There a lot of links to Iraq in this post. Links to what is going on and, more important, links that try to answer why. But first I want to share three pictures that show what this is really about — people.

People dying...

people killing...

people terrified.

The picture of the three soldiers made me cry. They are as scared as anyone else. They are just kids. The don't belong where they are. They should not be doing what they are doing. They probably know that. May those that sent them there rot in a special hell. And may all those kids come home.

Here are some links to check on what is happening.

The Agonist

Juan Cole

Whiskey Bar

AntiWar.com

Senator Byrd's comments are a must read.

A Call for an Exit Door from Iraq
by Sen. Robert Byrd

During the past weekend, the death toll among America's military personnel in Iraq topped 600 – including as many as 20 American soldiers killed in one three-day period of fierce fighting. Many of the dead, most perhaps, were mere youngsters, just starting out on the great adventure of life. But before they could realize their dreams, they were called into battle by their Commander in Chief, a battle that we now know was predicated on faulty intelligence and wildly exaggerated claims of looming danger. As I watch events unfold in Iraq, I cannot help but be reminded of another battle at another place and another time that hurtled more than 600 soldiers into the maws of death because of a foolish decision on the part of their commander. The occasion was the Battle of Balaclava on October 25, 1864, during the Crimean War, a battle that was immortalized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in his poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade." "Forward, the Light Brigade!" Was there a man dismay'd? Not tho' the soldier knew Someone had blunder'd: Their's not to make reply, Their's not to reason why, Their's but to do and die: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. [...] When speaking of Iraq, the President maintains that his resolve is firm, and indeed the stakes for him are enormous. But the stakes are also enormous for the men and women who are serving in Iraq, and who are waiting and praying for the day that they will be able to return home to their families, their ranks painfully diminished but their mission fulfilled with honor and dignity. The President sent these men and women into Iraq, and it is his responsibility to develop a strategy to extricate them from that troubled country before their losses become intolerable. It is staggeringly clear that the Administration did not understand the consequences of invading Iraq a year ago, and it is staggeringly clear that the Administration has no effective plan to cope with the aftermath of the war and the functional collapse of Iraq. It is time – past time – for the President to remedy that omission and to level with the American people about the magnitude of mistakes made and lessons learned. America needs a roadmap out of Iraq, one that is orderly and astute, else more of our men and women in uniform will follow the fate of Tennyson's doomed Light Brigade.

[more]

Here is what is happening...

Gunbattles Rage in Many Iraqi Cities on Wednesday

Urban warfare grips Iraq

US loses control of two cities
Up to 300 dead in Falluja
Three Japanese 'taken hostage'
Iraqi interior minister resigns

Battles rage from north to south
Dozens die in bomb and missile attack near mosque
Militia leader warns: Iraq will be new Vietnam
Blow to US as ayatollah fails to condemn uprising

US Bombs Fallujah Mosque; More Than 40 Worshippers Killed
Revolutionary violence engulfs Iraq

Mosques will be targeted: US

Here are some looks at the larger picture...

Fleeing Baghdad
I didn't want to leave the nation my country tore apart. But then came warnings that our house was targeted. A farewell portrait of a place on the edge of the abyss.

Hell in a handbasket

Steve Gilliard has been saying it for over a year. I have been saying it for as long. What's happening is not a surprise -- it was to be expected. It took Saddam nearly a million men under arms and brutal repressive tactics to keep the country under control. And even then, there was near perpetual insurgency against his rule. For the US to think they could control the country, as outside occupiers, with a shade over 100,000 troops (and, according to Rumsfeld, about a third of that at this point in the calendar) bordered on insanity. But as we have seen again and again in this administration, ideology trumps reality. And the reality on the ground is sickening. We are facing a well-armed, well-trained, and coordinated enemy. Remember -- we never defeated these guys in combat. The US bought off Republican Guard commanders sparing our troops heavy combat on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere across the country.

[more]

Volley and Thunder, Shot and Shell

It is clear that the rationalizations that worked the day before yesterday will not work today, nor on any day henceforward. The rapid deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the realization that we are up against an inflamed population whose ferocious hatred confounds us, and the fecklessness of our "leaders" in the face of this untoward consequence of our invasion follies all lead to the same conclusion John Burns dolefully expressed on PBS tonight: that we are, in effect, damned and doomed no matter what our course of action

[more]

Shockwave:
Kut evacuated, Poll numbers hit

Tet broke the will of the political leadership in the US to pursue victory in Vietnam, at the same time it destroyed the credibility of the US political leadership in the eyes of a significant proportion of the population. Core to this was the contrast between rosy reports by the military, and clear images from the ground that the war was not going as well as had been stated. Similar mistakes are being made in Iraq, with the signs in the polls being that yesterday represented a measurable hit in the credibility of the executive branch that has staked its tenure on Iraq.

[more]

Here are four pieces from The Asia Times. A good source for analysis.

One year on: From liberation to jihad

So this is the Bush administration-sponsored "free Iraq" people identify not only in the Sunni triangle but in the Shi'ite south: an occupying power maybe not formally occupying the country any more, but installed in 14 military bases and able to exercise full control on security, the economy and the whole infrastructure. In plain English: a US colony. This is the reason the mob in Fallujah rejoiced in the burning of those American bodies. This is the reason Sunnis and Shi'ites have for now united in anger. And this is the reason the "liberation" has finally turned into a jihad.

[more]

The Shi'ite voice that will be heard

The coalition believes that arresting Muqtada will end the resistance. But arresting or killing him will make no difference. Muqtada is seeking martyrdom and has been seeking an apocalypse. The problem is not a single individual. The problem is the occupation, and this week things got much worse for the Iraqi people and their occupiers. In Iran before the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters condemned the hated Shah as Yazid, the murderer of Husein, the leader of the Shi'ites whom they mourned during Ashura. In Lebanon, the Shi'ite resistance called the Israeli occupier Yazid. During Ashura, banners in Karbala declared that America was the new Yazid. Other banners warned of Husein's revenge that would soon remove the Americans. Iraq's Shi'ites were expected by the planners of the war to rejoice at their liberation. The rejection of the Koran as the main source of the constitution began a process of alienation leading to the current fighting. But one must ask, how could the Americans be so stupid to provoke the Shi'ite majority three months before the planned handover of sovereignty back to the Iraqi people?

[more]

Iraq revolt: Tactics of diversion

The substantive extent of the present gamble which the Bush administration appears to be undertaking cannot be exaggerated, providing a measure of the perceived severity of US political imperatives, or administration blindness. Providing commentary on Iraq's reality, Democratic senator Ted Kennedy just charged that Iraq is "Bush's Vietnam". But on October 28, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brezinski provided what may be a more accurate analogy to another country, where France battled insurgents. Brezinski described a movie "which deals with a reality which is very similar to that we confront today in Baghdad ... The Battle For Algiers". In Algeria, the French lost, and some observers believe that France itself was nearly plunged into civil war because of it.

[more]

When fear turns to anger

In the beginning of the occupation a taxi driver was asked what he thought of the events in Iraq. He looked away and started crying. Asked if somebody in his family had died, he replied: "We all died." Now taxi drivers talk only of the latest explosion, and how much they hate the Americans and want to kill them. One taxi driver drove by a mosque and saw Americans in the courtyard. "Look what they're doing!" he shouted hysterically, "they even enter inside mosques! They are dirty Jews, I swear if I had an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] now I would shoot them!" Only the fools are optimistic in Iraq. If the Americans stay, more innocent Iraqis will be killed by them and more Iraqis will die fighting them. More American boys will die for nothing far away from home, where there is even talk of the draft being reinstated to compensate for a military stretched thin. Should the Americans withdraw, Iraqis will not rejoice for long before they turn on each other in the competition for power, but the American retreat will be viewed by radical Islam as a success akin to the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, giving their movement a fillip in the "clash of civilizations", a theory with no basis made real thanks to Osama bin Laden and Bush. Americans should have learned on September 11 that they are not immune to the consequences of their government's irresponsibility.

[more]

Report from Baghdad -- Opening the Gates of Hell

Shaykh Sadun al-Shemary, a former member of the Iraqi army who participated in the 1991 uprising and now a spokesman for the al-Sadr organization in Shuala, told me, "Things are exactly the same as in Saddam's time -- maybe worse." That is all you need to know about the occupation of Iraq.

[more]

Death of a Dream

Whether that's due to an irrational hatred of Jews and all their works, or understandable anguish over the suffering of the Palestinian people, is irrelevant, at least at the moment. Either way, it means the "wet" neocon strategy for making the Middle East safe for a Greater Israel though democratic liberation has been revealed as an utter failure. This leaves only the "dry" alternative of military force -- applied relentlessly and, when necessary, overwhelmingly. Somewhere in the background I think I can hear Ariel Sharon, muttering: "Hell, I could have told you that."

[more]

The Twenty Minute President

But Iraq isn't the West Bank, and the Iraqi intifada isn't going to be put down by beating the crap out of a few unarmed demonstrators -- as the Marines found out yesterday. "Shutting them down" is probably going to require the U.S. military to deal out death and devastation on a fairly massive scale, to insurgent and civilian alike. If so, then it would seem the unforgiving minute has come and gone -- and we have not been forgiven. We may be over the edge of the cliff now, heading for the bottom, accelerating at 32 feet per second per second.

[more]

Talking Points Memo

One might argue that that was a proper strategy. Sometimes a looming crisis needs to be brought to a head. But if that's so, we seem to have done little to prepare for the reaction. Where's the White House's strategy? Where is it now, three days later? All we seem to be hearing are hollow assertions of a vacant will. From the White House's advocates we hear logic puzzles about appeasement in which the fall-out from the president's screw ups become the prime argument for continuing to support them. At the critical moment the president has the toxic mix of the bulldog will of a Winston Churchill and the strategic insights and imagination of a Neville Chamberlain. He has no plan. And will without policy just equals death. The gap between the reality in Iraq and the White House's Potemkin village version of it is closing rapidly, like an upper and lower jaw about to shut tight. And the White House's penchant for denial is being squeezed between the two.

[more]