Last Chance Texaco...

__________________________________________________________
iraqiroulette Saturday, August 06, 2005
It was a cruel cruel summer .......
30/8/2005{sic}

Last week was completely disastrous speaking service and security wise , the electricity is deteriorating with every hour , and it is even resulting in putting people out of business . Our local shop owner was getting bags of rotten hamburgers and chicken drumsticks out of his freezer since the generator could not catch up with the pressure. He was telling me that carpenters and welders are suffering just the same .
I popped by an internet café “closed for maintenance” they said and so on .
in AL Iskan Area sewerages wastes are flowing freely on the streets no one even can dare to pop his noses out of a car window .
And people are going on an on about it every where from TV screens to radio stations, a frustrated woman said with fury on one radio program the other day : I live behind al Jafari’s house and the power does not go out for a second there .
Al Jafari on the other hand was full of confidence two days ago announcing that Iran , Syria, Turkey are going to provide us with extra Mega watts of power he said and I qoute : the electricity has always been one of my priorities !!!!
I think this last summer has vanquished the last shred of optimism people had left.

________________________________________

motherjones
We Regard Falluja As a Large Prison"
By David Enders
July 27, 2005
Eight months after the second invasion of Falluja, there is hardly a street that does not still feature a building pulverized during the assault....
...Falluja General hospital..In the last week, they have received three civilian casualties of US fire, and say that this week has been below average normally, says Ahmed, they see one or two dead civilians every day, and that hundreds have been killed by coalition forces since the city was taken over by the US.


more Iraq blogs:

___________________________
occupationwatch
Where has all the money gone?
Ed Harriman follows the auditors into Iraq
London Review of Books | Vol. 27 No. 13 dated 7 July 2005
On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN's Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn't properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA's inspector general, 'there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.' Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The 'reconstruction' of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the 'liberated' country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA 'in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people'. Congress, it's true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers' money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.
________________________
Colonel Stephen W Davis, head of Regimental Combat Team 2, responsible for controlling the troubled western Anbar province.

"There are very few lessons that have not been learnt in history. The skill is to choose to rediscover them."

By his desk he keeps a copy of Lawrence's pamphlet The Evolution of a Revolt, which first appeared in Britain's Army Quarterly and Defence Journal in October 1920.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Ports, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic. The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyse the enemy's organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen's definition of strategy, "the study of communication" in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not. In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.

cgsc.army.mil
___________________________________

Angelina Jolie watch:
Angelina, who has a number of tattoos on her body, last year got a 12-inch tiger etching onto her lower back to celebrate becoming a Cambodian citizen. .
The 'Tomb Raider' star revisited Thai tattooist Sompong Kanphai after she became convinced a tattoo of an ancient Cambodian script he had designed filled her life with good fortune
Tattoo pics
a b

c
d
e f g h i
the dragon