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03/10/2006:

"Developments in Iraq, March 9"

* BAGHDAD - A car bomb exploded near a mosque in New Baghdad on the eastern side of the city, killing three people and wounding 10 others, police said.
NEAR FALLUJA - Three bodies of unidentified civilians with gunshot wounds to the head, chest and limbs were found on a main road in a village just south of Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, a police official said.
BAGHDAD - Two civilians were killed and at least seven wounded when a car bomb apparently targeting Iraqi soldiers exploded in front of a hospital in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - An Oil Ministry official said three of the 18 men found bound and strangled on Tuesday were employees of the state oil pipeline company in Dora in the south of the capital. There was still no information on the other 15 bodies.
BAGHDAD - Six civilians were killed and eight wounded when a roadside bomb went off near an Iraqi army patrol in western Baghdad, police and hospital officials said.
FALLUJA - A U.S. Marine was killed in combat on Wednesday in Anbar Province, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed two people employed in the Green Zone, home to the Iraqi government and foreign embassies. The two were on their way to work when they were attacked in the western Mansour district, police said.
alertnet.org


Daniel Pipes Finds Comfort in Muslims Killing Muslims
One of the abiding myths about the War on Iraq is that the neocons were too stupid to realize that they would confront an unrelenting, indigenous resistance to their occupation of Iraq. Unwittingly, the story line goes, they led the U.S. into a conflict which has now produced a civil war. But this simply does not fit the facts. The neocons clearly anticipated such an outcome before they launched their war as Stephen Zunes documents in Antiwar.com:

"Top analysts in the CIA and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as much: In a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be "ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the United States to "expedite" such a collapse anyway."

Yet the line persists that the neocons had no idea what they were getting into. This cannot be correct as they think a lot about what they do and they plan carefully. Not only is that charge absurd on the face of it, but it is arrogant on the part of those who level it. And it is the worst political mistake possible underestimating your adversary.

Now the neocons are beginning to advocate for civil war in Iraq quite openly. The clearest statement of this strategy as yet comes from pre-eminent neocon and ardent Zionist Daniel Pipes. In a recent piece in the Jerusalem Post, Pipes spills the beans. He writes:

"The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. Iraq's plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi'ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one."


"The Country Has Already Collapsed"
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Headlines from Iraq seem to be getting progressively worse. Not only are suicide attacks and bombings a daily occurrence, but particularly after the February attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra -- a Shiite holy site -- deadly sectarian violence has increased. Are we witnessing a country falling apart?

Marina Ottaway: At this point in Iraq, you do not have a central government -- so you don't have a legitimate authority running the country. You don't have a government with the power to establish or maintain order. What you have is a nominal government that can only stay in power because the Americans are there. The government is supposed to have derived legitimacy from the constitution and the elections. But I think the government we end up with, won't have much legitimacy either.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why not? After all, the Iraqis went to the polls and chose their representatives. That seems pretty legitimate, does it not?

Ottaway: It is now almost three months after the elections and there is still no government. The Iraqis continue postponing the opening of parliament because according to the constitution, after they open parliament, they only have two months to form the government. They don't think they can form a government that quickly. A government that takes over five months to form is not a government that is going to have very much legitimacy in the end. The country has already collapsed. Now the challenge is figuring out a way to deal with this fact.


U.S. Sets Plans to Aid Iraq in Civil War
The U.S. military will rely primarily on Iraq's security forces to put down a civil war in that country if one breaks out, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told lawmakers yesterday.

Sectarian violence in Iraq has reached a level unprecedented since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and is now eclipsing the insurgency as the chief security threat there, said Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, who appeared with Rumsfeld.

"The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the . . . Iraqi security forces deal with it to the extent they're able to," Rumsfeld told the Senate Appropriations Committee when pressed to explain how the United States intended to respond should Iraq descend wholesale into internecine strife.

If civil war becomes reality, "it's very clear that the Iraqi forces will handle it, but they'll handle it with our help," Abizaid said later when asked to elaborate on Rumsfeld's remark.


Night-time knock on door heralds secret assassins
The cars may be back on the streets of Baghdad, but the shuttered homes of Street Number 60 provide a grim reminder that the sectarian violence that flared after the destruction of the Golden Mosque continues under cover of darkness.

Each house in this street in the southern neighbourhood of Dora once housed a family. Now most lie empty, their owners having fled after armed groups warned Shia in this predominately Sunni area to leave or die.

"It is like a gangster film," said one resident too frightened of reprisals to give his name or even profession.

"Darkness comes and then people with masks set up checkpoints.

"There is a knock on the door and those who answer are either abused or killed.

"Those abused are not expected to wait to be warned twice. I see them pack their car and leave."

Every day brings killings and kidnaps in Baghdad and no one knows the culprits.