Broken promises, broken Iraq

An August 30, 2010 article at English.xinhuanet.com gives a pretty good synopsis of the events of the Iraq conflict thus far, which can be compared to the initial judgments of Jeremiah upon Babylon:

A secure, stable and free Iraq, it's what the United States promised after its tanks and armored vehicles rumbled into the center of Baghdad and toppled former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet, as the U.S. troops are leaving "as promised and on schedule," for Maher Abbas, a Bagdhad lawyer, the world is as broken and dangerous as these promises could be.

"Broken" -- just as Jeremiah saw the land of the Chaldeans after the invasion by "a great nation and many kings... aroused from the remote parts of the earth," (Jer 50:41): "Suddenly Babylon has fallen and been broken; wail over her!" (Jer 51:8). The invasion of those forces foretold: "Surely I will fill you with a population like locusts, and they will cry out with shouts of victory over you," (Jer 51:14) along with the capture of the capital: "Tell the king of Babylon that his city has been captured from end to end," (Jer 51:31) and the 'toppling' of Saddam: "I am against you, O arrogant one... for your day has come, the time when I shall punish you. And the arrogant one will stumble and fall with no one to raise him up," (Jer 50:31-32a).

The 'broken promise' of a secure, stable and free Iraq was also foretold: "Bring balm for her pain; perhaps she may be healed. We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed," (Jer 51:8b-9a). And the abandonment at the failure of reconstruction: "We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed; forsake her and let us each go to his own country, for her judgment has reached heaven and towers up to the very skies," (Jer 51:9).

Abbas, 34, is a Sunni resident living in the capital's western neighborhood of Khadraa with his family.He said that the U.S. invasion and the following seven years were devastating to Iraqi society.

"Devastating," just as Jeremiah prophesied: "I shall dispatch foreigners to Babylon that they may winnow her and may devastate her land," (Jer 51:2).

"It created deep cracks between the Iraqi factions who used to live together for hundreds and thousands of years," he said with an apparent anguish.

And so the specter of civil war looms, just as Jeremiah foresaw, not war between factions of Islam, but between Chaldean (Iraqi) and Mede (Kurd): "Sharpen the arrows, fill the quivers! The LORD has aroused the spirit of the kings of the Medes, because his purpose is against Babylon to destroy it... The kings of the Medes, their governors and all their prefects, and every land of their dominion... The sound of an outcry from Babylon, and of great destruction from the land of the Chaldeans! For the LORD is going to destroy Babylon... And her mighty men will be captured, their bows are shattered," (Jer 51:11,28,54,56).

Seven years and five months ago, the Americans rushed to war. Now they are trying to leave the mess of their own making by convincing their victims that they could put things strait [sic] all by themselves. [...] As Iraqis are taking over the baton, they are destined to face the consequence of similar broken promises. The only difference, if any, is the Iraqis may have to struggle much longer and with far greater efforts to put their broken homeland back to normal life.

According to Jeremiah, there will never be another normal in Babylon.

The Iraq Attacks: US mission still not accomplished

A Time.com opinion article by Bobby Ghosh, published Thursday, Aug 26, 2010

For American troops pulling out of Iraq, Wednesday's news of the string of attacks across the country must come as a kick in the solar plexus. Despite the soldiers' hard work and sacrifice for over seven and a half years, it took the enemy hardly any time at all to reassert its presence across much of the country. What was it all for, a soldier may well ask.

For Iraqis, the question is not philosophical, it's existential: who can protect them now? If there was any doubt about the incompetence of their own security forces, the attacks have laid them to rest. More such spasms of violence will inevitably lead to calls for the remaining U.S. forces to drop their non-combat status and ride to the rescue. How will they respond?

Bombings in at least 13 cities across the length and breath of Iraq have killed more the 70 people, and wounded hundreds of others. In different cities, authorities have blamed al-Qaeda, or Iraqi Sunni groups, or some combination thereof. Whoever is to blame, the message they're sending is not subtle: now that the Americans are gone, we can strike anywhere, at any time.

The Obama administration's decision to pull out combat troops this month was, at least publicly, predicated on the ability of Iraqi security forces to protect civilians and take the fight to the insurgents. But the Iraqi police and military are scarcely able to protect themselves: many of yesterday's bombings struck security targets.

The timing of the attacks is an especially damning indictment of the quality of the Iraqi forces. They have known for months that the American pullout would end in late August, and that al-Qaeda and its allies would use the opportunity to strike hard. In other words, the Iraqi forces were on the highest possible state of alert for attacks. Yet that wasn't good enough to prevent the enemy from mounting the most audacious and ambitious operation then have ever attempted.

The attacks exposed as a fiction the Obama administration's long-standing claim that the Iraqi forces were ready and able to take over from U.S. troops. While that claim may have played well with war-weary Americans, Iraqis have never been fooled: only last week, the commander of the Iraqi military said his forces would not be fully ready until 2020.

The bombings don't automatically mean all (or even much) of Iraq is once again in the grip of the insurgency. But they suggest the country is in for a great deal more violence in the months ahead.

The quandary for the White House is whether it can restrict the 50,000 remaining U.S. troops in Iraq to non-combat functions when the gains achieved by force of American arms are at risk, or should it put them directly in harm's way. President Obama may not have announced that the mission had been accomplished, but his countrymen won't take kindly to being told it is incomplete.

Car bombings across Iraq kill 45

Excerpts from an article at latimes.com by Ned Parker and Riyadh Mohammed, August 25, 2010

A string of car-bomb attacks killed at least 45 people across Iraq on Wednesday. The violence shook at least seven cities from north to south and appeared timed to undermine confidence in the Iraqi army and police as the U.S. military ends its formal combat mission in the country.

The attacks came a day after White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan called the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq a "truly remarkable achievement," as reported by Tom Diemer at Politics Daily.


In Washington on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden used language similar to Brennan's, calling the drawdown a "remarkable milestone in a war that began more than seven years ago."

Apparently coordinated bombings occurred in Kut, Baghdad, Moqdadiya, Baquba, Ramadi, Fallujah, Basra and Karbala.

The attacks followed the announcement by the U.S. military on Tuesday that their troop numbers had now dropped to 49,700 soldiers as soldiers switched from a combat mission to the job of training the Iraqi army and police and assisting them when asked. Iraqis are concerned that the scaled-back American presence could help fuel violence.

As soldiers withdraw, other US personnel are "stepping in and staffing up"

As reported today at U.S. News & World Report online in an article by Alex Kingsbury, a senior U.S. intelligence official in an interview on Thursday described the US transition from its combat mission in Iraq to one of support this way: "What the American and Iraqi publics don't realize is that, as the soldiers step back, we're stepping in and staffing up."

U.S. troop levels in Iraq have dropped by a total of 90,000 since March. On September 1, combat-oriented Operation Iraqi Freedom is to be replaced by a "stability" mission called Operation New Dawn. Yet some 56,000 troops still remain in the country, including logistics and support personnel, trainers, military advisers and 4,500 Special Forces.

As US Vice President Joe Biden told the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Indianapolis Monday, "Drawing down our troops in Iraq does not mean we are disengaging from Iraq. In fact, quite the opposite is true", according to a Christian Science Monitor report by staff writer Howard LaFranchi.

While all U.S. soldiers and Marines are slated to lift their boots off Iraqi ground by the end of next year, many of their tasks will continue to be done by private contractors, diplomats and intelligence officers, according to the US News & World Report article. They'll be based in the hardened fortress in Baghdad, known as the Green Zone, that has earned the distinction of being the world's largest and most expensive embassy.

According to the 2,600 year-old prophecy of doom on Babylon written by Jeremiah the hebrew prophet, the occupiers will attempt to "heal" Babylon after having "broken" her. But their efforts will be thwarted, as the cities are engulfed in flames, pushing the reconstructionists to finally abandon her outright in frustration: "We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed; forsake her and let us each go to his own country, for her judgment has reached to heaven..." (Jer 51:9).

Now that the US mission has formally transitioned to one of support and reconstruction, will the fires ignite just as Jeremiah foresaw, or is this current occupation of Iraq not the one described in his ancient prophecy?

We have only a little more than a year to find out, as the deadline for complete withdrawal draws closer.

Iraq's senior military chief says US forces should stay until 2020

From Aljazeera.net, Thursday, August 12 -- Iraq's most senior military officer, Lieutenant General Babaker Zerbari, has said that his security forces will not be able to secure the country until 2020 and that the US should delay its planned withdrawal.

The US government plans to withdraw its combat troops by the end of August, and to remove all remaining troops, to number 50,000, by the end of 2011.

Zerbari said the planned withdrawal will create a "problem" and increase instability in Iraq -- "I would say to politicians: the US army must stay until the Iraqi army is fully ready in 2020."

Hours after Zerbari's comments, Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, told reporters that the US is still "on target" to withdraw troops from Iraq. He said only "dozens" would remain at the US embassy in Baghdad after 2011.

Here is a video report:



The US pullout of Iraq is only linked to a deadline and a timetable, rather than an actual strategy, an American expert said in a recent interview with Xinhua, as reported by Liza Jansen at English.xinhuanet.com.

Jooset Hiltermann, an expert on political issues in Iraq, made the statement only days after US President Barack Hussein Obama had announced that the withdrawal of thousands of American troops from Iraq would "as promised and on schedule" be done by the end of this month.

But the hebrew prophet Jeremiah foresaw an abandoning of the "land of the Chaldeans" by her occupiers, not according to a negotiated timetable, but motivated by a realization of failure in all attempts at reconstruction, mitigated by fires that ravage her cities --

"I shall set fire to his cities, and it will devour all his environs... Her high gates will be set on fire, so the peoples will toil for nothing, and the nations become exhausted (because of the) fire... Suddenly Babylon had fallen and been broken; wail over her! Bring balm for her pain; perhaps she may be healed. 'We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed. Forsake her now, and let us each go to his own country, for her judgment has reached to heaven and towers up to the very skies,'" (Jer 50:32b, 51:58b, 51:8-9).

If the cities of Iraq do not burn before the total withdrawal of US and other coalition reconstruction personnel, then we can know for sure that the current events in Iraq are NOT the fulfillment of Jeremiah's 2,600 year-old prophecy of total desolation on Babylon, the land of the Chaldeans.

US says Iraq attacks likely to increase during Ramadan

With temperatures of 120 degrees, little electricity and an expected increase in politically linked religious fervor around the Muslim holy month, Ramadan could bring a spike in Iraq attacks, according to a Christian Science Monitor online article by Jane Arraf published today.

On Saturday at least 43 were killed and another 185 wounded, many of them women and children, as roadside bombs and a car bomb exploded in a crowded market in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.

Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the deputy commanding general of US Forces in Iraq, told reporters Monday that the US expects attacks in Iraq to continue to spike as Ramadan begins this week.

Muslims abstain from eating or drinking even water from sunrise to sundown to foster patience and humility, according to the CS Monitor report.

Iraqi officials have reported between 300 and 500 Iraqis killed in attacks in July alone.

Jeremiah the hebrew prophet predicted that after the arrogant one was punished, the cities of Chaldea would burn, and then the occupying forces would abandon Babylon to her judgment.

Could the deprivation of Ramadan, the holy month in which millions of muslims seek patience and humility, light the fires that consume the cities of Chaldea in fulfillment of Jeremiah's ancient prophecy?

Aziz: "Bush and Blair... wanted to destroy Iraq for the sake of Israel..."

Martin Chulov, writing for guardian.co.uk today, quotes imprisoned Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's former deputy prime minister, in his first interview since the fall of Baghdad --

"Bush and Blair lied intentionally (about Iraq's weapons program). They were both pro-Zionist. They wanted to destroy Iraq for the sake of Israel, not for the sake of the US and Britain."

Jeremiah the hebrew prophet wrote that the destruction of the land of Babylon -- modern-day Iraq -- would come as a vengeance for Israel: "The inhabitant of Zion will say, 'May my blood be upon the inhabitants of Chaldea,' Jerusalem will say. Therefore thus says the LORD, 'Behold, I am going to plead your case and exact full vengeance for you,... and Babylon will become a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals, an object of horror and hissing, without inhabitants'... Indeed, Babylon is to fall for the slain of Israel, as also for Babylon the slain of all the earth have fallen," (Jer 51:35-37, 49).

Aziz also had harsh words for current US President Barack Hussein Obama -- "Obama is a hypocrite. He is leaving Iraq to the wolves." He said America and Britain "killed our country in many ways." In his first interview in seven years, Aziz said the United States would cause the death of Iraq if it continued to withdraw its combat forces.

But Jeremiah predicted just such an abandonment by the occupying reconstructionists -- "Suddenly Babylon has fallen and been broken; wail over her! Bring balm for her pain; perhaps she may be healed. 'We applied healing to Babylon, but she was not healed; forsake her and let us each go to his own country, for her judgment has reached to heaven and towers to the very skies,'" (Jer 51:8-9).