Friday, July 27, 2007
Iraqi guerrillas killed 8 US soldiers on Thursday. Among other violence against Iraqis, guerrillas detonated a massive car bomb in Central Baghdad that killed 25, wounded 75, and left rows of shops destroyed.
Some 20 bodies were found in the streets of Baghdad on Thursday. South of Baghdad in Babil, a guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill 5 policemen and wound two civilians.
Al-Hayat writing in Arabic put the Iraqi death toll from direct civil war violence for Thursday at 65.
Sawt al-Iraq reports that member of the Kurdistan parliament, Nuri Talabani, insists that US economic interests are driving its heavy-handed push to make sure the Iraqi parliament signs a petroleum law in short order. He said that the US government wants special deals for US petroleum corporations in developing, producing and distributing Iraqi petroleum, and that is why it is in such a hurry. Since the US and its Iraqi allies have been involved in heavy negotiations with the Kurdistan Regional Government over the exact provisions of a petroleum law, it is plausible that Talabani has special knowledge of US goals.
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The Sunni Arab party, the National Accord Front carried through Thursday with its threat to suspend membership in the al-Maliki government again. The party leaders gave Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki one week to meet their demands, or they said the six cabinet members from the party would resign, and that Front would pull out of the so-called national unity government for good. (The National Accord Front has made these threats before and then withdrawn them, so it is hard to know how seriously to take them this time.) Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulyan of the Front explained its demands:
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The LA Times
reports that Baghdadis are down to one or two hours of electricity a day, but that the Bush administration will no longer be measuring or reporting on that sort of local data. It will give Congress only the general statistic for the entire country. But obviously whether the
capital has electricity would help you know whether the current policies are working.
We had just learned from Reuters last week that
the number of guerrilla attacks in Iraq in June reached an all-time high, suggesting that the
surge isn't actually going very well. CNN appears to have been one of the few news organizations, then, to pay much attention to
Gen. Odierno's allegation that the surge is obviously working because US combat deaths have fallen so far in July. I know it is the general's job to spin things this way, but it is my job to call a spade a spade. In fact the secular trend of US combat deaths for April, May and June was significantly up:
' The previous three months were the deadliest three-month stretch in the war, with 104 deaths in April, 126 in May and 101 in June. '
This is up from 81 in February and March. So the quarterly average is still higher than in winter. Three weeks tells you nothing. (It is 130 degrees in Baghdad; what guerrilla in his right mind rolls out a big offensive in July or August?) Second, what kind of improvement is that, where over-all attacks rise but fewer US combat troops are affected by them? That sounds like US troops are having less contact with the enemy, which is hitting out more frequently than ever before at Iraqi security and civilian targets. That outcome does not point to "success" for the "surge"!
moreThe daily length of time that residents have power has dropped. The figure is considered a key indicator of quality of life.By Noam N. Levey and Alexandra Zavis, Times Staff Writers
July 27, 2007
WASHINGTON — washington — As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.
But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.
Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.
The change, a State Department spokesman said, reflects a technical decision by reconstruction officials in Baghdad who are scaling back efforts to estimate electricity consumption as they wind down U.S. involvement in rebuilding Iraq's power grid.
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