Today in Iraq

War News for Saturday, January 29, 2005 Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed by small arms fire in Baghdad ambush. Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi soldiers killed, four wounded in rocket attack near Duluiyah. Bring ‘em on: Three Iraqi soldiers, five civilians killed by suicide bomber near Khanaqin. Bring ‘em on: Three US soldiers killed, one wounded by roadside bomb in Baghdad. Bring ‘em on: Five Iraqis killed by car bomb at Baghdad power plant. Bring ‘em on Six Iraqi soldiers killed in Ramadi ambush. Bring ‘em on: One US soldier killed, three wounded by roadside bomb in Baghdad. Bring ‘em on: Heavy fighting reported in Samarra. Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi policeman killed in multiple attacks on Kirkuk polling stations. Bring ‘em on: Mosul election center heavily damaged by car bomb. Bring ‘em on: Insurgents execute three Iraqi contractors near Balad. Bring ‘em on: Four polling stations in Basra bombed. Bring ‘em on: One Iraqi soldier killed, one wounded in mortar attack near Suwayrah. Two US soldiers killed in helicopter crash near Baghdad. Lowering expectations. “Violence in Iraq is unlikely to subside after Sunday's election and may well get worse before it gets better, U.S. and British officials say, a sentiment seconded by many Iraqis. But the officials maintain the mainly Sunni Muslim insurgency against American and British troops and their Iraqi government allies is cracking and will be defeated in time.” How many times have we heard this crap? First they told us the insurgency would crack when we rounded up all the “dead-enders” in Rummy’s deck of cards. It got worse. Then, they said it would crack after the deaths of Saddam’s two sons. It got worse. Next, it was supposed to crack after Saddam was captured in his “spider hole.” It got worse. Then there was a barrage of yapping about how the insurgency would crack after sovereignty was transferred to Allawi’s regime. It got worse. Then they promised that elections would crack the insurgency. Looks like that statement is no longer operative. Election preparations. “As fast as butcher Shakir Salman can hang the skinned, headless sheep from hooks in his shop, customers scurry away with armloads of fresh meat. Homemaker Manar Shumari is frantically stocking up on diapers for her 2-year-old. ‘I bought some yesterday, but I came again today, just to be sure,’ she said. At Medical City in Baghdad, doctors are dragging mattresses into their offices and bunking in vacant nursing-home beds, preparing for the possibility of widespread bloodshed.” More election preparations. “The stuff of democracy arrived Friday at Iman Elhadi Girls Primary School: plywood, 2-by-4s, sandbags and lots of concertina wire. As Sunday's election neared, Marines trained as combat engineers were deployed throughout this violence-racked city, the capital of Al Anbar province, to erect barriers to keep insurgents from sneaking into polling places.” Some good news. “Feith, who serves as undersecretary of defense for policy, announced Wednesday he would leave his position this summer. He told Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld he was leaving for ‘personal and family reasons.’ Sources close to Feith said he was in fact leaving for personal reasons and was not asked to leave by the administration.” Of course the Bushies wouldn’t ask this idiot to leave. “Why is Feith involved with all these foul-ups? How could one man be so consistently in error? Nearly every critique of the Pentagon's plan for Iraq's occupation blames the blinkers imposed by ideology. For example, The New Yorker reported last fall that Feith intentionally excluded experts with experience in postwar nation-building, out of fear that their pessimistic, worst-case scenarios would leak and damage the case for war. In the Atlantic earlier this year, James Fallows told a similar story: The Pentagon did not participate in CIA war games about the occupation, because "it could be seen as an 'antiwar' undertaking" that “weakened the case for launching a 'war of choice.' " The State Department's Future of Iraq Project, an effort that accurately predicted some contingencies that the Pentagon overlooked, was dismissed by Feith and company out of hand.” Lieutenant AWOL says Iraqis want US troops to remain after election. A Zogby poll says otherwise. Commentary Opinion: “We should tell the Iraqi leadership now that we draw a distinction between the security threat which they face (as a result of what we have done and left undone) and their central political problem. That political problem of bringing together Shias, Sunnis and Kurds must be for Iraqis to sort out. Our troops cannot be expected to police relations between the majority and a rejectionist minority. British and American troops are no substitute for a political process. The latest allegations of human rights abuse by the Iraqi security services sharpen the dangers to us of too close an identification.” Casualty Reports Local story: New York soldier wounded in Iraq. Local story: Wisconsin soldier wounded in Iraq.