:(

Negroponte strikes again.

its not fear, its gratitude! damn liburl media. sarc/on

Horrible. Bush and Cheney need to be charged by the Hague.

Robert Crush @ 7:

Horrible. Bush and Cheney need to be charged by the Hague.

The entire cabal need to be indicted!

Robert Crush @ 7:

Horrible. Bush and Cheney need to be charged by the Hague.

Sadly, the only thing 'on the table' are achievements every bit as fake as the show turkey Bush served the troops, with a side of slam-the-door diplomacy.

Nice to see how well the surge is working. How long until we wear flack jackets to take a stroll in the USA? We want to be normal don't we?

The Sunnis should be dancing and singing in the streets. They should be praising the American Imperator for granting them the freedom to avoid hospitals and the freedom to cower in their homes for fear of Shia death squads!

oh please...there are no death squads

the surge is working

Aha!!!! More single payer universal health plan related deaths.

The death squads are using staph infections now?

ah the surge.

the surge has been, despite the media hype and murtha's idiotic comment, a complete failure.

no, the surge has not worked at all. those that claim it is working are just plain wrong. and those that claim that there are '2 aspects' to the surge (political and military) are also just plain wrong.

one example of thousands: "Sunnis are not going to any hospitals no matter how sick or injured they are because they fear that they’ll be assassinated by the Shias."

Like I said, the WarPigs are making a distinction between American lives and Iraqi lives. Things are going peachy as long American casualties are down. Before the WarPigs illegally occupied the country, Shi'ite and Sunni lived side by side with no problem. They are directly responsible for this civil war. Cheney and Bush should to be brought before an international court for war crimes.

I read that estimates of the value of the Iraqi oil fields is in the area of 7 trillion dollars.

And they claim this is about freeing the Iraqi people?

So many lies that lead to so many deaths should not go unpunished.

Can C&L please stop using asterisks and strikethroughs in its posts? It's vaguley reminiscent of the eyesore that is the Anti Idiotarian Rotweiller's posting style (*shudder*). Believe me I share the impulse to respond to these right wing idiots on their level. But their level is so very low. I love this site, it should stick to what it does best: fighting fire with water. 'Fire' being conservative rhetoric/spin, 'water' being truth/logic.

CBS took a story that MSNBC ran more than a year ago and made it seem like this was your discovery. But with the MSNBC piece it was Shiites who were the target.

Why wouldn't he, no one is ever held accountable IOKIYAR!. Only when the people trash his hopes will it be known. Currently, an objective Media would be the only way to effect a change in his BS.

As you know, we don't have that here in the US anymore!

swarmofkillermonkeys @ 34:

Three state solution? (We may not have a choice, of course...)

Prolly not. This conflict between the sects is little more than a Capulet-Montegue conflict: nobody remembers WHY they fight, but dammmmmn, nothing's going to quench those flames. The only difference is, a horrible loss won't end the conflict; both sides have already lost so much from this conflict, mostly innocents. It's almost like they have deadened themselves to compassion in their quest for dominence.

These doctors must have gone to the medical school of the same college who trained the firefighters in Fahrenheit 451.

apartheid is progress to the beltway bumpkins

Ahlyssah @ 35:
Prolly not. This conflict between the sects is little more than a Capulet-Montegue conflict: nobody remembers WHY they fight, but dammmmmn, nothing's going to quench those flames. The only difference is, a horrible loss won't end the conflict; both sides have already lost so much from this conflict, mostly innocents. It's almost like they have deadened themselves to compassion in their quest for dominence.

"... little more than a Capulet-Montegue conflict ..."???

Most Muslims well understand that it's a question of who were the legitimate inheritors of the Prophet Mohammed's role as leader. Shi'a Muslims ascribe that to the caliphs, while the Sunnis only recognize the descendants of Ali. There are other differences, to be sure, but it's hardly a trivial matter as you seem to be making it.

PS: Maybe a centuries-old dispute over who should be leading the Muslim people is still a fresh conflict in their minds, but do you really intend to justify the killings of so many people over that dispute? The war goes on, people are dying, and frankly I think that's a bigger issue than two families who couldn't decide who had the power.

Shadowgm @ 44:

Ahlyssah @ 43:

PS: Maybe a centuries-old dispute over who should be leading the Muslim people is still a fresh conflict in their minds, but do you really intend to justify the killings of so many people over that dispute? The war goes on, people are dying, and frankly I think that's a bigger issue than two families who couldn't decide who had the power.

Who said I'm justifying anything? You're the one who made the assertion that Shiite v. Sunni is little more than a plot out of Shakespeare.

The imagined differences are real enough for them to kill one another. The 'bigger issue' is that we lack the perspective and the means through which to resolve a centuries-old hatred, and are instead being dragged into the conflict. (Certainly, a shrew like Condi Rice, or a moron like George W. Bush ain't gonna win the day.)

I'm not sure how my comparison trivializes the conflict, but I apologize if it did. My point is, even though it is not their conflict (those who had the dispute are long dead), and neither of the sides now existing had anything to do with the schism, they will still act as though the other side had personally caused the conflict. With such conviction, normal means of resolution are pretty much null. You are correct: we certainly do lack the means to resolve this.

On top of all that, the UN is warning Iraq's undergoing a cholera epidemic because their infrastructure's sorta broken.

Via Preznut George Barrett Browning: How do I kill thee? Let me count the ways...

It has never been the plan for the PNAC to do anything other - beside stealing Iraq's natural resaources - than to get the Iraqi's to start eating their own. Mission accomplished.

We have to remember, that while Iran under the Shah's regime was not as despotic as the Islamic Revolutionaries would become (many of the parties that allied to overthrow the Shah would pay the ultimate price at the hands of their erstwhile Ayatollah "allies") the Shias in IRAQ have had plenty of grudges to work out.
All during the 1980s, after the Iran revolution, the US govt. (Reagan, and VP and later president Bush Sr.) switched allegiences from Iran to Iraq, and armed and supported Saddam's Baathist, Sunni dominated regime. That of course included conscripting Iraqi Shiites as gun-fodder in the Iran-Iraq war; outright genocide campaigns against the Kurds as well as the "marsh Arabs" in Southern Iraq, and of course the routine political massacres, of both Sunnis and Shias, to keep the populace cowed. (Despite which, there were at least a half-dozen assassination attempts on Saddam.) Bush-Reagan-Cheney (as Sec. Defense) US support for Saddam's regime extended to selling Iraq *WMD precursor technologies*, bio, chemical, and nuclear, and of course the fully fungible (read, "cash") "agricultural credits" that funded the war (in addition Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other Sunni sheiks providing tens of millions in funds.) (95,000 hits for "Iraq wmd precursors" - for a story that was "old news" before the internet started up. Here is a good place to start:
Spider's Web: The Secret History of how the White House Illegally Armed Iraq.
http://www.amazon.com/Spiders-Web-Secret-History-Illegally/dp/0553096508
And of course, all those WMDs (mainly poison gas) would be useless if not targeted correctly, so the US military/intel dedicated itself to providing targeting info to Saddam's Army, where to dump the poison gases to exact maximum kia from Iranian troops positions.
America's funding and supporting Iraq's WMD and conventional military programs would switch over to conflict - war - against Iraq after Saddam invaded Kuwait. Again, it was the Shiite conscripts who bore the brunt of the war, Saddam maintained a reserve of Republican Guard armored troops close to Baghdad that survived the war. Bush Sr., sensing an undercurrent of disgust that Saddam had been allowed to remain in power, had publicly encouraged "regime change" by Iraqis, urging rebellion against Saddam's rule. This encouragement was acted upon by both Kurdish and Shiite rebels, whose rebellion was crushed, often within clear sight of US forces, by Saddam's armored and attack-helicopter forces. The movie "Three Kings" is pure Hollywood fantasy, for the US did nothing to restrain Saddam's massacres, even though the war-ending treaty gave the US the authority to down any Iraqi helicopters used as gunships. Speculation is that the mass executions and casualties from the suppressed rebellion ran into the thousands.
THE ABOVE is the PREAMBLE, in clipped fashion, to the current Shia violence against Sunnis in Baghdad. Indeed, we Americans should remember that WE had "BLOWBACK," ourselves, from the "Good" Iraq war: both Timmy McVeigh and the DC sniper had been Iraq war combat vets. And Gulf War1 vets came back home to a nation that was safe, secure, and would soon be in the midst of the 1990s economic boom.