Informant38

on a scale never seen:

A U.S.-Iraqi campaign to stabilize Baghdad will begin soon and the offensive against militants will be on a scale never seen during four years of war, American officers said on Sunday.
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[A3]The Qur'an forbids killing in the month of Muharram [21 January through 18 February 2007]. So they'll do all the killing then. There is no better time for a true believer to die...
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"The end of the summer is when we should see some concrete results and be able to say is this working or not," Heckman said. That would be around September.
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[Q4] Some claim that the army and police have been extensively infiltrated by your men and that the Marines by themselves will never manage to disarm you.
[A4] It's really exactly the other way around: it is our militia which is swarming with spies. It doesn't take much doing to infiltrate an army of the people. It is precisely those people who by soiling themselves with unworthy actions have discredited the Mahdi.
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One problem that bedeviled last summer's offensive was the reluctance of Iraqi soldiers in the regionally recruited army to be deployed in the capital, far from their homes and families.
This time soldiers will get pay bonuses to come to Baghdad and will be given a finite tour of duty
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It seems evident that the whole series of episodes that surrounded the execution of Saddam (and his half brother) at year's end did a lot to catalyze and/or exacerbate this tsunami of anti-Shiite feeling among many Sunnis... But that is certainly not all that has been afoot. Other very relevant factors include the fact that after three-years-plus of increasingly sectarian carnage in Iraq, the nerves and sensibilities of nearly everyone in the Arab world are very raw. At this level, it doesn't even "help" the argument much to note that the greatest number by far of casualties from sectarian violence there have been Shiites-- those thousands of Iraqi Shiites who have been killed over the past three-plus years by acts of anti-civilian violence of almost mind-numbing callousness... Bombs in markets, bombs in mosques, bombs at religious festivals, etc etc.

Reuters/Yahoo -*- Just World News
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So on the one hand a campaign against "militants", on the other hand far and away the greatest number of victims of the "sectarian violence" have been Shi'ite. On the one hand the "Mahdi" Army, named for the expected Messiah, the Islamic version of Jesus, on the other the "Mehdi" Army, same thing only spelled differently so that the casual reader will be subliminally confused and more likely to give up trying to figure out what's being said, because all those Arab words look alike it's impossible to tell them apart. Which creates a reliance on the official sources, which are in turn pretty clearly in the hands of not-exactly-disinterested third parties.
On the one hand Al-Sadr predicts, clearly and plainly that "they'll do all the killing then" meaning now, and that's exactly what's happening -
"a day after a suicide truck bomb killed 135 people in a mainly Shi'ite area of Baghdad, the single biggest bombing since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003"
- and what's this? "They" have created a "'shadow' about which nobody ever talks, trained in great secrecy in the deserts of Jordan by the American armed forces."
So Al-Sadr's replaced bin Laden, remember him? 9/11? And Saddam. As target, bug-bear, demon, boogie-man. Americans know they were lied to at the beginning of this nightmare, in order to begin it, and during it in order to continue it, and now...? Still?
And now at the same time Al-Sadr's people are taking the biggest hits in Iraq, especially in Baghdad, and the wonderfully efficient "contractor" led-and-protected forces for good in Iraq are going to be mounting a surged-up campaign against him.
The American people's declaration of outrage about this whole thing has been redirected into a namby-pamby debate about whether or not to provide Bush - as if Bush is doing anything other than reading his lines now - with a fait accompli "surge" of troops.
The tension here is between the desperate ignorance of Americans - who have no history and no literacy, but still have most of the money and manpower that's being deployed against this horribly great threat to the peace and safety of that special nation that can't be named the Middle East - and the helpless knowing of the Arab/Muslim world, many of whom can see directly into the madness as it rolls toward them, but have no voice, no power, and no resort now but prayer.
Sadistic pleasure is the vice of the hour, and it builds exponentially, its agents are running loose in Iraq, given free rein by a Congress of cowards and cynical hypocrites.
It's getting easier and easier to believe in an ultimate evil.