Our blogs about
America's Wars
War on Iraq
War on Drugs
War on Afghanistan
War on Columbia
War on Philippines
War on Venezuela

MORE
Matrix Masters
Blogs
World Events
Katrina's Aftermath
US News
Bush Crime Family News
Science & Health
Earth News
Free Speech
News from Africa
News from Palestine
Bill of Rights Under Attack

Support Bloggers' Rights!

Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

Al Jazeera (English)
    Baghdad Burning Blog (by Riverbend, an Iraqi civilian girl)
            Dahr Jamail's Blog from Baghdad
                Imad Khadduri's blog "Free Iraq" (scroll down for English version)

Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

End to Iraqi disarray sought
(Derk Kinnane Roelofsma, UPI, June 27, 2003)
With daily killings of coalition troops, sabotage of oil pipelines, uncontrolled crime, continuing shortages of electricity and water, and rising Iraqi hostility to occupation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is looking, two months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, for ways to end the disarray in U.S. policy on Iraq. . . . "Lawlessness is endemic. Alongside the highway, boys scale electric poles with wire cutters (the electric cables have copper that can be sold) while their elders look on. To the south, in Umm Qasr, Iraq's only deep-sea port, young men climb atop trucks chartered by the World Food Program, casually tossing down 100-pound bags of flour to their friends waiting below, while a Spanish military unit guarding its ship stands by impotently only yards away. There is no police force of any note here -- and if a policeman had a gun and was to fire, he would just start his own interfamily war." . . . Last week, Patrick Cockburn, a British journalist particularly knowledgeable about Iraq, reported from Baghdad that the few Iraqis who have joined the authority describe the American officials administering Iraq as living in an air-conditioned fantasy world. . . . A well-known writer on military, Ralph Peters, told UPI there has been what he called a Stalinist refusal by the administration to admit that anything in its plan for Iraq could go wrong. Peters is a retired lieutenant colonel with a background in military intelligence. . . . Asked how the White House and Defense Department went wrong, Houlahan answered that, "Virtually no thought at all went into what to do in Iraq after the war." . . . Rumsfeld, he said, "made the whole operation more difficult than it needed to be and increased the risks to the soldiers." . . . Houlahan did not spare the military. "There are too many senior leaders in the armed forces who are boot-licking yes-men," he said. "If serious and well-presented objections had been raised, Rumsfeld would not have created so many problems." . . . Peters, asserting that neo-conservatives such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others were behind the war, said they "talked themselves into believing a scenario in which the Iraqis would magically restructure themselves."

posted by LoZo 3:43 PM