Wednesday, March 03, 2004

The suicide bombers and users of mortars have been at it again and bloodier than ever. On the Shia festival of Ashura, they attacked crowds gathered at mosques in Karbala and Baghdad, killing more than 140 people. What a monstrous act! The New York Times called it the “…deadliest day of violence since the American-led occupation of Iraq began”. Can anything be retrieved from this situation that will be of help to the Iraqis and not just feed various egos in Washington and Iraq? The immediate reaction is more anti-Americanism among Iraqis that will be hard to erase, and make it even harder for them to come to some sort of compromise on their own future.

The official American version blames a man known as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who they say was born in Jordan and is linked to Al-Qaeda. Since every so-called bad guy they blame is always linked to Al-Qaeda, I’m very skeptical of the official version. It just sounds like more official attempts to link Iraq and al-Qaeda which we have seen to be a fantasy of the Bush Administration since nothing was ever proved about the supposed link with Saddam Hussein’s government. After all the lies and exaggerations that convinced so many to support the war, it is now almost impossible to believe much of what officials may say about Iraq.

Christopher Allbrighton has a stunning piece on his Back to Iraq site about Ahmed Chalabi. (See February 23) Chalabi appears to have conned the Administration into believing all the nonsense about WMD, and now says that being in error doesn’t matter because he is now back in Iraq and Saddam is gone. This is the man who was sentenced for bank fraud by Jordan and who is now setting up companies in Iraq to take advantage of American generosity in contracts and is a member of the Iraq Interim Governing Council.

How can any good come from such people? And why is anyone still listening to this man? And why is he on the IGC?

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John Kerry will be the candidate for the Democrats. I hope he has the spine to stand up to all the dirty tricks the Republicans will certainly play on him. 8 months is a long time, and they have unseemly amounts of dollars to spend to try to make him into some kind of a dangerous “Liberal” and worse. I wavered between voting for him and voting for John Edwards who really impressed me with his manner and positive message, but in the end I decided that Kerry had the best chance to win being experienced in the ways of political parties and Washington. Lots of other people evidently had the same idea. I hope Kerry chooses Edwards as his Vice President, but it’s much too soon to tell how that will turn out.

Howard Dean won his own state of Vermont even though he is no longer a candidate.