Today in Iraq

War News for July 29, 2003 Bring ‘em on: Iraqi insurgents attack bridge repair crew. Iraqis furious after botched US raid. Anger simmers in Baghdad. Unemployed Iraqis demonstrate in Baghdad. Explosion at Baghdad mosque, no casualties, cause unreported. Blood money, private militias in Fallujah. “Instead of waiting for the police to adjust, the brigade allowed the mayor to assemble a protection force, drawn from the city's largest tribes. Ives {the brigade intelligence officer} organized training for the group, whose members now walk around with AK-47 assault rifles and green FPF armbands. "You have to bend with the culture," Ives said. "In America, this would be illegal. But here, it's natural." The reaction of people in the city has been cautious. Many who so ardently wanted American troops to leave now express deep reservations about the decision to allow the mayor -- who was not popularly elected -- to have his own militia. "This is the same thing Saddam did," said Nadir Mukheef, the owner of a juice bar. Shocking! CNN reports condoms and Viagra discovered among Uday’s personal effects. The US media is broken beyond salvage. American soldiers are dying daily in an illegal war, the occupation policy includes assassination and family hostage-taking, US special operations teams kill civilians in the street, and CNN hypes the sex angle. Give correspondent Barbara Starr a Pulitzer for this report - and is this reporter aptly named or what? US pays $200 million for Polish troops. Stars and Stripes reports informal inquiry into soldiers complaining to reporters; division commander bars reporters except under limited circumstances. Local story: Soldier learns to cope with amputation. Home Front: Department of Homeland Security issues warning that Al Qaeda may hijack US planes. Demonstrating yet again the curious inverse relationship between Bush’s poll numbers and the terrorist threat level… Yankee's Rant of the Day We have lost this war. It doesn’t matter that the administration redefines success, or finds new factors to blame for their own failures. We have lost. We lost diplomatically before the first shot was fired. Where America once had friends and allies, we are now alone and isolated. We no longer lead the Free World; the Free World treats us as a pariah and we lead a motley assembly of hopeful opportunists and mercenaries. The opportunists will be disappointed and the mercenaries will disappoint us. We lost militarily. We overpowered a conventional army that wouldn’t fight but we created an insurgent army that will fight us where none existed before. We gave the world’s sympathy to people who want to kill us and destroy our nation. People once said Americans lost their innocence in Vietnam. In Iraq we have lost our honor. We justified an aggressive war on conquest based on falsehoods as flimsy as the Nazis justified the conquest of Poland on a fictional incident at Sender Gleiwitz. While the American media believed those lies, the rest of the world did not. It might be worth remembering that in 1939, only the Germans believed Goebbels. We have disgraced our profession of arms. We have a shoot-on-sight policy for our enemies. We kill bystanders, pay blood money and call it “cultural awareness.” We kidnap families as hostages, call them “detainees,” and believe that information extracted under such circumstances is “intelligence.” We have lowered the standards for actionable intelligence to the point where we feel justified to use lethal force in two simultaneous raids, hundreds of miles apart, to kill the same man. We have lost but we don’t know it yet.