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

 

The Destruction of Fallujah
(Edward Wong, The New York Times, 14 November 2004)
Neutralizing the threat from the green-domed mosque looked almost effortless. Marines in the dusty warrens of Falluja had been taking fire from one of its twin minarets. They called in air support. A 500-pound bomb slammed into a blue-tiled tower, obliterating a signature part of the Khulafa Al Rashid mosque, the city's most celebrated religious building. . . . As in a fevered dream, that and other scenes of destruction played out last week in Falluja before the eyes of American troops, residents and reporters. . . . given the track record of the Americans and their allies, military analysts say, the immediate goals in Falluja seem naïve, if not utterly inconsequential given the surging resistance across the Sunni-dominated regions of Iraq, almost certainly organized by the very leaders who fled Falluja before the offensive. . . . "Iraq is a complex problem," said Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group based in Washington. "Our problem is that we keep leading people to believe that there are simple solutions." . . . "Our military action creates other problems that our military cannot solve," he said. "And we haven't been very good at fixing what we broke in Iraq." . . . American commanders say they had no illusions that the Falluja offensive would let them capture the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, or break the back of the insurgency. . . . What they do not acknowledge is that seizing Falluja does not bring them much closer to solving the occupation's most intractable problem - how to get Sunni Arabs to overcome their feelings of disenfranchisement and accept the role of a minority in a democratic Iraqi state. . . . In anticipating a democracy, the Americans have signaled at every turn that they foresee power flowing to the majority Shiites, and the elections scheduled for January are a way to accomplish that in a manner that appears legitimate. Hammering Falluja is supposed to force insurgent Sunnis to realize the hopelessness of armed conflict and instead turn to the ballot box. . . . But it is not so easy to convince people with little concept of minority rights that a Western-style democracy will work for them. For Sunnis to accept this new style of government, they will have to be persuaded that their rights will still be respected by an American-backed Shiite-dominated ruling class . . . Installing a working Iraqi government and police force in Falluja is a less ambitious goal, but it too seems a stretch for the Americans. In the offensive, most of the Iraqi forces have done little actual fighting. They roll in after the Americans have already cleared city blocks of insurgents and are assigned to search buildings. . . . Some seem disoriented as they stand in the debris-strewn landscape, their brown uniforms spotless from not having done a lick of fighting. Little has changed since last May, when the First Armored Division laid siege to Karbala, and Iraqi security forces merely cleared weapons out of mosques. . . . In Mosul on Thursday, police officers at a half-dozen police stations scurried away as soon as insurgents began firing their rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles. Two weeks ago, bombings and mortar attacks left at least 30 dead in Samarra, only a month after American forces swept through the city and claimed a resounding victory. A senior American military officer in Baghdad admitted that after the Americans left, the insurgents were able to overwhelm the poorly trained Iraqi police. . . . In Samarra, the guerrillas evacuated before American armor rolled in, and then bided their time, which is the greatest advantage an insurgency has, because the occupying force at some point will depart. The insurgents don't need a safe haven like Falluja to run down the clock. "In fact, Maoist tactics would argue against trying to settle in a city and hold it at this stage of a weak insurgency, and for using the population as a sea to swim in,"

posted by LoZo 12:29 PM