It's still hard to find comprehensive news about what is happening right now in Iraq, but here's another piece of the puzzle.

US helicopters fire on Sadr supporters in Baghdad
April 5, 2004 - 11:44PM

US Apache helicopters sprayed fire on the private army of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr during fierce battles today in the western Baghdad district of Al-Showla, witnesses and an AFP correspondent said.

"Two Apaches opened fire on armed members of the Mehdi Army," said Showla resident Abbas Amid.

The fighting erupted when five trucks of US soldiers and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) tried to enter the district and were attacked by Sadr supporters, Amid said.

Coming under fire, the ICDC, a paramilitary force trained by the Americans, turned on the US soldiers and started to shoot at them, according to Amid.

The soldiers fled their vehicles and headed for cover and then began to battle both the Mehdi Army and the ICDC members, he said. Their vehicles were set ablaze.

Heavy gunfire rattled the district and columns of black smoke billowed into the sky.

Burning tyres and tree trunks were used to barricade the neighbourhood, where young men toting clubs and carrying light weapons patrolled the streets.

But 16 US Humvees all-terrain vehicles, backed by two tanks, rolled into Showla, the AFP correspondent said.

I got this from Mark A. R. Kleiman, who says (among other things):

As far as I can tell, there's only one source for this so far, a story from Agence France Press printed in the Sydney Morning Herald. (I picked it up from Atrios, who had it from Billmon,who had it from Unfair Witness.) Can anyone confirm or disconfirm?

As I write this, about eight American soldiers have died in Iraq, and there is more violence in Shia areas than in the Sunni triangle.

I haven't been able to find any information that I haven't seen in the mainstream media. I did find a new blog while searching, whose outstanding feature is a list of Iraqi blogs. Gives me somewhere new to look.

Iraq Blog Count.

Hoping for better news tomorrow. Good luck digging it out before I do.

Comments from Japanese Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki that Japan had grown resilient to the stronger yen gave the currency another boost in the European session, lifting it to 103.45 yen to the dollar -- its highest since April 2000.

This is important because people have been talking about about 105 yen to the dollar as a resistance level for some time. As Kash notes on The Angry Bear:

Such rumors have been floating around for over a week now, but the fact that they persist and seem to be gaining credibility may be significant. The telltale sign will be if they allow the yen to fall below about 105 yen/dollar, since that seems to have been where they've dug their heels in up to now

and

The drop in the yen/dollar exchange rate below 105 would have a minimal impact on the US economy, at least this year. However, given that Treasury data shows that Japan has recently been buying a net of $20-25bn in US government bonds per month, if Japan were to stop buying US treasuries there could be an effect on long-term interest rates. Exactly how much long-term rates will rise is the $64,000 question.

Note though that a crash instead of a decline could result if people start deciding the dollar is not a good long term investment. That would have immediate consequences.

I haven't been able to find any trace of this anywhere but Al Jazeera.net, so take it for what it's worth. If it's true, it is thought provoking on several counts. Incitement to violence is not considered part of the right to free speech in the United States, so that it is perfectly constitutional to arrest someone trying to get a crowd to riot. I've never heard of that being applied to newspaper coverage in the United States rather than a man trying to get a crowd of people right in front of him to start a riot though. And whenever we hear about an authoritarian regime closing down a newspaper by force we never pause to ask if there was a good reason for it - we always assume lies could have and should have been contradicted by truth. That is the crux of the problem - if the people who read this newspaper believe it, and disbelieve everything Bremmer says regardless, that may be impossible. Closing down this source of news doesn't make them trust news from the occupation authority any more though, so there is another difficulty for Bremmer.

Why haven't I found this in American media yet? Could be time zone difference or something innocuous. Maybe I looked in the wrong places.

Followers of Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr flocked to the offices of his newspaper on Sunday after US-led occupation forces shut down the daily, accusing it of inciting "violence".


They were responding to a call for an open-ended sit-in outside al-Hawza al-Natiqa buildings on al-Hurriyah square in southern Baghdad to protest against the action on the daily.

"No to occupation," shouted the crowd, as dozens of unarmed al-Sadr supporters, wearing black and deployed to maintain security, watched a group burn a US flag.

Al-Sadr's spokesman, Mahmud Sudani, said that dozens of US troops came to the premises and shut the doors with chains and locks before issuing a written order by occupation administrator Paul Bremer for the closure of the newspaper.

The order accused the paper of having "published articles that prove an intention to disturb general security and incite violence against the coalition and its employees."

It ordered a 60-day shut down of al-Hawza from the day the letter was dated. However, the order gave no date.

Rarely do people think that government programs that benefit them are welfare or pork. Here is an exception. We need more hard thinking like this - hard not because it's complicated, but because it requires willpower and self examination. The logic itself is obvious.

In 1980 I built a wonderful beach house. Four bedrooms -- every room with a view of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was an absurd place to build, right on the edge of the ocean. All that stood between my house and ruin was a hundred feet of sand. My father told me: "Don’t do it; it’s too risky. No one should build so close to an ocean."

But I built anyway.

Why? As my eager-for-the-business architect said, "Why not? If the ocean destroys your house, the government will pay for a new one."

What? Why would the government do that? Why would it encourage people to build in such risky places? That would be insane.

But the architect was right. If the ocean took my house, Uncle Sam would pay to replace it under the National Flood Insurance Program. Since private insurers weren’t dumb enough to sell cheap insurance to people who built on the edges of oceans or rivers, Congress decided the government should step in and do it. So if the ocean ate what I built, I could rebuild and rebuild again and again -- there was no limit to the number of claims on the same property in the same location -- up to a maximum of $250,000 per house per flood. And you taxpayers would pay.

Well, I'm persuaded by Steven's argument on USS Clueless that after Israel finishes building the wall, or even before, the Arab territories they are withdrawing from are headed towards war. I'm also convinced by his assertion that they know this and are counting on it. The only question is if the civil war will actually make Israel safer or not.

But the most important result for Israel is that it will make Palestinian disunity blatantly obvious and undeniable. When others demand that Israel negotiate, they can respond, "Who should we negotiate with? Who among the Palestinians can actually speak for them all and can deliver on any promises made in negotiations?"

If having a response to those who demand they negotiate would stop terrorism, this argument would make some sense. Since it won't, we are left with the idea that terrorists killing each other off will mean there are fewer to attack everyone else. This is exactly the opposite of what we want for Iraq, where we are trying to prevent civil war at all costs.

Since the wall was placed so as to separate certain centers of terrorist activity from centers of Jewish population, the initial effect was indeed a drop in deaths. Unfortunately, if there are large populations of terrorist sympathizers within the wall, new centers will spring up there. Only if we consider Arabs inside the wall utterly separate from those outside the wall can we claim that a civil are will weaken those outside the wall rendering them less able to cause trouble inside the wall.

Tokyo stocks opened sharply lower Tuesday taking a cue from Wall Street's decline amid terrorism fears. The dollar also traded lower against the Japanese yen.

The Nikkei Stock Average of 225 issues was off 117.68 points, or 1.04 percent, at 11,220.83 points at the open. On Monday, the index lost 100 points, or 0.88 percent.

The dollar was quoted at 106.79 yen on the Tokyo foreign exchange market at 9 a.m. Tuesday, down 0.17 yen from late Monday in Tokyo and slightly below the 106.80 yen it bought in New York later that day.

On the stock market, the benchmark Nikkei opened lower with shares trading lower across the board after U.S. stocks plummeted. Investors grew increasingly worried about terrorism Monday after Israeli troops killed the leader of the Palestinian group Hamas.

It looks like Bush will get his wish. The dollar is falling, making it cheaper for Japanese consumers to buy American goods and more expensive for Amerincans to buy Japanese goods. You have to be careful what you wish for though. When the dollar starts falling, the tendency to think of the dollar as the ultimate safe currency may dissipate. Some commentators seem to avoid the obvious - is the dollar falling as investors begin to sell dollar denominated assets along with their dollars?

There was no soft landing after the tech bubble popped. Can there be after this one? If the dollar is really overvalued, it might be better to think hard about the causes than take the easiest course. Making the dollar go down is a very comfortable economic policy which can be accomplished by spending and cutting taxes sometimes. I hope the short term attractions of these has not been rationalized into economic policy in the months preceeding the election.

So much of what I see at the Washington Times seems wrongheaded. All the more reason to blog a great article when I see it. Credit where credit is due. Many of the people worried about the effect American Christian missionaries will have in Iraq are Iraqi Christians.

BAGHDAD - Missionaries from the United States, determined to spread evangelical Christianity in Iraq, are opening new churches in Baghdad, building congregations drawn from Iraq's ethnic Christian community and in some cases preparing to take the Gospel directly to Muslims themselves.
The campaign makes sense in the United States, where Christian denominations and other religions compete for adherents in a free market of ideas.
But for Iraqi Christians — made up of Assyrians, Chaldeans and a smattering of smaller Catholic and Orthodox denominations, plus some Protestant churches dating back to colonial times — the presence of American evangelists is both unsettling and possibly dangerous.
Iraq's 25 million people are overwhelmingly Muslim and, in Islam, conversion to another religion is forbidden. The penalty is death.
"In America, people are free to be either Christian or Muslim. Here, the family applies Muslim law, and if someone in the family leaves Islam, the family will slaughter them. In America people are free, but here they are not free," said the Rev. Ikram Mehanni, senior pastor of a Presbyterian church in Baghdad.

I've fixed the RSS feed sidebar, since the old feeds were only updating once in a blue moon. I've also done a much better job fitting them into my color scheme than when I first started fooling with Feedster.

Here's the take of a real soldier in Iraq on the Times article I quoted in my previous post. I hope he's completely right, and there have been no new terrorist tactics employed. I'm not convinced this will be the last weekend like this, but we can hope. And difficulties were prediected for the changeover period.

Read the whole thing. The "daisy chain" technique is very basic, and they were doing that from the very beginning--we were running into some of them in May and June. We were running into the 'bait and switch' technique --where they'd put a shell out in plain view hoping you'd stop and bunch up, and then blow a series of hidden IEDs pretty regularly-- by the first week of July.

If the article tells us anything, it's that the new bunch of military officers in Baghdad that provided the source material for this story are probably recent arrivals, and are still going through a discovery mode.

The new units are going to have to go through a steep learning curve, but that shouldn't take too long. It's just going to be a very painful process for a while.