Death toll in Baghdad blasts rises to 35 - police

[sabra]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/COL256502.htm

Death toll in Baghdad blasts rises to 35 - police


BAGHDAD, March 12 (Reuters) - At least 35 people were killed and 93 wounded in three apparently coordinated car bombs at two markets in Baghdad's Shi'ite district of Sadr City on Sunday, police said.

Police said they had discovered a third car bomb at another market and defused it.

[rodeodance]

1. AP Attacks Kill 37 in Baghdad Shiite Slum

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060312/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq&printer=1;_ylt=AuEg5OYOvrNALMSJ8KefBq0UewgF;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-
Attacks Kill 37 in Baghdad Shiite Slum

By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS, Associated Press Writer 1 minute ago

Car bombings and mortar attacks rocked a market in a Shiite slum in Baghdad Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding 84, police said.

.....

While moving the first session of parliament forward suggested some progress, none of those present suggested any breakthrough had been made in the deadlock over forming a new government comprising Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, a precondition for U.S. hopes to start withdrawing some forces this summer.

Two car bombs exploded at the Al-Hay market in the Sadr City slum shortly before sundown and were followed by four mortar rounds, two that slammed into the Keyara district and two more at Hamza square, police Lt. Colonel Hasan Jellob said.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, stood by Shiite leader Adbul-Aziz al-Hakim and other Kurdish, Sunni Arab and secular leaders to make the announcement about the parliament, telling reporters that meetings would continue daily until there is agreement on key government positions and other issues.

[sabra]

2. where do we go from here?

:-(

[saigon68]

20. Saw this on TV--- from the article

Smoke billowed into the evening sky and angry young men kicked the decapitated head of the suicide attacker, who appeared to be an African, that lay in the street at a shop door, according to AP Television News video.

A new sport

SOCCER WITH A SEVERED HEAD

[rodeodance]

7. there is a heart wresting photo on the yahoo website with this story.

[Joanne98]

3. Car Bomb in Sadr City kills 8

Car bomb in Baghdad's Sadr City kills 8 - police
12 Mar 2006 15:26:20 GMT

Source: Reuters


BAGHDAD, March 12 (Reuters) - Eight people were killed and 10 wounded when a car bomb exploded near a market in the Shi'ite Sadr City district of Baghdad on Sunday, a policeman at the scene told Reuters.

The Interior Ministry confirmed the blast and said four mortar bombs had also landed in the district, although it was not immediately clear if they had caused any casualties.

Other police officials earlier attributed the blasts to two almost-simultaneous car bombs or a mortar attack.

Sadr City is a stronghold of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who commands the Mehdi Army militia force. The district in eastern Baghdad has been relatively free of violence in the last two years.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12757133.htm

[DoYouEverWonder]

4. Maybe it was the welcome wagon

for the new Iraqi military that just took over yesterday?

[Joanne98]

6. Sending a message to Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.......

and his Mahdi Army Militia......

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
We are here now! Disband your militia! They are not helpful!
signed.....
George W. Bush



1:15 a.m. March 10, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq – On a sandy field shrouded in a dust storm, the red flag of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 6th Iraq Army Division passed from American to Iraqi hands – and with it, control of one of Baghdad's most restive districts.
But while Iraq's new army now runs the optimistically named Forward Operating Base Hope, the question of who really controls the teeming Shiite ghetto beyond its gates is far from certain.

Col. Hussain Muhsein, commander of the 3rd Battalion, expressed confidence in his freshly trained and equipped men as they lined up in green camouflage and dark glasses for Thursday's ceremony.

“Iraqis know Iraqis,” Muhsein said. “We can handle the security inside Sadr City.”

After the handover, his soldiers raised their rifles in triumph, chanting: “Where is the terrorist today? We are ready to serve our country.”

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/20060310-...

This is getting way to easy......

[The_Casual_Observer]

13. "let freedom reign!"

[DoYouEverWonder]

5. Why can't the US Military maintain law and order in Iraq?

Iraq is the same size has Texas geographically and has about the same number of people - 25 million. There is no reason that for Billion a week we can't secure Iraq. It's just King George doesn't want to.

[Warren Stupidity]

8. Texas is not occupied territory.

(Well actually it is, but that was a really long time ago and there weren't a whole lot of people living there at the time.)

Go look at the West Bank - Israel has been trying to 'maintain law and order' there since 1967 without much success. I don't disagree with your thesis: "King George doesn't want to", as in the Neocon Cabal is fine with and expected an insurgency that justifies permanent occupation. However it is difficult and/or impossible for an occupying army to do anything other than try to keep the anti-occupation violence at a low enough level to avoid domestic political disaster. The occupying army can't 'win' and it is not a 'law enforcement' issue.

Well probably the occupying army can win in the short term if they are willing to escalate to a level of brutality unseen since WWII, (or perhaps the siege of Fallujah*.) But consider the atrocity level siege of Fallujah and the consequent totalitarian regime imposed on that city. The Resistance has not been broken there. It went deep underground, but every few weeks another IED scores a hit. They aren't going to quit until we leave or they are all dead.

*There are other modern examples as well, for example the seige of Grozny in Chechnya. The results have been the same. Short term success, long term disaster.

[Joanne98]

9. Yes it is! It's occupied by assholes!

http://filmstripinternational.com/

[Warren Stupidity]

10. You do have a point.

Thanks for the laugh.

[Joanne98]

11. you're welcome

[DoYouEverWonder]

15. I believe it is a law and order issue

Especially since Iraq was a relatively peaceful place when we invaded. Once we took over Baghdad, most of the people were happy to see us and it would have been easy to maintain law and order at that point. Instead, we turned a blind eye to the looters, we left all the ammo dumps unguarded, and we failed to provide even the most basic services like electric and water right from the start. Then you add in folks like Negroponte and his black ops folks and instead of a Free Iraq, we have a mess and Iraq is now a military state. Bush told us the Iraqi people were going to better off if we got rid of Saddam, but just like New Orleans, he refuses to lift a finger to make the situation better instead of worse. As in the words on Michael Ledeen (PNAC) we do not come to bring peace to the Middle East, but rather to destabilize it.

[Warren Stupidity]

21. "most of the people were happy to see us "

Why do you think that is true? There is no evidence I know of that this was ever true. Would you be happy if foreigners toppled our government and occupied our cities? Why would you think the Iraqis would be happy?

"it would have been easy to maintain law and order at that point" Well we are just going to have to disagree about that. Once again, you have foreigners with guns telling residents what to do and how to do it. That hardly ever works. The best we might have done was to have left the Iraqi army and its officer corp in place, but think about that. This would have left the sunni baathist officer corps that was responsible for the brutal suppression of Kurd and Shiite uprisings (uprisings that we encouraged and then betrayed) after Gulf Farce I. I rather doubt that would have been the lovefest you seem to imagine. Instead of a Sunni insurgency we would have had Shiite and Kurdish insurgencies. Toppling the odious Saddam dictatorship guaranteed the disintegration of the artificial nation of Iraq. This was the equation that was well understood in '91, and was equally understood in '03.

"we do not come to bring peace to the Middle East, but rather to destabilize it" - on that point we agree, as I tried to indicate in my original response. I disagree that there could have been a different outcome, for lots of reasons, but I do not disagree that we weren't even interested in trying.

[DoYouEverWonder]

23. The first year after the invasion

things were relatively quiet in Iraq. At that point, if we had done it right, we had a good chance at success. Do you think the Japanese were happy to see us? I don't think so. But after WW2 we went in, established law and order and then got their economy going again. In Iraq the deliberate incompetence is astounding and now to hear the pResident and Rummie shrug off civil war, while they walk away and count their stock returns is appalling. They're not even trying to pretend any more.

[Warren Stupidity]

24. "The first year after the invasion ...

things were relatively quiet in Iraq." That is simply not true. The trouble with insurgents started almost as soon as we had finished with our sham victory celebrations. The incident in Fallujah was April 2003.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7246

"Do you think the Japanese were happy to see us?" No I don't. On the other hand the level of destruction and devastation visited on Japan was pretty much beyond comprehension. Plus what we did there was not to eliminate the Japanese ruling elites, but to eliminate the top level and let the rest of them sort out how to continue to run Japan within the facade of representative democracy McCarther established. They have done so ever since with a one party tyranny that our own corporate fascists can only look at with awe and admiration.

[DoYouEverWonder]

25. Take a look at this article published today in the Guardian

Seems they have founds some memos that back up many on my previous assertions on this thread.



US postwar Iraq strategy a mess, Blair was told

Tuesday March 14, 2006

Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos. John Sawers, Mr Blair's envoy in Baghdad in the aftermath of the invasion, sent a series of confidential memos to Downing Street in May and June 2003 cataloguing US failures. With unusual frankness, he described the US postwar administration, led by the retired general Jay Garner, as "an unbelievable mess" and said "Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals" were "well-meaning but out of their depth".

That assessment is reinforced by Major General Albert Whitley, the most senior British officer with the US land forces. Gen Whitley, in another memo later that summer, expressed alarm that the US-British coalition was in danger of losing the peace. "We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be 'yes'," he concluded. The memos were obtained by Michael Gordon, author, along with General Bernard Trainor, of Cobra II: the Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, published to coincide with the third anniversary of the invasion.

The British memos identified a series of US failures that contained the seeds of the present insurgency and anarchy.
The mistakes include:

· A lack of interest by the US commander, General Tommy Franks, in the post-invasion phase.
· The presence in the capital of the US Third Infantry Division, which took a heavyhanded approach to security.
· Squandering the initial sympathy of Iraqis.
· Bechtel, the main US civilian contractor, moving too slowly to reconnect basic services, such as electricity and water.
· Failure to deal with health hazards, such as 40% of Baghdad's sewage pouring into the Tigris and rubbish piling up in the streets.
· Sacking of many of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, even though many of them held relatively junior posts.


Mr Sawers, in a memo titled Iraq: What's Going Wrong, written on May 11, four days after he had arrived in Baghdad, is uncompromising about the US administration in Baghdad. He wrote: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis."

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1730427,00.html

[Warren Stupidity]

26. We have a very minor point of disagreement.

I think the only thing we disagree on was if there was any potential for a good outcome. I think there wasn't, I also think that our administration didn't care and I think we agree about that.

As for the Brits: shame on them. They had their own disastrous occupation of Iraq after WWI - with very similar results. They ruled Baghdad and suffered a prolonged insurgency. The fact that they ignored their own recent history in this exact same region with the exact same outcome is beyond comprehension - unless one accepts that they also didn't care. At least Americans can claim to be idiots with respect to history.

[acmavm]

12. Oh hell, and here I thought everything was going just peachy keen

over there. That's what Rumsfeld said. I think.

Actually I'm not really 100% certain about what he means. I guess because civil war is untidy and the insurgents are all around Tikrit, to the north, and the south, and the east...

Sorta like WMDs.

[karlrschneider]

14. Attacks kill 41 in Baghdad Shiite slum

sorry if this has been posted, I searched but couldn't spot it

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/World/Iraq

[Clara T]

16. Scores killed in Baghdad car bombings-66 killed, 290 wounded

Scores killed in Baghdad car bombings

Monday 13 March 2006, 0:26 Makka Time, 21:26 GMT  

At least 66 people have been killed and more than 300 wounded in a series of attacks in Iraq, including 50 dead and 290 injured in a triple car bombing of a Baghdad Shia neighbourhood.

Sunday's attacks coincided with the announcement that Iraq's parliament would meet on Thursday for the first time since the December elections. It was one of the worst days of violence in Baghdad in recent months. An official said 50 had been killed and 290 wounded in the Sadr City blasts. "We expect the toll to rise," the official said.
 
Two car bombs exploded in one market while a third blew up almost simultaneously at another in Sadr City. Police said they had found a fourth car bomb in a third market and defused it.
 
"People were torn to pieces," a witness said at the scene of one blast. "Nobody knows the number of casualties. It's a lot, it's a lot."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/489C95D4-365C-430D-86D0-9DE3D6F9D9A8.htm
 

[Rose Siding]

17. WP now has: Explosions in Baghdad Kill at Least 50, Injure More Than 200

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/12/AR2006031200580.html

[VegasWolf]

18. Is it Civil War now??? nt

[Art_from_Ark]

22. Nope, it doesn't become a Civil War

until they start firing at Ft. Sumter :crazy:

[osaMABUSh]

19. When do you stop saying Civil War might happen?

And just go ahead admit it is Civil War? It's not like there's going to be a Declaration of Civil War at some point.

[lonestarnot]

27. last count was 70 bodies found in various parts of Bagitdad.

[lonestarnot]

28. Now 85 dead.