Just received email from TruthOut: Five churches and a hospital bombed in Baghdad!

Posted by Dorothy M. Ligon at October 16, 2004 06:43 AM

The US upped the ante yesterday with their increased assult on Fallujah. Its going to get really nasty and ugly. Why don't people understand that most of these insurgents are fighting for their country. Do you really think they are going to be intimidated into stopping.

The bombing of hospitals/churchs is going to be a tactical error because many Iraqis will not consider it an appropiate target

Rumsfeld's approach "Eventually they will get tired of being killed"

Posted by soccerdad at October 16, 2004 07:51 AM

Aljazeera is reporting that it was near a hospital, 1 killed. Not clear what the target was. No one killed at the church attacks. Rocket shot at hotel housing foreign journalists, hit car outside no injury.

Posted by soccerdad at October 16, 2004 07:56 AM

They never thought they would have to put up with this to steal Iraqi oil. I think Halliburton needs a new no bid contract to make this all better.

Posted by phidipides at October 16, 2004 08:28 AM

Dan Drezner in his anemic endorsement of Kerry stated it very well:

If Bush gets re-elected, he and his team will view it as a vindication for all of their policy decisions to date. Whatever groupthink occurred in the first term would pale besides the groupthink that would dominate the second term. Given the tactical and strategic errors in judgment that this administration has made, I have to lean towards Kerry.

It all boils down to incompetence. It was incompetent to invade in the first place and the post war was the ultimate in incompentence. Arrogant incompetence, the trademark of the Bush administration.

Posted by Ron In Portland at October 16, 2004 09:45 AM

Ron

For the sake of discussion I'm going to qibble with you. Tell me what you think.

It was incompetent to invade in the first place

I disagree with this because the reasons for invading had nothing to do with WMDs, etc. It was and is a classic occupation for the purpose of establishing a military presence in the region, the ultimate reason being preserving the flow of relatively cheap oil. So i would say that there were extremely competent to deceive us so well. I'm working on a longer piece tracing the history of the US/British involment in the ME and everything becomes clear in this context.

The arrogent incompetence comes in the execution of the war. Once the elction is past and if Bush is re-elected they will just flatten the cities until the insurgency disappears.

So my opinion is that we need to forget about WMDs and start talking about this war in its true terms, i.e. occupation and control and whether we want to be an empire by slaughtering civilians.

Posted by soccerdad at October 16, 2004 11:26 AM

soccerdad, what are the real consequences of that incompetence? I agree that there have been many mistakes made in the prosecution of this war, but in comparison to other wars of liberation, how is what we have done so unacceptably awful?

Posted by Toby Petzold at October 16, 2004 08:29 PM

First, this is not a war of liberation so lets be done with that propaganda.

The main effects of the incompetence is too many US soldiers killed, too many civilians killed, and by not providing security,stopping looting, anddoing real reconstruction that employed Iraqis it became clear to the Iraqis that we were there as occupiers and therefore our actions/inactions helped promote the insurgency which themajority just want us out of the country.

The US policy in the ME dating all the way back to at least 1953 has been centered on maintaining a flow of cheap crude oil.

Posted by soccerdad at October 17, 2004 05:26 AM