Iraq: Suicide bombers interrupt celebrations in Baghdad over soccer win - 26-Jul-07 - Generational Dynamics

Minutes after the Iraq team clinched victory in the tense, nail-biting game, thousands of people began streaming out into the streets of Baghdad and other cities throughout the country, celebrating the victory. Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds all celebrated together, screaming with joy and jubilation.

However, the Baghdad celebrations were interrupted by two suicide car bombers who blew themselves up in the middle of the celebrating crowds, killing 50 and wounding 100 more.

Not surprisingly, the BBC on Wednesday led with the bombings, emphasizing the blood and gore. (Last week, the BBC newscast carried a 20-minute segment on bodies in the Tigris River, and described in precise detail how the police cut up the body, examine the stomach contents, and so forth. I would have thought that was over the top even for the BBC, but apparently I was wrong.)

The BBC played down the unity of the Iraqis, and played up the sectarian violence and so-called "civil war" aspect. The BBC blamed the suicide bombings on "the Sunnis," without mentioning al-Qaeda in Iraq.

I've been very critical of journalists and politicians because of their sheer stupidity and ignorance. This was shown by articles in the Congressional Quarterly. Washington journalists, analysts and politicians have no idea what's going on in Iraq. They don't know the differences between Sunni and Shi'ite, and up until recently they didn't know that al-Qaeda is operating in Iraq, or that al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization.

Iraqi 'Civil War'

Brookings Institution does a full reversal on Iraq war: As Americans withdraw from cities, Brookings admits there's no civil war.... (1-Jul-2009)

Stock markets in Iraq and Iran are surging.: Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says "it is the end of capitalism."... (17-Oct-2008)

On "60 Minutes," Bob Woodward makes ridiculous claims about Iraq.: He says the surge succeeded because of some magic new military technique.... (7-Sep-2008)

Iraq's Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr turns from arms to "culture": This follows several Sunni "Tribal Awakenings" to expel al-Qaeda.... (10-Aug-2008)

Obama continues to damage his candidacy with his Iraq policy.: Obama is hurting himself by bobbing and weaving on the success of the "surge."... (27-Jul-2008)

The new Iraqi "civil war" fizzles out, as expected: Radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a cease-fire on Sunday,... (1-Apr-08)

The Iraq war may be related to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.: On the first anniversary of the successful "surge" strategy,... (17-Feb-08)

Casualties are down sharply in Iraq.: This issue has been a spectacular validation of Generational Dynamics theory.... (31-Oct-07)

As Turkey prepares to invade northern Iraq, it's isolating itself internationally: A new "Young Turks revolution" is reestablishing strong Turkish nationalism.... (29-Oct-07)

Washington Post says that al-Qaeda in Iraq is "crippled": Meanwhile, Iraqi citizens' political opposition to America is growing.... (16-Oct-07)

Antiwar Democrats are freaking out over Bush's Vietnam - Iraq war comparison.: The same people who have been comparing Iraq to Vietnam for years... (24-Aug-07)

Iraq: Suicide bombers interrupt celebrations in Baghdad over soccer win: Iraq's stunning 4-3 soccer victory over South Korea in the Asia Cup semi-final... (26-Jul-07)

The al-Askariya Shrine in Samarra, Iraq, is bombed again: Last year's bombing triggered months of vicious sectarian violence in Baghdad,... (14-Jun-07)

Congress votes to fund Iraq war without deadlines: The result shows conflicting anxieties during America's Crisis era.... (24-May-07)

Senator Joe Biden wants to move troops from Iraq to Darfur civil war: Saying on Meet the Press that we should remove troops from Iraqi "civil war,"... (29-Apr-07)

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman shows ignorance and evasiveness about al-Qaeda in Iraq: In an interview that appeared on CNN on Sunday,... (24-Apr-07)

BBC kills an Iraqi war story because it's "too positive": But a drama showing British troops brutalizing civilians is perfectly fine.... (11-Apr-07)

Tens of thousands of Shi'ites protest against American "occupiers": In what appeared to be a grand, party-like atmosphere,... (10-Apr-07)

Iraq's Moqtada al-Sadr tells followers to attack Americans, not each other: This could be good news.... (9-Apr-07)

Iraqi Sunnis are turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq : This is exactly the kind of thing that generational theory predicts. (1-Apr-2007)

New optimistic poll of Iraqi people barely mentioned on Sunday TV news shows: And Bob Shieffer on CBS's "Face the Nation" asked really dumb questions of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.... (19-Mar-07)

Robert Gates on "civil war" in Iraq.: Following the release of the Iraq National Intelligence Estimate on Friday,... (2-Feb-07)

News as theatre: NBC announces it will call Iraq war a "civil war": On Monday morning on the "Today Show,"... (29-Nov-06)

President Bush's reference to Vietnam War "Tet Offensive" has journalists in a tizzy: Airhead journalists have completely missed the point, and the real danger.... (20-Oct-06)

Learning-disabled journalists and politicians continue to predict Iraq civil war: Occasionally journalists take a break from their heavy-breathing over Congressional pages,... (8-Oct-06)

General John Abizaid says there'll be no troop cutbacks in Iraq: This is hardly a surprise to me, though not for the reasons most people give.... (19-Sep-06)

Debate over civil war in Iraq rages over semantics: An actual crisis civil war in Iraq is impossible, but it's now embroiled in the November elections,... (23-Aug-06)

Washington becomes hysterical again over an Iraqi 'civil war' : A civil war in Iraq is impossible, as I've said many times, because only one generation has passed since the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s. Here's some additional historical information. (7-Aug-2006)

Israel's war against Hizbollah and Lebanon forces Muslims to choose sides : The war is part of a larger Shi'ite-Sunni struggle, and a stopgap ceasefire will create a worsening environment leading to a much more chaotic situation within a few months (25-Jul-2006)

Speculations about a stock market panic and crash : Will there be a stock market panic next week, next month, or next year, and will it lead to a crash? We speculate on some possibilities. (31-May-2006)

Journalists have a 'civil war in Iraq' orgy over the weekend: It's hard to remember when news shows had so much sheer non-stop nonsense... (21-Mar-06)

I just heard on CNN International: "The threat of civil war in Iraq is over.": Surprise! Surprise! The press corps was 100% wrong, and I was right.... (28-Feb-06)

Fear of Iraqi civil war nears hysteria: But there is NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER of a civil war.... (24-Feb-06)

Bombing of 1200 year old Shi'ite mosque inflames Iraq to the verge of massive civil war rhetoric: Shi'ites conducted over 90 revenge attacks on Sunni shrines on Wednesday,... (23-Feb-06)

Vitriolic Iraq war politics erupts in Washington: But the basics of the Iraq war haven't changed a bit.... (21-Nov-05)

After President Bush's speech: What next for Iraq?: With growing insurgency violence and flagging public support, what's America's "end strategy" in Iraq?... (1-Jul-05)

Iraqi Sunni and Shi'ite clerics call for restraint: Analysts, pundits and journalists are still predicting civil war, and they're still getting it wrong.... (23-May-05)

The chaotic Iraq election is only two days away: The election is on Sunday, January 30, and no one has a clue what's going to happen.... (28-Jan-05)

Brent Scowcroft predicts an "incipient civil war" for Iraq: Pundits are returning to wishful thinking as the January 30 election approaches... (09-Jan-05)

Can we withdraw from Iraq in 2005?: Suddenly the Washington buzz is that whoever wins - Bush or Kerry - will begin to withdraw American troops from Iraq. We look at two historical examples to predict scenarios. (16-Oct-2004)

Fallujans are getting angry with insurgents: Just a few hours after my posting that al-Zarqawi's most formidable enemy may be the 40-50 year old mothers of Fallujah,... (13-Oct-04)

Al-Sadr's Shi'ite militia fighters turn in their weapons: The war in Iraq took a significant turn this week when the Shi'ite militias agreed to disarm,... (13-Oct-04)

The press is talking about another "uprising" in Iraq. Yawn.: Nothing shows more how clueless the press is about what's going on in Iraq than this constant talk about civil war and uprisings.... (7-Aug-04)

Iraq Today vs 1960s America (Revised): They have much in common: Bombings, assassinations, student demonstrations, violent riots, calls for insurrection and civil war and harsh rhetoric. That's much more than a coincidence. (8-May-2004)

What Iraqi Civil War?: Early in 2003, I predicted that there would be no popular uprising against the Americans, and that there would be no civil war. After the overthrow of Saddam, I said that an Iraqi civil war was impossible. Despite the constant near-hysteria of the politicians, journalists and high-priced analysts, I've been right so far. Here's why. (09-Apr-04)

Anti-Shi'ite Terror Attacks in Iraq, Pakistan: So far, Sunni and Shi'ite leaders in Iraq aren't taking the bait. (2-Mar-04)

Terrorist suicide bombings in Iraq may backfire against terrorists: During an awakening period, terrorist acts cause masses of people to shrink from more violence. (19-Aug-03)

And Lawrence Kaplan, a senior editor at the liberal, pro-Democratic opinion magazine, The New Republic, wrote an article entitled "Congressional leaders are illiterate on Iraq," in which he basically reached the following conclusions about the Democrats in Congress: They're morons; they go out of their way to avoid learning anyting; they make up any "fact" they want as they go along, since they don't know anything; and they couldn't care less what happens in Iraq, since they just want votes.

And yet little ol' me, sitting in my apartment in Framingham -- I've known since 2004 that al-Qaeda was operating in Iraq, through Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I've written about it many times since then.

When I wrote my comprehensive analysis, "Iraqi Sunnis are turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq," a few months ago, most journalists and politicians still were completely clueless about al-Qaeda in Iraq, even though Muslim sources were loaded with reporting on it.

The reason is because they assume that the Iraq war is just a replay of the Vietnam war in every detail. Actually the two wars have almost nothing in common, but the journalists and politicians are too stupid to figure that out.

Instead they call it a civil war simply because the Vietnam War was a civil war. I've explained dozens of times why the Iraq war is NOT a civil war and can't be a civil war, as you can see from the adjacent "related articles" box. But it makes no difference.

Things have changed in the last few weeks, because various military reports and intelligence estimates have been emphasizing al-Qaeda in Iraq. It's nothing that you didn't already know if you've been reading this web site, but now it's come to the attention of the politicians and mainstream journalists, and they have to deal with it.

It's been particularly galling to the New York Times. Incredibly, they refuse to acknowledge its existence, and the editors have distributed a secret internal memo telling its people to call it "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," rather than "al-Qaeda in Iraq." It's as if we're dealing with a bunch of petulant teenage girls instead of a major newspaper.

However, Wednesday's news about the celebrations after the soccer game shows how absurd the mainstream media explanation is. Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds were out in the streets celebratring together. People who hate each other and have civil wars with each other don't do that.

Also, this wasn't a unique event. Just two months ago, there was similar revelry among united Iraqis when sentimental Iraqi pop singer Shada Hassoun won the Arab "Idol" contest. Go back to that article and watch the video of Shada again. She's wonderful.

So, as I've written many times, the politicians and reporters have no idea what's going on in Iraq.

In the article that I wrote several months ago, I showed how Iraqis, including Sunni Iraqis, were turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Why? You can see why on Wednesday. There are no Iraqi suicide bombers, so the suicide car bombers that destroyed the revelry on Wednesday were foreigners, probably from Saudi Arabia, recruited by al-Qaeda. And they killed Iraqis -- ordinary Iraqi men, women and children. Why wouldn't the Iraqis turn against that? The claim that this can't be a civil war is obvious to everyone except the petulant teenage girls at the BBC, the NY Times, and, of course, in Congress.

Another dispute going on today is whether "al-Qaeda in Iraq" is really "al-Qaeda." President Bush says they're the same organization, and the Democrats say that the two organizations are completely unrelated to each other.

The truth is in the middle, but it's not even an important question. Al-Qaeda is turning into a kind of public relations "brand name" for Sunni Muslim terrorist groups stretching around the world from southeast Asia to the Mideast to the Mahgreb (North Africa) and up to Spain and France and Russia. Even if Osama bin Laden is not running al-Qaeda in Iraq, they communicate and share knowledge and resources. It makes absolutely no difference whether you call them the same group or different groups, because the effect is the same.

In fact, there's apparently a clear generational different between "bin Laden's al-Qaeda" and al-Qaeda in Iraq. A fascinating story came out of Yemen recently about the suicide bombings that killed Spaniards and Yemenis a few weeks ago in Yemen. An older al-Qaeda operative, now in custody, was insisting that the bombing was NOT the work of bin Laden's al-Qaeda, but rather was perpetrated by a bunch of younger generation al-Qaeda newbies who really don't know what they're doing. "The new generation is not the generation of Osama Bin Laden, it is the generation of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, which is different from Al Qaeda, although the word al-Qaeda is used by some groups." Unfortunately, the article doesn't give enough details, but it's a juicy story anyway.

But it doesn't matter because they're both terrorist groups sharing resources with a number of common objectives. Two of the most important of these common objectives are (1) high-profile terrorist attacks on American soil, and (2) sparking an "Islamist revolution" in Pakistan or wherever it can be one, like the 1979 Islamist revolution in Iran.

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jul-07
Iraq: Suicide bombers interrupt celebrations in Baghdad over soccer win

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jul-07 Iraq: Suicide bombers interrupt celebrations in Baghdad over soccer win

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 26-Jul-07
Iraq: Suicide bombers interrupt celebrations in Baghdad over soccer win