Iraq Goes To the Dogs

The mainstream media seems to be losing it's taste for blood in Iraq. Now that Iraq is (ahem!) "truly soveriegn" many people would like to assume, as the Bush cartel hoped they would assume, that all problems in Iraq are no longer our problems or our responsibility. This is the same kind of willful ignorance that allowed Bush & Co to launch their war in the first place. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Iraq is rapidly going to the dogs and the top dog today - aside from the extremely quiet John Negroponte, of course - is Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi. The Australian Foreign Minister's response to SMH allegations that Allawi murdered suspects in cold blood typifies Bush & Co's shameful new Pontius Pilate attitude. Alexander Downer says the reporter who uncovered the story should "take it to the Iraqi police" - even though the incident took place in a police station!

Iraq's descent into anarchy and looming civil war removes Bush's final argument for going to war. It wasn't about WMDs and it wasn't about terrorists, we are told, it was about saving the Iraqi people from a brutal tyrant. As one reader asks in the SMH letters column today, "Do we now have to go to war again to rid Iraq of Iyad Allawi?"

Meanwhile, Allawi says he OK'd yet another deadly US airstrikes on civilian targets in Falluja yesterday. As the US forces are too scared to enter Falluja on foot, we can assume that clever Iraqi "intelligence sources" (of the same type that disclosed information on Saddam's WMDs, ties to al-Quaeda etc) are now phoning in the co-ordinates for the USA's aerial bombing campaign, a tactic which even Israeli pilots refuse to endorse.

How many innocent people in Falluja will have to die for Bush's re-election campaign? Echoing many opinions, Jordan's King Abdullah II says their target, al-Zarqawi, who served time in Jordanian prisons as a youth, is little more than a 'street thug' and 'the press made him much more capable, much smarter and much more of a threat than actually he really is'. But George needs heads on sticks that he can hang outside the White House window in the run-up to November.

Meanwhile, the neo-cons are trying to shift the public's attention to a new enemy and a new danger: Iran. There are a lot of Iran-linked stories coming out simultaneously at the moment - join the dots and you see a deliberate pattern emerging:

- USA now blames Iran for 9/11

- Bush Aide promises regime change in Iran

- Iran trial debacle angers Canada

- Iran claims Al-Quaeda has been "dismantled" in Iran