World Iraq Newswire Archive

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS ISSUES OFFICIAL REPORT CONFIRMING 73,000 U.S. TROOPS KILLED IN IRAQ
SAME GOVERNMENT AGENCY REPORT CONFIRMS 1.6 MILLION "DISABLED" BY THE WAR

Finally the Imperial Senate calls for Iraq's partition.

It is, to say the least, a predictable outcome, one that dovetails nicely with the neocon master plan. “US lawmakers voted Wednesday to split Iraq into a loose federation of sectarian-based regions and urged President George W Bush to press Iraqi leaders to agree,” reports Monsters and Critics.

Now we have article 41.In brief, it says go to your cleric and he will deal with whatever issues you have.

AS MEGA DEATH TOLL FROM OCCUPATION PASSES A MILLION

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” - Josef Stalin

And how proud Old Joe would have been of our Soviet-style self censorship! Here’s one that slipped past the headlines - the death toll in Iraq has now passed the one million mark.

When children fainted in school, the reason was usually: 'It's not my turn to eat today' - courtesy USA and Britain.

Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon from his Multinational Division-Baghdad headquarters, painted a generally positive picture but acknowledged that the fighting remains hard.

Alan Greenspan had acknowledged what is blindingly obvious to those who live in the reality-based world: The Iraq War was largely about oil.

The British government promoted its occupation of Basra as an exercise more sophisticated and intelligent than that conducted by its ally the US in Iraq. From the moment the British hunkered down in Basra after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq it seemed the British government and much of the mainstream media never missed a chance to boast of the softly-softly, ‘hearts and minds’ approach of its occupation. We were assured that this had everything to do with the experience it had gained in previous British military exploits, particularly in Northern Ireland, while the US were still learning lessons from their historic defeat in Vietnam. This projection of the fair-playing Brits was repeated ad naseum until a string of dramatic events took place in front of the world’s media which put an end to this myth making. Events such as prisoner and detainee abuse by British soldiers, and SAS special forces undercover operations apparently designed to foment civil strife, exposed the British army as no different to any other hostile military occupier. Everyone outside the Ministry of Defence and Cabinet agrees that the British ‘deployment’ from Basra Palace to the airport eleven kilometres out of the city is a defeat.

As should be obvious, the invasion and occupation of Iraq—and the coming attack against Iran and Syria—is not “largely” about oil or even Israel’s “security.” It is about flattening Arab and Muslim societies and reshuffling the charred and blood-spattered remains into splintered, emasculated, and “failed” vassal states.

We Can’t Talk About Oil

A recent Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll “suggests” Bush “may have a little more maneuvering room at a critical point in debates over war costs and troop levels... The poll shows an uptick in support for the president’s handling of the war as well as a small increase in the proportion of Americans who believe the troop surge is helping and that victory remains possible.”

If we can trust the numbers cranked out by the War Street Journal and NBC-GE, the coming attack directed against Iran—next week, next month, certainly before the decider-commander guy leaves office—will not be a cakewalk, but rather a piece of cake, as the American people are easily swayed, or at least half of them are, by neocon manufactured “new realities” enthusiastically marketed by a corporate media with a vested interest in continued mass murder and misery.

In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003.

News media this week are devoting huge swathes of coverage to the report by General David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq, on the impact of the so-called ‘surge’ of US troops. The surge boosted the number of US troops in Iraq earlier this year by 30,000 to 168,000.

In October 2006 researchers from Johns Hopkins University published a peer-reviewed article in The Lancet, one of Europe's most important and respected medical journals, estimating that 650,000 Iraqis had been killed due to the U.S.-led invasion of their country, 601,000 violently. [1] The report was quickly marginalized in public debate in the United States.

On May 12th 2005, the United Nations organization which monitors drug trafficking announced that Iraq "is about to become a transit station for transporting the heroine, which is manufactured in Afghanistan and is heading towards Europe through neighbouring Iran".

Former US Marine Matt Howard, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, toured Australia last week, speaking at a number of antiwar meetings as well as demonstrations in Sydney held during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Howard, 26, was a 7-tonne driver in the Marine Corps’ 1st Tank Battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He served a second tour of duty in 2004.

Last week the British armed forces left Basra Palace, their last base in the Southern Iraqi city, and moved to an airbase outside the city.

Their withdrawal will be followed by the official handover of Basra province sometime in the next few months. Once that is complete, the British will finally leave Iraq.

The British withdrawal has led to a classic propaganda battle over how effective the British were in their four years of occupation.

A review of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq by Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books, pp 240.

International concern was first raised by Astrid Van Genderen Stort, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Geneva, who stated in 2005, "They (Palestinians) have been victims of night raids, arbitrary arrests and torture carried out by Iraqi security forces."