Iraqi officials: Truck bombings killed at least 500

From CNN:

The death toll in the suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, local officials in Nineveh province said Wednesday.

Iraqi Army and Mosul police sources earlier put the number at 260, but said it was likely to rise. 320 were reported wounded.

The Tuesday truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a "trademark al Qaeda event" designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, a U.S. general said Wednesday.

The attacks, targeting Kurdish villages of the Yazidi religious minority, were attempts to "break the will" of the American people and show that the U.S. troop escalation -- the "surge" -- is failing, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon said.

The bombings highlight the kind of sectarian tensions the troop surge was designed to stop.

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I'm not at all surprised that the US is trying to pin this on al Qaeda, which bolsters the crazed notion that the Iraq occupation is all about ending terrorism, but as of late Wednesday evening, CNN was reporting that nobody really knew who was behind the attacks. Well, whether it's "foreign fighters" working for "al Qaeda in Iraq" or simply homegrown extremists makes no difference in this one respect: the "surge" failed to prevent it. Indeed, the "surge" is a total failure, which anybody with half a brain knew months ago when Bush first announced it. The sectarian violence in Iraq is obviously beyond our military's abilities. I mean, okay, we could firebomb the whole damned country, get into some severe genocide, and that would probably work. Eventually. If that's what you really want, the old "destroy the village in order to save it" Vietnam philosophy. But I assume most Americans have some sense of morality which would rule out genocide as US policy for Iraq. So we're screwed. If we pull out, the violence will get worse. While we stay, the violence is getting worse, and Americans are dying, too.

Time to go. Like now. There's nothing the US can do on the ground over there.

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