Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[shereads]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6447305/

"...Ashcroft praised Murphy as 'an attorney general whose respect for and familiarity with law was so profoundly understood that he became a member of the U.S. Supreme Court' — making one wonder if that was where Ashcroft, too, hoped to end up."










(•)(•) <---- I glimpse the future

 

[carsonshepherd]

shereads, it has begun. Our nightmare descends.

 

[shereads]

shereads, it has begun. Our nightmare descends.

It can't happen, can it?

Of course it can! It makes perfect Bush-sense.

 

[Guest]

So is that why he resigned?

I thought it was because the other neo-cons thought he was too warm and fuzzy.

 

[Belegon]

He'd never get past the senate.

 

[Boxlicker101]

It can't happen, can it?

Of course it can! It makes perfect Bush-sense.

It would come as no surprise for him to be nominated. When it comes to confirmation, though, I would expect the Dems to vote solidly against him and there should be a few Reps who would not be able to stomach him either.

 

[Somme]

shereads, it has begun. Our nightmare descends.

Past tense, Mistah Shepard.

Time to rattle the dags, I believe.

Lets see what effectively happens with the voting scandal too, eh?

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

AHAahahahahahahaahahha...heh..hehhehh...heh... oh... oh...haha.

 

[impressive]

He'd never get past the senate.

... which still has enough Dems to filibuster.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

As things stand Asscroft would never get confirmed. He has enemies in both parties and the Dems could filabuster, but...

If Renquist hangs on for two more years, it is concieveable the Gop could increase it's hold on the senate at the mid terms. If that occured, they might, be able to end a filibuster.

A rather sobering proposition.

 

[carsonshepherd]

AHAahahahahahahaahahha...heh..hehhehh...heh... oh... oh...haha.

I wonder if you people will be laughing when your sister dies from a back alley abortion (the way my mom almost did in the bad old days before Roe v Wade.)

When government agents raid your house without a warrant and seize your hard drive for "obscenities"?

When Lit and other sites like it become outlawed?

When you retire and you have no Social Security? You can't afford medications and have to eat dog food out of cans?

When your child is forced to pray in school even if your religious beliefs don't match?

Kiss your Bill of Rights on the way out the door every morning, folks, because gradually, these rights will slip away; and America will be so preoccupied with fighting the fags and babykillers, no one will let out a whimper.

 

[Guest]

You must ignore Joseph, carson.

He truly enjoys acting as a pedantic ass.

 

[Pure]

Forward looking fellow, the replacement.

[Can this be called 'affirmative REaction'?]

Gonzales drafted memos, as advisor to Bush, stating that the Geneva Conventions were obsolete, inapplicable to Al qaeda and the taliban (and those captured in Afg'n).

Some are online. I don't have a url, at the moment.

 

[bg23]

I'm so glad I don't live in America right now.

Although I'd say it's starting over here too, with the abortion debates starting up in parliament.

 

[shereads]

As things stand Asscroft would never get confirmed. He has enemies in both parties and the Dems could filabuster, but...

If Renquist hangs on for two more years, it is concieveable the Gop could increase it's hold on the senate at the mid terms. If that occured, they might, be able to end a filibuster.

A rather sobering proposition.

They won't dare violate the tradition of Mid-Term Backlash! The party of a second-term president is supposed to lose a substantial number of congressmen during the mid-term. That's when people who regret their presidential vote get the opportunity to take out their frustration on some poor schmuck who rode his coattails.

Mid-Term Backlash is all some of us have to live for. It's possible they can take it away from us permanently with some more of that shrewd gerrymandering; it's even possible that Tom Delay won't suffer any repercussions from the financial scandal connected with the role he played in Texas.

If it happens, I smell an insurgency.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

They won't dare violate the tradition of Mid-Term Backlash! The party of a second-term president is supposed to lose a substantial number of congressmen during the mid-term. That's when people who regret their presidential vote get the opportunity to take out their frustration on some poor schmuck who rode his coattails.

Mid-Term Backlash is all some of us have to live for. It's possible they can take it away from us permanently with some more of that shrewd gerrymandering; it's even possible that Tom Delay won't suffer any repercussions from the financial scandal connected with the role he played in Texas.

If it happens, I smell an insurgency.

Last time they picked up votes at the mid term. I forsee it happening again. The GOP is on a roll. With every liberal columnist telling those who supported Bush how stupid they are, I have the feeling they will turn out in large numbers to turn out some more democrats.

May not happen, I honestly don't even know what seats will be up for grabs or if the numbers are enough to even pose a threat to the filibuster option.

-Colly

 

[Boxlicker101]

They won't dare violate the tradition of Mid-Term Backlash! The party of a second-term president is supposed to lose a substantial number of congressmen during the mid-term. That's when people who regret their presidential vote get the opportunity to take out their frustration on some poor schmuck who rode his coattails.

Mid-Term Backlash is all some of us have to live for. It's possible they can take it away from us permanently with some more of that shrewd gerrymandering; it's even possible that Tom Delay won't suffer any repercussions from the financial scandal connected with the role he played in Texas.

If it happens, I smell an insurgency.

Since district boundaries are redrawn after each census, there will be no problem with gerrymandering unless a problem already exists. Don't take too much solace in the liklihood of mid-term losses by the administration. They returned control in the last mid-term election.

Edited to add: Colly, you know as well as I do that all the House seats are up for grabs every two years. Incumbents usually win but not always. One third of the Senate seats are also up.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Since district boundaries are redrawn after each census, there will be no problem with gerrymandering unless a problem already exists. Don't take too much solace in the liklihood of mid-term losses by the administration. They returned control in the last mid-term election.

Edited to add: Colly, you know as well as I do that all the House seats are up for grabs every two years. Incumbents usually win but not always. One third of the Senate seats are also up.

Wasn't worried about the house. Don't know what senate seats are up for grabs. The Gop don't hold enough of a mjority to make it likely more Gop seats are up than Dems, but it's possible. And some will be returned no matter what party. I'm too lazy to go find out and tally up the seats that are likely to be eaces and see what the result would be

 

[shereads]

Gonzales [/B] drafted memos, as advisor to Bush, stating that the Geneva Conventions were obsolete, inapplicable to Al qaeda and the taliban (and those captured in Afg'n).

That explains why they're calling him a moderate. He didn't come right out and recommend raping prisoners.

 

[shereads]

"We won the mid-terms. This is our due."

~ Vice President Cheney, arguing for the second tax cut after GWB asks whether it might be better to "do something for the middle class this time."

From meeting minutes in the possession of former Treasury Secretary O'Neill and published in "The Price of Loyalty." The White House got a court order to stop publication of this and other documents.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

The other thing we can expect in this second term are scandals. They always seem to pop up as the first-term chickens come home to roost.

The Unwritten Law says that Democratic scandals are always about sex, and Republican scandals are about money. (I noticed that the Governor of NJ who just resigned because of a homosexual affair was a Dem.)

With all the shady stuff we heard about Iraq contracts so far, I'm expecting something along those lines to break in a year or two. Whether they'll change anyone's mind about voting Republican though seens doubtful to me.

---dr.M.

 

[carsonshepherd]

. Whether they'll change anyone's mind about voting Republican though seens doubtful to me.

---dr.M.

No. It won't. because the republicans have made politics into a religious issue. I really don't mean to rant, but they use their fight-faggots-and-babykillers rhetoric to convince people that the democratic party is the party of abortion and gay marriage. So if you're a Christian then you must be a republican! Or you'll burn in hell!

(okay, deep breaths....)

 

[Edward Teach]

2006 - National Anthem

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle see His banners go!

Refrain

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.

At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!
Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
Brothers lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.

Refrain

Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.
We are not divided, all one body we,
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.

Refrain

What the saints established that I hold for true.
What the saints believèd, that I believe too.
Long as earth endureth, men the faith will hold,
Kingdoms, nations, empires, in destruction rolled.

Refrain

Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,
But the church of Jesus constant will remain.
Gates of hell can never gainst that church prevail;
We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail.

Refrain

Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng,
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud and honor unto Christ the King,
This through countless ages men and angels sing.

Refrain

 

[rgraham666]

My visceral reaction to Ed's post.

(Razor sharp claws a la Wolverine popping from my hands)

 

[Somme]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111104C.shtml


Go Kick Some Butt and Make History, Vietnam-Style, U.S. Troops Urged
By Rory McCarthy
The Guardian U.K.

Tuesday 09 November 2004

America's much-vaunted assault on Falluja began with the capture of the city's hospital, which was regarded as an important strategic target.

But the operation, codename Phantom Fury, is likely to become much more complicated and much more dangerous.

Although Falluja general hospital, a small, poorly-equipped facility on the western outskirts of the city, should have been protected under the Geneva conventions, it was deemed legitimate by US commanders because they said it had been taken over by insurgents.

No shots were fired during the capture of the hospital, although one Iraqi soldier accidentally shot himself in the leg, and 38 people were arrested, four of them foreign Arabs.

The Euphrates river runs through the western edge of Falluja, cutting off the hospital from the city. US marines also seized two bridges near the hospital, clearly an effort to establish the river as a natural barrier on the western flank.

One unnamed senior American officer also admitted that the hospital had become a "center of propaganda," reflecting the military's frustration at the high death tolls doctors frequently announce after American bombing raids.

It was accounts of the hundreds killed during the first assault on Falluja in April that brought the operation to a rapid halt and produced a badly thought-out ceasefire which only strengthened the hands of the insurgents.

Now the US marines, who will lead the full assault, encircle the city and face a much more difficult and dangerous fight.

As in April, they plan to take the city one sector at a time. This time there have been ever more intense nightly bombing raids for weeks, what commanders call "softening up the battlespace".

In military jargon, the city has been "depersonalized" and districts are given American names like "Queen's" to replace their Iraqi names.

Troops have been told to think of the fight in historic terms, as another Inchon or Iwo Jima, even with occasional references to Vietnam and the 1968 Tet offensive. "You're all in the process of making history. This is another Hue city in the making," Sergeant Major Carlton Kent, the most senior enlisted marine in Iraq, told the forces. "I have no doubt if we do get the word that each and every one of you is going to do what you have always done - kick some butt."

The groundwork has been prepared for an operation unrivalled in its ferocity.

Although the US rarely talks about its military rules of engagement there are some hints of it in the state of emergency imposed by the Iraqi government on Sunday. Under these new laws an indefinite curfew was enforced from dusk in Falluja and all weapons have been banned.

"All pedestrian movement will be strictly prohibited," according to the national safety defense order. The city's police force and the Falluja brigade, the insurgency-riddled defense force set up under the last ceasefire deal, have been disbanded.

Yet while the overwhelming firepower of the 15,000 US troops waiting in the desert around the city will inevitably defeat the less well-armed insurgents, who number perhaps 3,000, the battle of Falluja is unlikely to end Iraq's insurgency.

Just a month ago the US 1st Infantry Division was boasting of its success after the biggest joint US-Iraqi operation so far in an assault on Samarra, another Sunni town north of Baghdad that was dominated by insurgents. Reporters were flown into a US base to hear the division's commander, Major General John Batiste, speak of a new peace in the city.

"The operation in Samarra has been very successful," he said. "Anti-Iraqi forces have been defeated and the city has been returned to the people."

Yet, in the style of the guerrilla army they have become, the insurgents paused and then returned to fight. On Saturday 39 people died and 49 were injured in Samarra in a string of suicide bombings and attacks on police posts. In Falluja too, many of the insurgents are likely to have fled the city in recent weeks to regroup and return to their guerrilla operations once the assault is completed.

Last year in the Pentagon, officials were turning for advice to Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film the Battle of Algiers, which showed how brutal French military tactics put down an Islamic insurgency in Algeria, only to be followed by a national uprising that defeated the French.

The film holds ominous warnings about the need for a political settlement in Iraq. In the final scene a French policeman addresses a crowd of Algerian protesters through clouds of smoke. "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez?" he asks them. "Estiqlal," they reply in Arabic. "Independence."



Go to Original

Troops Push Deeper into Fallouja
By Patrick J. McDonnell, Mark Mazzetti and Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times

Wednesday 10 November 2004
The U.S.-Iraqi force takes control of key buildings, including the City Hall complex. Military leaders say resistance is lighter than expected.

Fallouja - U.S. and Iraqi forces pushed deeper into Fallouja on Tuesday and today, taking control of mosques, the City Hall complex and other key buildings as they searched house to house for weapons and guerrillas.

Troops from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, seized the City Hall near the city center without major resistance this morning as troops began the third day of their major offensive to take control of the insurgent stronghold, Marines said. Heavy fighting continued in some areas, including the Jolan district.

Several units encountered heavy fire from snipers and squads of guerrillas, but U.S. military leaders said that overall, resistance was lighter than expected and the advance was proceeding more quickly than anticipated.

U.S.-led forces took control of at least one-third of the city, with some troops estimating that they held twice that amount. At least 10 U.S. troops and two Iraqi soldiers had been killed in the operation. The U.S. gave no overall tally of civilian or insurgent casualties, but Army Lt. Col. Pete Newell, a battalion commander with the 1st Infantry Division, told CNN that his unit had killed or wounded at least 85 guerrilla fighters.

Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the top operational commander in Iraq, said that "several more days of tough urban fighting" would be needed for U.S. forces to complete their sweep through Fallouja.

Metz said militants were fighting in small squads of three to six and did not appear to have a comprehensive plan to defend the city.

"I think the enemy is fighting hard, but not to the death, and I think that they are continuing to fall back," he said, speaking via teleconference from Iraq to reporters at the Pentagon.

Before the assault began, American officials estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 insurgents were in Fallouja. U.S. commanders were unsure Tuesday whether the lighter-than-predicted fighting was a sign that fewer were left in the city than estimated, or whether they might be retreating toward the city center to stage a coordinated defense.

Even as commanders said the Fallouja offensive was progressing according to plan, violence flared in other areas of Iraq. Two U.S. soldiers were killed in a mortar attack in the northern city of Mosul, and insurgents attacked two police stations in Baqubah, injuring eight Iraqi policemen, the military said.

And in a statement that appeared on an Islamist website, insurgent groups warned Iraqis in Baghdad and other cities to remain at home today to avoid "putting their lives in danger."

The warning posted on the Internet was also distributed on leaflets early today in neighborhoods of Baghdad where the insurgency is active. It specifically said government workers should stay away from their offices, with the exception of those at the Health Ministry. The leaflet was signed by 10 insurgent groups, most of which had claimed responsibility for previous attacks on Iraqi government forces and Westerners.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi imposed a nighttime curfew in Baghdad on Tuesday, the first in more than a year.

The offensive to retake Fallouja, which has been controlled by insurgents since April, is part of a strategy by the U.S. military and Allawi's administration to stabilize the country and reduce violence ahead of elections for a national assembly planned Jan. 31.

In September, Metz and other senior military officials said it was possible that violence might exclude Sunni Muslim-dominated cities such as Fallouja from voting. On Tuesday, however, Metz expressed more confidence that the Fallouja offensive would enable the city of 300,000 - as well as other towns throughout restive Al Anbar province west of Baghdad - to participate in the voting.

"I think because Fallouja has been the cancer, that when the cancer is removed it will impact other places, especially Ramadi, especially Baghdad and other parts of the [Sunni] Triangle," he said.

Meanwhile, however, an influential group of Muslim clerics called on Sunnis to boycott the vote in protest of the attack on Fallouja.

Harith Dhari, director of the Assn. of Muslim Scholars, said his group would spread the boycott message through 1,000 mosques with which it had affiliations. The election, he said, was being held "over the corpses of those killed in Fallouja and the blood of the wounded."

On the battlefront in northeastern Fallouja, Marines and Iraqi troops seized a mosque and a convention center after fighting through a mile of hostile urban terrain.

"It was one hell of a difficult fight," said 1st Sgt. Jose Andrade of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, which entered Fallouja through the northeastern neighborhood of Askari. "We had to fight back fire the whole way."

On several occasions, squads and platoons were pinned down by volleys of rocket-propelled grenades and rockets and had to take cover in houses or elsewhere.

As Charlie Company advanced, squads of guerrillas took up positions in the many houses abandoned by their residents.

Explosions rocked the city as U.S. ground and air forces - and insurgents - fired rockets and mortar and artillery rounds. Great plumes of smoke rose occasionally as U.S. forces destroyed houses filled with weapons.

Finally, troops reached the Al Hadra al Muhammadiya mosque.

"This is the nerve center of the resistance - and we're here," said Capt. Theodore Bethea, Charlie Company commander.

Inside, the troops found a weapons cache that included several rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, AK-47 rifles, a rifle and materials for homemade bombs.

An even larger cache of small arms and bomb-making material, including improvised blasting caps, was found across the street from the mosque in a convention center.

Marine officials said four guerrillas were killed in the attack on the mosque. There was some damage to the mosque, including broken glass and some destroyed walls. But its interior and distinctive single minaret were largely intact.

Meanwhile, Marines of Bravo Company, also with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, seized a convention center across the street from the mosque.

The two facilities were considered key gathering points for the resistance, U.S. officials said. Both facilities are also closely associated with Omar Hadid, an Iraqi insurgent leader said to be allied with Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant whose group has claimed responsibility for many bombings, shootings, and beheadings of foreigners.

Metz said Zarqawi and his key aides probably had fled before the U.S.-led forces began sealing off the city Sunday night.

As night fell Tuesday, exhausted Marines and Iraqi soldiers billeted in the mosque, while outside, Abrams tanks and troops kept guard. Volleys from machine guns and 120-millimeter guns occasionally broke through the darkness.

About 10,000 U.S. troops and at least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers are participating in the Fallouja offensive. They began to storm in from the north Monday night after a massive U.S. bombardment of the city.

Much of the city seemed abandoned Tuesday. Streets appeared deserted, except for guerrilla fighters who darted in and out of alleys and peered through windows.

The bodies of several insurgents were seen on the streets. Metz said that insurgents had suffered "significant" casualties and that "very few" civilians had been hurt or killed.

Reports of high civilian casualties were a major factor in the decision to call off a Marine invasion of Fallouja last spring after five days.

In coming days, U.S. forces will attempt to seize several other main buildings, including Fallouja's government center, the former Iraqi national guard headquarters and other mosques considered central to the insurgency.

But it will clearly take a much larger effort to assert full control over Fallouja. Many of the residents have been openly supportive of the guerrillas and opposed to the U.S.-led intervention here.

U.S. officials say the invasion will be followed by a multimillion-dollar plan to help rebuild the city. People whose houses have been destroyed will be able to make claims for compensation, officials say.

But a more difficult task will be to counter the perception here that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Saddam Hussein have led to a disenfranchisement of the minority Sunni population that has long dominated Iraq. January's elections will probably advance the cause of the majority Shiite Muslims, who were oppressed by Hussein.

On Tuesday, Allawi's government tried to demonstrate that it was looking beyond the current fighting and appointed a military governor for Fallouja, who was to be in charge until civil authority was in place.

But the announcement, made at a Marine base outside Fallouja, was jeered by assembled Falloujans who complained that the appointee, Maj. Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem, lacked local ties.

Other Sunnis voiced dismay at the onslaught in Fallouja. The Iraqi Islamic Party, the only Sunni party in Allawi's government, announced that it was withdrawing.

But Hachim Hassani, the party's only Cabinet minister, said that rather than withdrawing himself, he planned to keep his position and form a new party because it was important for Sunnis to remain involved in the political process.

"Iraq is larger than any party," he said. "I feel it's a mistake to leave the government."

He also decried the clerics' boycott plan. "It will be a big mistake not to have the Sunnis' participation in the election," he said. "We would have problems for decades to come."



Go to Original

Screams Will Not Be Heard
By Madeleine Bunting
The Guardian U.K.

Monday 08 November 2004
This is an information age, but it will be months before we learn the truth about the assault on Falluja.

With fitting irony, one of the camps used by the US marines waiting for the assault on Falluja was formerly a Ba'ath party retreat occasionally used by Saddam Hussein's sons. Dreamland, as it was known, has an island in the middle of an artificial lake fringed by palms.

Now the camp's dream-like unreality is distorting every news report filed on the preparations for the onslaught on Falluja. We don't know, and won't know, anything about what happens in the next few days except for what the US military authorities choose to let us know. It's long since been too dangerous for journalists to move around unless they are embedded with the US forces. There is almost no contact left with civilians still in Falluja, the only information is from those who have left.

This is how the fantasy runs: a city the size of Brighton is now only ever referred to as a "militants' stronghold" or "insurgents' redoubt". The city is being "softened up" with precision attacks from the air. Pacifying Falluja has become the key to stabilizing the country ahead of the January elections. The "final assault" is imminent, in which the foreigners who have infiltrated the almost deserted Iraqi city with their extremist Islam will be "cleared", "rooted out" or "crushed". Or, as one marine put it: "We will win the hearts and minds of Falluja by ridding the city of insurgents. We're doing that by patrolling the streets and killing the enemy."

These are the questionable assumptions and make-believe which are now all that the embedded journalists with the US forces know to report. Every night, the tone gets a little more breathless and excited as the propaganda operation to gear the troops up for battle coopts the reporters into its collective psychology.

There's a repulsive asymmetry of war here: not the much remarked upon asymmetry of the few thousand insurgents holed up in Falluja vastly outnumbered by the US, but the asymmetry of information. In an age of instant communication, we will have to wait months, if not years, to hear of what happens inside Falluja in the next few days. The media representation of this war will be from a distance: shots of the city skyline illuminated by the flashes of bomb blasts, the dull crump of explosions. What will be left to our imagination is the terror of children crouching behind mud walls; the agony of those crushed under falling masonry; the frantic efforts to save lives in makeshift operating theatres with no electricity and few supplies. We will be the ones left to fill in the blanks, drawing on the reporting of past wars inflicted on cities such as Sarajevo and Grozny.

The silence from Falluja marks a new and agonizing departure in the shape of 21st-century war. The horrifying shift in the last century was how, increasingly, war was waged against civilians: their proportion of the death toll rose from 50% to 90%. It prompted the development of a form of war-reporting, exemplified by Bosnia, which was not about the technology and hardware, but about human suffering, and which fuelled public outrage. No longer. The reporting of Falluja has lapsed back into the military machismo of an earlier age. This war against the defenseless will go unreported.

The reality is that a city can never be adequately described as a "militants' stronghold". It's a label designed to stiffen the heart of a soldier, but it is blinding us, the democracies that have inflicted this war, to the consequences of our actions. Falluja is still home to thousands of civilians. The numbers who have fled the prospective assault vary, but there could be 100,000 or more still in their homes. Typically, as in any war, those who don't get out of the way are a mixture of the most vulnerable - the elderly, the poor, the sick; the unlucky, who left it too late to get away; and the insanely brave, such as medical staff.

Nor does it seem possible that reporters still use the terms "softening up" or "precision" bombing. They achieve neither softening nor precision, as Falluja well knew long before George W Bush arrived in the White House. In the first Gulf war, an RAF laser-guided bomb intended for the city's bridge went astray and landed in a crowded market, killing up to 150. Last year, the killing of 15 civilians shortly after the US arrived in the city ensured that Falluja became a case study in how to win a war but lose the occupation. A catalogue of catastrophic blunders has transformed a relatively calm city with a strongly pro-US mayor into a battleground.

One last piece of fantasy is that there is unlikely to be anything "final" about this assault. Already military analysts acknowledge that a US victory in Falluja could have little effect on the spreading incidence of violence across Iraq. What the insurgents have already shown is that they are highly decentralized, and yet the quick copying of terrorist techniques indicates some degree of cooperation. Hopes of a peace seem remote; the future looks set for a chronic, intermittent civil war. By the time the bulldozers have ploughed their way through the center of Falluja, attention could have shifted to another "final assault" on another "militant stronghold", as another city of homes, shops and children's playgrounds morphs into a battleground.

The recent comment of one Falluja resident is strikingly poignant: "Why," she asked wearily, "don't they go and fight in a desert away from houses and people?" Why indeed? Twentieth-century warfare ensured a remarkable historical inversion. Once the city had been the place of safety to retreat to in a time of war, the place of civilization against the barbarian wilderness; but the invention of aerial bombardment turned the city into a target, a place of terror.

What is so disturbing is that much of the violence meted out to cities in the past 60-odd years has rarely had a strategic purpose - for example, the infamous bombing of Dresden. Nor is it effective in undermining morale or motivation; while the violence destroys physical and economic capital, it usually generates social capital - for example, the Blitz spirit or the solidarity of New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11 - and in Chechnya served only to establish a precarious peace in a destroyed Grozny and fuel a desperate, violent resistance.

Assaults on cities serve symbolic purposes: they are set showpieces to demonstrate resolve and inculcate fear. To that end, large numbers of casualties are required: they are not an accidental byproduct but the aim. That was the thinking behind 9/11, and Falluja risks becoming a horrible mirror-image of that atrocity. Only by the shores of that dusty lake in Dreamland would it be possible to believe that the ruination of this city will do anything to enhance the legitimacy of the US occupation and of the Iraqi government it appointed.

-------

Jump to TO Features for Thursday November 11, 2004


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