Walker's World:Running out of time in Iraq

Quite apart from issues of Arab resentment, religion and the remaining bands of Saddam Hussein loyalists, there is one simple reason why the stabilization of Iraq is proving so frustratingly difficult. By comparison with other similar peacekeeping missions in recent years, the place is very seriously under-policed.

Consider the Balkans. In proportion to their populations, three times as many troops were deployed in Kosovo as in Iraq, and in Bosnia twice as many. By Kosovo standards, there ought to be more than half a million troops in Iraq. But maintaining 180,000 British and American troops in Iraq is putting intense strain on the military manpower of both countries. There is no serious prospect of their deploying any more. Reinforcement will have to come from other countries -- and in far greater numbers than the 70 Ukrainian soldiers who flew in Sunday.
[...]

So of all the grim questions now hanging like so many vultures over Iraq, the most urgent is whether the Bush administration is prepared to swallow its pride and go back to the United Nations for a new resolution on the reconstruction of Iraq.

The price to be paid for this would be considerable, and not just in loss of American face. Any hopes of a favored role for British and American oil companies would have to be reconsidered, and France and Russia might even see the honoring of those oilfield development contracts they negotiated with Saddam's regime.

Above all, Washington would lose its current power to determine the political future of Iraq. The initial hopes that Iraq could become a prosperous pro-Western democracy, a catalyst for modernization throughout the Middle East, would become highly problematic. A political process supervised by the United Nations is likely to strengthen the hand of the Shiite majority, and may well help those Shiite religious leaders who take their cue (and their funds) from neighboring Iran. It would be hard for the United Nations to turn down the friendly offer from Iran of welfare missions and an accompanying 25,000 peacekeeping troops.
[more]

  thanks to Talking Points Memo

Anita Roddick has two dispatches from Baghdad written by a friend of hers. I hope there will be more.

Dispatch From Baghdad

Sunday, 3 August I'm in Baghdad and it's Sunday night. Today was perhaps the most bizarre, terrifying (although my traveling companions and I were never in any immediate danger), and mind-blowing day of my life. We left lovely Amman at 4 a.m. and were in Baghdad by about 3 p.m. The landscape, physical, climatological, and cultural, changed so much that the night bore no resemblance to the morning. I can't possibly catalog it all, but I can give some impressions.

We crossed the border and headed into Iraq at about 10 a.m. A GMC Suburban, the choice of foreign travelers, at $500 cash for the trip. perhaps 100km into the western desert, and burned out cars appear by the roadside. A scorched Ferrari said to have belonged to Uday Hussein, missiled to oblivion as one of his lieutenants tried to escape. Saddam's majestic 6-lane highway from Jordan to Baghdad, probably better than any U.S. desert interstate, marked by scores of burn marks. A highway overpass with a gaping hole caused by a bomb, which we are told was aimed at a passenger bus. A few hundred yards later, the bus itself, utterly destroyed, the only visual comparison to one suicide-bombed in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
[more]

  thanks to the bitter shack of resentment

Dispatch From Baghdad, Part II

Thursday, 7 August
We spent the better part of this afternoon in the middle of a firefight. We left our hotel at around 1 pm, headed for the Jordanian embassy, which was hit by a car bomb early this morning. As we drove out, we saw a tall column of thick black smoke rising straight up into the windless sky just a mile or two away. We told our driver to turn around and we sped to the scene. We were the first journalists there.

We found the smoke coming from the flattened skeleton of a U.S. Humvee, burning pathetically in the street. There were two other vehicles in the convoy, another Humvee and a 2-1/2-ton truck. The soldiers in those vehicles were taking cover behind their rides and waiting for reinforcements. We hustled up just behind them and took cover on the sidewalk. An al-Jazeera cameraman and a couple of others came in behind us.
[more]

  thanks to the bitter shack of resentment

'Bring us home': GIs flood US with war-weary emails
An unprecedented internet campaign waged on the frontline and in the US is exposing the real risks for troops in Iraq. Paul Harris and Jonathan Franklin report on rising fears that the conflict is now a desert Vietnam   thanks to daily KOS

'We don't feel like heroes anymore'   thanks to Truthout

US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq

Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car

Eruption of violence in Basra angers army

British troops battle to control mobs in Basra
Rioters attack petrol stations in protest over dire shortage of fuel and electricity

Curiouser and Curiouser
Iraq’s mysteries are of two kinds: no one knows, and no one says   thanks to Cursor