Bush plans fucking enormous bloodbath in Iraq

[TAE]

Recently I was in Europe and had a conversation with an Iraqi archeologue ...

When Yugoslavia imploded, there were many Yugoslavs living in Berlin and they could not believe what was happening either.

Kurds, a separate ethnic group, are largely Sunnis but not Arabs.

The media normally leave that little detail out, perhaps they think it would confuse people.

 

[Aldebaran]

My first reaction on this is:

ALLAH!!!!!!!! (I always automatically fall back to Arabic when that stunned that I think my own eyes *must* betray me).

Recovering... switching back to English...

Korran said his troops would face a language barrier because 95 percent of the brigade is Kurdish and unable to speak Arabic. Kurds, a separate ethnic group, are largely Sunnis but not Arabs.
"I believe that we will bring translators with our brigade to solve this problem," he said.

Yes, why not. Add some more confusion to the hellfire pot. Very clever move.
In the end nobody shall understand anybody and everyone gets killed. Job done.
side note: it must be me... So odd that I know no Kurd who is even Muslim.

The general said his troops were part of the Iraqi army and do not belong to local Kurdish militias, known as peshmergas, as some Iraqi media reports have claimed.

It must be me... I never heard of any "Kurdish regiments" inside the "new" Iraqi "army". Maybe a few individuals like in the past and which honestly I doubt in hte present situation. I am about sure if I ask my Kurdish friends they shall have no clue either.
"Peshmerga working for the Iraqi government" translates in my reading as "Private militia of Kurdish members of the present Iraqi puppet government".
But possibly I am by now cynical beyond rescue.

"We do not represent any sect or ethnic group," Korran said...

Oh... A miraculous new turn of and in Kurdish history then. Ask any Kurd anywhere in the world what he is and wants and "represents".

Mahmud Uthman, a prominent leader in the Iraqi Kurdish Coalition, has come out against sending Kurdish forces to fight Arabs anywhere in Iraq, "Al-Zaman" reported on January 8. "There are fears that a fight like this, pitting Kurds against the Arabs, is bound to add an ethnic touch to the conflict," he said. "The deployment of Kurdish forces in Arab areas is wrong and will create sensitivities and accusations that the Kurds are killing the Arabs."

He is even very moderate to call it "fears". It is clear as cristal what is going to happen.

Someone should translate this in English and send it to Bush and his lunatics.

Oh... wait... It is in English.

Maybe it needs translation in Kurdish and Arabic for the puppets.

salaam.

 

[david dissadent]

(For the more casual readers) The Kurds are heavily involved in ethnic conflicts of there own on the perhihpery of the lands they would claim as there own. Especialy in the city of Kirkuk. It is oil rich and was heavily settled by Arabs during the rule of Saddam in order to help bind it and its oil closer to Baghdad.

There is now ethnic conflict in these areas.

It is probible that the Kurdish troops here are veiwing this operation of on the job training funded as supported by the americans of re-Kurdishising Kirkuk and other areas of Kurdistan, plus giving them experiance in fighting in cities that they may need to defend Kurdistan against Turkish invasion.

 

[nino_savatte]

I still haven't found much info on Iraq's Armenian community who, for years, have been oppressed by their more powerful Kurdish neighbours.

I did, however, find this

"Some of these minority groups are specific to Iraq and have been an important part of the country's history. During the regime of the former president, Saddam Hussein, they were living in peace with the Muslims and they held important posts in the government," said the Christian cleric and spokesperson for Christians Peace Association (CPA), Lucas Barini.

"Minorities in Iraq have found that living under the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein was better than living under the current sectarian violence and without the protection of the government or of the US forces. And when we ask for help the only answer we get from both sides is that we are like other Iraqis and should not be considered as a special group," Barini said.

Iraq's religious minorities include Chaldean Catholics, Eastern Rite Catholics, Orthodox, Assyrian, Syriac, Sabaean-Mandeans, Kaka'I [sometimes known as Ahl-e-Haqq], Armenians, Yazidis, Bahais, and Hebrews.

http://www.aina.org/news/20070105003000.htm

 

[Barking_Mad]

.......

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The Baghdad morgue took in about 16,000 unidentified bodies last year, the bulk of them victims of death squads and other sectarian violence, a source at the morgue told Reuters on Sunday.

About 1,350 bodies were received in December, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the Iraqi government has banned officials from releasing data on casualty rates. As throughout the year, between 80 and 85 percent of these were victims of violence.

The morgue data -- for Baghdad only -- suggest that a figure of 12,320 civilian deaths in "terrorist violence" in 2006, given two weeks ago by Interior Ministry sources, does not include all the victims of the bloodletting in Iraq. The Interior Ministry statistics exclude violent deaths classed as "criminal".

Since the morgue statistics also do not take account of the many deaths outside Baghdad, nor indeed of all violent deaths in the capital, the total death toll is certainly higher.

A Health Ministry official told the Washington Post last week that nearly 23,000 civilians and police were killed in the year, according to Health Ministry data. A deputy minister said he could not confirm the figures.

The Interior Ministry said 1,231 policemen were killed.

The United Nations has added Health Ministry data for the country as a whole to Baghdad morgue figures to come up with figures showing 3,700 civilians were killed in October alone -- or about 120 people a day.

The Iraqi government has called that an exaggeration but given no comparable official figures of its own. No U.N. data are yet available for the period since October.

While the total death toll remains disputed, no officials challenge the indications given by various sets of data that killings have increased markedly in the past year, notably since the destruction of a major Shi'ite shrine in February.

The Interior Ministry figures showed three and a half times more civilian deaths in December than in January.

No data were available for November, but in October the morgue took in about 1,600 bodies, down from a peak of 1,815 in July.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/art...-IRAQ-MORGUE.xml&WTmodLoc=World-C1-Headline-1

 

[Aldebaran]

What nobody ever seems to take notice of is that any such data exclude all the dead burried without passing the morgue. No way to find out exact figures anywhere.

salaam.

 

[newharper]

Are you under the impression that George Bush broke some law? You never answered.

Hey Mears, according to Steve Clemons, Playboy have a massive expose of Lockheed, which starts with some of the intelligence stichup for the war.

anuary 13, 2007
Iraq War Profiteers, Neocon Front Operations and White House Friends

Playboy Magazine has a very useful, long article out titled "Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" that does a great job of exposing the power of informal networks in Washington and how such informal networks are moving billions of dollars around and teeing up military conflicts like Iraq.

Here is some of the juicy intro:
In November of 2002, Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security advisor, asked Bruce Jackson to meet with him in the White House. They met in Hadley's office on the ground floor of the West Wing, not far from the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Hadley had an exterior office with windows, an overt indicator of his importance within the West Wing hierarchy.

This was months before Secretary of State Colin Powell would go to the United Nations to make the administration's case for the invasion of Iraq, touting the subsequently discredited evidence of weapons of mass destruction. But according to Jackson, Hadley told him that "they were going to war and were struggling with a rationale" to justify it. Jackson, recalling the meeting, reports that Hadley said they were "still working out" a cause, too, but asked that he, Jackson, "set up something like the Committee on NATO" to come up with a rationale.

Jackson had launched the U.S. Committee on NATO, a nongovernmental pressure group, in 1996 with Hadley on board. The objective of the committee, originally called the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, was to push for membership in the NATO military alliance for former Soviet bloc countries including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

What Bruce Jackson came up with for Hadley this time, in 2002, was the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. The mission statement of the committee says it was "formed to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations." The pressure group began pushing for regime change -- that is, military action to remove Hussein -- in the usual Washington ways, lobbying members of congress, working the media and throwing money around. The committee's pitch, or rationale as Hadley would call it, was that Saddam was a monster -- routinely violating human rights -- and a general menace in the Middle East.

"I didn't see the point about WMDs or an Al Queda connection," Jackson says. In his mind the human rights issue was sufficient to justify a war.

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001870.php#more

but i doubt that'll interest you any more than the Downing St. memo.

He links to the Playboy article, interesting.

 

[laptop]

The very sane Dan Plesch in the Guardian:

"There's a strong sense in the upper echelons of the White House that Iran is going to surface relatively quickly as a major issue - in the country and the world - in a very acute way," said NBC TV's Tim Russert after meeting the president. This is borne out by the fact that Bush has sent forces to the Gulf that are irrelevant to fighting the Iraqi insurgents. These include Patriot anti-missile missiles, an aircraft carrier, and cruise-missile-firing ships.

Many military analysts see these deployments as signals of impending war with Iran. The Patriot missiles are intended to shoot down Iranian missiles. The naval forces, including British ships, train to pre-empt Iranian interference with oil shipments through the straits of Hormuz.

Guardian

Uh-oh...

 

[Barking_Mad]

Mahdi Army lowers its profile, anticipating arrival of U.S. troops

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mahdi Army militia members have stopped wearing their black uniforms, hidden their weapons and abandoned their checkpoints in an apparent effort to lower their profile in Baghdad in advance of the arrival of U.S. reinforcements.

"We have explicit directions to keep a low profile . . . not to confront, not to be dragged into a fight and to calm things down," said one official who received the orders from the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Al-Sadr heads the Mahdi Army, Iraq's largest Shiite militia, headquartered in Najaf.

The official asked not to be named because he was not authorized to reveal the militia's plans.

Militia members say al-Sadr ordered them to stand down shortly after President George Bush's announcement that the U.S. would send 17,500 more American troops to Baghdad to work alongside the Iraqi security forces.

The decision by al-Sadr to lower his force's profile in Baghdad will likely cut violence in the city and allow American forces to show quick results from their beefed up presence. But it is also unlikely in the long term to change the balance of power here. Mahdi Army militiamen say that while they remain undercover now, they are simply waiting for the security plan to end.

"If the Mahdi Army is attacked, they will defend themselves," said Sheikh Abdul Razzaq al-Nidawi, a senior al-Sadr official in Najaf. "American troops are the enemy troops . . . if the Americans want armed resistance, we are ready, but we will work hard not to get involved in an armed opposition and we will work hard to endure the pressure even if we make sacrifices to keep our people and country safe."

Mahdi Army sources said that their heavy weaponry had been moved from Sadr City or hidden since the announcement.

 

[ska invita]

Mahdi Army lowers its profile, anticipating arrival of U.S. troops

This is interesting - the last "surge" on Fallujah was similiarly pre-announced for weeks before it happened. In military terms this means that any realy important "targets" have plenty of time to work out their response - or just leave. Never has a war been fought with so much public deliberation.

As a result Fallujah was like a sadistic and inefective show trial - absolutely no shock, no awe, just plenty spilt blood and rubble.

Statistically 80% of sectarian violence takes place within 30 miles of the Green Zone (so they say on the tv) - in otherwords the whole of Baghdad. This is the justification for the surge - as was the justification for the destruction of Fallujah.

If this surge is even half of what happened in Fallujah there will be nothing left but rubble - also in Fallujah residents were told to leave - this is just not possible in Baghdad: population 6million.

This isnt an issue of more troops/less troops, its about how many innocents are going to get killed - Bloodbath doesnt begin to describe it, I fear.

 

[laptop]

In his State of the Union speech Bush promised to remove "unneccessary restrictions" on US and "Iraqi" forces.

Change in the Rules of Engagement, then

 

[slaar]

That last bit is kind of interesting. I recall all those stories of academics and other intellectuals being 'mysteriously' assassinated early on during the occupation. I was reminded of the stuff the first einsatzgruppen were doing in places like occupied Poland, depoliticising the country by simply shooting the intelligensia and terrorising the rest into fleeing for their lives.

Well, intellectuals and academics being targeted is pretty much a feature of all extreme 'revolutionary' situations.