Not one more soldier

Just in case you're tempted to believe the Bushco nonsence that Iraq really is turning into a land of rose petals and honey, read Josh Partlow's excellent profile of the dismal tour experiences of 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division in Sadiyah. 'I Don't Think This Place Is Worth Another Soldier's Life'

"When we first got here, all the shops were open. There were women and children walking out on the street," Alarcon said this week. "The women were in Western clothing. It was our favorite street to go down because of all the hot chicks."

~snip~

Before the war, Sadiyah was a bustling middle-class district, popular with Sunni officers in Saddam Hussein's military. It has become strategically important because it represents a fault line between militia power bases in al-Amil to the west and the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Dora to the east. U.S. commanders say the militias have made a strong push for the neighborhood in part because it lies along the main road that Shiite pilgrims travel to the southern holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

American soldiers estimate that since violence intensified this year, half of the families in Sadiyah have fled, leaving approximately 100,000 people. After they left, insurgents and militiamen used their abandoned homes to hold meetings and store weapons. The neighborhood deteriorated so quickly that many residents came to believe neither U.S. nor Iraqi security forces could stop it happening.

The descent of Sadiyah followed a now-familiar pattern in Baghdad. In response to suicide bombings blamed on Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Shiite militias, particularly the Mahdi Army, went from house to house killing and intimidating Sunni families. In many formerly mixed neighborhoods of Baghdad, such as al-Amil and Bayaa, Shiites have become the dominant sect, with their militias the most powerful force.

"It's just a slow, somewhat government-supported sectarian cleansing," said Maj. Eric Timmerman, the battalion's operations officer.

Go read the whole thing. If the violence is down, it's because there's no one left to kill. They're either dead, or they've fled the country, like Riverbend and her family.

BTW, a little off topic, but I have to say something. It's become fashionable at Eschaton and other progressive blogs to bash the press 24/7 in a reflexive, knee-jerk, fashion. I just want to take a minute to remind you that everything you know about Iraq, about the Bush administration's crimes and abuses, or about the events of the day is because of the work of reporters.

There are still many good ones out there, working in difficult conditions and not making much money doing it. Please don't confuse the asshattery of the pundit class and Fox News with actual, honest journalism. Reports of the death of journalism have been greatly exagerated, IMHO.

note: I'd post a photo, but blogger photos seems to be down.

Don't let the screen door hit ya....

.... on your way out!!

Good riddance. Gonzo Gone- this must have really stuck in chimpy's craw. Just makes me wonder what other shoe there is left to drop?

Photo: Larry Downing, Reuters.

Why I Hate Texas

Oy.

I've been so busy that I didn't realize that our goofy governor, good-hair Perry, put this asshat, Don McLeroy on the State Board of Education. You people who live in more civilized parts of the world won't recognize the name, but he's a well know religious nutjob who thinks evolution is a myth, and that the earth doesn't revolve around the sun.

I'm not making that up. Here's what the National Center for Science Education had to say about his appointment:

The state's newspapers also expressed concern about McLeroy. Referring to previous ideological struggles in which the board was involved, the Dallas Morning News (July 19, 2007) worried, "The elevation of veteran board member Don McLeroy to the chairman's post raises concerns that the board is headed back in that direction," and urged McLeroy to steer clear of "the bitterness of past culture wars." Similarly, the Austin American-Statesman (July 22, 2007) commented, "McLeroy's elevation to chairman comes as the board begins a revision of science standards for public schools. That could prove embarrassing for Texas if McLeroy pushes for standards that push theology over science."

A document on McLeroy's personal website entitled "Historical Reality" and dated September 8, 2003, offers a glimpse of McLeroy's understanding of evolutionary science. Relying on discredited sources as Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution and Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon's Of Pandas and People as well as on tendentious misreadings of legitimate science and on long-ago-debunked creationist claims, McLeroy argued that common descent is "only a hypothesis, and a shaky one at that." He then urged his colleagues on the board to reject the books then under consideration -- a plea that was ignored.

I'm told, on good authority, that he also subscribes to this nonsense: Fixed Earth.

I wish I could say this is a satirical post. It's not. Oh, and remember that Texas is the biggest purchaser of text books in the nation. This fucking nutter will have direct influence on the content of science textbooks purchased for Texas schools. And how Texas goes, often so goes the rest of the nation.

Feh.

Two-bit Wingnut Dictators

Biggus Dickus is on Larry King tonight. And even Larry King thinks he's a big, fat liar.

Damn. How bad do you have to be when you can't even convince Larry King?

Big Dick does make some news, however. He backs up Edelman's letter to Hillary calling her a terra-ist enabler.

Staking out a position at odds with that of his own Defense Secretary, Dick Cheney was just quoted on CNN saying that he agrees with a Pentagon official's recent assertion that Hillary Clinton's request for info about withdrawal contingency plans is helpful to the enemy.

In an excerpt from an interview with Larry King set to air later today that was just shown on the network, Cheney was asked whether he agreed with an earlier assessment by Under Secretary of State Eric Edelman, who recently sent Clinton a letter chiding her request for info about the plans as helpful to "enemy propaganda." Cheney's reply: "I agreed...I thought it was a good letter."

Of course he likes the letter. I'm certain he dictated it.

Details VIA TalkingPointsMemo

Also from TPM, a truly hilarious suggestion for Hillary from commenter hwc:

Speaking of two-bit wingnut dictators. Somebody should ask Hillary Clinton whether she would be willing to meet, in Washington or elsewhere, without precondition, with Dick Cheney.

Bravo. The entire democratic field should adopt that one.

Onward Christian Soldiers

Reuters/Nikola Solic

I'm sorry, but this kind of thing creeps me out. I am extremely uncomfortable with the gains the evangelicals have made in the army and air force.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want some nutjob with a jeebus complex flying an F16.

On the other hand, if it makes the soldiers in that hell hole feel better to pray before they venture out on missions, they should knock themselves out. I guess I'll shut up about it and not point out that if jeebus *really* loved them he woulda kept them out of the hell hole in the first place. (and yes, that's snark, put ur pearls down.)

The Human Tide

Via the Indepdent, Iraq: One in seven joins human tide spilling into neighbouring countries

Two thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people, one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.

Yet, while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down- a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.

Cue Bush administration hacks saying how the Iraqis just aren't trying hard enough, or aren't grateful enough, or just don't love them some freedom enough.

Hard Werk

"Fuck, when I became Prime Minister, they told me I would have to do some unpalatable things, but riding in a cart with this supreme wanker is above and beyond the call of duty."

NY Times/Doug Mills

Infuriating

AP/Petr David Josek

From today's Froomkin comes this infuriating piece of news:

Bush frequently claims that he changed his Iraq strategy in Iraq and opted for a troop surge after listening to his commanders. He says this notwithstanding the fact that his commanders in Iraq -- as well as the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff-- opposed the surge.

So where did the idea come from?

Now Rowan Scarborough writes in the Examiner: "A group of military experts at the American Enterprise Institute, concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a calamitous failure in Iraq, almost single handedly convinced the White House to change its strategy.

"They banded together at AEI headquarters in downtown Washington early last December and hammered out the surge plan during a weekend session. . . . Then came trips to the White House by AEI military historian Frederick Kagan, retired Army Gen. John Keane and other surge proponents.

"More and more officials began attending the sessions. Even Vice President Dick Cheney came. 'We took the results of our planning session immediately to people in the administration,' said AEI analyst Thomas Donnelly, a surge planner. 'It became sort of a magnet for movers and shakers in the White House.' Donnelly said the AEI approach won out over plans from the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command." (my emphasis added)

Okay, the idiots who promoted this clusterfuck in the first place are responsible for dreaming up the "surge" strategy? And looks who's right in the thick of it all- yes, a Kagan.

Oh, and there's more:

The emergence of AEI as a power player on Iraq belies the notion that neo-conservatives are on the decline in Washington. AEI brags an impressive roster of neo-con thinkers. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect, arrived at AIE this summer, joining such prominent conservatives as John Bolton, David Frum and Michael Ledeen.

With its plan in place, the AEI Iraq team is not sitting still. Keane is an adviser to Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. He has inspected war conditions on two visits. Kagan left for Iraq this week.

I swear to god this makes me want to take a hostage.

Original article in the Examiner by Rowan Scarborough. Arm Chair Generals Help Shape Surge In Iraq What do you bet they coined the name "surge" too? And why the fuck are we paying people in the Pentagon if they're outsourcing war strategy?

Civics

Oh boy. What part of "civilian control of the military" does the Pentagon not understand?

Via the Associated Press, Pentagon Slams Clinton on Iraq.

ASHINGTON - The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans to eventually withdraw from Iraq boosts enemy propaganda.

In a stinging rebuke to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman responded to questions Clinton raised in May in which she urged the Pentagon to start planning now for the withdrawal of American forces.

A copy of Edelman's response, dated July 16, was obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

"Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia," Edelman wrote.

He added that "such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks."

Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines called Edelman's answer "at once outrageous and dangerous," and said the senator would respond to his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Good grief. We're a democracy (at least I think we still are) and public discussion about public policies questions, including wars, is part of the equation. And it's up to policy makers to decide when and where we fight wars, not the pentagon brass and their bushie-syncophant spokespeople.

If this thinking has permeated the Pentagon, we're all in a lot of trouble. It's the congress' job to provide oversight. Period. End of story.

The world will be a safer place when all of these asshats are out of government.

Today's Progess Report

Ali al-Saadi/Agence France Presse

We heard a lot of talk from some senators (including Traitor Joe Lieberman) about how well the 'surge' was going.

A little reality check:

BAGHDAD, July 17 — Assassinations and car bombs killed at least 39 people in Iraq on Tuesday and details emerged of a massacre of Shiite civilians in Diyala Province on Monday in which at least 29 people were killed.

One car bomb on Tuesday exploded in the Zayouna neighborhood of Baghdad, the capital, killing 20 people, four of them Iraqi Army soldiers, and wounding 20, according to a police official at the Interior Ministry.

~snip~

Another car bomb, this one near the Iranian Embassy, killed four people, according to an Interior Ministry official. The police also reported finding 24 bodies in the city on Tuesday.

~snip~

A village of 30 to 35 houses, Dulayiya, referred to in earlier military reports as Adwala, is in an isolated area in the countryside north of Baquba, the provincial capital. It is populated by members of the Bawi tribe, a large tribe in Diyala Province.

Gunmen wearing Iraqi Army uniforms and driving civilian pickup trucks surrounded several houses on one side of the village, the police said. It was not clear if they shot at the houses or dragged people out of them and then executed them, but police officers who reached the area on Tuesday said mostly young men were killed and that the gunmen later mutilated 10 of the bodies.

~snip~

The violence on Tuesday included an attack on a judge in Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. Gunmen wearing uniforms of the security forces stopped Judge Hamdi Habeeb al-Jubori at a fake checkpoint as he was heading home and shot him to death, according to Col. Hameed Majeed of the Tikrit police. The director of a local hospital was also killed Tuesday in a shooting that wounded three people driving with him in his car, provincial officials said.

In Wasit Province south and east of Baghdad, the Iraqi police found five bodies floating in the Tigris River. They were all civilians, bore marks of torture and had been shot multiple times, said a police official in Kut, the provincial capital. A truck driver was also killed in the area. Afterward, the gunmen burned the truck, which was loaded with food and was headed to Baghdad.

Via the NYTimes Attackers Kill 39 in Iraq.

Sounds pretty hellish to me.

The Hell of Baghdad

We often hear that the Iraqis are so much better off with Saddam gone. Only an idiot or an asshole really believes that.

Anne Nivat reports from Iraq: Life in the "Red" Zone:

The "red zone": that is to say, all of Baghdad outside the fortified American enclave. The "no-go zone." The sprawling capital city that is home to more than 10 million people. That's where I lived for two weeks to get "the other side" of the story. To do that, I had no choice but to blend in.

Dressed in a loose black tunic with long sleeves called an abbaya, I strapped on sandals, tucked my hair under a scarf tied at the chin and blended into the crowded streets of Baghdad. Only my contacts knew that I was a foreigner and a reporter, and I didn't tell anyone where I was staying or for how long. I was careful never to speak in public.

My contact and I got around in a gray Peugeot. Ali, whom I knew from a previous trip, had traded in his BMW because it was too conspicuous - residents of Baghdad have to consider how every detail of life could impact on their very survival. They assume as low a profile as they can, then wait fatalistically for the day that "something happens."

"The only sure thing here is that we have lost our trust. Can you believe that we are terrorized in our own homes?" Ali, 32, chose to remain in Baghdad while the majority of his friends and relatives joined the hoards of refugees in Syria and Jordan (for the less fortunate) or Sweden (for the others).

"I am Shiite," Ali said. "My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam's regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam's feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them!"

The temperature outside is nearly 130 degrees, but the capital has no electricity most of the time. Those who own private generators have become the most powerful people in every district. They sell the precious energy eight hours a day.

On the eastern bank of the Tigris River, where I stayed, the government could provide electricity only between 6 and 7 a.m. All the appliances would burst into action, waking up the household. For those who can afford it, a small generator fills in the gaps in power. But a generator consumes up to 20 gallons of gasoline a day, an enormous amount in a time of shortages.

Under Saddam Hussein, 40 gallons of gasoline cost half a dollar. Today, you'd have to pay $75 for the same quantity on the black market - or you could stand in line for four to five days at a gas station and pay about $35.

"You spend all your time preoccupied with either getting gasoline or getting electricity - not to mention worrying about violence," says Ali. "If they go out, my sisters could be kidnapped or killed by a bomb.I travel by car only if it is absolutely necessary."

Go read the rest. For those of us who have been keeping up, none of it is surprising. It's just deadly depressing.

This is the end result of "fighting them over there." How anyone can still claim that invading Iraq and blowing their country to hell and back was the moral thing to do is beyond me.

Simple answers

The New York Times takes time out of its regularly scheduled bashing of John Edwards to think about the "war on terra" and to wonder if the war in Iraq has made us safer:

WASHINGTON, July 17 — Nearly six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives expended in the name of the war on terror pose a single, insistent question: Are we safer?

On Tuesday, in a dark and strikingly candid two pages, the nation’s intelligence agencies offered an implicit answer, and it was not encouraging. In many respects, the National Intelligence Estimate suggests, the threat of terrorist violence against the United States is growing worse, fueled by the Iraq war and spreading Islamic extremism.

In other words, no.

And yes, this has been another edition of simple answers to stupid fucking questions.

Link here: Same People, Same Threat

BTW, that NIE is enough to make even an old cynic like me weep in frustration. What a fucking travesty.

A Day in Iraq

The Independent sums it up. I'll feel we're making progress when we see front pages like these here in America.

hat tip- Plum P.

Fighting them over there...

The rhetoric we hear lately from Bush and from his dead-ender supporters goes something like this, "Well, Saddam was AWFUL and you have to admit that if he were still alive things in Iraq would be at least this bad, or probably worse."

Well, first of all, no, I don't have to admit that. Because I'm absolutely certain that as bad as Saddam was, there would not be Shi'ite death squads roaming about Baghdad. There would not be 100,000 plus dead Iraqi civilians. There would not be a million plus Iraq civilians who had fled the country. And above all, if we had not invaded, there would not be 3,600 plus dead American soldiers.

Oh, and add to that death toll the 100 people who died in Kirkuk and Diyala today.

BAGHDAD, July 16 — A suicide bomber in the volatile northern city of Kirkuk on Monday crashed his truck into a compound that includes offices of a major Kurdish political party, killing 85 people. Many victims were women and children, shopping in the busy market next to the political offices, who were engulfed by a large fireball.

Hours later, the Iraqi authorities said, men wearing Iraqi military uniforms stormed into a village in Diyala Province and killed 29 men, women and children. An Iraqi security official, Col. Ragheb Radhi al-Umiri, said the gunmen surrounded the victims and fired into the crowd. The attack occurred in a remote village north of Baquba, he said, and the bodies of some victims were “desecrated” before the attackers fled.

From Bush himself we get the "we gotta fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight them over here!!" slogan, even as recently as last Thursday's presser. What we rarely get is anyone debating the appalling lack of morality (and not to mention dubious legitimacy) of a policy that calls for turning someone else's country into a hell hole in the name of our saftely.

Bad, disastrous policies have bad disastrous results. This is what they look like.

All photos: Slahaldeen Rasheed, Reuters