May 7, 2008
At least one person in DC gets it. From yesterday's White House briefing:
THOMAS: Yesterday, according to The New York Times, we dropped a bomb on a home in Sadr City and burned alive a pregnant woman and her children. How long is the siege of Sadr--how long are we going to keep bombing Iraqis?
PERINO: Well, I'm not aware of that particular report. I have not--I've not seen it.
THOMAS: Well, it was pretty buried in the story.
PERINO: Okay. Well, the operation against the militias in Sadr City will continue until they root them out. And that is expressly in order to protect people like you just mentioned.
THOMAS: Root who out, Iraqis, in their own country?
Its such a basic point, and yet virtually no one seems to recognize it. They live there. We do not. They will always live there. So long as we stay, we will always at best be guests and at worst occupiers.
The Iraqis are fighting a civil war. This is not our fight. There is no reason for us to stay. Al Qaeda in Iraq did not exist before we arrived, and it will not exist once we leave. The Iraqis hate AQI even more than they hate us. It is their country, and they want to control it. They won't allow AQI to control Iraq any more than they will allow us to control Iraq. If the combined might of the US armed forces cannot even subdue Iraq, what on earth makes you think a few thousand foreign fighters can?
It is their country. They live there. We do not. Iraq belongs to the Iraqis. Let them have their country back. We should never have gone there in the first place, and we should not be there now. Bring them home.
BBC:
The authorities in Baghdad say they are preparing for an exodus of thousands of people from eastern parts of the city.
Fighting between government and US troops on one side, and Shia militia on the other, has intensified recently.
Two football stadiums are on stand-by to receive residents from two neighbourhoods in the Sadr City area.
The government has warned of an imminent push to clear the areas of members of the Mehdi Army, loyal to the anti-American cleric, Moqtada Sadr.
In the last seven weeks around 1,000 people have died, and more than 2,500 others have been injured, most of them civilians.
The fighting so far in Sadr City has been fierce - street to street, and house to house.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is showing a determination to disarm the country's Shia militia groups - particularly the Mehdi Army - that he has never displayed before.
However, Iraqi army operations, backed by US ground and air support, have so far failed to overwhelm the Shia militiamen, who are still responding with roadside bombs, sniper fire, mortars and rockets.
The government has distributed leaflets in two key districts of Sadr City, warning people to leave.
The speculation is that government forces are preparing for a big push into eastern Baghdad to end the current fighting once and for all.
Shortages of water and medical supplies have already made life inside Sadr City extremely difficult.
NYT:
Two mortar shells exploded Tuesday morning in the Baghdad municipal building, killing three civilians and wounding 15 people. And a rocket landed in Al Mansour University College, wounding five students, according to an official at the Interior Ministry who asked not to be quoted because he was not authorized to speak on the record.
Insurgents often fire mortar shells and rockets toward the Green Zone, headquarters of the Iraqi government and American Embassy, but their misses often harm civilians.
In the Shaula neighborhood, a Sadrist stronghold in western Baghdad, Iraqi forces captured several dozen police officers who were believed to be aiding militia fighters. Some of the officers were captured in a local hospital, which was believed to have been caring for militia fighters, according to a deputy of Qassim Atta, the military spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.
Families have begun to leave Sadr City over the past several days, trickling into the grounds of a sports stadium in Baladiat, which is on the western edge of Sadr City. The families, who lived near the front lines of the fighting and the wall being built by the American military to partition the neighborhood, said they had fled because their children were terrified of the bombing.
As many as 1,500 families are expected to go to the area in the next few days, said Abu Wa'il, the informal mayor of the refugees who live in the area. Some came as recently as two days ago and others have been there for several years, squatting in abandoned buildings. The army will provide tents for the refugees, he said, but there appeared to be no latrines and it seemed doubtful that there would be enough water to supply so many families.
In Tikrit, a car bomb exploded in midafternoon, killing two civilians and wounding 26 people, including four policemen. A curfew was in effect on Tuesday evening.
In Nineveh, an American soldier died after his patrol was attacked on Tuesday, the military said in a statement. In a separate incident in the province, Sunni extremists killed three Iraqi women and wounded two others in an attack on Monday, according to a statement from the American military. The local police said the extremists were members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the statement said.
Juan Cole provides context:
AFP also reports:
' On the political front, an Iraqi lawmaker whose party is loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, resigned on Tuesday protesting the violence in Baghdad's Sadr City where street battles claim a daily death toll.
"I announce the suspension of my membership in protest at what is happenning in Sadr city," Hassan Al-Rubaie said. "The religious and political leaderships in Iraq are responsible for the violations that happen in Sadr City."
He acted even as President Jalal Talabani made a fresh appeal to the militia to lay down its arms and allow essential supplies to get into the Sadr City, parliamentary officials said.'
I take away from these grafs that Iraqi politics is in danger of collapsing. Not that many members of parliament come to the sessions, and if you start having any number of resignations, even getting a quorum may be difficult. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism for holding by-elections, so the seat that was resigned will probably remain empty until the next parliamentary elections.
Also, President Talabani's statement unwittingly reveals that essential supplies are not getting into Sadr City and suggests that al-Maliki and the US are holding the civilian population hostage as a way of putting pressure on the Mahdi Army.
May 6, 2008
Ilan Goldenberg catches the Bush Administration admitting something that all us lefties have been saying for years: Iraq is preventing us from achieving success in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has concluded it can't send additional troops to Afghanistan until sizable numbers of forces withdraw from Iraq, a senior military official said Monday.
U.S. commanders in Afghanistan believe they need an additional three brigades of American forces, between 10,000 and 12,000 troops, to combat the Taliban and to speed the training of Afghanistan's security forces.
The requests will go unmet until U.S. troop levels in Iraq start coming down. The military "can't move a substantial amount of additional forces into Afghanistan unless there are additional forces which come out of Iraq," the official said. "We might be able to generate a little bit more, but not 10,000 to 12,000 more troops."
The comments were an acknowledgment of the challenges facing the Pentagon as it scrambles to find enough troops for counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. troop levels in both Iraq and Afghanistan are already at or near their highest levels since the start of the two wars. The administration's decision to freeze troop levels in Iraq after the last of the 30,000 "surge" troops depart this summer has left Pentagon officials with few options for finding more forces for Afghanistan.
To put this another way, our use of military force in Iraq directly undermined our mission in Afghanistan.
On the one hand, the fact that the Iraq War will produce more suicides than combat deaths could be seen as a triumph of modern battlefield medicine.
On the other hand, given that mental health is more of a long-term problem than a short-term one, mental health problems should be mostly treatable. So it is an absolute disgrace that we are not providing adequate mental health care to our returning soldiers:
Soldiers who'd been exposed to combat trauma were the most likely to suffer from depression or PTSD, the Rand report said. About 53 percent of soldiers with those conditions sought treatment during the past year. Half of those who got care were judged by Rand researchers to have received inadequate treatment.
Failure to adequately treat the mental and neurological problems of returning soldiers can cause a chain of negative events in the lives of affected veterans, the researchers said. About 300,000 soldiers suffer from depression or PTSD, the report said.
This is why the "I put a yellow magnet on my car" version of "supporting the troops" infuriates me. That's politics as personal symbolic expression and noting more. Returning soldiers don't need magnets. They need medical care. And we aren't giving it to them.
May 5, 2008
The Internet's Matt Yglesias:
It's really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it's not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don't like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.
What a fascinating place Iraq must be! Maybe someday we'll discover that in Arab culture they have this weird thing where people's political allegiances are heavily influenced by issues of ethnic, cultural, and religious identity and that having their destinies controlled by a foreign, religiously alien, occupying army that doesn't speak the language is kind of a drag. Who knows?
UPDATE: John Cole follows up by noting this story from the Onion in July of 2007, and remarking: "At some point in the not so distant future, we may be better off turning over our entire government to the staff of the Onion."
But its not just the Onion. Grand Theft Auto IV (yes, that's why blogging has been light since last week) is loaded with the same sort of satire.
There is a very sizable majority of the country that recognizes just how broken our political discourse has been these past 8 years. The question is, are we going to be brave enough to do something about it?
May 3, 2008
I was planning on taking the day off today, but you really do need to read this.
May 2, 2008
Rahm Emanuel:
"Madam Speaker, in 1993, when professional-baseball owners were deciding how to rehabilitate the reputation of baseball, after the player's strike, they debated whether to enact a wild-card rule to allow a second-place team into the playoffs. Only one owner at the time voted against this: Texas Rangers general partner George Bush.
"When the rule passed 27-1, at the time the President said, 'I made my arguments and went down in flames...History will prove me right.' [Associated Press, 9/9/93]
"Since then, nearly a third of World Series champions have been wild-card teams, including the 2004 World Series Champion Boston Red Sox.
"The rule helped saved baseball as history has shown.
"And just like his baseball predictions, President Bush sings a very similar tune about Iraq, he says, 'History will prove whether I'm right. I think I'll be right...' [Whitehouse.gov, March 29, 2006]
Has Bush ever been right about anything?
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