NAJAF: Iman Ali Mosque Damaged

Reuters
carries the following report on the shelling of this holy shrine:

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) -
''The Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, the holiest Shi'ite site in Iraq (news - web sites), was damaged on Tuesday by rockets or mortars, witnesses said -- a development likely to spark outrage among Iraq's Shi'ite majority.

One of the entrances to the shrine was damaged in the attack. It was not clear who fired the missiles. U.S. forces have been fighting Shi'ite militiamen loyal to rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Najaf and other Shi'ite areas.''

more below...

''Ahmad Shebani, Sadr's representative at the shrine, said five or six missiles had hit the building. There was no immediate comment from U.S. troops.

Witnesses said three people had been wounded in the attack, none seriously.

Sadr visited the shrine after the attack to personally inspect the damage, as crowds of supporters chanted.

Earlier this month, the vast gilded dome of the shrine was damaged in fighting. The U.S. military and Sadr's militiamen blamed each other for causing the damage.''
. . . . . . . . . . . . .

And just because I landed on it, this editorial from the lost and lamented Anthony Lewis (formerly of the NYT, tho I notice this is in the LAT... ) on Rumsfeld's Long List of Failures:

By the normal standards of business or government, Donald Rumsfeld should long since have resigned or been fired as secretary of Defense.

The reason is not ideology, nor is it his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, horrifying though that may be. The reason is incompetence. His record in Iraq over the last 13 months is the most dramatically incompetent performance by a public official in recent American history.

United States forces entered Baghdad in triumph in April 2003. Today they cannot prevent an assassination on the doorstep of occupation headquarters. Insecurity roils the country. Six weeks before some uncertain form of sovereignty is to be turned over to an Iraqi regime, no one knows what that regime will be.
...
It was Rumsfeld who thought it was wise to violate the third Geneva Convention, to which this country is a signatory, and unilaterally label all the prisoners held at Guantanamo as "unlawful combatants" -- without the right to the hearings required by the convention.

The policy brought condemnation around the world; a top British justice, Lord Steyn, said Guantanamo was a "legal black hole." Rumsfeld dismissed complaints about the treatment of prisoners as "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation."
...
And now, Abu Ghraib, according to Seymour Hersh in the last issue of the New Yorker, can be traced directly back to Rumsfeld.

The results of this parade of incompetence are terrible for the United States. Countries long friendly to us are seething with anti-American feelings. And it is hard to see any way out of the mess Rumsfeld has created in Iraq. We are now reduced to pleading for help from a United Nations we so recently scorned. [snip]

Slowly we have learned, as bad as it is on any dawn, wait for evening, if we escaped by that evening, wait for it to be dawn again.  Looking ahead, across the months, well, it is a scary prospect.

MSNBC's Bianca Solarz, just now, begins to cover the scene in Najaf and the car bombing in Baghdad, announce
"it is shaping up to be another violent day in Iraq".  Exactly.