Antiwar.com Blog

Given the Bush administration’s fondness for failed Soviet initiatives, they may want to consider another one that has just come to light: putting a military base on the moon. From The Moscow News:

In the days of the Cold War Soviet commanders and their best scientists were working on a project to build military headquarters on the Moon, the Novaya Gazeta weekly reports. The paper writes that the lunar base project was developed thirty years ago and was only abolished because of its enormous cost.

The newspaper cited Aleksandr Yegorov, deputy general designer of the General Machine Building Design Bureau (the name of the bureau suggests that it deals with top secret military projects — MosNews) as saying that he personally took part in the development of the lunar base project.

Soviet scientists considered the Moon to be a very good place for a strategic headquarters as nuclear strikes on its surface would lose most of their destructive force. As the moon has no atmosphere, no shockwave could spread there and the radioactive dust would immediately fall out back on the surface without an atmosphere to carry it. …

The project was abolished only due to its enormous cost, Yegorov said. According to him, the Soviet project was “tens of times” more expensive than the Apollo project of the United States which cost $34 billion.

Well, cost has yet to prevent Bush from doing anything else, and occupying the moon would probably be a damn sight cheaper than occupying Iraq for the rest of eternity.

Is the US still holding Al-Douri’s wife and daughter hostage? The US admits to having two women prisoners and it is for these two women’s release that the Tawhil wal Jihad is currently beheading their American and Briton hostages. Scotsman.com reports that Dr Rihab Taha and Dr Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash are the only known women prisoners of the US. If so, what happened to Al-Douri’s family?

Just asking.

From Abbas Kadhim’s blog:

The residents of Baghdad do not agree with al-Sha’lan and al-Alusi about their #1 enemy. Here are the numbers in response to the only question in the survey, “Whom do you think is Iraq’s #1 enemy”:

1. Israel 32%
2. USA 23.2%
3. Extremist Islamic groups 12.3%
4. Saddam and his supporters 11.4%
5. Iran 8.8%
6. Al-Qa’ida 8%
7. Al-Zarqawi 4.3%

Reportedly 3 Kurds labeled as “KDP party members” have been beheaded and the video posted on the web. At the same time, it is reported that 25 “Iraqi National Guard members” have also been abducted. Considering that the “Iraqi National Guard” which fought alongside US forces in Fallujah, Najaf and Tal Afar were almost completely made up of Kurdish peshmerga, it is possible that these 25 abducted Iraqis are Kurds.

After the bloody siege and assault on Fallujah, Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karl Vick reported in the Washington Post:

Guerrillas coming out of Fallujah have complained bitterly that Kurdish militiamen known as pesh merga are deployed against them. The Kurds are members of the 36th Battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps built from several exile-based militias that supported the U.S.-led campaign against Saddam Hussein. Commanders of another, overwhelmingly Arab Iraqi arm battalion refused to fight alongside the Marines.

“Worse than pigs, thieves and tramps,” read lines a poem circulating on fliers in Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq where Kurds are accused of pushing Arab families off land claimed by both groups. The fliers condemned the leaders of Iraq’s two Kurdish parties. It is not known who produced the fliers, which were also seen in Baghdad.

The Kurdish leaders were condemned in chanting that followed Friday prayers at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad.

“When the fighting is over in Fallujah, I will sell everything I have, even my home,” said a resistance fighter who gave his name as Abu Taif Mashhadani. He wept as he recalled his 8-year-old daughter who he said was killed by a U.S. sniper in Fallujah a week ago. “I will send my brothers north to kill the Kurds, and I will go to America and target the civilians. Only the civilians. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And the one who started it will be the one to be blamed.”

During the attack on Najaf, London based Asharq al-Awsat reported:

An assistant to Muqtada al-Sadr, Husam al-Moosawi, yesterday threatened to attack US troops violently if they enter Najaf. He also accused Kurdish peshmerga fighters of helping the US troops. Moosawi described a barrier built by the Americans between Kufa and Najaf as a provocative step aiming at isolating the two cities. “Any American patrol in Najaf is liable to attacks because we consider this an encroachment upon the holy city. We have the right to defend ourselves, the religious authorities, and the cities,” said Moosawi, who added that he had hard evidence of Peshmerga participation with US forces near Najaf. He said Peshmerga elements are in Najaf’s al-Askari quarter.

After the siege of Tal Afar, Patrick Cockburn writes:

The Americans claim that Tal Afar is a hub for militants smuggling fighters and arms into Iraq from nearby Syria. Turkish officials make clear in private they believe that the Kurds, the main ally of the US in northern Iraq, have managed to get US troops involved on their side in the simmering ethnic conflict between Kurds and Turkmen.

“The Iraqi government forces with the Americans are mainly Kurdish,” complained one Turkmen source. A Turkish official simply referred to the Iraqi military units involved in the attack on Tal Afar as “peshmerga”, the name traditionally given to Kurdish fighters.
[…]
There has been tension, sometimes boiling over into gun battles, between the Kurds and the Turkmens since last year. As Saddam Hussein’s regime fell apart Kurdish troops, aided by the US air force, advanced to take Kirkuk and Mosul. The Kurds felt they at last had a chance to reverse 40 years of ethnic cleansing which had seen their people massacred or driven from their homes.

Both Arabs and Turkmen fear ethnic cleansing in reverse. In Tal Afar, a poor city with high unemployment, there was friction from the beginning. Days after the fall of Saddam the Kurdistan Democratic Party appointed its own mayor called Abdul Haleq in the city. He ran up a yellow Kurdish flag outside his office. He was told by local people to take it down or die. He refused and was killed the following day. His office, along with the yellow flag, was burned by an angry crowd.

This, of course, was the danger inherent in the US’s use of peshmerga against Arab Iraqis, as I have tried to point out as these developments became known. The Israeli involvement in Kurdistan, as reported by Seymour Hersh, surely would not help matters.

zeyad, a pro-occupation blogger purportedly living in Basra has posted once again a bizarre thesis, which raises many questions – such as, to what news does this guy have access? Is he oblivious or deliberately posting misleading and outright wrong information? and, Why, out of 172 comments currently posted to the thread on this entry, does not one person point out that his entire premise is wrong? Who are these people?

I have to shed light on something that has been bothering me for quite some time. Events over the last six months or so seem to indicate a developing pattern of the violence in Iraq. Simply put, when there is a surge of violence in the south, it completely ceases in other areas of Iraq, and vice versa. In other words, whenever Sadr takes a rest, Zarqawi comes into action again.

There were zero suicide attacks during Sadr’s revolt last April and May. They resumed when the situation was clear, as did activities of militants in certain Baghdad areas such as the old Karkh (Haifa street, Talayi’ square and Khudhr Al-Yass) and Adhamiya. They ceased again all together during the second Sadr uprisal last month, and now they look as if they are just starting again.

It also looks as if it applies to US military actions as well, taking turns at Najaf, Sadr city and Fallujah, but that can probably be attributed to military tactics such as the reluctance to fight on several fronts at the same time. Furthermore, insurgent activities have worryingly spread to areas that are usually peaceful, such as Talafar and Haifa street in Baghdad. Even more confusing is the fact that some areas usually not peaceful (Adhamiya in Baghdad, Hawija), are unusually peaceful now, that is if you disregard the occasional mortar attack.

I posted a refutation to his last assertion that during al-Sadr’s second Najaf uprising, attacks elsewhere ceased.

One more comment on Zeyad’s post. At the end he sends another unwarranted accusation Al Sadr’s way:

Something else has been bothering me for a while. How come there are NEVER any suicide bombings whenever there is trouble in the south with Sadr? And why do the Sunni areas seem so peaceful?

I didn’t think Iraqis got Fox News. How else to explain how clueless zeyad is about events in Iraq? There was a suicide bombing yesterday that killed two Iraqis and wounded eight and it was in Baquba, a city in the Sunni area.

Al-Sadr’s second Najaf uprising began approximately August 5 and ended with a peace deal approximately August 25. Let’s see what happened in Iraq during that time frame. From handy link collections in Today in Iraq: Continue reading “Is zeyad a fake or just uninformed?”

How the Flypaper Theory is working. If you don’t understand it you’re just unenlightened, like Jim Henley.

Via Micah Holmquist, Mickey Z. on Osama bin Laden vs. Pat Tillman

zeynep zeroes in on the essential question for the US military, which tried to justify firing missiles into a crowd on Haifa Street in Baghdad last weekend:

Simply put, if you cannot tell “insurgents” and “civilians” apart then you’re in the wrong country. Something is very wrong if the “civilians,” “natives,” or “non-combatants” –however you want to name the people on whose behalf you claim to be fighting– are indistinguishable from your “enemies.”

Laura Rosen says the neocons are creating an “enemies list.” Tristero says:

Two thoughts:

1. Huh? They only got around to it now? More proof of their clueless incompetence.

2. If I’m not on that list, I’ll like totally never live it down. Where do I apply?

The competition to be on the list will undoubtedly be fierce.

Some “I was Wrong About the Iraq Invasion” posts, here and here. If anyone knows of more that should be gathered into a Hall of…well, let’s be kind…Bad Judgement or something, let me know. And anyone who feels even the slightest bit of enthusiasm for any war should read this again, and maybe this, especially the ones who are saying they’re surprised at how the Bushistas botched every thing possible, even botching things no one thought botchable. For example, who would have ever thought any bureaucrats could botch spending billions of dollars? That’s got to be a first in the history of bureaucracy.

Scandalette updates: Ken Layne on Rathergate, Rising Hegemon on FatherFReeper of the Year (see William Rivers Pitt on this one, too plus I still think the whole thing is funnier if you read some of this first) and I think we have everything on the Protest Warrior here.

The Emperor is Naked. I’ve been looking for a good place to post this picture that I stole from Sadly, No!

And don’t miss Chris Deliso’s interview with Scott Taylor, the Canadian journalist taken hostage by Ansar Al Islam just before the US attacked Tal Afar – it’s an eye opener!