"...At first, Bremer responded to Sadr's growing strength by ignoring him; now he is attempting to provoke him into all-out battle. The trouble began when he closed down Sadr's newspaper last week, sparking a wave of peaceful demonstrations. On Saturday, Bremer raised the stakes further by sending coalition forces to surround Sadr's house near Najaf and arrest his communications officer.
Predictably, the arrest sparked immediate protests in Baghdad, which the Iraqi army responded to by opening fire and allegedly killing three people. At the end of the day on Sunday, Sadr called on his supporters to stop staging demonstrations and urged them to employ unnamed "other ways" to resist the occupation - a statement many interpreted as a call to arms.
On the surface, this chain of events is mystifying. With the so-called Sunni triangle in flames after the gruesome Falluja attacks, why is Bremer pushing the comparatively calm Shia south into battle?
Here's one possible answer: Washington has given up on its plans to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, and is creating the chaos it needs to declare the handover impossible. A continued occupation will be bad news for George Bush on the campaign trail, but not as bad as if the hand-over happens and the country erupts, an increasingly likely scenario given the widespread rejection of the legitimacy of the interim constitution and the US- appointed governing council.
But by sending the new Iraqi army to fire on the people they are supposed to be protecting, Bremer has destroyed what slim hope they had of gaining credibility with an already highly mistrustful population. On Sunday, before storming the unarmed demonstrators, the soldiers could be seen pulling on ski masks, so they would not be recognised in their neighbourhoods later.
The coalition provisional authority is increasingly being compared on the streets to Saddam, who also didn't much like peaceful protests, or critical newspapers.
In an interview yesterday, Iraq's minister of communication, Haider al-Abadi, blasted the act that started the current wave of violence: the closing of Sadr's newspaper, al-Hawzah. Abadi, who is supposedly in charge of media in Iraq, says he was not even informed of the plan. Meanwhile, the man at the centre of it all - Moqtada al-Sadr - is having his hero status amplified by the hour.....
guardian.co.uk
The jihadists didn't have to spark a fire because the Bushies were there with all the gasoline and torches in the world. The jihadists certainly didn't help matters along but they are't the only culprits.
You keep talking as if we have unlimited choices. We can CHOOSE to keep fighting, we can CHOOSE to keep throwing $100 billion into this mess.
What makes you think that the US has unlimited resources? We do not have enough troops without a draft and we're living on borrowed money. We need $23 billion just to fix and replace equipment. Who knows how many billion are needed to fix 22,000 wounded vets?
Do you want to be like Dubyette and consider nukes as tactical weapons?
Rightwingers have eaten up all the choices. You guys have made one bad decision after another after another after another. What choices do you think we actually have?
It's better to look at the situation realistically while we have some ability to change the course of events rather than to have another Vietnam moment where people are climbing on the last helicopter from the roof of the embassy. |
