You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Iraq’ tag.
Shattered lives, ruined families, revenge bombings. The regular SNAFU in Iraq, thanks to the benevolent Western powers.
The phrase mentioned above will, for many people, always have a slightly ironic connotation. The Iraqi people are still without an effective governing body. What makes the news now though is many people are killed when sectarian violence escalates and innocents die.
“The death toll from explosions at a market in Iraq’s second-largest city has risen to 43, Iraqi officials said Sunday.
They added that as many as 185 people were also wounded in Saturday’s blasts.”
The swampy sectarian stew that is Iraq continues to churn and froth, claiming more victims with every explosion and gun battle. The gormless words from the US about Afghanistan ring hollow for much of the world looks to the US’s first project; ‘Nation Building’ in Iraq looks a lot like anarchy.
“In other violence Sunday, a car bomb exploded near a school and a cluster of stores in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah west of Baghdad, killing two people and injuring four.”
I really think that someone has been massively aerosol spraying the ‘Mission Accomplished’ meme all over the western media. Newsflash bitches: Iraq is still broken and not getting better.
“At least four people have been killed and dozens wounded in a bombing at the provincial government building in the Iraqi city of Ramadi.
Police sources told Al Jazeera that a female suicide bomber entered the deputy governor’s office and blew herself up.”
I am thinking that people blowing themselves up in your parliament buildings is not usually a sign of peaceable progress toward a democratic state.
“More than 20 people were wounded in the blast.
“At least four people were killed and 23 others wounded, including women and children, by a female suicide bomber at the entrance to the provincial government building,” an interior ministry official said.”
Mission Accomplished, indeed. Is this the climate for any sort of reasonable governance to take place?
“Violence in the region has dropped from its peak in 2006 and 2007, but bombings and assassinations remain common.”
Err. No. The situation in Iraq is like trying to paint your house during a rainstorm and the only solution you can think of is using more paint.
“Many Iraqis worry that the ongoing political impasse, with no one able to form a government four months after parliamentary elections, will lead to increased violence.”
Whoa, no functioning government for four months? You think that little tidbit would be making the rounds on CNN and MSNBC. I would think that a nation’s imperialist conquests would be of utmost concern, or at least page two news once and awhile.
I really wish someone in the massive american military industrial complex had done their homework. Iraq was held together by an authoritarian secular regime that actively repressed the various cultural and religious in the region. Did they think that everyone would just kiss and make up after being repressed for so long? How would a democracy function in a society split along almost diametrically opposed religious and cultural fault lines?
Kinda like a chaotic higglety pigglety mess would be my estimation.
Iraq has dropped off of the news cycle in North America. We’re finished with the whole thing. The American presence in Iraq is still costing billions of dollars and hundreds of innocent lives on the ground. A shaky measure of stability has been achieved but nothing resembling a stable safe nation has yet been established.
“A suicide car bomber has killed at least four policemen and injured 10 outside a police station in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, an official in the interior ministry has said.
The attacker drove a vehicle packed with explosives into a gathering of police during a shift change at a station in the mainly Shia Amil district, in the southwestern area of Baghdad, the source said on Sunday.
This is the latest in a series of attacks on official buildings, including those to do with crime and punishment.”
Iraq is now fractured along sectarian lines. Bombings, shootings, kidnappings are all par for the course in America’s hub of Freedom and Democracy in the middle east. I’m thinking though that the oil is now flowing into the correct hands and the correct people are now in power. The people of Iraq can now squabble and kill each other as much as their inane religion dictates them to do because it will not effect the important people in Iraq.
News from Iraq is coming in fits and spurts. It requires something of this magnitude to break into the press services headlines. This from the CBC:
“Gunmen wearing Iraqi military uniforms raided homes in a Sunni village south of Baghdad, killing at least 24 people in execution-style attacks, officials said Saturday.
An army official said many of the victims, who included five women, were brutalized “beyond recognition.”
At least seven people were found alive, bound with handcuffs, said Baghdad’s security spokesman, Maj.-Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi.”
The violence, of course, is sectarian in nature.
“Many of the dead were members of local Sahwa, or Awakening Councils — one of several names for the Sunni fighters who changed the course of the war when they revolted against al-Qaeda in Iraq and joined the Americans in late 2006 and 2007, officials said. The fighters are also known as Sons of Iraq.”
So we have people who are the American’s allies being slaughtered. More interestingly the article goes and says:
“But the question of what to do with these nearly 100,000 people in the long term remains. The U.S. handed over control last year of the Awakening Councils to Iraq, which pays their roughly $300 monthly salaries.
The violence comes as Iraq’s major political blocs scramble to get enough parliamentary support to form a government after results from the March 7 election gave no single group enough seats to govern alone.”
No Laws, No Morals, No Accountability, NO PROBLEM!
The Iraqi government is paying people some $300 dollars a month to serve as an armed paramilitary presence in Iraq. What are they thinking exactly? Let us take the worst ideas from the US, yes I’m looking at you Blackwater and other mercenary groups, and implement them as civil policy. Nothing can go wrong there, especially when, as the article says, there is extra political turmoil because of the recent elections.
Fighting a fire with gasoline comes to mind.
In the lawless shamble that is occupied Iraq the private mercenaries have, and continue to run amok.
“Saad al-Muttalibi, an adviser to the Iraqi council of ministers, said on Friday that if the [5] guards did not receive a just sentence for the killing of 14 Iraqis in 2007, the issue would complicate relations between Iraq and the United States.”
Not particularly surprising. Gunning down innocent people is usually frowned on, unless of course they the enemy. Then it is O.K..
” Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government spokesman, said in a statement: “The Iraqi government will follow up on this issue in strength and resolution to bring those murderers of Blackwater to accountability in order to return the rights of iraqi people who are the victims of this crime.”
He said “the investigations carried out by the specialised Iraqi authorities confirmed with no doubt that the guards of Blackwater company have committed a criminal murder act and they have violated the combat environment rule to use force while there was no threat against them”
The Iraqi authorities are justifiably pissed off as Blackwater has had a history of shooting and looting in their country and want to see justice done. Yeah right:
“Ricardo Urbina, a district judge, dismissed the charges against the five men on Thursday, saying US justice department prosecutors improperly built their case on sworn statements that had been given under a promise of immunity.
Urbina said the government’s explanations were “contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility”.”
Technicality observed. Get out of Jail Free card handed out, problem solved.
It has been strangely quiet in the news about Iraq. It takes a significant event, as CBC reports, to make headlines about the shattered country.
“At least 136 people died Sunday after two car bombs detonated in Baghdad. With casualty figures still rising, officials said that nearly 600 people had been injured and taken to six area hospitals.
So many people were wounded that even civilian cars were pressed into service to take the casualties to area hospitals, said a Baghdad hospital official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The two vehicles were packed with explosives and detonated less than a minute apart in the centre of the Iraqi capital, officials said.”
Are we purging our collective memories of Iraq and the atrocities we have committed there? Do we think that not bringing Bush and Cheney in for war crimes will not incense the rest of the world?
Iraq is still being torn asunder. The coverage has moved on to Afghanistan and so has our consciousness. Our actions leave us accountable for so much destruction and chaos. We owe the people of Iraq and Afghanistan more than just bullets and bomb craters.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…