Checkpoints of Death

More info from the Iraq Papers, this time detailing more than 600 civilian deaths at US military checkpoints. Usually in these situations, an Iraqi civilian vehicle will approach a checkpoint, and the soldiers there will instruct it to stop so they can inspect it for bombs and the like. If the vehicle does not stop as instructed, standard procedure is to fire warning shots, then shoot out the tires if the car continues towards the checkpoint. The military refers to this procedure coldly as "escalation of force" and many of these encounters have turned deadly. Al Jazeera has an excellent piece on this on-going problem -

It Was Iran All Along

Thousands of US government and military documents, obtained by the provocateurs at WikiLeaks, have just flooded onto the Internet and front pages world wide shedding a pale, sickening light on the Iraq War. Perhaps the biggest detail that the papers reveal is just how involved Iran has been in the conflict. The New York Times breaks it down here, and the level to which the Islamic Republic and their Republican Guards have meddled in Iraq is just staggering. Iran has been supplying weapons and given guidance and training to anti-US Shiite militias in Iraq, much the same way they support Hezbollah. Perhaps most astoundingly of all is the revelation of numerous border skirmishes between American and Iranian forces-

 - including a Sept. 7, 2006, episode in which an Iranian soldier who aimed a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at an American platoon trying to leave the border area was shot and killed by an American soldier with a .50-caliber machine gun. The members of the American platoon, who had gone to the border area with Iraqi troops to look for “infiltration routes” used to smuggle bombs and other weapons into Iraq, were concerned that Iranian border forces were trying to surround and detain them. After this incident, the platoon returned to its base in Iraq under fire from the Iranians even when the American soldiers were “well inside Iraqi territory,” a report noted.

What these documents make clear most of all is that the current Iraq War is simply the latest in a series of long battles that have made up our 30 year war with Iran, which has its roots in the CIA ousting of their democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, but began in earnest with the overthrow of the US-backed Shah and the siege of our embassy in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Then came the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988, where-in we supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, supplying money and weapons, stationing US war ships in the Persian Gulf, and even shooting down an Iranian passenger plane. Now this latest and bloodiest chapter, and we seem to be losing, what with the persistence of the militias, and Iran's hand print on the formation of the new Iraqi government. As genocidal and maniacal as he might have been, Saddam was the only thing that, for a time, prevented his country from becoming a big Lebanon, which is now what Iraq is turning into.

(Top: Iranian soldiers wear gasmasks to protect from Iraqi chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. photo from Wikipedia.)

Talk About Entitlement

The French government raises the national retirement age from 60 to 62 and the citizenry goes berserk. Airports and gas stations have been shut down by protests and strikes, and most French students are boycotting classes. All this over a measly two more years of work. In the US, millions of people work until they die or are unable to work, at which point they settle into a meager existence of choosing whether to eat enough or take pills to keep them from pissing on themselves.

 The Big Picture has a great overview of the strikes in France. Makes the whole country look like one giant Romain Gavras video.

"The Future is Here, it's Just Not Evenly Distributed."*

In an age of file-sharing, flying killer robots, and cyber-organized protests, it is easy to forget that parts of the world still fall victim to fates that are almost as old as agriculture. Exhibit A:

Bride abductions are an endemic phenomenon in the Caucasus and Central Asia. In Chechnya alone, rights activists say as many as one in four marriages begin with the woman being kidnapped and forced to wed against her will. 

The president of Chechnya has pledged to end so-called "bride snatching." Glad he's finally getting around to that.

Exhibit B illustrates the importance of good sanitation and the horror of societal breakdown:

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti's government and its aid partners fought on Friday to contain a cholera epidemic that has killed at least 138 people in the nation's worst medical emergency since the January 12 earthquake.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said the virulent diarrheal disease, which had affected 1,526 people as of late Thursday, would be the first cholera epidemic in a century in the disaster-prone Caribbean nation, already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. 

What a strange contradiction that one can blog about problems like forced marriage and cholera as happening now.

*(William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4th, 2003)

"May God Get Rid of America in Iraq."

Growing up American during this past decade, I have come to think of Iraq and Afghanistan as colonies of the US, as extensions of the soil that is my homeland; I don't think I'm alone. I don't agree with this notion, and on further analysis it breaks down, but the sentiment is so strong I cannot ignore it. Perhaps I have some idea of how many average Brits felt about India, Ireland, and a large swath of Africa back when the sun never set on their empire.
And so, though I've never been to Iraq and it is thousands of miles outside my country's borders, I feel strangely protective and violated when I read about Iran making machinations in Iraqi politics and government-making. The Guardian has the scoop:

Iran has brokered a critical deal with its regional neighbours that could see a pro-Tehran government installed in Iraq, a move that would shift the fragile country sharply away from a sphere of western influence.

This should come as no great surprise; Iran was only waiting for us to pull most of our forces out of Iraq and focus our media and military on Afghanistan. Now they are swooping in to secure Iraq as an ally. And why shouldn't they? The two countries share a large border, and Iraq is 60% Shiite, the dominant sect of Islam in Iran. If anything, the Islamic Republic has more right to help decide Iraq's political fate than the US, if anyone other than the Iraqi people has that right at all.

"They saw a freezer. They opened it up, and there he was."

Bizarre story out of North Carolina:

The girlfriend of a missing North Carolina man has been charged with murder after police found the man's body stuffed in a freezer in their home.

Adding to the mystery - the couple's children:

The eyes of a killer?

Alexis Green, 17, has been incarcerated at the Wake County Jail since Sept. 16 on multiple charges, including contempt of court and failure to appear, stemming from a July arrest on burglary charges. 15-year-old David Green III is missing and investigators are concerned about his safety.

Is David III on the run, perhaps because of involvement in his father's death, or is he also waiting to be discovered in some dark, drippy freezer?

whoops.

From NYT:

Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday that a British aid worker killed in an American rescue raid in Afghanistan last week may have been killed by a grenade detonated by a United States special forces unit — not in an explosion of a suicide bomber’s vest detonated by her Taliban captors, as the American command in Afghanistan suggested when it confirmed her death on Saturday.

Hm. Botching a rescue. How French of us. In all seriousness, though - I realize that shit happens and hostages can die, even at the hands of their would-be rescuers, but for the military leadership to lie about the circumstances like a bunch of cowards (as they appear to be doing) is just inexcusable and uncalled-for. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson after lying to the Tillmans, or after the Jessica Lynch episode.

Linda Norgrove. Her death is still under investigation.