Today in Iraq

War News for August 2, 2004 Bring ‘em on: Four churches bombed in Baghdad; ten Iraqis killed, 40 wounded. Bring ‘em on: One US soldier dies of wounds received in roadside bomb ambush near Samarra. Bring ‘em on: Two Iraqis killed, 15 wounded in church bombing in Mosul. Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi policemen killed, four wounded in drive-by shooting in Kirkuk. Bring ‘em on: Explosion reported in Christian neighborhood of Kirkuk. Bring ‘em on: Electricity riots reported in Najaf. Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi civilians wounded in fighting between police and insurgents in Ramadi. Bring ‘em on: Insurgents execute Turkish hostage. Poland discusses reducing military force in Iraq with Colin Powell. India considers evacuating citizens from Iraq. Turkish transportation companies halt operations in Iraq. Turkish trucks delivered 200-300 loads of material to US forces every day. Kuwait bans Fahrenheit 9/11. Iraqi Christians. Corporal Sampson. “Through the living room window, sunlight falls across his face. Some patches of skin are discolored, darker shades of peach and beige. A spider web of scars crisscross his left cheek and lower neck, where there used to be nothing, just a gaping hole. And over his left eye, an empty socket is covered by a black patch.” Shut up! Shut up! “Rushing, now a captain assigned to the Marine Corps Motion Picture and Television Liaison office in Los Angeles, has been prohibited from giving any more interviews about his part in the film. Marine officials at the Pentagon have even asked Rushing to keep his wife, Paige, from giving interviews after she made comments critical of how the military handled her husband's situation. Because of this, several of Rushing's friends say the 31-year-old Marine plans to leave the military in October…’Here's a guy who represents the very best of public affairs in the Marines,’ says a senior military official who worked with Rushing at Central Command, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘For whatever reason, it didn't play well with some of the senior brass in the Marine Corps at Pentagon. They're losing one of their finest.’” Riverbend is back and has a new post at Baghdad Burning. Commentary Editorial: “Washington is now trying to keep a relatively low diplomatic profile in Iraq, hoping to sustain the illusion that the interim government is fully in charge. This is disingenuous, and not only because of the continued presence of nearly 140,000 American occupation troops. It was the United States that created a woefully unrepresentative governing council and that then let the exile politicians on that thinly rooted body shape the interim government. The Bush administration cannot afford to simply stand aside and see these problems compounded. The deep alienation of so many pivotal groups of Iraqis is one of the main reasons that the insurgency continues to gain strength. Fixing this fundamental problem should begin with a more wisely organized national conference.” Editorial: “Explicit in their desire to block Bush's re-election, the group claims the administration's foreign policy misadventures have irreparably harmed national security and U.S. credibility abroad. Retired Gen. Merrill A. ‘Tony’ McPeak, former Air Force chief of staff, said Bush's war planners anticipated a rosy reception after a military victory in Iraq. ‘We were totally unprepared for the post-combat occupation,’ McPeak said. ‘So we see here unfolding before us a total disaster.’ Old-timers games in sports don't have much riding on them; they're mostly played for laughs and nostalgia. But with so much at stake in the upcoming election, it's worth listening to these old dogs who still have some game.” Opinion: “The voters deserve better in an era of overwhelming problems. Consider Iraq. Neither the president nor Mr. Kerry knows what to do about this terrible misadventure that has cost more than 900 American and thousands of innocent Iraqi lives. The war is draining the U.S. Treasury and has made the Middle East more, not less, unstable. Dreams of democracy taking root in the garden of Baghdad and then spreading like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East have given way to the awful reality of bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. You won't hear straight talk about this all-important matter from either camp. And you can forget the chatter about an exit strategy for American troops. There isn't one.” Opinion: “As if this weren’t bad enough, Bush and the neo-cons went on to completely ignore a year’s worth of post-war planning by the State Department, principally because the authors of the plan were Clintonites. They had such a disdain of things Clinton, such arrogance, and such a lofty opinion of their ideas that they didn’t even bother with those plans. How much money and lives were lost because of this? How many lives have been lost because Bush, to this day, still allows the usage of cost-plus contracts, and therefore is burning through cash so fast that he hasn’t enough to buy extra armor for the vehicles and flak jackets for the soldiers?” Opinion: “What, indeed, are we to make of a war which is turned into a fantasy by those who started it? As foreign workers pour out of Iraq for fear of their lives, US Secretary of State Colin Powell tells a press conference that hostage-taking is having an ‘effect’ on reconstruction. Effect! Oil pipeline explosions are now as regular as power cuts. In parts of Baghdad now, they have only four hours of electricity a day; the streets swarm with foreign mercenaries, guns poking from windows, shouting abusively at Iraqis who don't clear the way for them. This is the ‘safer’ Iraq which Mr Blair was boasting of the other day. What world does the British Government exist in?” Opinion: “Bush has been decisive alright -- decisively wrong. The American leader he most closely resembles is Col. George Armstrong Custer, an arrogant, opinionated, headstrong fool who spurned all warnings, boldly and resolutely leading his command to disaster on the Little Big Horn.” 86-43-04. Pass it on.