Blood On The Sky-blue Flag

Asia Times has some chilling analysis of yesterday's bombing:

The bombing of the United Nations headquarters, a bloody attack on the "soldiers of peace" who work under the sky-blue flag, is the culmination of a coherent sequence: sabotage of water pipelines, sabotage of oil pipelines, and now sabotage of humanitarian aid. Water, oil and the UN are the targets in a perverse scorched-earth policy designed to prevent any possibility of normalization in Iraq. In the minds of the attackers, as the American occupying force has organized and installed a durable chaos, now it's the time to tell the Americans: you don't, and you can't, control anything.

More than an attack on the representatives of the international community as a whole, the bombing was a stark warning to any nation that might even contemplate sending peacekeepers to Iraq, and thus internationalize the American occupation. And compounding the perverse logic, the UN was all but used as a means to an end: once again, to hurt the American occupation force.

The cold, clinical, almost simultaneous headlines, in their eerie resemblance, tell the whole story. "Truck blast at UN's Iraq HQ kills 20". "Suicide blast kills 18 on Jerusalem bus". There's no denying that the majority of the Arab world will read this as Iraq-Palestine, the same struggle: to get Israel out of occupied Palestine, to get America out of occupied Iraq, to get the West out of occupied Muslim land.

It's well worth reading the entire article. They have a few others on the attack--good reads as well.

ntodd  ¶ 9:55 AM