Al Jaafari asks troops to act more civilized

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari said that coalition forces need to act more civilized, and shoot at tires, not passengers, when vehicles fail to yield to hand signals at checkpoints.

With checkpoints being a frequent target of insurgents, the US military is, understandably, reluctant to comply, but immobilizing a vehicle shouldn't always require shooting into a car's windshield. From the very beginning of the occupation, the actions of at least some soldiers has tended to alienate innocent Iraqis more than earned their support.

The uncivilized behavior of American troops is just part of the reason why former CIA Al Qaeda specialist Larry Johnson said:

You now in Iraq have a recruiting ground in which jihadists, people who previously were not willing to go out and embrace the vision of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, are now aligning themselves with elements that have declared allegiance to him. And in the course of that, they're learning how to build bombs. They're learning how to conduct military operations.

Al Jaafari's comments were reported by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro for NPR.

I have an earlier post on this topic featuring tragic photos of a family that was shot at by American troops, killing the parents in the vehicle.

Meanwhile, (via YatPundit) the London Times reported Iyad Allawi saying that Iraq is already descending into civil war thanks to the Bush administration's lack of a clearly-defined, constructive plan for peace and reconstruction:

Former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.

“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.

In an interview with The Sunday Times last week as he visited Amman, the Jordanian capital, he said: “The policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.”