Sherry Chandler

Words of caution from Juan Cole:

Sunni Arab guerrillas deployed an explosively formed projectile (a kind of roadside bomb) against 4 soldiers who had come in a humvee to investigate the sniping death of a fifth soldier. All four were killed. Unfortunately the LA Times calls the guerrillas “al-Qaeda-allied.” This terminology is from the Bush administration lexicon. I very much doubt that the LA Times knows whether the group that set the bomb is allied with al-Qaeda or not. Indeed, for all we know, this cell belonged to the Baath Party.

Note too that the Sunni Arab neighborhoods have the explosively formed projectiles, just as do the Shiite neighborhoods. Iran is not giving them to Sunnis, and certainly not to ‘al-Qaeda-allied’ Sunnis. Ipso facto, Iran cannot be the only source of EFPs, and it is not established except by allegation and innuendo that they are a source at all. (If the Sunni Arab guerrillas can make EFPs, so could Iraqi Shiites).

It is always surprising what you can conclusively deduce just from reading the newspapers without the spin that the administration and the Pentagon manages to implant in the stories.

And also from this morning’s post at Informed Comment:

A group of corrupt businessmen with ties to the Italian Cosa Nostra was discovered to have arranged for the shipping of 100,000 sophisticated machine guns to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, allegedly to be supplied to the police in al-Anbar Province. The MoI was supposed to inform the US military about any such purchases, in accordance with America’s colonial role in Iraq. It did not. The deal was worth $40 millon. Since the US has heavily armed the al-Anbar police, it is not plausible that they would need massive numbers of machine guns.

From The Enormous Room (Modern Library, 1934)

The Autumn wore on.

Rain did, from time to time, not fall; from time to time a sort of unhealthy almost-light leaked from the large uncrisp corpse of the sky, returning for a moment to our view the ruined landscape. From time to time the eye, travelling carefully with a certain disagreeable suddenly fear no longer distances of air, coldish and sweet, stopped upon the incredible nearness of the desolate without-motion autumn.Awkward and solemn clearness, making louder the unnecessary cries, the hoarse laughter, of the invisible harlots in their muddy yard, pointing a cool actual finger at the silly and ferocious group of man-shaped beings huddled in the mud under four or five little trees, came strangely in my own mind pleasantly to suggest the ludicrous and beautiful antics of the insane. Frequently I would discover so perfect a command over myself as to easily reduce la promenade to a recently invented mechanism; or to the demonstration of a collection of vivid and unlovely toys around and around which, guarding them with impossible heroism, funnily moved purely unreal plantons,* always absurdly marching, the maimed and stupid dolls of my imagination. Once I was sitting alone on the long beam of silent iron and suddenly had the gardual complete unique experience of death…

It became amazingly cold.

*Planton is French for orderly; in this context, les plantons served as guards in the concentration camp. La promenade was daily exercise in a courtyard.