Page 6
April 5, 2017
New Prices
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April 1, 2017
O PINION
Martin
Cleaning
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CARPET CLEANING
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Pre-Spray Traffic Areas
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1 Cleaning Area (only)
$50.00
Includes Pre-Spray Traffic Area
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Stairs (12-16 stairs - With
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Area/Oriental Rugs:
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Area/Oriental Rugs (Wool) :
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(Requiring Extensive Pre-Spraying)
Are You Watching Iraq? You Should Be
U.S. may be killing
more civilians than
the Russians
P eter C erto
In a desolated patch
of Mosul, Iraq, people
are still digging through
the rubble. Rescuers
wear masks to cover the
stench, while anxious
family members grow
desperate about missing loved ones.
The full story of what happened in the
al-Jidideh neighborhood isn’t yet clear,
but the toll is unmistakable. A New York
Times journalist reported stumbling across
charred human limbs, still covered in
clothing, while a man stood nearby hold-
ing a sign with 27 names — extended fam-
ily members either missing or dead.
All told, 200 or more civilians may be
dead there following a U.S. airstrike on
the densely populated neighborhood. The
military has acknowledged the strike, but
says it’s still investigating the deaths. If
the allegations are true, this was by far our
deadliest attack on innocents in decades.
The carnage comes amid a push by the
U.S. and its Iraqi allies to reclaim Mosul,
Iraq’s second most populous city, from the
Islamic State (or ISIS).
That’s making life terrifying for the
city’s residents, who’ve endured years of
by
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(503) 281-3949
depredations from ISIS only to fall under
U.S. bombs — and to face possible hu-
man rights abuses from Iraqi soldiers they
don’t trust. “Now it feels like the coalition
is killing more people than ISIS,” one res-
ident told the UK’s Telegraph newspaper.
Unfortunately, that may not be so far
from the truth. AirWars, which tracks ci-
vilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, count-
ed over 1,300 reports of civilian deaths
from coalition airstrikes in March alone.
That’s about triple the count from Febru-
ary.
In fact, AirWars estimates, more U.S.
coalition strikes are now causing civilian
casualties than strikes by Russia, which
was loudly (and appropriately) accused
of war crimes for its bombing of Aleppo,
Syria last year.
Is this the simple result of the fight
heating up in Mosul? Not quite.
In the same month, at least 30 civilians
were reported killed by a U.S. airstrike
outside Raqqa, Syria — where the real
battle with ISIS hasn’t even begun yet —
and up to 50 more may have died when
the U.S. bombed a mosque in Aleppo.
Instead, some observers suspect the
Trump administration is relaxing Obama-
era rules designed to limit civilian casu-
alties in war zones. They deny this, but
the Times reports that field commanders
appear to be exercising more latitude to
launch strikes in civilian-heavy areas than
before.
During the campaign, Trump himself
famously promised to “bomb the s—” out
of ISIS. That sounds extreme, and it is.
But it’s only a few steps beyond the
Obama administration’s approach of
gradually expanding our air wars out-
side the public eye. Trump’s just taking
it to another level by putting virtually all
key foreign policy decisions in military
hands, while gutting resources for diplo-
macy and humanitarian aid.
The human costs of this will be enor-
mous. The political costs will be, too.
The U.S. has been “bombing the s—”
out of Iraq for decades now, which has
consistently created more terrorists than
it’s killed. Extremists are flourishing in
Iraq. The same can’t be said for the ci-
vilians now burying their dead in Mosul.
Of course, ISIS is guilty of its own
innumerable atrocities. But the war-
torn sectarian politics that gave rise to
the group are a direct result of this mil-
itary-first foreign policy. There’s simply
no reason to believe that reducing Iraq’s
cities to rubble will give way to less ex-
tremism in their ashes.
Iraqis will still have to wrest their coun-
try back from ISIS. But if it’s ever going
to get back on its feet, what the country
truly needs is a political solution. That’s
going to require a surge of aid, diploma-
cy, and honest brokering — all of which
are in short supply now.
Peter Certo is the editorial manager of
the Institute for Policy Studies and the ed-
itor of OtherWords.org.