Sold Out Again

Here's an interesting piece on the death of Steve Vincent and the situation in Southern Iraq.

There's a significant amount of dishonesty going on today in the warblogs' coverage of the death of Steven Vincent. Alot of this has to do with the reluctance of warbloggers to confront the reality of what is happening to the Iraqi south since its rule shifted to the hardline Shia fundamentalists who are the new rulers of Iraq since the election, touted by warbloggers as a triumph of democracy, swept these Shiite theocrats to power.

Here, for example, is an excerpt from a post by the inexplicably popular "Wretchard" writing in a warblog called "Belmont Club."

This is not the place to speculate why this murder occurred, but the tragedy serves to underline the discussion in the previous post which discussed, among other things, the rising tensions between Sunni and Shi'ite in Iraq. It's interesting to note that the BBC linked Mr. Vincent's murder to his interest in the sectarian conflict. It would have been ironic if Vincent had been killed not because he was an American, but because he came too close to a story.

This, besides being a lie, neatly dodges the point of everything Vincent had been writing about the oppression of secular Shiites by the Islamic theocrats of al-Jafaari's democratically-elected New Iraq. Here's the part of the BBC article "Wretchard" omitted so that he could write his own version of the circumstancesVincent's murder:

In a recent New York Times article, Mr Vincent wrote that Basra's police force had been infiltrated by Shia militants.
He quoted a senior Iraqi police lieutenant saying some officers were behind many of the killings of former Baath party members in Basra.
Mr Vincent also criticised the UK forces, who are responsible for security in Basra, for ignoring abuses of power by Shia extremists.

Did you miss the part about "sectarian conflict" to which Wretchard referred? That's OK, because it isn't in there.

Vincent wrote about the frightening rise of the Shiite theocracy in southern Iraq and how it was affecting ordinary secular Iraqis, particularly Iraqi women. Of course, the warbloggers, having cheered and spun each blundering step made by the US occupiers that led to this debacle, cannot admit that they have rolled the red carpet out for the rule of the Iraqi ayatollahs, much less be honest about the results of their faux "liberation" in the face of the Shiite assassination squads roaming Basra in the Toyota Mark IIs of Death.

The violence in the Iraqi south is not "sectarian" . The context of the violence in which Steven Vincent has been caught is the playing out of this scenario, predicted in the fall of 2003:

In removing the Baath regime and eliminating constraints on Iraqi Islamism, the United States has unleashed a new political force in the Gulf: not the upsurge of civic organization and democratic sentiment fantasized by American neoconservatives, but the aspirations of Iraqi Shiites to build an Islamic republic. That result was an entirely predictable consequence of the past 30 years of political conflict between the Shiites and the Baathist regime, and American policy analysts have expected a different result only by ignoring that history.

Arthur "Good News!" Chrenkoff exhibits similar dishonesty as he twists Vincent's words into his own version of Shia vs. Sunni conflict:

It appears that Steve might have fallen foul of Shia hardliners whose violent campaign of revenge against local Sunnis ha has been documenting for some time, including in his last opinion piece for "The New York Times". As he wrote on this blog in June:

Over the last week, for example, gunmen killed up to 100 ex-Baathists (as I've noted elsewhere, to some there is no such thing as an "ex" Baathist.) Ask about the identity of these murderers and people claim they don't know--a denial that's not exactly true: Basra's police chief recently admitted to a U.K. Guardian reporter that he believed that Iraqi cops themselves were complicit the Baathist assassinations.

Of course, what Steve wrote doesn't say anything about local Sunnis at all. What Vincent has written about is local Baathists. Chrenkoff is ignorantly equating all Baathists with Sunnis, but the Baath Party in Iraq was heavily Shiite:

But Abdel Mahdi (Interim Iraqi government Finance Minister, a leading Shiite, writing in Feb 2005) advocated extending a hand to disaffected Sunnis in a Shiite-dominated parliament and expressed conciliatory views on the key issue of reincorporating members of the former regime in the army and administration.

"There are more Shiite baathists than Sunni baathists, so the de-Baathification process doesn't only affect the Sunnis," he explained.

And, from Hannah Allum for Knight-Ridder, February, 2005:

The war between Shiite vigilantes and former Baath Party members is seldom investigated and largely overshadowed by the insurgency. The U.S. military is preoccupied with hunting down suicide bombers and foreign terrorists, and Iraq's new Shiite leaders have little interest in prosecuting those who kill their former oppressors or their enemies in the insurgency.
[...]
Especially besieged are Shiite Baathists who live in predominantly Shiite or mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods, where targets are more accessible than in homogenous Sunni strongholds. Militiamen have demanded that former Baathists fly white flags to atone for their party membership and let their neighbors know they've renounced their pasts. Those who refuse often end up dead.

"They're doing it in Shiite neighborhoods because it's easier," said Mishan Jubouri, a prominent former Baathist who was one of the few Sunni Arabs elected to the new Parliament. "I know a lot of Shiite Baath Party members who have had to escape to Ramadi or Mosul or Tikrit," mostly Sunni territories.

There's been little or no investigation into any of the assassinations, the slain men's relatives said. Not that they need an investigation to place blame: The families staunchly believe that Shiite militias are behind the killings.

The assassination squads are widely believed to be from the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country's most influential Shiite political party and the biggest winner in the elections.

"I believe they were Badr forces. They're assassinating all the well-known men," said Walid Rasheed, whose brother, a former Baathist named Falah Rasheed, was gunned down Monday outside his shop in Baghdad. "They just want to provoke strife among Iraqis."

Officially, the Iran-backed Badr militia is now the Badr Organization, a political party whose leaders say it's disarmed. In reality, Badr fighters were so emboldened by their sect's victory at the polls that they're again roaming southern Shiite territories with weapons displayed, according to witnesses and Iraqi authorities.

Oh, and Arthur, Swopa points out that Iran is building a new airport in Najaf. You might want to put that info in your next "Good News!" post.

Speaking of Swopa, I ran across a post he made on Roger Simon's warblog on the subject of Steve's killing that succintly states the problem the war cheerleaders are having such a bad case of cognitive dissonance over:

Good question. The problem is, the people who boasted about their ability to "see clearly what we are fighting" and their determination to defeat it are now the ones making the excuses.

The war they supported, and elections they proclaimed as a purple-fingered tsunami of freedom, put the folks who just murdered Steven Vincent in charge of Basra.

That's right -- instead of defeating radical Islamists, they empowered them. But rather than admit that, they shut their eyes and pretended that southern Iraq was a thriving young democracy, making excuses for the corruption and Islamicization that Vincent wrote about.

So, now that exposing those flaws has gotten Vincent killed, will the war's supporters open their eyes and stop making excuses? You tell me.