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Iraq

Fallujah Still Dangerous - 25 Police Recruits Blown Up

2007-05-31

BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber hit a police recruiting center in Fallujah on Thursday, killing at least 25 people and wounding 50, police said. U.S. forces backed by helicopter gunships clashed with suspected al-Qaida gunmen in western Baghdad in an engagement that lasted several hours.

At least 10 policemen were among the dead in the Fallujah attack, which occurred about 11 a.m., according to a police official in the city who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Fallujah, in restive ...
obligatory descriptor
... Anbar province, is 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Police said the bomber detonated his explosives vest at the third of four checkpoints as he stood among recruits who were lining up to apply for jobs on the force. The center had only been opened on Saturday in a primary school in eastern Fallujah.

The U.S. military and Iraqi army and police were running the center along with members of Anbar Salvation Council, a loose grouping of Sunni tribes that have banded together to fight al-Qaida.
Key question - will this scare the tribal counter-insurgency off, or inspire it?
Police stations and recruiting posts have been a favorite target of Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida through the course of the Iraq war.

Posted by:Glenmore

#2 Excellent diagnosis, doc.

Al Qaeda and the Media-Industrial Complex are de facto allies in this conflict. In broadest terms, that complex includes news, entertainment, advertising, and their ideological auxiliaries, the media-based activist industry and the leftist academic community. Since the 1960s, they have reflexively sided with, and exploited, any force that showed the ability to undermine those institutions and values that stand in the way of complete cultural dominance by the mass media.

The term "media-industrial complex" is my own but the related concepts are based on work done by Thomas M. Frank in his landmark cultural history, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
Taken together, the elements of the Media Industrial Complex constitute an unelected, unaccountable, and often utterly depraved shadow government.

Their power and agenda are not, of course, the result of some overarching conspiracy (though complicity with enemy forces is often concious), but of the internal culture of the media industries as that internal culture has developed since the early 1960s.

In many ways, the media don't work for the terrorists, the terrorists work for them.

(BTW, I am well aware of Frank's status as a major lefty. This really only enhances the credibility of his message, since he is essentially biting the hand that feeds his end of the ideological spectrum.)

Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2007-05-31 18:01

#1 This was no doubt in response to Joe Klein's "NewsWeak" piece. This is less an attack than a sign that this war is first and foremost an info war. AQ uses the media far better than we. In fact, they play OUR media like a Stradivarius against us. I would urge all candidates, both Dems and Repubs, to reflect on ways to win in this arena. Win the Info War, in our media and theirs, on the Internet and in the Cafes and Schools, and the ~~Cockroaches~~ Lions of Islam are doomed to the very Gehenna to which they would condemn us.

Posted by: doc 2007-05-31 08:01

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