Guerrilla War Still Going Strong:
Guerrillas kill 26, Wound 74 in Seven bombings, Other Attacks
Al-Zaman [Ar.]: The Iraqi governent says that during the seven days ending on Sunday, guerrillas launched 111 attacks on Iraqi army and police and on US and Coalition forces. These attacks left over 100 Iraqis dead and over 200 wounded.
The bloody totals for victims of guerrilla violence in Iraq on Monday can only be arrived at by combining press reports. Even then, I'm sure not all the wounded are accounted for, since wire services tend to report mainly deaths. The limitations of those Western sites that count casualties according to Western reports are suggested by how limited a lot of the reporting is. And, surely a fair number of those wounded in these attacks later die, and these are never reported in the Western press.
What follows is drawn from this AFP report, and another one from Reuters., and finally this CNN article. Here is what the whole sanguinary thing looks like at the end of Monday:
*A suicide bomber on a bus in Shiite Kadhimiyah killed 12 and wounded 9.
*Also in Baghdad, guerrillas set off a car bomb in the Diyala Bridge area in an attempt to assassinate the district head of that municipality, killing 2 and wounding 11. The politician escaped, but two of his security guards were the ones killed.
*Guerrillas set off a bomb near a group of laborers in Baghdad, wounding at least 19.
*Guerrillas set off two roadside bombs in East Baghdad as a Western convoy went by, wounding 11 persons, including two foreign contractros.
*A roadside bomb in central Baghdad wounded 2 policemen.
*About an hour's drive north of Baghdad, guerrillas in 15 cars attacked a truck convoy bearing supplies to a US military base, firing rockets and spraying machine gun fire. They killed 5 Iraqis. [This is a big, brazen attack near the capital.]
*In Mosul, a bomber left behind his payload at the Abu Ali Restaurant, killing 5 and wounding 21.
* Guerrillas ambushed a civilian motorist in Balad, killing him.
*Guerrillas near the Shiite holy city of Karbala used a roadside bomb to kill a US soldier.
*A roadside bomb in Iskandariyah south of Baghdad wounded yet another policeman.
posted by Juan Cole @ 2/21/2006 12:29:00 AM
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"Democratic revolution" goes on
Ind. Anne Penketh. US threatens to cut aid to Iraq if new government is sectarian
The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, warned yesterday that Washington might cut aid to the Iraqis if the new government included sectarian politicians, pointing out that the US had spent "billions" in building up the police and the army.
"American taxpayers expect their money to be spent properly. We are not going to invest the resources of the American people into forces run by people who are sectarian," he said. He singled out the defence and interior ministries, saying they should be in the hands of people "who are non-sectarian, broadly acceptable and who are not tied to militias".
Is Zalmay essentially saying that the ministries should be in the hands of neoconned Americans? Because I really don't think any Iraqi leader meets that Khalilzad definition...
In other interesting news - The Observer is reporting that 37 Million people in these here them United States are now living under poverty:
(QUOTE)
A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.
Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.
Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush's trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.
For a brief moment last year in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina brought America's poor into the spotlight. Poverty seemed on the government's agenda. That spotlight has now been turned off. 'I had hoped Katrina would have changed things more. It hasn't,' says Cynthia Duncan, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire.
(END QUOTE)
Whatever happened to the trickle down process? And if there really are so many poor people in the U.S. of A. then why is the military failing to meet its recruiting quotas? Oh yes, the "I don't want to get my poor ass blown to bits" excuse... Even the poor don't want to die in Dubya's War, I guess.
Oh yeah, I know, it ain't Dubya's War - it was all Iraq's fault for attacking US on 9/11. That and those new-killer bombs it was gonna launch in 45 minutes...
Suuuuure...
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