Shiites,
including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last week,
as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to
leave their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has produced
rage throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up
about IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that
of her husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a
great deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html

.
User: "Jtm"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 06:08:03 PM
"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:N5juf.455806$084.156415@attbi_s22...

Jtm wrote:


"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:VNhuf.674308$_o.43823@attbi_s71...

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that
left at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did
not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons
were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the
victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.


All this bad news made your day didn't it?


Your neocon utopia is fucked up. You can't stand the truth, just keep
listenling
to your master's voice and pretty soon you'll understand what a terrible
mistake conservatism is.

Oh yes it is a mistake to want to have the ability to defend one's self with a
firearm! We must let a criminal have whatever he wants! And then we must
rehabilitate him so he can do it again! And we must love our Queer and Lizzy
friends because that is what the Dummyrats say is normal. And of course we must
kill every unwanted baby that comes along right? Also we must denounce God and
let darwin run our lives right? You can keep your Dummyrat, Socialist,
Comunistic BS to your self because a Conservitive will never believe you! Wake
up and smell the roses baby you are about to become a extinct member of society!
Jim




AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said
gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers
at
a
gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a
Sunni mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a
market in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a
dozen gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding
three policemen, police said."


The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it,
the
Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on.
The
guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make
them
afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the
Baghdad capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against
a tripling
of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4
protesters
(they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday
with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one
in principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries,
and nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were
announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral
from
the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the
hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from
both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around
130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that
SCIRI candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi
of the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not
boycott
parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution
(he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract
in
Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is
not
a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that
Muslims do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American
Islam." All the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni
reformers to get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be
assumed to be on the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of
Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that
manufactured
much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've never
seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the language;
he
is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted
to smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've
tried to unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well, apparently
it would take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic Right.
Laura Rozen, who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with him
at
her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute
for
comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone
besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a
word
of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress
for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts
diverted to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend
to ask for any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration
intentions. If the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to
make a significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite
the bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush
administration is throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough
electricity really isn't
its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any
credit
for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about
them),
and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting the
services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as
2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do
more than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it
was less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that
it
can't
just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in
November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort
of flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before
the elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9
Shiites,
including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last
week,
as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to
leave their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has produced
rage throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up
about IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and
that
of her husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means
a
great deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html


.
User: "GW Chimpzilla"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 06:24:13 PM
Jtm wrote:


"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:N5juf.455806$084.156415@attbi_s22...

Jtm wrote:


"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:VNhuf.674308$_o.43823@attbi_s71...

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that
left at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated
in Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did
not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons
were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police
source told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of
the victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least
two car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One
hit a popular restaurant and wounded at least six.


All this bad news made your day didn't it?


Your neocon utopia is fucked up. You can't stand the truth, just keep
listenling
to your master's voice and pretty soon you'll understand what a terrible
mistake conservatism is.


Oh yes it is a mistake to want to have the ability to defend one's self with a
firearm!

Did you know that Iraqis have always had the right to keep and bear arms? Funny
how that didn't stop Saddam from taking power. That's because Iraq is full of
conservatives. Conservatives put much too much trust and faith in their
government.

We must let a criminal have whatever he wants! And then we must
rehabilitate him so he can do it again! And we must love our Queer and Lizzy
friends because that is what the Dummyrats say is normal. And of course we
must
kill every unwanted baby that comes along right? Also we must denounce God
and
let darwin run our lives right? You can keep your Dummyrat, Socialist,
Comunistic BS to your self because a Conservitive will never believe you!
Wake up and smell the roses baby you are about to become a extinct member of
society! Jim




AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said
gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers
at
a
gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a
Sunni mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at
a market in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about
a dozen gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and
wounding three policemen, police said."


The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it,
the
Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on.
The
guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make
them
afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the
Baghdad capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest
against a tripling
of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4
protesters
(they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday
with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint
news conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of
a government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no
one in principle, but the question is what parties would get which
ministries, and nothing could be decided until the final election returnes
were announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral
from
the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the
hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from
both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would
have been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got
around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar
finds that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is
that SCIRI candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and
Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi
of the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not
boycott
parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution
(he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda
contract in
Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is
not
a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that
Muslims do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American
Islam." All the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni
reformers to get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be
assumed to be on the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But
when Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice
things about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business
relationship with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's
"Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that
manufactured
much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've
never seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the
language; he
is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted
to smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've
tried to unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well,
apparently it would take one to keep up with this squirrel of the
militaristic Right. Laura Rozen, who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a
little fun with him at
her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise
Institute for
comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone
besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a
word
of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress
for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts
diverted to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not
intend to ask for any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of
administration intentions. If the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and
still hoping to make a significant place for the multinationals there, it
would have to bite the bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If
the Bush administration is throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have
enough electricity really isn't
its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any
credit
for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about
them),
and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting
the services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as
2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do
more than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December
it was less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so
that it
can't
just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up
on those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad,
Ramadi and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like
Najaf, when called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that
they don't continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab
provinces (and certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in
November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create
new guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous
sort of flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in
before the elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9
Shiites,
including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last
week,
as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to
leave their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has
produced rage throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up
about IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and
that
of her husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means
a
great deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html


.

User: "Server 13"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 06:48:21 PM
Jtm wrote:

"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:N5juf.455806$084.156415@attbi_s22...

Jtm wrote:


"GW Chimpzilla" <gw@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:VNhuf.674308$_o.43823@attbi_s71...

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that
left at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did
not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons
were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the
victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.


All this bad news made your day didn't it?


Your neocon utopia is fucked up. You can't stand the truth, just keep
listenling
to your master's voice and pretty soon you'll understand what a terrible
mistake conservatism is.



Oh yes it is a mistake to want to have the ability to defend one's self with a
firearm! We must let a criminal have whatever he wants! And then we must
rehabilitate him so he can do it again! And we must love our Queer and Lizzy
friends because that is what the Dummyrats say is normal. And of course we must
kill every unwanted baby that comes along right? Also we must denounce God and
let darwin run our lives right?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!
.




User: "Jerry Spriggs"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 09:51:53 PM
If's there's still a planet earth rotating around the sun,
Neocon's fantasy has not been realized.
GW Chimpzilla wrote:

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.

AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at a
gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a Sunni
mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a market
in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a dozen
gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding three
policemen, police said."

The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it, the
Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on. The
guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make them
afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the Baghdad
capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against a tripling
of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4 protesters
(they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday with
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one in
principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries, and
nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral from
the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that SCIRI
candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of
the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not boycott
parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract in
Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is not
a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that Muslims
do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American Islam." All
the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni reformers to
get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be assumed to be on
the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that manufactured
much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've never
seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the language; he
is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted to
smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've tried to
unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well, apparently it would
take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic Right. Laura Rozen,
who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with him at her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute for
comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone
besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a word
of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts diverted
to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend to ask for
any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration intentions. If
the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to make a
significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite the
bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush administration is
throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough electricity really isn't
its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any credit
for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about them),
and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting the
services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do more
than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it was
less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it can't
just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort of
flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before the
elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9 Shiites,
including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last week,
as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to leave
their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has produced rage
throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up about
IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that of her
husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a great
deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html

.

User: "J Clark"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 07 Jan 2006 08:09:29 AM
On 2-Jan-2006, GW Chimpzilla <gw@hotmail.com> wrote:

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that
left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services
did not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq
al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons
were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police
source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the
victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least
two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.

Let's impeach bush before the rapture takes him away.
--
Jay ClarK http://www.cafepress.com/fartotheleft.43445547
Far To The LEFT.com
.
User: "A Veteran for Peace"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 07 Jan 2006 09:48:10 AM
In article <SVPvf.1316$__4.807@bignews1.bellsouth.net>,
"J Clark" <Jay@clark.net> wrote:

On 2-Jan-2006, GW Chimpzilla <gw@hotmail.com> wrote:

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that
left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services
did not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq
al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons
were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police
source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the
victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least
two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.


Let's impeach bush before the rapture takes him away.

and the NG alt.impeach.bush
needs
your posts.
--
Impeach Bush ! a noble cause
Operation Iraqi Liberation = O.I.L.
.


User: "Julian D."

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 07:41:44 PM
On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 22:28:05 GMT, GW Chimpzilla <gw@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in Kirkuk,
Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did not
report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat
says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons were
killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad
al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source
told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the victims
were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the
vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two
car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a
popular restaurant and wounded at least six.

AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at a
gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a Sunni
mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a market
in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a dozen
gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding three
policemen, police said."


The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it, the
Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on. The
guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make them
afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the Baghdad
capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against a tripling
of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4 protesters
(they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday with
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one in
principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries, and
nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral from
the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that SCIRI
candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of
the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not boycott
parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract in
Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is not
a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that Muslims
do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American Islam." All
the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni reformers to
get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be assumed to be on
the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that manufactured
much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've never
seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the language; he
is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted to
smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've tried to
unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well, apparently it would
take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic Right. Laura Rozen,
who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with him at her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute for
comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone
besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a word
of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts diverted
to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend to ask for
any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration intentions. If
the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to make a
significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite the
bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush administration is
throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough electricity really isn't
its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any credit
for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about them),
and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting the
services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do more
than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it was
less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it can't
just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort of
flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before the
elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9 Shiites,
including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last week,
as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to leave
their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has produced rage
throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up about
IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that of her
husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a great
deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html

There's a war going on.
Things go 'boom'.
Julian D.
"But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures:
After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling
phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for
being an inept commander in chief."
-Ann Coulter
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing
their memory, or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and
let them rewrite history." -- ***** Cheney 11/16/2005
"If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why."
- President George W. Bush - January 1, 2006
.
User: "GW Chimpzilla"

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 02 Jan 2006 08:27:57 PM
Julian D. wrote:

On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 22:28:05 GMT, GW Chimpzilla <gw@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk, Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire
services did not report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but
al-Sharq al-Awsat says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at
least 10 persons were killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the
districts of Baghdad al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and
Baladiyyat. A police source told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada,
and that most of the victims were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to
cars and buildings in the vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other
districts. At least two car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they
could go off. One hit a popular restaurant and wounded at least six.

AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at
a gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a
Sunni mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a
market in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a
dozen gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding
three policemen, police said."


The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it,
the Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on.
The guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make
them afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the Baghdad
capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against a
tripling of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4
protesters (they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday with
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one in
principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries, and
nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral
from the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that SCIRI
candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of
the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not
boycott parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract
in Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is
not a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that Muslims
do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American Islam." All
the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni reformers to
get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be assumed to be on
the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that
manufactured much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess.
(I've never seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the
language; he is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion
attempted to smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because
I've tried to unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well,
apparently it would take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic
Right. Laura Rozen, who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with
him at her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute
for comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does
anyone besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even
speak a word of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts diverted
to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend to ask for
any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration intentions. If
the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to make a
significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite the
bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush administration is
throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough electricity really
isn't its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any
credit for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about
them), and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from
getting the services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do more
than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it was
less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it
can't just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort of
flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before the
elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9
Shiites, including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late
last week, as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been
warned to leave their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has
produced rage throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up about
IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that of her
husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a great
deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html



There's a war going on.
Things go 'boom'.

Perpetual war is indeed, is AWOL Bush's plan for victory.







Julian D.



"But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures:
After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling
phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for
being an inept commander in chief."
-Ann Coulter

"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing
their memory, or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and
let them rewrite history." -- ***** Cheney 11/16/2005

"If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why."
- President George W. Bush - January 1, 2006

.
User: "Julian D."

Title: Re: Neocon Utopia Hit With 13 Car Bombs 03 Jan 2006 06:44:11 PM
On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 02:27:57 GMT, GW Chimpzilla <gw@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Julian D. wrote:

On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 22:28:05 GMT, GW Chimpzilla <gw@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that left
at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in
Kirkuk, Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire
services did not report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but
al-Sharq al-Awsat says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at
least 10 persons were killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the
districts of Baghdad al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and
Baladiyyat. A police source told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada,
and that most of the victims were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to
cars and buildings in the vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other
districts. At least two car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they
could go off. One hit a popular restaurant and wounded at least six.

AFP reports other violence:
"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen
killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at
a gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a
Sunni mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a
market in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a
dozen gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding
three policemen, police said."


The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are
intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it,
the Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective
counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the
neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on.
The guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make
them afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the
guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the Baghdad
capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against a
tripling of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4
protesters (they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday with
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition
government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news
conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a
government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one in
principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries, and
nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral
from the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the
national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very
important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat
to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments,
which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI
being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both
branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have
been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130
seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds
that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that SCIRI
candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the
Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of
the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not
boycott parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the
elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he
opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract
in Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is
not a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire
(which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that Muslims
do have pretty good ***** detectors, and they decry "American Islam." All
the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni reformers to
get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be assumed to be on
the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise
Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when
Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things
about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship
with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special
Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that
manufactured much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess.
(I've never seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the
language; he is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion
attempted to smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because
I've tried to unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well,
apparently it would take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic
Right. Laura Rozen, who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with
him at her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute
for comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does
anyone besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even
speak a word of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts diverted
to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend to ask for
any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration intentions. If
the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to make a
significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite the
bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush administration is
throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough electricity really
isn't its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is
demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any
credit for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about
them), and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from
getting the services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2
billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be
corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do more
than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it was
less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it
can't just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran
reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only
demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on
those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi
and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when
called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't
continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and
certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced
article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November
and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of
counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new
guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort of
flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before the
elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the
conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have
impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of
tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9
Shiites, including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late
last week, as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been
warned to leave their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has
produced rage throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up about
IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that of her
husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a great
deal to me.

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/guerrillas-target-police-all-over-iraq.html



There's a war going on.
Things go 'boom'.

Perpetual war is indeed, is AWOL Bush's plan for victory.

Bush said from the beginning that the war on terror will take years.
Why don't you actually listen to him carefully, instead of acting
shocked and dismayed?







Julian D.



"But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures:
After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling
phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for
being an inept commander in chief."
-Ann Coulter

"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing
their memory, or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and
let them rewrite history." -- ***** Cheney 11/16/2005

"If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why."
- President George W. Bush - January 1, 2006

Julian D.
"But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures:
After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling
phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for
being an inept commander in chief."
-Ann Coulter
"The president and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing
their memory, or their backbone, but we're not going to sit by and
let them rewrite history." -- ***** Cheney 11/16/2005
"If somebody from al-Qaida is calling you, we'd like to know why."
- President George W. Bush - January 1, 2006
.