( from TIMESONLINE, UK)
July 20, 2005
Mortuaries swamped as toll estimate hits 25,000
By James Hider in Baghdad and Michael Evans in London
FROM the street outside Baghdad’s main mortuary, it looks more like a bus station: dozens of minibuses line up as crowds of men stream in with empty wooden coffins, then out again bearing loaded ones on their shoulders, chanting prayers as they go.
The line of about 50 male relatives in the courtyard never seems to diminish, and the yard itself is full of empty coffins awaiting their grisly load. Murder is booming in Baghdad, and some mortuary staff say that their workload has doubled in the past month.
The latest prominent targets to be shot yesterday in Baghdad were Sheikh Mijbil al-Sheikh Issa and Dhamin Ileywi, two Sunni members of the committee that is writing the constitution. They were killed with a third Sunni, a committee adviser, as they left a restaurant after lunch.
Yesterday in London figures were published estimating that more than 25,000 civilians have been killed and 42,000 wounded in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003. A report by Iraq Body Count, an activist group, and Oxford Research Group, claimed the death toll for the 12 months to the end of March was 11,351, almost double the toll for the previous year.
About 20 per cent of the victims were women and children, according to the report, which is based on media reports, mortuary and medical witness statements, and official Iraqi ministry statements. American-led forces were blamed for 37 per cent of the deaths, “criminals” for 36 per cent and anti-occupation forces for 9 per cent. The balance could not be attributed to any single group.
Most of the killings slip by virtually unnoticed, almost routine in a country where death is so commonplace. Of the 23 people killed yesterday in scattered shootings, 13 died in an attack on a bus carrying Iraqi workers to an American army base northeast of the city. Most of the dead are brought to one of Baghdad’s main hospitals for a post-mortem examination, then taken by families for burial, mainly in the giant Shi a cemetery in Najaf to the south.
At the central mortuary, camphor is thrown into coffins to disguise the stench of death. But at Yarmouk hospital, where the aged refrigerators frequently break down, the marsh-gas reek makes even veteran mortuary workers hold their noses as they hose down the yard after bodies are collected by relatives.
Muhammed Fahmi al-Samarrai, a Sunni businessman, came to the central mortuary to pick up his younger brother Zakariah, a captain in the police who until the day before had guarded the building maintained by the United Nations in Baghdad. The young officer phoned his wife when he left work the day before, accompanied by three cousins, also police officers, acting as bodyguards because they did not trust their fellow officers. Fifteen minutes later when his wife called his mobile phone, there was no answer.
When a person vanishes in Baghdad, relatives desperately check the hospitals. If that fails, they trawl the mortuaries. Mr al-Samarrai found his brother’s body there, a bullet hole in the head and one in his chest, and scars where somebody had tortured him with an electric drill before he was put to death. He blamed police officers acting on orders of the Shia-dominated Government, hoping to purge the police of Sunni officers. But he said he does not blame the Shia, and will not seek revenge. Instead, he accuses the Government of being in thrall to Iran — where many of the Shia parties spent decades in exile and where some built powerful militias — and Syria, which allows foreign jihadists to cross into Iraq.
Near by, Hisham Ali al- Hashimi, a Shia football player, was collecting the body of his own brother, Hussein. He had been shot 30 times in the street. His only crime, according to his brother, was to pray publicly at a Shia mosque in an area of Baghdad where sectarian revenge killings are rife.
Sectarian strife is still a taboo subject in a country where everyone knows the consequences of a full-blown civil war would be too dire to countenance.
GROWTH INDUSTRY IN BAGHDAD: UNDERTAKING
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Zlatko Waterman
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As I pointed out elsewhere in my paste of the Pat Buchanan column, Robert Pape's book on the strategy and origin of suicide bombers is very insightful.
Fact: Before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the number of documented suicide bomb attacks was zero.
Here's a short essay by Pape summarizing his thesis and part of his research from his book, "Dying to Win."
( paste)
Blowing Up an Assumption
By Robert A. Pape
The New York Times
Wednesday 18 May 2005
Chicago - Many Americans are mystified by the recent rise in the number and the audacity of suicide attacks in Iraq. The lull in violence after January's successful elections seemed to suggest that the march of democracy was trampling the threat of terrorism. But as electoral politics is taking root, the Iraqi insurgency and suicide terrorism are actually gaining momentum. In the past two weeks, suicide attackers have killed more than 420 Iraqis working with the United States and its allies. There were 20 such incidents in 2003, nearly 50 in 2004, and they are on pace to set a new record this year.
To make sense of this apparent contradiction, one has to understand the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Since Muslim terrorists professing religious motives have perpetrated many of the attacks, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause, and thus the wholesale transformation of Muslim societies into secular democracies, even at the barrel of a gun, is the obvious solution. However, the presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading, and it may spur American policies that are likely to worsen the situation.
Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.
The leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more than Hamas (54) or Islamic Jihad (27). Even among Muslims, secular groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aksa Martyr Brigades account for more than a third of suicide attacks.
What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause.
Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns. Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists; America, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades. Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.
Before Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after this event. Before the Sri Lankan military began moving into the Tamil homelands of the island in 1987, the Tamil Tigers did not use suicide attacks. Before the huge increase in Jewish settlers on the West Bank in the 1980's, Palestinian groups did not use suicide terrorism.
And, true to form, there had never been a documented suicide attack in Iraq until after the American invasion in 2003. Much is made of the fact that we aren't sure who the Iraqi suicide attackers are. This is not unusual in the early years of a suicide terrorist campaign. Hezbollah published most of the biographies and last testaments of its "martyrs" only after it abandoned the suicide-attack strategy in 1986, a pattern adopted by the Tamil Tigers as well.
At the moment, our best information indicates that the attackers in Iraq are Sunni Iraqis and foreign fighters, principally from Saudi Arabia. If so, this would mean that the two main sources of suicide terrorists in Iraq are from the Arab countries deemed most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of American combat troops. This is fully consistent with what we now know about the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.
Some have wondered if the rise of suicide terrorism in Iraq is really such a bad thing for American security. Is it not better to have these killers far away in Iraq rather than here in the United States? Alas, history shows otherwise. The presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula after 1990 enabled Al Qaeda to recruit suicide terrorists, who in turn attacked Americans in the region (the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000). The presence of nearly 150,000 American combat troops in Iraq since 2003 can only give suicide terrorism a boost, and the longer this suicide terrorist campaign continues the greater the risk of new attacks in the United States.
Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea so long as foreign combat troops remain on the Arabian Peninsula. If not for the world's interest in Persian Gulf oil, the obvious solution might well be simply to abandon the region altogether. Isolationism, however, is not possible; America needs a new strategy that pursues our vital interest in oil but does not stimulate the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.
Beyond recognizing the limits of military action and stepping up domestic security efforts, Americans would do well to recall the virtues of our traditional policy of "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf. During the 1970's and 1980's, the United States managed its interests there without stationing any combat soldiers on the ground, but keeping our forces close enough - either on ships or in bases near the region - to deploy in huge numbers if an emergency. This worked splendidly to defeat Iraq's aggression against Kuwait in 1990.
The Bush administration rightly intends to start turning over the responsibility for Iraq's security to the new government and systematically withdrawing American troops. But large numbers of these soldiers should not simply be sent to Iraq's neighbors, where they will continue to enrage many in the Arab world. Keeping the peace from a discreet distance seems a better way to secure our interests in the world's key oil-producing region without provoking more terrorism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert A. Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is the author of the forthcoming Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
Fact: Before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the number of documented suicide bomb attacks was zero.
Here's a short essay by Pape summarizing his thesis and part of his research from his book, "Dying to Win."
( paste)
Blowing Up an Assumption
By Robert A. Pape
The New York Times
Wednesday 18 May 2005
Chicago - Many Americans are mystified by the recent rise in the number and the audacity of suicide attacks in Iraq. The lull in violence after January's successful elections seemed to suggest that the march of democracy was trampling the threat of terrorism. But as electoral politics is taking root, the Iraqi insurgency and suicide terrorism are actually gaining momentum. In the past two weeks, suicide attackers have killed more than 420 Iraqis working with the United States and its allies. There were 20 such incidents in 2003, nearly 50 in 2004, and they are on pace to set a new record this year.
To make sense of this apparent contradiction, one has to understand the strategic logic of suicide terrorism. Since Muslim terrorists professing religious motives have perpetrated many of the attacks, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause, and thus the wholesale transformation of Muslim societies into secular democracies, even at the barrel of a gun, is the obvious solution. However, the presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is misleading, and it may spur American policies that are likely to worsen the situation.
Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.
The leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more than Hamas (54) or Islamic Jihad (27). Even among Muslims, secular groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al Aksa Martyr Brigades account for more than a third of suicide attacks.
What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in seeking aid from abroad, but is rarely the root cause.
Three general patterns in the data support these conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks - 301 of the 315 in the period I studied - took place as part of organized political or military campaigns. Second, democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists; America, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades. Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective: from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign - 18 organizations in all - are seeking to establish or maintain political self-determination.
Before Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide terrorist campaign against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after this event. Before the Sri Lankan military began moving into the Tamil homelands of the island in 1987, the Tamil Tigers did not use suicide attacks. Before the huge increase in Jewish settlers on the West Bank in the 1980's, Palestinian groups did not use suicide terrorism.
And, true to form, there had never been a documented suicide attack in Iraq until after the American invasion in 2003. Much is made of the fact that we aren't sure who the Iraqi suicide attackers are. This is not unusual in the early years of a suicide terrorist campaign. Hezbollah published most of the biographies and last testaments of its "martyrs" only after it abandoned the suicide-attack strategy in 1986, a pattern adopted by the Tamil Tigers as well.
At the moment, our best information indicates that the attackers in Iraq are Sunni Iraqis and foreign fighters, principally from Saudi Arabia. If so, this would mean that the two main sources of suicide terrorists in Iraq are from the Arab countries deemed most vulnerable to transformation by the presence of American combat troops. This is fully consistent with what we now know about the strategic logic of suicide terrorism.
Some have wondered if the rise of suicide terrorism in Iraq is really such a bad thing for American security. Is it not better to have these killers far away in Iraq rather than here in the United States? Alas, history shows otherwise. The presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula after 1990 enabled Al Qaeda to recruit suicide terrorists, who in turn attacked Americans in the region (the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000). The presence of nearly 150,000 American combat troops in Iraq since 2003 can only give suicide terrorism a boost, and the longer this suicide terrorist campaign continues the greater the risk of new attacks in the United States.
Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea so long as foreign combat troops remain on the Arabian Peninsula. If not for the world's interest in Persian Gulf oil, the obvious solution might well be simply to abandon the region altogether. Isolationism, however, is not possible; America needs a new strategy that pursues our vital interest in oil but does not stimulate the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists.
Beyond recognizing the limits of military action and stepping up domestic security efforts, Americans would do well to recall the virtues of our traditional policy of "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf. During the 1970's and 1980's, the United States managed its interests there without stationing any combat soldiers on the ground, but keeping our forces close enough - either on ships or in bases near the region - to deploy in huge numbers if an emergency. This worked splendidly to defeat Iraq's aggression against Kuwait in 1990.
The Bush administration rightly intends to start turning over the responsibility for Iraq's security to the new government and systematically withdrawing American troops. But large numbers of these soldiers should not simply be sent to Iraq's neighbors, where they will continue to enrage many in the Arab world. Keeping the peace from a discreet distance seems a better way to secure our interests in the world's key oil-producing region without provoking more terrorism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert A. Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is the author of the forthcoming Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
in the NYTimes article posted, Pape, in drawing the contrast between "religious" and "secular-political" motivations excludes what is perhaps the most significant dimension in the equation: ethnic-nationalism. for example, the Tamil Tigers are not simply a "Marxist-Leninist" organization -- whether or not they use Marxist-Leninist slogans i do not know, but to say the least the translation of such an orientation (if there were such a thing as "Marxism-Leninism", but that's another matter) to the geo-political context of South Asia is far from unproblematic -- the key aspect of the Tigers' struggle is that of "Tamil" identity. likewise, the Palestinian and Iraqi insurgencies could be seen as ethnic-nationalism. anyway, while Pape's efforts to deconstruct the facile assumption of a necessary connection between islamic fundamentalism and suicide bombing is important, he reproduces another, much more pernicious and false assumption -- which is the restriction of the label of terrorism to nonstate terror and ignoring state terrorism.
state terrorism is terrorism. the propagandistic use of the phrase terrorism to ONLY refer to acts of terror which are not state-authorized-or-organized is, not merely descriptively inaccurate from a social analysis perspective, but is precisely the kind of propaganda that furthers fascism, totalitarianism and imperialism.
nevertheless, the historical, scientifically objective gesture that Mr. Pape attempts is needed in the sane study of suicide fighters. it is a wonder that he does not consider the connection between jihadis and kamakazis. [spelling?] the kamnakazis of the japanese army may have undergone a similar self-sacrificing dedication to their cause , or brainwashing, depending on how you look at it, that the modernday suicide bomber exhibits. the belief in immortality may have a religious component, or it may simply have a collectivist component, the belief that your efforts further the cause or survival of your people. this is, indeed, the very rationale that fuels the duty, honor, glory, etc. rationale of any old fighter, whether they engage in suicide attacks or more traditional forms of warfare. the suicide attacker, like the conventional soldier, runs a risk of death in the proces of trying to kill his oppoent -- the suicide attacker is just the limit case where the probability of death approaches certainty. the soldier and the suicide attacker should not perhaps be seen as difference in kind but rather differences in degree, that in appearance seem to be differences in kind.
the death instinct, as the pessimistic side of Freud concluded, can be turned outward toward others, or inward toward the self. but it will find expression one way or the other, despite the efforts of civilization to subdue it.
[bold font added]Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.
state terrorism is terrorism. the propagandistic use of the phrase terrorism to ONLY refer to acts of terror which are not state-authorized-or-organized is, not merely descriptively inaccurate from a social analysis perspective, but is precisely the kind of propaganda that furthers fascism, totalitarianism and imperialism.
nevertheless, the historical, scientifically objective gesture that Mr. Pape attempts is needed in the sane study of suicide fighters. it is a wonder that he does not consider the connection between jihadis and kamakazis. [spelling?] the kamnakazis of the japanese army may have undergone a similar self-sacrificing dedication to their cause , or brainwashing, depending on how you look at it, that the modernday suicide bomber exhibits. the belief in immortality may have a religious component, or it may simply have a collectivist component, the belief that your efforts further the cause or survival of your people. this is, indeed, the very rationale that fuels the duty, honor, glory, etc. rationale of any old fighter, whether they engage in suicide attacks or more traditional forms of warfare. the suicide attacker, like the conventional soldier, runs a risk of death in the proces of trying to kill his oppoent -- the suicide attacker is just the limit case where the probability of death approaches certainty. the soldier and the suicide attacker should not perhaps be seen as difference in kind but rather differences in degree, that in appearance seem to be differences in kind.
the death instinct, as the pessimistic side of Freud concluded, can be turned outward toward others, or inward toward the self. but it will find expression one way or the other, despite the efforts of civilization to subdue it.
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.
http://www.undercurrents.org/pages/cwar0003m.htm
I remember in the Vet Center therapy groups, the rap groups, during the period of time from about 1984-86, there were 4 local Vietnam Vet suicides......there was an intermittant level known as "being reckless" engaging in reckless behavior, such as walking out to the freeway in the middle of the night and putting one's thumb out, getting to Frisco with 35 bucks, sleeping in the panhandle of Goldengate Park, driving the back roads of Mississippi drunk and stoned, speeding, once I climbed up the side of a three story building in Dover, New Hampshire, usingf a drainpipe, cause I wanted to see the view from the gazebo that was on top, then saw the stairs leading down, followed them into the judges chambers, went into the courtroom, wrote the judge a note, "Viet Cong was here," looked out the courtroom door, saw down the stairs the lighted opaque glass door of the police, left the same way, a strange evening. Rode a train drunk, sitting on it like it was a horse, got zapped twice by knotted ropes hanging from trestles warning about low passages ahead knocked on my back, ontop of the train, whilst these bridges would have decapitated me otherwise, drunk,
the other guys did the same, playing with guns, speeding motorcycles into abbuttments, swerving at the last moment, and so on.
the way i see it, suicide is painless, so much better to feel the pain and live with it, yet self destructive is so satisfying yes it were.
Much better to have a socialised madness, let others do it for you.
http://www.fagotten.org/grifter/bush/ww ... rg/743.jpg
http://www.fagotten.org/grifter/bush/ww ... rg/714.jpg
http://www.fagotten.org/grifter/bush/ww ... rg/577.jpg
http://www.fagotten.org/grifter/bush/wa ... iriyah.jpg
[color=darkcyan]i'm on a survival mission
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
yo ho ho an a bottle of rum om[/color]
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