Summaries here and here and here and also here.

Suffer the children.

The bomb went off just outside the school as the IPS correspondent stood speaking to children and teachers within.

The headmaster smiled. “You will hear many of these every day if you stay here another day or two,” he said. “The resistance will not stop until the last American leaves.”

The children too took no notice of the blast, which shook the doors and windows of the half-destroyed school in this town near Fallujah, 70km west of Baghdad.

The children are growing up in occupied Iraq — and they are resisting it.

[snip]

“How can we teach them forgiveness when they see Americans killing their family members every day,” the teacher in the classroom who gave her name as Shyamaa told IPS. “Words cannot cover the stream of blood and these signs of destruction, and words cannot hide the daily raids they see.” Article

Note that this comes from the newly ensconced head of the British army.

- The head of Britain’s army said the presence of British troops in Iraq was exacerbating the security situation on the ground and they should be withdrawn soon, according to a British newspaper.

General Sir Richard Dannatt also said in an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper that Britain’s Iraq venture was aggravating the security threat elsewhere in the world.

In unusually blunt comments for a serving senior officer, Dannatt told the Friday edition of the newspaper that the troops should “get … out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems”. Article

So how’s that training going?

The Bush administration plans to shut down a highly successful Iraqi police academy in Jordan even as security in Iraq worsens, the Daily News has learned.

The Jordan International Police Training Center near Amman will stop training Iraqi police recruits this year, having already graduated 40,000 cops from its eight-week course since 2004, U.S. officials confirmed.

[snip]

…State Department officials who run the Pentagon-funded academy said Iraqi authorities want all training shifted to eight regional academies in Iraq, including Baghdad Police College - which has to be rebuilt because of bungled construction.

“Moving the functions of this facility to Iraq will add to the cost - especially for security - and subtract from these vital recruitment and training missions,” Leahy said.

The Iraqi Police - apart from the paramilitary National Police linked to death squads - are routinely attacked at recruiting centers and stations. By some estimates, 12,000 of the 130,000-man force have been killed or wounded or have quit or been fired.

“They’re under siege,” said one U.S. official. “Their main focus is their own security.” Article

McLuhan revamped: The media mutates the message.

American news outlets tend to be rather cavalier about the suffering at the other end of the Pentagon’s missiles, bombs and bullets. And there’s a strong tendency to brand documented concerns as unfounded speculation – a media reflex that suits war-crazed presidents just fine. Article

Editorial du jour:

At his news conference Wednesday, President Bush expressed not once but three times his view that if the U.S. does not defeat the terrorists “over there” in Iraq, it will have to fight them here in the United States. This crude formulation is tiresome and insulting to Americans’ intelligence.

“I firmly believe that the American people understand that this is different from other wars because in this war, if we were to leave early, before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here,” Bush said. This conjures up improbable images of Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents stuffing bomb-making manuals into their backpacks and booking flights to LAX while U.S. troops march out of Baghdad.

There are good reasons not to withdraw from Iraq hastily. But Bush’s assertion about a good offense being the best defense undermines his own credibility.

[snip]

Bush is right to say that Al Qaeda would crow at an American “defeat” in Iraq. Indeed, anti-American elements around the world would surely take great satisfaction in any U.S. humiliation. But his equation of withdrawal with defeat, of leaving the Iraqis to manage their own affairs with handing a victory to terrorists, is simplistic in the extreme. Sooner or later, the U.S. military will leave Iraq. A sober and thoughtful national debate could illuminate how best to accomplish that.

The deliberate repetition of a shameless canard just before an election does not contribute to this thoughtful debate. Indeed, Bush’s formulation could lead to a false sense of complacency. Fighting the terrorists “over there” does not necessarily make us safer “over here.” This is not to say that there is no relation at all between Iraq’s fate and the threat of terrorism to the U.S. But the relationship is not as simplistic as the president describes it. Pretending these two issues are part of the same problem trivializes them both. Article