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Mother Jones
Paul Bremer’s hasty summons to Washington for an emergency meeting this week was a clear sign that the White House is operating in crisis mode. The impression of barely concealed panic was reinforced by the outcome of that lightning conference: a plan, as yet hazy, for quickly transferring more power to Iraqis—a concept, remember, that the United States lately derided as … French.
Jim Lobe
Asked about the CIA report that found growing popular disillusionment with the USA occupation, Bremer was unusually uncertain. “I think the situation with the Iraqi public is, frankly, not easy to quantify.” Meanwhile, a leaked CIA report, whose existence was disclosed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, concluded that growing numbers of Iraqis believe that the occupation can be defeated and are supporting the insurgents.
World Crisis Web Editorial
With both the rate, the coordination, and the success of attacks against ?coalition? troops increasing exponentially since before the beginning of Ramadan, it?s been a bad few weeks for the new occupier of Baghdad?s Republican palace, and no better for the other illegal President over the water in Washington. The one a mere underling of the other, Paul Bremer has been summarily summoned to the White House for talks on how to “push the envelope” further in Iraq (euphemism for “get your f***ing act together, Bremer!").
Helena Cobban
It is six months since Baghdad fell to General Tommy Franks’ forces, and already it is clear that the Bush administration’s decision to launch the fundamentally unilateral, preventive war of early 2003 will change the whole Middle East and the whole global balance - just not in the way they intended it to.
M. Junaid Alam
The rapidly decreasing morale and increasingly high suicide rate among USA soldiers in Iraq is probably attributable to the ululating musicals being sung by the locals in their honour - not exactly Metallica material. Helicopter crewmen, too, have been irked as villagers below happily hurl flowers in the air with such vigour that it’s doing a number on the rotor blades.
Patrick Graham
Sarab rolls up her sleeve and looks at the thick scar across her upper arm. The eight-year-old says she was playing in the bathroom of her house when the shots were fired but cannot remember anything else. “It is their routine,” said her grandfather, Turk Jassim. “After the Americans are attacked, they shoot everywhere. This is inhuman - a stupid act by a country always talking about human rights.”
Karim El-Gawhary
Heavily armed with all manner of weaponry, and coupled with a deadly determination, the invisible opponents of the USA occupation have proven more persistent and determined than Washington expected. “They are occupiers, what else do they expect?” commented Hoda Nueimi, a political scientist at Baghdad University.
Naomi Klein
Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq’s military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as well. That means reversing the shock therapy reforms that USA occupation chief Paul Bremer has fraudulently passed off as “reconstruction”, and cancelling all privatisation contracts that are flowing from these reforms.
Maureen Dowd
But let’s look at it from the president’s point of view: if he grieves more publicly or concretely, if he addresses every instance of bad news, like the hideous spectre of Iraqis’ celebrating the downing of the Chinook, he will simply remind people of what’s going on in Iraq.
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