1.

Special report

Iraq

POLICE FIND 85 BODIES IN 24 HOURS OF PEOPLE 'EXECUTED' IN BAGHDAD
By Jonathan Steele

** Residents stay at home fearing tit-for-tat killings -- Gunmen refuse to respond to pleas to end violence **

Guardian (UK)
March 15, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1731086,00.html

A huge surge in what has become a daily toll of political killings is ravaging Baghdad with the discovery over the past 24 hours of at least 85 bodies of people shot at close range. Thousands stayed at home yesterday as people feared that tit-for-tat killing was going out of control and party leaders failed yet again to form a new government.

Other residents were afraid of a repetition of three car bombs which devastated street markets in the mainly Shia district known as Sadr City on Sunday, killing 58 people and wounding over 200.

In the worst incident yesterday children playing soccer in the Kamaliya district in south-east Baghdad noticed a powerful smell. They alerted police who dug up 29 unidentified bodies from a pit, most of them in their underwear and with gunshot wounds. Some appeared to have been tortured and killed in the past few days, police said, adding that they had been gagged and bound.

Earlier police found the bodies of 15 people bound and strangled in a minibus on a road between two mainly Sunni districts in western Baghdad. Baghdad hospitals received the bodies of 40 people shot dead in other incidents. They included four men shot in the head and hanged from pylons in Sadr City. Muhsin Khudayyir, the editor of an Iraqi weekly, was gunned down near his home in a Sunni part of Baghdad. His killing followed that of two journalists this week.

Shia and Sunni religious leaders continued to call for restraint but the gunmen were not heeding their pleas. The radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has the loyalty of thousands of militiamen in his so-called Mahdi army, held a rare press conference in Najaf, saying Iraqis did not want civil war. "I can fight the terrorists. I am able to face them, militarily and spiritually. We are not weak, but we don't want to be dragged to a civil war. So I will keep calling for calm," he said.

He blamed al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, led by the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for the bombings and appealed to the Association of Muslim Scholars, the main group of Sunni clerics, to denounce them and other "Takfiris," the Sunni fundamentalists who claim Shias are heretics.

He also accused the U.S. of supporting the bomb attacks in Sadr City. "We all know that . . . this act was carried out under U.S. aerial cover. Spy planes and other kinds of planes were present when the incident took place. This is in addition to disruption to the telephone network. All this corroborates the occupiers' cooperation with Takfiris so as to destabilize these Shia areas," he was quoted as saying by the state-run TV channel, al-Iraqiya.

Mr. Sadr angered the Americans further with a provocative response at his press conference to remarks made by Donald Rumsfeld last week. The U.S. defense secretary said American troops would let Iraqi security forces deal with any civil war that might break out. "My friend, whether there's a civil war or not, we don't want you to intervene," the cleric said.

In response, the U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Mr. Sadr of hypocrisy in taking ministerial jobs in government. He said: "You cannot be a part of the government while at the same time you issue statements demanding that we leave."

Mr. Khalilzad said he wanted to remind the cleric that Saddam Hussein's regime killed his father and "the U.S. saved the Iraqi people from this regime."

President Jalal Talabani once again urged political factions "to intensify their efforts to form a government and establish a broad front to achieve security and stability."

But party leaders' failure to agree on a government three months after the new parliament was elected is causing anger. The newspaper al-Dustur said: "What makes some of our politicians so stunningly stiff and reckless in their approach to even the most fateful of our national issues is that they are privileged with dual nationality. Such political players do not hesitate to go to terrifying lengths in their bid for power . . . they know they can pack up bag and baggage and flee to safety, leaving behind a country in flames."

2.

Opinion

IRAQ FANTASY CLASHING WITH REALITY
By Robert Scheer

Huffington Post
March 15, 2006

Original source: Yahoo!

What is he thinking? On a day when Shiite vigilantes conducted hangings in Sadr City in reprisal for the killing of scores of their co-religionists in a market bombing, President Bush continued to insist that progress in Iraq justified staying the course.

"By their response over the past two weeks, Iraqis have shown the world that they want a future of freedom and peace," he said Monday. "We're helping Iraqis build a strong democracy so that old resentments will be eased and the insurgency marginalized."

Contrast that fantasy with the same day's harsh news: "In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the terrorist suspects were executed, government forces vanished," reported the New York Times. "The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns. They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that."

The next day, 87 corpses, all male, were found scattered throughout the city, shot or strangled after being bound and blindfolded. This, in turn, was in apparent reprisal for a series of bombings on Sunday targeting Shiite civilians which killed 58 and wounded 300, according to Iraq's Health Ministry.

Of course, the drip-drip of American troop deaths continues, as Lance Cpl. Bunny Long, 22, of Modesto, Calif., will be coming home in a flag-draped casket after being killed Friday by a suicide, vehicle-borne, IED.

If such constant mayhem is taken as a sign of progress, three years after the U.S. invasion, then Bush surely will be thrilled by what the future holds. The British, on the other hand, have seen the handwriting on the wall and once again have begun to flee an imperial disappointment in Mesopotamia, announcing they are reducing their forces by 10 percent. Clearly, London has grasped what Bush cannot: The three-year occupation by Western armies is an incitement to guerrilla violence, not an impediment.

Of course, Bush would have us believe this expanding civil war is the work of insidious foreigners rather than of competing agendas arising from within an Iraq society long stunted by colonialism and dictatorship. It does not occur to him that he is the foreigner who the majority of Iraqis hold responsible for the country's despair, and whose occupation immeasurably strengthens the hand of extremists on all sides. Bush's neoconservative Svengalis apparently failed to alert him to the possibility that religious, ethnic, and nationalist sentiments might trump his plans for a Western-imposed "democracy," subservient to U.S. interests. Or that U.S.-engineered elections would be won by allies and disciples of the radical Shiite government in the "evil axis" capital of Tehran.

Such bright contradictions were on display in Bush's latest strategically bankrupt "plan" for victory: Spending $3.3 billion to fight the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) Bush now claims Iran is smuggling into Iraq -- to the very Shiite forces that won the U.S.-engineered election and are positioned to form the first real post-Hussein government. The IEDs, mentioned a whopping 26 times in the speech, have obviously come to replace that nonexistent WMD threat as the centerpiece of Bush's Iraq policy. We will stop them, he says, by bumping anti-IED-related spending by a factor of 22, from %$150 million in 2004 to $3.3 billion. "We're putting the best minds in America to work on this effort," Bush said.

Why not put a few of them to work on figuring how to extract the U.S. military from Iraq instead? After all, that is where all the IEDs happen to be exploding.

But, of course, this alternative, to stop making U.S. troops targets in the midst of a raging civil war in a Muslim country that the United States has no business occupying, was summarily dismissed by our president.

"[M]y decisions on troop levels will be made based upon the conditions on the ground and on the recommendations of our military commanders, not artificial timetables set by politicians here in Washington, D.C.," he said.

Has the president never read our Constitution, which mandates civilian control over the military? Does he not grasp that he is himself a Washington politician? How can you effectively sell democracy to the world when you mock it so contemptuously at home?

You can't. Not until the public and its representatives force this administration to change its disastrous course can we begin to restore international respect for the American political system that Bush has so masterfully subverted.

--Robert Scheer is editor of truthdig.com.