Today in Iraq

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR TUESDAY, August 8, 2006

Photo: Sandals of Iraqi victims lay in the blood-soaked flatbed of a pick-up truck at the site where two roadside bombs exploded in Baghdad. Bombings and shooting have killed at least 24 people and wounded 80 in Baghdad as a previous raid by US and Iraqi troops into a Shiite militia stronghold stoked political controversy.(AFP/Karim Sahib)

Two Iraqi journalists have been killed in separate incidents in Baghdad, police said Tuesday.

Mohammed Abbas Hamad, 28, a journalist for the Shiite-owned newspaper Al-Bayinnah Al-Jadida, was shot by gunmen at he left his home Monday in the Adil section of western Baghdad, police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun said.

Late Monday, police found the bullet-riddled body of freelance journalist Ismail Amin Ali, 30, about a half mile from where he was abducted two weeks ago in northeast Baghdad, Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said. The body showed sign of torture, he added.

OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS

Baghdad:

Ten people were killed and 69 wounded when two roadside bombs exploded in al-Shorja market in central Baghdad.

Three separate roadside bomb attacks in Baghdad killed at least nine people. Two of the blasts targeted police, and the third was aimed at one of Baghdad's busiest bus stations.

Gunmen stormed a bank in the northern Baghdad district of Adhamiya, killing five people -- three bodyguards and two employees -- before walking away with the equivalent of $4,000.

A police commando was wounded when a roadside bomb went off near his patrol in the eastern Zayouna district of Baghdad.

(near) The bodies of seven people wearing military uniforms were found shot dead in a small town 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad.

Three bombs exploded near the Interior Ministry building in central Baghdad, killing 10 people and injuring eight.

United States military in Iraq said on Tuesday that its warplanes killed four armed men who were trying to plant bombs in the southern suburbs of the Iraqi capital.

Two brothers were slain in their car repair shop in southwestern Baghdad.

Iskandariya:

Two civilians were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near a police patrol on the main road between Mussayab and Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad.

Rashad:

Gunmen killed two employees of a private company in the small town of Rashad, near Kirkuk, 250 km (150 miles) north of Baghdad.

Falluja:

Gunmen killed a police lieutenant colonel and wounded his brother in Falluja, 50 km (35 miles) west of Baghdad.

Mosul:

Gunmen killed two people at a mobile telephone shop in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad.

Tikrit:

Two separate roadside bomb attacks killed a policeman and wounded eight civilians, including a child, in Tikrit, 175 km (110 km) north of Baghdad.

Hawija:

Police arrested two insurgents while they were planting bombs on the side of the road near Hawija, 70 km (43 miles) southwest of Kirkuk.

Diyala prov:

Four people were gunned down in a series of attacks in Baqouba and Muqdadiyah, two cities in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.

In Country:

An improvised roadside bomb exploded and destroyed a border patrol vehicle close to the Iraqi-Iranian border amid reports of an Islamic group's infiltration across the northern border lines, a police source said on Tuesday.

>> NEWS

al-Maliki has criticised his own government's security forces and their US advisers for carrying out a night-time raid on the Baghdad Shiite district of Sadr City, which he said had been undertaken without his consent.

"I reiterate my rejection to such operation and it should not be executed without my consent. This particular operation did not have my approval," the Shiite prime minister said, echoing concerns made by President Jalal Talabani.

"I am very sorry for what happened. Such aircraft attacks are unjustifiable on a vulnerable residential area like Sadr City under the pretext of arresting one person," he said, promising to pay damages to the families of the victims.

U.S. officials said the latest phase of the Baghdad security operation was launched Monday "to reduce the level of murders, kidnappings, assassinations, terrorism and sectarian violence in the city and to reinforce the Iraqi government's control of Baghdad."

A U.S. statement said about 6,000 additional Iraqi troops were being sent to the Baghdad area, along with 3,500 U.S. soldiers of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team and 2,000 troops from the U.S. 1st Armored Division, which has served as the theater reserve force since November.

Iraqis shout slogans during a protest in the southern city of Basra August 8, 2006 against Israeli attacks in Lebanon. REUTERS/Atef Hassan (IRAQ) (Photo caption)


>> REPORTS

The government of Iraq is secretly holding a Baathist cabal of military officers it claims attempted a coup against Prime Minister al-Maliki: The plotters were rounded up July 5 with the help of American military authorities after the Iraqi government's security warning center sent word to Mr. Maliki, who was in Kuwait on his first official visit as head of state, two highly placed Iraqi sources said.

The prime minister quickly canceled a scheduled trip to Amman, Jordan, and returned to Baghdad to attend to the matter. At the time, Mr. Maliki's staff told reporters that the prime minister was cutting his trip short because of Iraq's "security situation."

In an interview last night, an adviser to Mr. Maliki and a member of parliament in Baghdad, Mithal al-Alusi, said a coup attempt indeed took place last month. He said the mutinous attempt to replace the elected government of Iraq was organized by military officers loyal to Saddam Hussein.

"The Baathists were trying to have this coup, and people have been arrested and it has been stopped. There have been a lot of rumors as to who is behind this," Mr. Alusi said, referring to speculation that the plot may have involved a former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, whose men worked with the CIA in 1995 to oust Saddam in a military coup.

"WE CHANGE OUR TACTICS, THEY CHANGE THEIR TACTICS"

The Marines here [Ramadi], part of the 3rd Battalion, 8th Regiment, say they faced a far less sophisticated enemy last year when they operated around Fallouja and the Abu Ghraib prison.

"He never came out and fought us with complex attacks," said Lt. Col. Stephen Neary, the battalion commander. "Last year there was nothing complex. Here he likes to put things together."

The danger of the complex attacks, along with the rising heat, has forced the Americans to put a stop to most daytime patrols. Instead, they roam the streets after sunset, when their night-vision goggles give them an advantage.

When the Americans venture forth on a daylight patrol, the insurgents attack - as the U.S.-Iraqi patrol along the walled street discovered.

When the patrol came under fire, the Marines saw the alley but instinctively did not move toward it. Some jumped over the wall next to them. Others kicked in a courtyard gate and ran through it.

Part of the patrol was caught on the other side of the street. (...)

Later, Staff Sgt. Joe Modesto, the patrol leader, said the insurgents did not expect to hit any of the Marines or Iraqi soldiers in the initial volley but wanted to drive them to the alley.

"They were trying to find a way to get us toward the IED so they could detonate it," Modesto said.

Knowing what might be coming next, Americans have adjusted their own tactics to try to avoid the traps.

"They try to bait us into running into an IED," Neary said. "But we are wise to those tactics. That is why you see us go through doors and over walls."

Yet in Ramadi, it is a constantly changing battle. As soon as the Americans think they have figured out how the insurgents are operating, the techniques change.

"We change our tactics, they change their tactics," said Sgt. Joey Catron of India Company. "We watch them and they watch us. It is a big cat-and-mouse game."

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>> COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

JUAN COLE: MASHHADANI ON AMERICASTAN IN IRAQ

Gilbert Achcar kindly translates a recent article from al-Hayat, interviewing the Speaker of the House of the Iraqi Parliament. I repeat, this is the elected speaker of the House of the Iraqi government elected under Bush's auspices.

' The president of the Iraqi Parliament, Dr. Mahmoud] Al-Mash’hadani spoke to Al-Hayat yesterday, at the end of an official visit to Damascus, where he met with president Bashar al-Assad… On the accusations directed at Syria and Iran of interfering in Iraq’s affairs, al-Mash’hadani said vehemently: “America installs itself between two countries like Syria and Iran that it considers as enemies and you want them to stay passive! That is not realistic at all, and if ever they intervene, it is to protect their national security. And we do not object to that, the national security of Syria and Iran is threatened by the American presence … Let’s suppose that they (the Syrians) interfere in Iraq’s affairs, why don’t you object to America’s rule over Iraq before objecting to Syria’s interference in order to protect its security? In this respect, Iraq has opened its doors to all countries, even to an Israeli presence, so has Syrian interference now become a threat to Iraq’s security? Who destroyed Iraq? Who plundered Iraq? Who stole from Iraq? Who humiliated Iraq? Who desecrated Iraq’s holy sites? Who damaged the honor of Iraqi women? It is none other than the blue jinn whose name is: the occupation.”

Al-Mash’hadani accused the American forces of standing behind terrorist attacks in Iraq, saying: “The occupation is the first and last cause of the problem, it has overthrown the [former] regime without a plan, it has suppressed the state with no reason, it has led to the resistance and it has infiltrated it, it has brought Al-Qaeda to Iraq…” After approving the statement that “American occupation troops stand behind some of the terrorist attacks,” he described today’s Iraq as “Americastan.” '

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IRAQ IS VIETNAM, AND THE ATROCITIES ARE THE SAME

We have heard many allusions to Vietnam made to explain the "quagmire" in Iraq. US forces bogged down. US forces in Vietnamization, etc.

But what we haven't heard that the same military that waged an illegal war in Vietnam is now commiting the same atrocities in Iraq. The Generals in Iraq were lower-ranking in Vietnam.

This is the ethos of the US military. Period.

For example, according to the Los Angeles Times:

Among the substantiated cases:

• Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.

• Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.

• One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.

My, my. Nazis? Heck yeah, why should the US military be considered any better. No difference whatsoever. Nazis killed Jews and Slavs. US military kills, tortures and rapes everyone else.

Also, I love this particular gem:

Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Los Angeles Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated there. Retired Brig. Gen. John Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, said he once supported keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

So, wait. When the Pentagon whitewashed the atrocities in Iraq by chalking them up to a few rogue elements, they knew they were lying? Hmm ... perjury in Congressional Hearings? The truth and nothing but the truth? Or is that not part of the born-again White Christian mantra?

Goddammit, hold on just a darn parsec there. There IS more.

Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967.

He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.

Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action.

US justice, boy. You get yer justice, boy! If you so much as opens yer mouth, yas be gettin a lynchin, boy.

You can read more here, as well.

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'IN THE SAME OLD WAY'

Those Iraqis busy engaging in the majority of attacks in Iraq - attacks upon the American army of occupation and it's green zone government allies, continue to make life difficult. The most effective way of doing this is as I wrote in "Attacking the Tail" back in February:

"Attacks upon supply convoys which are incapable of defending themselves have now been going on for a long time, now however the incidence, already high, is increasing markedly. The use of such indefensible convoys is a direct result of Secetary Rumsfeld's "reform" of the US armed forces logistical wing.

I won't insult my readers' intelligence by explaining the signifcance, or what it means for the "withdraw to bases" plan."

There's a reason why professional soldiers have the following proverb, "Amateurs study strategy professionals study logistics." The reason is simple an unsupplied soldier is a dead or captured soldier. If you don't want to take my word for it go read what two militarily very experienced American commentators Joe Galloway, and Pat Lang have to say. Today there's this report from Xinhua* :

"Gunmen attack truck convoy in northern Iraq, killing two drivers

(...)

The convoy was carrying barbed wire by the way. You need rather a lot of barbed wire if you're a foreign soldier occupying a country illegally. You need it to help stop the enraged brown people who actually live there and are furious at what you've done their home, their family, and their neighbours, from making clear their displeasure by capturing or killing you. Attacks on convoys are escalating. They're escalating in intensity, scale, and sophistication, that's why the US is resorting more and more to air supply and people who actually know what they're talking about like Joe Galloway and Pat Lang have been sounding the alarm. Supplying by air is unsustainable and is a loser's strategy. You've lost leave. I'll finish with a quotation from a British military genius, the Duke of Wellington:

"They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way"

I doubt if any of the fighters who've wrecked the American logistical effort in those parts of Iraq where having a good logistical tail is essential to survival have heard either version of Wellington's aphorism but I've no doubt whatsoever that they'd nod vigorously in agreement if you quoted it at them. Then they'd go back to attacking the tail "in the same old way."

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STREET SCENE

Just an interesting wrinkle in Life During Wartime: I was coming back from the store today and spotted a van for an electrical contractor a few cars ahead of me at the stoplight. A large American flag decal was on one of the rear doors, as you see all the time, but the two windows on the van's rear doors each had another message spelled out in professional white lettering. One said "IRAQ IS ARABIC FOR VIETNAM," while the other said "TAKE THE PROFIT OUT OF WAR."

It's interesting when a small business will take a risk like that...unless they don't think it's much of a risk anymore. Hmm...wonder if I need some electrical work done.

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MAHMUDIYA

More testimony today about the... unpleasantness... in Mahmudiya. Honestly, I don't know what to call it. There was a gang-rape, it was of a 14-year old, they burned her body, killed her and her family. There's not really a word that sums all that up. Speaking of summing up, let's look at the headlines. The Guardian headline to an AP story focuses on the preliminaries: "Soldiers 'Hit Golf Balls Before Going out to Kill Family.'" Other headlines mention whisky (mixed with an energy drink) and gin rummy. The Daily Telegraph focuses on the after-party: "Troops Ate Chicken Wings after 'Killing Rape Girl, 14.'" The BBC notes that the "Troops 'Took Turns' to Rape Iraqi," CNN that "U.S. Soldier Poured Kerosene on Raped, Slain Iraqi." So many ugly, ugly details to focus on. May I stop focusing on them now? Please?

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>> BEYOND IRAQ

KILL US ALL

Hanady Salman (friend and editor at As-Safir newspaper in Beirut) sent this:

"One suggestion I need any of you to transmit to the Israelis: I offer you all of us. Our flesh, our scalps, our inner parts to exhibit live on TV screens, our bare feet eaten by wolves during the night in ex- villages, our blood flooding in the streets, our kids, our mothers, our fathers , our brothers, sisters, grandparents , every single one of us. KILL US ALL. You can be selective if you wish. Leave those who like you, believe in you, to prosper by you side in the new whatever hell you would like to have.

JUST KILL US. DO NOT LEAVE US BEHIND. DO NOT LEAVE US TO WATCH. Tens of kids everyday, toddlers, elderly, killed in their houses, in their shelters, on the roads trying to flee, in the centers where they took refuge.

THEY ARE ALL MINE,THE KIDS THEY KILLED, THEY ARE ALL MEMEBERS OF MY FAMILY THE "CIVILIANS" THEY KILLED, AND YOU KNOW WHAT ,THE FIGHTERS ARE FIGHTING FOR ME AND FOR MY CHILD'S TOMORROW. THEY ARE ALL MINE, THE ONES THEY'RE KILLING. Blood is all what you have to offer, it has always been that way. Blood you shall have. As much blood as you planes can get. As much blood as your fantasies imply. As much blood as there is in our veins.

Did you have enough blood for today? Only in the afternoon, in Ghazyeh, in Ghassanieh, in Houla, in Britel, in Chmestar, in Ali Nahri, in Hezzine, in Tyre, in Bayyada, in Qassmieh, and those you killed a few minutes ago in Shayyah, in the southern suburb, the Hezbollah stronghold as your reporters label it. In this Hezbollah stronghold, my colleagues fail to mention, hundreds of POOR families live, and today most of them are refugees from other parts of the country. Kill as much as you can. Your smart planes and smart rockets and smart asses and smart allies: kill us all.

This is not just another war. This is extermination. This is another fun game, the way the Israelis like them, played with US made arms, funded by YOUR MONEY, justified by YOUR PRESS, encouraged by YOUR ELECTED POLITICIANS. SHAME ON ANY OF US WHO WILL EVER FORGRET. SHAME ON THAT WHO WOULD EVER FORGIVE. SHAME ON THAT WHO WOULD EVER MENTION PEACE AGAIN : YOUR PEACE WAS MISSED BY MY KIDS, THUS , I NEED IT NO MORE."

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HAARETZ: SYSTEMIC FAILURE

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has not won a war. However, in all its wars during the last generation, neither has Israel been defeated. (...)

So that in four different campaigns - to which we could add the War of Attrition and the Gulf wars - Israel achieved a stalemate of one kind or another, which was not decisive but allowed a certain stability to persist until the next campaign. Accordingly, the second Lebanon war is different from all its predecessors. In the second Lebanon war, there is a danger that Israel will be defeated. If the large-scale ground move that Ehud Olmert initiated very late does not go well, the reality to which we are liable to awaken after the war is one of a first Israeli defeat.

A defeat is not a holocaust. It is not the end. The French were defeated in Indochina and survived, the Americans were defeated in Vietnam and prospered. Egypt was defeated in 1967, drew its conclusions and was back on its feet by 1970 and certainly in 1973. However, to prevent even a point-specific Israeli defeat, we must define the situation precisely. The attempt to create a fake ostensible victory does not serve Israel's national goals or national existence. On the contrary: it lulls the nation and prevents it from mobilizing all its strength for the necessary coping with its fate. If Israel seeks life, it cannot go on living within the gossamer webs of a military establishment with high-powered PR. It must emerge from the virtual-reality studio of the channels of patriotic ratings and look at reality as it really is. The reality is hard, very hard. Very hard, but not hopeless.

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WHY THE LEBANESE RESISTANCE ARE CLOBBERING THE IDF

Eventually, they would have to start asking this sort of question: why are the local European supremacists not beating the brown people? Isn't this what we pay them for? How come they're not doing their job? According to The Guardian this morning, 57 Israeli soldiers have died. The latest estimate for Hezbollah deaths, meanwhile, is 53. The latest estimate for civilian deaths in Lebanon, meanwhile, is 933. Yes, the Israelis have never found any especial difficulty in slaughtering civilians, but why can't they beat what they confidently assured the world was a 'rag-tag' army? The New York Times tries to provide some answers. The casual reliance on Israeli military intelligence is to be expected. Essentially, the NYT boils it down to Syria and Iran. They gave um weapons n everything. It's not fair. Oh, there's some interesting information in there: Hezbollah's use of tunnels, their targeting of the houses that IDF soldiers hide out in, the use of 'part-timers' who supply logistics and weapons. Of course, it's hard to realistically assess this, since the Israelis speciously use the latter claim to legitimise their targeting of civilian areas. Indeed, the NYT repeatedly suggests that Hezbollah are hiding out in civilian targets, something well-known to its reporters to be false.

The theme is similar elsewhere. The Washington Post reports that its all weapons, weapons, weapons. And Hezbollah, mark you, is in possession of night-vision goggles. I shit you not. In that article, Israeli officials admit that they've only killed a small fraction of Hezbollah's fighters: evidently the claim that they have killed hundreds and hundreds of them is wearing a little thin, and now they are obliged to account for their lack of success by making Hezbollah out to be a Levantine Godzilla. And they're playful too, the Party of God:

"Most of the time we only see them when they want to draw attention to themselves, then they kick us from behind," said Tyler, who was resting with his battalion at a lakefront hotel near Tiberias after a week in southern Lebanon. "It's horrible, yes. You feel -- not weak, but how do you say it, threatened? There is always, always uncertainty."

It's almost like a Marx Brothers skit: "Oh, yoohoo!" "Whassa..?" Blam! "I'll teach you to kick me!" "You don't need to teach me, I already know how!" Boof! Another toe up the arse. What's the difference between Hezbollah and Clint Eastwood? Clint Eastwood will make your day, but Hezbollah will make your hole weak.

The IDF has its own account, reported by Haaretz: "Our missions are unclear, our combat equipment is antiquated". I don't understand this. Israel is spending billions of dollars each year on its military equipment, and its mission in Lebanon is surely perfectly clear: to drive out the civilian population, occupy it and annexe it while siphoning off water from the Litani if they can manage it. The soldiers complain that Hezbollah has been training for six years: well, armies will tend to train. What has the IDF been doing when not tearing up Palestine and making regular incursions into the blue zone?

The answers that might be given as to why the IDF are not winning are: 1) motivational, inasmuch as the IDF's "mission" is unclear to its soldiers, whereas for Hezbollah the goals are obvious and compelling; 2) technological, because Hezbollah has some gear that the IDF did not expect to confront; 3) tactical, because Hezbollah has managed to outwit the IDF all along, hiding in underground tunnels and steering well clear of areas likely to be bombed by Israel (civilian areas); 4) strategic, because the resistance forces are not divided by sectarian animosity and work toward a common goal; 5) training, because the IDF have evidently had it too easy while ravaging civilian areas in Palestine. I'm not sure how much weight to attach to each of these factors, but those are the commonly citet ones.

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DUMBER THAN REAGAN'S "WE BEGIN BOMBING IN 5 MINUTES"?

A Reuters reporter got tapped for the Great Privilege of accompanying Bush on one of his Crawford bike rides this weekend. Oh, to see the Leader of the Free World in his natural habitat:

"What I would give to be 16 again!" Bush yelled out at one point as he mashed the pedals of his Trek bicycle through a wooded area.

In fact, Bush does not ride quietly, constantly shouting out in his Texas twang the names of trees and geographic features and yelling at himself to pedal faster.

"Air assault!" he yelled as he started one of two major climbs, up Calichi Hill, which he named for the white limestone rock from which it is formed.

To be 16 again? It doesn't sound like he's made it to the level of an 8 year-old. No word if he stretched his arms out like wings and yelled "Nyraaaarrrwooow! Powpowpowpowpow!"

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "For me, June marked the first month I don't dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don't wear a hijab usually, but it's no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It's just not a good idea." -- Riverbend, Baghdad Burning blog, Saturday, August 05, 2006

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, August 7, 2006

Photo: Iraqi children walk past the bullet ridden windscreen of a vehicle, after a gunbattle, in Baghdad's Sadr City, Iraq, Monday Aug. 7, 2006. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim) (See below)

U.S. and Iraqi forces raided a suspected death squad in mostly Shi'ite east Baghdad early on Monday, the U.S. military said, and a police source said they fought with militia there for several hours. The police source said that 18 people had been wounded and two killed in the fighting in Sadr City, a stronghold of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters are part of the ruling Shi'ite coalition. One U.S. soldier was hurt in the clash.

Col. Hassan Chaloub, police chief of Sadr City, said three people were killed and 12 injured, including five children. He said three cars and three houses were destroyed.

US jet fighters bombed civilian targets in an eastern Baghdad suburb, claimed a leading Shia official Monday. According to Fattah al-Sheikh, an official in the Shia Sadr group, civilian areas of the Sadr suburb were targeted by US planes Sunday night. He denied that the Mahdi army the armed wing of the Sadr bloc, was present in the neighbourhood, adding that the leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, has urged his fighters to "(maintain) self-restraint and abort any provocative attempt by the US to target them".

A suicide truck bomber on Monday rammed into the provincial headquarters of a commando force north of Baghdad, killing at least nine soldiers and injuring 10 civilians. The truck carrying vegetables drove through razor wire barricades around the two-story building of the Interior Ministry's police commandos in Samarra, police Capt. Laith Mohammed said. The building was virtually leveled and three houses nearby were also severely damaged, said other police officials contacted by telephone.

Bring 'em on: Three US soldiers were killed Sunday in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad.

OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS

Baghdad:

Unidentified gunmen stormed and bombed a barbershop in a southeastern Baghdad district on Monday.

The gunmen, driving past the shop in two sedans, opened fire, killing four customers and the owner.

Seven people including three policemen were injured in a bomb blast and a subsequent car bomb explosion at an Internet Cafe in Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad.

(update) An Australian man has escaped death but suffered serious burns in a roadside blast in Iraq that killed two of his colleagues. The roadside bomb exploded early on August 3, about 45km north-east of Baghdad.

A bomb and a car bomb exploded in quick succession near a commercial building on Palestine street, northeastern Baghdad, wounding three people. The target of the bombing was unclear.

Two bombs exploded on Palestine Street, a major shopping area of Baghdad, injuring 10 people, including a senior police officer.

Two bodies, handcuffed and shot in the head, were also found in western Baghdad.

Baqubah:

Unknown gunmen stormed an Iraqi army checkpoint near Baquba killing six Iraqi soldiers and wounding 15 others, a source from the U.S. and Iraqi liaison office told Xinhua. He said the Iraqi soldiers seized a large quantity of weapons after they fiercely fought the attackers, who sustained casualties, before they fled the scene.

Khan Bani Saad:

A bomb targeting a police foot patrol exploded in a vegetable market killing a civilian and a policeman and wounding seven people in Khan Bani Saad near Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad.

Muqdadiya:

Gunmen killed four Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint in the market area of Muqdadiya, 90 km (50 miles) northeast of Baghdad.

Khalis:

Four civilians were killed and seven others critically wounded when their minibus was struck by a roadside bomb on a road near Khalis, 80 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad.

Mosul:

Gunmen opened fire on a taxi killing two policemen inside in Mosul. Two other policemen in the taxi were injured.

Darbandikhan (near Sulaimaniyah city):

Police fired in the air to disperse hundreds of stone-throwing demonstrators in Darbandikhan in northern Iraq, injuring at least 11 people. The protesters were demanding better living conditions such as electricity and fuel, the second such protest in two days in the area near Sulaimaniyah city.

Fallujah:

Six people were killed and two others injured when a roadside bomb went off in Fallujah. Although the roadside bomb was targeting a police patrol that was passing through Arba'een street in central Fallujah, the patrol was unharmed.

Ramadi:

Three civilians were killed and 15 injured in crossfire during clashes in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, after insurgents attacked a joint US-Iraqi patrol.

>> NEWS

HAGEL WANTS U.S. TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ WITHIN 6 MONTHS

Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel has been an outspoken Republican critic of the Bush administration's U.S. military occupation of Iraq. A year ago, Hagel told U.S. News magazine: "Things aren't getting better; they're getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality," Hagel told U.S. News. "It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq."

In June, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) voted against the Levin amendment, a "nonbinding proposal [that] did not set a withdrawal deadline, urged President Bush to start pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq this year." At the time, Hagel explained his vote: "We should not limit the Commander in Chief's options in Iraq. That is why I will vote against the Levin amendment."

Now, Hagel has made a new call to the Bush administration according to an article in the the Lincoln Journal Star: "The United States needs to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within the next six months," Sen. Chuck Hagel said, rather than ratcheting up its military commitment now.

With Iraq exploding in sectarian violence and "moving closer and closer to a straight-out civil war," Hagel said, the Bush administration's decision to transfer nearly 5,000 additional U.S. troops into Baghdad is "only going to make it worse for us."

In the end, Hagel said, "feed(ing) more American troop fodder into the fight" could result in "even a worse defeat."

Hagel is a decorated war veteran who served in Vietnam. Hagel served in Vietnam with his brother Tom in 1968. During the worst year of the war, they walked side by side as infantry squad leaders with the U.S. Army's 9th Infantry Division.

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RIVERBEND'S BLOG TAKEN ON STAGE

"Is it time to wash our hands of the country and find a stable life somewhere else?"

The question in "Girl Blog from Iraq" was posted only last weekend by an anonymous young Iraqi woman whose weblog has now been adapted into a theatrical documentary at the Edinburgh Fringe arts festival.

Played by actresses of Palestinian, Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi origin, she recounts the horrors of abduction, murder and rape alongside her determined efforts to carve out a normal life amid the carnage.

"It is exciting when she posts as we know she is OK. All of a sudden you are reminded how real and immediate this all is," said Kimberly Kefgen who adapted the weblog with Loren Ingrid Noveck.

Known only as "Riverbend," the Iraqi blogger has been providing regular despatches since August 2003, writing in her first entry: "I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That is all you need to know. It's all that matters."

The blog was praised by the New York Times who said her "articulate, even poetic prose packs an emotional punch while exhibiting a journalist's eye for detail."

Her online diary on www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com, which was collected together and issued by Marion Boyars Publishers, was nominated for a major literary prize in Britain.

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>> REPORTS

Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith claims Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the invasion of Iraq: In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

A year after his "Axis of Evil" speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq's first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.

Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam--to which the President allegedly responded, "I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!"

U.S. PLANS REMOVAL OF US. TROOPS IN EVENT OF IRAQ CIVIL WAR

The Bush administration insists Iraq is a long way from civil war, but the contingency planning has already begun inside the White House and the Pentagon. President Bush will move U.S. troops out of Iraq if the country descends into civil war, according to one senior Bush aide who declined to be named while talking about internal strategy. "If there's a full-blown civil war, the president isn't going to allow our forces to be caught in the crossfire," the aide said. "But institutionally, the government of Iraq isn't breaking down. It's still a unity government." Bush's position on a pullout of U.S. troops emerged in response to news-week's questions about Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Warner warned last week that the president might require a new vote from Congress to allow troops to stay in Iraq in what he called "all-out civil war." But the senior Bush aide said the White House would need no prompting from Congress to get troops out "if the Iraqi government broke down completely along sectarian lines."

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comment to the above report by Dude | 08.06.06 - 11:45 pm | at Information Clearinghouse:

Not sure if you guys are aware of this, but according to Islam, it's a sin for 2 Muslims to fight one another.

I find it puzzling, and fishy, that this whole Sunni and Shia thing is coming up. I would think, Sunnis and Shia.. I mean, Muslims, would rather live with each other than to live under a foreign power. Call me crazy, but they're still brothers by blood and faith - and it's so clear to me, that this "civil war" crap was being trumpetted from the start when I heard CNN, NBC, CBS, etc. describe Iraq along sectarian lines. I always refered to them as Arabs + Kurds, or simply just Muslims!

Divide and conquer, what a horrible tragedy... but it's definitely effective. :-(

NO BOMBS YET FOR U.S. IN SADR CITY

"Why does he always have to choose the suckiest road?" mutters Sergeant First Class Daniel Odom, with a swear, as his shuddering Humvee follows the lead vehicle of his patrol over trash and potholes and into Sadr City, the teeming stronghold of Baghdad's Shia militias.

Above, the pitiless summer sun beats down on the imposing American jeep's armored carapace, heating the fetid air in the street to 45 degrees. Below, an odor of decay rises from the market trash and goat droppings crushed under its wheels as it negotiates the narrow alleyways.

"Damn. F*** this place!" The shout comes from above, where roof gunner Specialist Marcus Bedell has just taken a ripe tomato full in the face. He swivels his gun, remaining alert to the danger that the next attack might be more deadly; an ambush, a sniper or a suicide bomber.

Sadr City, a sprawling warren of rundown apartment blocks, is home to more than 2 million Iraqi Shias. It is also the heartland of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, whose movement's core support comes from the legions of unemployed young men in its streets and mosques.

More than two months after an elected coalition government took over in Iraq, the black-clad fighters of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia still openly carry weapons on the streets of their stronghold.

At parades over the weekend its fighters chanted "Death to America" and trampled on a dusty Stars and Stripes painted on the road. They brandished Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers and chanted their support for Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas.

Nevertheless, the militia is not in open conflict with the United States. Sadr has 30 lawmakers in parliament and two ministers in the US-backed government of national unity run by Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki, a fellow Shia. His firebrand speeches keep the political temperature high, but there is no sign he is preparing a re-run of his 2004 armed revolt in Najaf.

For their part, the Americans are careful to respect Iraq's new politically correct vocabulary. The black-clad gangs who nightly kidnap Sunni civilians, torture and kill them, are not Mehdi Army. In US statements they are thugs and criminals and - the new buzz term - "death squads".

But privately, US officers admit that militias like Sadr's are very much part of the problem in Baghdad and elsewhere, and that some kind of strategy has to be found to take them out of the equation; either by disarming them or tying them into a national reconciliation initiative.

Privately also, some Mehdi militiamen expect they will come into conflict once again with US forces, some of them looking back in nostalgia to their so-called "intifada" in Najaf.

"If the American army deploys again in Sadr city, it will face attacks and we're expecting big clashes," one Sadr supporter said this week.

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AP BLOG: WHEN DIET COKE DOESN'T MAKE IT TO THE DINING FACILITY...

There was no Diet Coke today at the dining facility. For a few seconds, I was a little irritated. I try to limit my caffeine intake and keep it to one Diet Coke a day, but I do look forward to my soda with a little ice.

After a few seconds I remembered that just about all the food that is eaten on this base is driven by truck, possibly from Kuwait to the south or Turkey to the north. And those truck drivers - many from neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan - take horrible risks driving on roads that are filled with homemade bombs set by insurgents and ambushes set up by people wanting to steal their loads.

So every time that something such as Diet Coke doesn't make it to the dining facility or the mail doesn't arrive or there's no sour cream for the baked potatoes, it could mean that a driver out on the roads of Iraq is dead.

read in full...

>> COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

A WAR RESISTERS INVISIBLE FENCE

Sitting at the computer, wearing my official Electronic Monitoring Ankle Bracelet is certainly better than sitting in jail...but it still does a pretty good job of reminding you you're now in the criminal class.

On August 4, Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Charles Wittenberg sentenced me for two felony convictions I got for spraypainting "Troops Out Now!" on a highway overpass on January 1 of this year. Part of the sentence includes 60 days under house arrest, tethered to the 1,050 sq. ft. of my home in Toledo like it has one of those "invisible fences" for dogs at the front and back doors. The ankle bracelet ($60.00 weekly service fee) communicates with a black box ($40.00 installation fee) tied into the phone line to a company in Indiana that monitors the whole business by computer. I wonder how many and who are my fellow "monitorees" so served by B.I. Inc., and whether I should buy some stock. Incarceration in its various forms is clearly America's growth industry.

During the jury trial July 18-19, my attorney, Terry Lodge, and I did our best to put the war on trial and the prosecutors of course did their best to narrow it to criminal vandalism - and "possession of criminal tools," of course. Below you can read the letter I wrote the judge. He read it into the record prior to pronouncing his sentence.

News coverage of the arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing generated thousands of times more discussion and debate on the war than all the times I've politely held a sign by the side of the road. A video clip of the overpass, taken by WTOL TV before the transportation department hurriedly covered the offensive slogan, ran numerous times on days of my arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing. My first public art installation - fluorescent orange oil on concrete - was seen numerous times by many thousands of viewers. Newspaper editorials, letters to the editor and news articles added significantly to the debate.

At every opportunity, when asked why I did it or why I didn't plead to misdemeanor charges, I explained politely that, "There's a war on, you know! We're complicit in war crimes; in a war of aggression; in the killing and maiming of thousands. We have to do more than write Congress. This is one more nonviolent way I can speak out against this criminal war and uphold international law."

I don't regret painting "Troops Out Now!" on that overpass, nor taking it to trial. Now's it's time to pay the price as so many good peace warriors before me have done. Compared to what hell the people in Iraq and our soldiers go through every day, and compared to the level of repression we'll experience if we don't reverse America's slide into fascism, my sentence is a minor inconvenience. Like I said, it's better than being in jail. It just makes me wonder what the penalty would have been for writing "Mike loves Sue" instead of "Troops Out Now!"?

link

'INDEPENDENT OF REALITY'

...are a full 50% of US respondents to a recent Harris poll, according to NewsMax.com

Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Those were the questions and the result had some 'flabbergasted'.

Michael Massing:

"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence."

[...]

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

This is plainly freakin' me out:

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record) and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra (news, bio, voting record), released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

link

>> BEYOND IRAQ

PANIC IN DETROIT

In Dearborn, Michigan, Arab demonstrators are holding up portraits of Sheik Hassan Nasralla, "chanting his name and Hezbollah," according to the Detroit Free Press. "We find any support for murderous terrorist organizations like al-Qaida or Hezbollah very disappointing, if not disturbing," Eric Straus, chief of the counterterrorism unit at the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit, told the newspaper. "Our office's No. 1 priority is preventing another terrorist attack," reports the Associated Press.

Of course, Hezbollah is not "al-Qaeda," the infamous CIA-ISI made-to-measure terror group. Hezbollah is a legitimate resistance group, completely legal under international law, minus its stupid rocketing of Israeli settlements. But then we shouldn't expect the U.S. attorney's office to admit this. It should come as no surprise Nasralla and Hezbollah would find support in Detroit's Arab community, or for that matter among Arabs and Muslims anywhere.

Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News of Dearborn and spokesman for the Council of Arab American Organizations, basically told Straus and the feds to take a hike. "Who should they chant for? George Bush, the one who's sending Israel bombs to kill their relatives, to kill more people?" Siblani said. "If they want to prosecute us, prosecute us. Let them get their buses, line them up and haul us out." As Siblani probably knows, there are not enough buses in Detroit or for that matter the whole of Michigan to bus all the Arabs and Muslims to those brand spanking new Halliburton constructed concentration camps.

There are roughly 300,000 southeastern Michigan residents with roots in the Arab world, many of them with relatives in Lebanon. Straus and the feds will have their hands full if they believe they can stop the rising tide of anger and resentment on the part of Arabs, who witness daily the slaughter of the brothers and sisters in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq.

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A HEZBOLLAH UPON ALL OF THEE!

The way Israel is conducting the war right now is the worst of both worlds: it's too bloody and not bloody enough at the same time. Give me a second to explain what I mean by that. At the moment that skinny nasal-voiced jerk Anderson Cooper is saying Israel's killed about 320 Lebanese, vs. 36 Israelis dead. Now actually that's a perfectly standard count for asymmetrical warfare; the technologically superior force usually kills about ten of the guerrillas for every one of its own losses. But in PR terms, this war has been a disaster for Israel, a can't win scenario. Just try this experiment: watch CNN with the sound off for a few minutes. Without that non-stop pro-Israel commentary, you'll see what the whole world outside the US sees: non-stop video feed of terrified Lebanese civvies fleeing in terror, crying on camera, hugging their bloodied-up kids. Then there's a shot of the IDF zooming around in their Merkavas and US-supplied SP 155mms, blasting dry hills or doing dirt donuts on some local's wrecked house. Ask yourself this question:

WHAT'S MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE?

It'll come to you after a minute: you never, ever see an armed Hezbollah fighter. They're there, all right. You better believe it. They've killed at least 20 IDF troops, and they're the real reason, the only reason, the IDF isn't invading all-out: because those Hezbollah apprentice martyrs are dug in, waiting and hoping and praying for the IDF to steam into the kill zones they've been polishing since Israel quit Lebanon in 2000.

But you never see them on TV. You think that's an accident? No, fellas, that's brains is what that is. Nasrullah may look like a fat social studies teacher who needs a shave, but you don't claw your way to the top of a bloody world like that one without brains. The men who run Hezbollah attacked because they finally figured out that they literally cannot lose. The IDF can never expel Hezbollah from South Lebanon, because it's a genuine mass movement, as committed and crazy at the roots as at the top. (As opposed to Arafat's PLO, which they could and did expel from Lebanon because it was topheavy, corrupt and cowardly.) If Israel comes down hard on the Lebanese, another generation learns to hate the Jews down south and dream of bloody revenge. If Israel holds off, then Hezbollah becomes the one victorious Arab/Muslim force in the world, darling of every little nine-year-old Jihadi in Jakarta and Khartoum. If Israel retaliates by blasting every target of value in Lebanon, every TV tower and shopping mall and freeway...well, that's the beauty of the plan: the Shia are the poorest of the poor. They don't own any of that shit anyway. They sit back and laugh watching their neighbors' stuff that they've envied all their lives get blown away -- and it's the Israelis who get the blame.

So call'em crazy if it makes you feel better, but don't call'em stupid. Better yet, get used to calling'em "Sir."

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Sometimes it sounds like bullets. It's more a game for the small kids, but the ones who throw rocks today might throw grenades tomorrow." -- Sergeant First Class Daniel Odom with the 356th Regimental Combat Team, as rocks thrown by children and teenagers batter his Humvee patrolling in Sadr City, Baghdad (see above “No Bombs Yet For U.S. In Sadr City”)

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 2006

An Iraqi man carries the body of his child outside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf August 6, 2006. The child was killed by a stray bullet during clashes between insurgents and Iraqi police in Najaf on Saturday. REUTERS/Ali Abu Shish. Note: This is yet another example of an incident that only gets reported in a photo caption. -- C


Police find 14 bullet-riddled bodies in various parts of Baghdad on Saturday, according to an interior ministry source who demanded anonymity. Some were blindfolded and bound.

Mortar strike kills one, injures two, in southern Baghdad. Also, according to AP:

• Two low-ranking members of Saddam Hussein regime killed in separate incidents
  
• A bomb explodes in Baquba, destroying a grocery store. A second bomb, minutes later, targets rescuers. Eight people are injured.

Five Iraqi soldiers killed in ambush in Kirkuk. Also, unidentified armed men kidnapped a civilian in the city.

In Mosul, unidentified men opened fire against multinational forces. The scene has been "besieged," but casualties are unreported. Also in Mosul, according to KUNA, police found the body of an al Qaeda leader, according to a major general of the police, following a confrontation with armed men. The police claim 20 were killed in armed confrontations in Mosul.

Iraqi police say three people killed in separate incidents in Diyali. Also, "a member of one of the security protection agencies" killed in Baqubah.

Four truck drivers, transporting barbed wire to a U.S. base, are killed in an ambush near Ishaqi, north of Baghdad. Also, according to Reuters:

• Four more people died from injuries sustained in a bomb attack in the Baghdad district of Karada last Tuesday, taking the toll from the blast to 14, an Interior Ministry source said.
  
• Iraqi and U.S. forces arrested 15 suspected insurgents in villages near Kirkuk, police said.
  
• Iraqi police said they had retrieved four bodies from the river Tigris in Suwayra. All were handcuffed and blindfolded and had been shot.
  
• Gunmen killed a police officer on Saturday in Baghdad, police said.
  
• Gunmen attacked an army checkpoint, kidnapping a sergeant and seizing a number of weapons in the town of Taza, near Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
  
• Gunmen kidnapped a contractor in Hawija, 70 km (43 miles) southwest of Baghdad, police said. Nationality of this "contractor" is not stated.

Roadside bomb wounds two police commandos and two civilians in Jihad neighborhood of Baghdad. AFP also reports a second roadside bomb in Baghdad, but gives no details. Also, AFP gives the day's total of tortured and murdered bodies in Baghdad as 17, rather than the 12 or 14 mentioned elsewhere. The discrepancy appears to be in part that AFP includes 4 Iraqi soldiers, as well as 13 civilians.

Gunmen in Samarra ambush a convoy of Iraqi trucks carrying food, killing two drivers and setting their trucks on fire, according to police Capt. Laith Mohammed. Also, A sniper shot dead a government security guard in southern Baghdad, and a body is found in Amarah. This story also refers to five men found shot in Baghdad, but it is unclear whether this is in addition to those reported elsewhere.

MNF Casualty Report

Marine killed on Thursday is identified as Lance Cpl. Kurt Dechen, 24, of Springfield, VT. Shot while on foot patrol in Fallujah.

Sailor killed August 2 in Ramadi identified as Petty Officer 2nd Class Marc A. Lee, 28, of Hood River, Ore.

OTHER NEWS OF THE DAY

Police undertake morning ritual of recovering bodies. (Note: This story reminds us that our daily practice of listing reported incidents greatly understates the level of violence in Iraq, most of which is not specifically reported. -- C) Excerpt:

EVERY morning in the Sadr area of northern Baghdad, police undertake a familiar ritual. A dusty area once used as a city rubbish tip has for two months been the dumping ground for Sunni victims of Shiite death squads.

Just after dawn each day, before the temperature soars to 50 degrees, police gather as many as 30 bodies - each identifiably Sunni from a hole bored in the head by an electric drill - for transport to the morgue.

Meanwhile, a similar number of headless bodies are pulled from the Tigris, the daily crop of Shiite victims of Sunni militia. The corpses are the latest tally in a sectarian war raging through Baghdad. As many as 200 a day are delivered to the morgue.

"Some of the bodies are impossible to identify," Dr Falih Hassan said at the morgue. "But we can tell the victim's religion: if they have been beheaded they are Shia, if they have been killed by an electric drill or hammer blows to the face they are Sunni."

For the fighters roaming Baghdad, the logic is simple. Hassan Alami, 25, a Shiite from Sadr City, said the holes drilled in the Sunni heads were to "destroy their stupid minds". The Sunnis are said to behead their victims because this was how Muhammad dealt with apostates.

U.S. Army 172 Stryker Brigade takes up positions in Baghdad. Excerpt:

08-06-2006, 06h42 BAGHDAD (AFP)

US reinforcements have rolled into some of the most violent districts of Baghdad in a fleet of 17-tonne armoured troop carriers as part of a major push to halt Iraq's slide towards civil war. Units of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team deployed in flashpoint districts in the west of the capital Sunday, which in recent weeks has seen hundreds of civilians murdered by sectarian death squads.

snip

An extra 3,700 combat troops will join Operation Forward Together in support of some 50,000 mainly Iraqi personnel struggling to regain control of the capital and to restore the embattled coalition government's authority. "The Stryker Brigade continues to move, and its final positions are still being worked out," said US military spokesman Major William Willhoite.

snip

The Stryker Brigade had already completed a 12-month deployment in the restive region around the northern city of Mosul, and had begun to head home to Alaska when the order came to proceed to Baghdad for the next 120 days.

The 172nd -- nicknamed the "Arctic Wolves" -- has handed over authority in Mosul to the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a US statement said. The handover maintained US troop levels in Iraq at around 130,000. The Arctic Wolves use the "Stryker", a wheeled armoured car regarded as well-suited to urban terrain.

Authorities lift curfew in Mosul after making 62 arrests. Excerpt:

By RAWYA RAGEH | Associated Press August 6, 2006

Iraqi authorities Sunday lifted a partial curfew in the country's third largest city, rounding up 62 suspects after repulsing a series of attacks that killed a police colonel and raised concern that insurgents were regrouping there.

A Defense Ministry statement said the 62 arrests were made in northern Iraq since Saturday, a day after heavy fighting erupted in Mosul between security forces and insurgents. Another 10 suspected insurgents were arrested in other parts of the country, the statement said. Nine other people were arrested elsewhere in the country in the ongoing sectarian and political violence, police said.

The curfew had been imposed in the eastern part of Mosul, where much of Friday's fighting took place, but was listed Sunday after order was restored, police chief Maj. Gen. Wathiq al-Hamdani said.

Police estimated that 20 militants were killed in the Friday fighting but only four bodies have been found. The fighting began after a car bomb killed a police colonel and three other policemen.

Military hearing in Mahmudiyah rape/massacre begins. Excerpt:

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq (AFP) - An Iraqi army doctor has told of his horror at coming upon a dead teenager "naked with her legs spread" after the alleged murder of her family by a group of US soldiers. Testifying Sunday on the first day of a US military hearing to decide whether there is enough evidence to court martial four of the soldiers, the doctor decribed how he was called to the 14-year-old's home in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad.

It has been alleged that on March 12 five US soldiers left their post and headed to the nearby home of a Iraqi. The young girl was allegedly raped and killed, along with her family, and the house set on fire.

The doctor said the girl's upper torso and her head were burned and she had a single bullet under her left eye. Her five-year-old sister was found in an adjacent room, where a bullet had blown the back of her head out. The girls' father and mother had also been shot dead. The mother was riddled with bullets in her chest and abdomen. The doctor told the prosecutors that he was ill for weeks after witnessing the crime scene.

Reporters were barred from the hearing during the testimony, and the medic's name was not released, but a recording of his testimony was made available. Two other Iraqis also testified but the media was not allowed to listen.

Families of UK soldiers killed in Iraq form party to challenge government. Excerpt:

Steve Boggan Saturday August 5, 2006 The Guardian

Whenever news of British military deaths in the Middle East flashes on to their TV screen, Reg and Sally Keys become silent and you can see anxiety wash across their faces. This week has been particularly tough; three soldiers killed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. Each time it happens, it reminds them of their son, Thomas, one of six royal military policemen killed in Iraq in 2003.

The Keys are among 115 families whose sons have been killed in Iraq. But this week, one of the worst for British casualties, has been different for the bereaved; this week, they have been doing something about it.

Mr Keys, a 54-year-old former paramedic who stood against Tony Blair in Sedgefield at the general election, is at the centre of moves to form a new political movement aimed at bringing down ministers who failed to vote against the war in Iraq. In the next two weeks he and a small group of others will meet to lay down the foundations of Spectre, a political party that will target the people they hold culpable for the deaths of their sons in what they see as an illegal war.

Last week, four of them won an appeal court challenge against the government's refusal to hold a public inquiry into the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein. Their lawyer, Phil Shiner, described the victory as stunning, not least because, if they are successful in November, the inquiry could see the prime minister, former foreign secretary Jack Straw and former defence secretary Geoff Hoon called to explain their actions.

The parents were delighted, but regard legal proceedings as only one element of a two-pronged attack. At Spectre's inaugural meeting, expected to be held in the Midlands, they will lay plans for a launch next month at the start of Labour's annual conference in Manchester. The families hope to field upwards of 70 candidates at the next general election, and suck enough votes away from Labour ministers to cause political ructions.

"Every time you see news of more deaths, it just brings it all back and you realise that some family's nightmare is just beginning," Mr Keys says. "We know how those families will be feeling. We all feel we've been lied to, ignored and, frankly, insulted. But now it's different. Now we're going to make ministers pay with their seats."

Thomas Keys, 20, and five colleagues were murdered at an Iraqi police station in Al-Majar Al-Kabir. Since the deaths, Mr Keys has learned that the six were ill-equipped and could have survived if they had had such basic resources as a satellite phone to call for help.

"When they recovered Thomas's body there were 30 bullet holes in it," he says. "He had been systematically shot in the feet, shins, shoulders and arms. It was only the last two shots, to the head, that killed him. The authorities know who killed him. They even have the murderers' addresses, and the address of a man who took Thomas's watch from him, the watch I gave him for his 18th birthday. But these men are still free.

"All the parents of the soldiers killed are angry. If Thomas had been fighting for his country in a legal war, then you wouldn't be hearing from me. But we were lied to. Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction; he was no threat to us. So we feel those lives were lost for nothing."

Mr Keys took 4,252 votes in Sedgefield - 10.3% of the vote. Now he believes similar results up and down the country could cost Labour ministers their seats. He will stand, as will Rose Gentle. Her 19-year-old son, Gordon, was killed in a roadside bombing in Basra in 2004. She uses a website, www.mfaw.org.uk (Military Families Against the War) to encourage bereaved families to come forward and make a stand.

"I'm getting between 200 and 300 emails a day from bereaved families, concerned military families and serving soldiers who all feel angry at the way we have been lied to," she says. "This movement is growing and by forming a political party we'll have a focus of that anger."

The idea came from John Mackenzie, the lawyer representing families of the six military policemen. He says the name Spectre was chosen to remind ministers of the fear that should haunt them. Spectre's steering committee is likely to comprise Mr Keys, Mrs Gentle and Mr Mackenzie, with Mike Aston, whose son Russell died alongside Thomas Keys, Peter Brierley, whose son Shaun died in Kuwait in 2003, Sue Smith, whose son Phillip Hewett died in a roadside bombing last year, and Beverley Clarke, who lost her son David to "friendly fire" in 2003.

Mr Brierley, who put up £11,000 of his own money to fund last week's successful court action, says: "We can do a lot of damage to the ministers who supported the war. I don't particularly have an argument with the Labour party, or even most of the government. I blame the personal ambitions of one man: Tony Blair."

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

Note: I'm going to concentrate on "mainstream" -- i.e. corporate news media -- sources today. It's important to understand where the conventional wisdom is heading, and right now it's going in an interesting direction. You may have a gripe with Dexter Filkins, but more people read him than read Noam Chomsky. -- C

CNN's Kim Seagal describes the limitations of practicing journalism in Iraq, which corresopnd to the limitations of living there.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The past few weeks we've had a fairly normal schedule in the Baghdad bureau. Reminding you that normal is relative here. With so much news coming out of Lebanon and Israel, we didn't broadcast as much as we usually do. But that has changed in the past few days.

We are back to working round the clock to bring the situation in Iraq to our viewers. Unfortunately, the situation has not changed for the better. When a bomb goes off on a soccer field, killing young athletes and spectators, you cannot help but wonder if there will ever be a time when we can go out and find a story instead of reacting to a crisis.

As much as possible, we work on stories that are not reactionary -- but the daily bombings, shootings and kidnappings consume a large part of our day. Even the stories we do that are not based on a tragedy seem to ultimately have a tragic twist.

The other day an official with the Iraqi government estimated the unemployment rate was about 50 percent. Eleven million people without jobs. So we went to talk to day laborers looking for work. The men we spoke with were scared to be on the streets, but had no choice but to work in order to feed their families.

The fear was real: They all knew the story of a group of day laborers lured with the promise of work into the car of a suicide bomber. That blast killed over 60 people. For now, the common thread whether it be a reactionary story or an enterprise story, one in which we seek out ourselves, is fear. When youngsters are risking their lives for the chance to play soccer, it is no wonder people in Baghdad think twice before going out to buy bread.

Lebanon war dashing Bush administration plans. Excerpt:

By SALLY BUZBEE of The Associated Press
Published Sunday, August 6, 2006

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Anger toward America is high, extremists are on the upswing and hopes for democracy in the Middle East lie dashed. The Lebanon war is creating dangerous ripples in the war on terror, the future of Iraq - even the effort to keep nuclear weapons from dangerous hands.

"America, we hate you more than ever," Ammar Ali Hassan wrote in the independent Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, in the kind of visceral, slap-in-the-face rhetoric boiling across the region.

So far, the violence has not led allies to take steps that directly hurt America’s strategic interests, such as forcing the military from its regional headquarters in Qatar or its naval base in Bahrain. And there are those who see the conflict as the bloody but necessary prelude to a real assessment by the Arab world of its choices: democracy and peace, or Islamic extremism and warfare. Yet so far, almost every U.S. and European goal for the region - keeping oil prices stable, promoting democracy, fighting extremists, strengthening moderates - is damaged.

Jordan’s pro-American King Abdullah gave the sharpest warning last week: Even if Hezbollah loses the military battle, its rising popularity among Arabs means a like-minded group could pop up anywhere in the Middle East, even in his own country.

Others worry terror groups might already be directly benefiting. Al-Qaida’s No. 2 leader has called on supporters to wage holy war against Israel in a clear effort to turn the hostility to its advantage.

More broadly, a wide swath of even progressive, middle-class people across the Mideast are outraged at the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and in part blame the United States. That means the long-sought U.S. effort to win Arab and Muslim "hearts and minds" - so crucial to fighting terrorism - has been dealt a huge blow.

The signs are everywhere grim:

● Moderates such as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have become almost irrelevant. All hope of an Israeli-Palestinian "land for peace" deal lie in tatters.

● Iran has received a prestige boost as a key Hezbollah backer, and it has gained some relief from its own problems: U.N. efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions still limp along but have taken a back seat.

● The effort to calm Iraq has been "complicated" because the Lebanon war has boosted the prestige of Shiite extremists who are pushing Iraq toward civil war, said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The fighting even led to tension between Washington and Iraq’s Shiite moderates, when the country’s prime minister was harshly criticized by Democrats for condemning only Israel, not Hezbollah.

● The push for democracy in other Arab regimes, already stalled, has ground to a halt. The United States is unlikely to pressure allies such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt for reform when it needs their help to end the crisis. Even many Arab reformers now believe the United States cares more about supporting Israel than anything else, including democracy.

Chaos in Baghdad forces U.S. to veer from chosen course. Excerpt:

By Dexter Filkins, The New York Times

Published: August 6, 2006
BAGHDAD Over the past year, as U.S. commanders pushed Iraqi forces to take over responsibility for this violent capital, Baghdad became a markedly more dangerous place. Now the Americans are being forced to call in more of their own troops in an attempt to bring the city under control.

The failure of the Iraqis to halt the slide into chaos here undercuts the central premise of the American project: that Iraqi forces can be trained and equipped to secure their own country, allowing U.S. troops to go home. A review of previously unreleased statistics on U.S. and Iraqi patrols suggests that as Americans handed over responsibilities to the Iraqis, violence in Baghdad increased.

In mid-June 2005, Americans conducted an average of 360 patrols a day, according to statistics released by the military. By the middle of February this year, the patrols ran about 92 a day - a drop of more than 70 percent. The first Iraqi brigade took over a small piece of Baghdad early last year. Now, Iraqi soldiers or police officers take the leading role in securing more than 70 percent of the city, including its most violent neighborhoods. They control all of Baghdad's 6,000 checkpoints.

Even after the attack on the Askariya shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22 unleashed a wave of sectarian violence, the U.S. patrols remained at a level lower than in the past. At the end of July, Americans were patrolling Baghdad 89 times a day - a quarter of their patrols in mid-June last year.

Thirteen months ago, Baghdad had about 19 daily violent events, like killings. Today, the daily average is 25 - an increase of more than 30 percent. Many of these attacks cause more than one death; some cause many more, like the rampage by Shiite gunmen in western Baghdad last month that left as many as 40 people dead.

On Thursday in Washington, senior U.S. military commanders pointedly warned that Iraq was heading toward civil war. To stop the slide, the United States has decided to double the number of U.S. troops in the city, to about 14,200 from about 7,200. U.S. officials have declared Baghdad the country's "center of gravity," an arena that must be won if the Iraqi project is to succeed. The Americans and Iraqis say they are also preparing to bring in more Iraqi troops and spend at least $50 million for jobs and public services like electricity.

The decision to increase the number of U.S. troops in the city appears to reflect a conviction that only U.S. troops can bring the city under control.

"If we were willing to accept the high levels of casualties that occur in the city each month, then the Iraqi security forces could have continued handling the situation," said Major General William Caldwell 4th, the spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. "We can handle it at the levels we have. But if we want to reduce the violence, then we bring more forces into the city."

U.S. commanders say the greater violence in Baghdad does not necessarily suggest that the Iraqi forces are failing. Iraqi police officers and army soldiers are competent, the Americans say, but the explosion of sectarian violence was of a scope and virulence that could have overwhelmed any army.

"I don't think we moved too quickly," Caldwell said of putting the Iraqis in charge of Baghdad. "I don't think anyone could have anticipated the sectarian violence."

Some independent observers say the Americans have a point - that the job of trying to secure a city of seven million people plagued by terrorism, sectarian violence and crime is a task of a magnitude that has never been attempted by a modern army. Some wonder whether the additional 7,000 U.S. troops bound for the city will be enough.

Residents in Iraqi town say US presence incites insurgents. Excerpt:

By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post | August 6, 2006

HIT, Iraq -- Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Graves wasn't expecting trouble as his convoy rolled toward this embattled Euphrates River town at midday recently, on a mission to monitor Friday prayers at mosques. Local officials had assured Graves, the top US commander in the area, that Hit was ``going through a period of peace and quiet," he said shortly before leaving his camp.

But just as Graves reached the edge of town, the road in front of his Humvee exploded in a cloud of dust and debris. An insurgent hiding in a nearby palm grove had detonated two buried artillery rounds, narrowly missing the colonel.

``Welcome to Hit! It's a peaceful little town -- sorta," Graves told a reporter traveling with him. So it goes here in western Iraq's Anbar Province, a center of Sunni resistance. In Hit, US forces and their Iraqi counterparts are the target of most of the two dozen attacks -- road bombs, shootings, and mortar fire -- each week.

Residents are quick to argue that the American presence incites those attacks, and they blame the US military rather than insurgents for turning their town into a combat zone. The Americans should pull out, they say, and let them solve their own problems. Increasingly, the US military seems eager to oblige.

While senior US commanders have indicated that troops will be required to stay longer in Anbar than elsewhere in Iraq, they have already begun cutting back forces in some smaller, less strategic towns along the Euphrates. In Hit, Graves's Army battalion replaced a much bigger Marine contingent; US troops have been ordered recently to leave other regions in western Anbar to reinforce Baghdad.

``We want the same thing. I want to go home to my wife," Graves, of Killeen, Texas, said he told Hit officials when his unit, the First Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment, First Armored Division, arrived here in February. The goal, Graves said, is for US forces to leave Hit proper and patrol only the main highway passing by the town. Another US officer put it more bluntly.

``Nobody wants us here, so why are we here? That's the big question," said Major Brent E. Lilly. Lilly leads a Marine civil affairs team that has disbursed many thousands of dollars for damage claims and projects in Hit, but is still mortared almost daily. ``If we leave, all the attacks would stop because we'd be gone."

Lying 35 miles upriver from Anbar's capital of Ramadi, Hit is an ancient city known for its tar deposits and relatively educated population. But more than two years of warfare have dragged the town of 40,000 people back to the pre-industrial age.

WHISKER'S ROUNDUP OF THE WOUNDED


Corporal Mark Sutcliffe's left leg was sliced off when a razor-sharp rocket-propelled grenade hit him while he was walking through the streets of Basra alongside a military convoy. With his leg severed at the knee by the grenade's blades, the 27-year-old was dragged aboard an armoured vehicle by his comrades who managed to flee to the safety of their army headquarters.

Sgt. Kevin Downs a guardsman with the 278th Armored Calvary Regiment--Shortly after turning down a dirt road, the Humvee exploded. Downs was thrown 60 feet. Fire consumed his body. It was sometime after waking from a three-week coma in Fort Sam Houston’s hospital in San Antonio, Texas, that Downs learned the truth the attack that cost him the use of his left arm. Both legs had to be amputated.


Army Specialist Matthew Pennington was traveling in a convoy with the 82nd Airborne Division on April 29th when a roadside bomb blew up near his vehicle. He lost his left leg below the knee, and his right leg has severe tissue damage. He has been at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington since he was wounded.

Stephen McLaughlin was driving a Humvee down a road near Fallujah. McLaughlin, a U.S. Marine platoon sergeant, swerved around the pothole - which had the explosives hidden in it, his father said. the explosion destroyed the Humvee and McLaughlin, along with the three other Marines in the vehicle, sustained a grade II concussion. McLaughlin also received second-degree burns on his arm, shoulder and neck.

Lance Corporal Mark Beyers A U-S Marine from western New York who lost an arm and a leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq was mugged after leaving a Washington-area restaurant.

Spc. Benjamin Marksmeier, 20, suffered serious leg wounds in the same attack that killed Spc. Joshua Ford, 20, Monday in An Numaniyah in south-central Iraq, according to family members. The men were riding in the same truck, army officials said.

A 29-year-old soldier from Mobile has been seriously wounded in Iraq, his father said Thursday. Pfc. Jeremy Hardy a member of the Army's famed 101st Airborne Division, is recovering in a hospital in Germany from wounds he received Monday in Baghdad. The soldier was lifting weights in a gymnasium in the war-torn city when a mortar shell slammed through the roof of the gym, Phillip Hardy said. He said his son was "hit by a good-sized piece of shrapnel which went in just below his hip and lodged in his colon." He reported that several other U.S. soldiers in the gym were also wounded.


Sgt. Andrew A. Robinson, 23, suffered spinal cord trauma and broke both legs during a June 20 military vehicle explosion in the Al Anbar province of Iraq. The young Marine has undergone more than 20 surgeries since the incident.

Sgt. Jeff Vorpahl was wounded July 24 by a roadside bomb explosion while on convoy duty near Tallil, Iraq. He was serving with the Wisconsin National Guard's 2nd Battalion, 127th Infantry. Spc. Stephen Castner, 27, of Cedarburg was killed in the same attack. Welter said she expects her son will be treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for the next month. She has declined to publicly discuss the nature or extent of her son's injuries, calling it a family matter

QUOTE OF THE DAY

It may be that that hawks are thinking this way: Destroy Lebanon, and destroy Hizbullah, and you reduce Iran's strategic depth. Destroy the Iranian nuclear program and you leave it helpless and vulnerable to having done to it what the Israelis did to Lebanon. You leave it vulnerable to regime change, and a dragooning of Iran back into the US sphere of influence, denying it to China and assuring its 500 tcf of natural gas to US corporations. You also politically reorient the entire Gulf, with both Saddam and Khamenei gone, toward the United States. Voila, you avoid peak oil problems in the US until a technological fix can be found, and you avoid a situation where China and India have special access to Iran and the Gulf.

The second American Century ensues. The "New Middle East" means the "American Middle East."

And it all starts with the destruction of Lebanon.

-- Juan Cole And do read

WAR NEWS FOR SATURDAY, AUGUST 05, 2006

“We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”

Baghdad

On Friday, gunmen shot dead a bodyguard of a senior Justice Ministry official in western Baghdad.

Nine bodies, all apparently killed, were recovered in five predominantly Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad on Saturday. Five of the bodies were found in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Baladiyat.

A police officer was killed Saturday in the predominantly Sunni area of Adhamiya in northern Baghdad.

Two people were killed and four wounded Friday when three mortar shells exploded in a religiously mixed suburb near Baghdad.

Baquba

Two bombs exploded minutes apart Saturday in a market in Baquba, wounding eight people. The first blast destroyed a grocery store and the second went off about five minutes later as police cars arrived at the scene. Police said the eight wounded included seven civilians and one policeman.

Diwaniyah

Hassan Wannas, a former member of Saddam's Baath Party, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Diwaniyah.

In Diwaniya gunmen killed a human rights advocate on Friday.

Kut

Police recovered seven bodies, four of them had been decapitated, in the southern city of Kut.

Samarra

A police commando was killed in a roadside bomb in Samarra on Friday.

In country

American forces killed at least three insurgents during an air strike and multiple raids southeast of Baghdad last Thursday according to the US military.

"Non-hostile" fatality: A U.S. military statement said a soldier assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died Saturday "due to non-hostile action" in Anbar province, west of Baghdad. It did not provide details.

Reinforcements: U.S. reinforcements sent to Baghdad to help quell sectarian violence and clamp down on other attacks took up positions in a restive neighborhood Saturday, while two bombs at a market northeast of the city wounded eight people.

The 3,700 soldiers of the Army's 172nd Stryker Brigade moved in from the northern city of Mosul to bolster U.S. and Iraqi security forces already in the city.

Several Stryker armored fighting vehicles were seen Saturday in Baghdad's mostly Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliyah in the western part. Iraqi police used loudspeakers to encourage residents to go about their business and reopen shops because the troops were there to protect them.

Mosul, this brigade was stationed in Mosul…hmm…didn’t zig post a story about running gun battles lasting half a day, multiple fatalities, just yesterday…what a coincidence, huh? Who could have guessed that if you pull troops providing security out of Mosul to provide security in Baghdad you’d have security problems in Mosul? -m

Another forehead slapper: A review of previously unreleased statistics on American and Iraqi patrols suggests that as Americans handed over responsibilities to the Iraqis, violence in Baghdad increased.

In mid-June 2005, Americans conducted an average of 360 patrols a day, according to statistics released by the military. By the middle of February this year, the patrols ran about 92 a day — a drop of more than 70 percent. The first Iraqi brigade took over a small piece of Baghdad early last year. Now, Iraqi soldiers or police officers take the leading role in securing more than 70 percent of the city, including its most violent neighborhoods. They control all of Baghdad’s 6,000 checkpoints.

Even after the attack on the Askariya shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22 unleashed a wave of sectarian violence, the American patrols remained at a level lower than in the past. At the end of July, Americans were patrolling Baghdad 89 times a day — a quarter of their patrols in mid-June last year.

Thirteen months ago, Baghdad had about 19 daily violent events, like killings. Today, the daily average is 25 — an increase of more than 30 percent. Many of these attacks cause more than one death; some cause many more, like the rampage by Shiite gunmen in western Baghdad last month that left as many as 40 people dead.

Civil War?

Some say so: While American politicians and generals in Washington debate the possibility of civil war in Iraq, many U.S. officers and enlisted men who patrol Baghdad say it has already begun.

Army troops in and around the capital interviewed in the last week cite a long list of evidence that the center of the nation is coming undone: Villages have been abandoned by Sunni and Shiite Muslims; Sunni insurgents have killed thousands of Shiites in car bombings and assassinations; Shiite militia death squads have tortured and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Sunnis; and when night falls, neighborhoods become open battlegrounds.

So do some others: Iraq is slipping towards a civil war which could see the division of the country, Britain's outgoing ambassador in Baghdad has warned the government.

Ambassador William Patey's final cable to London - leaked to the media - painted a gloomy picture of a country more likely to tear itself apart than to embrace democracy.

In his confidential telegram, Mr Patey told the government: "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy."

Even US generals sorta kinda think so: Two top U.S. generals said yesterday that the sectarian violence in Iraq is much worse than they had ever anticipated and could lead to civil war, arguing that improving the situation is now more a matter of Iraqi political will than of U.S. military strategy.

"The sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it," Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

The testimony from Abizaid and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, was the military's most dire assessment of conditions in Iraq since the war began 40 months ago. It echoed the opinion of Britain's outgoing ambassador to Iraq, who, in a confidential memo revealed yesterday, told Prime Minister Tony Blair that a de facto partition of Iraq is more likely than a transition to democracy.

Both U.S. generals said they think Iraq will be successful in maintaining a stable government in the near future, but their assessment about the possible slide into civil war is something the administration had avoided acknowledging before.

Of course some called it earlier, but who cares what a bunch of lefties think: In these columns and related ones, we have repeatedly noted that Iraq has been in a state of full-blown sectarian civil war at least since Feb. 22 this year, when Sunni insurgents bombed the al-Askariya, or Golden Mosque, in Samara and successfully provoked a furious nation-wide wave of bloody and indiscriminate reprisal killings by Shiite militias.

Finally, five and a half months after those events, top U.S. military commanders were permitted by their civilian masters to admit to the U.S. Senate Thursday that Iraq was 'near' to a state of civil war between its Sunni and Shiite communities. At long last, this admission made it into the mainstream of the U.S. media. It made the front page in the Washington Post Friday, and was, quite correctly, the main lead in USA Today and the joint lead story in the New York Times on that day.

But even these belated public admissions were dangerously behind the fast-breaking trend of events in Iraq. And neither U.S. national political leaders nor the mainstream American media have yet begun to discuss the new strategic dilemmas into which the reality of sectarian civil war has already thrust the 135,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

What it’s costing: The Iraq war is to overtake Korea and Vietnam as the second-most expensive overseas military operation in US history, with spending expected to top $US500 billion ($660 billion) by the end of the decade.

A report from the Congressional Budget Office says $US291billion has been allocated for the Iraq war, the equivalent of $US1000 for every man, woman and child in the US.

The CBO examined two alternative spending projections. Under the first, more optimistic scenario, the US would maintain troop levels in Iraq at 140,000 next year but quickly begin bringing them home thereafter, with almost all its forces out by the end of 2009. This would still cost taxpayers another $US184billion from next year to 2010.

The alternative scenario is a slower drawdown and a US military presence of 40,000 over the long term. This would cost a further $US406 billion over the next decade, leaving total costs approaching $US700 billion.

What it’s buying: At a press conference yesterday, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained that he declined to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about the status of the Iraq war this morning because “my calendar was such that to do it…would have been difficult.”

Amidst a firestorm of criticism, Rumsfeld’s schedule miraculously cleared up and, just a few hours later, he agreed to testify.

It will be the first time Rumsfeld has testified publicly about the war before the committee since February 2006. Here’s what’s happened in Iraq since then:

– Approximately 300 U.S. troops have died in Iraq

– Approximately 2,530 U.S. troops have been wounded

– Well over 10,000 Iraq civilians have been killed

– Insurgents have conducted an average of 620 attacks per week

– In March there were 7.8 hours of electricity per day in Baghdad (down from 16-24 hours before the war), last month there were 7.6 hours.

– In March there were 133,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Today there are 132,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and plans to raise that number to 135,000.

That’s Rumsfeld’s record. Now he has to explain why it shows that we should “stay the course.”

Not that it’s been bad for everyone: A comprehensive U.S. government audit of a Bechtel project in Iraq has exposed gross mismanagement by the company. As a result, the $50 million contract has been canceled.

As the auditors plan to expand their investigations to all of Bechtel's $2.85 billion in Iraq contracts, they are sure to discover a pattern of failure. Not only should Bechtel be dropped from all of its failing contracts, but the company should be required to refund all misspent U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi funds so that Iraqi contractors can get to work and real reconstruction can finally begin.

But time is running out.

On Sept. 30, 2006, all unobligated money for reconstruction in Iraq reverts back to the U.S. Treasury. This means that unless action is taken now to ensure that this money goes to Iraqis, U.S. corporations will keep their billions, while Iraqis are left with failed projects and little money to recover.

Why Does Donald Rumsfeld Still Have A Job?

Stupid question, I know…: As lawmakers increasingly fret about whether U.S. policies are failing in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this week that he has never provided overly optimistic assessments of either conflict.

The actual picture in Iraq continues to look grim, with two dozen people dead in a surge of violence in northern Iraq in the past two days. In addition, two American soldiers were killed Friday in restive Anbar province.

On Thursday, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee: "I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words. And you'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I've been excessively optimistic."

Here's what the public record shows:

- On Nov. 14, 2002, Rumsfeld, in an interview with Infinity Radio, said:

"The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."

- On Feb. 7, 2003, Rumsfeld, in a town hall meeting with U.S. forces in Aviano, Italy, said:

War with Iraq "could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

Current situation: The Iraq war has lasted for 3 1/2 years.

- On July 9, 2003, four months after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"The residents of Baghdad may not have power 24 hours a day, but they no longer wake up each morning in fear wondering whether this will be the day that a death squad would come to cut out their tongues, chop off their ears or take their children away for 'questioning,' never to be seen again."

Current situation: Violence spawned by sectarian militias, Sunni and Shiite death squads and al-Qaida insurgents has sharply increased in Baghdad. Additional U.S. forces are being dispatched to the city in an effort to reduce the mayhem.

- On Feb. 4, 2004, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"The increased demand on the (U.S. military) force we are experiencing today is likely a 'spike,' driven by the deployment of nearly 115,000 troops in Iraq. We hope and anticipate that that spike will be temporary. We do not expect to have 115,000 troops permanently deployed in any one campaign."

Current situation: The U.S. military force in Iraq stands at 133,000. Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said last week that the security situation was so precarious that it was unlikely large numbers of U.S. forces would come home soon.

- On June 23, 2005, Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee:

"The insurgency remains dangerous, to be sure, in many parts of Iraq. But terrorists no longer can take advantage of sanctuaries like Fallujah."

Current situation: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, complained last month that Fallujah, one of the largest cities in restive Anbar province, was "still not under control." Sunni leaders complain that Shiite death squads roam Fallujah's Sunni neighborhoods. Last week, a Sunni imam was assassinated in his home there.

- On June 23, 2005, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee:

"These final months between now and that constitution drafting and the election, (the insurgents) may very well be in their last throes by their own view because they recognize how important it will be if they lose and in fact a democracy is established."

Current situation: Nearly 10 months after the adoption of a constitution and eight months after parliamentary elections, Abizaid, and Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warn that Iraq is on the verge of civil war.

- On March 9, 2006, Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee:

"At least thus far, the situation has been such that the Iraqi security forces could for the most part deal with the problems that exist," referring to the capability of Iraqi forces to stop the violence.

Current situation: No more than a single Iraqi battalion of some 800 soldiers is capable of battling enemy insurgents without American assistance, according to Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

- On March 21, 2005, Rumsfeld told reporters:

"Well, the situation in Afghanistan has just made wonderful progress. They have a new government, they assumed sovereignty over their country, the Taliban are gone, the al-Qaida are gone. The people that killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11th have been captured, killed or driven out of that country and it's on a path towards democracy."

Current situation: The Taliban is increasingly resurgent. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said last month that "the Taliban is more organized than they were last year and they have more fighters in certain areas."

In June, Eikenberry said that "the presence and strength of the Taliban has grown in some districts, primarily in the south."

Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, chief of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, said in February that "the Taliban-dominated insurgency remains capable and resilient."

Attacks against the U.S.-led coalition there increased 20 percent in 2005, he said.

Al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri remain at large.

War Crimes

Cold blooded murder: A military prosecutor said Friday that four U.S. soldiers accused of murder in Iraq crossed the line and violated the "laws of war," arguing they freed three detainees, encouraged them to flee and then shot them down as they ran.

"Soldiers must follow the laws of war. That's what makes us better than the terrorists, what sets us apart from the thugs and the hit men. These soldiers did just the opposite," Capt. Joseph Mackey said in closing arguments at a hearing to determine if the four should face a court-martial -- and possibly the death penalty.

Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard and Spc. Juston R. Graber are accused of murder in the killing of three Iraqi men taken from a house May 9 on a marshy island outside Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The soldiers, all from the 101st Airborne Division's 187th Infantry Regiment, declined to testify at the hearing, relying instead on statements they made to military investigators.

They claim the detainees, who were blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs with plastic straps, were killed while trying to escape.

Rape and cold blooded murder: On March 13, a group of American soldiers sitting at a checkpoint south of Baghdad were asked to look into a horrible crime: A 14-year-old Iraqi girl had been raped, then killed along with her family in their house nearby in Mahmudiya.

The soldiers knew the house. They had been there only the day before, military prosecutors now say, committing the crime.

Those soldiers, along with others from their checkpoint, walked over and took detailed forensic photographs of the charred and bullet-riddled bodies, as if it were a routine investigation of an insurgent attack, according to a defense official.

Now, those photographs will probably serve as evidence in the military's prosecution of the case, which opens a new chapter on Sunday when an Article 32 hearing, the rough equivalent of a grand jury proceeding, begins in Baghdad for five soldiers accused in the crime.

Our Creeping Stalinism

Secret charges: A petty officer has been in the Norfolk Naval Station brig for more than four months facing espionage, desertion and other charges, but the Navy has refused to release details of the case.

The case against Fire Control Technician 3rd Class Ariel J. Weinmann is indicative of the secrecy surrounding the Navy military court here, where public affairs and trial court officials have denied access to basic information including the court docket – a listing of cases to be heard.

The Navy’s position was challenged by military legal affairs experts and First Amendment advocates who say the nation’s courts, whether civilian or military, historically have been open to the press and public.

A docket listing Weinmann’s preliminary hearing, called an Article 32, was never produced. The Navy would not disclose when the hearing was held.

“That’s hogwash,” said Eugene R. Fidell, president of The National Institute of Military Justice and a Washington lawyer .

“I know of no authority to keep the proceeding closed,” he said. “I’ve never seen an Article 32 classified.”

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, said that, even in military courts, an order must be issued closing or sealing a case.

Brown acknowledged Thursday that “there is no order,” but said that the charge sheet in the Weinmann case would not be released.

Dalglish and others said protecting someone’s privacy has never been a legally acceptable reason to exclude the public from a court proceeding or to withhold the identity of someone who’s been in custody for four months.

“We don’t lock up people in this country secretly,” Dalglish said. “Personal embarrassment has never been found to be a justification for closing a proceeding.”

No due process: US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the US government could "indefinitely" hold foreign 'enemy combatants' at sites like the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"We can detain any combatants for the duration of the hostilities," said Gonzales, speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"If we choose to try them, that's great. If we don't choose to try them, we can continue to hold them," he said.

State sponsored kidnapping: …(T)his month, at a conference in Florence convened by NYU law school's increasingly influential Center on Law and Security, Italy's renowned investigating judge, Armando Spataro, declared—as reported in the June 4 New York Times—that he has activated in Milan a "criminal case against 22 people allegedly linked to the Central Intelligence Agency charged with the abduction of [Hussan Nasr] . . . as part of a rendition operation."

The exposure of this CIA kidnapping ring is part of the growing revulsion throughout Europe and other parts of the world against such American gangsterism. As Judge Sparato said in Florence: "We know it's a great mistake to fight terrorism in this way."

For example, by its own involvement in torture, the CIA has given Al Qaeda and its offshoots an effective recruiting tool. And even among people across the globe who have supported American efforts to export democracy, these crimes make a mockery of the president's recurring assurances—most recently on June 14—that "we are a nation of laws and the rule of law. . . . This is a transparent society."

Now, further angry attention is being focused throughout Europe on an explosive report by the 46-nation Council of Europe, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights. It documents the secret collusion of certain European countries with the CIA in what the report's chief investigator—former prosecutor Dick Marty of Switzerland—calls "a spider's web across the globe." This exposure—says the London-based Financial Times—"is likely to make it more difficult for European countries to cooperate with U.S. intelligence."

Torture: The Geneva hearings are over and the final report has been released. It is not pretty, insofar as the U.S. and human rights are concerned.

Every four years, nations representing the Conventions against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights meet to review meet to review compliance of ICCPR nations. An official report is issued, along with a "shadow report," what The Raw Story refers to as "a rebuttal from non-government organizations (NGO), advocacy groups, and citizen representatives. The US “shadow report” was prepared by The Coalition for Human Rights at Home, a coalition of 142 not-for-profit groups."

This year's 456-page shadow report describes over a hundred instances of human rights violations, in a response to the official report issued by the United States. Also, the U.S. was a mere seven years late in developing its report, which it is obligated to prepare as an ICCPR signatory nation.

Breaking The US Army

Calling all warbloggers!: The Army has begun training the oldest recruits in its history, the result of a concerted effort to fill ranks depleted during the Iraq war.

In June, five months after it raised the enlistment age limit from 35 to just shy of 40, the Army raised it to just under 42.

To accommodate the older soldiers, the Army has lowered the minimum physical requirements needed to pass basic training.

The first group of older recruits is going through basic training here. So far, only five people 40 and older — and 324 age 35 and older — have enlisted, Army records show.

Fighting Back

New party: A new political party is forming in Britain to challenge lawmakers who voted to support the war in Iraq.

The move to create the Specter Party is led by Reg Keys, a 54-year-old former paramedic, whose son, Thomas, was one of six British military policemen killed in Iraq in 2003, the Guardian newspaper reported Saturday.

Growing numbers of families who lost loved ones to the war are banding together across Britain to form the party, which will target lawmakers and other politicians, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, who have supported a war the party considers illegal.

Does This Surprise Anyone?

Profound ignorance and smug certainty: Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith is claiming President George W. Bush was unaware that there were two major sects of Islam just two months before the President ordered troops to invade Iraq, RAW STORY has learned.

In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

A year after his “Axis of Evil” speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought would be the political situation after the fall of Saddam Hussein. During their conversation with the President, Galbraith claims, it became apparent to them that Bush was unfamiliar with the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites.

Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam--to which the President allegedly responded, “I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!”

Commentary

Paul Waldman: A few days ago William Kristol, who is as responsible as anyone outside the Bush administration for the neocon dream of creating an empire in the Middle East—which has become the now-familiar nightmare—made clear his preference for military action against Iran, sooner rather than later. And not only that, once we start dropping bombs, the Iranian people will do their part and rise up to overthrow their government. “The right use of targeted military force,” Kristol told Fox News, “could cause them to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power.”

That Kristol could make such a prediction without getting laughed out of Washington, never to be invited on television again, tells us something about the miasma of inanity and insanity that envelopes our politics like a fog. Being wrong—or being an outright fool, or being possessed of not a shred of morality, for that matter—carries no cost. Only being “weak”—that is, insufficiently enthusiastic about spilling others’ blood—will earn you the contempt of the Washington establishment.

Why? Because that establishment, both governmental and journalistic, is ruled by weenies. They burn to show that they’re real men, that they’re tough and strong and mean, that they don’t cower from a fight, that they’re the ones who get going when the going gets tough. Washington is an arena of institutional and ideological competition, but it is also a throbbing mass of insecurities.

We sometimes see it as ironic that those calling for the most bellicose foreign policy are almost invariably those both in and out of government, like Bush and Cheney and Gingrich and DeLay and Limbaugh and O’Reilly, who never served in the military and never got within a thousand miles of combat. But it is not ironic at all; in fact, it is absolutely predictable. Combine a personal history devoid of evidence that one’s manliness has been tested (let alone proven) with an ideology inclined to divide the world into enemies and friends, and you have a recipe for frantic muscle-flexing.

Judith Coburn: While comparisons to Vietnam and terms from that era like "quagmire," "hearts and minds," and "body counts" swamped the media the moment the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, "Vietnamization" didn't make it into the mix until that November. Then, the White House, which initially shied off anything linked to Vietnam, launched a media campaign to roll out what they were calling "Iraqification," perhaps as an answer to critics who doubted the "mission" had actually been "accomplished" and feared that there was no "light at the end of the [Iraqi] tunnel." But the term was quickly dropped. Perhaps it resurrected too many baby-boomer memories of Vietnamese clinging to the skids of choppers fleeing the fruits of Vietnamization.

It seems, however, that there is no way of keeping failed Washington policies in their graves, once the dead of night strikes. I was amazed, when, in 2005, in Foreign Affairs magazine, Melvin Laird resurrected a claim that his "Vietnamization" policy had actually worked and plugged for "Iraqification" of the war there. Soon after, journalist Seymour Hersh, famed for his reportage on the Vietnam-era My Lai massacre (and the Iraq-era Abu Ghraib abuses), reported in the New Yorker that the Vietnamization policy of the Nixon era was indeed being reclothed and returned to us -- with similarly planned American drawdowns of ground troops and a ramping up of American air power -- and I wondered if we could be suffering a moment of mass post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Missy Comley Beattie: I have often remarked to my husband that if more and more families of the fallen would speak out against the war in Iraq, the mainstream media, might, just might, begin to give them airtime. My 81-year-old mother was interviewed by Pacifica Radio host Deepa Fernandez ("Wakeup Call") soon after my nephew died in Iraq. Her words and pain are still vivid in my mind and heart. She speaks the same way today about the death of her grandson.

Soon, we will mark the first anniversary of the death of Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, killed in action on August 6, 2005. We received the news early Sunday morning, the day after he died, that day our lives changed forever.

When I hear or read that a devastated family member has said, "He died doing what he loved," or "protecting our freedoms," or "she was fighting them over there so we wouldn't have to fight them over here," I turn to my husband or call my parents with complete understanding of the tragic loss, and we discuss that, while it might be some small comfort to believe all this, we simply can't. And we wish that more parents and relatives of the dead would say, "This is an illegal, immoral war that took our child, our loved one. So, now, what are we doing to do to prevent others from hearing the words that no family should have to bear?"

Saul Friedman: There is an alien influence, mostly unpublicized, running like an undercurrent beneath the Bush administration's Middle East policies. It may help explain George W. Bush's single-mindedness, his oblivious inability to face reality as his war in Iraq, his war against terror and his policies towards Arabs and Israeli have collapsed.

I say "alien," because I believe this to be the first time in modern American history that a president's religion, in this case his Christian fundamentalism, has become a decisive factor in his foreign and domestic policies. It’s a factor that has been under-reported, to say the least, and that begs for press attention.

Bush, who says he reads the Bible daily, acknowledges his fundamentalist beliefs. Biblical and Middle East scholar Karen Armstrong writes in The Guardian, "Whatever Bush's personal beliefs, the ideology of the Christian right is both familiar and congenial to him. This strange amalgam of ideas can perhaps throw light on the behavior of a president who, it is said, believes God chose him to lead the world toward Rapture, who has little interest in social reform, and whose selective concern for life issues has now inspired him to veto important scientific research.

"It explains his unconditional support for Israel, his willingness to use 'Jewish End-Time warriors' to fulfill a vision of his own, arguably against Israel's best interest, and to see Syria and Iran...as entirely responsible for the unfolding tragedy."

Noting that "the same time as Bush decided to veto the stem cell bill, Israeli bombs were taking the lives of hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians, many of them children, with the tacit approval of the U.S. " And she suggested there is "a connection between a religiously motivated mistrust of science...and a war in the Middle East."

As she notes, Bush and his administration not only rely on Christian fundamentalists, he espouses many of their ideals, including their belief that "the second coming of Christ is at hand" but Christ cannot return unless, "in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, the Jews are in possession of the Holy Land."

Casualty Reports

The Department of Defense announced today the death of nine soldiers and marines who were supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Sgt. Ryan D. Jopek, 20, of Merrill, Wis., died in Tikrit, Iraq on Aug. 2 of injuries suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his convoy. Jopek was assigned to the Army National Guard's 2nd Battalion, 127th Infantry Regiment, Waupun, Wis.

Sgt. Dustin D. Laird, 23, of Martin, Tenn., died on Aug. 2 during combat operations in Rawah, Iraq. Laird was assigned to the Army National Guard 913th Engineer Company, 46th Engineer Battalion, Union City, Tenn.

Cpl. Joseph A. Tomci, 21, of Stow, Ohio, died Aug. 2 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Spc. Hai Ming Hsia, 37, of New York, N.Y., died Aug. 1 during combat operations in Ar Ramadi, Iraq. Hsia was assigned to the 6th Infantry Regiment, 1st Armored Division, Baumholder, Germany.

Sgt. George M. Ulloa Jr., 23, of Austin, Texas, died Aug. 3 from wounds suffered while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Sgt. Joshua A. Ford, 20, of Wayne, Neb., died on July 31 during combat operations in Al Numaniyah, Iraq. Ford was assigned to the Army National Guard 189th Transportation Company, 485th Corps Support Battalion, Norfolk, Neb.

Lance Cpl. Kurt E. Dechen, 24, of Springfield, Vt., died Aug. 3 from wounds received while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, while attached to Regimental Combat Team 5, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Pendleton, Calif.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Marc A. Lee, 28, of Hood River, Ore., was killed on Aug. 2 during combat operations while on patrol in Ramadi, Iraq. Lee was an aviation ordnanceman and a member of a West Coast-based SEAL Team.

Staff Sgt. Daniel A. Suplee, 39, of Ocala , Fla., died on Aug 3 at James A. Haley Veterans Hospital, Tampa, Fla., of injuries sustained on Apr 1 in Kabul, Afghanistan, when his HMMWV was involved in a traffic accident. Suplee was assigned to the National Guard 153rd Cavalry Squadron, Ocala, Fla.

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR FRIDAY, August 4, 2006

Photo: Carrying effigies of U.S. President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Iraqi Shiites in their thousands gathered in a mass demonstration against Israel's bombing of Lebanon, Friday, Aug. 4, 2006, in the Sadr City area of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim) (See below)

Hundreds of thousands of Shiites chanting "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" marched through the streets of Baghdad Friday in a show of support for Hezbollah militants battling Israeli troops in Lebanon.

The demonstration was the biggest in the Middle East in support of Hezbollah since the Israeli army launched an offensive July 12 after a guerrilla raid on northern Israel. The protest was organized by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose political movement built around the Mahdi Army militia has been modeled after Hezbollah.

Al-Sadr summoned followers from throughout the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq to converge on Baghdad for the rally but he did not attend.

Demonstrators, wearing white burial shrouds symbolizing their willingness to die for Hezbollah, waved the group's yellow banner and chanted slogans in support of its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who has attained a cult status in the Arab world for his defiance of Israel.

"Allah, Allah, give victory to Hassan Nasrallah," the crowd chanted.

"Mahdi Army and Hezbollah are one. Let them confront us if they dare," the predominantly male crowd shouted, waving the flags of Hezbollah, Lebanon and Iraq. (...)

Al-Sadr followers painted U.S. and Israeli flags on the main road leading to the rally site, and demonstrators stepped on them - a gesture of contempt in Iraq. Alongside the painted flags was written: "These are the terrorists."

Protesters set fire to American and Israeli flags, as well as effigies of President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, showing the men with Dracula teeth. "Saddam and Bush, Two Faces of One Coin" was scrawled on Bush's effigy.

Iraqi government television said the Defense Ministry had approved the demonstration, a sign of public anger over Israel's offensive and of al-Sadr's stature as a major player in Iraqi politics.

State television said a million people had gathered for the rally, but this could not be independently confirmed. A dense sea of marchers slowly moved along al Shuhada, the slum's main street, many waving yellow Hizbollah flags and holding pictures of the group's leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

After the rally, gunmen opened fire on a convoy of Sadr supporters near Yusufiya south of Baghdad. Police said 25 people had been wounded.

Heavily armed "insurgents" battled U.S. and Iraqi troops in Mosul on Friday where at least four policemen, including a top officer, and four militants were reported killed. (...)

As is often the case in Iraq, accounts of the fighting in Mosul were confused and the U.S. military offered only scant information on the gunbattles which police sources agreed lasted from about 6.30 a.m. (0200 GMT) until just after midday.

A source in the city morgue said it had received 20 bodies from the fighting, including those of five policemen, but police sources said four policemen and four militants died during six hours of clashes that also drew in U.S. and Iraqi troops.

"We have killed a number of them (insurgents) and burned their cars. Now the west bank is 100 percent secured," Nineveh police chief General Wathiq al-Hamdani told state television, adding that the insurgents were members of al Qaeda.

The governor of Nineveh province imposed a curfew until 6 a.m. (0200 GMT) on Saturday.

Police sources said several roadside bombs exploded shortly after dawn, followed by gunfights between police and insurgents firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.

Two car bombs also exploded, one outside the offices of a Kurdish political party and a police station, which killed Colonel Jassim Muhammad Bilal and two bodyguards, they said. (...)

The United States recently announced it was moving more than 3,500 troops from the 172nd Stryker Brigade in Mosul to Baghdad to help rein in worsening sectarian violence there.

Bring 'em on: Two Soldiers assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division died due to enemy action while operating in Al Anbar Province today. (CENTCOM)

OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS

Baghdad:

An engineer was shot dead and an unidentified body, showing signs of torture, was found in western Baghdad.

Two bodies were found in Baghdad, including one showing signs of torture.

Three suspected militants linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq were killed in U.S. raids and an air strike southeast of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

A bystander was killed in a botched attempt to target a police patrol with a roadside bomb a short distance south of Baghdad.

Amara:

A former member of one of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's security services was shot dead in the southern city of Amara.

Mahmudiya:

Two "insurgents" were killed and one arrested by US soldiers as they attacked a watchtower in Mahmudiya, 35 kilometres to the south of the capital.

Diyala Bridge:

Two Iraqi civilians were killed and 17 wounded on Friday in a mortar attack on a popular market south of Baghdad. An Iraqi security source told KUNA that four mortar rounds hit a popular market on Friday afternoon in the town of Diyala Bridge, south of Baghdad, noting that a number of commercial stores and houses were damaged.

Kout and Nahrawan:

An Iraqi Interior Ministry source announced that 14 unidentified dead bodies were found in the towns of Kout and Nahrawan, south of Baghdad. The source told KUNA that the local police in Kout found 10 unidentified dead bodies more likely for Iraqi soldiers, noting that the bodies were handcuffed, blindfolded, had torture marks, and were executed by shooting. Also, the local police in Nahrawan found four unidentified dead bodies that were shot to death.

Dujail:

(Thursday) Gunmen shot and killed four people and wounded eight from a Shiite family in Dujail, 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Baghdad.

Huweidar:

A roadside bomb killed a pregnant Iraqi woman and her husband as they raced to hospital to deliver her child in the early hours of the morning. Police said the couple were taking a taxi at 2 am (2200 GMT Thursday) from the village of Huweidar towards the maternity hospital in Diyala provincial capital Baquba, north of Baghdad. The cab driver and the man's sister-in-law were injured in the blast.
Behdinan:

One of the top names in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was killed in a gun attack in north Iraq on August 1, according to a pro-PKK website.

Al-Obaidey: (Ubaudi)

The United States military said Friday three Iraqi civilians were killed and nine were injured in mortar shelling close to the Iraq-Syria borders. A statement issued by the US military said insurgents attacked with 120 mm mortars a civilian area in the Al-Obaidey town close to the Iraqi and Syrian borders.

Hadhar:

Ten people, including three Iraqi policemen, were killed by a suicide bomber in Hadhar, a town 90 km (55 miles) south of Mosul. The attack took place on a sports field and wounded 12 people, including nine policemen, who were patrolling the area.

In country:

Four members of a family were gunned down in a city north of the capital.


>> REPORTS

"WELCOME TO HIT!”

Lt. Col. Thomas Graves wasn't expecting trouble as his convoy rolled toward this embattled Euphrates River town at midday recently, on a mission to monitor Friday prayers at mosques.

Local officials had assured Graves, the top U.S. commander in the area, that Hit was "going through a period of peace and quiet," he said shortly before leaving his camp.

But just as Graves reached the edge of town, the road in front of his Humvee exploded in a cloud of dust and debris. An insurgent hiding in a nearby palm grove had detonated two buried artillery rounds, narrowly missing the colonel.

"Welcome to Hit! It's a peaceful little town -- sorta," Graves told a reporter traveling with him.

So it goes here in western Iraq's Anbar province, a center of Sunni resistance. In Hit, U.S. forces and their Iraqi counterparts are the target of most of the two dozen attacks -- road bombs, shootings and mortar fire -- each week. Residents are quick to argue that the American presence incites those attacks, and they blame the U.S. military rather than insurgents for turning their town into a combat zone. The Americans should pull out, they say, and let them solve their own problems.

Increasingly, the U.S. military seems eager to oblige.

read in full…

OFFICERS ALLEGEDLY PUSHED 'KILL COUNTS'

Military prosecutors and investigators probing the killing of three Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops in May believe the unit's commanders created an atmosphere of excessive violence by encouraging "kill counts" and possibly issuing an illegal order to shoot Iraqi men.

At a military hearing Wednesday on the killing of the detainees near Samarra, witnesses painted a picture of a brigade that operated under loose rules allowing wanton killing and tolerating violent, anti-Arab racism. (...)

[Witness Pfc. Bradley] other depicted a unit [101st Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade] that had embraced a violent ethos and was routinely hostile to ordinary Iraqis. Commanders encouraged soldiers to compete to rack up "enemy kills," he said. A board at their headquarters that showed the numbers of Iraqis killed served to reinforce the message. "Let the bodies hit the floor," read a phrase at the bottom of the board.

"That's another terrorist down," Mason quoted [accused Staff Sgt. Raymond L.] Girouard as telling soldiers after they killed someone. "Good job."

Soldiers referred to ordinary Iraqis derogatorily as "hajis," a reference to Muslims who have made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and considered the 10 or so Iraqi army soldiers and interpreters working for their unit as mostly "terrorists," Mason said. Under questioning, Mason acknowledged saying that even before he arrived in Iraq, he asserted that "every man, woman and child in Iraq deserves to die."

On May 8, the day before the raid, [Army Col. Michael] Steele [commander of the 3rd Brigade] reportedly addressed a group of about 100 soldiers.

"We're going in tomorrow," he told them, according to 1st Lt. Justin Werheim, another prosecution witness. "We're going to hit the ground shooting, and kill all the Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgents."

The rules of engagement were unambiguous, Werheim said, and came down "several times" via Capt. Daniel Hart, who also has requested immunity.

"We were to positively identify and kill any military-age male on the island," Werheim said.

read in full...


>> COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

AL-HAKIM’S "NATIONAL RECONCILIATION"

Today [August 2], Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the biggest and one of the most influential Shiite group in Iraq, appeared before a mob of thousands of Shiites and provoked more ethnic and sectarian-based assassinations and urged the sheep flock to arm themselves and kill Iraqis in the streets. All this was aired on the Iraqi government's official TV station.

Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told the jobless, uneducated and vulgar mob that gathered around him that the main "battle" in Iraq now is the one against the baathists. The baathists should be killed, he told the mob, and then Iraqi will stabilize. The last problem left in Iraq now is what is left of baathists!!

"The battle today is against the remnants of baathists," he barked in speakers reading with difficulty from a paper [because he didn't write it maybe!] "it is a critical battle. It is either to be or not to be," he said quoting someone he never read or heard of, Shakespeare.

"We should never forget that the baathists killed hundreds of thousands of people," he reminded the audience. In this time, when the government, which basically is led by Hakim and his kind, calls for a "national reconciliation," Hakim appears on TV provoking people to kill each other.

read in full...

TOY STORE OWNERS KILLED

I just read some shocking news on the Where Date Palms Grow blog that the Jelawi Store has shut down because its three owners were killed. La hawla wa la quatta illa billah. This store is the only store I've seen in Baghdad that sells high quality baby and children products/toys and better quality houseware. I've shopped there many times for my one year old daughter; got her a set of Legos from there, some crib toys and her walker. So it was quite shocking for me to hear this news of the store that is just a few minutes drive from my house.

Apparently the three brothers who own the store were murdered, and the store closed down.

Zappy writes:

One of the Gelawi Boys was interviwed some time ago by the Baghdad Sattilite Channel he was asked why have you not shut down your shop and fled the country. He answered that where should I go? I love my country and I like to keep the smile on the Children's faces.

Two weeks ago the three Gelawi Brothers were assassinated inside their Shop.

The Terrorist succeeded in closing the largest toy shop in Baghdad.

Another blow to life in Baghdad.

link

A SWEET FAMILY

I had to take a couple of days off to put down an attempted mutiny by my brain. But I see that during my absence, this recent column by John "I Give Nepotism A Bad Name" Podhoretz has been widely celebrated:

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

Among those finding this noteworthy were Tristero, Matthew Yglesias, Mark Kleinman, and Gregory Djerejian. They all seem to think genocide is a bad thing.

I'm not really in a position to criticize here, given the massive bloodshed that was required to quell my own mental insurgency. But I do think it's worth recalling something related.

John Podhoretz is the son of Midge Decter. Back in May, 2004, Decter frankly explained the real reason we attacked Iraq:

"We're not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We're there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil."

So there you have it, straight from the world's most appealing family: we invaded Iraq for the oil, but we may have made a mistake by not killing millions when we got there.

link

>> BEYOND IRAQ

Afghanistan:

A Canadian military convoy was rocked by two bombing attacks in southern Afghanistan, just a day after four Canadian soldiers were killed. The convoy was hit by two improvised explosive devices and one civilian vehicle was engulfed in flames on the main highway west of Kandahar city. There are no reports of Canadian injuries, however it's not clear whether there were civilian casualties.

ISRAEL'S IMAGE OF INVINCIBILITY LITERALLY SHATTERED

There was a time when the international media was literally 'owned' by Israel. I can't help remembering the previous wars between Israel and her neighbors. The media bias was astounding. The other point of view was virtually non-existent!

This time, there was live coverage from Arab and other media channels, dozens of channels. The declared claims of avoiding civilian casualties, acting in self defense, helping the Lebanese government etc. etc. simply could not hold!

This time, Prime Minister Olmert complained about the media's unbalanced reporting.

It seems that Israel did things with a mentality that assumed that they were going to get away with things like previous times. That was a major error.

As the battles unfolded, the declared objectives of the Israeli campaign were 'reduced' several times, clearly indicating that things were not going as planned.

A major casualty in this war was Israel's image of invincibility. It was literally shattered! Yes, Israel had air and fire-power superiority. In more than 2,400 sorties and precision bombings, they killed many children but could not make a noticeable dent in Hezbollah's primitive armor. When ground skirmishes started, those fighters gave the Israelis a good run for their money. Much of it was reported almost immediately. The impressive Israeli war machine looked clumsy and almost pathetic! Also gone is the image of small country fighting against all odds for survival.

read in full...

TODAY YOU'VE GOT THE POWER TO TAKE IT, TOMORROW YOU WON'T HAVE THE POWER TO KEEP IT

Several days ago at American Footprints, praktike offered a parable about the American/Israeli neocon desire to reshape the Middle East through military force:

There's a kind of raccoon trap where you drill or countersink a hole in a log, then nail a few nails pointing downward that are spaced just wide enough to allow a furry paw to enter. You put a shiny object, like a piece of tinfoil, in the hole and wait for the raccoon to discover it. So entranced by his treasure, he won't be willing to let go, and thus his balled little fist won't make it past the nails. Sound familiar?

I thought about this analogy when reading (via Billmon) the latest column by Tony Karon in Time magazine:

Israel's strategy is now premised on the arrival in the not-too-distant future of an international security force in south Lebanon. . . . But the terms on which an international force will be deployed is now the focus of an intensifying diplomatic fight.

. . . [T]he U.S. is insisting that there be no demand for a halt to Israel's offensive until a mechanism is in place to disarm Hizballah. . . . But the French, who are currently the prime candidates to lead an international force, are making clear that the international community is not going to finish the job for Israel, and will only police a cease-fire when one has been agreed to by the Lebanese government, which includes Hizballah. In other words, it won't try to disarm Hizballah unless Hizballah has agreed to be disarmed. And the only formula likely to achieve that objective on the basis of the current battlefield situation would be an agreement among Lebanese parties to somehow incorporate Hizballah's fighting forces into the Lebanese Army - which may not be quite what the U.S., and certainly not Israel, had in mind. (...)

So here is Israel, its furry paw tightly gripping whatever shiny bits of Lebanese territory it's been able to hold (not much according to the latest from Billmon, whose coverage of this war has been extraordinary). It promises to let go and pull its paw out, if someone will volunteer to crawl between the nails and take custody of the tinfoil on its behalf.

If not, Israel will just have to... stay caught in the trap. Which doesn't sound like much of a threat, when you think about it.

read in full...

BILLMON: IMPORTANT IF TRUE

Important because it would mean the war clock is ticking down to it's final few days. Ha'aretz:

Ideally, the IDF would also like a number of weeks for "clean-up" operations. The prime minister has indicated only that it has at least until next Monday. In his note, Olmert wrote: "Chief of Staff! If we have time... at least until Monday... because only then will the Security Council convene."

It may be, of course, that Olmert always has the option of calling up the timekeeper in Washington and asking him to to put another week back on the clock. No sweat, Olmy old buddy, says Shrub, cheefully.

But if Monday is indeed the deadline, then it's hard to see how the IDF can even eke out a narrow loss. As best I can tell from wire reports and this Ha'aretz story (I mean, we're not talking the Hizbullah Times here) the Israelis are still fighting nasty little battles in and and/or around a three or possibly four villages along the border -- Ayta a-Shab (not far from lovely Bint Jbeil, gateway to southern hell) Taibe and Kfar Kila to the east, and someplace called Mahabib, which I can't find but which is said to be right across the border from an Israeli town called Manara. (see map.)

This is not much of a buffer zone -- more like a series of small pockets poking a couple of kilometers into Lebanon. And the IDF appears to be moving very slowly and deliberately to try to hold down its own casualties -- successfully so far, but at what cost in terms of the mission?

It looks to me like it would take weeks of hard fighting -- Iwo Jima style fighting -- just to link these pockets into a contiguous zone inside the border, much less advance to the Litani River on a broad front. (The Israelis claim they've already reached the river, but it appears to be far to the east, where the Litani ducks close to Israel before taking a hairpin turn to the north.

It's very hard for me to see how the IDF can accomplish even the Olmert government's minimum objectives over the next 4-5 days. Not unless the pace is drastically picked up, which could cost many lives.

read in full...

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Nobody wants us here, so why are we here? That's the big question. If we leave, all the attacks would stop, because we'd be gone." -- Maj. Brent E. Lilly, who leads a Marine civil affairs team in Hit, 35 miles upriver from Anbar's capital of Ramadi (See above "Welcome to Hit!")

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR THURSDAY, August 3, 2006

Photo: Iraqis [Iraqi women, actually - zig] burn an American flag during a protest march denouncing Israel's Sunday attack in southern Lebanon, Monday, July 31, 2006, in the Shiite area of Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq. Iraq's Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi on Monday accused Israel of carrying out 'massacres' in Lebanon in the strongest criticism of the Jewish state by a top official of the U.S-backed Iraqi government. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

U.S. troops opened fire on a convoy carrying supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, wounding at least 16 people. The U.S. military said it was checking the report and had no immediate comment. A Mahmudiya police source said the convoy, transporting Sadr supporters from the holy city of Najaf to Baghdad for a rally on Friday, had been passing by a U.S. base in the flashpoint town of Mahmudiya when the shooting took place. (See below "Thousands of Iraqi Shiites have converged on Baghdad…")

Iraqi police came under attack and fought intense battles with gunmen overnight in the southern outskirts of Baghdad. In the first clash [in the town of Wahda], 30 kilometres (19 miles) south of the capital, gunmen attacked a police checkpoint killing 14 people, including six policemen.

A second battle erupted nearby between a joint military and police force and insurgents the prime minister's office announced. Iraqi forces chased the insurgents through a rural area [near Suwaiyah] 40 kilometres (25 miles) southwest of the capital and killed 15 of them, the statement said, adding that two policemen had also died.

Bring 'em on: Two Marines assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5 died, in separate incidents, due to enemy action while operating in Al Anbar Province today.

Bring 'em on: A Wisconsin National Guard soldier who was about two weeks away from completing his tour of duty in Iraq was killed in action by a roadside bomb, his mother said Wednesday. Spc. Ryan Jopek, 20, of Merrill, was killed by an explosive device Tuesday somewhere near Tikrit, said his mother, Tracy Jopek, by telephone.

OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS

Baghdad:

(updated) Police said the death toll from Wednesday's twin bomb attack on a soccer pitch where children were playing in west Baghdad's neighborhood of Amil had risen to 16.

A bomb strapped to a motorcycle exploded in the center of Baghdad, killing at least nine people and injuring 21. The attack near Rusafi Square in the Rashid Street shopping area apparently targeted vendors and commercial stalls.

At least 10 people were killed in a roadside bomb in Al-Amin, an eastern district of Baghdad. A further 14 were wounded.

Two civilians were wounded when a roadside bomb targeting police commandos exploded in the Zayuna district of Baghdad.

A roadside bomb went off near a police commando patrol in a southern Baghdad district, wounding four commando members. A police vehicle was damaged and four commando members aboard were wounded in the blast.

Kut:

Police found the body of a former member of Saddam Hussein's ousted Baath party in Kut, 170 km (105 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Police in Kut reported finding 18 bodies in the Tigris river showing signs of torture. They had all been shot.

Wajihiya:

Gunmen stormed a house in Wajihiya killing four people and wounding a fifth. Wajihiya is about 50 miles (80 km) north of Baghdad.

Latifiya:

Gunmen snatched a car with its driver after wounding a man and a woman in Latifiya.

A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in Latifiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, wounding two policemen.

Diwaniya:

A guard was shot in Diwaniya, a town 180 km (112 miles) south of Baghdad.

Samarra:

A decomposed body was found in Samarra, 100 km (62 miles) north of Baghdad.

Balad:

Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in Balad, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad.

Dujail:

Police found the bodies of three people shot dead on Wednesday in Dujail, 90 km (55 miles) north of Baghdad.

Ishaqi:

Gunmen kidnapped a food contractor for the Iraqi army on Wednesday.

Mussayab:

Three people were killed and 22 wounded on Wednesday night when gunmen attacked a wedding party with hand grenades in Mussayab, 60 km (40 miles) south of Baghdad.

In Country:

Gunmen shot to death three people in separate incidents in Amarrah, Mosul and Basra, police said.

>> NEWS

Thousands of Iraqi Shiites have converged on Baghdad ahead of a major demonstration: Shiite protesters were summoned to the capital by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr Thursday in order to protest Israel's attacks on Lebanon but also as a show of force by a leading opponent of the US-led coalition force in Iraq. The protest is timed to begin after Friday prayers and could bring tens of thousands onto the streets.

Britain's outgoing ambassador to Iraq has advised his government that the country is likely headed to "low intensity civil war": The network [BBC] said it obtained a diplomatic dispatch from William Patey to Prime Minister Tony Blair and top members of Blair's cabinet.

The British government, which maintains troops in Iraq, has been supportive of the policies of the Bush administration in Iraq, making Patey's assessment all the more significant. Patey's views are shared by many other commentators, but few, if any, officials allied with the U.S.-led coalition have said so publicly.

Patey's assessment was not made publicly either and the British government said it does not comment on leaked documents.

"Iraq could move toward civil war" if the violence is not contained, Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have seen it," he said, adding that the top priority in Iraq is to secure the capital, where factional violence has surged in recent weeks despite efforts by the new Iraqi government to stop the fighting.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the panel, "We do have the possibility of that devolving into civil war." He added that this need not happen and stressed that ultimately it depends on the Iraqis more than on the U.S. military.

"Shiite and Sunni are going to have to love their children more than they hate each other," Pace said, before the tensions can be overcome. "The weight of that must be on the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government."

Four US soldiers accused of killing three Iraqi prisoners refused to give evidence as a military hearing heard that one of the captives' brains were blown out as he lay injured. The troops followed the lead of several of their superior officers Thursday, invoking their right not to incriminate themselves before a legal panel set up at their unit's base camp in the central Iraqi city of Tikrit.

The investigation of the four men from the famed "Rakkasans" -- the 3rd Combat Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division -- is expected to spotlight the US military's controversial and opaque rules of engagement in Iraq.

Civilian defence lawyers have said orders from the Rakkasans' commander, Colonel Michael Steele, called for troops to "kill all military age males" during a raid on May 9 on a suspected Al-Qaeda base. Civilian defence lawyers acting for Private Corey Clagett, Staff Sergeant Raymond Girouard, Specialist William Hunsaker and Specialist Juston Graber have argued that the defendants were following orders when they killed the Iraqis.

>> REPORTS

According to figures compiled from Iraqi security and health department figures, more than 1,000 civilians, 135 members of security forces and 143 insurgents were killed nationwide in July. In addition, 1,800 civilians were injured.

The U.S. military is increasingly using air lifts instead of ground convoys to resupply troops to avoid the deadly roadside bombs that remain a major killer of American soldiers after more than three years of war. (...)

"When we first got here, all of our stuff was shipped out by ground," said 1st Lt. Ted Mataxis [of the The 3rd Corps Support Command], 29, of Raleigh, N.C., whose unit is responsible for assembling Humvee tires, engines and other repair parts for air transport. Now "we're sending the majority of our stuff by air," he said. "The only stuff that goes out by ground are the big, bulky items."

In October, the command moved about 6,500 pallets - the platform that items are loaded onto - by air each month. The monthly figure now stands at about 16,000. The increase of air shipments means about 33,000 vehicles and 71,000 troops who would have been driving convoys around Iraq's dangerous highways have been taken off the roads. (...)

"Any time you go outside the wire, anything can happen," said Maj. Doug A. LeVien, 34, from Brooklyn, N.Y., with the 548th Logistic Task Force. "All battalion commanders try to minimize how often you have to go out. If you don't have to go out, that's a win. Those are numbers that don't show up in box scores."

Moving cargo by air has its limits. Bigger, bulkier items such as fuel, drinking water or food weigh too much to make them practical to ship by air, and there's too much of it.

The air effort has meant a greater role for the Air Force in Iraq. Working with Army engineers, the Air Force has improved runways around the country that were originally built for small Iraqi fighter planes. Now large cargo planes can fly directly from the United States or other staging points around the world and land at a number of bases instead of going first to Kuwait to offload supplies.

IRAQ RESISTANCE GAINS STEAM

Iraqi resistance fighters have stepped up attacks against US occupation forces over the past weeks, with some security sources linking the momentum to the US-based Israeli onslaught on Lebanon.

"Attacks against US forces have increased, particularly since the Israeli military offensive on Lebanon began," Anbar police officer Yusuf al-Dailemi told the London-based Al-Quds Press news agency.

"Dozens of attacks are being carried out every day against US troops in the Al-Anbar province, western Iraq."

Dailemi further said in recent days attacks on the Americans forces hit a record high of 50.

The US military admitted Tuesday, August 1, that nine marines have been killed in the past week in clashes with Iraqi fighters in Al-Anbar alone.

The army also announced Wednesday, August 2, that another US soldier was killed in the province, a bastion of the Iraqi resistance.

read in full...

>> COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

CAN WE EQUIP THEIR RIFLE SCOPES WITH 20/20 HINDSIGHT?

The U.S. war in Iraq has been dragging on for more than three years now, and it seems that with each year we see a batch of news stories about how our military/political geniuses running the show have just figured out that what we were doing a year ago was insanely stupid. (See, for instance, my gripe on Monday about the Iraqi constitution.)

The Washington Post has another example today, describing the tactics of American soldiers in guerrilla-dominated Ramadi:

The outpost also blocks a main route that insurgents had used to bring explosives into the city. They would stash them at a train station in the south and pay teenage boys to ferry them north at night. Until recently, U.S. troops shot the youths -- fighting what [the local commander, Col. Sean] MacFarland suggests was a losing war of attrition. "We were killing these guys - kids. We could do that forever," he said. "Were we creating more insurgents that way?"

Gee, ya think so? I look forward to next year's installment, explaining how our current tactics are just as counterproductive.

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ON FOOT PATROL IN FALLUJAH

So you want to know what a foot patrol is like?

Most days, the men from Plainville-based Charlie Company walk Fallujah. No armored Humvees. Nothing between them and the city. Maybe a dozen Marines counting on nobody but each other.

No, there's no way to replicate it, but here's how you can give it a shot:

Wait for the hottest day of summer, when the heat is pounding the earth, stealing the air from your lungs and sweat from your skin.

Put on 82 pounds of gear. Heavy boots. A helmet, if you've got it. And a backpack jammed with stuff to make up the balance.

Get three hours of sleep the night before. (You probably were on post or ran out to a roadside bomb attack just a few hours before dawn.)

Find a place where it's hunting season, and stalk around the woods. (Though, unless the woods run with open sewers and are strewn with rotting garbage, it would be hard to get the smell right.)

If you don't get hit after a few hours, walk back home, shoulders cramping, stomach tight from the weight and the heat and the tension.

When you walk through the door, sweat running in tiny streams down your body, turn the air conditioner off, and the lights, too. (The generator got hit by a mortar today.)

As you lie there, recovering in the dark, think about what it would have been like to have walked under a thousand black windows where snipers might hide, in narrow alleys where you brush against the people, walking past traffic stopped because of you, the drivers glaring as you pass.

But if you want an even better idea what it's like for the Marines, do it all over again tomorrow.

link to excerpt

AS THEY STAND UP...OTHER IRAQIS RUN LIKE HELL

I've written about the problem of counterfeit uniforms in Iraq many times--this post from April is the oldest we have in our database now, but I'd addressed the topic several times before then. And each time, officials assure the public something is about to be done about the fact that in Iraq, you've no idea if a man wearing a uniform is legitimate or not. And now, 4 months after that post, we get this feeble assurance:

Everywhere Iraqis in uniform go, from ice cream shops to checkpoints, people now flee. The mottled mix of green, blue and khaki camouflage, along with the blue shirts of the local police, have all blurred into a flag for alarm. "En eles," Iraqis in Baghdad now say when a friend has been taken; in traditional Arabic it means chewed up, but in the streets it has come to mean taken by mysterious men without explanation.

American and Iraqi officials have been promising for weeks to address the problem. This week, the interior minister, Jawad Bolani, acknowledged that rogues were among his ranks. He told Parliament that new uniforms and identification cards would soon be supplied to hobble those "who carry out bad activities under the cover of this institution."

The first 2,000 of 25,000 new uniforms are scheduled to be handed out later this month, officials said. Made with imported camouflage cloth and intricate patches and insignias, they are designed to be difficult to copy. Their source, as well as other details about them, is being kept secret in part to reduce the risk of counterfeiting. But only a small percentage of the 145,000 Interior Ministry officers - from the national police, public order brigades and other forces - will get them.

Our "grand plan" hinges on Iraqis taking over their own security--supposedly by the end of the year according to the Prime Minister. And yet, at best, the chances an Iraqi will know an Interior Ministery officer is legit will be about 1 in 6 by then...and only 1 in 73 this month. Boy, there's a feeling of security.

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IS THAT AN ARROW IN YOUR POCKET, OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?

Iraqi President Talibani says that Iraqi forces will take complete responsibility for the security of the country by the end of the year. He also says that the current wave of violence is "the last arrows in their pockets" and that "We are highly optimistic that we will terminate terrorism in this year." He added, "Dude, I am so high right now."

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"NO HEARTS AND MINDS WON HERE EITHER!"

I have a soft spot for Lebanon. There was a time when many Iraqis spent their summer holidays In Lebanon. I was 13 when I first visited the country and immediately fell in love with it. I was struck by the friendliness of the people, their openness towards strangers and the wonderful lifestyle. The picturesque country and its pleasant cultural and geographic variety are also unique in the region: It is one of the few countries I know where you can move from warmth of sunny sandy beaches to the fresh coolness of mountain air in less than half an hour. I went back to Lebanon many times. I have fond memories of the country and its people.

Some people have indicated that most Iraqis are too busy with their own misfortunes to follow what is happening in Palestine and Lebanon. This is not true. Despite their own misery and preoccupations, most Iraqis are following those developments very closely.

Sunnis mostly do not look at Hezbollah as a 'Shiite' movement. The sectarian polarization, bad as it is, has not gone that far in Iraq... yet. In this respect, most Iraqis are united. Most 'Shiite' and 'Sunni' pro- and anti-Occupation political and insurgency groups declared their solidarity with Hezbollah and Lebanon and their outrage at Israel! Even the puppets and the stooges, have expressed their displeasure! Notable exceptions are the Kurdish 'leadership' and the Qaeda people.

Furthermore, these people almost unanimously believe that the root cause of all that is taking place is America, not Syria and Iran! Odd? Not really!

America and Israel keep saying that Hezbollah's weaponry comes from Iran. What most people here see is that Israel's superior weaponry that was killing innocent civilians comes from the US.

There is a lot of anger at America and the way the administration is implicitly condoning those criminal acts and giving the Israeli war machine political and diplomatic cover until they have finished their business.

No sir, no hearts and minds won here either!!

What is the matter with these ungrateful people?

read in full...

>> BEYOND IRAQ

Afghanistan:

Taliban fighters killed three NATO soldiers in an attack in southern Afghanistan, a NATO spokesman said. The insurgents attacked the soldiers with rocket-propelled grenades near a school on the outskirts of the city of Kandahar, a NATO statement said. Six soldiers were injured, but their wounds were not life-threatening, it said.

A roadside bomb killed a Canadian soldier on Thursday in Afghanistan's south, where NATO troops took over security from U.S. forces this week. Another soldier was wounded when the bomb hit a NATO vehicle in Kandahar province, a stronghold for Taliban insurgents, NATO said in a statement.

A second blast in the same area hit another NATO vehicle hours later, wounding three more Canadian soldiers, it said.

A roadside bomb possibly aimed at a NATO convoy wounded three civilians in the northern province of Baghlan.

A suicide car bomb attack aimed at a convoy of NATO troops in Afghanistan's southern province of Kandahar killed 20 Afghan civilians. There was no immediate word if there were any casualties among the NATO troops, Sayed Aziz told Reuters. "It was a suicide car attack, aimed at NATO, but killed instead 20 civilians and wounded 13 others," he said. No further details were immediately available.

BUSH'S OWN ADVISOR LAUGHS IN HIS FACE

haven't seen this bit circulated much, but then I've had some downtime today too. But a former member of Team Bush, Richard N. Haass, Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director, had this to say about how the crisis in Lebanon is "an opportunity" according to his former boss:

Haass, the former Bush aide who leads the Council on Foreign Relations, laughed at the president's public optimism. "An opportunity?" Haass said with an incredulous tone. "Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"

Good thing he can still raise a chuckle about this. The latest knee-slappers seem like Adam Sandler movies to me--they open big, and then it's all downhill.

read in full…

TODAY YOU'VE GOT THE POWER TO TAKE IT, TOMORROW YOU WON'T HAVE THE POWER TO KEEP IT

Several days ago at American Footprints, praktike offered a parable about the American/Israeli neocon desire to reshape the Middle East through military force:

There's a kind of raccoon trap where you drill or countersink a hole in a log, then nail a few nails pointing downward that are spaced just wide enough to allow a furry paw to enter. You put a shiny object, like a piece of tinfoil, in the hole and wait for the raccoon to discover it. So entranced by his treasure, he won't be willing to let go, and thus his balled little fist won't make it past the nails. Sound familiar?

I thought about this analogy when reading (via Billmon) the latest column by Tony Karon in Time magazine:

Israel's strategy is now premised on the arrival in the not-too-distant future of an international security force in south Lebanon. . . . But the terms on which an international force will be deployed is now the focus of an intensifying diplomatic fight.

. . . [T]he U.S. is insisting that there be no demand for a halt to Israel's offensive until a mechanism is in place to disarm Hizballah. . . . But the French, who are currently the prime candidates to lead an international force, are making clear that the international community is not going to finish the job for Israel, and will only police a cease-fire when one has been agreed to by the Lebanese government, which includes Hizballah. In other words, it won't try to disarm Hizballah unless Hizballah has agreed to be disarmed. And the only formula likely to achieve that objective on the basis of the current battlefield situation would be an agreement among Lebanese parties to somehow incorporate Hizballah's fighting forces into the Lebanese Army - which may not be quite what the U.S., and certainly not Israel, had in mind. (...)

So here is Israel, its furry paw tightly gripping whatever shiny bits of Lebanese territory it's been able to hold (not much according to the latest from Billmon, whose coverage of this war has been extraordinary). It promises to let go and pull its paw out, if someone will volunteer to crawl between the nails and take custody of the tinfoil on its behalf.

If not, Israel will just have to... stay caught in the trap. Which doesn't sound like much of a threat, when you think about it.

LETTER FROM HIZBULLAH TO ISRAEL

Recently received intelligence via my Hamas contact, Mel Gibson*, in which it was learned that Hizbullah has sent a "thank you" letter to Israel. Text follows.

* Expelled for intoxication.

Dear Isr--- Hated Zionist Enemy:

Please accept our earnest thanks for making us the most powerful force in Lebanon, and rallying even many of the kuff--- Christians to our cause. We would also like to thank you for getting al-Qaeda to almost care about suffering Shiites. Although we do not like our children being killed and maimed by your stones-break-scissors airstrikes, who'd have thought that you could make an exercise in deadly mischief, like a soldier kidnapping, into an outpouring of pity for our constituents, even as we lob rockets willy-nilly into cities full of people and make intermittent anti-Jewish bigotted comments? And please accept our great thanks for being made to sound downright rational while your statements sound like Nasserist spiel in 1967 or the Arab states in 1948, or Russians in Chechnya.

And thank you for blustering and not winning, at least right away. We're the big heroes now.

Loved also the way the Iraqi leaders had to up-end the official line of their American sponsors too.

And it is really a pleasure too to watch you push along the live-action drama: the Passion of the Rice.

May God destroy you,

Appreciatively,

His Party

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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "That's fine. He's the president of Iraq, and he can make his statements." -- Donald Rumsfeld responding to Iraqi President Talibani's claim that Iraqis could take charge of security in the whole country by the end of the year.

WAR NEWS FOR WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 02, 2006

“We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”

An Iraqi journalist working for the Iranian government-run Al-Alam television was slain in western Baghdad. Adil al-Mansuri, an Iraqi in his 20s, was stopped by gunmen Monday and shot.

Tuesday a cameraman for an Iranian television channel was killed at about noon in the Amariya neighborhood of Baghdad. The victim’s identity, and the circumstances of his death, remained unclear. (This may be the same incident as in the entry above.)

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, at least 74 journalists, 53 of them Iraqis, have died in Iraq since the American-led invasion in March 2003.

Three Iraqi soldiers were killed Tuesday evening when a suicide car bomber attacked a checkpoint in the northern city of Tal Afar.

Early Wednesday three roadside bombs exploded in central Baghdad near a group of laborers seeking work, killing three people and wounding nine.

A U.S. soldier died Tuesday during fighting in Anbar province.

In Baquba, north of Baghdad, gunmen killed the chief of the traffic police, Ahmed Abdel Hussein, and one of his bodyguards.

On Wednesday, two traffic police colonels were killed and two guards wounded in a drive-by shooting in Khalis.

A police patrol was hit by a roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul, killing one policeman and injuring four.

A man was killed when a bomb he was planting on a highway in northern Baghdad exploded.

Two unidentified bodies, showing signs of torture and gunshot wounds to the head, were found in northwestern Baghdad.

Tuesday a gunman was killed and another wounded in fighting between commandos and unidentified armed men in Jihad, the Baghdad neighborhood where marauding gunmen executed dozens of people in mob violence last month.

“Plan to kill everyone you meet”: Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's western Anbar province, has sunk into virtual anarchy under the stranglehold of a skilled, well-financed and ruthless insurgency. Now, for the first time, U.S. and Iraqi forces are engaged in a block-by-block campaign to retake the area.

The U.S. strategy here aims to avoid a full-scale military onslaught like the one that demolished much of the nearby city of Fallujah in November 2004, flattening hundreds of homes, emptying it of people and leaving it struggling to rebuild. The senior U.S. commander in Ramadi, Army Col. Sean MacFarland, does not rule out major combat operations. But he makes it clear he sees no value in sending U.S. troops "crashing through like a bull in a china shop."

Instead, U.S. and Iraqi forces are advancing one step at a time into key locations in Ramadi's walled neighborhoods, setting up small outposts of about 100 troops each. The goal is to slowly choke off the insurgents' ability to move freely, making them easier to capture or kill. Meanwhile, Iraqi soldiers, backed by U.S. troops, are to take the lead in patrolling around the outposts, creating small zones of safety for residents that will gradually spread.

Ramadi has lost as much as a quarter of its population of 400,000 since the insurgency began. The city has no effective government and few police officers. Insurgents assassinate officials with impunity, and recently issued a death threat against anyone entering the heavily shelled Government Center downtown. Last month, after the provincial highways director defied the threat, he was captured and beheaded, his body dumped in the street, according to a U.S. military officer.

Joblessness in Ramadi is at least 40 percent and there is no local industry, with utilities and other vital infrastructure regularly blown up by insurgents, U.S. officers say. Residents survive on irregular food rations and wait hours for fuel that often doesn't arrive. The chaos and stagnation create steady recruits for the insurgency -- estimated to have 1,500 hard-core members and hundreds more part-time fighters -- even as U.S. and Iraqi forces have killed at least 200 insurgents since June alone.

Warfare rocks the city daily. Over a one-month period this summer, insurgents launched nearly 600 attacks, laying about 250 roadside bombs, firing more than 100 rockets and mortars, waging 150 assaults with rifles and machine guns, and setting off four suicide car bombs. "The problem set is mind-numbing," said Maj. David Womack, operations officer for the 101st Airborne Division's battalion in charge of eastern Ramadi. A warning in bold type posted at the battalion's dusty headquarters advises all soldiers to "be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet."

Popular committees: Thousands of Shi'ite civilians charged with guarding neighbourhoods in Iraq marched through Baghdad on Wednesday in a show of force likely to stir passions in a country ravaged by sectarian violence.

Young men in civilian uniforms and headbands, all members of what is known as the popular committees, chanted as a speaker called on them to crush "terrorists" and loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein leading a Sunni Arab insurgency against the Shi'ite-led government.

"Step on terrorism," he said.

The crowd included members of the Badr Organisation, one of the armed Shi'ite groups Sunni Arabs accuse of running militia death squads, a charge they deny.

Shutting down: Sectarian violence and rising crime are transforming Baghdad's once bustling commercial hubs into deserted streets -- leaving the country's economy in tatters. Popular markets in neighborhoods such as the Sunni Azamiyah and Shiite Kazimiyah have all but disappeared.

Merchants are shuttering their shops not only because they fear attacks but also because they are unable to keep their shops well-stocked.

Bombings, hijackings and checkpoints delay deliveries. Customers shy away from shopping in parts of town where their sect is in the minority.

"We used to get our supplies from the wholesale in Sadr City," said Ahmed Ismail, a 55-year-old Sunni vegetable vendor. "But many of my fellow (Sunni) vendors were killed there. Who dares to go there?"

In Kazimiyah, jewelry stores have folded after driving restrictions and checkpoints discouraged customers from reaching their shops. In Mansour, once among the capital's most prosperous neighborhoods, gunmen last month threatened some store owners with death if they didn't close.

Fliers containing the warnings were slipped under the doors of boutiques, bookstores and bakeries owned by Shiites, Sunnis and even Christians. Some merchants who defied the orders lost their lives to drive-by shooters.

Terminating terrorism: President Jalal Talabani said Wednesday that Iraqi forces will take over security of all provinces in the country by the end of the year. U.S. forces currently are responsible for security in 17 of Iraq's 18 provinces.

The optimistic statement by Talabani comes at a time when the country is reeling under intense sectarian violence, mainly involving Shiite and Sunni militias. On Tuesday, more than 70 people were killed in one of the worst days of bloodshed.

Talabani, a Kurd from northern Iraq, said the government is confident of vanquishing terrorism.

"We are highly optimistic that we will terminate terrorism in this year... the multinational forces' role is a supportive one and the Iraqi forces will take over security in all Iraqi provinces by the end of this year gradually and God's will, we will take the lead," he said.

Sounds good to me! All US forces home by January! Tell 'em, Jamal! -m

Iraqi Reconstruction

Pathetic: A flailing Iraq reconstruction effort that has been dominated for more than three years by U.S. dollars and companies is being transferred to Iraqis, leaving them the challenge of completing a long list of projects left unfinished by the Americans.

While the handover is occurring gradually, it comes as U.S. money dwindles and American officials face a Sept. 30 deadline for choosing which projects to fund with the remaining $2 billion of the $21 billion rebuilding program. More than 500 planned projects have not been started, and the United States lacks a coherent plan for transferring authority to Iraqi control, a report released Tuesday concludes.

In some cases, Iraqis are having to take over projects from American construction firms that were removed from jobs because of poor performance. For example, in Nasiriyah, about 300 miles southeast of Baghdad, the Iraqi firm Al-Basheer Co. was recently given a prison-construction contract that a huge American conglomerate, Parsons Global Services Inc., lost. Parsons was six months overdue with the project and had completed only a third of the job.

The war that would pay for itself: A project to build a critical oil pipeline in northern Iraq has fallen more than two years behind schedule, costing the Iraqi government $14.8 billion in revenue and jeopardizing the safety of local water supplies, according to a report by U.S. government auditors released yesterday.

The 31-mile pipeline, designed to connect Iraq's northern oil fields with a major refinery, is intended to replace an old, decrepit line that has been leaking oil for years. But because contractors were unable to finish construction of the new pipeline by March 2004 as scheduled, oil is pooling in the open air rather than being sped to market, auditors with the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction say.

Even when the project is complete, the auditors conclude, there is no way of knowing whether it will actually be an improvement because reconstruction officials have not been monitoring its progress.

Down The Rathole

Another $57 billion: Years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq have been tough on U.S. military equipment, with trucks, tanks and other items in need of overhauls or replacement.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, U.S. Army chief of staff, has requested $17 billion as an emergency appropriation and another $40 billion over three years, The Washington Times reported.

Emergency funding: As lawmakers decried the strain on the U.S. military from the Iraq war, the Senate on Tuesday unanimously approved $13.1 billion for emergency repairs and replacement of Army and Marine Corp equipment.

The Senate approved the measure on a voice vote with no debate after Democrats accused the White House of letting the war weaken the military's ability to take on missions.

Domestic Politics

About three years late: After months of struggling to forge a unified stance on the Iraq war, top congressional Democrats joined voices yesterday to call on President Bush to begin withdrawing U.S. troops by the end of the year and to "transition to a more limited mission" in the war-torn nation.

With the midterm elections three months away, and Democrats seeing public discontent over Iraq as their best chance for retaking the House or Senate, a dozen key lawmakers told Bush in a letter: "In the interests of American national security, our troops and our taxpayers, the open-ended commitment in Iraq that you have embraced cannot and should not be sustained. . . . We need to take a new direction."

Law and Order

Murder: A military court opened a preliminary hearing on Tuesday to determine whether four U.S. soldiers charged over the deaths of three male prisoners in Iraq will face court martials.

They have been charged with premeditated murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, communicating a threat, and obstructing justice in the killings in or around May 9 north of Baghdad.

Premeditated murder charges can bring the death penalty under U.S. military law.

The Article 32 hearing is being held at Contingency Operating Base Speicher in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, 175 km (110 miles) north of the capital.

It comes at a sensitive time when the military is investigating other cases of alleged abuses -- including the killings of up to 24 unarmed civilians in the town of Haditha last year by U.S. Marines -- which have infuriated Iraqis.

Smiles: U.S. soldiers charged with murdering three detainees in Iraq smiled before carrying out the shootings and threatened to kill another soldier if he informed on them, a military court heard on Wednesday.

Prosecution witness Private First Class Bradley Mason said one of those charged, Staff Sergeant Raymond Girouard, told him if he were arrested he would try to get out of it on medical grounds because he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"They just smiled," said Mason.

"I told him (Girouard) that I am not down with it. It's murder."

Lawsuit: A Marine Corps staff sergeant who led the squad accused of killing two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq, will file a lawsuit today in federal court in Washington claiming that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) defamed him when the congressman made public comments about the incident earlier this year.

Attorneys for Frank D. Wuterich, 26, argue in court papers that Murtha tarnished the Marine's reputation by telling news organizations in May that the Marine unit cracked after a roadside bomb killed one of its members and that the troops "killed innocent civilians in cold blood." Murtha also said repeatedly that the incident was covered up.

Rape: The media and public will be barred from witnessing the testimony of Iraqis in a hearing for U.S. Army soldiers accused of raping and murdering an Iraqi teenager, an Army commander has ruled.

The restriction was issued Monday after an appeal by the trial counsel to protect the witnesses, who fear they could be perceived as aiding U.S. forces and be targeted by insurgents.

Crime and punishment: Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who commanded detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and helped organize the interrogation process at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, retired from the military on Monday, Pentagon officials said.

Because of his experience as a commander of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, General Miller was sent to Iraq in the summer of 2003 to review the detention system and interrogation techniques there. His mission was to recommend methods that would increase the success of intelligence-gathering as coalition forces battled a tenacious and growing insurgency.

Subsequently, dogs were used as a tool of intimidation of detainees at Abu Ghraib, and debate has swirled over responsibility for abusive interrogation procedures.

At his retirement ceremony Monday, General Miller received the Distinguished Service Medal, which is awarded for exceptionally commendable service in a position of great responsibility, Army officials said.

John Sifton, a lawyer who is a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said giving the medal to General Miller “is not just a disappointment, it’s an outrage.”

Commentary

Joel Connelly: As Iraq was crowded off TV screens last week by the fighting in Lebanon, a question came to mind: Are Americans getting the information they need to intelligently judge progress -- or lack of it -- in the war on terror?

No, or at least not as the Middle East exploded last week.

Americans saw injured Lebanese kids, sobbing widows in Beirut and -- to a decidedly lesser extent -- Israelis taking cover from Hezbollah rockets.

At the same time, on Thursday, car bombs and rockets ripped through an upscale Baghdad neighborhood. Businesses were burned. Buildings collapsed. At least 25 civilians died, and dozens more were injured.

We saw almost none of this on the tube, dominated this night by high-profile news personalities relocated to Lebanon.

The body count from sectarian strife in Iraq -- the phrase "civil war" is officially avoided -- has topped 100 a day.

We can read about the Baghdad bombing in The Washington Post. And, last week, National Public Radio carried a remarkable report on a team of volunteers that fishes dead bodies out of the Tigris River.

Why no pictures?

Are not civilians being hurt, and killed, in greater numbers than in Lebanon?

Are the TV networks fearful of displeasing those in high places, or being labeled advocates of "cut and run" by Fox News commentators, if they run sharply critical reports?

Paul Krugman: The most compelling argument against an invasion of Iraq wasn’t the suspicion many of us had, which turned out to be correct, that the administration’s case for war was fraudulent. It was the fact that the real reason government officials and many pundits wanted a war — their belief that if the United States used its military might to “hit someone” in the Arab world, never mind exactly who, it would shock and awe Islamic radicals into giving up terrorism — was, all too obviously, a childish fantasy.

And the results of going to war on the basis of that fantasy were predictably disastrous: the fiasco in Iraq has ended up demonstrating the limits of U.S. power, strengthening radical Islam — especially radical Shiites allied with Iran, a group that includes Hezbollah — and losing America the moral high ground.

What I never expected was that Israel — a nation that has unfortunately had plenty of experience with both war and insurgency — would be susceptible to similar fantasies. Yet that’s what seems to have happened.

Glenn Greenwald: How do you have a meaningful debate over what the U.S. ought to do in Iraq with people who believe that things are going really well over there and who insist that Saddam really did have WMDs? How do you have a meaningful debate with people over the Israel-Lebanon war who insist that reports of civilian deaths in Lebanon are the by-product of a massive conspiracy/cover-up between the international media and Hezbollah rather than Israeli air attacks? And how do you have a meaningful debate with people who continue to insinuate that Saddam helped plan the 9/11 attacks?

Meaningful political debates require agreement at least as to the basic facts comprising reality. For a substantial portion of the American population, that agreement is lacking, due to a desire to believe only those facts which comport with one's beliefs and the powerful, self-contained ideology-based media bubble which enables that desire. Those who live in the world where Iraq helped Al Qaeda plan terrorist attacks, Saddam had WMDs, things are going well in Iraq, and Hezbollah rather than Israel collapsed the apartment building in Qana, don't merely have different political views but really live in a different reality.

David Corn: Why is it taking the Senate intelligence committee forty times longer to examine how the Bush administration used--or misused--the prewar intelligence on Iraq and WMDs than it took for the United States military to topple Saddam Hussein? American troops reached Baghdad in three weeks (there were a few complications after that). But the intelligence committee, led by Republican Senator Pat Roberts, has dilly-dallied for two-and-a-half years when it has come to reviewing how George W. Bush and his top aides represented--or misrepresented--the WMD intelligence as they led (or misled) the nation to war. Last fall, the Senate Democrats shut down the Senate for a few hours to protest the committee's lack of progress in producing the so-called Phase II report that was supposed to focus on this matter. Roberts and the Republicans promised to conclude the inquiry soon. Yet another nine months have gone by, and as The Washington Post reported on Sunday, the committee is still not yet done.

Georgie Anne Geyer: Despite all proof to the contrary, Israel persists, like the U.S., in thinking it can terrorize its enemies into submission, instead of terrorizing them into ever more lethal and potent irregulars -- thus the Armageddonesque destruction of both Lebanon and Iraq by massive bombing.

But this attitude, as any even reasonably sensitive person should know, is, at the bottom, one of despising one's enemies (always a dangerous business), of believing that he would never react the way you do and thus creating more guerrillas, insurgents and suicide bombers through the humiliation thus inflicted.

Hezbollah, after all, did not exist before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and stayed for 22 years. Hamas was originally formed with Israeli encouragement to stand up against the PLO. With Iraq, the United States ever so helpfully dismantled the one great enemy of Iran, which kept that imperious and ambitious nation in check. With the same naive destructiveness inside Iraq at the very same time, the American presence was creating new and dangerous insurgent groups -- the Shiite Mahdi Army, the al-Qaida spinoffs, and too many more to mention.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

Meanwhile, these self-indulgent policies, which refuse to take into consideration the cultural realities of other peoples and groups, are changing the Middle East still further. Old movements are already morphing into new and more dangerous ones.

The New York Times recently wrote about the new war between nations, like the United States and Israel, and "networks," like Hazbollah and al-Qaida, which are simply an advanced form of the classic guerrilla movements of history. At the same time, radical Islamist groups from Lebanon to Somalia to Iraq, and potentially even the moderate Arab regimes, are now gaining power through electoral legitimacy.

And on every level, the American presence in the region is serving to create a new "retribalization" that is destroying what is left of the secular Arab states.

This is not at all to say that these groups are innocent, desirable or unsusceptible to violent confrontation -- far from it. It IS to say that there are intelligent ways to confront them, and to defeat them, other than indiscriminately bombing them to smithereens.

The intelligent policy would be the old middle ground: to address their real grievances, to negotiate and mediate confidently even with difficult governments like Syria's and Iran's and, while using military power prudently, to work on diffuse levels to gradually change the structures of power.

But it's so much easier to drop bombs, even if they only create exactly what you set out to destroy.

Casualty Reports

A nephew of Sen. Max Baucus serving in the Marines was killed in Iraq during the weekend, the senator's office said Tuesday.

Cpl. Phillip E. Baucus, 28, died Saturday during combat operations in Anbar province, the Department of Defense said. It did not immediately release further information.

Lance Cpl. James W. Higgins Jr. was fascinated by the past. His favorite musician was Frank Sinatra; his favorite comedians, Abbott and Costello; his favorite books, histories -- particularly anything about World War II.

And when the Frederick County native saw his chance to serve his country and become part of history in the making, as part of a new global war, he jumped at it.

He grabbed his piece of history, but it cost him. The Pentagon announced Monday that Higgins was killed Thursday in Anbar province, a desert region in western Iraq that is the heartland of the Sunni-led insurgent movement.

Lance Cpl. Anthony E. Butterfield, 19, of Clovis, California, died Saturday ``while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq.''

Army Specialist Dennis K. Samson Junior was killed July 24th by enemy gunfire in Taqaddum.

The 24-year-old was assigned to the Fourth Brigade Troop Battalion, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, (Kentucky).

Sgt. Christian B. Williams, a decorated U.S. Marine, was killed in Iraq on Saturday.

Family members of the 27-year-old Winter Haven native got the news Monday and said Tuesday that they were too grief-stricken to talk to reporters, but a relative said Williams loved his military service.

Williams was killed during combat operations in Al Anbar province, where he was assigned as a light-armored-vehicle section leader

The Ministry of Defence has named the soldier killed in Iraq on Tuesday as Corporal Matthew Cornish.

The 29-year-old, who served with 1st Battalion The Light Infantry, died as a result of wounds sustained in a mortar attack on a UK military base in Basra in the early hours of Tuesday morning.