hey Insane McCain and Hillary the Hawk -- Iraq carnage -- one person killed every hour in Basra
Frank M. Reichert
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: hey Insane McCain and Hillary the Hawk -- Iraq carnage
-- one person killed every hour in Basra
Date: 17 May 2006 20:10:02 -0500
From: can_o_worms <can_o...@bogus.com>
Reply-To: can_o...@bogus.com
Organization: Newscene Usenet News Service, http://www.newscene.com/
Newsgroups:
alt.politics.libertarian,alt.politics.usa,alt.politics.republicans,alt.politics.democrats,alt.politics.usa.republican,alt.politics.democrats.d
Basra carnage escalates as one person killed every hour
from the UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article485489.ece
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil 17 May 2006
One person is being assassinated in Basra every hour,
as order in Iraq's second city disintegrates,
according to an Iraqi Defence Ministry official.
And a quarter of all Iraqi children suffer from
malnutrition, a survey of 20,000 households by the
Iraqi government and Unicef says.
The number of violent killings in Basra is now at a
level close to that of Baghdad, and marks the failure
of the British Army's three-year attempt to quell
violence there. Police no longer dare go to the site
of a murder because they fear being attacked. The
governor of Basra, Mohammed Misbahal-Wa'ili, is
trying to sack the city's police chief, claiming that
the police have not carried out a single
investigation into hundreds of recent assassinations.
The collapse of government authority in Iraq is
increasing at every level and leaders in Baghdad have
yet to form a cabinet, five months after
parliamentary elections on 15 December.
Insurgent attacks on American and British troops are
also proving more lethal, with 44 US soldiers and
seven British killed so far this month, and with
daily losses exceeding anything seen for more than a
year.
Majid al-Sari, an adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of
Defence, describing the situation in Basra to the
daily al-Zaman, said that on average one person was
being assassinated every hour. Militiamen and
tribesmen are often the only real authority. When
Sheikh Hassan Jarih al-Karamishi was killed by men
dressed in police uniforms at the weekend, Mr Sari
said his heavily armed armed tribesmen stormed one
police station in south Basra, killing 11 police,
and burnt down two other buildings, headquarters for
a political party.
Tribes who once lived in the marshlands outside Basra
are engaged in constant feuds with other tribes.
While militias owe allegiance to Shia parties, they
are also suspected of receiving funds from Kuwaiti
and Iranian intelligence.
The number of Iraqis killed as a result of violence
receives some international attention, but many others,
particularly young children, die because they are
malnourished and vulnerable to disease. A quarter of
all Iraqi children suffer from chronic malnutrition,
according to an Iraqi government survey of more than
20,000 households, backed by Unicef's Iraq Support
Centre.
The number of children between six months and five
years old suffering from acute malnourishment rose
from 4 per cent in 2002, the last year of Saddam
Hussein's rule, to 9 per cent in 2005, Unicef said.
In the midst of the turmoil, Iraq's political
leaders have been labouring unsuccessfully to put
together a unity government. Their inability to do
so after five months only serves to demonstrate
their deep disunity. The prime minister-designate,
Nuri al-Maliki, is due to announce a cabinet by next
Monday, but there is no agreement on the most
important posts such as the interior and defence
ministries.
At the root of the failure to form a government is
the fact that Shia religious parties won two
parliamentary elections last year, on 30 January and
15 December.
Last year, Ibrahim al-Jaafari led a government based
on an alliance between the Kurds and Shia religious
parties. The Shia fear that the US and Britain,
supporting the Kurdish and Sunni parties, want to
rob them of their electoral victory.
Meanwhile, the rest of Baghdad has slipped into
civil war. Yesterday gunmen shot dead five guards
in the largely Shia district of Shaab. As bystanders
went to help the dead and dying, a car bomb blew up
beside an oil tanker, killing another 13 people.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article485489.ece
--
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
John J. Mearsheimer
University of Chicago - Department of Political Science
Stephen M. Walt
Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011
( has polemical response from Alan Dershowitz at site )
Edited non-PDF version :