The present-day U.S. military qualifies by any measure as highly professional, much more so than its Cold War predecessor. Yet the purpose of today’s professionals is not to preserve peace but to fight unending wars in distant places. Intoxicated by a post-Cold War belief in its own omnipotence, the United States allowed itself to be drawn into a long series of armed conflicts, almost all of them yielding unintended consequences and imposing greater than anticipated costs. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. forces have destroyed many targets and killed many people. Only rarely, however, have they succeeded in accomplishing their assigned political purposes. . . . [F]rom our present vantage point, it becomes apparent that the “Revolution of ‘89” did not initiate a new era of history. At most, the events of that year fostered various unhelpful illusions that impeded our capacity to recognize and respond to the forces of change that actually matter.

Andrew Bacevich


Tuesday, April 19, 2011

War News for Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq


Reported security incidents

Baghdad:
#1: Separately, three policemen and two bystanders were wounded by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday. The bomb was planed near a security checkpoint outside Iraq’s Finance Ministry.

#2: In Baghdad, a sticky bomb attached to the car of Abdul Amir Hussien, director general in the Education Ministry, detonated in the morning and killed him while he was driving in Baghdad southern district of Doura, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. Two bystanders at the scene were also wounded by the blast which destroyed the victim's car, the source said.

#3: A roadside bomb wounded Naseer al-Chaderchi, a politician who ran unsuccessfully for parliament last year, along with two of his bodyguards and three bystanders, in Baghdad's northern district of Adhamiya, an Interior Ministry source said.

#4: Gunmen in a speeding car using silenced weapons shot and wounded a policeman in central Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.


Mussayab:
#1: A member of parliament belonging to the Sadrists's; bloc escaped unharmed after a roadside bomb exploded near his convoy in central Mussayab, 60 km (40 miles) south of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.


Kirkuk:
#1: Police say gunmen stormed a house in a northern, ethnically mixed city in Iraq, killing three women who lived there. Police Col. Sherzad Mofaly says it’s not clear why the women were targeted in the attack late Monday in the city of Kirkuk. The women were Shiites from southern Iraq who recently moved to the city located 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad. Mofaly says two were sisters, one was a teacher and the other was a lawyer. The third woman was a relative.


Al Anbar Prv:
#1: An Iraqi civilian has died and another man was injured in an explosive charge blast, stuck to his car, in west Iraq’s Falluja city on Tuesday, a security source said. “A group of armed men, who stuck an explosive charge to a civilian man's car, blew up while he entered a government office in central Falluja, killing him and wounding another civilian, who was close to the venue of the blast,” the security source told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.



Afghanistan: "The Forgotten War"
#1: At least one person was injured Tuesday when a NATO oil tanker was burned out in southwestern Pakistan's Balochistan province. According to local media reports, some unknown militants opened fire at the container carrying fuel for NATO force in Afghanistan in Dasht area of Sibi district in central Balochistan. The oil tanker was destroyed and a driver was injured, reports said.

#2: A car bomb exploded outside a charity’s office, wounding two people in Quetta, police said on Tuesday. Ten houses were also damaged in the remotely-detonated blast in the capital of impoverished Balochistan province, which suffers from a separatist insurgency, sectarian violence and Taliban militancy. “Two passers-by including a woman received shrapnel wounds but they are out of danger,” senior police official Zaman Tarin told AFP.

2 comments:

Cervantes said...

Err, ahh, we told you so, not that we're any great geniuses:

"LONDON: Government ministers discussed plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves in the months before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, documents have revealed.

The secret papers, obtained by an oil campaigner and published by The Independent, are minutes of meetings between senior oil executives and Labour cabinet members, and highlight for the first time the hollow nature of Western governments' public denials of national self-interest in the decision to invade Iraq.

The documents, which have not been provided to the continuing Chilcot inquiry into Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, appear to contradict statements made by Shell in 2003, just before the invasion, that reports of meetings between the oil giant and Downing Street about Iraqi oil were ''highly inaccurate''.

BP also denied it had any ''strategic interest'' in Iraq, while the then prime minister, Tony Blair, dismissed what he called ''the oil conspiracy theory'' as absurd.

The published papers cover October and November 2002 and show that just five months before the invasion, Baroness Symons, then the British trade minister, told BP that the government believed British energy firms should take a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Mr Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change."

Do you really believe that President Cheney's motives were any different?

TONY @oakroyd said...

So it was oil all along. Who would ever have guessed?