THEY KILL PEOPLE THEN SAY I'M SORRY (Child in Iraq whose parents were killed)

What a joke.

After almost 5 years George W. Bush is making some hard right turns.

Call them Republican Ruses.

To bolster the Republican base (that is currently distancing itself from the Long War President), George W. Bush finally wants to secure the U.S.-Mexican Border.

How long was Rip Van Winkle asleep?

This president has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to the security of the borders.

He doesn't think about bin Laden any longer, so the Long War President has plenty of time to think about the security of America's borders.

But this latest stunt is just more window (bandage) dressing to divert the public's attention away from the tragic and devastating debacle in Iraq.

Here is information that’s not in your newspapers, or on your TVs and radios:

“Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.”
“The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. ‘Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you,’ warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.”

Weekend Edition/www.CounterPunch.org

May 20 / 21, 2006

Ethnic Cleansing Takes Hold
Iraq is Disintegrating

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Khanaqin, North-East Iraq

“Iraq has had to wait over 5 months after the
December 15 elections for a government finally to be formed. The US intervened with local Iraqi parties to overturn the democratic vote of the United Iraqi Alliance for Ibrahim Jaafari. It got instead a long-time member of the Damascus politburo of the then-radical Islamic Dawa Party, which helped form Hizbullah in Lebanon. Nuri al-Maliki has finally been elected prime minister, but has not presented ministers for any of the key three cabinet posts having to do with national security.”

”Wouldn't you think that addressing national security might be the first priority? He has given us a minister of Tourism but not a Minister of Defense or a Minister of the Interior?”

”Of course, it probably doesn't matter that much. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement will only redouble its efforts to overthrow this new government. And, there is no evidence that the troops and security forces of the new government can effectively curb the guerrillas, even if they had new leadership.”

There are now four distinct wars going on in Iraq simultaneously
1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland
2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south
3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war
4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).

Informed Comment/www.juancole.com

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion/Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan

IT'S THE OIL STUPID!