This poll result:
Forty-five percent of Iraqis believe attacks on U.S. and British troops are justified, according to a secret poll said to have been commissioned by British defense leaders and cited by The Sunday Telegraph.Might explain why scenes like this still occur in Iraq:Less than 1 percent of those polled believed that the forces were responsible for any improvement in security, according to poll figures.
Eighty-two percent of those polled said they were “strongly opposed” to the presence of the troops.
Four U.S. contractors for the U.S. military were killed in Iraq last month, the military said on Saturday, confirming an attack that a British newspaper said saw two of the men murdered in front of a jeering crowd.The hatches on their Humvees were closed? That’s an odd thing to say, isn’t it? Were the soldiers locked in or what?
[…]
The Telegraph, quoting a U.S. officer in the area who had spoken to soldiers involved, said the victims were American employees of Halliburton unit Kellog, Brown & Root, the biggest U.S. military contractor in Iraq.At least two of the men were dragged alive from their vehicle, which had been badly shot up, and forced to kneel in the road before being killed, it said.
“Killing one of the men with a rifle round fired into the back of his head, they doused the other with petrol and set him alight,” the newspaper report said.
“Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming man’s body to stoke the flames.”
The Telegraph said U.S. soldiers escorting the convoy were unable to respond quickly because the hatches on their Humvees were closed.
As if on cue, the New York Times has posted another story featuring death by fire:
The Bradley fighting vehicles moved slowly down this city’s main boulevard. Suddenly, a homemade bomb exploded, punching into one vehicle. Then another explosion hit, briefly lifting a second vehicle up onto its side before it dropped back down again.Does this sound as if Iraq is getting any better? Even before these stories were reported, Larry Johnson made the following astute observation:Two American soldiers climbed out of a hatch, the first with his pant leg on fire, and the other completely in flames. The first rolled over to help the other man, but when they touched, the first man also burst into flames. Insurgent gunfire began to pop.
Several blocks away, Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Rosener, 20, from Minneapolis, watched the two men die from a lookout post at a Marine encampment. His heart reached out to them, but he could not. In Ramadi, Iraq’s most violent city, two blocks may as well be 10 miles.
“I couldn’t do anything,” he said of the incident, which he saw on Oct. 10. He spoke quietly, sitting in the post and looking straight ahead. “It’s bad down there. You hear all the rumors. We didn’t know it was going to be like this.”
Here in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, Sunni Arab insurgents are waging their fiercest war against American troops, attacking with relative impunity just blocks from Marine-controlled territory. Every day, the Americans fight to hold their turf in a war against an enemy who seems to be everywhere but is not often seen.
The cost has been high: in the last six weeks, 21 Americans have been killed here, far more than in any other city in Iraq and double the number of deaths in Baghdad, a city with a population 15 times as large.
The delusional happiness reflected in Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s remarks this week to Congress about the so-called progress in Iraq ignores hard facts that point to a debacle. The international media appears to be finally catching on that the Washington spin about the purple thumb as a sign of democratic progress is pure nonsense. It is true that more people in Iraq voted in this election than last January. What Rice and other folks out of touch with reality ignore is that the increased number of Sunnis who voted came out to defeat the constitution. Unfortunately, the fix was in. Vote fraud was rampant. U.S. TV crews caught one Shia on tape casting seven yes votes. That’s sort of an old style American politics a la Chicago’s Daley machine–you know, vote early, vote often. And, results are now, once again, being withheld to “investigate” the irregularities.End it. Now. Bring them home.Here is a bold prediction: The Constitution will pass and Shia politicians will have a lock on the new Government of Iraq. Consequently, the civil war currently underway will escalate. As the Iraqi Army grows, comprised mostly of Shia and Kurds, attacks against Sunnis will also increase. And that will put the United States in an impossible situation. If we allow the Shia Army and militias to attack Sunni targets we will continue to be the target of Sunni insurgents. If we intervene to try to aid the Sunnis, the Shia’s will turn on us. If you doubt that I would ask you to recall what happened in the Shia enclave, Sadr City, in April of 2004. That battle killed Casey Sheehan and left my cousin’s son with a shattered leg.