The Bush/McCain doctrine in Iraq

C

Cypress

Well-known member
A failed nation-state, unmitigated human misery, ethnic cleansing. Courtesy of BushCo. and their enablers.


Patrick Cockburn explains that among the main outcomes of the US troop escalation ("surge") was the Shiite victory in the 2007 battle for Baghdad, which has left hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs homeless and often in exile in Syria. He is also scathing on how the "Awakening Councils" are full of ex-al-Qaeda fighters who still despise the Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which returns the sentiment in spades. He points out that the era of good feeling in Washington DC and New York about Iraq is part of a cycle of unfounded optimism that has much more to do with US politics than the squalid situation on the ground in Iraq.

Contrary to the glowing depictions of Iraq in the US press, Baghdad is engulfed in a lake of sewage so big it can be seen on Google Earth, many neighborhoods lack water, and electricity supply is insufficient and spotty. Although the Iraqi government crows about building clinics, the fact is that most nurses and physicians have fled, and medicines are in short supply. Last I knew, water purification was being impeded by US blockades on chlorine trucks coming in from Jordan. Some 70% of Iraqis do not have access to clean water, and there have been 100 recent cases of cholera in the capital, especially in the slum of Sadr City.

In nearby Baquba to the northeast, most children cannot go to school because of the poor security and some of those who can faint from hunger. The lack of services, poor security and perceived US favoritism to Shiite have stirred anger and resentment in Baqubah against the US.
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juancole.com
 
So this is success? The neighborhood fighting is down but if you are Sunni you can't work for anyone but the US. Sunni cab drivers can't drive in Shia neighborhoods. We are not helping people obtain possession of their private property, one of the foundations to a successful democracy. And we are living under the false standard of delining body counts being equivilent to success.

During Vietnam, we used body counts to "show" that we were winning the war. Now we are using declining body counts to prove that the county is returning to normalcy. Bagdad is a ghettoized series of neighborhoods where one wrong turn and a shia or sunni family could find themselves dead or disappeared. Success should be measured by the rebuilding of the country. Are the jobs returning? are the refugees coming home? And when they do, can they have THEIR private property back? The answer to all those questions is no. Things are just quiet, they are not normal.
 
As Obama has correctly stated, "George Bush isn't running for president, but his policies are."

Obama will crush McCain.
 
You know it is funny how when posts like this make the board, WRL can't be found anywhere. When you have to start debating the reality of the war on the gound and how it has affected life in Iraq he is no where to be found. When he can debate big broad ideas that make good use of pictures and quotes that are 5 and 6 years old he is all over the board.
 
Socrtease said:
You know it is funny how when posts like this make the board, WRL can't be found anywhere. When you have to start debating the reality of the war on the gound and how it has affected life in Iraq he is no where to be found. When he can debate big broad ideas that make good use of pictures and quotes that are 5 and 6 years old he is all over the board.
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The fact that Iraq is a failed nation-state hopelessly split on sectarian lines and wracked by violence, doesn't fit in with "the surge is working" nonsense.


Iraq: Bombing Creates New Enemies

By Dahr Jamail, IPS News. Posted February 14, 2008.

Now that the smoke has cleared and the rubble settled, residents of a group of bombed Iraqi villages see the raid as really a U.S. loss.

Many Iraqis view the attack Jan. 10 by bombers and F-16 jets on a cluster of villages in the Latifiya district south of Baghdad as overkill.

"The use of B1 bombers shows the terrible failure of the U.S. campaign in Iraq," Iraqi Major General Muhammad al-Azzawy, a military researcher in Baghdad, told IPS. "U.S. military and political tactics failed in this area, and that is why this massacre. This kind of bombing is usually used for much bigger targets than small villages full of civilians. This was savagery."

The attack on Juboor and neighbouring villages just south of Baghdad had begun a week earlier with heavy artillery and tank bombardment. The attack followed strong resistance from members of the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Juboor tribe against groups that residents described as sectarian death squads.

"On Jan. 10, huge aircraft started bombing the villages," Ahmad Alwan from a village near Juboor told IPS. "We took our families and fled. We have never seen such bombardment since the 2003 American invasion. They were bombing everything and everybody."

Residents said two B1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets dropped at least 40,000 pounds of explosives on the villages and plantations within a span of 10 minutes.

"The al-Qaeda name is used once more to destroy another Sunni area," Akram Naji, a lawyer in Baghdad who has relatives in Juboor told IPS. "Americans are still supporting Iranian influence in Iraq by cleansing Baghdad and surroundings of Sunnis."

The cluster of Sunni villages was bombed just weeks after the U.S. military encouraged families to return to their village after heavy bombing earlier in which scores of people were killed. Many residents had fled fearing sectarian death squads, which they say were backed by the U.S.

Few people in the village now talk the language of reconciliation of U.S. President George W. Bush and of some Iraqis in the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.

"We have no alternative but to fight this occupation and its allies," a former army officer in Baghdad speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS. "We can see clearly now that Americans came with the idea that we, Sunni Arabs, are the enemies they have in mind no matter what we do to please them. We will fight for our existence, and this massacre will not go unpunished."


http://alternet.org/waroniraq/76662/
 
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