The Tal Afar Plan

So in Iraq, Bu$h plans to 'surge'. The plan is supposed to be based on the 'victory' of Tal Afar. The victory refers to the second assault on the city where it was surrounded by a kind of wall/moat thing and people only allowed in via check points and with ID cards. As with Fallujah, Tal Afar was a pyhrric victory and the violence has returned. After the victory in September 2005, there have been plenty of attacks including suicide bombings and IEDs. Such assaults only ever lead to a temporary victory because insurgent warfare is not about territory, like conventional war, its about a subtler undercurrent of control.

Not only that, as with all the US assaults in Iraq, as with Falujah, there is a heavy civilian cost which the media often glosses over with the thrill of the military hardware;

In the wake of a savage US offensive on the city of Tal Afar, residents have begun returning home, only to find that their houses destroyed, no water available and that they must generate their own electricity if they want the luxury of power... following the ferocious US bombing and shelling that lasted for days on end. Many families have been forced to live in tents pitched atop the mounds of rubble that once were their homes.

The image below, to illustrate this cost, shows a girl, covered in her parents blood, who were shot and killed as a US check point outside Tal Afar;

The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.

Its sickening to think that our dear leaders are looking to widen the war, rattling their swords at Iran and Syria while Iraq continues with it brutal civil war - a civil war our leaders are dragging us into deeper and deeper.

What sickens me most is this is going on while our court system wastes money and resources trying to prosecute somebody who did the best any individual could do to stop this insane slaughter. Josh, the last of the Fairford Five, is a principled and moral individual who far from being in court should be given the highest civic honour we have. It is Bliar, the war criminal, who should be on trial, not Josh. I hope to see they day when the events in More4's drama 'The Trial of Tony Blair' come to pass.

It does make you think that Michael T.Klare is correct when he states that 'Energo-Fascism is our Future' - think of the amount of oil those bombers based at Fairford took to build, maintain, fly over here then arm and fly to Iraq to bomb people? Short answer is lots; 'the Pentagon is itself one of the world's great oil guzzlers, consuming 134 million barrels of oil in 2005, as much as the entire nation of Sweden.' We also know that all this oil was spent to secure more oil in Iraq. Investing oil to gain oil - this is why the state needs to try Josh - he tired to interrupt the global oil Jihad, and so must pay the price.