The counter on Helena Cobban’s site says
82 days since Iraqis elected an Assembly with a UIA-list majority, without a government accountable to that Assembly being allowed to take power.
Meanwhile longtime CIA asset’s Allawi list refuses to join Iraq cabinet without five posts
Allawi’s Iraqiya list took just 40 of the 275 seats in parliament in landmark elections on January 30. The Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance took 146 seats, while the main Kurdish bloc took 77.
You are free to guess who gave the advice to Allawi to further block the creation of an Iraqi government with his ridicules request. It is time for Sistani to call for some impressive peaceful demonstrations or for Al Sadr to induce some other forms of mass protest.
The military situation of the U.S. forces is getting worse day by day. In a Washington Post report by an embedded reporter we find this scene from a Forward Operating Base only 25 miles from Baghdad:
Capt. Ryan Seagreaves, of Allentown, Pa., told [his commander] McMaster that he needed engineers to reinforce and expand his austere base so that there would be room for more Iraqi forces. He said he also needed dirt to fill protective barriers. Iraqi contractors are so terrified to work in the area that a convoy of 10 earth-filled dump trucks recently refused to travel south to McMaster’s base. One driver fainted when told the destination, he said.
USA Today writes about another FOB:
Unable for safety reasons to patrol the city on foot and in vehicles, troops are limited in their ability to gain important street-level intelligence. So the Marines primarily mount counterattacks on insurgents and criminals who fire into the camp. Last week, the Marines averted disaster when three car bombers backed by 30 insurgents assaulted the camp.
May I suggest that situations where you are "unable to get dirt" and you are "restricted to counterattack" are exactly those, that tell you it is game-over and to get your ass out of there. These under supplied FOBs are ready to be run over. One of them will inevitably be annihilated by the insurgents within the next weeks. I do not expect them to allow for survivors.
In this context an important book by Andrew J. Bacevich has been released and excerpts are available at Mother Jones and elsewhere. From the The Normalization of War:
The American public’s ready acceptance of the prospect of war without foreseeable end and of a policy that abandons even the pretense of the United States fighting defensively or viewing war as a last resort shows clearly how far the process of militarization has advanced.
…
The old twentieth-century aesthetic of armed conflict as barbarism, brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste grew out of World War I, as depicted by writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, and Robert Graves. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam reaffirmed that aesthetic, in the latter case with films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket.The intersection of art and war gave birth to two large truths. The first was that the modern battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and modern war an orgy of destruction that devoured guilty and innocent alike. The second, stemming from the first, was that military service was an inherently degrading experience and military institutions by their very nature repressive and inhumane. After 1914, only fascists dared to challenge these truths. Only fascists celebrated war and depicted armies as forward-looking — expressions of national unity and collective purpose that paved the way for utopia. To be a genuine progressive, liberal in instinct, enlightened in sensibility, was to reject such notions as preposterous.
As it is convenient (and profitable) for the established media not to show the real aesthetic of war, you can watch some videos made by the legitimate resistance to get some sense of what is going on. Here are some links form the Oxford Antiwar site:
Mercenary chopper shot down – no prisoners taken (RealMedia)
Vehicle born IED on convoi (RealMedia)
Secondary IED attack on US troops (RealMedia)
IED on Stryker vehicle (mpeg)
Kid gets shoot by US(?) sniper (Windows media player)
Bacevich:
In the right circumstances, for the right cause, it now turned out, war could actually offer an attractive option–cost-effective, humane, even thrilling. Indeed, as the Anglo-American race to Baghdad conclusively demonstrated in the spring of 2003, in the eyes of many, war has once again become a grand pageant, performance art, or a perhaps temporary diversion from the ennui and boring routine of everyday life.
War has not changed, but the people and the ruling class of the United States. As Bacevich says: "only fascists celebrated war."
