A year on from 'Mission Accomplished', an army in disgrace, a policy in ta

A year on from 'Mission Accomplished', an army in disgrace, a policy in tatters and the real prospect of defeat

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A year after President George Bush famously declared "major combat" in Iraq over, how is it that so many Iraqis now have such a visceral hatred of Americans? One reason is that the photographs of brutality and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by British and American troops, which have so shocked the rest of the world and angered Arab countries, have come as little surprise to Iraqis. For months it has been clear to them that the occupation is very brutal; for weeks they have been watching pictures of the dead and injured in Fallujah on al-Jazeera satellite television which CNN did not broadcast.

Iraqis, who are cynical about their rulers, may also suspect that real as well as simulated torture is going on in Abu Ghraib prison, where US intelligence calls the shots. They may suspect that, as under Saddam Hussein, the humiliation and ill-treatment were quite deliberately inflicted to soften up prisoners before they were interrogated. More graphic pictures of real torture are said to have been taken as well those shown on US television last week.

Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis knew that he had ruined their lives through his disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait, and were glad to be rid of him. Even the supposed beneficiaries of his rule, the Sunni Arabs of cities such as Tikrit and Fallujah, could not see why they were so much poorer than the people of other oil states such as Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.

Watching the dancing, jeering crowd in Waziriya was Nada Abdullah Aboud, a middle-aged woman, dressed in black. She had a reason for hating Americans, though she claimed she did not do so. "I do feel sorry for the young soldiers, though they killed my son," she said quietly. "They came such a long distance to die here." It turned out that her son, Saad Mohammed, had been the translator for a senior Italian diplomat working for the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority. She said: "My son was driving with the Italian ambassador last September near Tikrit when an American soldier fired at the car and shot him through the heart."

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The tide is going out for the US in Iraq. They were not able to use their military strength against Fallujah and Najaf. They have very little political support outside Kurdistan. They can no longer win. It may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in history.

more…
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=517306

The well deserved Sympathy for the dead civilians killed in this War will pale in comparison to the mounting wrath of US families who, in good faith, sent their sons and daughters to their deaths based entirely on the validity of Bush's SOTU Address.

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(sigh)

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What we are fighting here pure evil, and most Americans will not be willing to confront this evil until they start to see it reflected on their t.v. screens.

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WOW - Go to sleep with THAT BoyKing

From the article:

Iraqis in Baghdad continually say that Iraq recovered more quickly from the damage inflicted by the first Gulf War under Saddam in 1991 than it did after the second war in 2003.

Baghdad is a city on edge. Shopkeepers keep their stock at home in case there is another outbreak of looting. The police are back on the streets and there is less casual crime than last year, but it is still more dangerous than it was under the old regime.

Abu Amir, a shopkeeper in the middle-class Jadriyah district of the capital, said: "Under Saddam I sometimes did not make money in my store, but I could go home in the evening without worrying if my son had got back safely. Now there is looting everywhere. If you walk in the streets maybe you will be shot by the Americans or by criminal gangs fighting each other."
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Whoever labeled George Junior "Miserable Failure" was right on.

All the US's bombs and bribes can't get respectability back.

The US is going to have to start BEING decent,

the forked and silver tongues have lost their audience,

at least OUTSIDE the US.

(sigh)

history as a great blunder. there is no one to blame but the whitehouse and his advisors. it won`t be people like mari333 who was slammed by the cowards at our "friends" at "cu", it will be them who backed bush`s insanity and urged on our troops while they were being killed. at least we can hold our heads up and say we support the troops because many here know people there and we want them home. if they are so untouched by mari then maybe they should go there with their freeper friends and sacrifices themselves for the glory of george bush and his white god...
this war is over- we need our friends home

"It is a measure of how far the Governing Council is out of touch with ordinary Iraqi opinion that they should have voted to change the flag in the first place. Mohammed, an engineer trying to patch up a broken sewage pipe in Baghdad, still had time to express his fury at the change."
"Of course the occupation is a disaster," he said. "We understand the Governing Council are American agents. But a man has to be the worst of collaborators to change his country's flag."

"The worst of collaborators" - what hope for a puppet government if that is how they are described.

he said. "We understand the Governing Council are American agents. But a man has to be the worst of collaborators to change his country's flag."

How come this guy understands all this, but half of Americans or more still do not?

as a constant reminder of the deaths and misery that Bush has brought to our country and the world.

So far all we got from Bush are bad lemons, not fit for lemonade even.

and he said he "regretted using that banner, the one with the 'Mission Accomplished'". He said that he had taken a lot of criticism over it, even though they meant that they had in fact accomplished their mission: getting rid of Saddam.

See how they work? You don't even need to scratch the surface; just watch their mouths move and you instantly hear lies. Bush in fact tried to cover his ass by shifting the responsibility on the navy crew, that it was their "Mission Accomplished".

Now we hear another story. It's important to pay attention to these details because this gives you insight to how they operate. Who they are.

And it was this lying mentality that got us in this mess to begin with.

courage or humility to preside over what will be viewed as another 'defeat' a la Vietnam so they're likely to dig in deeper before it's all over. I remember watching the slow agonizing build up in Vietnam until we finally had over 500000 troops there in addition to the South Vietnamese army that we'd trained and still we could not defeat the will of the people! But a lot of Americans and a whole lot more Vietnamese had to die before we finally tucked tail and came home.

I think I discern the threads of two possible scenarios -- one is that we'd be satisfied to put an Iraqi face on the situation while we retreat to our bases, still basically in control of the economy and the oil as well as being available in case some other mideast nation needs a little disciplining. Forget democracy -- bring back the Iraqi generals and ministers and who ever -- to stabilize the situation so we can get back to the business of stealing Iraqi oil.

Or door number two:

I'm afraid that between the neo-cons and false Christian zealots we're liable to use more and more powerful, deadly weapons to force the situation. Remember what Ledeen, the neocons' Godfather said before the war -- the ongoing chaos might just be what the assholes wanted -- remember he talked and salivated over the prospect of regional war and completely fragmenting and decimating the whole of the middle east.

Obviously if Kerry wins, this option will be off the table. I think Kerry would prefer to simply contain Iraq, unfortunately I don't think he will be willing to do the courageous and honorable thing -- and that is to totally withdraw from Iraq.

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And a Muslim girl in the audience observed that they knew what the Americans real intention was after they saw the American flag jammed into the groud just after they landed, one draped over a building somewhere around Basra(?), and over the head of Saddam's statue.

That display of THE AMERICAN FLAG in Iraq sticks in the minds of Muslims and Iraqis alike.

What would happen if anyone displayed the Iraqi flag in Murrikka?

YIKES!

Perhaps he should change his tune soon if he wants to win.

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Although there are many in the US that now believe that the war was wrong, alot don't think they should just pull out.

If Kerry goes for the pull-out option before the election, he WILL lose a certain amount of votes.

I'm hoping JK is trying to be a bit vague to leave him the option of changing to the pull-out option when/if elected?

It's a gamble, but if he was going to do a pull-out platform, he should do it right now -

I mean RIGHT NOW,

With the combination of the coffin kafuffle and the atrocities in the forefront of peoples minds, this would be the time.

I'm afraid that in my opinion the American Voters appear to have very short attention spans. If Jackson's trial gets in the news, or gawd forbid Janet loses another boob, well, the coffins and the tortures/abuses will be long lost in the bowels of the grey-matter.

My personal opinion is that a pull-out is the right thing to do.

But elections/politics have a way of distorting right/wrong.

(sigh)

He is for withdrawal and there is a certain hard core who will vote for him and therefore for * based on that issue alone.

(Note - Professor Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of several books on Iraq politics and culture. He's a frequent collaborator of Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo fame. I highly recommend his web log as required reading on Iraq. - alg0912)

http://juancole.com/

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Saturday, May 01, 2004

Arab Reaction to Photos of Prisoner Abuse

The sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions by US soldiers at the Abu Ghuraib prison, has naturally produced outrage in the Arab world. This is a big thing, folks. I saw the American rightwing talking heads Friday evening trying to shrug off the photos and the incidents as minor affairs. They are not, in the world of public diplomacy. Can you imagine what the mood would be like in the United States if some foreign power had treated US POWs like this and then the photos came out?

Samia Nakhoul of Reuters has gathered up some immediate reactions from the person on the street, a few of which I quote here. She reports that a Syrian woman, Khadija Mousa, said, "They keep asking why we hate them? Why we detest them? Maybe they should look well in the mirror and then they will hate themselves . . . What I saw is very very humiliating. The Americans are showing their true image."

Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the pan-Arabist London newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, said, "The liberators are worse than the dictators. This is the straw that broke the camel's back for America . . . "That really, really is the worst atrocity. It affects the honour and pride of Muslim people. It is better to kill them than sexually abuse them.""

Daud al-Shiryan of Saudi Arabia: "This will increase the hatred of America, not just in Iraq but abroad. Even those who sympathized with the Americans before will stop. It is not just a picture of torture, it is degrading. It touches on morals and religion . . . Abu Ghraib prison was used for torture in Saddam's time. People will ask now what's the difference between Saddam and Bush. Nothing!"

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In significant part these practices are a direct result of Rumsfeld policies--the Pentagon's kidnapping of unprepared reservists for long-term military duty in Iraq, supplemented by unregulated cowboy security firms. It has already been forgotten that some of the fighting around Najaf was done by US private security guards, who even deployed an attack helicopter! The rhetoric that all those who oppose the US presence in Iraq are "terrorists" also dehumanizes prisoners of war and implies that they are akin to the 9/11 hijackers, when in fact many of them are just neighborhood boys who took up a gun to defend their city quarter from what they saw as a foreign incursion.

I really wonder whether, with the emergence of these photos, the game isn't over for the Americans in Iraq. Is it realistic, after the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Shiite uprising of early April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi Arab public?
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Professor Cole is right. The war is lost - turning Fallujah over to the Ba'athists is proof of this...

Bush has a knack for losing the sympathies and support of its allies, post 9-11, and now in Iraq, post-Saddam capture. It takes a special kind of incompetence.

Special kind of incompetence indeed! :dunce:

perhaps would be a better banner we could wave!!

Have you noticed that the UN is now the fall guy for the transfer of sovereignty??