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| This boy is crying because his family was in this car which was riddled with US bullets in Ramadi. |
American troops opened fire after their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, killing at least two policemen and three civilians, police said Sunday, a day after the U.S. military acknowledged five people were killed when it bombed the wrong house during a search operation in northern Iraq
Is one reason this plan:
Security at some 9,000 polling places will be largely provided by Iraqi security forces, he said, with U.S. forces standing back unless they are called in.
will result in even fewer Iraqis voting in the election. It is entirely predictable that polling places will be attacked. It is also predictable that the American troops (whose numbers in Baghdad have been beefed up by 35,000 recently) will be targeted. Typically, American troops respond with overwhelming force when attacked. The problem is that the overwhelming force is usually random spraying of machine gun and tank fire, as is illustrated by the checkpoint story, which is not atypical, but a routine account of the violence that is a daily feature of the New Iraq.
Between the huge numbers of American troops and the Iraqi “security” all presenting attractive targets for the resistance, how many Iraqis will venture out into what is essentially going to be a free-fire zone on election day?