THE FOURTH WORLD WAR

BAGHDAD UNDER ELECTRICITY SIEGE BY INSURGENTS

TOWERS BLOWN UP, DAILY SUPPLY ALL BUT GONE

"AMERICAN FORCES ARE INCAPABLE OF FACING THE MILITIAS"

Where do you begin trying to update on events in Iraq in the past two weeks alone?

Iraqis are dying at an average closing in on 100 per day. Shiite and Sunni neighbourhoods are mortaring each other across the Euphrates River. American forces on the ground are running out of equipment, vehicles and after the recent successful strike by insurgents on the US Army's biggest ammo dump in Iraq, Marines and soldiers are short on bullets.

The Saudis have more than hinted they will deploy their own forces into Iraq to protect vulnerable Sunnis if the ethnic cleansing continues. The American-backed Iraqi president and prime minister are losing their grip on power, as more and more Shiites in Baghdad turn to Moqtada al-Sadr's 50,000 strong mix of army and militia for protection.

American forces have been all but defeated in any traditional sense of historical warfare. The most high-tech, best-funded, most capable Army in the world has been done over by the Ba'athist resistance Saddam Hussein helped organise before the war began in March, 2003.

Departed US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked in early 2003 about how they had to do everything they could to stop Americans from getting caught up in an urban warfare zone. It is ironic, then, that it was decisions made, or in some cases ignored, by Rumsfeld that allowed the resistance to become what it is today.

Until only last week, US President Bush was proclaiming they would have Victory In Iraq and stay "until the job is done".

But President Bush is now the most unpopular American president fighting the most unpopular war in American history.

However, Americans are being prepared by the media for the next stage in the Iraq War.

US President Bush wants to send some 30,000 more troops into Baghdad.

Moqtada al-Sadr's army and militias are said to total 50,000, with hundreds of thousands of supporters to provide cover, supplies and hiding places.

Barely two out of ten Americans support sending more troops.

The troops being sent are not battle-hardened killers, for the most part. But they will be facing brutal death squad assassins, who have beheaded their own countrymen, drilled into living skulls and blown up women and children.

Americans now there will be a slaughter, of Americans. But as Bush would say, "further sacrifices will be made."

But Bush is facing vast opposition for his plan. His last shot at whatever Victory in Iraq is supposed to be.

The Joints Chiefs of Staff, for starters, don't like the idea. Neither do a lot of generals, in the US and on the ground in Iraq. The American people clearly hate the idea, and the quietening right wing media can't sell it to their own hardcore audiences.

Everyone understands what tens of thousands of National Guard and Army Reserves sent into the hellstorm of death that is now Baghdad will mean. Mass casualties of US troops, if they are forced to face off against the Shiite militias.

There is a rising, chilling, reality dawning in the United States.

Bush is really going to do this.

He is going to send hundreds of more kids, maybe thousands more, to their deaths, to try and get a win in this war.

Bush is set to go against his allies, friends, parents, military advisers and the wishes of most Americans. But perhaps most importantly, he wants to deploy more troops against the wishes of the US Army, and the National Guard.

Expect more key resignations in the senior ranks of the US military if the 'Bush Baghdad Or Bust' urban massacre goes ahead. And expect more near-or-active mutinies amongst un-armoured, ill-equipped US troops in Iraq.

From the New York Times :

Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south and west.

The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind as it attempts to repair the lines.

And in a measure of the deep disunity and dysfunction of this nation, when the repair crews and security forces are slow to respond, skilled looters often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to steal as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as possible. The aluminum is melted into ingots and sold.

What amounts to an electrical siege of Baghdad is reflected in constant power failures and disastrously poor service in the capital, with severe consequences for security, governance, health care and the mood of an already weary and angry populace.

There's a plan to bring in 100 diesel generators for some of the suburbs, before the ultra-heat hits again next summer. Nobody is expecting a steady flowing electricity supply, like a major European city would expect, anytime in the next four to six years.

Iraqis can only be expected to be so patient. With the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaching, the least they could have expected from the occupation was a functioning electricity system.

IRAQ'S FIVE ENEMIES OF AMERICA

From the IraqSlogger.com :

Az-Zaman daily headlined: “The American forces are incapable of facing the militias”.
...the US is not simply facing a ‘bunch of suicide bombers and insurgents’, but that in fact, the American army in Iraq is facing five enemies at once: al-qa`ida, the loyalists to the ex-president, the criminals, the sectarian militias and the domestic insurgents.

...the report claims that the Badr militia has over 25 000 armed men and that the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq has over 3 million supporters, while the Mahdi army has 10 thousand fighters and 1.5 million supporters.
The daily headlined, in its international edition, “Tehran uses the Islamist Kurds as mediators to negotiate with the Sunnis of Iraq”.