AP
Excerpt:
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Sunni Arab representatives said Tuesday they will end their boycott of Iraq’s parliament following a call for reconciliation by a radical Shiite cleric and promises that a kidnapped colleague will be released.
The easing of tensions in the government came on a day of violence. Bombings and shootings killed at least 47 people nationwide.
Gunmen seized an Iraqi diplomat on leave from his post in Iran as he was driving near his Baghdad home. Iraq’s Foreign Ministry said Wissam Jabr al-Awadi was a consul in the Iranian city of Kermanshah, a city with a large Kurdish population near the border with Iraq
Talking Points Memo
Excerpt: There’s a brutal, astonishing and final dispatch today from Lawrence Kaplan at the New Republic blog, The Plank. Let me reprint it in full …
Even by the degraded standards of everyday life in Baghdad, this report from CNN’s Nic Robertson comes as a shock:
One international official told me of reports among his staff that a 15-year-old girl had been beheaded and a dog’s head sewn on her body in its place; and of a young child who had had his hands drilled and bolted together before being killed.
From its gruesome particulars, the report goes on to describe the fear that has gripped even the most hardened Iraqis during this latest round of sectarian bloodletting. Robertson’s dispatch points to a revolting truth about the war in Iraq–one that American officers discovered long ago, but which has yet to penetrate fully the imaginations of theoreticians writing from a distant remove. The fact is, there is very little that we can do to dampen the sectarian rage and pathologies tearing Iraq apart at the seams. Did the Army make a mistake when it banished “counterinsurgency” from the lexicon of military affairs? Absolutely. Does it matter in Iraq? Probably not. How can you win over the heart and mind of someone who sews a dog’s head on a girl? Would more U.S. troops alter Iraq’s homicidal dynamic? Not really, given that, on the question of sectarian rage, America is now largely beside the point
Uruknet
Excerpt Surprise, surprise. In an interview with John King from CNN last Thursday, Dick Cheney said that withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be the “worst possible thing we could do.”
Doing his best to stoke the always simmering fears of so many US residents (let us be careful how we use the word “citizen”), Cheney said of the terrorist groups in Iraq, “If we pull out, they’ll follow us”…Lovely to watch how people like Cheney, and the minions who support his ilk, conveniently forget that there was no terrorism in Iraq prior to the US invasion/occupation. And one must love his “logic.” For according to Cheney, “whether we complete the job or not in Iraq” his beloved “terrorism” will “continue” … “only it’ll get worse.”
Then why stay in Iraq, Dick?
