Bombs Over Baghdad
09.06.07 - 09:40am
Nothing epitomises the disaster that is the invasion of Iraq more than the fact that, four years on, the US is not only still bombing the country daily but actually bombing densely populated urban Baghdad neighbourhoods.
According to early reports in the media this morning, an air strike on the Mansour area of Baghdad killed 14 people. The status of the 14 people killed is as yet unknown.
The BBC report of the strike describes Mansour as “mostly Sunni, but there is a pocket where there is strong support for Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia”.
But this kind of description does not really do justice to the fact that Mansour is first and foremost an urban area in the capital city of the nation the coalition continues to occupy, and as such is made up of civilian homes and full of innocent people.
And this kind of activity is supposed to be part of a strategy to defeat an insurgency?
I have discussed here before the insanity of claiming to be winning the hearts and minds of the people whose neighbourhoods you are attacking. Until those in charge of this occupation take such considerations on board chaos and violence will continue to reign in Iraq.
Meanwhile representatives of various Iraqi factions meeting in Finland have repeated that the occupation is an impediment to peace in Iraq. According to the story coming out of Helsinki today:
The representatives from Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni groups who held four-day talks in Finland last weekend pointed out that U.S. forces are an impediment to achieving peace in Iraq, Finnish daily “Helsingin Sanomat” reported on Wednesday.
The gathering was arranged by the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) of former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, and by the John W. McCormack Institution of the University of Massachusetts, which was represented in the talks by Professor Padraig O’Malley.
The Iraqi delegates taking part in the talks agreed on the need to get American forces out of the country as quickly as possible and they have set a “realistic timetable” for the withdrawal, Padraig O’Malley told “Helsingin Sanomat.”
According to Padraig O’Malley, who took part in the talks, all parties said that the earlier the occupation ends, the better.
The paradigm which still prevails in much of the mainstream discussion, especially in the States, holds that the occupying forces are needed for peace to eventually prevail, or at the very least are capable of imposing it.
Even the dovish end of mainstream opinion in America, and a significant part of it in the United Kingdom, holds that the occupation has to continue so as not to abandon the Iraqi people to the violent forces unleashed by the invasion.
It is time to face up to the fact that the occupation is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The greater scale of Terrorism, the occupation.
Anything the US/UK do in Iraq, even if positive, is a national humiliation for Iraq.