Riverbend is back. Word from the streets of Baghdad. Riverbend, a young Iraqi woman, is always a must read.

Fahrenheit 9/11...

I constantly wonder, three years after 9/11, do Americans feel safer? When it first happened, there was a sort of collective shock in Iraq. In 2002, there was a sort of pity and understanding- we’ve been through the same. Americans could hardly believe what had happened, but the American government brings this sort of grief upon nations annually… suddenly the war wasn’t thousands of kilometers away, it was home. How do we feel about it this year? A little bit tired. We have 9/11’s on a monthly basis. Each and every Iraqi person who dies with a bullet, a missile, a grenade, under torture, accidentally- they all have families and friends and people who care. The number of Iraqis dead since March 2003 is by now at least eight times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center. They had their last words, and their last thoughts as their worlds came down around them, too. I’ve attended more wakes and funerals this last year, than I’ve attended my whole life. The process of mourning and the hollow words of comfort have become much too familiar and automatic. September 11… he sat there, reading the paper. As he reached out for the cup in front of him for a sip of tea, he could vaguely hear the sound of an airplane overhead. It was a bright, fresh day and there was much he had to do… but the world suddenly went black- a colossal explosion and then crushed bones under the weight of concrete and iron… screams rose up around him… men, women and children… shards of glass sought out tender, unprotected skin … he thought of his family and tried to rise, but something inside of him was broken… there was a rising heat and the pungent smell of burning flesh mingled sickeningly with the smoke and the dust… and suddenly it was blackness. 9/11/01? New York? World Trade Center? No. 9/11/04. Falloojeh. An Iraqi home.

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Iraq on fire
by Helena Cobban

The Bushites, who dominate every single rung on the ladder of violence-escalation in Iraq, have recently been systematically choosing escalation over de-escalation... And escalation is what they have got. Only a small portion of this news is even getting heard in the US. We heard a little about the incident on Haifa Street in Baghdad on Sunday, when Iraqis crowded jubilantly around a burning US Bradley Fighting Vehicle and then were strafed by US helicopters shooting down at them from the sky. Many Iraqi civilians were killed, and many more injured. One of the injured was Salam's friend Ghaith, who went to the scene as a photog to get some pix. Salam urges us to go look at some of the pix Ghaith was able to shoot, anyway, regardless of his injuries.

Far graver than Vietnam
Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale

"Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday. But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

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Seymour Hersh's alternative history of Bush's war
The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war.

Turning point
A journalist who was embedded with the U.S. Marines in Fallujah explains how the Bush White House lost the key battle of the Iraq war.

On Sunday, at his change-of-command ceremony, the outgoing top Marine general in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, gave tragic voice to what thousands of servicemen throughout Iraq have believed for months. He announced that the April assault on Fallujah had been an overly aggressive mistake and that the often-vacillating American approach to the town had undermined U.S. efforts to win the hearts and minds of local Iraqis. I arrived in western Iraq shortly after the siege of the town was called off, and whenever the subject came up, young Marine officers -- men with crew cuts in the duty-honor-country mold who evince an almost pathological optimism about all things Iraq -- would look away wistfully or just shake their heads in disgust. Many of the Marines involved in the attack would have preferred to complete the assault once it started, despite the likely huge increase in civilian casualties. Those who fought on the ground have complained about the timing, intent and restrictive rules of engagement of the White House-ordered assault.

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GIs claim threat by Army
Soldiers say they were told to re-enlist or face deployment to Iraq

Soldiers from a Fort Carson combat unit say they have been issued an ultimatum - re-enlist for three more years or be transferred to other units expected to deploy to Iraq. Hundreds of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team were presented with that message and a re-enlistment form in a series of assemblies last Thursday, said two soldiers who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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  thanks to Eschaton

General Warns of a Looming Shortage of Specialists

The chief of the Army Reserve warned on Thursday that at the current pace of operations in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army faced a serious risk of running out of crucial specialists in the Reserves who can be involuntarily called up for active duty. The remarks by the officer, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, throw a spotlight on the military's existing mobilization authority, under which Reserve and National Guard personnel can be summoned to active duty for no more than a total of 24 months, unless they volunteer to extend their tours. As military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq continue with no end in sight, General Helmly said he was increasingly concerned that a growing number of soldiers with critical specialties that are contained mainly in the reservist ranks will exhaust their two-year stints, making it increasingly difficult to fill the yearlong tours of duty that have become standard. The skills include civil affairs and truck driving. "The manning-the-force issue for me is the single most pressing function I worry about," General Helmly told reporters at a breakfast meeting.

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Our savage numbness

Been meaning to comment on this for more than a day, but busy unpacking. A big damn deal, though. I am deeply saddened by the following. This is no longer a country I fully recognize. Y'know how gradual changes, which can eventually become radical transformations, are sometimes only obvious to people who weren't around much? Aunts and uncles are always saying the kids have grown so much -- which, of course, they have. I've only been gone for almost a month. Maybe it was like this before I left and I'm just now noticing... Yesterday, I'm working and unpacking, and I've got CNN on in the background. And I hear Wolf Blitzer, barking in that constant breathless get-the-kids-excited-for-Christmas, here-comes-another-shiny-pebble pacing of his, mentioning a video of a civilian journalist, Mazen al-Tumeizi, and about a score of other civilians (reports vary) getting killed in a U.S. airstrike. About 60 other civilians were injured. I didn't actually see the report live -- Wolf had already moved on to his next story -- but I was struck by how casual this was: innocent civilians killed in a U.S. airstrike, and it wasn't even the news hook; the death of the reporter was. (CNN doesn't have a transcript up for the report I saw. They do, however, have one for a later, similar report. Scroll down, or just search for the words "I'm dying." The entire mention of the U.S. inflicting over 70 civilian casualties is exactly four sentences long. The Batman guy, meanwhile, got thirty.) So, through the miracle of TiVo, I rewound. And there it was. Video. Civilians. Being killed by a U.S. airstrike. Non-combatants. Celebrating on a disabled U.S. vehicle, granted. But civilians nonetheless. Certainly not in combat against any U.S. troops. In the foreground, a reporter just doing his job, frowning over some little technical glitch, maybe something he forgot to do... Bang, boom. No warning. Just an incoming U.S. aerial attack. "To prevent looters from stripping the vehicle," the Pentagon later says, classifying everyone within thirty feet as "looters" and sentencing them to summary execution. Blood splashes on the lens. The camera spins. Tiny glimpses of terrible carnage. Without a beat, without reflection, without even a moment of minimal thought, Wolf Blitzer moves on. As do we, collectively. And that's that. America kills innocent civilians. Lots of them. And it's no big deal now. Not controversial. No reason to ask questions or rationalize or even pretend to soul-search like the national media once did. America kills civilians. Lots of them. Just part of the fabric of things now. Happens every day. [...] We are numb now. We are killing. We are killing in large numbers. And we are numb to what we are doing.

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