Bush orders quick Iraq pullout as 27 killed by suicide bomber
By Helen Cook
PRESIDENT Bush last night ordered an early American exit from Iraq after a suicide bomber killed 27 people. He did a U-turn after crisis talks with Iraq’s American governor Paul Bremer. Reports said Bush had "directed" Bremer to "speed the transfer of authority to the Iraqi people". The US recently rejected a similar proposal by France and Germany.
| It's not a U-turn. It's speeding up the schedule. And the proposal by France and Germany was "similar", not the same... |
Bush’s move came as a suicide bomber drove a petrol tanker into an Italian forces base in Nasiriyah, killing 18 soldiers and police and nine Iraqi civilians in the deadliest attack since the invasion. A decoy car ran a roadblock to distract guards, who opened fire on it. Moments later the tanker, packed with 650lb of explosives, crashed into the base. The blast tore the front off the building, sent a giant fireball hundreds of feet into the air and set every vehicle parked in the compound on fire.
US troops began to hit back after the bombing. They killed two people in an attack on a building in Baghdad said to be used by guerrillas "to meet and plan operations". A dozen explosions were heard as the 1st Armoured Division and jets went into action. In Baghdad, armoured vehicles and helicopters chased and destroyed a van that fired mortars at US forces. Two Iraqis were killed and five captured. And US paratroopers claimed they killed six "enemy militants" and wounded four in a shootout after coming under attack near Fallujah. But Iraqis said the troops fired on a truck returning from a chicken farm.
Militant chicken?
A CIA report warned that Iraqis increasingly believe the allies can be defeated by guerrillas, believed to number up to 50,000. A source said: "It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course."
ALARM ALARM a democrat infiltrated the CIA!
Of 13 countries with nearly 147,000 troops in Iraq, America has 130,000, Britain 8,000 and Italy 2,300.
Pretending it's not a guerrilla operation doesn't make much sense. Getting the Iraqs organized to help root it out does. I'm certainly not surprised. Islamic Jihad started sending boomers to Iraq at the end of March. On April 10th, I wrote Now we have to contend with the xenophobes, with the blind, unreasoning hatred that's not limited to the Islamic world, but which the Islamic world is trying to make its trademark. They're hardly even bothering with the pro forma Islamic posturings — the Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians, Sudanese, and other sweepings are swarming to Iraq not to protect Iraq and the Iraqis, but to kill Americans. There's a desultory blessing given by the usual vicious holy men, who are more politicians than theologians, but the real driver is pure malevolence, hatred of America and Americans.
The tactics used by the Masked Marauders are the same they use back home in Palestine or that they'd like to use if their repressive regimes in other places would let them. The link has always been there with Iraq, but because it's so much more obvious in Syria and Iran we tended to overlook it. But Sammy managed to pack in a bit of both terror worlds: Ansar al-Islam in the north, with its al-Qaeda roots and international wahhabi links, to terrorize the Kurds, and a deep and intricate involvement with the PLO and the Fatah thugs. Our battle goes from being "only" with al-Qaeda and its supporters, but encompasses al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Tanzim, and Hezbollah. It's all warf and woof on the same fabric. So now we can gradually switch from conventional war to dealing with the intifadah to come. Syria's already described our presence in Iraq as an "occupation" — shades of Paleostine. If we don't deal sternly with the flow of explosives and hard boys, if we don't cut the funding off at its source before it has a chance to get started, we're going to have a long drawn-out problem. Islamists aren't the most original of thinkers. The only model they have that they think works is the intifadah, and that's what they're trying to go with. Since we can't afford to lose in Iraq, we have to start stacking up deaders — and publicizing the numbers. |
|