watch the SPIN!

i have little time only for this posts, so i am just giving a short warning:

take a VERY CLOSE look at news from Iraq these days.

there are plenty of signs, that the "iraqi offensive", which is nothing but inter-shii fighting is faltering. the extension on the deadline to surrender, was a very sure sign. as is the slow (NONE?) progress of the offensive and counter strikes by the sadrists. (they shouldn t be able to take over small towns)

the US can not allow Maliki to fail (especially if we agree with Juan Coles assessment, that Cheney gave the advice to attack..) so US forces wll continue to get involved MORE and MORE.

they are going to give air support (pretty bad, as it often hits the false targets in cities) use special forces (this is a lead element. if US special forces and iraqi troops achieve an objective together, teh iraqis did VERY LITTLE work...) and simply suppor with combat troops, as we see already in sadr city, Baghdad.

always remember: in combat operations, most iraqi units will rely MASSIVELY on US "advisors". (yup, tehse are the guys that were start into the vietnam war...)
calling in airstrikes is a difficult task, that will usually be performed by an ALO (air liassion officer) who will be added to iraqi units to cooperate with teh US air force.
most significant battles will be decided by these guys, who are not part of the iraqi force..

Bush did veto torture bill

well, looks like he did it. Bush told the public in a radio address that he vetoed a bill that would ban torture like water boarding and restrict secret services to the same interrogation techniques used by the army and described in their field manual:

President George W. Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

in contradiction to army research results that show that torture is not only evil but NOT working as well, Bush continues to make false claims about americans being safer because of the torture laws. i would call that a lie:

Senator John Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, disputed that assertion on Saturday. "As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack," he said in a statement.

turks fight kurds in iraq

i wonder if this is still part of the plan to "stabilise" the region:

ARBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - Turkish troops inside northern Iraq fought gunbattles with Iraqi Kurdish security forces on Thursday, a senior Iraqi Kurdish official said.

governments continue deceive

it is official. the UK government deceived its people to get their support for the war.

We have also learned how raw intelligence was pumped up to make a strongly worded "executive summary". Thus, a draft report from the JIC which claimed that Iraq had "sought to develop" mobile facilities to produce a biological agent becomes, in Williams's draft, "has developed transportable laboratories".

and this does continue. it turns out that the story about the mentally handicapt "forced" female suicide bombers has some holes as well.

Psychiatric case files of two female suicide bombers who killed nearly 100 people in Baghdad this month indicate that they suffered from depression and schizophrenia but do not contain information suggesting they had Down Syndrome, U.S. officials said.

sometimes it feels as if they don t want anyone to thrust them at all....

on torture

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (via TPM) on torture:

In such cases, "smacking someone in the face" could be justified, the outspoken Scalia told the BBC. "You can't come in smugly and with great self satisfaction and say 'Oh it's torture, and therefore it's no good."'

and

Scalia said that it was "extraordinary" to assume that the Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" also applied to "so-called" torture.

no comment.

US Senat passed the immunity bill for telecom companies. pretty sad day.

Lancet is back in the news!

a new mortality study on Iraq just brought back the discussion about the Lancet papers. (Lancet 2004 and lancet 2006)

the study "Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006" published in the "new england journal of medicine"
is used by the usual suspect (lead by one David Kane) and in right wing editorials (WSJ) as a contradiction of the Lancet results.
the death estimate by violent cause in the new study (151000, 95% uncertainity range 104000-225000) is lower that that found in Lancet 2 (601000, confidence interval ranges from 426,000 to 793,000)

while the NJoM study finds a lower number of violent deaths, the result is still a shockingly high mortality. an interesting part of the new paper is, that security did not allow polling (mostly in 2006) in some clusters in Anbar and Baghdad.
the authors chose to reconstruct the mortality in those clusters by using the IBC numbers, a dead count based on reports in news paper articles.
the general tone of the paper tends to be more positive toward the IBC (a project using a very different method, producing definetly an undercount) and slightly sceptical of the Lancet results (a scientific study done in a very similar way).

a few talking points to notice are: (good discussion, as always, can be found on deltoid)

1. the numbers of the NJoM are in good agreement with the Lancet 1 numbers for the early period of the war.

2. while the paper finds a smaller increase in violent deaths than the Lancet 2 paper, it shows a masiive increase in the rate of non-violent deaths (doubled deathrate, some calculations lead to an estimate of 400000 total excess deads, in comparison with a total of 650000 in the lancet 2)

3. the paper does not show an increase in dathrate after the Samarra bombing and in early 2006. this is extremely strange, as the increase in violence was even registered by the US military and lead to the surge.

4. the mortality results are a small part of a huge survey about health in iraq. the questions fill about 20 pages, the relevant part being on page 16.

more soon.

Turkey keeps bombing Iraq

Iraq strongly condemned Monday Turkish air strikes on Kurdish rebel bases in its northern territory, branding them a "cruel attack" on Iraqi sovereignty that claimed innocent lives.

so, how much closer to a free, peaceful and independent Iraq have we gotten lately?

ps: sorry for the latest lack of post. i was slightly busy, commenting on some CO2 issues. but it looks like i will return home soon :)