Since neo-cons are trying their best to con the American public into believing the problem in Iraq isn't that things are going from bad to worse but rather that the American public doesn't know what's really going on in Iraq, I've spent some of my idle time compiling a little list of the news out of Iraq. From Reuters.com

American Philip Bloom, who controlled three companies that worked on reconstruction in Iraq, was charged on Wednesday with paying bribes and kickbacks to U.S. occupation authorities and their spouses, The New York Times reported.

Sounds good to me. I mean what's a regime change without some bribes?

From the New York Times

Five marines were killed and 11 wounded Wednesday in an ambush at a farmhouse while hunting for insurgents on the outskirts of this rural town, Marine officials said. It was the deadliest day for the Marines since beginning an aggressive sweep along the Euphrates River near the Syrian border early this month. [. . .] Military officials also announced Wednesday the deaths of two other marines with the Second Marine Division in Anbar Province, one killed Wednesday by a homemade bomb near Haqlaniya and the other by a car bomb near Al Karma on Tuesday. An American soldier died Wednesday of wounds suffered in a roadside bomb attack near Baghdad the day before, officials said.

Sure sounds like the Iraqi "army" is starting to take the lead and that the insurgents are on their last legs. Just in case you're not sure the same NYT article quotes a Colonel Davis as saying the following about the insurgents

"Their tactics were very good, their discipline was very good," he asserted. "It's not your average insurgents running around because they have nothing better to do."

Discipline and improving tactics are always a sign of an insurgency in its last throes.

And then there's the news that the Iraqi "government" tortures people. This from the NYT.

Iraq's government said Tuesday that it had ordered an urgent investigation of allegations that many of the 173 detainees American troops discovered over the weekend in the basement of an Interior Ministry building in a Baghdad suburb had been tortured by their Iraqi captors. A senior Iraqi official who visited the detainees said two appeared paralyzed and others had some of the skin peeled off their bodies by their abusers.

The silver lining to this is that U.S. troops discovered the torture and reported it. Whew, becaus you know we don't torture, only our Iraqi proxies do, you know the ones we trained. But the bad news is that the tortured prisoners are Sunnis. That should do wonders for Shiite-Sunni relations. Oh, an it appears there might be more secret detention centers in Iraq.

So you see, once you know what's going on in Iraq you have to admit things are going pretty well. If only more Americans knew how things were progressing in Iraq they'd be more supportive. And they'd realize that as the Washington Post reports, life is returning to "normal" in most of Iraq,

Nov. 10 -- Two suicide bombers struck a popular restaurant in Baghdad and an army recruiting center north of the capital Thursday, killing at least 40 people and injuring three dozen more, police and witnesses said.

posted by Idle Crank at 11/17/2005 02:09:00 AM