OPERATION BUSH SUCKS
Air assault targets insurgents

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

In a well-publicized show of force, U.S. and Iraqi forces swept into the countryside north of the capital in 50 helicopters Thursday looking for insurgents in what the American military called its "largest air assault" in nearly three years.

The military said the assault — Operation Swarmer — detained 41 people, found stolen uniforms and captured weapons including explosives used in making roadside bombs. It said the operation would continue over several days.

There was no bombing or firing from the air in the offensive northeast of Samarra, a town 60 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. All 50 aircraft were helicopters — Black Hawks, Apaches and Chinooks — used to ferry in and provide cover for the 1,450 Iraqi and U.S. troops.

And

White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied the offensive was tied to the new campaign to change opinion about the war. "This was a decision made by our commanders," he said, adding that President Bush was briefed but did not specifically authorize the operation.

And

The Pentagon said there were no reporters embedded with U.S. troops, and it released video and a series of photos of preparations for the assault.

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It is very interesting to obverve that the AP quotes no witnesses who actually saw the attacks, only Pentagon statements, and witnesses who weren't really there; there were no "embedded" reporters, either. What I'm getting at is that only a fool would trust what the Pentagon has to say these days. It is now clearly understood that the US military is every bit as image conscious, that is, completely willing to bend, stretch, and alter the truth, you know, lie, in order to look good to a skeptical US population, as the White House is. Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, and the US use of napalm and other chemical weapons against Fallujah, all lied about by the Pentagon, serve as ready examples of what I'm talking about. Oh yeah, Abu Ghraib, too.

Anyway, the point is that, given the Pentagon's reputation for lying, it's probably a good idea to doubt their stated motivations and look for more reasonable ones. Like Bush's low approval ratings: even though the White House declared that the attack has nothing to do with their latest pro-war publicity campaign, which obviously is an attempt to boost Bush's abysmal approval ratings, I think it's pretty safe to say that today's action has everything to do with opinion polls. Nothing like some good old fashioned war to hep everybody to the White House's coolness.

But there's more. As New Yorker reporter Symour Hersh, the guy who broke both the My Lai story during the Vietnam era and the Abu Ghraib story two years ago, has observed, the insurgents are guerilla fighters; the US military doesn't really know how to find them. These "search and destroy" styled missions can't possibly be aimed at fighting the insurgency. Rather, they're about going in and blowing the hell out of civilians who are suspected of helping the insurgents: today's attack was about striking terror into the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, attempting to make them more afraid of us than of the insurgents. That is, the attack was US sponsored terrorism.

Furthermore, I speculate that the use of so many helicopters to ferry in troops is simply a model for how the US military will exist in Iraq for the next couple of decades. That is, as I've observed several times before, the ability to heavily influence oil markets to America's overall economic advantage by sitting on top of Iraq's oil reserves is so tempting a prize that no future president, Republican or Democrat, is really ever going to pull out. It is increasingly looking like the plan is to purposely keep Iraq in a near civil war state, in total chaos, in perpetuity, while our five soon-to-be-completed permanent bases respond only to perceived threats to US control of Iraqi oil, using rapidly deployed massive force, pulling out of the crisis zone as quickly as they came.

Just some thoughts.

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