RAPID ESCALATION OF DEATH IN IRAQ

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A team of suicide car bombers, bent on death for "collaborators," devastated the Red Cross headquarters and three police stations today, killing three dozen people and wounding more than 200 in the bloodiest day in Baghdad since the start of the U.S. occupation.

From north to south in this city of 5 million, the explosions over a 45-minute period left streetscapes of broken bodies, twisted wreckage and Iraqis unnerved by an escalating underground war. The dead included a U.S. soldier, eight Iraqi policemen and at least 26 Iraqi civilians.

"We feel helpless when see this," said an Iraqi doctor.

Iraqi and U.S. authorities in Baghdad blamed the coordinated quadruple blasts on foreign fighters intent on targeting those they accuse of collaborating with U.S. forces. One captive would-be bomber was said to carry a Syrian passport.

But in Washington, Pentagon officials said they believed loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein were responsible. President Bush said insurgents had become more "desperate" because of what he said was progress in Iraq.

The tactics suggested a level of organization that U.S. officials had doubted the resistance possessed. In past weeks, bombers have carried out heavy suicide bombings but in single strikes.

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So why the hell are US forces still in Iraq, inspiring such carnage? It can't be because they're still looking for those missing WMD's. From the Washington Post via Eschaton:

Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

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No, it's not about WMD's, at least, not anymore. So what's it really all about? Here's one of the big reasons reported by the Nation:

Big Bucks in Iraq

They say the shock therapy being applied in Iraq will concentrate wealth in the hands of large US and Iraqi corporations, particularly the family-owned businesses that have won the majority of subcontracts from Bechtel and Halliburton. "I like the analogy of Wal-Mart coming into a town," says Timothy Mills, an attorney in the Washington law firm Patton Boggs who represents several US and foreign corporations that have contracted with the US government and are doing business in Iraq. "The downtown dies, Wal-Mart grows and the owners of local businesses are displaced. The effect of Iraq's new foreign investment law for the medium and small-sized Iraqi business could be very detrimental and could result in even more concentration of capital in Iraq." With the US Export-Import Bank providing $500 million to insure US investors, he added, "If I was an Iraqi and I was political, I'd say this was a ploy to favor US companies and let them steal the riches of Iraq." In a similar vein, Fareed Yasseen, an adviser to Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Governing Council, says that the CPA has made its economic plans "completely out of the Iraqi context." He worries that the CPA will sell state-owned assets to cronies of the previous regime and create a "new class of oligarchs" in Iraq. "They haven't taken into account Iraq's reality at all," he says.

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Yeah, that's right. American boys, foreign relief workers, and innocent Iraqi citizens are dying for corporate globalism! What a sickening day it's been...

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