Oh yeah, and be sure to not leave your homes during unauthorized time periods or you may be shot on sight. Proceed with caution.
And have a nice day.

Robert Fisk: For the people on the streets, this is not liberation but a new colonial oppression
America’s war of ‘liberation’ may be over. But Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is just about to begin

It’s going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of “liberation” has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of “liberation”.
At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. “Go away! Get out of my face!” an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. “God is Great! God is Great!” the Iraqi retorted.
“Fuck you!”
The Americans have now issued a “Message to the Citizens of Baghdad”, a document as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone. “Please avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before the call to morning prayers,” it tells the people of the city. “During this time, terrorist forces associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as various criminal elements, are known to move through the area … please do not leave your homes during this time. During all hours, please approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution …”
So now

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Faith-based relief agencies in Iraq will be serving Christianity up with their meals.
When Bagdad was liberated last week, Iraqi Shiites who had been repressed under Sadam’s regime were chanting “At last! We can be a Muslim country!”
I doubt that trading religious oppression under Sadam for mandatory Christianity under faith-based relief organizations is what the Iraqi’s had in mind.
This is, of course, the problem with faith-based aid to begin with. If Faith-based organizations want to provide Aid, it should be a requirement of any organization doing work on behalf of our government — on behalf of the people of the United States — to leave the religious rhetoric at home. Especially when it known already to conflict with the beliefs of the people we are purportedly trying to help.

A crusade after all?
By Jane Lampman for the Christian Science Monitor.

Yet to many Muslims and Christians alike, proselytizing at this highly volatile moment in the newly liberated country, with Muslims worldwide questioning US motives, could only spur outrage and undermine US policy in the region as well as in Iraq.
“Coming in the wake of a military conquest of an Arab country, and of openly hostile statements by [the Rev. Franklin] Graham and others, it’s going to backfire in the worst way for US plans to be seen as a liberator,” says Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University…
Iraq is particularly volatile, because it has just emerged from a dictatorship and is under military occupation. And those planning to proselytize are known in the region: the former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention has called the prophet Muhammad a “demon-possessed pedophile,” and Mr. Graham, head of Samaritan’s Purse, has termed Islam “an evil religion.”
Their remarks flew across the Muslim world with such effect that a group of Baptist missionaries working in 10 predominantly Muslim countries sent a letter home calling for restraint and saying such comments “heighten animosity toward Christians,” affecting their work and personal safety.
Graham’s close ties to the administration – he gave the prayer at Mr. Bush’s inauguration and is invited to give the Good Friday prayer at the Pentagon – give Muslims the impression, some say, that evangelization efforts are part of US plans to shape Iraqi society in a Western image…
Such efforts reawaken colonialist images of missionaries following British and French troops into the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries. And that, critics add, plays directly into the hands of Osama bin Laden, whose missives have predicted a Christian crusade.

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This would almost be funny at this point if our Administration wasn’t in the process of following these imaginary WMDs over into Syria.
Now they’re saying it could take up to a year to find them. Or not.
Hmmm. I remember three months being too long to let the inspectors do their job. Now we’re supposed to wait a year or more for them to tell us if the U.S.’s official reasons for invading Iraq even exist?
Pressure to find weapons mounts
By Bryan Bender for the Boston Globe.

A month after the outbreak of war, arms control specialists and former United Nations weapons inspectors are increasingly critical of the Bush administration for its failure to substantiate prewar claims of a hidden weapons arsenal, the principal argument for going to war against Saddam Hussein…
Several thousand soldiers in Iraq are now dedicated to the US search, being run by the Defense Department. But so far the mission has been plagued by numerous false readings of suspected chemical and biological materials.
Washington’s credibility is being eroded further, according to arms specialists, by the continued refusal to include international participation in the search.
Some analysts say the Bush administration could build support for a lengthy, exhaustive search by immediately bringing in either the United Nations weapons inspectors who left Iraq before the war or other international specialists. The UN Security Council next week will discuss the possible resumption of its inspections in Iraq…
”They are not demonstrating much capability,” said David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. ”It has been run somewhat incompetently. They have to bring the professionals in. They said the UN inspectors were bumbling idiots and can’t find anything. Now these guys are looking like bumbling idiots that can’t find anything.”
However, the United States has not indicated any willingness to accept UN help in the search. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Richard B. Myers said Tuesday that ”right now our searches are done under military control, and it’s not appropriate to add anyone to that equation.”
Other analysts say the failure to find weapons so far suggests there may be few to find.
”There will be less than we have been led to believe,” predicted Robert Einhorn, who was the assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation in the Clinton administration. ”There is a good chance that Iraq disposed of some weapons. There was no real security need to keep some of the junk they had stored up.”
If US military forces are unable to locate a ”smoking gun,” the specialists say, it will raise new questions about whether the UN weapons inspectors could have successfully contained the threat posed by the Hussein regime, without the need for an invasion. The inspectors returned to Iraq in November after a four-year absence, but left again in early March after the United States and Britain said Iraq had failed to meet its obligation to disarm.
”The case was made that there were a lot of weapons,” said Albright, the former inspector. ”To make its case, the Bush administration has to find a lot – not 20 chemical shells here, or a couple of drums there. If Iraq destroyed any incriminating evidence, people will say that the inspectors could have contained Iraq.”
Administration officials maintain that the search is still in its early stages and point out that at least a dozen suspected weapons sites have been identified and that most are still being investigated.
But some analysts say the slow progress of the search suggests that the US intelligence community widely misjudged the Iraqi weapons program.
”The fact that we haven’t found any yet seems to indicate that there were fewer weapons than the administration feared,” said Joseph Cirincione, a weapons specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ”It would be very difficult to hide a large, ongoing biological or chemical weapons production program [making] hundreds of tons of agents. Janitors who worked in these plants should be able to give us information.”
…Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke has sought repeatedly to ”manage expectations,” in her words, saying that the search process could take up to a year to complete.

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