Seven more Americans are missing in Iraq.

Two U.S. soldiers and seven employees of a U.S. contractor were still missing after an attack on a convoy west of Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said Monday. A wave of kidnappings continued with the capture of seven Chinese and two Czech civilians. The U.S. military said the contractors were working for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a unit of oil field services company Halliburton Co., the largest contractor in Iraq. They vanished after an attack on a U.S. convoy in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers also disappeared in the incident.

The Christian Science Monitor posits: Have We Miscalculated in Iraq?

This eyewitness account from Fallujah written at 10 pm Baghdad time, Sunday night, charges that Americans are slaughtering civilians. Report from a medical clinic:

As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who'd been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in. One woman and small child had been shot through the neck -- the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning. The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life. After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.

One victim of American aggression after another was brought into the clinic, nearly all of them women and children. ....What I can report from Falluja is that there is no ceasefire, and apparently there never was. Iraqi women and children are being shot by American snipers. Over 600 Iraqis have now been killed by American aggression, and the residents have turned two football fields into graveyards. Ambulances are being shot by the Americans. And now they are preparing to launch a full-scale invasion of the city. All of which is occurring under the guise of catching the people who killed the four Blackwater Security personnel and hung two of their bodies from a bridge.

You can read more about the Fallujah massacre over at Democracy Now.

Update from today:

In the latest group of foreign hostage-takings, seven Chinese citizens have been kidnapped in Iraq.

Seven Chinese citizens have become the latest foreigners to be kidnapped in Iraq, the Chinese government said, and pledged no efforts would be spared to rescue them. The seven workers entered Iraq from Jordan early Sunday and were abducted in the flashpoint city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, the foreign ministry and a Chinese diplomat in the Iraqi capital said.

....The kidnappings came a day before US Vice President Dick Cheney was due to arrive in Beijing Tuesday straight from a visit to Tokyo overshadowed by the kidnapping of three Japanese civilians in Iraq.

China opposed the war in Iraq and did not send any troops there. It also was friendly to Saddam Hussein's regime.

There are reportedly now 30 foreigners who have been taken hostage in Iraq this week. The three Japanese citizens and American Thomas Hamill have not yet been released. 8 other hostages, including one from Britain, have been released. Two Germans are missing and their Government has said they are presumed dead.

Update: China reports they have now been released.

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Rahul Mahajan is blogging from Fallujah at Empire Notes. He says the major newspapers are not telling the true story.

Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small group of isolated "extremists" repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it. ....

Nothing could have been easier than gaining the good-will of the people of Fallujah had the Americans not been so brutal in their dealings. Now, a tipping-point has been reached. Fallujah cannot be "saved" from its mujaheddin unless it is destroyed.

There's lots more in this daily account of Baghdad and Fallujah, but no permalinks, so just start reading at the top.

The new Newsweek examines how Vietnam compares with Iraq. "In Iraq, the scale is smaller, but there are echoes. How it compares with Vietnam—and doesn't."

....to most Americans, Vietnam is the recurring nightmare. To anyone over the age of about 50, last week felt a little like the end of February 1968, when the Tet offensive was raging through the cities of South Vietnam and Americans were starting to wonder if the war would ever end. A year after Iraqi civilians (with the help of U.S. Marines) toppled Saddam's statue, America suffered through its worst week of combat since the supposed end of the war, with more than 40 soldiers dead and hundreds more wounded. During Tet, a Viet Cong suicide squad penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon before being gunned down. Nothing quite that dramatic happened in Baghdad. Yet Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, had to cancel an appointment on the edge of the so-called Green Zone, where the Americans are headquartered, when security forces found an unexploded bomb possibly waiting for his arrival.

....One significant difference between now and then—no draft—has kept down dissent in the heartland. Even so, it is possible to lay Iraq and Vietnam side by side and see disturbing parallels, as well as critical differences—both of which shed light on what must be done going forward.

Maxspeak says he's not voting for Ralph Nader, but he likes this memo Nader just sent out on the war and the draft. When we last bashed the draft, Max disagreed with us a bit. (Our post that he refers to has moved here.) Now, Max says, he's "four-square agin' any draft." As to Bush and Kerry:

Kerry seems to be channeling Hubert Humphrey, circa 1968. Send in more troops and do the job "right." I was in SDS and helped to "dump the Hump," resulting in Richard Nixon. That did not turn out well. Neither would Dubya, the Sequel.....Short-term, I'd say support your local peace movement, sticking to a resolute "get the hell out now" stance and communicate your views to your elected representatives.

Now here's Ralph's message to American Students:

The War, the Draft and Your Future

"
We have been down this road before.

U.S. troops sent to war half a world away. American foreign policy controlled by an arrogant elite, bent on projecting military power around the globe. A public misled into supporting an unconstitutional war founded on deceit and fabrications. As the death toll mounts, we hear claims that the war is nearly won, that victory is just around the corner. But victory never arrives.

As the public loses confidence in the government, the government questions the patriotism of any who express doubt about the war. When a presidential election arrives, both the Democrat and Republican nominees embrace the policy of continued war. The military draft comes to dominate the lives of America's young, and vast numbers who believe the war to be a senseless blunder are faced with fighting a war they do not believe in, or facing exile or prison. The year was 1968. Because voters had no choice that November, the Vietnam War continued for another six years. Hundreds of thousands of Americans like you died, were maimed, or suffered from diseases like malaria. A far greater number of Vietnamese died.

Today, the war is in the quicksands and alleys of Iraq. Once again, under the pressure of a determined resistance, we see an American war policy being slowly torn apart at the seams, while the candidates urge us to "stay the course" in this tragic misadventure. Today's Presidential candidates are not Nixon and Humphrey, they are now Bush and Kerry.

Once again, there is one overriding truth: If war is the only choice in this election, then war we will have. Today enlistments in the Reserves and National Guard are declining. The Pentagon is quietly recruiting new members to fill local draft boards, as the machinery for drafting a new generation of young Americans is being quietly put into place.

Young Americans need to know that a train is coming, and it could run over their generation in the same way that the Vietnam War devastated the lives of those who came of age in the sixties.

I am running for President, and have been against this war from the beginning. We must not waste lives in order to control and waste more oil. Stand with us and we may yet salvage your future and Americas' future from this looming disaster.

We're not voting for Nader either, but we sure do agree with him about the war and we share his concern that our kids will see a draft train before they see a peace train.

Bump and Update: The militants are now threatening to kill and mutilate the American hostage, Thomas Hamill, if their terms aren't met within 12 hours.

"Our only demand is to remove the siege from the city of mosques," a spokesman said in a tape given to the Al-Jazeera television network. "If you don't respond within 12 hours ... he will be treated worse than those who were killed and burned in Fallujah."

Update: The Japanese hostages may be released within 24 hours.

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Original Post

The militant group named Ahmed Yassin brigades now claims to have 30 hostages in Iraq. They are demanding the U.S. withdraw its forces from Iraq in return for release of the hostages. The group claims to have one American and one Canadian. Canada has no forces in Iraq.

On a related note, Colorado lost a much beloved member of the Winter Park ski community Thursday with the death of Michael Bloss in Iraq.

Bloss, an instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, died in a firefight Thursday in Iraq, where the former soldier in British special services had traveled to provide security to private contractors. Back in Wales, Peter Bloss told the BBC that his son must have jumped at the opportunity to provide security in Iraq after his military experience. "As I was originally told, he was escorting these electrical workers who were working on redoing some cables or whatever, and they were attacked by a group of Iraqis," the father said. "And Michael got them to safety and then was shot dead. He spent two years in Northern Ireland during the real troubles and didn't have a scratch, and this happens now in Iraq."

Portland Indy Media has photos of the fighting in Fallujah obtained from Al Jazeera. Not for the faint of heart. Link via Skippy.

In June, 2003, Human Rights Watch released this report (pdf) of its investigation into violent acts involving U.S. troops in Fallujah:

This report documents these first two violent incidents of April 28 and 30, the facts of which continue to be deeply contested by both sides. The conclusions of Human Rights Watch’s investigation challenge some of the assertions made by the U.S. military....The report also highlights some of the difficulties of putting a powerful combat force in a law enforcement role....Human Rights Watch’s findings of excessive use of force by U.S. troops point to the need for a full, independent and impartial investigation of the al-Falluja incidents by U.S. authorities. Such an investigation should aim to determine the full circumstances that led to the killing of as many as twenty Iraqi civilians in these two incidents, and to hold accountable anyone found to have violated international humanitarian law.

Here's some background on Fallujah:

It's not just Fallujah. The early Saturday AP headline is Baghdad Turns to Chaos:

Gunmen running rampant on Baghdad's western edge attacked a fuel convoy, killing a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver and causing a fiery explosion that sent up a pall of black smoke. A Baghdad correspondent for Al-Jazeera Arab television said that at least nine people had been killed. Another U.S. soldier was killed in an attack on a base elsewhere in the capital, and large groups of insurgents fought U.S. soldiers in two cities to the north, Baqouba and Muqdadiyah.

This week's toll so far: 46 U.S. soldiers killed. 460 Iraqis killed, 280 in Fallujah.

The Guardian judges the right-wing Iraq pundits. Christopher Hitchens is but one:

He taunted the anti-war marchers and "half the newspaper columnists in England" for their forecasts of doom, confidently claiming that all was well in liberated Baghdad, which had not "become a Stalingrad, with house-to-house resistance". The Arab streets had not risen, "to spit in the face of Zionism and imperialism". He thrilled to the news that the US and its allies had made "a clean sweep of Arab de-Stalinisation".

Anti-war demonstrators who claimed that "there would be heaps and heaps of slaughtered Iraqi civilians, and massive casualties among coalition troops" had been wrong. "Soon it will become evident to the naked eye that the city is substantially undamaged. It will also become obvious that its inhabitants waited patiently through what must have been very stressful days and nights, trusting and being able to tell that the targeting was careful and the intentions honourable."

The moral of the story: "Journalism and propoganda should be separate."

[link via Sean Paul at Agonist who is doing a great job of reporting current events in Iraq despite the paucity of official news reports.]

Diane Carman of the Denver Post interviewed Condoleezza Rice's former professor , Arthur N. Gilbert, at the University of Denver International Studies Program. Interestingly, the former Director of the Program was Josef Korbel, the father of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In fact, Korbel was the reason Rice changed her major from music to international studies.

Professor Gilbert has some flattering things to say about Condi personally, but is harshly critical of her stance on Iraq.

Gilbert is puzzled by what has become of this bright, diligent student...he believes she has failed to heed the lessons of the past. To a historian, this is unconscionable. When the Bush administration exploited the nation's anxiety over 9/11 to justify invading Iraq, Gilbert said, "it was the worst foreign policy decision made in living memory. "It worries me that with all this focus on 9/11, it's taking the grave situation in Iraq off the front page," he said, referring to the hearings. "Iraq is a catastrophe beyond measure."

The fact that Rice is capable of defending the decision to go to war is a "terrible failure of education, of picking up what your education should have led you to."....Whether Rice shared the neoconservatives' obsession with Iraq or was just being a "good soldier," Gilbert said, Iraq will be her disastrous legacy. "It was such a horrendous mistake, knowing what she should have known.... He shakes his head. Rice should have known better than to send our troops to Iraq, he said.