Six US soldiers were killed in three separate attacks in Iraq Nov. 5, bringing the number of deaths this year to 852—and making 2007 the deadliest year of the war for US troops. The news comes days after the military announced a steep drop in the rate of US deaths this year. In October, 38 US soldiers were killed in Iraq, the lowest monthly tally since March 2006. November's total, if the current pace continues, would be higher, but still below the war's average of 69 US military deaths per month. Despite the decline, US commanders acknowledged that 2007 would be far deadlier than the second-worst year, 2004, when 849 US soldiers died. (NYT, Nov. 7) The news also comes as Congress has yet again approved war funding—reported by the NY Times Nov. 7 under misleading headline "Military Bill Approved, but Without Iraq Increase." The text reveals far greater wiggle room than the headline would indicate:

While we certainly don't put it past the Taliban to blow up a bunch of schoolchildren to take out a couple of politicians, we note that this attack comes in the normally (relatively) peaceful north of the country, where the Taliban were never popular and still have little following. News accounts frequently forget that the real power in Afghanistan's hinterlands remain the warlords who terrorized the country in a decade and more of internecine ethnic and sectarian bloodshed after the Soviets pulled out, and still have their deep personal grudges—despite the best efforts of Karzai and the US to broker peace (and maintain the fiction of a centralized Afghan state). Baghlan, the scene of today's horrific attack, lies within the domain of regional warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who (as we have noted) has long been in an oft-bloody power struggle with local rivals. We'd like to know where the apparent targets of this blast stood vis-à-vis this conflict. Note that the Taliban explicitly deny responsibility this time, and raise the possibility of Mujahedeen accounts-settling. From Reuters Nov. 6, emphasis added:

Days after a car bomb in the normally (relatively) peaceful northern city of Kirkuk left eight dead in a Kurdish neighborhood (Reuters, Oct. 28), comes this ominous news from AlJazeera Nov. 6:

Kirkuk's Arabs paid to pack up
It is a volatile city, but one that is vital to Iraq's future, and Kirkuk is now facing its toughest test yet. Just weeks before a scheduled referendum on the city's future, Arab residents are being paid to pack up and leave.

A fascinating story from the New York Times Nov. 5. The Vatican seems to be sending an explicit message here about the need to protect Christians in Muslim lands. But note that the situation for Iraq's Christians has dramatically worsened under the US occupation. And it is very refreshing that Emmanuel III Delly refuses to cast collective guilt on his Muslim neighbors, and explicitly repudiates the logic of sectarian cleansing:

2,000-Year-Old Christian Community in Iraq Gains a Spiritual First in Baghdad
BAGHDAD — There is neither a cross nor a sign on the heavy metal gate to indicate that this is the official residence of one of the country’s most prominent Christians, the first in Iraq in modern times to be elevated to cardinal by the Roman Catholic Church.

The New York Times reports Nov. 5 on an initiative to win justice for Jews who fled Arab countries after 1948, and their descendants. But the first paragraph makes nearly explicitly clear that they are being exploited as bargaining chips against the claims of Palestinian refugees:

Within days of the 9-11 attacks, media speculation started that al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear weapons. Now it is starting to look like US actions could make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. Washington imposed sanctions on both Pakistan and India after their 1998 nuclear tests. Those sanctions were both lifted immediately after 9-11 as the US prepared for war in the region. US military aid to Pakistan continues—despite the regime's complicity in nuclear proliferation to rogue states, and despite the fact that Musharraf threatened to use nuclear weapons in both the 2002 crisis with India and the Kargil crisis of 1999 (when he was just armed forces chief—his coup came in the immediate aftermath of Kargil). Using Pakistan as a proxy state in the GWOT has only inflamed jihadist sentiment there, providing a convenient justification for Musharraf to seize still greater power—which will further inflame the jihadis in a vicious cycle. And it's all rendered even more ironic by the incestuous relationship between Musharraf's own security forces and the jihadis. It isn't difficult to see where all this is leading. On Oct. 29—before Musharraf's auto-golpe—Newsweek found, with good reason, that Pakistan is the "most dangerous" country on earth:

From Newsday, Nov. 3:

Mom accidentally hits son with SUV
The mother of a 4-year-old Central Islip boy accidentally struck her son with her SUV Friday afternoon when she backed up out of the family driveway, police said.

Peru is sending a force of 100 national police to what has been declared a zona cocalera (coca-growing zone) in Apurímac region to hunt down suspected Shining Path guerrillas who killed a police commander and wounded an officer in a grenade attack there Nov. 2. Some 30 presumed Senderistas attacked the district police station in Ocobamba, Chincheros province, in what authorities say was an attempt to recover 82 kilos of cocaine which had been confiscated by police some 15 days earlier. Said Interior Minister Luis Alva: "Narcoterrorists always try to show force like this. It's an area where there are terrorists and drugs traffickers, and this happened because, in the last few days, we've been working in the area and seizing drugs." Several days before the attack, the government said it feared powerful Mexican drug syndicates, including the Sinaloa Cartel, were starting to operate in Peru. (Living in Peru, Reuters, Nov. 2)