Meanwhile, Back In Iraq
by digby
The United States and allies cannot resolve the current sectarian violence in Iraq, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said today during a lecture in Minneapolis.
[…]
In Iraq, “staying the course isn’t good enough because a course has to have an end,” Powell said…In the U.S. today, a challenge the war poses is a question of whether an essential “bond of trust that must exist within a nation…has been shaken,” he said. The extent of the damage to trust will be measured in the November elections, he said.
How about the damage to our troops? It’s a meat grinder over there right now:
Two months after a security crackdown began in the capital, U.S. military deaths appear to be rising, even as fatalities among Iraqi security forces have fallen, U.S. military sources and analysts said.
The U.S. military Tuesday revised to eight its count of American deaths in the capital on Monday, the highest daily toll in a month. In September, 74 U.S. troops died nationwide, about a third of them in Baghdad, according to the military.
21 have died just since Saturday.
Observers also noted recent statements by Al Qaeda in Iraq that reveal a strategy to redirect its attacks from Iraqi troops to U.S. forces.
Well, George said to bring it on …
…although Al Qaeda is the most virulently anti-American insurgent force in the country, it is by no means the only one. The Sunni Arab insurgency is composed of many elements, including former members of Saddam Hussein’s toppled regime. Iraq’s national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie, said last month that 80% of the insurgency was made up of local fighters.
The latest casualties come as the U.S. military’s focus has shifted from a broad, national counterinsurgency effort to suppressing sectarian fighting in Baghdad.
The rising number of U.S. fatalities is dwarfed by the tally of violent Iraqi deaths, which in July and August reached the highest point since 2003: more than 5,000 in Baghdad alone, according to the United Nations. The Iraqi government is planning to release September’s death toll this week.
The high number of slain civilians, many of whom were Sunni Arab victims of Shiite death squads, suggests that U.S. forces eventually may have to take on Shiite militias as vigorously as they have fought insurgents — a prospect that probably would lead to even more American deaths.
“As long as they are fighting the Sunni insurgents, you don’t have a problem with the Shiites,” said Anthony Cordesman, a Washington-based military analyst. “But the minute they try to deal with the overall sectarian violence — you can’t do that without coming into occasional conflict with sectarian and ethnic elements who are not insurgents and not terrorists. These are things that don’t offer easy choices to make.”
The U.S. military has not released data on the number of attacks against Americans by Shiite fighters, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they may be rising.
“We’ve seen attacks by various groups of extremists on both sides of the equation,” Army spokesman Johnson said.
A senior U.S. military official said last month that Shiite militias were obtaining high-quality bombs from Iran that were occasionally used against U.S. and British troops.
U.S. forces have been met with heavy resistance during occasional raids on Shiite militia strongholds such as Sadr City, a poor Baghdad neighborhood named for the father of anti-U.S. cleric and Al Mahdi militia founder Muqtada Sadr. On Sunday, U.S. forces engaged in a shootout with militiamen as they attempted to detain a suspected death-squad leader.
U.S. officials have complained that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, has blocked a more concerted effort to combat militias in Shiite neighborhoods.
On Tuesday, U.S. military sources said that U.S. Army Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which has operational control of ground forces in Baghdad, canceled a planned raid on a national police station. The predominantly Shiite police brigade is suspected of kidnapping 26 Sunni Arabs from a Baghdad meat processing plant Sunday. Most of the abductees have been found dead.
Mohammed Daini, a Sunni Arab legislator, said that warrants were issued Tuesday for 15 members of the police brigade but that 12 of them fled before they could be detained.
Meanwhile, police said they found 15 bodies in Baghdad on Tuesday, most of them bearing bullet wounds and signs of torture. Attacks killed at least 12 Iraqis in the capital, and two in Kirkuk.
Jesus oh jesus. What are we doing in the middle of that hell? (Why did Bush create that hell?) Every day, they find piles of dead bodies that have been tortured and beheaded!
This is a nightmare.
I’m firmly in favor of beating the shit out of the Republicans with this disgusting Foley thing or Woodward’s book or whatever. This world desperately needs someone to put some brakes on Bush and Cheney. But, really, no matter what happens now, what they have done to Iraq is so huge, so horrible, so fundamentally immoral I don’t know what the United States can ever do to make it right. We invaded a country that was under political repression and turned it into a chaotic bloodbath in which neighbor is killing and torturing neighbor.
There was no need to invade it. These guys just wanted to prove their manhood. But then, old Dick Cheney has been angling for just such a manhood proving bloodbath for years. He didn’t really care where:
In “A World Transformed,” the memoir that he and Bush senior published in 1998, [Brent] Scowcroft makes it clear that while all Bush senior’s top advisers had different perspectives, the fundamental division lay between Defense Secretary Richard Cheney and everyone else. By his account, and by those of others in the administration, Cheney never trusted Gorbachev. In 1989 Cheney maintained that Gorbachev’s reforms were largely cosmetic and that, rather than engage with the Soviet leader, the US should stand firm and keep up cold war pressures. In September 1991 Cheney argued that the administration should take measures to speed the breakup of the Soviet Union—even at the risk of encouraging violence and incurring long-term Russian hostility. He opposed the idea, which originated with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, that the US should withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Europe and South Korea. As a part of the preparations for the Gulf War he asked Powell for a study on how small nuclear weapons might be used against Iraqi troops in the desert.
The man is a psycho.
Taylor Marsh has more on the ongoing hell on the ground, including some video from Baghdad that will make your hair curl.
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