Juan Cole - 09/22/05

US Bombs Dhulu'iyyah
Basra declares Noncooperation

US warplanes bombed the small Sunni Arab city of Dhulu'iyyah (Thuluiya) on Wednesday. The bombing is unlikely to be an effective counter-insurgency measure. In fact, it appears to be a simple sort of tribal revenge, where the US military is punishing the city for the killing in the general area of 4 US private security guards the day before. I think it would have been better to do nothing rather than to reply to the incident with a bombing campaign, which will likely harm innocents and just drive more people into the arms of the guerrillas.

Huffington on Bolton and Plame

Someone in the Bush White House blew the cover of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, to punish her husband, Joe Wilson. Wilson had gone to Niger to investigate the phony story pushed by Dick Cheney that Iraq had bought yellowcake uranium from that country. (The charge was in fact meaningless since insiders knew that Iraq had no capability to do anything with yellowcake. For this reason, the US military did not even bother to secure the yellowcake at Tuwaitha after Saddam's fall). When the Bush administration kept lying about the "African uranium" case, Wilson went public. That was why the Bushies believed he "had to be punished."' They would no doubt have preferred to "punish France," but not all of us get the primo revenge gigs.