Iraq jihad update from AP:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Five car bombs targeted American and Iraqi troops across Baghdad Friday, killing as many as 20 people, and the military said two U.S. Marines had been killed the day before by a roadside bomb near the Jordanian border.In the deadliest attack, a suicide car bomber hit an Iraqi army base in the Shaab neighborhood of northern Baghdad, killing eight Iraqis, including civilians and security personnel, Maj. Khazim al-Tamimi said.
Two Iraqi soldiers died and six were wounded when a suicide attacker detonated a car bomb near an Iraqi patrol in Andalus Square in central Baghdad, Col. Salman Abdul Karim said.
A car bomb also exploded near a U.S. convoy in the Rustamiyah area of southeastern Baghdad, wounding two Americans, the U.S. military said.
Two Iraqi soldiers were killed and 14 people wounded in a suicide car bombing at the former Defense Ministry building in northern Baghdad, Iraqi officials said.
Another car bomb exploded in eastern Baghdad, wounding six people, including a U.S. soldier, police said.
A U.S. military statement put the overall death toll at 20 but gave no breakdown by attack. Al-Qaida's wing in Iraq claimed responsibility in Internet statements for the attacks in Rustamiyah and Andalus Square, but the authenticity of the claims could not be confirmed...
The two Marines assigned to the Regimental Combat Team 2 of the 2nd Marine Division were killed Thursday when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb near Trebil along Iraq's border with Jordan, the U.S. military said Friday...
Earlier Friday, mortar shells exploded near the headquarters of an Iraqi commando battalion in the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah of north Baghdad, police said. Three mortars also fell across the Tigris River in the Shiite district Kazimiyah, police added. No casualties or damage were reported in those blasts.
Al-Qaida in Iraq also claimed responsibility for a largely unsuccessful suicide attack Thursday near the Green Zone entrance. The area is home to the U.S. Embassy and major Iraqi government offices...
What I find very disturbing about the morals and values of Muslims and Arabs is that it took the slaughtering of the group of children in Iraq recently before I heard "Enough is enough"
and how that their now putting their foot down on all the killing being down by Muslims.
So all the basic killing which started out as a attack against the West and infidels was fine,but now that Arabs and Muslims look bad from the Muslim-only terrorism in the past few years,now they decide to show their value for human life and Allah's compasion for civilians that are victims of unprovoked attacks.
Gotta love that Muhammed.
Time to outlaw cars, trucks, etc. in the city centers, and make them all ride bikes, riskshaws, and oxcarts, -or travel in open-sided police-run buses.
You can shoot them easier as they whip a donkey or pedal a three-speed toward the checkpoint, (with the weight of their suicide vest slowing them down even further).
Once the bombings stop, the cars can come back.
The inconvenience might get the people to turn on their jihadist brothers.
Nothing else has.
"Nothing else has."
Leaving Sunni and Shi'a to fight among themselves, so that the Shi'a militias can deal with Sunni bombers as they normally would, without the reliance on the Americans, who are themselves constrained in their own use of force, would in the end lead to some "solution" -- at least as far as the rest of the world is concerned. We can leave, claiming that the Iraqis are "ready" without waiting for a nunc dimittis from Jaafari or anyone else.
We made a great mistake. We thought they were civilized. We thought the kind of Iraqis we met in official Washington, with their good English and good sense, represented "Iraq." They did, and do, not. There should be no more being fooled by various Muslims, including the so-called "good" ones who wish to inveigle Americans to unseat this or that despot, so that the "good" ones can take power, because even if in some sense this improves things for the locals, it is entirely unproven, that this will help weaken Islam. In Iraq the American intervention has not weakened but strengthened Islam in the Shi'a areas and Sunni areas alike, now that Ba'athism which though a subset of pan-Arabist ideology, and that itself a subset of pan-Islamism rather than an alternative to it, nonetheless was a threat to other Muslim states, such as Saudi Arabia.
The net effect of the Iraqi venture on the Muslim world has been the use of American power to remove the main perceived threat to both Iran and Saudi Arabia. And Iran (Shi'a) and Saudi Arabia (Sunni) are, in turn, the main threats, because the richest and most powerful and most aggressive Muslim states, to all Infidels.
The Iraq war, as long as it was confined to seizing and destroying major weaponry (just as any campaign to seize and destroy weaponry or weapons projects in Iran would be justified, but not any invasion to overturn the entire regime), made sense, or at least could be justified. The rest cannot. It can only be explained as a favor to Blair, to come up with some naive project to remake Iraq, failing to realize almost everything: the enormous effort to create democracy even in countries with elements of that tradition, the natural antipathy of Islam (if not of all Muslims) for placing legitimacy in "the people" rather than in Allah, and the fissures within what only seemed to have become, out of three Ottoman vilayets, a nation-state, but in fact had not only remained a three-vilayet cart, but one in which each of the three was, after 80 years of Sunni dominance, even less able to hold together.