American Missile Strike in Sadr City Lands Near Hospital. Why We Are Killing Sadr's People These Days.

Our military says, it's the militants fault because they hide among their people. 

But, wait a minute, we invaded their land.  So, of course they are among their people.

I guess if those militia members don't have the decency to line themselves up against a wall for extermination, then, of course they are at fault.

Now that we've invaded their part of Baghdad (Sadr City) so the same idea applies there too.l

Isn't this a fun war?

The bad guys used to be the Sunnis.  But we mostly got the Shia and Sunni civilians divided and started paying off the Sunni militias so that they would be 'pacified' (well at least until the money stops and the Badrists sure aren't going to pay them so that's you, taxpayer), and now we are attacking one sect of the Shia for the other sect of the Shia.  Can you guess which one we support?  Well, it seems to have many names, but all you have to remember is that it is closer to the Iranians than al Sadr's group, has been more murderous than al Sadr's sect, is less open to uniting with the Sunnis and therefore to creating a viable Iraqi government, but it promises Bush that Exxon and Chevron will get incredible contracts on rebuilding the massive Iraqi oilfields and extracting Iraqi oil; so it's the one we are killing other Shia to protect.

 The whole scenario of shifting bad guys is straight out of 1984, but lets not digress.

 It's as if we went into Europe to fight the Nazis, and then when they were defeated we turned around and started fighting the Dutch and the Belgians because France offered us as much wine as we could ship home to do so.  Those were more innocent days.  Those Gallo folks just never had a clue on how to manipulate a war for their own ends. (Hint, it starts with unimaginably large donations through the PACs to the proper political party.)  Let Exxon and Chevron show them how it's done.* 

 Excerpts below (indented) are from AP report at Yahoo News  "US strike takes out militant holdout in Baghdad " .

U.S. and Iraqi forces have waged street battles with Shiite militias since late March in Sadr City, the power base of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

The fighting is part of a 5-week-old crackdown by the Iraqi government and U.S. forces on Shiite militia factions. The clashes have brought deep rifts among Iraq's Shiite majority and have pulled U.S. troops into difficult urban combat.

Before the "clash" actually al Sadr had a peace agreement with the Shiite faction that we back.  He even renewed the ceasefire agreement recently, but no, his people controlled too much and were in a place to challenge al Maliki when his folk started handing out those oil contracts that allowed victors' spoils on their best fields.

Militia members have been blamed for firing hundreds of rockets or mortars from Sadr City into the Green Zone, the U.S.-protected area housing the American embassy and much of the Iraqi government. In the past month, more than a dozen people — including two American civilians and soldiers — have been killed inside the zone during the attacks.

What they don't tell you is that the heavy shelling of the Green Zone started when the Badr Brigade (short name of al Maliki's militia for which the US is recruiting and training new personnel and calling them the "Iraqi army") started on the Sadrists in Basra.  Like with Palestine such heavy shelling is likely to ease when our troops and the Badr Brigade (Iraqi army) stop  attacking the Sadrist's people.  Instead our generals have decided to take out the Sadr militia, just because they think they can and because our mainstream press will mostly report 'just the facts' as handed to them by the Bush administration.  

In response to the shelling, American and Iraqi troops in recent weeks have moved into Sadr City, hoping to push the militants far enough from the Green Zone so their rockets and mortars would be out of range.

This, of course, using the Palestinian model, just extends the shelling, but it also kills off a lot of the Sadr militia and who care how many civilians get in the way.  "It's the militants' fault!"  Says a military spokeswoman.  "It's the militants fault!" says the mainstream press.  "It's the militants' fault!" Screams the vast right wing network of news and commentary sources and tens of thousands of Internet trolls, paid or not.

 And in this way, "Truth for Dummies" is created in our nation. 

The New York Times report on the same attack "Missiles Strike Sadr City, Damaging Hospital " is notable for showing the response reporters get if they barely question the methods of the US-Iraqi army.

 The ugly daily fight for ground in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City unfolded Saturday at a small mosque next door to a hospital, damaging the hospital and a number of its ambulances, and near a group of children who were wounded as they gathered tin cans to sell for salvage.

The missiles that hit close to the Sadr General Hospital were American. After a night of clashes in the neighborhood, the Americans fired at least three “precision-guided munitions” at the small building next door to the hospital. Neighbors said the building was used as a place of prayer for pilgrims, hospital employees and neighborhood residents, but the military identified it as a command center for the Shiite militias that it is battling.

The militias use rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles and mounted machine guns as well as AK-47 rifles while the Americans shoot Hellfire missiles, tank rounds, satellite-guided missiles and rounds from machine guns.

 But, of course:

When asked about the attack, Col. Gerald O’Hara, a spokesman for the multinational forces, said the Americans “take great care to prevent any collateral damage and will continue to do so.”

“We don’t target civilians and regret any casualties,” he added. 

Yet, the results of courts martial on soldiers who have killed civilians show the truth, though. The low level troops who murder civilians, even when they have the option to not kill them, get ridiculously light punishment, any immediately higher officers who order such killings might get even lighter punishment and the officers high enough to order attacks that can kill and maim hundreds face no punishment at all.  Such a scenario shows the truth of our military 'adventure' in Iraq.  We get BS talking points after the fact, instead of extreme care during an attack which is actually unnecessary unless we are fighting for one faction over the other, in an effort to secure the power of the one group that will hand out overly rewarding oil contracts to American Big Oil. 

More from the NYT report linked above:

Haider Abbas, 10, was brought to the hospital with what appeared to be a gaping hole in his back and shrapnel injuries across his stomach. The boy screamed and whimpered in pain, barely able to answer a doctor’s questions.

“My friend brought me to the hospital, but we had to leave the other wounded kids behind,” he said. “The Iraqi Army refused to allow them to be evacuated, but my friend took me anyway.”

The doctor, Abdul Rahman Hadi, said the boy was bleeding internally. “He needs surgery quickly,” Dr. Hadi said. “The irony is that not one of his relatives has come because he is an orphan.”

Another victim of that attack, Ahmad Yahya, 31, whose leg was broken, said the Iraqi Army had blocked evacuation from the area of the attack. “I was with a group of about 15 children who were collecting the empty cans or the trash in Jamila,” he said. “I don’t know why this happened.” 

 * Yes there are a few problems with my analogy up there. The oil in Iraq was our primary purpose in 'liberating' it  (if you think women forced back into full body and head cover is liberation). But my was just a snap illustration.

Iraq would be more like us liberating Europe which the expectation of grabbing economic control of it's wine and then finding out that the Dutch and Belgians didn't want to slave in the fields to provide us wine or even just give up their vineyards so that we could bring in cheap labor from whereever our companies could find it to jarvest the grapes as send them back to our companies here for processing.

In our imagined post WW2 scenario, France would willingly give out generous contract to US companies if they would 'rebuild' them and those of Holland and Belgium, and run them for a few decades.  But first we must 'pacify' those countries so that the French could control them.  But we'd find ourselves up against the militias (previously known as freedom fighters) of the two nations and call them 'militants' and start killing them and the civilians around them in the countryside and later in their cities.  And then we blame the 'militants' for the horror of our slaughter.  Poor Stalin.  He could only dream of such joy, and such a docile press without direct federal control. Who knew that fat cat money would work just as well as a gulag? (Return to * above) 

tags: iraq  war  troops  sadr  badr  al maliki  civilian casualties  

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