Kurdish Oil Deal Shocks Iraq's Political Leaders
A Norwegian company begins drilling in the north without approval from Baghdad.
By Borzou Daragahi
Times Staff Writer

December 1, 2005

BAGHDAD — A controversial oil exploration deal between Iraq's autonomy-minded Kurds and a Norwegian company got underway this week without the approval of the central government here, raising a potentially explosive issue at a time of heightened ethnic and sectarian tensions.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls a portion of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, last year quietly signed a deal with Norway's DNO to drill for oil near the border city of Zakho. Iraqi and company officials describe the agreement as the first involving new exploration in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Drilling began after a ceremony Tuesday, during which Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdish northern region, vowed "there is no way Kurdistan would accept that the central government will control our resources," according to news agency reports.

In Baghdad, political leaders on Wednesday reacted to the deal with astonishment.

"We need to figure out if this is allowed in the constitution," said Adnan Ali Kadhimi, an advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. "Nobody has mentioned it. It has not come up among the government ministers' council. It has not been on their agenda."

The start of drilling, called "spudding" in the oil business, is sure to be worrisome to Iraq's Sunni Arab minority. They fear a disintegration of Iraq into separate ethnic and religious cantons if regions begin to cut energy deals with foreign companies and governments. Sunnis are concentrated in Iraq's most oil-poor region.

Iraq's neighbors also fear the possibility of Iraqi Kurds using revenue generated by oil wells to fund an independent state that might lead the roughly 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iran and Syria to revolt.

Iraqi legal experts and international oil industry analysts have questioned the deal. Oil industry trade journals had expressed doubts that it would come to fruition.

Iraq's draft constitution, approved in an Oct. 15 national referendum, stipulates that "the federal government with the producing regional and governorate governments shall together formulate" energy policy. However, it also makes ambiguous reference to providing compensation for "damaged regions that were unjustly deprived by the former regime."

Iraq's Kurds have argued that the country's existing oil fields and infrastructure, such as those in the largely Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Khanaqin, should be divvied up by the central government but that future oil discoveries should be controlled by each oil-producing region.

In his speech Tuesday, Barzani, the nephew of Kurdish politician and former guerrilla leader Massoud Barzani, eschewed the language of the law and couched the deal in political terms. He invoked the Kurds' years of deprivation at the hands of the Sunni Arab-dominated government of Saddam Hussein.

"The time has come that instead of suffering, the people of Kurdistan will benefit from the fortunes and resources of their country," he said during the ceremony in the western portion of Kurdish-controlled territory.

The Kurds, who during the last several years of Hussein's rule maintained sovereignty in northern Iraq under the protection of U.S. warplanes, made millions in transit and customs fees as the Baghdad government smuggled oil to Turkey in violation of United Nations sanctions. Since the end of the sanctions, the Kurds have sought ways to make up for that lost income.

The eastern administrative half of the Kurdish region also is rushing to sign energy deals with foreign companies without Baghdad's approval. The government of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, based in the city of Sulaymaniya, has signed an electricity agreement with a Turkish company and explored a possible oil deal with a foreign partnership near the city of Chamchamal, the site of several dormant oil wells.

During months of painstaking constitutional negotiations, Kurds insisted on the authority to cut energy deals without Baghdad's approval. Under the draft charter, the task of determining how oil resources will be allocated is left to the National Assembly that will be elected Dec. 15.

The language in the constitution regarding the power of regions to pen such contracts was a major reason that the vast majority of Sunnis voted against the charter in October.

The announcement of the DNO drilling took many Iraqis by surprise Wednesday.

"This is unprecedented," said Alaa Makki, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab group. "It's like they are an independent country. This is Iraqi oil and should be shared with all the Iraqi partners."

Makki said Kurds were trying to have it both ways, controlling the Iraqi presidency and several powerful ministries in the national government while also trying to lay claim to extra-constitutional powers in the north. Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, is the Iraqi president.

However, Helge Eide, managing director of Oslo-based DNO, said he believed Iraq's new constitution gave the Kurdish north jurisdiction over certain drilling and oil exploration activities.

"That was clearly pointed out by Mr. [Nechirvan] Barzani," said Eide, who attended the Zakho ceremony.

Oil companies have become used to operating in hostile and unstable territories. DNO, founded 25 years ago, is considered an upstart in the oil business, with projects in Yemen, Mozambique and Equatorial Guinea, the site of a coup attempt last year, as well as northern Europe.

Eide said his company was more than willing to work with the government in Baghdad, though it had not yet signed a deal with the capital for oil exploration. In April, the company signed a deal to provide the Iraqi Oil Ministry with training and technology as "the first steps" to being invited by Baghdad, as well as the Irbil-based Kurdish government, for future oil and exploration work.

Iraq, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, holds an estimated 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, mainly in the south, according to Oil & Gas Journal, an industry publication.

That places Iraq among the top five nations in oil reserves. Iraq could contain significantly more undiscovered oil where energy exploration hasn't occurred, an area that stretches across about 90% of the country, the U.S. Energy Department said.

Iraq exports about 2 million barrels of oil a day, according to the International Energy Agency in Paris.

Non-Iraqi Arabs banned from Iraq
The Iraqi government has barred non-Iraqi Arab nationals from entering the country ahead of the parliamentary poll on 15 December.

An interior ministry official said the move was "part of security procedures", according to Reuters news agency.

The ban was reportedly introduced several days ago, and no date for lifting the restriction has been set.

US and Iraqi forces have said they expect increased rebel violence during the elections.

Non-Iraqi Arab militants have been accused of playing a major role in rebels' attacks since the US-led invasion in 2003.

On Thursday, several non-Iraqi Arabs were prevented from boarding a Royal Jordanian flight to Baghdad, said airport officials in Jordan's capital, Amman.

Royal Jordanian and Iraqi Airways are the only two carriers making regular passenger flights in and out of war-torn Iraq.

The companies need clearance from the US-led coalition troops to land in or take off from Baghdad.

Iraq sealed off its airspace and land borders for several days around general elections in January, and also during October's constitutional referendum.
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10 Marines killed in Iraq bombing

7 minutes ago
December 2, 2005, 12:10 pm

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ten U.S. Marines conducting a foot patrol outside the Iraqi city of Falluja were killed in the explosion of an insurgent bomb on Thursday, the U.S. military announced on Friday.

In a statement released in Falluja, the military said another 11 Marines were wounded in the blast caused by an "improvised explosive device" fashioned from several large artillery shells. Seven of those wounded have been able to return to duty, the military said.

The attack is one of the worst single incidents to hit U.S. Marines in the war.

In another deadly incident, 14 Marines died on August 3 south of Haditha in western
Iraq when their Amphibious Assault Vehicle was blown up with a roadside improved explosive device made from three land mines.

The military statement said that Marines "continue to conduct counterinsurgency operations throughout Falluja and surrounding areas to provide a secure environment for the national elections, December 15." Iraqi voters select a new government in those elections.

Excellent thoughtful piece by Ian Lustick. There is also a lurking
issue whether Bush II, and certain members of his administration,
should eventually answer to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for
alleged crimes against Humanity for the tens of thousands of Iraqi
civilians killed by US forces - in spite of the fact that US
participation in the ICC was (effectively) "unsigned" by this
Administration.

Ian Lustick on Iraq

Iraq: Withdraw or stay the course?

Admit mistake, then set an exit date

The end did not justify the ravaging of international norms and legal
principle entailed by our unilateralism.

By Ian S. Lustick

When it comes to Iraq, all questions have easy answers except one: How
do we get out of this mess?
First, answers to the easy questions.
The start of the war. Were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
poised to strike us in the next decade? No. Were the inspectors doing
their job? Yes. Were Saddam and al-Qaeda in cahoots? No. Why did we
invade? Post-9/11 fears were exploited by a God-struck President and a
neocon cabal on the warpath toward Baghdad long before Osama bin Laden
became a household word.
The results of the war. Did our government have any idea what it would
do with the country once Baghdad fell? No. Are Americans safer for
having invaded? No. Are there more Muslim terrorists in the world ready
and able to kill Americans than there would have been had we not
invaded? Yes. Are Iraqis better off now than they would have been after
four more years of a decrepit Saddam regime? Not if measured in
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties.
The future. Where is Iraq headed? Toward civil war and breakup. What
is our strategy for winning? None. What will our role be if we do not
leave? Patrolling oil-poor and insurgent-rich Sunnistan. Who will gain?
Al-Qaeda (recruits), Kurds (precarious independence), and Iran
(effective domination of Shiastan and its oil fields).
Now the hard question: How do we get out of this slaughterhouse
without turning it into an even bigger catastrophe?
Neither Republicans nor Democrats tell the truth. Republicans postpone
their day of reckoning with stiff upper lips and patriotic happy talk.
Though some have now started declaring that the emperor has no exit
strategy, most Democrats can't live down their failure to stand up when
the intelligence was cooked and the war launched. For leading
Democrats, sniping from the sidelines has been the limit of their
contribution.
Here is the answer to the hard question. The president - and it will
not be George W. Bush - must declare that Americawas wrong to have
invaded Iraqand apologize for that immense misjudgment. Despite all
Saddam's crimes, the end did not justify the ravaging of international
norms and legal principles entailed by our unilateralism. Our soldiers
(he should say) died in an unnecessary war, but at least their deaths
will not doom thousands more of their comrades. Let their sacrifice (he
should continue) also be the salvation of thousands more in the wars of
arrogance that will be prevented by the memory of Iraq.
The president should then note that no Iraqi regime emerging under
U.S.auspices could survive an American departure. Yet a sudden
withdrawal of American troops could produce an even larger calamity,
dooming those with the courage to pursue a democratic alternative to
Baathist dictatorship, and exposing us to an Iraq10 times more
dangerous than Afghanistan.
Therefore, the president should declare, the United States is ready to
put the hundreds of billions of dollars it would otherwise be spending
on war in Iraq into a fund to be managed by international bodies ready
to assemble and deploy a massive military force capable of assuming
responsibility for security operations and a civilian development and
reconstruction authority to assist Iraqis in rebuilding their country.
These bodies could include the United Nations, the European Union,
NATO, the Arab League. Should those bodies call on the United Statesto
contribute forces, Washingtonwould respond affirmatively, including
agreement to place those forces, for stipulated purposes, under the
command of non-Americans.
As part of its renewed commitment to multilateralism in the search for
a peaceful, free, and secure Middle East the president should also
announce Washington's readiness to move decisively, with its ally
Israel, toward a just and permanent solution to the Palestinian problem.
Following his speech at the United Nations, the president would meet
privately with the leaders of a dozen crucial countries, indicating to
them that to change the balance of political expectations in Iraqand
help legitimize the newly forming democracy there, the United
Stateswould soon announce a timetable for the withdrawal of American
forces. This plan would be drawn up in consultation with our allies and
with those bodies working to create a new international framework for
achieving a transition in Iraqtoward a more peaceful future, whether as
one nation, as more than one, or as multiple trusteeships. The United
Stateswould coordinate its withdrawal to facilitate the transfer of
security responsibilities to properly vested international authorities
while offering opportunities to Iraqis seeking political asylum to
emigrate to the United Statesor to other countries.
This answer to the hard question is tough to swallow and difficult to
implement, and certainly will not be implemented by our current
president. True, this administration's irresponsibility knows no
bounds. It may be as ruthless in implementing a politically expedient
evacuation of Iraqas it was in mounting an ideologically driven
invasion. But to live up to our commitments and protect ourselves
against the consequences of anarchy in Iraq, something like the policy
described here is the answer, indeed the only answer, to those who ask
when American troops can come home.

Ian Lustick (ilustick@sas.upenn.edu) is a professor of political
science at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Insurgencies Are Winning
Robert Dreyfuss
December 02, 2005


Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached at his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

There are now two resistance movements that are winning. The first, of course, is the one in Iraq, which is gaining in its war against the U.S. occupation. And the second is the resistance movement inside the Democratic party, which is increasingly vocal in its demand for the United States to get out of Iraq.

Next week, the entire House Democratic caucus will meet in closed session with one item on the table: Iraq. Don’t expect the Democrats to come up with a unified position: Donkeys will fly before that happens. But to say that the meeting is crucial is an understatement, and it is likely to mark that start of a year-long battle that will pit the party’s progressives, now joined by Rep. John Murtha, against both nattering nabobs like Hillary Clinton and the ever-warlike Liebermansheviks.

According to a source on Capitol Hill, there isn’t a clear agenda for next week’s meeting, but it is a hopeful sign that Democrats might be finally be getting ready to speak clearly on Iraq. It’s unlikely, they say, that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is now supporting Murtha’s courageous call for a six-month withdrawal timetable, will try to force a unified Democratic stand. But it’s guaranteed to be a lively discussion, one in which the various species of stay-the-course and sorta-stay-the-course Dems will be on the defensive. (Important historical note: By a majority of 126-81, House Democrats voted against the war in 2002, according to Roll Call , which first reported the meeting of the caucus next week.)

The caucus meeting itself was directly triggered by Murtha’s bombshell, which thrilled progressives and anti-war activists. It has given new momentum to the push by Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Neil Abercrombie, who’ve introduced a resolution that calls on the Bush administration to start withdrawing troops no later than next Halloween, and it has reenergized the House’s Out Of Iraq caucus. Abercrombie told me the organizers of the so-called Jones-Abercrombie resolution (the Jones being Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, the Republican version of Murtha) are willing to substitute Murtha’s far stronger, out-in-six-months resolution for theirs. And he said that they will begin organizing for a discharge petition to force a vote on it. Since such a petition requires a majority of the House, there’s no chance it will happen, but it provides the anti-war House Dems with a good organizing tool.

Naturally, the Liebermansheviks are in high dudgeon, warning that if the party decides to align itself with the vast majority of American voters, it will be a mistake. In today’s Washington Post , Marshall Wittman of the Democratic Leadership Council invokes the terrifying name of Rove the Mighty to scare the party away from doing the right thing. "If Karl Rove was writing the timing of this, he wouldn't have written it any differently, with the president of the United States expressing resolve and the Democratic leader offering surrender. For Republicans, this is manna from heaven,” says Wittman. Why, exactly, Democrats ought to take advice from a former Christian Coalition leader who worked for uber-hawk John McCain isn’t exactly clear—never mind the fact that Rove may soon be indicted for lying or leaking state secrets in defense of the war. (The Washington Times and Rev. Moon are smiling, too, running a headline today that reads: “Democratic split on war thrills GOP.” It quotes the spokesman for the Republican National Committee saying Pelosi et al. have adopted a “defeatist position of retreat” in Iraq.)

It isn’t often in politics that doing the right thing coincides with doing the thing that is politically popular. As I wrote last week in Rolling Stone , there are three elements to a new policy for Iraq: First, set a date for withdrawal; second, start negotiating with enemy, that is, with the non-Zarqawi resistance; and third, internationalize the effort. That latter step would involve an international mediator, the United Nations and the Arab League. It has the added, and comforting, benefit of making President Bush look like the weak, flailing, strategy-less executive that he is.

From a moral standpoint, packing up and leaving Iraq is the right thing. The war in Iraq has become a moral blot on America’s soul. U.S. troops in Iraq are dying to defend a Shiite theocracy allied to Iran that operates death squads, tortures prisoners with electric drills and fosters violent sectarianism. Meanwhile, in support of that anti-democratic gang, our forces are killing thousands of oppositionists to no useful result. And the war is being led by Bush administration officials who lied to start the war, who support torture of our enemies in secret prisons and who seem obsessed with what they see as a titanic struggle against an imaginary Evil Caliphate.

From a political standpoint, too, getting out of Iraq in 2006 is a winner. Since last summer, poll after poll has shown that something like two-thirds of Americans now believe that the war in Iraq wasn't worth fighting, and more than half say that the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. More and more GOPers are having doubts about the war, and the looming election will concentrate their minds wonderfully. That’s what makes it all-important for the Democrats to define themselves by supporting Get the Heck Out. Not because it will cause the Republican caucus to splinter, which it will—why would Republicans want to go into 2006 with the Bush-Cheney war albatross tied to their necks? But because by doing so, they will guarantee that the war in Iraq ends in 2006.

Now, does that mean that the Democratic Party will embrace a Murtha-style stand? Sadly, no. The party has enough Liebermansheviks to guarantee it remains divided. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, that paragon of Middle East expertise, is doing his best to undermine his party’s majority. “I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation's security and credibility,” he chirped. Despite Hoyer, though, the good guys are winning on this one.

Democratic Lawmakers Splinter on Iraq

By Jonathan Weisman

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's embrace Wednesday of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq highlighted the Democratic Party's fissures on war policy, putting the House's top Democrat at odds with her second in command while upsetting a consensus developing in the Senate.

For months now, Democratic leaders have grown increasingly aggressive in their critiques of President Bush's policies in Iraq but have been largely content to keep their own war strategies vague or under wraps. That ended Wednesday when Pelosi (D-Calif.) aggressively endorsed a proposal by Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, leaving only a much smaller rapid-reaction force in the region.

The move caught some in the party by surprise. It threw a wrench into a carefully calibrated Democratic theme emerging in the Senate that called for 2006 to be a "significant year of progress" in Iraq, with Iraqi security forces making measurable progress toward relieving U.S. troops of combat duties. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said last month that "it's time to take the training wheels off the Iraqi government."

What's more, House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) issued a statement Wednesday that was in marked contrast to Pelosi's. "I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation's security and credibility," he said.

Marshall Wittmann, a former Republican political strategist now with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, said Pelosi may have resurrected her party's most deadly liability -- voters' lack of trust in the party on national security.

"If Karl Rove was writing the timing of this, he wouldn't have written it any differently, with the president of the United States expressing resolve and the Democratic leader offering surrender," Wittmann said, referring to Bush's top adviser. "For Republicans, this is manna from heaven."

David Sirota, a Democratic strategist in Montana long critical of the party leadership's timidity, fired back: "It is not surprising that a bunch of insulated elitists in the Washington establishment -- most of whom have never served in uniform -- would stab the Democratic Party in the back and attack the courage of people like Vietnam War hero Jack Murtha and Nancy Pelosi for their stand on Iraq."

For Democrats, Iraq presents a political quandary. Americans have clearly turned against the war, with a growing majority disapproving of the president's handling of the conflict and saying the invasion was not worth the costs. What they want done is far less clear.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech yesterday that military leaders "have not articulated well enough" to the American public what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the case of Iraq, he said, top U.S. officers "made a conscious decision" with the formal transfer of sovereignty in June 2004 to "step back a little bit in the press" and let the new Baghdad government "speak for itself publicly."

"But as a result of stepping back," Pace said, "I think we may have stepped back a little too far inside our own country with regard to explaining to our own people what we were doing."

House Republican leaders, meanwhile, are touting a bipartisan poll in November by RT Strategies that found half of registered voters support a withdrawal of troops only when the nation's goals are met, compared with 15 percent who want an immediate withdrawal and 29 percent who want a specific, public timetable for withdrawal. But a Pew Research Center poll in October found that 52 percent favored a withdrawal timetable, while 43 percent opposed one. An additional 1 percent said that U.S. troops should get out now.

Some Democrats continued yesterday to finesse their position. At a White House appearance after an event honoring civil rights leader Rosa Parks, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said: "If you just continue along the road we're going now without a more concrete transfer of responsibility -- a target schedule by which you begin to turn over provinces, by which you specifically begin to shift the responsibility -- I think a lot of people fear that it's going to be more of the same."

He added: "I'm not asking even for the specific timetable of withdrawal. I'm asking for a specific timetable of transfer of authority."

Pelosi hesitated for nearly two weeks before endorsing Murtha's call for the withdrawal of 160,000 U.S. troops, while she and her aides assessed the political fallout from his action. "What he has said has great wisdom," Pelosi said of her colleague on Wednesday. "While the president is digging a hole, Mr. Murtha is speaking from the light of day about the realities in Iraq, and so yes, I am supporting Mr. Murtha's proposal."

Her pronouncement Wednesday, more than anything, was proof that "the frustrations of the activist wing of the Democratic Party have boiled over," said a prominent Democratic pollster, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering clients.

Aides to Pelosi said yesterday that they are confident she and Murtha speak for a broader group. Since Murtha announced his position, he has received 14,000 e-mails, faxes and phone calls, 80 percent in support, aides said. Over Thanksgiving week, Murtha received a standing ovation in a Dallas Starbucks.

Staff writer Bradley Graham contributed to this report.


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10 Marines Killed in Fallujah Bombing

By Jonathan Finer

BAGHDAD, Dec. 2 -- Ten U.S. Marines died Thursday when a homemade bomb blasted their foot patrol outside Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. military reported Friday.

Eleven other Marines were wounded by the explosive, which was fashioned from several large artillery shells, the military said. Seven of the injured have returned to duty.

It was the deadliest bomb attack on U.S. forces since Aug. 4, when 14 Marines were killed by a roadside bomb that ripped through their armored personnel carrier in the western city of Haditha.

A year ago last month, U.S. and Iraqi troops leveled much of Fallujah, which had become Iraq's main insurgent stronghold, in the largest offensive waged since the 2003 invasion. They established a strict cordon around the city, with four main entry points complete with metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs.

Since the assault, military commanders and local politicians there said it had become one of the safest and most stable cities in Anbar province, which stretches across the vast desert from just west of Baghdad to the Syrian border. Anbar is the heartland of the country's Sunni Arab-led insurgency.

But while large-scale attacks have been few in recent months, insurgents have re-established a presence in the city, soldiers interviewed there this week said. The last lethal car bombing was in early summer, but roadside bombs and sniper fire are a constant threat, according to Lt. Patrick Keane, of Aberdeen, N. J., a member of the 8th Marine Regiment, which patrols the city.

Asked how many insurgents were present in Fallujah, John Kael Weston, the U.S. State Department representative in the city, said, "It's hard to say, but there's sympathy for the insurgency. Almost everyone here has the potential to be an insurgent."


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U.S. ex-general calls for Iraq pull out
WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- The U.S. general who used to head the National Security Agency says the only way to stabilize the Middle East is to leave Iraq.

Retired three star Lt. Gen. William Odom, writing for NiemanWatchdog.org, wrote that while President George W. Bush wants to bring democracy and stability to the Middle East, the only way to achieve that goal is for the U.S. armed forces to get out of Iraq now.

Odom, one of the most respected U.S. military analysts and a prominent figure at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, wrote, "We have seen most of our allies stand aside and engage in Schadenfreude over our painful bog-down in Iraq. Winston Churchill's glib observation, 'the only thing worse that having allies is having none,' was once again vindicated.

"There is no chance that our allies will join us in Iraq," he wrote. "... Iraq is the worst place to fight a battle for regional stability. Whose interests were best served by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place? It turns out that Iran and al-Qaida benefited the most, and that continues to be true every day U.S. forces remain there."



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Senior army analysts argue against early withdrawal, but still see 'bleak' road ahead.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1202/dailyUpdate.html

Iraqi journalists condemn US military media tactics 2 hours, 57 minutes ago



Journalists in Iraq say they are shocked by revelations that the US military paid Iraqi newspapers and journalists to run positive articles about US activities in Iraq.

"It is a scandal that the US administration would use methods like these which contradict all principles of the profession and seek to defraud public opinion," well-known Iraqi journalist and political analyst Ahmed Sabri said.

"A newspaper should reflect the reality on the ground, not sponsored information aimed at improving the image of the The United States, which in reality has failed in Iraq," Sabri added.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that dozens of stories written by "information operations" soldiers were secretly placed with media outlets in Iraq through a defense contractor to mask the military's involvement.

The report relied largely on leaks from members of the military establishment who say they fear that US attempts to influence the Iraqi media may actually be subverting a free press.

As recently as Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed to the free press in Iraq as evidence of the progress made in Iraq.

Knight-Ridder newspapers on Thursday reported that the military also was paying Iraqi reporters up to 200 dollars a month to write sympathetic stories.

It said the payments were made to members of the Baghdad Press Club, an organization set up by US army officers more than a year ago.

An Iraqi female journalist, who preferred to remain anonymous, told AFP about working for the Baghdad Press Club, which is headquartered is at the airport, for three months before quitting.

"We were called to go out with them on various educational, reconstruction, health or aid projects and asked to write positive articles about them in exchange for 50 dollars," she recalled.

"After three months, I left. The whole thing was ridiculous and against the ethics of journalists," she said, recalling a US-sponsored trip to Sadr City where people called her a traitor and threw rocks at her.

Another Iraqi journalist in Baghdad who also preferred not to be named was more philosophical about the entire affair.

"It's true that it's fraud, but a professional journalist shouldn't fall into such a trap," he said.

Major General Rick Lynch, the US military spokesman in Iraq, cast the matter as an effort to counter lies spread by Al-Qaeda.

"We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact not based on fiction," he said.

Military officials would not comment on whether newspapers and journalists were paid to plant the articles.

Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, head of the US military's press department in Baghdad, cited operational secrecy in withholding information about the program.

Johnson explained that the Iraqi press has traveled a long hard road from total control under ousted president Saddam Hussein to the current period characterized by a lethal insurgency.

"There's outright intimidation and many murders and other ways of manipulating the press, so it was felt operationally that it was necessary to make sure the facts were out," he said.

The White House announced on Wednesday that it was "very concerned" about the report.



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Odom: Want stability in the Middle East? Get out of Iraq!
COMMENTARY | November 11, 2005 In his last piece for NiemanWatchdog.org, retired Gen. William Odom argued that all the terrible things the Bush administration says would happen if we pulled our troops out of Iraq are happening already. In a new postscript, Odom writes that the converse is true as well: Bush says he wants to bring democracy and stability to the greater Middle East -- but in fact the only way to achieve that goal is to get out of Iraq now.

By William E. Odom

As I have watched the reactions to my earlier piece on NiemanWatchdog.org, "What’s wrong with cutting and running?”, I recognize that one critical point does not come through to many readers. The problem may stem from the words "cut and run" in the title. In the minds of some, that seems to imply leaving the region for good. My argument is fundamentally different.

I believe that stabilizing the region from the Eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan is very much an American interest, one we share with all our allies as well as with several other countries, especially, China, Russia, and India.

The ‘Global Balkans’

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has called this region the "global Balkans," a name that recalls the role of the European Balkans during two or three decades leading up to the outbreak of World War I. By themselves the Balkan countries were not all that important. Yet several great powers, especially Russia and Austria, were jockeying for strategic advantages there as they anticipated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and competition for control of the straits leading from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. Britain and France wanted neither Russia nor Austria to dominate; and Germany, although uninterested in the Balkans, was allied to Austria. From a strategic viewpoint, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 was unimportant, but it set in motion actions that soon brought all of the major powers in Europe to war. Four empires collapsed, and the doors were opened to the Communists in Russia and the Nazis in Germany as a result. Brzezinski's point today is that the Middle East and Southwest Asia have precisely that kind of potential for catalyzing wars among the major powers of the world today, although nothing in the region objectively merits such wars.

Thus Brzezinski calls for the United States to lead the states of Europe plus Russia, Japan, and China in a cooperative approach to stabilizing this region so that it cannot spark conflicts among them. As he rightly argues, theask of stabilization is beyond the power of the United States alone. With allies, however, it can manage the challenge.

A Missed Opportunity

After al Qaeda's attacks in the United States, the European members of NATO invoked Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, meaning that they considered the attack on the United States as an attack on them all. Article Five had never been invoked before. Moreover, over 90 countries worldwide joined one or more of five separate coalitions to support the U.S. war against al Qaeda. Seldom has the United States had so much international support. It was a most propitious time, therefore, for dealing with "the Global Balkans" in precisely the way Brzezinski suggested.

Over the next year and a half, however, in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, many neoconservatives, both inside and outside the administration, disparaged NATO and other US allies as unnecessary for "transforming the Middle East." Because the United States is a superpower, they insisted, it could handle this task alone. Accordingly, we witnessed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s team and some officials in the State Department and the White House (especially in the Vice President's office) gratuitously and repeatedly insult the Europeans, dismissing them as irrelevant. The climax of this sustained campaign to discard our allies came in the UN Security Council struggle for a resolution to legitimize the invasion of Iraq in February-March 2003.

>From that time on, we have seen most of our allies stand aside and engage in <i style="">Schadenfreude over our painful bog-down in Iraq. Winston Churchill's glib observation, "the only thing worse that having allies is having none," was once again vindicated.

Iraq as a Dead End Street

Two areas of inquiry follow naturally from this background:

First, how could we induce our allies to join us in Iraq now? Why should they now put troops in Iraq and suffer the pain with us? Could we seriously expect them to do so?

Second, is remaining in Iraq the best strategy for a coalition of major states to stabilize the region? Would a large NATO coalition of forces plus some from India, Japanese, and China enjoy more success?

On the first point, there is no chance that our allies will join us in Iraq. How could the leaders of Germany, France, and other states in Europe convince their publics to support such a course of action? They could not, and their publics would not be wise to agree if their leaders pleaded for them to do so.

And on the second point, Iraq is the worst place to fight a battle for regional stability. Whose interests were best served by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the first place? It turns out that Iran and al Qaeda benefited the most, and that continues to be true every day U.S. forces remain there. A serious review of our regional interests is required. Until that is accomplished and new and compelling aims for managing the region are clarified, continuing the campaign in Iraq makes no sense.

Withdrawal is the Precondition to Progress

Once we recognize these two realities, it becomes clear that U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is the precondition to winning the support of our allies and a few others for a joint approach to the region. Until that has been completed, they will not join such a coalition. And until that has happened, even we in the United States cannot think clearly about what constitutes our interests there, much let gain agreement about common interests for a coalition.

By contrast, any argument for "staying course," or seeking more stability before we withdraw -- or pointing out tragic consequences that withdrawal will cause -- is bound to be wrong, or at least unpersuasive. Putting it bluntly, those who insist on staying in Iraq longer make the consequences of withdrawal more terrible and make it harder to find an alternative strategy for achieving regional stability.

Once the invasion began in March 2003, all of the ensuing unhappy results became inevitable. The invasion of Iraq may well turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history. In any event, the longer we stay, the worse it will be. Until that is understood, we will make no progress with our allies or in devising a promising alternative strategy.

"Staying the course" may make a good sound bite, but it can be disastrous for strategy. Several of Hitler's generals told him that "staying the course" at Stalingrad in 1942 was a strategic mistake, that he should allow the Sixth Army to be withdrawn, saving it to fight defensive actions on reduced frontage against the growing Red Army. He refused, lost the Sixth Army entirely, and left his commanders with fewer forces to defend a wider front. Thus he made the subsequent Soviet offensives westward easier.

To argue, as some do, that we cannot leave Iraq because "we broke it and therefore we own it" is to reason precisely the way Hitler did with his commanders. Of course we broke it! But the Middle East is not a pottery store. It is the site of major military conflict with several different forces that the United States is galvanizing into an alliance against America. To hang on to an untenable position is the height of irresponsibility. Beware of anyone, including the president, who insists that this is "responsible" or "the patriotic" thing to do.

Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. He was Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer. From 1977 to 1981, he was Military Assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Crowd Attacks Allawi In Najaf

By Jonathan Finer and Saad Sarhan

BAGHDAD, Dec. 4 -- A crowd of angry men, some wielding knives, others throwing shoes or bricks, attacked an entourage led by former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf on Sunday, as gunfire echoed in the area. Allawi later described the melee as an "assassination attempt."

Allawi was not hurt, according to Abdulal Wahid Esawi, secretary general of Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party.

A convoy of cars with tinted windows had carried Allawi, a secular Shiite who heads a slate of parties running in the Dec. 15 legislative elections, to Najaf's Imam Ali shrine in the course of a series of campaign stops in the southern city. Dozens of people chanting, "God cursed the Baathists!" descended soon after he left his vehicle, witnesses said.

"After the prayers, a group of about 60 people dressed in black and carrying daggers and pistols started chants against us," Allawi told reporters. "We have seven bullet shells from the incident. One of them lost his gun when he tried to shoot me. We believe that these are hurtful rebels. This will increase our insistence to cleanse the country of them. We warn them that after the elections, we, the people in power, will pursue them toughly."

A onetime ally of ousted president Saddam Hussein, Allawi quit Hussein's Baath Party in the mid-1970s, joining the Iraqi opposition and eventually developing a close relationship with the CIA. But during his tenure as prime minister, he drew criticism from other former opposition leaders for adopting what they considered a conciliatory stance toward ex-Baathists.

Allawi also earned a reputation as a hard-liner on security issues, sending Iraqi forces to support U.S. troops in several battles, including clashes in Najaf with followers of Moqtada Sadr, the outspoken Shiite cleric whose office is near the Imam Ali shrine. Sadr supporters had gathered in Najaf on Sunday to memorialize Sadr's father, a revered cleric who was slain in 1999.

When the crowd turned belligerent, "Allawi's guards started shooting in the air to push people away," said Bahjat Bahashi, 32, who owns a fabric shop next to the shrine. "The police and army were in the area but did not get involved." Bahashi said the guards then put Allawi back in the car, and the convoy left.

The governor of Najaf province, Asaad Abu Gelal, told reporters that Allawi had flown to Najaf with the U.S. military and had not sought official protection. "He entered the city with his own convoy and security," Gelal said.

Allawi, who retains close ties to the U.S. government, is considered a main rival of the Shiite religious coalition that governs Iraq and that is heavily favored in the Dec. 15 elections.

A member of the National Assembly, Allawi angered some members of the government last week by appearing at a state-sponsored military rally in Baghdad and giving a speech outlining his goals for the country. He said Iraq should disarm the country's militias, some of which are linked to the government and are frequently accused of political violence, despite a ban on their operations.

The run-up to the elections to determine Iraq's first full-term government since the 2003 invasion has been marred by attacks on candidates and party workers. Earlier Sunday, Abdul Salam Bahadli, a National Assembly candidate aligned with Sadr, was found shot dead in Baghdad, according to Mustafa Yaqoubi, a Sadr aide.

Two U.S soldiers were killed Sunday when their convoy was attacked in a roadside bombing in a southeastern suburb of Baghdad, the U.S. military said, according to the Reuters news agency.

Also Sunday, Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak Rubaie, announced that security forces had thwarted a planned rocket attack on the building housing the courtroom where Hussein and seven co-defendants are being tried. A government statement said an insurgent group called the 1920 Revolution Brigades had intended to attack the proceedings, which after a week-long recess are set to resume Monday inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone.

Hussein's lawyers expected to meet with their client Sunday to discuss strategy for the trial, former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, who is advising Hussein's defense team, told the Associated Press in Amman, Jordan, before departing for Baghdad on Sunday morning.

Sarhan reported from Najaf. Special correspondents Naseer Nouri and Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.




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What Will Define Victory In Iraq
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Washington (UPI) Dec 05, 2005 - President's Bush's newly minted "Strategy for Victory" in Iraq lists the criteria for snatching success from the jaws of failure. It could work provided Congress and the American people understand the strategy's hidden persuaders.

Getting Out Of Iraq Safely
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Lessons Of A 15-Year War In Iraq
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Mohammed for withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq
By Fadi Fahem

4 December 2005



DUBAI — General Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Defence Minister, has called on foreign forces in Iraq to withdraw and to give Iraqis the opportunity to govern themselves.


During a question-and-answer session with delegates of the Young Arab Leaders Forum, Gen. Shaikh Mohammed said: "Iraq has been suffering a lot with all the wars. It is time for Iraq to be independent."

"Iraqis must take responsibility for their own security and we all have to help Iraq protect its own territory," he added.

Pointing out that the US is a modern, developed country, a super power, and a great and good nation, he said: "But they made a mistake in choosing Paul Bremer (administrator of the former Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq). Bremer made mistakes in Iraq and the US admits this fact."

He called for the withdrawal of coalition troops, stating: "Armies should withdraw from the cities and streets of Iraq and make efforts for reconstruction."

Reiterating the point that the US is a great nation and a developed country, Gen. Shaikh Mohammed questioned how the US could destroy a country when their intention was to fix it. "Iraq is in chaos with no electricity, no water, no infrastructure and no security. It requires rebuilding and it is time Iraq took independence into its own hands," he said.

Gen. Shaikh Mohammed said that God gave man the brain and until he uses that, violence will give way to more violence.

He concluded his answers by asking again for the withdrawal of the coalition forces from the streets and cities of Iraq.

When asked about the future of Dubai, Gen. Shaikh Mohammed responded by saying that the country — under the wise leadership of the President, His Highness Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and His Highness Shaikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai — has been progressing well.

"We are becoming more developed and advanced, but we are still at the beginning of the road. There is still a lot to do. We will never stop," said Gen. Shaikh Mohammed.

Saddam Hussein says he is not afraid to die, after witnesses at his trial described the horrors of his rule and defence lawyers stormed out of proceedings questioning the legitimacy of the court.

"You cannot continue playing these games," said Iraq's former president, who had repeatedly interrupted witnesses and the judge. "If you want my neck, you can have it."

Saddam yelled at one of two witnesses: "Don't interrupt me, you boy."

The chief judge adjourned the trial until Wednesday after a highly charged session in which two men became the first witnesses to face Saddam in court.

But Raed al-Juhi, the chief investigative judge, later told reporters that the trial would resume on Tuesday after the prosecution and defence teams asked him to continue for security reasons and because of the advanced age of the witnesses.

Hassan's story

During the hearing on Monday, Ahmed Hassan, 38, said that he and his family were seized and tortured after a 1982 attempt on Saddam's life in the Shia town of Dujail.

Hassan, who risked reprisals by letting his face appear on television as he gave evidence, said they were taken to an intelligence building in Baghdad run by Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former intelligence chief.

"I swear by God, I walked by a room and ... saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath"

Ahmed Hassan, witness

Al-Tikriti, one of eight men charged with crimes against humanity, yelled at Hassan: "He should act in the cinema."

After chaotic procedural wrangling, during which Ramsey Clark, a former US attorney-general, led a defence walkout over threats to the lawyers and a challenge to the legitimacy of the court, Hassan gave his testimony.

"I swear by God, I walked by a room and ... saw a grinder with blood coming out of it and human hair underneath," Hassan told the court.

Al-Tikriti, sitting behind Saddam in the dock, interrupted Hassan, shouting: "It's a lie."

Electric shocks

Hassan said: "My brother was given electric shocks while my 77-year-old father watched ... One man was shot in the leg ... Some were crippled because they had arms and legs broken."

Saddam and his co-defendants are charged with killing 148 men from Dujail after the assassination attempt. Other trials over the oppression of Shia and Kurds by Saddam, who is a Sunni Arab, are expected to follow.


Saddam Hussein interrupted
witnesses several times

The trial began on 19 October but was adjourned for 40 days to give the defence time to prepare and again last week to let two of the defendants find new lawyers after a second defence lawyer was killed last month.

In his testimony, Hassan described seeing al-Tikriti in Dujail on the day of the attack in July 1982, wearing red cowboy boots and blue jeans, and carrying a sniper rifle. He said Saddam was there as well, and related an episode involving a boy of 15.

"Saddam said to him, 'Do you know who I am?'" Hassan said, adding that when the boy answered "Saddam", the president picked up an ashtray and hit him on the head.

As he listened to the testimony, Saddam chuckled and half smiled to himself. Later, his chief lawyer, Khalil Dulaimi, argued with the witness and accused him of lying, saying he had implicated a former government minister who had died in 1979.

As the bespectacled Shia prosecutor was asking questions, Saddam's temper flared. "Hey, you in the glasses, don't you recognise your leader of 30 years?" he shouted.

Brother executed

The second witness, Juwaad al-Juwaad, said his 16-year-old brother was detained and executed after the assassination attempt in Dujail.


Witness Juwaad al-Juwaad
wipes his eye as he testifies

Dulaimi, for the defence, asked the witness how he could possibly identify anybody when he was only 10 at the time.

Al-Tikriti stood up and yelled across the courtroom and then hit guards with his notebook as they tried to subdue him.

Up to nine more witnesses are due to testify in the coming days. Most will be hidden behind a screen or will not appear on camera to protect their identities, officials have said.

Court questioned

Hassan's testimony followed a tense few hours when Saddam's defence team stormed out of court, returning 90 minutes later to challenge its legitimacy.

The walkout was lead by Clark, a veteran defender of unpopular high-profile causes, and was joined by Najib al-Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar.

As they left, Saddam shouted that the court was "Made in America" and then: "Long live Iraq!"


Al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother
was head of Iraqi intelligence

Behind him, Barzan chorused: "Long live Saddam." He then said: "Why don't you just execute us and get this over with?"

Clark and al-Nuaimi returned after receiving assurances that they would get time to address the court. They then assailed a lack of protection for the defence and impugned the legitimacy of a tribunal originally formed under US occupation.

"This trial can either divide or heal," Clark, who has previously represented former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, told the judge when given five minutes to make his argument.

Justice sought

"An essential element of fairness ... is protection," he said.

"There is virtually no protection for the nine Iraqi lawyers and their families who are heroically here to defend truth and justice."

Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the chief judge, listened and then cut Clark off after five minutes, before granting al-Nuaimi 15 minutes. Al-Nuaimi launched into an indictment of the tribunal, saying it was illegal under international law because it was formed by an occupying force.


Khalil Dulaimi, defence counsel,
accused a witness of lying

"There's no legal basis for what's taking place, this is part and parcel of the legal system in Iraq," he said.

"This land is becoming more American than Arab."

A senior United Nations official told Reuters on Sunday that he doubted that the proceedings could ever meet international standards.

Not-guilty pleas

Saddam and seven of his aides, who have pleaded not guilty, face the death penalty if convicted.

The former president denounced all the charges against him, saying that he was the victim.

"The case has been exaggerated. Every head of state who is subject to an attack has the right to see the assailants brought to justice," he said, referring to the attempt on his life.


Agencies

Training of Iraq Forces Suffers 'Setback' By SALLY BUZBEE, Associated Press

The training of Iraqi security forces has suffered a big "setback" in the last six months, with the army and other forces being increasingly used to settle scores and make other political gains, Iraqi Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer said Monday.

Al-Yawer disputed contentions by U.S. officials, including President Bush, that the training of security forces was gathering speed, resulting in more professional troops.

Bush has said the United States will not pull out of Iraq until Iraq's own forces can maintain security. In a speech last week, he said Iraqi forces are becoming increasingly capable of securing the country.

Al-Yawer, a Sunni moderate, said he agreed the United States cannot pull out now because "there will be a huge vacuum," leaving Iraq in danger of falling into civil war. In particular, armed Shiite militias in the south might try to incite war if U.S.-led coalition forces leave, he said in an interview with The Associated Press and a U.S. newspaper at a conference here.

"I wish it were that simple," he said of calls to set a timetable for withdrawal or a drawdown.

But al-Yawer said recent allegations that Interior Ministry security forces — dominated by Shiites — have tortured Sunni detainees were evidence that many forces are increasingly politicized and sectarian. Some of the recently trained Iraqi forces focus on settling scores and other political goals rather than maintaining security, he said.

In addition, some Iraqi military commanders have been dismissed for political reasons, rather than judged on merit, he said.

He said the army — also dominated by Shiites — is conducting raids against villages and towns in Sunni and mixed areas of Iraq, rather than targeting specific insurgents — a tactic he said reminded many Sunnis of Saddam Hussein-era raids.

"Saddam used to raid villages," using security forces, he said. "This is not the way to do it."

Al-Yawer also expressed grave concern that Iraqi army units might use intimidation to try to keep Sunni voters from the polls during the country's crucial Dec. 15 general election.

American officials — and Sunni moderates like al-Yawer — are trying to persuade Sunnis to go to the polls, hoping that if they gain a sizable chunk of parliament, Sunnis will abandon support for the insurgency.

Al-Yawer said many Sunnis want to vote. But he noted that both intimidation and voter fraud occurred during the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum, and complaints to the Iraqi Electoral Commission and U.N. voting advisers went nowhere, he said.

His supporters have made a series of requests to ensure a fair vote this time, including changes to the electoral commission and adequate numbers of polling stations and ballots in Sunni areas, he said. Most importantly, they have asked that U.S.-led coalition forces, and not Iraqi army troops, guard polling stations, he said.

Many outside experts have expressed concern that Iraqi security forces will actually increase tensions if they guard Sunni areas, rather than keep order. Al-Yawer did not specifically say that Shiites make up too much of the army, but said he would like to see more political and sectarian balance — especially among the officer corps.

Al-Yawer, running on a slate of secular candidates along with former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, also said he believes the Saddam trial also should be postponed until after the Dec. 15 election so Iraqis can focus on the election.

He expressed frustration with the trial so far, saying it is giving Saddam an opportunity to grandstand and appear sympathetic.




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December 6, 2005
No-Timetable Policy Rules Out a Deal on Zarqawi

by Gareth Porter
U.S. President George W. Bush's adamant rejection of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq effectively slams the door on a recent reported offer from Sunni resistance groups to eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist haven in Iraq as part of a negotiated peace agreement.

At the recent Iraqi reconciliation meeting in Cairo, leaders of three Sunni armed organizations – the Islamic Army, the Bloc of Holy Warriors, and the Revolution of 1920 Brigades – told U.S. and Arab officials they were willing to track down terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and turn him over to Iraqi authorities as part of a negotiated settlement with the United States, according to the highly respected London-based Arabic-language al-Hayat newspaper.

Other press reports have confirmed the presence of Sunni resistance leaders on the fringes of the conference, and al-Hayat reporters were on the scene covering the conference.

Bush has effectively ruled out such an agreement with the insurgent groups by rejecting any negotiation on a withdrawal timetable. He again attacked the idea of "setting an artificial deadline" for withdrawal in his speech to naval cadets on Nov. 29.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad declared for the first time in an interview on ABC news last week that he was prepared to open negotiations with leaders of Sunni insurgent groups who are not Saddam loyalists or followers of Zarqawi.

But without any flexibility on the troop withdrawal issue, no real negotiations with the insurgents are possible. The demand for a withdrawal schedule has been the central negotiating demand of Sunni insurgent leaders ever since they began communicating their conditions for ending the armed resistance to U.S. officials early in 2005.

The capture of Zarqawi by Sunni insurgents would not end the terrorist-haven problem by itself, but that offer appears to shorthand for a broader proposal to attack and eliminate the foreign terrorist bases of operation in Iraq. U.S. intelligence has long been aware of a sharp rivalry and even occasional armed clashes between Sunni insurgent organizations and the foreign terrorists under Zarqawi's leadership, despite their military cooperation against the occupation.

In the past, both the Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi's followers have raised the possibility that the Sunni leaders would turn on the foreign jihadists if a peace agreement were reached with the United States. Last August, Saleh al-Mutlaq of the Sunni National Dialogue Council, which is sympathetic to the Sunni armed resistance, declared, "If the Americans reach an agreement with the local resistance, there won't be any room for foreign fighters."

After the reports of contacts between the Sunni insurgents and U.S. officials surfaced last summer, the al-Qaeda organization in Iraq expressed serious concern about just such a possibility. An Internet posting by a follower of Zarqawi warned that if the Sunni insurgents ended their armed resistance, the insurgents would "exploit their knowledge of the mujahideen and their methods and their supply routes and they way they maneuver."

In 2005, the Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi have clashed over both possible peace negotiations and participation in the October referendum on the constitution. Organizations linked with Zarqawi warned as early as last spring against negotiating with the United States, and threatened to kill anyone who worked to turn out voters in the referendum. A coalition of larger insurgent groups called for maximizing the vote against the draft constitution.

The Sunni leaders told their U.S. contacts in Cairo they would not deliver Zarqawi to the U.S. forces, consistent with their demand that the U.S. military presence must be phased under any negotiated settlement, according to al-Hayat. A Pentagon source commented last week that it would "make perfect sense" that the Sunni insurgents don't want to hand over either arms or foreign jihadists to the U.S., as a matter of nationalist pride.

Cooperation with a Shi'ite-dominated government on the foreign terrorist presence in Iraq, however, would require further negotiations between Sunni insurgent leaders and the government on protection of minority rights and other major political issues.

Negotiating with the major Sunni resistance organizations, once regarded as impossible, become a real option after Sunni intermediaries began passing on peace feelers from several of those organizations early in 2005. Guerrilla units once thought to be acting entirely independently of one another and without any program are now credited with the capability for common political action.

In July, Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway told reporters in Washington that the military had identified the top eight to 10 leaders of the insurgency and knew that they had met "occasionally" to "talk organization tactics." Some of those meetings are said to have taken place in Syria and Jordan.

After meetings between the insurgent leaders and U.S. military officers, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, said that the "preliminary talks" could lead to actual negotiations with insurgent groups.

Bush's "declassified" war strategy reflects a much more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Sunni insurgents and Zarqawi's organization than is seen in past administration rhetoric.

Whereas Bush administration rhetoric has referred to the enemy only as "terrorists" and "Saddam loyalists" in the past, the document identifies a third group, the "rejectionists," who are said to represent most of those who have taken up arms against the occupation. It acknowledges that the "rejectionists" have goals that are "to some extent incompatible" with those of the terrorists.

The document, titled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," also hints that the Sunnis have legitimate Sunni concerns about the absence of any protection for minority rights in the constitution pushed through by Shi'ite party leaders.

Nevertheless, it suggests that there is no need for any compromise with the insurgency, because the U.S. and its Iraqi allies can play on divisions among the insurgent groups, drawing off some of them and controlling the rest. Bush declared in his speech on Iraq last week that the goal was to "marginalize the Saddamists and rejectionists."

According to source familiar with Defense Department thinking on the issue, a plan was adopted last summer for "negotiations" with insurgent groups that would offer no real compromise with them. Instead, the U.S. officials would offer withdrawal only if and as certain "conditions" were met, such as training and deployment of adequate government units to replace U.S. troops.

The marginalization strategy requires Shi'ite leaders to promise greater protection for Sunni rights through amending the constitution. "I think Khalilzad is gently nudging the government in the direction of negotiating with the Sunnis," said the Pentagon source.

The administration is unlikely to do anything more in contacts with Sunni insurgents until and unless a more accommodating Shi'ite leadership emerges from the Dec. 15 election, according to the source.

Meanwhile, no effort is being made to take advantage of an opportunity to do something concrete about the one issue which is of concern to the U.S. public. As the domestic political struggle over military withdrawal from Iraq heats up, the failure to pursue a timetable could eventually become an explosive issue for the Bush administration.

(Inter Press Service)

Most Americans Disapprove of Bush’s Handling of Iraq

(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in the United States continue to question the way their president is dealing with the coalition effort, according to a poll by Schulman, Ronca, & Bucuvalas (SRBI) Public Affairs published in Time. 60 per cent of respondents disapprove of how George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq.

The coalition effort against Saddam Hussein’s regime was launched in March 2003. At least 2,130 American soldiers have died during the military operation, and more than 15,800 troops have been injured.

On Nov. 14, Bush dismissed recent criticism of his decision to launch military action in Iraq, saying, "Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people. Leaders in my administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat." 48 per cent of respondents think Bush deliberately misled the American people in building the case for war in Iraq, while 45 per cent believe he was truthful and honest.

On Nov. 30, Bush dismissed establishing a timetable for the end of the coalition effort, declaring, "Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would send a message across the world that America is a weak and an unreliable ally. Setting an artificial deadline to withdraw would send a signal to our enemies—that if they wait long enough, America will cut and run and abandon its friends." 47 per cent of respondents would pull out of Iraq regardless of conditions on the ground, 40 per cent would keep most of the troops in Iraq until the new government is stable, and eight per cent would increase the number of soldiers.

Polling Data

Do you approve or disapprove of how Bush is handling the situation in Iraq?

Approve
38%

Disapprove
60%



Do you think U.S. president George W. Bush was truthful and honest in building the case for war in Iraq, or did he deliberately misled the American people?

Truthful and honest
45%

Deliberately misled
48%



Do you think the U.S. should pull out of Iraq regardless of conditions on the ground, keep most of the troops in Iraq until the new government is stable, or increase the number of troops in Iraq?

Pull out of Iraq
47%

Keeping most of the troops in Iraq
40%

Increase the number of troops in Iraq
8%



Source: Schulman, Ronca, & Bucuvalas (SRBI) Public Affairs / Time
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,004 American adults, conducted from Nov. 29 to Dec. 1, 2005. Margin of error is 3 per cent.

Dujail residents comment ahead of Saddam's trial Xinhua
On the eve of Saddam Hussein's Monday's trial hearing, residents in the Iraqi town of Dujail have voiced their opinions, appealing for the government to deal with mounting violence. One resident says Saddam's era is over. We should talk about our suffering at the moment, about conditions in the country", he said. He says the Iraqi government should attach more importance to issues such as unemployment and injustices suffered by people. Another resident describes the first two hearings as formalities. He says the Iraqi people want justice. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark is the lead advisor to Saddam's defense team. He has flown to Baghdad on Sunday. He has stressed this is his first chance to talk to the former Iraqi president about the trial. This is because the chief judge in the last trial had adjourned the session for a week last Monday. This was to allow time to find replacements for two slain defense lawyers. Another had fled the country after being wounded. A number of attacks have come on the eve Saddam's trial resumption. A car bomb was detonated on Sunday. The blast had occurred next to a car carrying Iraq's chief justice, Midhat al-Mahmoudi. He's serves as head of the Supreme Judicial Council of Baghdad's Qudat area. Meanwhile, a crowd of about 60 men has attacked former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. This has occurred at the Imam Ali mosque in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. Monday's upcoming session is the former Iraqi president's third trial since opening proceedings on October 19. At the proceedings he had been charged with murder, torture, forced expulsion and illegal detention.
Saddam and ex-intelligence chief dominate court Malaysia Star
Saddam bullies 'human meat grinder' witness Telegraph.co.uk
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The Defense secretary chides the media for focusing on attacks on American troops and Iraqis. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared Monday that the ...
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This commentary, shown below, can also be found at the Straus Military Reform Project website at www.cdi.org/smrp.

December 5, 2005

Little Promise in Iraqi Security Forces

The new consensus in Washington is that U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq are a question of when, not if, and how many.

Answers include U.S. military sources saying that the current force of about 160,000 could be reduced by two-fifths by the end of next year, and that, depending on the security situation, 20,000 or more troops could start to pull out in the next three months.

Some groups, such as the Washington, DC-based Center for American Progress, have released plans in which 80,000 of the total troops deployed in Iraq would be redeployed by the end of 2006.

However, all these plans depend on one thing; the ability of Iraqi military and security forces to operate effectively against the insurgents in the place of U.S. forces. This, in turn, is dependent on the ability of the United States and other coalition forces to equip and train these forces. Unfortunately, until about a year ago, this was something that was done as an afterthought, if at all.

Not now, though. U.S. President George W Bush, speaking to cadets at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, on Wednesday, spent considerable time outlining what has been done, and what will be done, to train up a "substitute" force in Iraq.

This is not going to be an easy task, with recent reports from Iraq suggesting that the Iraqi security forces - and their sectarian make-up - are themselves contributing to the country's destabilization.

An extensive article in the December issue of Atlantic Monthly by James Fallows details some of the problems:

Time and again since the training effort began, inspection teams from Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), think tanks and the military itself have visited Iraq and come to the same conclusion: the readiness of many Iraqi units is low, their loyalty and morale are questionable, regional and ethnic divisions are sharp, their reported numbers overstate their real effectiveness.

The numbers are at best imperfect measures. Early this year, the American-led training command shifted its emphasis from simple head counts of Iraqi troops to an assessment of unit readiness based on a four-part classification scheme.

Level 1, the highest, was for "fully capable" units - those that could plan, execute and maintain counterinsurgency operations with no help whatsoever.

Last summer, Pentagon officials said that three Iraqi units, out of a total of 115 police and army battalions, had reached this level. In September, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, Army General George Casey, lowered that estimate to one.

Level 2 was for "capable" units, which can fight against insurgents as long as the U.S. provides operational assistance (air support, logistics, communications and so on). Marine General Peter Pace, who is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in summer that just under one third of Iraqi army units had reached this level. A few more had by fall.

Level 3, for "partially capable" units, included those that could provide extra manpower in efforts planned, led, supplied and sustained by Americans.

The remaining two thirds of Iraqi army units, and half the police, were in this category.

Level 4, "incapable" units, were those that were of no help whatsoever in fighting the insurgency. Half of all police units were so classified.

In short, if American troops disappeared tomorrow, Iraq would have essentially no independent security force. Half its policemen would be considered worthless, and the other half would depend on external help for organization, direction and support. Two thirds of the army would be in the same dependent position, and even the better-prepared one third would suffer significant limitations without foreign help.

As Fallows notes, it was not until mid-2004 that the US became serious about the training effort. After former ambassador Paul Bremer went home and the Coalition Provisional Authority ceased to exist, a new American army general, Dave Petraeus, arrived to supervise the training of Iraqis. He is one of the military's golden boys.

Under Petraeus, the training command abandoned an often ridiculed way of measuring progress. At first Americans had counted all Iraqis who were simply "on duty" - a total that swelled to more than 200,000 by March of 2004. Petraeus introduced an assessment of "unit readiness", as noted above.

Training had been underfunded in mid-2004, but more money and equipment started to arrive. The training strategy also changed. More emphasis was put on embedding U.S. advisers with Iraqi units. Teams of Iraqi foot soldiers were matched with U.S. units that could provide the air cover and other advanced services they needed. Contrary to procedures under Saddam Hussein, Petraeus introduced live-fire exercises for new Iraqi recruits.

Petraeus, however, is not without problems. His record indicates that through his career, starting in 1974, he was more of a military intellectual than a battlefield leader. Although he was in the top 50 of his class of 733 at West Point and received a PhD in just two years at Princeton, prior to Iraq he had only two field commands, with the 101st Air Mobile and 82nd Airborne divisions.

Next to doing body counts, assessments of military readiness have long been among the most controversial and easily manipulated of military measurements. And embedding U.S. advisers in Iraqi units is hardly novel. That is exactly what U.S. forces did in Vietnam 40 years ago.

On Nov. 30, at the time Bush was giving a speech at the US Naval Academy, the White House released a "U.S. National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" report. Among its talking points was the claim: "As of November 2005, there were more than 212,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces, compared with 96,000 in September of last year."

But as the blog Arms Control Wonk pointed out the same day, Iraq did not, however, have 96,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces in September 2004. Reuters obtained internal Defense Department documents in September

2004 that revealed only 8,169 had completed the full eight-week academy training. So 46,176 of what were publicly called "trained and equipped" forces were listed privately as "untrained".

It is true that Iraqi security forces are improving, both quantitatively and qualitatively. But they are far from being ready to operate on their own. A mid-November report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies pointed out, "The progress the coalition has claimed does not mean that the Iraqi force development effort can, as yet, claim to be successful. Iraqi forces still do have major weaknesses, and the problems in the Ministry of Defense required a significant change in the coalition advisory effort as recently as Oct. 1, 2005."

It is best to view with skepticism administration claims when it comes to numbers about Iraqi military and security forces. As the Center for American Progress noted on Nov. 30:

In February 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed, "There are over 210,000 Iraqis serving in the security forces. That's an amazing accomplishment." Seven months later, in September 2004, Rumsfeld said that 95,000 trained Iraqi troops were taking part in security operations, less than half the number the administration had been publicizing. A year later, General George Casey testified before Congress that the number of Iraqi battalions rated at the highest level of readiness had dropped from three to one. "That number has apparently not changed." Now, just a few months later, the administration is claiming there are 212,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces. But as it has been for the past two-and-a-half years, it is unclear exactly what measuring sticks [the administration] is using, and whether they present the full picture.

Rotten to the core

Apart from the actual number of competent personnel, the Iraqi security forces are also cause for worry in other areas, reports Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service.

A spate of articles in the mainstream U.S. media since the discovery two weeks ago by U.S. troops of a secret underground prison in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, where some 170 Sunni Arab men and boys had been subjected to torture and ill-treatment, has detailed the existence of death squads in the largely Shi'ite police, or special commandos operating with their support.

These units appear to be under the control of two sectarian militias that have successfully infiltrated the security forces - the Iranian-trained Badr Organization, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI); and the Mahdi Army, which is led by the Shi'ite nationalist politician, Muqtada al-Sadr.

Operating through or with the Iraqi security forces, the two groups, which are themselves rivals, have abducted, tortured and executed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Sunni males, according to front-page reports that have appeared this week in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Knight-Ridder newspapers.

"Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged in recent weeks, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation," the New York Times reported on Tuesday. "Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished."

The motives for the abductions are mixed, according to the reports. In some cases, they appear directed against suspected insurgents or their supporters. In others, they seem designed to "ethnically cleanse" certain neighborhoods. In still others, they appear aimed at achieving revenge for decades of discrimination and repression by the Ba'athist regime, which generally privileged Sunni citizens.

The repression that is now directed against the Sunni community by the police and commandos and their sectarian auxiliaries threatens the Bush administration's plan to let the Iraqi security forces fight the largely Sunni insurgency on their own. The perception that those security personnel - about 110,000 of whom are controlled by the Interior Ministry - are in fact acting against Sunnis on behalf of Shi'ite political parties will likely only fuel the insurgency, despite new U.S. efforts to persuade Sunnis that their interests will be protected.

"[The abuses] undermine the U.S. effort to stabilize the nation, and train and equip Iraq's security forces - the Bush administration's key prerequisites for the eventual withdrawal of American troops," said the Los Angeles Times in a lengthy article that noted that U.S. military advisers in Iraq, as well as the Interior Ministry's inspector general, concurred that "death squads" were indeed operating within the security forces.

"It's increasingly becoming a war of all against all, with no rules," Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the Wall Street Journal this week. "The Iraqi security forces themselves are becoming just another of the players, and if they owe allegiance to anything, it's to their commanders or communities, and not remotely to the state itself."

The problem itself is not a new one, particularly after U.S. forces began conducting "joint" operations with Iraqi forces - which had been largely purged of Ba'athists by the Coalition Provisional Authority - in 2004. The newly constituted Iraqi forces consisted largely of units recruited from Kurdish peshmerga or Shi'ite militias. Their operations in the so-called Sunni triangle - combined with and often following those of U.S. forces - clearly helped fuel the insurgency.

While U.S. commanders have tried to remedy this problem - in part by ending the Iraqi army's ban on recruiting most former Ba'athist junior officers in early November and paying tribal militias to maintain order - the SCIRI-controlled Interior Ministry has been more resistant, even after the discovery of the secret prison.

While Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari promised that the incident would be fully investigated and those responsible punished, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, a former leader of the Badr militia, played down the abuses.

But it now appears that the prison was just the tip of the iceberg of anti-Sunni operations conducted by the police and commandos and their auxiliaries, as hundreds of bodies of Sunni males, many with their hands still bound by police handcuffs, have turned up in garbage dumps, rivers and alongside roads in recent months, according to the newspaper reports. In many cases, the victims had been abducted, sometimes in groups of a dozen or more, by individuals who identified themselves as police or commandos.

"These reports are definitely credible and very worrisome," said Joe Stork, a veteran Middle East specialist at Human Rights Watch in Washington.

Last week, former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite who is trying to woo Sunni support in next month's elections, charged that the level of repression recalled former president Saddam Hussein's reign.

"People are doing the same as Saddam's time and worse," he told the London Observer.

While Stork called that characterization "a bit much", he stressed that Washington should be very concerned about the situation.

But while U.S. military commanders were willing to tell reporters about the abuses, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discounted the reports as "unverified" during a press conference on Tuesday.

"There's ... a political campaign [in Iraq] taking place, and we ought to be aware of that, that there are going to be a lot of charges and countercharges and allegations," he told a reporter who asked about the death squad reports. "And they may very well be timed - as they are in every country in the world that has a free political system - they may be timed in a way to seek advantage," he said.

# # #

David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues. The views expressed are his own.

Bombing at Baghdad Police Academy Kills 43 ABC News
Two Iraqi paramedics attend an injured policeman at Al Kindi hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday Dec. 6, 2005. Two men strapped with explosives blew themselves up at Baghdad's police academy on Tuesday, killing at least 27 people and wounding 50 more, officials said.
Baghdad Suicide Bombers Kill 27, Wound 50 at Police Academy Bloomberg
Bombers kill 27 at Baghdad police academy Times Online
Miami Herald - The Age - CTV.ca - Aljazeera.com - all 158 related »

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL07Ak02.html
Iraqi kidnappers busy again
By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE - Hostage-takers are back in business in a big way in Iraq. Over the past five days, at least a dozen foreigners have been reported kidnapped. In the latest incident Monday, masked gunmen took a French engineer, Bernard Planche, off the streets of Baghdad.

The Khaleej Times in Dubai quoted Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, as saying he thought the sudden increase in kidnappings was not an accident.

"There is some sort of policy to go back to kidnappings," he said. "The elections are coming [on December 15] and these groups



want attention and publicity. That way their political statement will get a priority in the Western media."

The current rash of kidnappings began on Saturday when four Western peace activists - James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden of Canada, Tom Fox of the US and Norman Kember from Britain - were taken hostage. On Tuesday, German aid worker Susanne Osthoff, who had been working in Iraq since before the 2003 US invasion of the country, was taken hostage along with her Iraqi driver. The same day six Iranian pilgrims were abducted near a Shi'ite shrine north of Baghdad. Two of them - both women - were subsequently released.

The wave of kidnappings breaks a relative lull in hostage-taking in Iraq. It has been more than a month since any incident of kidnapping of foreigners has been reported. On October 19, an Irish journalist, Rory Carroll, was abducted but released within 36 hours. The spate of kidnappings over the past week is a reminder that although the number of kidnappings might have dipped in recent months, the problem clearly hasn't gone away.

According to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index, between May 2003 and November 27, 242 foreigners were kidnapped in Iraq. Of those, 43 were killed (almost 17%), 120 were released, three escaped, three were rescued and the fate of 73 is still unknown. April 2004 witnessed the largest number of foreigners kidnapped - 43 - and August 2004 saw the highest number of foreign hostages killed - 15. Most foreigners were taken hostage in the April-September 2004 period. About 135 foreigners - almost 56% of the total foreigners abducted - were kidnapped over this six-month period.

Since March, the number of foreigners being kidnapped dipped significantly. In fact, no foreigners were taken hostage in June. One reason for the decline in the number of kidnappings, especially of Westerners, was that many Western aid workers moved out of Iraq; those who remained took care not to move out of the heavily fortified Green Zone, making it more difficult for kidnappers to find foreign victims.

The decline in kidnappings was also attributed to a change in the militants' strategy. It was believed that with kidnapping and especially the gruesome beheading of hostages triggering revulsion worldwide, militant groups decided to go slow on abductions so as to not alienate support for the insurgency, especially among moderate Muslims.

Such speculation has now been proved wrong by the recent wave of abductions.

What began with the kidnapping and televised beheading of US businessman Nicholas Berg grew quickly into what some American analysts described as a "cottage industry" in Iraq. Kidnappings not only grew in frequency but the groups involved seemed to have a good grasp of its profit potential. They also showed understanding of how to blend the old with the new. Kidnapping as a pressure tactic to have demands conceded has been around for centuries, as has beheading. In Iraq, the kidnappers used kidnapping and beheading to generate immense terror and blended it with modern technology - the Internet - for maximum effect.

Demands put forward by kidnappers for release of hostages include pullout from Iraq of troops deployed by the victim's country, halt of business being conducted by the hostage's employers in Iraq, release of prisoners in Iraqi jails and, of course, money. Huge ransom demands have often been cloaked with political demands.

Initially it seemed citizens of countries that were part of the US-led occupation forces in Iraq were the prime targets for abduction. Several of the British and American hostages were decapitated and the beheadings were videotaped and uploaded on websites. Abductions were a means to pressure the concerned countries to pull out troops from Iraq. However, the motivations behind and targets of the abductions gradually became less focused.

In July 2004, seven truck drivers - three each from India and Kenya and one from Egypt - were abducted although neither of their countries had deployed troops in Iraq. However, the Kuwaiti firm they worked for transported supplies to American troops in Iraq. The changing demands put forward by the kidnappers revealed a lack of understanding of political issues in Iraq, signaling that the abductions had monetary rather than political motivations. A month later, two French journalists were abducted though France is not a part of the coalition forces in Iraq, but rather was at the forefront of the campaign against the US invasion of the country. The hostage-takers demanded that France lift its ban on Islamic headscarves in its state schools. It was the first time that hostage-takers laid down conditions external to Iraq.

Diplomats from Middle East countries also have been abducted in an apparent attempt to isolate Iraq's government from the Arab and Muslim world. In the beginning, several of those who were abducted were contractors or employees of firms working with the occupation forces. Soon, however, the list of hostages came to include journalists and humanitarian aid workers - people who were not working with the US-led coalition. Some have even had long ties with Iraq. Aid worker Margaret Hassan, who was abducted and subsequently beheaded, was the wife of an Iraqi and had deep roots in Iraq. She worked there for 30 years. Yet even she was not immune to abduction. The peace activists abducted on Saturday belong to a Chicago-based pacifist group that has criticized the war.

What has become apparent over the past year is that no one enjoys immunity from abduction in Iraq.

Drawing attention to areas most prone to kidnapping of foreigners, the Olive Security report said 54% of all foreign civilian kidnappings in Iraq occurred in Baghdad and Anbar provinces - including highways to Syria and Jordan. Provinces north of Baghdad toward Turkey, excluding the Kurdish areas, were also found to be high-risk areas.

An array of groups are said to be behind the kidnappings; some are active in the business of abductions only, while others are engaged in the insurgency as well. According to the Olive Security report, more than 20 groups have carried out kidnappings in Iraq. Of these, six have executed their hostages.

Several of the groups were unknown until they burst into the media spotlight with an abduction. The Holders of the Black Banners, for instance, had never been heard of until the kidnapping of the seven truck drivers in July 2004. The leader in the kidnappings comes, without doubt, from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group. It has carried out not only the most high-profile abductions but also the most gruesome executions of its hostages. Among others, it claimed responsibility for the abduction and beheading of Berg, South Korean translator Kim Sun-il, British engineer Ken Bigley and American contractors Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley.

Since Zarqawi's group Al-Tawhid wal-Jihad merged with al-Qaeda - it has assumed the name of al-Qaeda in Iraq - the beheading of hostages and the videotaping of the decapitation has become less frequent, according to the BBC website.

Other groups that have claimed responsibility for kidnappings in Iraq include the al-Saraya Mujahideen, the Ansar al-Sunna, Ansar al-Islam, the Jaish al-Mujahideen, Islamic Army in Iraq and the Ali bin Abi Talib Brigades. Several groups claiming responsibility for kidnappings have declared links with al-Qaeda. But it is possible that at least some of these groups were claiming these ties to press their ransom demands more effectively.

It appears many of the abductions are carried out by criminal gangs, which are into the business of kidnapping as long as prospects for profit hold out. These gangs sell the hostage to the insurgent groups which then use the hostage to press political demands. Foreign hostages command a higher price in the kidnapping business.

While the kidnapping of a foreigner in Iraq is extensively covered in the international media, the kidnapping of Iraqis has gone by largely unnoticed. The 242 foreigners kidnapped pales in comparison with the number of Iraqis abducted. According to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, 5,000 Iraqis were kidnapped between December 2003 and late April.

Hostage-taking in Iraq is not only lucrative, it has also met the militants' goals to some extent. Abductions and beheadings of victims have generated immense terror, on a scale far greater than that triggered even by suicide bombings. Militants have been able to get some countries such as the Philippines to pull out troops, and several business companies and contractors have halted operations in Iraq. Humanitarian aid operations have been scaled down; only those aid groups that can afford security for their workers remain in Iraq today. While violent attacks have contributed to some extent to construction companies and charity organizations scaling down, abductions of foreigners has had a larger impact. Through abductions, hostage-takers have not only made much money but also have been able to prevent the occupation forces from stabilizing the security or economic situation in Iraq.

Hostage-taking costs little, but returns are high. It is the "smart weapon" in the insurgents' arsenal.

Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

Two Iraqi Police Female Suicide Bombers Kill 27 Other Police Officers

Two Female Suicide Bombers Kill 27 in Iraq

By SAMEER N. YACOUB Associated Press Writer

Dec 6, 2005, 6:40 AM EST

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Two women strapped with explosives blew themselves up at Baghdad's police academy on Tuesday, killing 27 people and wounding 32, the U.S. military said.

The women blew themselves up in a classroom filled with (police) students, the statement from Task Force Baghdad said. No U.S. forces were killed or wounded in the attack, it added.

U.S. forces rushed to the scene to provide assistance, the statement said.

Iraqi police said one bomb exploded in a cafeteria, while the other detonated during roll call. Police Lt. Ali Mi'tab said the women were probably students at the academy, which is why they were not searched.

Five other female police officers were among the dead, he added.

Iraqi resistance fighters have concentrated their attacks against Iraqi security forces. Tuesday's attack was the deadliest against Iraqi forces since Feb. 28, when a suicide car bomber attacked police and National Guard recruits in Hillah, killing 125.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged that the resistance has been stronger than anticipated, but he also said the news media have focused on the war's growing body count rather than progress that has been achieved.

"To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks," Rumsfeld said in remarks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Also Monday, masked gunmen grabbed a French engineer off the streets of Baghdad, the latest in a spate of kidnappings of Westerners that coincides with Saddam Hussein's trial and the run-up to parliamentary elections.

Bernard Planche joined two Canadians, an American, a Briton and a German taken hostage in the last 10 days.

Police Maj. Falah al-Mohammadawi said he didn't have any additional information Tuesday about the kidnapping, but that the interior ministry had distributed Planche's photo to the all checkpoints around Baghdad.

In London, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Monday encouraged the kidnappers of the Briton to make contact, saying "we stand ready to hear what they have to say."

The British Broadcasting Corp. cited a Western diplomat in Baghdad as saying direct contact had been made with the hostage-takers. It did not name the diplomat.

Straw, however, underlined the British government's refusal to negotiate with kidnappers or pay ransom.

There is no evidence the kidnappings were coordinated, and those responsible for abducting the German aid worker and four Christian peace activists claim to represent different groups. But the incidents do seem timed to Saddam's trial or the Dec. 15 elections.

Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said he thinks the sudden increase is not an accident.

"There is some sort of policy to go back to kidnappings," he said. "The elections are coming and these groups want attention and publicity. That way their political statement will get a priority in the Western media."

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL02Ak03.html
Iran and the US exit strategy in Iraq
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Iran may be a member of the "axis of evil" according to the Bush administration, but increasingly it has become clear that it also holds a key to the riddle of a working strategy for US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

At least, that is the impression one gets by the recent statement by the US envoy to Iraq, reflected in Newsweek, regarding President George W Bush's authorization of a dialogue with Iran. Consequently, the question of future detente between Iran and the US has now gained new currency, as well as urgency.

Zalmay Khalilzad is, of course, no stranger to dialogue with Iran
and, in fact, can take credit for making deals with Teheran in Afghanistan, particularly at the Bonn summit of Afghan factions, which shaped the nature of Kabul's government after its liberation from the yoke of the Taliban in 2001.

Recently, a revolutionary guard commander in Iran boasted to this author that he and an American general met in a tent at Baghram airport outside Kabul and reached an agreement on the number of Northern Front forces entering Kabul, thus averting the much feared bloodbath.

Currently, the US must map out two exit strategies, one for Afghanistan and one for Iraq, and in more ways than one the two are interrelated, not the least because in both countries, sharing long, porous borders with Iran, there cannot be durable peace and stability without input from Iran.

Contrary to the prevalent, superficial analyses of today's Iran, the foreign policy of that country toward the "new" Iraq and "new" Afghanistan features all the essential ingredients of good neighborly relations warranting an alternative assessment of the Islamic Republic as "rogue" and/or "axis of evil".

In view of the steady expansion of trade and economic cooperation between Iran and its two neighbors under American occupation, there are ample grounds for perceiving Iran as a regional bastion of stability directly benefiting from the political and geostrategic windfall of the downfall of two hostile regimes in Kabul and Baghdad and their replacement with rather benign alternatives.

Needless to say, on the con side there are new national security worries for Iran generated as a result of the unprecedented Americanization of regional politics over the past few years, and crafting a balance between the positive and negative ramifications of post-September 11, 2001 developments in Iran's vicinity is difficult, given the fluid and at times uncertain nature of the political-security circumstances surrounding Iran.

One thing is for sure. Compared to the 1990s, when the fear of Iraq's nuclearization ran rampant in Iran, especially when Saddam Hussein ceased his cooperation with the United Nations inspection of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, today Iran has virtually no such fear and, hence, can recalibrate its defense strategies and the weapons needs of those strategies.

Equally certain is Iran's disdain for a re-Talibanization of Afghanistan and, similarly, the resurgence of Ba'athism and anything remotely similar to that within Iraq. Consequently, the rising chorus for American withdrawal, affecting the US Congress, cannot but raise new concerns and anxieties inside Iran, irrespective of the official, anti-American ideology that has been somewhat heightened on the rhetorical level by the new president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This brings us to a consideration of the nature of Iran's new anti-Americanism, vividly demonstrated by the marching millions across Iran chanting "death to America" recently.

The limits of Iran's new anti-Americanism
Iran's new president has wasted little time in whipping up anti-Americanism in Iran, accusing the US of committing war crimes in his latest speech. Ahmadinejad's comments regarding the US military's extensive use of depleted uranium in Iraq has hit a raw nerve in the American media and, interestingly, the CNN broadcast of his speech carried a little blurb at the bottom that "natural uranium" is more dangerous than depleted uranium.

But, of course, most Iraqis or Afghanis are not in proximity of natural uranium and the reported 210 tons of uranium-contaminated shells that the US military has so far fired in Iraq alone will without the slightest doubt cause serious health risk to the civilian population for a long time to come, particularly in the poor, working-class sections of Baghdad and other towns that have seen the firing might of the US war machine.

However, beyond such disturbing developments, the US's destruction of Saddam's regime and its replacement with a Tehran-friendly, Shi'ite-led political system constitutes, in fact, manna from heaven for Iran, thus laying the groundwork for a fresh start in troubled US-Iran relations.

Curiously, the rise of a militant anti-American president in Iran may actually serve this process for two reasons: (a) Iran is no longer bothered by elite factionalism hampering its diplomacy, and ( Iran's hardline politicians at the helm mirror to some extent their neo-conservative adversaries in Washington.

This is not to suggest that Iran's new surge of anti-Americanism is a mere ploy for domestic consumption, although there is an element of truth to that and the emotional and ideological basis for reinventing Iran's foreign policy (see Reinventing Iran's Foreign Policy , Asia Times Online, October 7); rather, the complexity of this new anti-Americanism can be best captured by viewing it through different prisms, ie, the ideological-religious, national interests, and regional and international considerations and proclivities of the Iranian system.

On the one hand, Iranian hostility toward American "hegemony" is a legacy of the Islamic revolution of 1979, receiving new shock treatment by the interventionist policies of the White House since September 11, 2001. The US may be actively engaged in selling its image in the Middle East as "Muslim-friendly", but unfortunately the "image repackaging" can only go so far, notwithstanding the facts of a sizeable military presence, say occupation, of two Muslim states, not to mention the powerful presence of the US military throughout the Persian Gulf and the Central Asia region minus Iran.

Hence, the symptoms of anti-Americanism can be found aplenty nowadays not simply among the clerical ruling elites of Iran, but also among a large segment of the population, which may be fascinated by the US superpower, yet at the same time resents its unilateralism and interventionism, as well as its selectiveness regarding democratization or nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. For example, Israeli nuclear arms are tolerated by the US, as is the continued pattern of pre-modern rule in the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf.

Nonetheless, the pitiful excesses of Iran's Americaphobia need mentioning. For one thing, the recent congressional calls for American troop withdrawal from Iraq have unnerved the ruling Iranians, bringing a strong dose of reality into the very midst of their public denunciations of the US. The fact is that a blanket Iranian objection to the US military presence complicates Iran's Iraq policy, which has been geared to sustain the new, Shi'ite-led status quo that is constantly put in grave danger by the Sunni-dominated insurgency.

With certain Iraqi Shi'ites aligning themselves with the US power, which has "liberated" them from decades of Ba'athist oppression, an Iranian ambivalence toward the US military presence in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, has been manifested at official and semi-official levels. Consequently, a structural limit of Iran's anti-Americanism can be seen here, precisely as a result of fears of Iraq's breakup or descent into the quagmire of inter-religious fratricide favoring the anti-Shi'ite extremist Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, overriding the ideological antipathy toward the "Great Satan".

This means that blind, diabolical opposition to the US is not really in Iran's geopolitical interests, at least for the moment, since neither Iran, nor any other regional power, can possibly fill the vacuum of departed American power - power that in any case has been inadvertently serving Iran's interests.

Functional or dysfunctional anti-Americanism?
A question worth pondering is whether the new Iranian anti-Americanism is dysfunctional when analyzed through the prism of Iran's national interests. Is it, in other words, irrational or self-disserving? The answer must consider a conflated and confusing recent history whose momentum, toward increasing or decreasing the risks to Iran's national security interests, is difficult to gauge in the light of contradictory impulses that ran in diametrically opposed directions with respect to the US threats against Iran.

Despite these contradictions, the fact that the American "enemy" has sent to history's dustbin two of Iran's foremost local enemies, replacing them with Iran-friendly substitutes, impinges on any concerted efforts in Iran today to make renewed anti-Americanism a big staple of collective identity.

Consequently, if left unchecked, the virulent anti-American political rhetoric in Iran runs the risk of causing policy rigidities resistant to pragmatic consideration of shared interests with the Western superpower that necessitate a partial overlap in terms of regional politics. Some of today's anti-Americanism in Iran may be inevitable, but the character and intensity of it militates against the logic of detente, given those shared interests between Tehran and Washington.

Certainly, one clear testing