Yeah, I've seen what charred bodies are like. Very sickening. When I heard the news on CNN this morning, my first reaction was "Get our troops out of there!" The capture of Saddamn doesn't seem helping very much, if anything.
Oh God, CBS just showed charred bodies dangling over a bridge. I almost puked. Looking at those yelling & shouting Iraqis I had to ask myself: Is this the true welcome we get? What the hell happend to the jubilent Iraqi crowds soluting the troops?
we need a rapid ramp up to democracy and stability. this requires: 1) a crash course in civic duties for everyone. this requires massive propaganda and state-led public reeducation. 2) strict curbs on dissent and anything that will incite unrest. this includes slamming the door on religious and political extremism. 3) a clear, stern message needs to be sent to the iraqi people that violence (or civic disorder for that matter) will not be tolerated. we sent clear messages to the japanese and germans when we hung all their war-time leaders. public executions of the murderers who committed this act today would really do the trick here. we may no longer have torture in our repertoire, but thankfully we still have the death penalty. =================== You may disagree with the spartan approach i'm suggesting. You may still insist on a gentle hand to ward off world opinion and arab sentiment. but i ask you, has it ever made a difference? what will make a difference is when real results, iraqis going to work, iraqis voting in a real election, iraqis learning what is true democracy, are clearly seen by everyone. religious freedom? they can have all the religious freedom they want, so long as it has nothing to do with the state, nothing to do with oppression of others, and nothing to do with violence. any religious leader professing otherwise, will go the way of david koresh. is it not the same way in america?
no. the difference is that american soldiers never did to the iraqis what the KMT did to the taiwanese (i.e. massacre tens of thousands of them, impose a reign of terror, imprison and execute a whole generation of intelligentsia/gentry/leaders). if america does but a tiny fraction of what the KMT did, iraq would be a whole lot more peaceful today. why? because all of their religious fanatics or anyone with an idea for that matter would be in hiding or already dead. totalitarian regimes do one thing terribly well, and that is keeping the order. i'm not proposing we start a authoritarian govt in iraq. nor am i proposing we impose sharia law (even saddam didn't use it). but certainly we need tougher laws and certainly better enforcement of existing ones to keep the order. there is a formula: the more enforcement you have, the more lenient you can make your punishments. the less enforcement you have, the more draconian the punishment must be. the ultimate goal being to curb violation of civic order. we obviously are terribly lacking in enforcement. and so unless we are going to be irresponsible about seeing more of our boys come home in bodybags, isn't the solution terribly obvious? we're not dealing with a nation of bourgeois secular landowners here (though there may be some of these too among the iraqis). we're dealing with criminals, who probably have nothing to lose, have nothing to fear, fanned by fanatical religious rhetoric, and quite simply don't know any better. going there to spread words of love just ain't going to cut it. what we have got to do in a hurry is: 1) rebuild that country asap, to give their people something worth protecting other than these criminals. 2) put the fear of god (or america) into these criminals. we need public executions for your basic crimes, robbery, murder, participation in terrorist groups. (weren't lincoln's killers all hung too?) 3) shoot all the clerics who will incite violence against the occupation or anyone else for that matter. 4) put in a hype/propaganda machine and total reeducation program that will make even Kim Jong-Il proud. ================== how is this different from israel you may ask: 1) we're reestablishing their state with clear timetables. 2) we're rebuilding their country. 3) we're giving them real freedoms and a real western democracy. 4) we do not have to resort to indiscriminate killings. but if we don't do all these things i've suggested, then i believe it is only a matter of time, before our troops are so demoralised that we pull out unilaterally (letting that country sink into fundamentalist hell) or we sink to a level no better than the israelis in palestine.
Lil; If your solutions worked then there would be no conflict between Palestine and Israel. Russia has done far worse to the Chechens than anything we've considered in Iraq yet they are suffering more casualties and terrorism than we are. A lot of people like to cite Germany and Japan has good examples but those are totally different situations. At the start of WWII Germany and Japan were among the most modern advanced countries in the World. Germany had a vibrant democracy for almost 20 years and were very well educated forwards looking. The Japanese were very united and focussed that allowed MacArthur to carefully use the Emperor to his advantage. Most importantly both countries were ethnically homogenous. In Iraq we don't have any of that. This is a country that has known almost nothing but dictatorship, been under externally imposed sanctions, and is a seething cauldron of ethnic and religious conflict. That's why the America didn't suffer a single violent death in postwar Germany or Japan. Unlike the hundreds so far in Iraq. More dangerous the enemies we face don't fear death. In fact they welcome it. They want to see us crack down hard because that makes their case for them. Don't believe me just look at Al Qaeda's propaganda. You seem to recognize this yet are still proposing a course that hasn't worked in similar conflicts like Chechnya and for the Soviets in Afghanistan or for the Israelis in Gaza. What it has done is just embitter people more against the occupiers and fight harder since they see they have nothing to lose.
This is a very good post Lil,...In my view we are being soft. 80% of the crap seems to be happening around Fallujah, and we need to act with a stronger response. The rest of the country of Iraq is no where near giving us the strife that this town has...A majority of areas are much more safe and stable with regards to volunteerism, and cooperative will. (I dare say the rest of Iraq is near pacified) The people of Iraq have known and understand force, and it's time we search every home in the town...Bring in the heavy guns, and instill an example of control in this town...If anyone shows dangerous resistance...shoot them dead. We can't allow the townsfolk to unify and glee over this...Saddam would have killed anyone in a whim if ill will or acts are even considered...An estimated 300,000 have died in his 25+ years of control with terroristic-like ravage...That indiscriminated killing is thankfully over, and we should not enact this, but we do need to allow our soldiers to do what they do best with regards to this town...
If the criminals/ terrorists/thugs in Fallujah are like minded with Al Qaeda,...then this gives us more reason to crack down on them...with regards to comparing other conflicts, keep in mind that each situation is relative with circumstances, issues and events that neither you or I can properly correlate with irregardless to superficial similarities...
Roxran and Lil; If y'all think that the rest of Iraq is behind us so much y'all haven't been watching the massive protests by Shiite's against us that have been having all this week or listened to the number two Shiite leader Sadr publicly criticize us. While its true every conflict is different but it would be a mistake to not learn from those in similar situations. In the case of Iraq it has much more similarity to Chechnya than post WWII Germany.
I feel really sorry for the families of those dead. Also, TV stations should blur those graphic scenes. Watching charred bodies being dragged across the streets with blood dripping is grossly inhumane. Where the hell are the back-ups? Don't our troops have aerial support anytime within 3~5 min?
all the more need to clamp down and reeducate these people. public protest is fine. but violence is no-no. time to get that message across in a big way. we simply disagree on this. russia is fighting chechnyan independence/nationalism. israel is fighting palestinian independence/nationalism. the US is NOT fighting iraqi independence or nationalism. we're trying to get them to rebuild their nation. we're trying to help them regain their independence. these are publically-stated goals, with clear timetables and international commitments. the situation is far more akin to post-ww2 germany/japan than to chechnya/palestine.
Lil and Roxran, It seems that you would advocate the US being as hard and murderous as Saddam was when he was in power. If we are going to simply act like Saddam, what was the reason for taking him out in the first place. If we are going to shoot people "in the head" for the slightest resistance, what makes us any better than Saddam was? As far as historical parallels go, it seems to me that Chechnya and Palestine have much more in common with Iraq than post-WWII Japan and Germany. Japan and Germany fought us tooth and nail and were defeated on the battlefield, their forces decimated. In Iraq, the enemy melted into the populace and disappeared only to attack us with guerilla tactics, much like is happening in Chechnya and Palestine.
The idea that Iraqi nationalism is not fueling the resistance to US occupation is absurd. It doesn't matter what our "publicly stated goals" are. Many Iraqis simply don't believe these statements. And why should they, with this Administration's track record. Even with the best intentions, extreme competence, and a very well conceived pre and post invasion plan, the chances of successfully imposing a stable democracy on a country like Iraq would be extremely low. In the current Iraqi situation, the US meets none of those criteria, which makes the chances of success almost nonexistent.
Lil; A lot of others have already stated what I was going to respond to this but I will add that there is a fundamental problem of whether we can impose "independence" on them. Unlike Germany and Japan Iraq for most of the 20th C. been under foreign control, in fact it is an artificial creation of foreign powers. In Iraq and throughout former colonial countries in the Third World there is a huge distrust of foreign intervention. Any level of intervention by a western power is inevitably percieved as an attempt to reestablish colonialism. While we may have noble motivations towards Iraq nearly all Iraqis harbor some level of distrust that we aren't just seeking to turn Iraq into an American puppet. While recent opinion polls show that most Iraqis are against violence towards coalition troops there is a very wide majority that don't trust our motivations and that would like to see us leave as soon as possible. Nationalism is also a strong force that often defies logic. For instance as you know with Taiwan and the PRC nearly everyone agrees that war between the two would be disastrous for both yet because of nationalist feelings on the PRC side they are still willing to uphold that as an option for reunification. There's also a great story from the Civil War that also illustrates my point. In the battle for Vicksburg a bunch of Union troops had one ragged Confederate soldier surrounded but who was still holding off the Union troops. The Union soldiers asked him to surrender and pointed out that as a poor white man he wasn't benefitting from slavery and that the practice of slavery was even hurting his chances to succeed because he couldn't compete with the free labor that the big plantations got. His response was he wasn't fighting for slavery or for the big plantations but he was fighting to get them out of his land.
OK, the sunnis are shooting at us, and now the shiites too. Things there seem to be getting progressively worse. from the Times: April 5, 2004 7 U.S. Soldiers Die in Iraq as a Shiite Militia Rises Up By JOHN F. BURNS AGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — A coordinated Shiite militia uprising against the American-led occupation rippled across Iraq on Sunday, reaching into the heart of Baghdad and the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City on the capital's outskirts and racking the holy city of Najaf and at least two other cities in southern Iraq. Seven American soldiers were killed in Sadr City, one of the worst single losses for the American forces in any firefight since Baghdad was captured a year ago. An Iraqi health official in Najaf said 24 people had been killed and about 200 wounded in clashes that ensued when armed militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, a 31-year-old firebrand Shiite cleric, besieged a garrison commanded by Spanish troops on the road leading into Najaf from neighboring Kufa. An American military spokesman said one Salvadoran soldier had been killed in Kufa and 13 soldiers wounded, including an American. All the other casualties were said to be Iraqis. Within hours of a call by Mr. Sadr to his followers to "terrorize your enemy," his militiamen, said to number tens of thousands across Iraq, emerged into the streets of Baghdad, Najaf, Kufa and Amara, a city 250 miles south of Baghdad where four Iraqis were reported killed in clashes with British troops. Forbidden to bear arms under a decree issued last year by the American occupation authority, the Sadr militiamen bristled with a wide array of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades that were fired at American tanks in Sadr City. Taking advantage of an American policy that has largely kept American and other occupation troops out of volatile Shiite population centers like Sadr City, Najaf and Kufa, the militiamen succeeded in taking control of checkpoints and police stations in all three cities that had been staffed by the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force. Residents in the three centers said the Iraqis had abandoned their posts almost as soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the militiamen in unchallenged control — and punching a huge hole in American hopes that American-trained Iraqis can be relied on increasingly to take over from American troops in providing security in Iraq's major cities. The insurrection, which spread across the Shiite heartland in a matter of hours came five days after the ambush in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Falluja, outside Baghdad, in which a mob mutilated the bodies of four American security guards and hanged two of them from a bridge. Together, the events in Falluja and the other cities on Sunday appeared likely to shake the American hold on Iraq more than anything since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's government last April 9. In effect, the militia attacks confronted the American military command with what has been its worst nightmare as it has struggled to pacify Iraq: the spread of an insurgency that has stretched a force of 130,000 American troops from the minority Sunni population to the majority Shiites, who are believed to account for about 60 percent of Iraq's population of 25 million. Privately, senior American officers have said for months that American prospects here would plummet if the insurgency spread into the Shiite population, leaving American and allied troops with no safe havens anywhere except possibly in the Kurdish areas of the north. Until now, powerful Shiite clerics with large followings in Shiite centers like Sadr City, with its two million people, and Najaf and Karbala, sister holy cities about 80 miles south of Baghdad, each with a population of more than a million, have largely avoided pitting their private militias against the American-led occupation forces, preferring to challenge the Americans politically. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, considered Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, has urged followers to protest peacefully. But on Sunday, Mr. Sadr's veiled threats to stir public disorder erupted into carefully orchestrated violence, with potentially dire implications over the long term for the Americans, and for Iraq. In Washington, officials said their concern about Mr. Sadr grew daily. "Sistani is playing a not unconstructive role in the politics," a senior administration official said. "It is not clear that what Sadr has in mind is a peaceful democratic future for Iraq." As reinforcements of American tanks headed toward Sadr City, Kufa and Najaf at nightfall, a senior American officer rushed into a news briefing inside the American headquarters compound in central Baghdad wearing a helmet, after viewing the events in Kufa and Najaf from one of the American helicopters that hovered over the city during the uprising. Using the insistently understated language that the American command has used at every juncture of the war, he described the Najaf fighting as "a fairly significant event," but added, "At this point, it's pretty settled down." The senior officer appeared to define the importance of the uprising in terms of the militiamen's failure to penetrate allied bases, and their failure to inflict higher casualties on the American-led forces. "There was never any danger of a coalition compound being breached or overrun, or extraordinary numbers of casualties being taken by coalition personnel," the officer said. Dan Senor, spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian head of the American occupation authority, struck a similarly untroubled note. "We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems," he said. Using a measure that has repeatedly been used by American officials to play down the threat of insurgency across Iraq, he said the people who staged Sunday's attacks represented "a minuscule percentage" of the Iraqi population, most of whom, the Americans believe, are solidly behind American plans to try and implant an American-style democratic system here after Iraq regains its sovereignty on June 30. But these, defiantly, were not the measures that were taken of the day's events among the large groups of Shiites who gathered at street corners and along alleyways in the contested cities as night fell. Their refrain was one of contempt for the Americans and their allies for losing control, for at least several hours, of Sadr City and Kufa. "The occupation is over!" young men on the streets of Sadr City yelled joyfully as Western reporters approached. "We are now controlled by Sadr! The Americans should stay out!" Mr. Sadr, the son of a powerful Shiite ayatollah who was assassinated by agents of Mr. Hussein in Najaf in 1999, has been a menacing presence in the shadows of the American occupation. He has refused to involve his organization with the American attempt to construct democratic institutions, calling them a ruse intended to place the country under permanent American control. He has threatened to establish an alternative government, and to send his militia, known as the Mahdi Army, into battle with American troops. A religious student, too young to be accepted as a serious religious authority, he has used the latent power of his militia to gain a voice in Shiite politics matched only by Ayatollah Sistani, who is in his 60's and is said to view Mr. Sadr with an intense personal distaste. While Mr. Sadr has made no effort to disguise his political ambitions, Ayatollah Sistani has insisted that cleric-based groups like Mr. Sadr's should stay out of direct involvement in politics. On Sunday, Ayatollah Sistani sent a message from his headquarters in Najaf in which he appeared eager not to distance himself from a cause that had attracted such popular support among Shiites, but also seemed intent on discouraging further armed challenges to the Americans. An aide to Ayatollah Sistani said he considered the militiamen's cause to be "legitimate" and condemned the "acts waged by the coalition forces." But he added: "The ayatollah has called on the demonstrators to remain calm, to keep a cool head and allow the problem to be resolved through negotiation." The scene for the uprising was set a week ago, when American troops raided the Baghdad offices of a popular newspaper, Al Hawza, that was the mouthpiece for Mr. Sadr, and chained its doors under an order by Mr. Bremer closing the paper for 60 days. American officials said Mr. Bremer had acted because of inaccurate reporting in the paper that incited hatred for the Americans, including a February dispatch that an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile. For days, demonstrators in the thousands marched through the streets of Baghdad and Najaf, hoisting portraits of Mr. Sadr and vowing retaliation against the Americans. But what appeared to have pushed Mr. Sadr into insurrection was the arrest by allied troops on Saturday — by probably Americans, although the American command did not say — of a cleric who was a senior aide to Mr. Sadr, Mustafa al-Yaqubi. A statement on Sunday from Iraq's interior ministry said Mr. Yaqubi was wanted in connection with the killing at a Najaf mosque last April of Ayatollah Sayyed Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a cleric the Americans brought back from exile in London in the hope of shifting the Shiite clerical establishment into a pro-American stance. Some reports, unconfirmed by the Americans, have said Mr. Sadr himself is on a list of 25 people who are wanted by the interior ministry in connection with the killing, and that he, too, is likely to be arrested. In any case, Mr. Sadr issued a statement early Sunday from the mosque in Kufa where he had barricaded himself telling his followers, in effect, to turn to violence. "There is no use for demonstrations, as your enemy loves to terrify and suppress opinions, and despises peoples," he said, referring to the Americans. "Terrorize your enemy, as we cannot remain silent over his violations." Jeffrey Gettleman and Christine Hauser contributed reporting for this article
Well other sources are reporting 10 US soldiers killed. Well I guess that these Shiites will just be lumped in with: "the dead enders", the "hussein's pissed-off sunni neighbors in fallujah" as Cohen calls them, the "foreign terrorists" or other terms the pro-war crowd is trying to call the resistance. I saw a rather stern, yet athletic, US general looking pretty impressive on TV a few days ago promising "overwhelming" I believe the adjective was, retaliation against Fallujah for the killing and brutal mutilation of the private military guys from the US. I suppose he or another similar guy will be on promising a similar action toward these Shiites in these cities as well. I heard Arnold De Borchgrave sp?, an American conservative on the radio talking how,about even if you took the US military's probably optimistic number of 5,000 armed insurgents, that it is big trouble. He said that approximately 300 armed IRA insurgents kept half the British Army tied up in Ireland for over 30 years using similar tactics. link
glynch, the hourly NPR news reports ( at npr.org ) that the Marines have moved into Fallujah. No other updates on the web come to mind. I don't have a TV. If we don't get these fools in line, we're going to need the draft to get enough foot soldiers just for Iraq, forget about any other commitments. On the mercenaries - we can't get enough soldiers to do soldier's work in Iraq. So now we get to pay 300-1000 dollars a day for these guys. And if they are American mercenaries, the opposition still gets a proganda victory when they die. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040412-607775,00.html A nation that goes to war on principle may not realize it will then have to hire private soldiers to keep the peace. The work of the four American civilians slaughtered in Fallujah last week was so shadowy that their families struggled to explain what exactly the men had been hired to do in Iraq. Marija Zovko says her nephew Jerry said little about the perils of the missions he carried out every day. "He wouldn't talk about it," she says. Even representatives for the private security company that employed the men, Blackwater USA, could not say what exactly they were up to on that fateful morning. "All the details of the attack at this point are haphazard at best," says Chris Bertelli, a spokesman for Blackwater. "We don't know what they were doing on the road at the time." What the murder of the four security specialists did reveal is a little known reality about how business is done in war-torn settings all over the globe. With U.S. troops still having to battle insurgents and defend themselves, the job of protecting everyone else in Iraq—from journalists to government contractors to the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer—is largely being done by private security companies stocked with former soldiers looking for good money and the taste of danger. Pentagon officials count roughly 20 private companies around the world that contract for security work, mainly in combat areas. They are finding plenty of it in Iraq. Scott Custer, a co-director of Custer Battles, based in Fairfax, Va., says as many as 30,000 Iraqis and "several thousand expats" are working for private outfits in Iraq. Security contractors make a lot more than the average soldier, but last week's events suggest that they may also be turning into more attractive targets for insurgents. "If they can chase us out," says Custer co-director Mike Battles, "then in a void, they become more powerful." . . . The current business boom is in Iraq. Blackwater charges its clients $1,500 to $2,000 a day for each hired gun. Most security contractors, like Blackwater's teams, live a comfortable if exhausting existence in Baghdad, staying at the Sheraton or Palestine hotels, which are not plush but at least have running water. Locals often mistake the guards for special forces or CIA personnel, which makes active-duty military troops a bit edgy. "Those Blackwater guys," says an intelligence officer in Iraq, "they drive around wearing Oakley sunglasses and pointing their guns out of car windows. They have pointed their guns at me, and it pissed me off. Imagine what a guy in Fallujah thinks." Adds an Army officer who just returned from Baghdad, "They are a subculture." . . . But with Congress and the Bush Administration reluctant to pay for more active-duty troops, the use of contractors in places like Iraq will only grow. A Pentagon official who opposes their use nonetheless detects an obvious if unsentimental virtue: "The American public doesn't get quite as concerned when contractors are killed." Perhaps. But that may prove to be yet another illusion that died in Fallujah last week.
Scott Custer, a co-director of Custer Battles , based in Fairfax, Va., says as many as 30,000 Iraqis and "several thousand expats" are working for private outfits in Iraq. I don't think I would want to work for a mercenary outfit named [edit] Custer.
