The Cakewalk War

[jjw1965]

Paul Craig Roberts | September 20 2005
The "cakewalk war" is now two and one-half years old. US casualties (dead and wounded) number 20,000. As 20,000 is the number of Iraqi insurgents according to US military commanders, each insurgent is responsible for one US casualty.

US troops in Iraq number about 150,000. Obviously, US troops have not inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi insurgents. US troops have perhaps inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi civilian population, primarily women and children who are the "collateral damage" of the "righteous" and "virtuous" US invasion that is spreading civilian deaths all over Mesopotamia in the name of democracy.

What could the US have possibly done to give America a worse name than to invade Iraq and murder its citizens?

According to the September 1 Manufacturing & Technology News, the Government Accounting Office has reported that over the course of the cakewalk war, the US military’s use of small caliber ammunition has risen to 1.8 billion rounds. Think about that number. If there are 20,000 insurgents, it means US troops have fired 90,000 rounds at each insurgent.

Very few have been hit. We don’t know how many. To avoid the analogy with Vietnam, until last week the US military studiously avoided body counts. If 2,000 insurgents have been killed, each death required 900,000 rounds of ammunition.

The combination of US government owned ammo plants and those of US commercial producers together cannot make bullets as fast as US troops are firing them. The Bush administration has had to turn to foreign producers such as Israel Military Industries. Think about that. Hollowed out US industry cannot produce enough ammunition to defeat a 20,000 man insurgency.

US military analysts are beginning to wonder if the US has been defeated by the insurgency. Increasingly, Bush administration spokesmen sound like "Baghdad Bob." On September 19 the Washington Post reported that US military spinmeister Major General Rich Lynch declared "great success" against the insurgency that had just inflicted the worst casualties of the war, including a three-day mortar attack on the "safe" Green Zone.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, says: "We can’t secure the airport road, can’t stop the incoming (mortar rounds) into the Green Zone, can’t stop the killings and kidnappings." The insurgency controls most of Baghdad and the Sunni provinces.

With its judgement lost to frustration, the US military has 40,000 Iraqis in detention – twice the number of estimated insurgents. Who are these detainees? According to the Washington Post, "Many of the men detained in Tall Afar last week were rounded up on the advice of local teenagers who had stepped forward as informants, at times for what American soldiers said they suspected amounted to no more than settling local scores."

Obviously, the US, not knowing who or where the insurgents are, is just striking blindly, creating a larger insurgency.

The Iraq government, despite being backed by the US military, is unable to control movements across the Iraqi – Syrian border. So the Bush administration has passed the buck to Syria. Puny Syria is declared guilty of not doing what the US military cannot do.

Adam Ereli, the demented US State Department spokesperson, denounced the Syrian government for "permitting" insurgents to cross the border. The US government cannot prevent a steady stream of one million Mexicans from illegally crossing its border each year, but Syria is supposed to be able to stop a couple hundred foreign fighters from sneaking across its border.

Ereli misrepresents Syria’s inability to be "an unwillingness" which indicates that Syria is consorting with terrorists, not only in Iraq, but also in Lebanon and Palestine. Does this sound like Syria being set up for invasion?

According to news reports, at Ted Forstmann’s annual meeting of movers and shakers last weekend, US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, predicted that US troops will soon enter into Syria. Simultaneously, the Bush administration is desperately trying to orchestrate a case that it can use to attack Iran.

Stalemated in Iraq, the White House moron intends to attack two more countries.

At the Human Rights Conference on September 9, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, described Americans as "people with blood-soaked hands."

"Who are the terrorists," asked Mahathir, the Iraqis or the Americans?

The entire world is asking this question.

 

[Reverend Blair]

heh, I type like feckin' monkey.

 

[Reverend Blair]

Ladies and Gentlemen, Country Joe McDonald.

 

[GL Schmitt]

Ladies and Gentlemen, Country Joe McDonald.

Gimme an F . . . ."

 

[Ocean Breeze]

British and American "special forces" Were Creating "Terrorist Acts" and Blaming Iraqis :evil:
Sam Hamod



September 20, 2005

For the past several months, I have been saying and writing that Americans and British are disguised as Iraqis and doing these "terrorist" attacks and trying to stir up civil war in Iraq. Now, the proof that backs up my assertions is here; the British "speical ops" were caught, disguised as Iraqis, as part of the Mehdi Army no less, and set to do more mischief. So there you have it.

This is just another nefarious deed to add to the lies of Bush and Blair--another inhumane and terrorist act on their part to send their men in to do these deeds in order to set Iraq afire with civil war. Add to this that Ahmed Chalabi is still being supported by America and its minions in Iraq, and you have even more evil afoot.

Remember also that the American governing authority makes all contracts in Iraq, has already made many binding contracts that will reward American companies, and give little to the Iraqi citizenry. In the meantime, the American ambassador to Iraq is now making sounds of attacking Syria! What further madness is this.

So remember, when you hear that Iraqis are killing Iraqis--as I've said for a long time, Don't you believe it. The proof is now here, just as the proof of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is here--now, what will we, and what will the world do to stop these evil twins, Bush and Blair. :twisted: :evil:

 

[Ocean Breeze]

To say we must stay in Iraq to save it from chaos is a lie

This is a fiasco without parallel in recent British history. Iraqis must run their country: we've made enough mess of it already

By Simon Jenkins

09/21/05 "The Guardian" -- -- Don't be fooled a second time. They told you Britain must invade Iraq because of its weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong. Now they say British troops must stay in Iraq because otherwise it will collapse into chaos.

This second lie is infecting everyone. It is spouted by Labour and Tory opponents of the war and even by the Liberal Democrat spokesman, Sir Menzies Campbell. Its axiom is that western soldiers are so competent that, wherever they go, only good can result. It is their duty not to leave Iraq until order is established, infrastructure rebuilt and democracy entrenched.

Note the word "until". It hides a bloodstained half century of western self-delusion and arrogance. The white man's burden is still alive and well in the skies over Baghdad (the streets are now too dangerous). Soldiers and civilians may die by the hundred. Money may be squandered by the million. But Tony Blair tells us that only western values enforced by the barrel of a gun can save the hapless Mussulman from his own worst enemy, himself.

The first lie at least had tactical logic. The Rumsfeld doctrine was to travel light, hit hard and get out. Neoconservatives might fantasise over Iraq as a democratic Garden of Eden, a land re-engineered to stability and prosperity. Harder noses were content to dump the place in Ahmad Chalabi's lap and let it go to hell. Had that happened, I suspect there would have been a bloody settling of scores but by now a tripartite republic hauling itself back to peace and reconstruction. Iraq is, after all, one of the richest nations on earth.

Instead the invasion came with tanks of glue. Decisions were taken, with British compliance, to make Iraq an experiment in "ground zero" nation-building. All sensible advice was ignored on the assumption that whatever America and Britain did would seem better than Saddam, and better than our doing nothing. Kipling's demons danced through Downing Street. Britain did not want to colonise Iraq. Yet somehow Blair's "fighting not for territory but for values" needed territory after all, as if to prove itself more than a soundbite.

The scenes broadcast yesterday from Basra show how far authority in southern Iraq has collapsed. This is tragic. When I was there two years ago the south was, in its own terms, a success. While the Americans were unleashing mayhem to the north, the British were methodically applying Lugard-style colonialism in Basra. They formed alliances with sheikhs, bribed warlords and won hearts and minds by going unarmoured. There was optimism in the air.

British policy demanded one thing, momentum towards local sovereignty and early withdrawal. There was no such momentum. An ever more confident insurrection was allowed first to impede and then dictate the timetable of withdrawal. Sunni terrorists now hold American and British policy in their grip. The result has been an inevitable civil collapse. We do not even know on which side are the Basra police.

The British government - and opposition - is in total denial. Ministerial boasts can't conceal the gloom of private briefings. Blair has done what no prime minister should do. He has put his soldiers at a foreign power's mercy. First that power was America. Now, according to the defence secretary, John Reid, it is a band of brave but desperate Iraqis entombed in Baghdad's Green Zone. He says he will stay until they request him to go, when local troops are trained and loyal and infrastructure is restored. That means doomsday. Everyone knows it.

Iraqis of my acquaintance are numb at the violence unleashed by the west's failure to impose order on their country. They are baffled at the ineptitude, the counter-productive cruelty of the arrests, bombings and suppressions. They are past caring whether it was better or worse under Saddam. They know only that more people a month are being killed than at any time since the massacres of the early 1990s. If death and destruction are any guide, Britain's pre-invasion policy of containment was far more successful than occupation.

Infrastructure is not being restored. Baghdad's water, electricity and sewers are in worse shape than a decade ago. Huge sums - such as the alleged $1bn for military supplies - are being stolen and stashed in Jordanian banks. The new constitution is a dead letter except the clauses that are blatantly sharia. These are already being enforced de facto in Shia areas.

British soldiers are in a war over whose course, conduct and outcome their leaders have no control. Their government's exit strategy is no longer realistic, indeed is dishonest. Talk of reducing troop levels from 8,000 to 3,000 next year has been abandoned. Everyone seems on the wrong planet. Meanwhile daily groping for good news and the sickening litany of the bad is reminiscent of Vietnam. Nobody reads Barbara Tuchman on folly.

Signalling withdrawal would, it is said, give a green light to the gangs and private militias, to revenge attacks, ethnic cleansing and even partition. That threat is no longer meaningful since these are all happening anyway. The militias have reportedly infiltrated at least half the police and internal security forces in each area. Barely a tenth of the army is considered loyal to the central authority. That a Basra police station should be vulnerable to al-Sadr irregulars is appalling.

The 150,000 foreign troops on Iraqi soil are overwhelmingly committed to self-protection. They do not do law and order any more. Power is finding its new locus, in the mafias, sheikhdoms, militias and warlords that flourish amid anarchy. Where there is no security, the gunman is always king.

The alleged reason for occupying Iraq was to build security and democracy. We have dismantled the first and failed to construct the second. Iraq is a fiasco without parallel in recent British policy. Now we are told that we must "stay the course" or worse will befall. This is code for ministers refusing to admit a mistake and hoping someone else will after they are gone. By then the Kurds will be more detached, the Sunnis more enraged and the Shias more fundamentalist. A hundred British soldiers will have died.

America left Vietnam and Lebanon to their fate. They survived. We left Aden and other colonies. Some, such as Malaya and Cyprus, saw bloodshed and partition. We said rightly that this was their business. So too is Iraq for the Iraqis. We have made enough mess there already.

British soldiers may indeed be the best in the world. But why then is Blair driving them to humiliation? - simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005