Sunday, April 3, 2005
Is it actually more controversial to just call the "insurgent" forces in Iraq by what they are - terrorists?
Washington Post: Fighters Target Abu Ghraib in Major Assault
The attackers apparently did not penetrate the prison grounds, although some inmates were reported to have been seriously wounded. The second of two car bombs exploded as troops were trying to evacuate the injured after the first, the Reuters news agency said.
Meanwhile, the possibility of defusing Iraq's Sunni Muslim-led insurgency by drawing the Sunni minority into the country's government and military appeared more remote...
Oops. Let this be a lesson to you, never look to the big papers (at least not the news section) for any sort of analysis.
On the very same day:
Washington Post: Iraqi Lawmakers Elect Sunni Arab as New Parliament Speaker, Ending Days of Deadlock
BAGHDAD, April 3 -- An American-educated Sunni Muslim won the first-to-be-filled post of parliament speaker in Iraq's new government on Sunday, breaking a serious impasse and launching a Shiite, Kurd and Sunni unity government more than two months after historic national elections.
Hachim Hasani's election by fellow members of the new parliament began the formation of Iraq's first democratic government in a half-century. Selection followed more than a month of negotiations, and a final week of rancorous finger-pointing, as lawmakers elected on Jan. 30 went about the unfamiliar process of finding a way to share power.
Filling of the first post represented compromises by all sides. Shiites and Sunnis withdrew their own, rival candidates for speaker, and Hasani gave up his hopes of a top Cabinet job to end an impasse over the speakership.
"The Iraqi people have been able to survive many attempts by their enemies to divide the people,'' Hasani told the assembly, invoking a "'free, democratic, federated and pluralistic'' future for Iraq...
