30 Bodies Found In Baghdad Death Squad

30 Bodies found in Baghdad
Death Squad killings Spike

For a Daily Kos diary on our panel at Yearly Kos in Chicago, Aug. 3-6, this link. Many thanks to Markinsanfran.

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq on Wednesday. Some 30 bodies were found in the streets of the capital, victims of death squad violence. About 26 had been found on Tuesday. The numbers of bodies found daily has gone up since the bombing of the Samarra shrine and the recent bombing of Shiites at Ermeli. Speaking of which, someone shot the mayor of Samarra dead on Wednesday. Not likely that municipal government is going to provide security to a mere shrine if the mayor’s life is taken so lightly. In the incidents reported by Reuters, I see a pattern of the Sunni Arab guerrillas relying more on katyusha rockets and mortar attacks, which however strike me as causing more casualties than in the past.

McClatchy reports some grisly incidents on Wednesday, including that of a man who killed his sister on discovering that she had been setting roadside bombs for US troops near their village in Salahuddin province. This incident speaks volumes about the contradictions in the current politics of resistance in the Sunni Arab areas– gender politics, taking sides between Salafis and US troops, etc.

A new poll shows that 70% of Americans want US troops back home by spring of 2008, and only 20% think the surge is working.

Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic on a speech by MP Aliya Naseef, a female member of the Iraqi National List led by Iyad Allawi. She said that some of the list’s 25 members of parliament never actually attend the sessions, and that Allawi is contemplating dropping them from his list. The article maintains that parliament has adopted new rules that allow for a party list to replace a sitting MP who is chronically absent. (This idea seems bad to me; voters vote on a ranked list, so replacing an MP detracts from the value of their vote.) Naseef also implied that the Iraqi National List, despite being a coalition, began with a relatively unified ideology (i.e. secular Iraq nationalism), and that there are also problems on that front. If Allawi is really expelling MPs from parliament for ideological reasons and not just for absenteeism, that would be really troubling.

Somebody posted this to YouTube, juxtaposing Bush on the ‘surge’ and Johnson on his Vietnam strategy. It certainly is eerily similar.

Michael Moore’s argument with Wolf Blitzer:

CNN report on the true cost of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’- must see.