Dozens Kidnapped, Killed, Wounded
A car bomb wounded 11 in an attack on police in the norther part of the city of Hilla.
Guerrillas killed two US soldiers in separate incidents and wounded 3, at an installation near to Baghdad.
Three guerrilla cells kidnapped 24 Iraqis in Baghdad on Tuesday, from 2 electronics shops and a money changing stall.
Guerrilla violence killed 9 and wounded 29 in separate incidents around the country.
The US military imposed a curfew on the oil city of Beiji north of Baghdad on Tuesday.
Timothy Phelps of Newsday has more on the conflict between the US military and the Shiite politicians over Sunday's raid on the Mustafa Husayniyah in the Ur district of Baghdad. Shiites maintain that innocent worshippers were shot down. The US military says it was raiding a militia center and captured weapons, and that someone rearranged the bodies to make them look like innocents.
Halliburton's KRB division "universally failed to provide adequate cost information as required." according to a US government report, while it racked up billions in no-bid contracts.
Wanting to increase the number of Sunni Arabs in the Iraqi armed forces and being able to do so are not the same thing.
The US tried to get a message to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Tuesday, asking him to intervene to resolve the gridlock in the formation of a new Iraqi government.
Eric Haney, a founding member of the Delta Force anti-terrorist unit, has denounced the Iraq War as an "utter debacle," and has blamed widespread US use of torture to the sadism of Dick Cheney, who he says seems to enjoy it. When people like Haney talk like this, it is probably over with.
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/28/2006 11:21:00 PM
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3 Comments:
"The US tried to get a message to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Tuesday, asking him to intervene to resolve the gridlock in the formation of a new Iraqi government."
In the Knight-Rider story referenced, we get
" Judith Yaphe, a Persian Gulf expert at the National Defense University in Washington, called the reported attempts to pressure al-Jafaari to resign 'heavy-handed.'
"'They have to know that Sistani does not want to be seen as interfering in the political process,' she said. 'You're guaranteed to get the result that you don't want.'"
But she doesn't spell out exactly what unwanted result the Republican Party invaders have now guaranteed themselves.
What _should_ Sistani do? Maybe that is a silly question for an outsider to ask, but I'd advise him to pretend to be very deaf or never to have received this humble supplication from Crawford.
"Heavy-handed" is sound as far as it goes, but an even more serious objection is that the omphaloscopic Bushies cannot have given thirty seconds' thought to Sistani's political situation, being totally wrapped up in their own problems, most of them self-inflicted. What reason can Khalilzad or Rice or Rumsfeld or Bush have suggested why he should grant them what they beseech? The only thing that comes to mind is that they have heard rumors about the ayatollah's so-called "quietism," and think that he is so besottedly quietistic that he never acts on any other principle.
Even that theory doesn't make much sense, really, because they are asking him to volunteer to handle a great deal of unquietness that would break out inside his own sect and the U.I.A. caucus if he did command the politicians to sack Dr. Jaafari. It really does look as if the heroes of pre-emption utterly did not think at all. No big surprise.
Presumably Sistani will not be as thoughtless as they. He isn't likely to think of the same parables and historical episodes that I do, of King Canute unwilling to make a fool of himself by dictating what he cannot enforce, or of the deep, but ultimately unrewarded, affection of British Tories and Unionists for the quietism of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in occupied Ireland, yet no doubt there are Muslim and Twelver parallels that point much the same moral.
For a neutral moralist, there is the goose-and-gander angle as well. Considering how little President Bush likes to admit that he is not infallible, it is really a bit steep for him to call upon Ayatollah Sistani to reverse an important decision already made and announced. How would he like to be treated that way?
More trouble. More futile gawking. Little to yield from an "I told you so" posture.
"Hope is not a strategy," goes an old saying. But what future is there for a strategy with no hope?
The situation:
1) Any civilian government is likely to be swayed by clergy, assure an Islamicist state and perpetuate sectarian bickering. Zealots will cow or intimidate moderates or secularists. Religious persecution and prejudice will seethe.
2) Security will remain elusive. How is any amount of "training" supposed to equip Iraqi soldiers to interdict or destroy insurgents of their own sect or ethnic group? How will any Iraqi government persuade the people to accept counterinsurgent assaults by troops of other sect or ethnic identity? How do you build any sort of local military command that does not incubate the next Saddam?
The alternative:
As the clock ticks towards the 2006 US elections, W may be compelled to implement a "plot B" of Stay the Course. This would entail forced imposition of a "peace & unity government" with exceptional powers and a single command over security forces. The head of the security aparatus would be someone like Allawi. Suppression or cooption of the militias would follow. The UIA, SCIRI, and Muqtada factions would be purged, marginalized, or sent into exile.
This would fulfill the Fukuyama - Garfinkle proposal to de-link democratization from the extermination of jihadi radicalism. Iraq would be ruled by a strategically benign despot. He might limit elections to mock affairs, shut down (or deny advertising revenue) to dissident journalism, but keep the clergy out of politics or the courts.
Iraq has not found its Adenauer or Mandela. Muqtada is not a promising substitute. Maybe Iraq can avoid another Hammurabi or Saddam, but still have to settle for someone nearly as firm.
Isn't this what faces W or any successor by 2009?
Haney:
We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.
YIKES!
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