Juan Cole on the Ceaseless Bad News

The whole piece is worth a read. Here's the opening:

Al-Quds al-Arabi: First, the Pentagon was forced to admit that it had in fact used white phosphorus as a weapon (and not just as a smokescreen) in Fallujah, though it insisted that it was used only against combatants, not civilians. (When you attack a civilian city, how could you be sure who was who?)

Then there was more bad news when 8 GIs were killed within 24 hours. They included 5 Marines killed while fighting in al-Ubaidi in western Iraq near the Syrian border. The Marines killed 16 guerrillas in the battle. Also on Wednesday, the US Department of Defense announced that 3 GIs were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad.

In a third wave of bad news, the scandal of the tortured Iraqi prisoners has continued to grow. The Iraqi Islamic Party demanded an international investigation, and also called on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual guide of the Shiites, to condemn the torture. Most of the men who were mistreated and half-starved were Sunni Arabs, and they were in the custody of the Ministry of the Interior, which is dominated by the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Although some Sunni Arabs have some influnce in the ministry, efforts are being made by the Badr Corps Shiite paramilitary of SCIRI to infiltrate the special police brigades run by the ministry of the interior.

The rest is here.