It was 60 day ago that Iyad Allawi said his regime had been granted emergency powers. Just who granted the Allawiites emergency powers was an exercise left to the imagination. These new powers allowed the Allawi militias to arbitrarily close the airports and the boarders, arbitrarily restrict movement within Iraq, to arbitrarily use leathal force under the cover of darkness, and to set up "midnight courts" to generate arrest warrents. Oh. No lawyers. Detention is arbitrary too, for those that live through their arrest.
All this, and the 1st MEF assault on Falluja, would produce an Iraq able to hold democratic elections.
A few hours ago the invisible hand granted Allawi another 30 days of license to run Iraq under these conditions.
Google your local punditocracy and see what they were saying just 60 days ago about the benefits of tossing civil liberties out the window, and giving the Zoomies and the Red Legs license to fire for effect on on an entire city, with the 1st MEF doing containment and mop-up of hostiles and non-hostiles alike.
And in case Cole is off-line, in addition to the casualties that make it past the filters, there is this: Hadi Saleh was found strangled to death in Baghdad today, his eyes blindfolded and hands tied with metal wire. He was a leader of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Posted by EBW at January 6, 2005 08:28 PM | TrackBack