Battle for Baghdad: City braces itself for US surge (Independent / UK)

[struggle4progress]

Urban fighting amid the ruins
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Published: 28 January 2007

Lina Massufi, a 32-year-old Iraqi laboratory assistant with two children, is a widow - her husband was killed by US troops when he accidentally drove down a closed road in 2003. In the past three months she has seen her house raided and her furniture smashed 12 times.

"Every time they raid my house, they break down the door," she told a UN official. When she asked them why they did not ring the bell "they laughed at me and called me an idiot". Her brother Fae'ek, a pharmacy student, was arrested and held in prison for a week. "He returned with signs of torture on his body, and was crying like a baby because of the pain." ...

But the failings of this strategy become more obvious the further one gets from Washington and the closer to Baghdad. The insurgents and militiamen, both Sunni and Shia, usually have more credibility in their districts than Iraqi government forces. As for the heavily Shia police commandos, they are seen by Sunni in Baghdad as licensed death squads.

A foretaste of what the "surge" of US and Iraqi soldiers will mean came last week, as they fought their way into the tough Sunni insurgent-controlled Haifa Street neighbourhood, only a mile from the Green Zone. Iraqi soldiers happily let US forces take the lead, and a US long-range missile demolished a house from which snipers were allegedly firing. The readiness of the Americans to use such heavy weapons in densely-populated urban areas ensures that many civilians have been, and will be, killed and wounded ...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2192979.ece

[frogcycle]

1. it is going to be ghastly

and any hope we might still have had of salvaging a decent relationship with the Iraqis is going to be gone.

Our troops are stuck with being the new "butcher of baghdad" in bush's desperation attempt to salvage his ego.

[Webster Green]

2. Hide the women and children..

U. S. troops are on the way. :cry:

[Just-plain-Kathy]

4. Re: "Hide the women and children...U.S. troops are on the way".

It's all so sad. :cry:

[flordehinojos]

3. they really suffer from impudent boldness, among other things, these bushes.

from poppy, to barbara, to jeb, to junior, to the rest of them, they simply are hateful but even beyond hateful, they are crazed criminals.

[malaise]

7. I wish this was mere impudent boldness

THis is mass murder to eliminate their opposition. They will pay.

[Rex]

5. I'm still waiting to see what these supposed 'lessons learned'

after the Vietnam War George keeps talking about. So far I see them repeating almost the EXACT same mistakes and getting worse.

I won't hold by breath on this one. :eyes:

[struggle4progress]

6. The "lessons" they think they've learned concern handling domestic opposition:

limit media coverage of the conflict, spy on Americans, fill government with "loyal" supporters, control leaks, &c&c ... None of it's new, of course, but they have a "opposition stabbed us in the back" view of Nixon's downfall, from which they think they've learned that Nixon should have been more ruthless ...