Beginning Of The End...

[gurgen]

Well, well, the Amerikanskis have a lot of work on their hands.

 

Let's see how ruthless they really are.

[America-Hye]

So now I know the true colors of some of you here. How can any self-respecting Armenian condone this kind of thing? This is what the Turks did to my male relatives in Constantinople, string them up like dead meat. I spit on those of you who make excuses for these actions SHAME ON YOU, AMOT, AMOT

[America-Hye]

Sadam was like a rat that killed the Shiite vermin. Perhaps, in retrospect he was a good thing, killing these vermin. Bush is so much in the hands of the Conservative Chrisians that he has no common sense.

[Accelerated]

You can’t impose democracy on people whose only democratic idea is either a murdering dictator or fire-breathing mullah. Americans didn’t have a clue about the region and the people before start of the war and nor do they now

 

 

Armat, and what brand of 'democracy' whould you have the US install in Iraq? Cambodian PolPot style, or perhaps Indonesian Suharto style?

 

Have no illusions, the best possible outcome of this for the US is to have another iron-fisted Sadaam installed, another US lackey basically. If true democracy was allowed to take place (ie. free and fair elections), the US would have another Iran on its hands - that would put a large chunk of the worlds oil supplies in the hands of bearded mullahs.

[Accelerated]

....forgot to mention the flowering democracy in Afghanistan following the defeat of the Soviet backed government - these last two years in particular. Edited April 7, 2004 by Accelerated

[gurgen]

Ah well, as long as the American illusion is alive eh Accel

[joseph parikian]

07 Apr 2004 15:53

 

 

Fierce fighting sweeps Iraqi cities, Shi'ite areas

By Akram Saleh

 

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S.-led forces battled Sunni guerrillas and a spreading Shi'ite uprising on Wednesday, with Iraqi passions inflamed by the explosion of a rocket in the grounds of a mosque that witnesses said killed 25 people.

 

The last three days have seen 35 coalition soldiers and at least 200 Iraqis killed in a burgeoning two-front war now calling into question U.S. plans to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis in June.

 

Battles raged between Marines and guerrillas in the Sunni city of Falluja and witnesses said the office of a Muslim organisation in the grounds of a mosque was hit by a rocket. Locals said at least 25 people were killed.

 

A senior U.S. official said the military was investigating whether its forces had fired missiles at the mosque -- something which would raise tensions even further in a country seething with anger at the widespread fighting.

 

The U.S. military confirmed that 12 Marines had been killed on Tuesday in a seven-hour battle in the Sunni Muslim city of Ramadi, 110 km west of Baghdad.

 

It was one of the costliest battles for U.S. forces in Iraq since the war that toppled Saddam Hussein began last March.

 

"Eleven Marines died while engaged with the anti-Iraqi forces for more than seven hours; one died from wounds suffered during the firefight," the U.S. military said in a statement.

 

A U.S. soldier was killed in fighting north of Baghdad on Tuesday evening and another killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Baghdad on Wednesday morning, bringing to 443 the number of U.S. troops killed in action in Iraq since the invasion last year.

 

Since Sunday, clashes across Iraq have killed 33 U.S. troops, a Ukrainian soldier and a Salvadoran soldier.

 

The U.S. military launched a major operation this week to secure Ramadi and Falluja, where four U.S. private security guards were killed last week and their bodies set ablaze and mutilated by a jubilant crowd of Iraqis.

 

In Ramadi a column of black smoke rose from the city centre and gunfire and blasts echoed across the city. Streets appeared deserted except for masked guerrillas with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Mosques broadcast calls for a holy war against the American troops.

 

In Falluja, dozens of Iraqis were killed. Doctors said at least 36 were killed on Tuesday, and locals said the toll was much higher as many were unable to reach the main hospital.

 

One mosque was being used as a makeshift morgue. The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed for access to be restored to the hospital, spokeswoman Nada Doumani said.

 

Doctors said 25 of the dead were in a house destroyed by a blast. Locals said it had been hit by a missile fired by a U.S. helicopter.

 

The U.S. military said it had no information on the incident.

 

"There had been enemy resistance and Marines have repeatedly repelled that resistance as well as conducting raids against key targets in the heart of Falluja city," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. army in Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad.

 

North of Baghdad, a U.S. helicopter landed after being hit by gunfire. The U.S. army said there were no casualties.

 

SHI'ITE UPRISING

 

Elsewhere in Iraq, followers of the Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have fought running battles with foreign troops in the southern cities of Nassiriya, Amara, Kut and Kerbala in an uprising that has claimed more than 150 lives since Sunday.

 

An aide to Sadr told a news conference that some U.S. soldiers had been captured in the fighting. "Some tribes have captured some occupation forces on the streets," Qays al-Khazali told a news conference in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf.

 

Kimmitt said U.S.-led forces would destroy Sadr's Mehdi Army militia and that Sadr would be arrested. "In the central and southern regions of Iraq the coalition and Iraqi security forces are conducting operations to destroy the Mehdi Army," he said.

 

The uprising by Shi'ites raised fears in Washington that U.S. forces, already battling a Sunni insurgency, faced a Vietnam-style quagmire as they try to pacify the country ahead of the planned transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

 

The head of Sadr's office in Kerbala was killed in fighting with Polish troops in the city, local police spokesman Rahman Mashawi said.

 

Ukrainian troops pulled out of Kut on Wednesday after clashes there in recent days and regrouped in their base camp, the defence ministry in Kiev said. It said the move was "on the request of U.S. representatives in the civil administration and with the objective to save soldiers' lives".

 

Coalition sources said a South African working for a British security company had been killed in Kut on Wednesday when Shi'ite militiamen attacked the house he was living in.

 

Bulgaria summoned ambassadors of the United States, Britain, Spain and Poland to the foreign ministry on Wednesday asking for back-up for 450 Bulgarian soldiers stationed in Kerbala.

 

The base has come under attack several times by Shi'ite militiamen, and a Bulgarian civilian truck driver was killed in an attack on a convoy in southern Iraq on Tuesday.

 

Sadr has appealed to all Iraqis, whatever their religion, to help expel the occupiers. "This insurrection shows that the Iraqi people are not satisfied with the occupation and they will not accept oppression," he said in a statement on Tuesday.

 

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, in London for talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said thousands more foreign troops might be needed to maintain order.

 

President George W. Bush vowed the campaign by Sadr's supporters would not derail Washington's plans. "We will pass sovereignty on June 30," he told a campaign rally in Arkansas on Tuesday. "We're not going to be intimidated by thugs and assassins."

 

A U.S. opinion poll released on Monday showed support for Bush's handling of Iraq at a new low of 40 percent, with 44 percent wanting U.S. troops withdrawn.

 

In Hawija, north of Baghdad, eight Iraqis were killed in clashes between U.S. troops and protesters who rallied in a show of support for guerrillas in Falluja and Ramadi. The U.S. army said three soldiers had been wounded in the clashes.

 

(Additional reporting by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Ramadi, Adnan Hadi in Kirkuk and Fiona O'Brien and Luke Baker in Baghdad)

 

http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle...storyID=4767960

[joseph parikian]

From HAARETZ

 

Analysis / An Iraqi intifada

 

By Zvi Bar'el

 

 

 

The last four days of clashes in Iraq, which have left dozens of locals and Americans dead, are not another chapter in the series of random attacks that have characterized the day-to-day security situation.

 

 

 

 

They appear to be the first signs, and maybe more so, of an uprising that has already earned the title of intifada.

 

A large group of Shi'ites, defined as loyalists to a young political leader by the name of Muqtada al-Sader, has initiated an organized struggle against the coalition forces under the banner of a local Iraqi liberation movement, rather than a pan-Islamic one, such as that of the radical groups.

 

Al-Sader's loyalists are still a minority that has yet to rein in the support of Iraq's Shi'ite majority; but this is what they are striving for.

 

Reports that the United States is weighing the option of sending more forces to Iraq in the wake of the dangerous developments testifies to the fact that we are dealing with a multifaceted threat that could, if the uprising continues, drag Iraq into a civil war.

 

Muqtada al-Sader is gifted with a sweeping rhetoric and the same public support enjoyed by his father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sader, an important Shi'ite religious leader killed by Saddam Hussein in 1999. After the war in Iraq, the young al-Sader managed to take control of Baghdad's large Shi'ite quarter, setting up a number of militia groups estimated to number some 10,000 fighters. He has also established power centers in Basra and Nasariye, as well as the Shi'ite towns in the south of the country.

 

Al-Sader's strength led him to arrive at unspoken "agreements" with the U.S. military. Under these "agreements," the U.S. army remained outside of areas under al-Sader's control. But these "agreements" collapsed recently when the Americans realized al-Sader was using the relative quiet to entrench his strength and, apparently and primarily, to set up "an Iranian extension" in Iraq.

 

Al-Sader's war against the coalition forces is the offshoot of an internal power struggle, primarily against the leadership of Ali al-Sistani, who is accepted as the religious and political leader of the religious Shi'ite majority. Al-Sistani is not an ally of the United States and has posed some serious challenges to the U.S. administration in Iraq. Among other things, he was the one to demand that the elections be brought forward, and he almost canceled the agreement reached last month with regard to the text of the temporary constitution.

 

For now, however, al-Sistani continues to adhere to the tactic of a nonviolent struggle against the coalition forces, in keeping with his understanding that the orderly handing over of power to an Iraqi government, followed by elections, will place most of the positions of power in the hands of his supporters.

 

This appears to be the move that al-Sader wants to undermine through the use of violent acts on the part of his loyalists, who have been operating in recent days with the cooperation of Sunni activists, particularly in the city of Falluja, which has seen most of the latest fighting. This cooperation with the Sunni in Falluja is a new development that is likely to give the random attacks on the coalition forces - attacks attributed to Saddam loyalists - a degree of legitimacy, under Shi'ite auspices.

 

At the directive of the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant against al-Sader, who is now considered a fugitive. The Americans are now faced with the dilemma of choosing between making an effort to apprehend al-Sader and a "targeted killing."

 

The problem revolves around not only the personal fate of al-Sader, but also the implications each of the aforesaid actions could have on the standpoints of the other Shi'ite movements and the transfer of power to an Iraqi administration - a move that is slated to take place in two-and-a-half months.

 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/413051.html

Edited April 7, 2004 by joseph parikian

[Accelerated]

"We have a serious problem in Iraq": Rumsfeld

 

indeed...

[Anonymouse]

Well, if you asked me before the invasion I could have told you this. But yes, yes, shut up you anti American non patriot rational thinkers. HOW DARE YOU CRITICIZE AND BRING UP FACTS ABOUT THE LACK OF FACTS REGARDING WMDs AND IRAQS TIE TO 911. ONLY IDIOT ANTI PATRIOTIC DUMBASS THINKING MORONS DARE DO QUESTION THE VERACITY OF THE STORY.

[Accelerated]

British overtures to Iran set allies at odds

By Alec Russell in Washington

April 15, 2004

 

 

 

British officials in Iraq have all but ignored President George Bush's plan to foster a new democracy in the country in favour of their own agenda, according to an American former official in Baghdad's interim government.

 

His comments mark the first time an official has publicly let the mask of co-operation between the White House and Whitehall slip.

 

They also highlight the difficulties facing Tony Blair at his meeting with Mr Bush tomorrow when the two leaders will try to plot the transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, which is due in 11 weeks.

 

Michael Rubin, who resigned from the Pentagon 10 days ago after returning from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, gave a stark account of fundamental divisions between British and American officials over how to run Iraq.

 

He suggested that British officials clearly had little interest in pursuing the White House vision of a democratic Iraq, a keystone of its foreign policy, and were too "soft" in confronting dissent.

 

He also said many US officials had been startled at their British counterparts' attempts to capitalise on their presence in southern Iraq for a "freelance" fostering of ties with Iran, one of Washington's most implacable enemies.

 

 

"That is a major policy decision for the White House," Mr Rubin said. "It should not be made in Basra" - the centre of the British zone of influence. "We got a sense that Britons were using the CPA as an outreach to Iran, which was not the Americans' intention."

 

Tensions between British and US officials have long been hinted at, not least between Paul Bremer, the US proconsul, and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former envoy to Baghdad who left - apparently in some frustration - last month.

 

One provisional authority insider said: "There was an understanding in the CPA that Bremer and Greenstock didn't like each other. It personified the differences between the two views. Greenstock thought Bremer was naive; Bremer thought Greenstock was pursuing the wrong policies."

 

Mr Rubin did not comment directly on relations between the two men. "Bremer is following the President's agenda. And, in general, most British diplomats still don't agree with the President's agenda."

 

Mr Rubin was an adviser on the governance group of the provisional authority until March. He is now an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank and arguably the ideological engine room of Mr Bush's Administration.

 

He said he and other US officials had been deeply concerned by the softly-softly approach of the British to former Baathists, who Washington felt should be excluded from positions of authority, and also to Iranian groups.

 

"When I came in to Iraq back in July . . . it was clear that the US was serious about democracy, the Brits less so."

 

Whats really interesting in this whole article is the highlighted bit - its the peak of hipocracy: suggesting that somehow democracy could be established by eliminating dissent.