What the great progress of The Surge (aka, the McCain esclation) looks like
Despite Maverick McCain's unbounded faith in his Surge plan and the claims of brilliant success from our Savior-General Petraeus, the Iraq War goes on. Juan Cole comments on the horrific double-suicide bombings on Friday in Baghdad (91 Dead in 2 Baghdad Blasts Informed Comment blog 02/02/08):
Two women set off separate suicide bombs in two markets in Baghdad on Friday, killing at least 91 persons and wounding a similar number. Contrary to what this AP squib implies, the bombings suggest neither that "al-Qaeda" is running out of men nor that it is desperate. Women were used because they would be less likely to be closely searched, in a society where gender segregation and female honor and chastity are important values. The story that the women had Downs syndrome seems unlikely to be true; you wouldn't trust a sensitive terror plot to someone without their full faculties. Rather, the bombings show that the Sunni Arab guerrillas seeking to destabilize Iraq have not been defeated and are still capable of making a big strike right under the noses of the surge troops. And that is how guerrilla war is-- large conventional forces find it difficult to curb it.
McClatchy News (formerly Knight-Ridder) is still doing a good job on reporting on the war as they have since the buildup to the invasion, making them nearly unique among major American journalistic enterprises: Iraqi insurgents find female bombers can skirt security by Leila Fadel and Hussein Kadhim 02/01/08. Fadel and Kadhim note in their report, "As is frequently the case in accounts of violence, U.S. officials offered a death toll that was only half that of Iraqi authorities'."
See also Women suicide bombers kill 72 in attacks on Baghdad markets by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 01/02/08. Cockburn is still doing reporting from Iraq despite the not-inconsiderable dangers. He also speaks Arabic, which many of the US reporters who have done Iraq War reporting do not.
He writes:
Al-Qa'ida has mounted a series of attacks in the past week, mostly targeting leaders of the Sunni tribal militia, al-Sahwah, which opposes al-Qa'ida. The bombing of Ghazil, in a predominantly Shia part of the city, will also have been aimed at provoking Shia retaliation against Sunni Muslims, who might then look again to al-Qa'ida for protection. ...
Al-Qa'ida has increasingly been using women as suicide bombers because they are never searched by male police officers men or soldiers, and there is a shortage of women to do the job in Iraq's overwhelmingly male security forces.
The atrocities show that al-Qa'ida is still a powerful force with many recruits willing to kill themselves, and is backed by an organisation with intelligence, explosives and the means to detonate them. In recent weeks, it has been targeting al-Sahwah leaders and has often succeeded in penetrating their security. Last week, a car bomb exploded next to the house of Abu Marouf, an al-Sahwah leader commanding 13,000 men, in the village of Khan Dari, between Baghdad and Fallujah.
When I met him four days earlier, he was surrounded by guards and chose which of his many vehicles to travel in at the last moment to prevent assassination. Even so, al-Qa'ida was able to get a bomb close to his home and wounded four of his guards.
Despite improving security, Baghdad was a very fearful city even before yesterday's attacks and will now be more so.
Hasn't Cockburn heard from Savior-General Petraeus and Maverick McCain that things are going great in Iraq?
And, whatever the mix of motivations that produced the 2003 invasion, oil revenues are very much part of what is at stake in Iraq. The Information Clearing House in reports on a 01/31/08 item in on Akhbar Alkhaleej newspaper (Iraqi sister paper to Bahrain's Gulf Daily News):
An Iraqi MP preferred to remain anonymous told the newspaper that highly confidential negotiations took place by representatives from American oil companies, offering $5 million to each MP who votes in favor of the Oil and Gas law.
Juan Cole also corrects the record that Hillary Clinton misstated about the 1998 end of weapons inspections in Iraq which was used as the justification of the Operation Desert Fox bombing in 1998. (Probably not the most inspired name for an American military operation in light of the fact that the Second World War German Gen. Ernst Rommel was famously known as the "Desert Fox".) Our crack "press corps" manages to pretty much ignore the periodic bombing that the US conducted against Iraq throughout the 1990s, of which Operation Desert Fox was the most significant. Cole writes (Iraq and Iran in the Democratic Debate 02/01/08):
It is worth noting that Clinton misstated the 1998 events. The US did not bomb Iraq because Saddam "kicked out" the UN weapons inspectors. The US decided to bomb Iraq for other reasons and therefore ordered the inspectors out of the country. The myth that Saddam "kicked out" the inspectors just won't die.
"Torture works," an American special forces major – now, needless to say, a colonel – boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men's anuses – and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees – has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned – the "waterboarding" technique – before they could be seen by US investigators?
Yet only a few days ago, I came across a medieval print in which a prisoner has been strapped to a wooden chair, a leather hosepipe pushed down his throat and a primitive pump fitted at the top of the hose where an ill-clad torturer is hard at work squirting water down the hose. The prisoner's eyes bulge with terror as he feels himself drowning, all the while watched by Spanish inquisitors who betray not the slightest feelings of sympathy with the prisoner. Who said "waterboarding" was new? The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the inquisition. ...
Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA's "waterboarding" did not confess that they could fly to meet the devil. And who knows if the CIA did not end up believing him. (my emphasis)
Torture does not work, as history shows by Robert Fisk The Independent 02/01/08:
