Today in Iraq

War News for January 18, 2004 Bring 'em on: British troops ambushed by roadside bomb in Basra. Bring 'em on: Car bomb kills 23, wounds 95 at CPA headquarters in Baghdad. Bring 'em on: Car bomb targeting US patrol in Tikrit kills two Iraqis. Bring 'em on: Explosion in Basra kills two Iraqis, wounds two British soldiers. Bring 'em on: Honduran troops mortared in barracks near Najaf. CENTCOM reports on US soldier died from "non-hostile gunshot wounds" in an incident near Ad Diwaniyah. Iraqi Resistance Report, January 15 - 17, 2004. Six hundred Iraqi police killed in Bush's War. "'We have worked out that nearly 600 police officers have been killed since the end of the (March-April 2003) war,' Moshtaq Fadhel, commander of Iraq's police academy, told reporters." Iraqi Sunnis seethe at CPA policies. Analysis: After regime change in Iraq, Bush Middle East policy is hopelessly adrift. Another former CIA officer blasts Lieutenant AWOL. "The war on terrorism has gone awry, Steele said. 'I am a moderate Republican who believes the party has been hijacked,' he said. 'We have been lied to, we have been misled. Iraq was a wrong turn.' Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, and for a tenth of the approximately $400 billion the United States has spent on the war in Iraq, it could have caught Osama bin Laden, he said. 'We're pretending to be at war with terrorism, but what this is really about is electing George Bush on an Iraq plank.'" Some background on Ayatollah Sistani. If you ever thought those neo-cons who planned (for want of a better word) Bush's War are loons, read this enlightening anecdote from the Soviet-Afghan War. Now I realize why General Zinni called these clowns a bunch of amateurs who "never had an idea that worked." Lebanon refuses to return seized dinars. This story sure smells funny. Congressmen ask Rummy to extend soldiers' R&R reimbursements. Rail service in Iraq. Only the CPA could make AMTRAK look good. Army after-action review finds insurgent skills, tactics improving. More from a newspaper email interview with Major General Eaton. Eyewitness account of attempted bomb ambush in Tikrit. US arrests, releases two Iranian journalists in Baghdad. Commentary Opinion: Army stretched too thin to be an effective counter-insurgency force in Iraq. "To win Iraqis' cooperation, Mr. Korb said, troops must build a rapport with them. New units must climb the learning curve all over again. Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, told Newsweek last month, 'You don't defeat an insurgency solely with military forces…you win by getting the people to believe they have a stake in the success of the new Iraq.'" Opinion: Farce to Tragedy. "If the Republicans pursue an ideological campaign and win, the world will change in highly combustible ways. It is one thing for an American administration to depart from traditional policies under stress and for a limited time, but it would be quite another for a president to win an election with a mandate to make that departure permanent." Editorial: Self-delusional Iraq policy. "L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. chief in Iraq, insists that there's no way Iraq could be ready for elections this year, and considering that the country is emerging from a history of totalitarian rule, it's a reasonable point. But devising an arcane and incomprehensible system of caucuses to pick delegates to an assembly - which is the current plan - and then calling it representative government smacks of self-delusion. We call it self-delusion because no one else - most of all the Iraqis - will be fooled into thinking that this isn't Washington's way of cooking up the kind of government it wants." Opinion: A Dishonest War. "The most fundamental decision a president ever makes is the decision to go to war. President Bush violated the trust that must exist between government and the people. If Congress and the American people had known the truth, America would never have gone to war in Iraq. No president who does that to our country deserves to be reelected." Casualty Reports Local story: Texas soldier killed in Iraq.