The Phantom Weapons...
by Riverbend

The phone hasn't been working for almost a week now. We just got the line back today. For the last six days, I'd pick up the phone and hear... silence. Nothing. This vast nothingness would be followed by a few futile 'hellos' and a forceful punching of some random numbers with my index finger. It isn't always like this, of course. On some days, you can pick up the telephone and hear a bunch of other people screaming "allooo? Allooo?" E. once struck up a conversation with a complete stranger over the phone because they were both waiting for a line. E. wanted to call our uncle and the woman was trying to call her grandson. The dial-tone came about an hour ago (I've been checking since morning) and I'm taking advantage of it. The electricity situation isn't very much better. We're getting two hours of electricity (almost continuous) and then eight hours of no electricity (continuous). We still can't get the generators going for very long because of the fuel shortage. Kerosene is really becoming a problem now. I guess we weren't taking it very seriously at first because, it really is probably the first time Iraq has seen a kerosene shortage and it is still difficult to believe. They say in 1991 when there was a gasoline shortage which lasted for the duration of the war and some time after, kerosene was always plentiful. This isn't the situation now. We're buying it for obscene prices and it's really only useful for the lamps and the heaters. It feels like just about everyone who can is going to leave the country before the elections. They say the borders between Syria and Jordan might be closed a week before elections so people are rushing to get packed and get out. Many families are simply waiting for their school-age children to finish mid-year finals or college exams so they can leave.

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Riverbend, a young woman in Baghdad, has had the best writing on living in under the occupation. Her blog is going to be a book...

Baghdad Burning
Girl Blog from Iraq

Buy the book or just go back and read her archives.

  thanks to Body and Soul

"The Tent of Occupation"
Fallujah's Refugees Won't Return Home, Won't Vote
By ROBERT FISK

They live beneath old fly-blown tents in the car-park of the Mustafa mosque and their canvas-roofed kitchen stands next to a pool of raw sewage, but the refugees from Fallujah will not return home.

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Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz, Desolate Falluja

Unfortunately, the only success in the Fallujan campaign so far has been in demonstrating "the consequences" that would accrue to cities that harbored guerrillas. Falluja was gutted. Two months after the invasion, Erik Eckholm of the New York Times described the city as "a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees." At least a quarter of its homes were fully destroyed, and virtually all the others were severely damaged. Blown out windows, wrecked furniture, three-foot blast holes in walls, and disintegrated doors demonstrated that American troops had relentlessly applied what they jokingly called the "FISH" strategy (Fighting in Someone's House), which involved "throwing a hand grenade into each room before checking it for unfriendlies." Since (in the words of Lt. Gen. Sattler) "each and every house" was searched, very few remained livable.

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New intelligence reports raise questions about U.S. mission in Iraq

A series of new U.S. intelligence assessments on Iraq paints a grim picture of the road ahead and concludes that there's little likelihood that President Bush's goals can be attained in the near future. Instead of stabilizing the country, national elections Jan. 30 are likely to be followed by more violence and could provoke a civil war between majority Shiite Muslims and minority Sunni Muslims, the CIA and other intelligence agencies predict, according to senior officials who've seen the classified reports.

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How Americans Were Seduced by War

Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders who they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, "you are with us or against us."

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U.S. Military Resorting to Collective Punishment

The U.S. military is resorting to collective punishment tactics in Iraq similar to those used by Israeli troops in the occupied territories of Palestine, residents say.

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Hotel Room Journalism
The US Press in Iraq

"Hotel journalism" is the only phrase for it. More and more Western reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the streets of Iraq's towns and cities. Some are accompanied everywhere by hired, heavily armed Western mercenaries. A few live in local offices from which their editors refuse them permission to leave. Most use Iraqi stringers, part-time correspondents who risk their lives to conduct interviews for American or British journalists, and none can contemplate a journey outside the capital without days of preparation unless they "embed" themselves with American or British forces.

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  thanks to Steve Gilliard's News Blog

The US Army is cracking, bit by bit

People still worry about the draft, but this sounds like a story from 1970, which means a draft would only add logs on a fire. When soldiers are deserting from combat units, that's a bad thing. The indiscipline will only spread to units in Iraq. The Army is falling apart, quietly, but certainly.

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RAND to seek ways to avoid draft

A reliable source tells me that RAND has been contracted by the government to come up with a way to avoid instituting a draft, despite the desperate needs for more combat forces. The solution? Outsource desk and logistics jobs to private companies while pushing those "chairborne" warriors out of their offices into fighting units.

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