Not for the squeamish but ask why we never read this sort of reporting from American sources?Each house cleared has a sticker put on its front door. But that's little protection, the locals say, from the shadowy gunmen who vanish by day and reappear by night.
Necessary as the searches are said to be, they are often disquieting to witness. In one house in the early hours, a woman and her small children cower petrified, as up to 20 American and Iraqi soldiers trawl through their belongings. More than once, I overhear lewd and insulting wisecracks from the troops.
"Too young even for you,"one American soldier says to another, as they pass a little girl of about 10. Both of the men are presumably unaware that I am within earshot - and that the girl's mother speaks excellent English.
Like the translators, some of the Iraqi troops wear ski masks to hide their identity,and I often witness them inexplicably rifling through jewellery boxes and jars containing small, precious personal items.
Every so often we come across a Kalashnikov. And if there is more than one weapon in the house,the occupants are taken in for questioning, their hands tied with plastic cuffs and a hood put over their heads.
In most places, though, we find nothing but traumatised civilians bunkered down and short of basic provisions. Often they are without electricity and are simply too scared to go beyond the front door.
The Scotsman reports that the presumptive British Prime Minister Brown will pull out British troops:
GORDON Brown will remove all British forces from Iraq before the next election under a plan to rebuild support among disillusioned Labour voters.
Scotland on Sunday can reveal the Prime Minister elect is working on a withdrawal plan that could see troop numbers slashed from 7,000 to as few as 2,000 within 12 months.
If implemented, the strategy would culminate in total withdrawal no later than spring 2010, the date by which Brown must go to the country to seek his own mandate.
This news probably surprised President Bush like so much else does but no one else. The Iraqi fiasco never enjoyed much enthusiasm in Britain. I think the only national leader able to continue military operations in Iraqi while opposed by the nation's electorate is...yep, George W. Bush. After writing this paragraph, I read David Broder's column in today's Washington Post where he makes pretty much the same point. I disagree with Broder's conclusion. He finds Bush and Blair heroically resisting the terrorists of Iraq when I see them as having created the terrorists of Iraq.
History will record that both of them saw the threat to the West posed by terrorism and responded courageously. The wisdom of their policy and the conduct of their governments are not likely to be judged as highly.
Ironies abound in this headline from The London Times: Blair under mortar attack in Iraq when compared with this headline from Scotland's Sunday Herald: Five US soldiers killed, Green Zone and Basra bombed, 13 civilians massacred ... yet Blair visits Iraq to say: it’s getting better. Oops, so much for a better Iraq. In all fairness, the Sunday Herald reports on the mortars, too.
Back to the States, and David Ignatius column in the Washington Post, An Army Against the Clock. Ignatius writes from a different perspective
than the Sunday's Herald's writer and while not an antidote to the British papers, it does offer a view in what I think is an unexplored complexity of Iraq.
TAJI, Iraq -- America set a long clock ticking when it decided to spend $300 million to rebuild the sprawling military base here as a logistical center for the new Iraqi army. This was to be the soldier's version of nation-building -- maintenance depots, orderly barracks and professional schools for Iraqi officers and NCOs.
But the political clock in Washington is running on a different speed. Congress is impatient with the slow work of building a modern army -- especially in a country where sectarian violence is destroying any semblance of normal life outside the confines of well-guarded compounds such as this one.
Also in the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland criticizes Bush's saber rattling with Iraq. Hoagland writes that Bush may be tempted to take bold and decisive action. I am worried about the same thing since every time Bush acted boldly and decisively he manged to screw things up to FUBAR status. I suspect the rest of the world fears not Bush's retribution but just how much worse Bush can make any situation. Hoagland writes about a possible scenario that ought to worry everyone:
But history and contemporary politics both suggest that this is a time for steady nerves and calibrated pressure tactics -- not sudden lurches in policy. Using Iraq as a springboard and rationale for an American military strike into Iran would expand the current disaster, just as Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, nominally undertaken to show American strength, came to undermine the U.S. presence in Indochina.
That invasion was meant to bolster an earlier U.S.-backed coup in Phnom Penh. Washington would risk similar results in Iraq by strong-arming the admittedly faltering government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki out of office and replacing Maliki with a U.S.-anointed Iraqi savior.
Arab allies are urging such a course on Bush and would not object to U.S. military action against Iran. There is growing concern in Baghdad that Washington is developing a "Plan B" that involves both hitting Iran and ousting Maliki -- who ironically was brought to office by American pressure to force out Ibrahim al-Jafari, Maliki's predecessor. The concern is augmented by demands from both sides of the aisle in Congress that Maliki meet obviously unrealistic benchmarks quickly or face a cutoff of U.S. support.
Thinking I missed something important, I checked the main web pages for the Washington Post and The New York Times. The Post has three headlines directly about Iraq: Iraq's Sadr Overhauls Tactics, 7 U.S. Troops Die and Assessments Foretold Situation. The New York Times has Bombs Imperil U.S. Troops Searching for Captured Comrades, Roadside Bombs Kill 7 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq, and In the Heat of Battle and Politics, Hard Facts Melt.
Comments for this post
