19 people killed in attacks in Iraq:

At least 19 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, a day after bloodshed claimed 18 lives
http://tinyurl.com/d3mwn

Gunmen kill Iraqi forces, bombs shake Baghdad:

Guerrillas killed 10 Iraqi policemen and soldiers in attacks north of Baghdad
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/BAB627106.htm

U.S. Soldier Killed:

A U.S. soldier died from wounds sustained by an improvised explosive device in Baghdad Dec. 25.
http://www.centcom.mil/CENTCOMNews/Casualt...rt=20051230.txt

2 U.S. Soldiers Among 4 Killed in Iraq:

Two Iraqi servicemen and two American soldiers died and 14 people were wounded in militants’ attacks at military and police patrols in various parts of Iraq on Sunday.
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?N...51980&PageNum=0

In pictures:

The Face and Voice of Civilian Sacrifice in Iraq :

Their portraits and their stories compel attention, not because they have endured worse than others, but because their miseries are so commonplace
http://tinyurl.com/dxykr

Analysis: U.S. Preparing for Iraq Exit :

At every stop on his three-day tour of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a similar message: The U.S. military is not rushing to get out, but it is getting out, nevertheless.
http://tinyurl.com/98ycv

Military leader says troop level could rise:

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said Sunday that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase next year, not decrease, if the insurgency continues.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nati...0_troops26.html

Desperately Seeking Victory in a War Already Lost :

There is no US victory to be gained from the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The clear lesson is that if people steadfastly resist, even the might of the hyper-power can be thwarted.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec05/Petersen1225.htm

Stars turn backs on America's troops in Iraq : ·

Danger and anti-war stance keep celebrities away
http://geography.about.com/library/misc/blequator.htm

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Iraq Violence Leaves at Least 2 Dozen Dead By MARIAM FAM, Associated Press Writer
48 minutes ago



Violence increased across Iraq after a lull following the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections, with at least two dozen people including a U.S. soldier killed Monday in shootings and bombings mostly targeting the Shiite-dominated security services.

Officials blamed the surge in violence on insurgent efforts to deepen the political turmoil surrounding the contested vote. Preliminary figures — including some returns released Monday from ballots cast early by extriate Iraqis and some voters inside Iraq — have given a big lead to the religious Shiite bloc that controls the current interim government.

The violence came as three opposition groups threatened a wave of protests and civil disobedience if fraud charges are not properly investigated. The warning came from the secular Iraqi National List, headed by former Shiite Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, and two Sunni Arab groups.

Iraq's Electoral Commission said Monday that final results for the 275-seat parliament could be released in about a week.

Sunni Arab and secular Shiite factions are demanding that an international body review more than 1,500 complaints, warning they may boycott the new legislature. They also want new elections in some provinces, including Baghdad. The United Nations has rejected an outside review.

"We will resort to peaceful options, including protests, civil disobedience and a boycott of the political process until our demands are met," Hassan Zaidan al-Lahaibi, of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, said in neighboring Jordan, where representatives of the groups have met in recent days.

Among the complaints are 35 that the election commission considers serious enough to change some local results. But, said Farid Ayar, a commission official, "I don't think there is a reason to cancel the entire elections."

He also said preliminary results from early votes by soldiers, hospital patients and prisoners and overseas Iraqis showed a coalition of Kurdish parties and the main Shiite religious bloc each taking about a third. Those nearly 500,000 votes were not expected to alter overall results significantly.

Preliminary results previously released gave the United Iraqi Alliance, the religious Shiite coalition dominating the current government, a big lead — but one unlikely to allow it to govern without forming a coalition with other groups.

Bahaa al-Araji, a member of the Shiite alliance, said the group was preparing to negotiate with other political blocs and had already met with the Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party.

Al-Araji also said likely candidates for prime minister were current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who heads the Islamic Dawa party, and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who belongs to the other main Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Every time there has been a defining event in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, there has been a period of calm. They included the June 28, 2004, transfer of power from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, the Jan. 30 elections, and the Oct. 15 constitution referendum.

The recent lull in violence ended Sunday, with the deaths of 18 people.

On Monday, a suicide car bomber slammed into a police patrol in the capital, leaving three dead, officials said, and a suicide motorcycle bomber rammed into a Shiite funeral ceremony, killing at least two, said Maj. Falah Mohamadawi of the Interior Ministry. A mortar then killed two people in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood.

Four other car bombs killed at least two people and gunmen killed five officers at a police checkpoint 30 miles north of Baghdad, officials said.

A U.S. soldier serving with Task Force Baghdad was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle while on patrol in the capital, the military said. The name of the soldier was withheld pending notification of next of kin.

In Jordan, a lawyer for Saddam and a Jordanian newspaper claimed Monday that the former ruler's half brother rejected a U.S. offer of a ranking Iraqi government position in exchange for testimony against the deposed leader.

The half brother, Barzan Ibrahim, reportedly made the claim Thursday before the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court which is hearing the cases against him, Saddam and six other co-defendants for the deaths of more than 140 Shiites after a 1982 attempt on Saddam's life in the town of Dujail.

The lawyer spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give details of the closed session.

Saddam's chief Iraqi lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, made the same allegations in Monday's editions of the independent Jordanian daily Al Arab Al Yawm. Dulaimi and U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment Monday, which was a U.S. holiday.

But chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Mousawi denied that there were attempts to cut a deal with Ibrahim during the closed session. "The defense team should respect the profession and should not make false statements," al-Mousawi said. He refused to divulge what happened during the closed session.

In other developments:

• Gunmen raided a house in southern Baghdad, killing three people, police Capt. Qassim Hussein said. Gunmen attacked the house again when police arrived to remove the bodies, wounding two officers, police said.

• A Shiite cleric in the southern city of Najaf and a man in the northern city of Mosul were gunned down. In Baghdad, a civilian driving his children to school and a professor were killed.

• A car bomb targeted the governor of Diyala province, killing a body guard, and gunmen killed a member of Diyala city council.

• Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko paid an unannounced visit to his country's troops. His country is pulling out its remaining 867 soldiers this week.

• Susanne Osthoff, a German freed after being held hostage in Iraq for more than three weeks, said in an interview aired Monday that she was treated well by her kidnappers, who told her they do not hurt women or children.

___

Associated Press reporters Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad and Shafika Mattar in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this story.



Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Chalabi Lacks Votes Needed to Win Spot in Iraqi Assembly

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 27, 2005; A18



BAGHDAD, Dec. 26 -- Unexpectedly low support from overseas voters has left Ahmed Chalabi -- the returned Iraqi exile once backed by the United States to lead Iraq -- facing a shutout from power in this month's vote for the country's first full-term parliament since the 2003 invasion.

Rebounding violence, which included bombings, assassination attempts and other attacks, claimed at least 19 lives in Iraq on Monday, including that of an American soldier. Eight members of a single Iraqi SWAT team were wiped out in what Iraqi authorities described as an hour-long shootout with better-armed insurgents.

With 95 percent of a preliminary tally from the Dec. 15 vote now completed, Chalabi remained almost 8,000 votes short of the 40,000 minimum needed for him or his bloc to win a single seat in the 275-seat National Assembly, according to election officials. Without a seat in the assembly, Chalabi would presumably be unable to obtain a post in the resulting government.

However, Chalabi was among the politicians jockeying Monday ahead of meetings that have been scheduled in the Kurdish north this week to bring Shiite Muslims, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and others into post-election talks on forming the next government.

A spokesman for Chalabi's party, which has filed complaints of election irregularities, said he was waiting for the results of the investigation. "What I can say is Dr. Chalabi will have an important role, whether in the government or outside,'' said the spokesman, Haider Mousawi.

Chalabi is regarded as both a master deal-maker and remarkable political survivor. The longtime exile and his associates played an influential role in the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein; U.S. authorities tapped Chalabi to lead a small Iraqi force in the U.S.-led invasion. But his reputation suffered from past financial scandals, and critics have charged he was always more popular with Americans than with Iraqis.

Chalabi's supporters here had hoped he would do well among exile voters who were allowed to cast ballots overseas. But results announced Monday showed he received just 0.89 percent of the "special vote,'' from Iraqi citizens in foreign countries, hospitals, the army and prisons. Kurdish politicians received the largest share of the special vote, with the backing of millions of Iraqi Kurdish exiles and members of the security forces, while the current governing coalition of Shiite religious parties has so far won the most votes overall.

Chalabi's bloc has done poorly across the country, according to the preliminary tally, which left it statistically unlikely that the bloc could win a seat outright. Final results are expected by early next month.

Chalabi pulled out of the governing Shiite alliance ahead of the elections, opting instead to form a small party of his own, after the alliance refused to guarantee him the top job of prime minister, his aides said at the time.

Representatives of the top finishers readied for midweek meetings to be convened under the auspices of President Jalal Talabani. With no party receiving an outright majority of seats in the new National Assembly, winning control of the next government will require forming a coalition that can command such a majority.

The deal-making has led to meetings among rivals at opposite extremes of Iraqi politics to feel out any possible alliance. On Saturday, the effort brought Saleh Mutlak -- a Sunni politician previously derided by Shiites as a front for insurgents -- together with Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite religious party whose militia Sunnis accuse of running anti-Sunni death squads. Both sides confirmed the meeting Monday.

"We have agreed that we should form a government of national unity without suggesting any names," Mutlak said. "And they've agreed on the principle and were very positive about it." He said there were "no results for these talks yet, but all expectations show that we are on the right track to solve the problem."

Tariq Hashimi, secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, said his organization also was "negotiating with all factions, including representatives of the Shiite alliance."

Iraq's election commission said Monday it still had found no evidence of any fraud serious enough to change the outcome of the elections.

Violence Monday targeted government security forces and officials. About 25 insurgents attacked a checkpoint run by an Iraqi SWAT team outside Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, said Kanan Hameed, a SWAT team member whom authorities say survived only because he was elsewhere during the attack.

"The attack lasted for one hour. We were waiting for any support from the Iraqi police or the American forces, but no one came," Hameed said.

"The men fought until they ran out of ammunition,'' said Awf Rahomi, deputy governor of Diyala province.

Baqubah, the capital of Diyala, has been the scene of Sunni protests against the election results. A roadside bombing Monday, apparently targeting the governor, wounded him and killed one of his guards, spokesman Ali Khaiyam said. A separate attack killed a female member of the provincial council, police in Baqubah said.

Armed men near Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, stormed the house of a Shiite family Monday and killed four men of the family in front of the women and children, a police spokesman said. Other killings Monday included the assassination of the local deputy chief of the Supreme Council party in Najaf.

In Baghdad, an American soldier on patrol was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade. Also, at least three bombs hit the predominantly Shiite Karrada district, killing at least one person.

"The resistance is doing the right thing," Uthman Abdullah, a taxi driver, said after the Karrada bombings. "They should never let the Shiites enjoy taking control of the country. The holy warriors should show them one black day after another. This is the only language that these people will understand."

Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and K.I. Ibrahim contributed to this report.


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 27, 2005
Iraq Vote Shows Sunnis Are Few in New Military
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 26 - An analysis of preliminary voting results released Monday from the Dec. 15 parliamentary election suggests that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni Arab participation in the political process, the Sunnis still have comparatively little representation in the Iraqi security forces.

The indication is troubling because Sunni Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Iraq's population, came out in greater numbers largely as a response to the recent domination of the government by Shiites and Kurds. In particular, Sunni Arabs say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.

American military commanders say that it is crucial to build an Iraqi Army representative of Iraq's ethnicity, and that the alternative is to risk the consequences of Shiite and Kurdish forces' trying on their own to pacify insurgent hotbeds dominated by Sunni Arab militants.

It has been suspected that Sunni Arabs are underrepresented in the new military and police. Election officials believe that a special tally from the Dec. 15 vote helps to detail the disparity, mostly because voting in Iraq has almost completely been along ethnic and sectarian divisions.

In the special tally - which the officials said overwhelmingly consisted of most of the ballots cast by security forces, but also included votes from hospital patients and prisoners - about 7 percent of the votes were cast for the three main Sunni Arab parties. Across the whole population, though, officials have estimated, Sunni Arab candidates won about 20 percent of the seats in the new Parliament.

Along the same lines, the tally also suggested that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen seemed to have a heavily disproportionate presence in the security forces.

The figures, which are preliminary, are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces. And it is impossible to know whether Sunni Arab soldiers and police officers turned out to vote to the same high degree as the overall Sunni population.

A spokesman for the American military command that oversees training of the Iraqi forces also said that while he did not know the security forces' ethnic mix, he believed that there were more Sunni troops than the election data suggest.

Yet the results provide some clues to the composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial but elusive factor in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat the mostly Sunni Arab insurgency. And the estimation seems to be a sign of how complete the reversal of fortune has been for Sunni Arabs, who dominated security forces under Saddam Hussein.

After a respite following the election, more than 70 Iraqis have been killed in the last four days, including more than 20 killed Monday in a string of ambushes and car bombings.

At least six car bombs detonated in Baghdad, killing five Iraqis. In Baquba, north of the capital, five policeman died in an early morning ambush. And a rocket-propelled grenade also killed an American soldier on patrol in the capital.

The voting data released Monday were just one sliver of preliminary results indicating that although Sunni Arabs will play a larger role in the new Parliament than they did in the interim government, where they were almost completely shut out, Shiites will once again dominate Parliament.

The Sunni Arabs have accused the Shiite-dominated government of widespread voting fraud and have demanded a new election. Sunnis, and some secular Shiites, have threatened to boycott the new government. But any chance of a large-scale election rerun has been all but ruled out. Officials from the independent electoral commission said Monday that they saw no reason for new elections - an opinion seconded by the chief United Nations election official here.

"We do think there might have been fraud in a few isolated places, but we don't see this widespread fraud people are talking about," Craig Jenness, head of the United Nations electoral assistance team in Iraq, said in an interview Monday evening.

"It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty credible given the circumstances," he said, adding, "There's nothing we see that would suggest a rerun is warranted."

Though more attention has been focused on the ethnic makeup of the government, the American military is very sensitive to the perception that the Iraqi forces have few Sunni Arabs, especially in the north, where Kurdish officials have made plain their desire to expand their territory into Sunni Arab and Turkmen regions. To many American commanders, a proportionate representation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish soldiers is vital to the Iraq's long-term stability and cohesion.

But on that score there still appears to be a way to go, according to the numbers from the special election tally. In that category, 45 percent of votes were cast for the main Kurdish slate of candidates, compared with the combined total of just 7 percent for the three main Sunni Arab political parties. The principal Shiite political alliance received 30 percent of the votes in the category.

The heavily disproportionate votes for the Kurds and the slight showing for the Sunnis primarily reflected their relative numbers in the security forces, election officials here said.

By contrast, while final election results will not be available for another week, Iraqi news reports have estimated that Kurds and Sunni Arabs each received perhaps 20 percent of the overall national vote for seats in Parliament. The main Shiite political alliance is expected to take slightly less than 50 percent of the seats. Those estimates more closely follow Iraq's demographic makeup.

Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, a spokesman for the military command that oversees training of Iraqi forces, said some Iraqi soldiers voted near their homes on Dec. 15 and would not have been included in the special tally, though he said he did not know whether those included a disproportionate number of soldiers from any one ethnic group.

Colonel Wellman said he did not have detailed estimates of the ethnic composition of the Iraqi military, though he said Sunni Arab representation "clearly lags." He also emphasized the efforts being made to recruit Sunni soldiers, including more than 4,000 who have been signed up in the last six months.

"One of the biggest goals of this enterprise is to build an army that reflects the national makeup of Iraq and deploys those units away from their home," he said. "There are great efforts to bring Sunnis into the fold and balance out the army as much as possible."

In addition to the special tally of votes from the military, prisons and hospitals, the Iraqi election commission also released separate figures showing that Iraqis living abroad voted evenly for the main Kurdish and Shiite coalitions, with each receiving 30 percent of the overseas vote. The figures reflected the high number of expatriates who fled Mr. Hussein's rule, whose government and military was dominated by and favored Sunni Arabs.

In the overseas tally, the three main Sunni Arab parties combined received about 7.5 percent of the vote. The slate of candidates backed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baathist, received 12 percent.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Mona Mahmoud, Khalid al-Ansary and Omar al-Neami.



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http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=8311


December 27, 2005
US-Shi'ite Struggle Could Spin Out of Control

by Gareth Porter
The George W. Bush administration has embarked on a new effort to pressure Iraq's militant Shi'ite party leaders to give up their control over internal security affairs that could lead the Shi'ites to reconsider their reliance on U.S. troops.

The looming confrontation is the result of U.S. concerns about the takeover of the Interior Ministry by Shi'ites with close ties to Iran, as well as the impact of officially sanctioned sectarian violence against Sunnis who support the insurgency. The Shi'ite leaders, however, appear determined to hold onto the state's organs of repression as a guarantee against restoration of a Ba'athist regime.

The new turn in U.S. policy came in mid-November, when the administration decided to confront Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari publicly over the torture houses being run by Shi'ite officials in the Ministry of Interior at various locations in Baghdad.

The decision was not the result of a new revelation, because the U.S military command and U.S. embassy had known about such torture houses for months, from reporting by U.S. military officers.

U.S. Army doctor Maj. R. John Stukey told the Christian Science Monitor that he and U.S. military police had visited Interior Ministry detention facilities and had reported evidence of torture and other mistreatment at those facilities up through the chain of command before he left Baghdad in June. Washington had nevertheless remained silent about the issue.

However, the U.S. military raided an Interior Ministry's detention center in the Baghdad suburb of Jadriya on Nov. 13, whereupon the U.S. embassy and U.S. command issued an unusual joint statement calling the torture center "totally unacceptable."

The embassy then used the torture house revelation to issue a public demand that the militant Shi'ite parties give up their power over the key state security organs. On Nov. 17, the embassy said, "There must not be militia or sectarian control or direction of Iraqi Security Forces, facilities, or ministries."

Shi'ite leaders viewed these U.S. moves as part of an effort to reduce the majority controlled by the Shi'ite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) in the parliament and to increase the vote for former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite and former Ba'athist who has been a longtime collaborator with the Central Intelligence Agency.

As early as August, Prime Minister Jaafari and other leaders of the main Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), had passed the word to their party members that the United States was trying to paralyze the government in order to bring Allawi back to power in the December elections.

When Allawi was interim prime minister in 2004-2005, he battled with militant Shi'ite party leaders over their push for radical de-Ba'athification and secret Iranian financing of SCIRI and Dawa candidates and the Iranian-trained Badr paramilitary units. Before last January's elections, Allawi's defense minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, publicly referred to the Shi'ite United Iraqi Alliance slate as the "Iranian list."

The administration shared Allawi's views on Iranian covert involvement in Iraqi politics but chose not to comment explicitly about it in public, sparing the new Shi'ite government embarrassment. Referring to Iran-Iraq relations last May, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice deplored "undue influence in the country through means that are not transparent."

Shortly before the recent parliamentary election, however, a U.S. official raised the issue explicitly on the record for the first time. Gen. George W. Casey complained in an interview with Knight-Ridder that the Iranians were "putting millions of dollars into the South to influence elections … funded primarily through their charity organizations and also Badr and some of these political parties."

Casey also referred to members of the Badr militia, who have entered the Interior Ministry units and the military in large numbers, as "their guys."

As the ballots were being cast on Dec. 15, Khalilzad indicated clearly that the United States wanted much broader power sharing in the next government. "Since no single party will have a majority, there will be a need for a very broad-based coalition," he said.

The embassy apparently hoped that the UIA would get fewer seats and Allawi more seats in the next parliament, increasing the pressure on the Shi'ite parties to negotiate a broad coalition government including both Allawi and Sunni representatives.

On Dec. 19, Khalilzad again signaled the U.S. determination to force the SCIRI leadership to yield control over the security organs of the government. "You can't have someone who is regarded as sectarian as minister of the interior," he said.

The initial returns indicated a stronger showing for the UIA than the embassy had expected, and a weaker showing for Allawi than in the January elections. Allawi now appears to be eliminated from negotiations on high-level jobs in the administration.

Nevertheless, Khalilzad still has the Kurdish card to play. The UIA will need the support of the Kurds to form a new government, and the Kurds, whose military alliance with the United States is central to their political strategy, have now signaled that they will demand the inclusion of Sunni representatives in the government.

At a meeting with Khalilzad on Sunday, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said, "Without the Sunni parties there will be no consensus government … [and] without consensus government there will be no unity, there will be no peace." Kurdish negotiators are also likely to insist that the Shi'ites give up control over the Interior Ministry.

The last time the UIA was in the process of trying to form a government after the first parliamentary election in January, Kurdish demands played a major role in delaying the formation of the new government for three months. That Kurdish negotiating strategy dovetailed with U.S. efforts to exert pressure on Shi'ite leaders to allow former Ba'athist officers to keep leading positions in the military and Ministry of Interior.

When the SCIRI leadership refused to back down on control over the Interior Ministry, the Bush administration relented rather than create a political crisis. This time, however, the stakes are higher. If sectarian violence continues to worsen, the White House risks a collapse of political support at home. And the administration has already warned publicly that it will not accept a continuation of the status quo.

For Shi'ite party leaders, U.S. pressure to share state power with secular or Sunni representatives – especially on internal security – touches a raw nerve. They regard control over the organs of state repression as the key to maintaining a Shi'ite regime in power.

If Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and other SCIRI leaders feel they have to choose between relying on U.S. military protection and the security of their regime, they are likely to choose the latter. They could counter U.S. pressures by warning they will demand a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops if the United States continues to interfere in such politically sensitive matters.

That would not be an entirely idle threat. Last October, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was reported by associates to be considering such a demand. The implication of calling for a relatively rapid U.S. withdrawal would be that the Shi'ite leaders would turn to Iran for overt financial and even military assistance, in line with their fundamental foreign policy orientation.

The Bush administration's strategy of pressure on Shi'ite leaders over the issue of control over state security organs thus has the potential to spin out of control and cause another policy disaster in Iraq and the entire Middle East.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis8.html


Bush Promises Victory in Iraq – But for Whom?
by Eric Margolis


Victory or defeat! So proclaimed President George W. Bush in his TV speech about Iraq last night.

Those who oppose Bush’s continued, $6.5 billion monthly war in Iraq are "defeatists." Withdrawal from Iraq would "damage US credibility around the world," warned the self-proclaimed "war president."

What Bush is really worried about, of course, is his own credibility. He has repeatedly shown he cares nothing about what the rest of the world thinks about the US. Why start now?

It’s too bad George W. Bush evaded regular military service by hiding out in the Texas Air National Guard during war time. If Bush had any real military experience, he and his mentor, Dick Cheney, who was "too busy" to do his military service during Vietnam, might have learned one of the basic laws of military science: only fools and megalomaniacs say "no retreat."

Retreat is as much a part of warfare as advance, and often an even more useful tactic. No general worth his stripes embarks on a battle or campaign without leaving open a secure line of retreat behind him. War is by nature uncertain and filled with nasty surprises.

The hallmark of a good commander is being able to quickly change plans when faced by unexpected adversity and withdraw, trading space for time, when his forces are in peril.

One of history’s greatest modern generals was Erich von Manstein who conducted a brilliant series of fighting withdrawals on the Eastern Front that are a classic of military art.

Two of the most egregious recent examples of the failure to retreat when military/political conditions demand it were Stalingrad and Kuwait. After the German Sixth Army was enveloped by vastly superior Soviet forces at Stalingrad in late 1942, Hitler refused his general’s pleas to break out. He thundered "no retreat" and accused his generals who urged a retreat to the west of "defeatism."

Hitler’s refusal to allow the Sixth Army to break out of encirclement and link up with advancing German forces condemned it to total destruction. Stalingrad marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich. Hitler, who was wounded three times in World War I, was a good soldier and understood strategy. He refused to allow his Sixth Army to retreat because he feared it would undermine his authority and aura of invincibility. A dictator cannot afford to lose face by retreating.

Saddam Hussein faced the same problem in Kuwait in 1990–1991. Saddam invaded the US protectorate after its rulers had gravely insulted Iraq by demanding its war widows be sent to Kuwait’s harems in lieu of billions in loans for the Iran-Iraq War that bankrupt Baghdad owed the Kuwaitis.

Facing certain destruction from the US-led coalition, Saddam wanted to withdraw but feared doing so would fatally undermine his authority and lead to a coup. So he sat transfixed, hoping the Soviets would somehow rescue him from the jaws of disaster. In the end, Saddam’s armies in Kuwait were destroyed and Iraq submitted to siege.

Fools and megalomaniacs don’t know when to retreat. Just as the distant oil fields of the Caucasus lured Hitler ever east into the wastes of southern Russia and destruction, so Iraq’s oil treasure continues to mesmerize Bush, Cheney & Co. They clearly do not understand, or will not face the fact, that the US cannot afford to keep spending $6.5 billion a month on Iraq and $1 billion monthly in Afghanistan to prop up the little puppet regimes they have created.

The US Army and Marine Corps are being relentlessly ground down in both theaters, and now face not only a crisis of personnel replacements but the massive deterioration of their equipment, from boots to tanks, which is not being replaced.

Democracies are no good at waging long-term guerilla wars. Vietnam showed this to French and Americans, Angola to South Africans, and Lebanon to Israelis.

A majority of Americans no longer believe all the lies about Iraq being pumped out by the Bush White House. They squirm with embarrassment while watching Condoleezza Rice lie through her teeth to Europeans by claiming the US does not kidnap or torture suspects. And they look with concern at their phones, never sure these days of what anonymous federal agency or military group is bugging their calls.

Bush’s latest untruths – that the recent election in Iraq will defeat the Sunni resistance and lead to lasting democracy – are about as believable as Bill Clinton’s prevarications about his sex life.

Perhaps the most galling and persistent of Bush’s lies is the one he repeated last night: that failure to prove Saddam was a threat to world civilization was due to "wrong intelligence." Not wrong. No way. This column maintained for years Iraq had no strategic weapons and no links with al-Qaida. So did many veteran CIA officers. We looked at the available evidence and drew the only logical conclusion.

It was not "wrong intelligence." War against Iraq was the product of a farrago of lies, distortions and disinformation provided by foreign "allies" and a domestic fifth column eager for the US to destroy Iraq, both eagerly abetted by the mainstream US media. Bush’s claims Iraq was behind 9/11 or about to attack the US with germ weapons released by drones were as lurid and outrageous as Dr. Goebbel’s claims in 1939 that Poland was about to invade Germany. The president who made these ludicrous claims now asks us to believe him about Iraq.

Iraq’s US-engineered elections will more firmly entrench the Iranian-influenced Shia majority in power, marginalize the Sunnis and leave the Kurds virtually independent in all but name, and accelerate the dangerous ethnic division of Iraq.

In spite of the current election, Iraq remains a US colony. Washington controls Iraq’s police, inept sepoy army, and assorted death squads – all of whom serve for money, not out of commitment to the government. The US controls Iraq’s total finances. US firms have been given the right to pump and export Iraq’s oil – 90% of its national income.

The US controls Iraq’s secret police and all communications. American money fuels Iraq’s political parties and almost all of Iraq’s so-called media. Behind every Iraqi minister discreetly stands a group of US "advisors." Not since the Soviets occupied Afghanistan have we seen such a reversion to classical colonialism.

The real poll that counts in Iraq is a recent BBC poll that revealed that 65% of all Iraqis – Shia, Sunnis and Kurds – want the US out of Iraq.

Now, we learn in another stinging irony, that the US Army in Iraq has depleted its reserves of M-16 rifle ammo and is currently buying munitions from Israel. One may imagine the reaction in the Muslim World when it is learned that the US is using Israeli bullets to kill Iraqis.

Speaking of the Soviets, this column has been noting for a long time how much the Bush Administration has come to resemble the Soviet Union of Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. The Taoists say, "you become what you hate."

Look at Bush’s foreign wars "to advance the cause of democracy" (Brezhnev called his aggressions "the Soviet Union’s internationalist duty); the gelding of the US media into Soviet-style sycophants; the expansion of political policing in the old USSR and in the new USA; the exhortations to nationalist flag waving and anti-Islamic racism in both empires.

Bush’s speech last night declaring "defeatism" a major new sin was a final ironic touch. What could be more Soviet or Red Chinese-sounding than this piece of opprobrium.

How long will it be before "defeatism" becomes a federal crime under the sinister Patriot Act?

December 26, 2005

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website.

Poland to Keep Troops in Iraq, Dropping Pullout Plan Bloomberg
Poland's two-month-old government plans to keep soldiers in Iraq next year, countering the previous cabinet's pledge to pull out of the US-led operation by this week. The government asked Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the head of the army, to approve the plan to prolong the eastern European country's military mission in Iraq. "Our plan is determined by the United Nations prolonging its mission in Iraq and requests from the Iraqi government, which asked us to keep our forces there longer,'' Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said at a press conference in Warsaw.
Poland to keep troops in Iraq Aljazeera.net
Poland set to keep troops in Iraq MSNBC
Khaleej Times - Malaysia Star - BBC News - Forbes - all 81 related »

Violence increases after election lull Bangkok Post
Baghdad _ Violence increased across Iraq after a period of relative quiet following the Dec 15 parliamentary elections, with at least two dozen people _ including a US soldier _ killed in shootings and bombings mostly targeting the Shi'ite-dominated security services. Officials blamed the surge in violence Monday on insurgent efforts to deepen the political turmoil surrounding the contested vote. Preliminary figures _ including some returns released Monday from ballots cast early by expatriate Iraqis and some voters inside Iraq _ have given a big lead to the religious Shi'ite bloc that controls the current interim government. The violence came as three opposition groups threatened a wave of protests and civil disobedience if fraud charges are not properly investigated. The warning came from the secular Iraqi National List, headed by former Shi'ite prime minister Ayad Allawi, and two Sunni Arab groups.
Iraqi leaders to meet after vote results friction ABC News
Shi'ites, Kurds agree to open Iraqi govt Sydney Morning Herald
Detroit Free Press - Reuters - Mail & Guardian Online - Reuters AlertNet - all 166 related »

2 U.S. Soldiers Among 11 Killed In Continuing Violence:

Three dead bodies, bearing marks of torture and bullet wounds, were found in the Shu'ula district of the capital, police said. The victims were from Kalidiya, west of Falluja
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KAM733353.htm

Sunni supporters rally in Iraq :

More than 5,000 people, supporters of Sunni and secular parties, which contested Dec 15 polls marched through Baghdad on Tuesday (December 27), denouncing the vote as fraudulent.
http://tinyurl.com/amenu


In case you missed it:

Sunnis on hit list:

A Shi'ite militia has drawn up plans to kill prominent Sunni leaders and eliminate a nascent Sunni political party, according to a document obtained by Asia Times Online from a person close to the Iraqi resistance.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL17Ak01.html


U.S. Exit Strategy in Iraq: Hand Quagmire to Iran:

The U.S. exit strategy is similar to the one used by the French to drag the Americans into Vietnam before they left. In this way Shiite Iran will become a "partner in the occupation of Iraq" and inevitably find itself head-to-head with the Sunni-led national Iraqi resistance.
http://tinyurl.com/9tu6p


Coalition partners pull out from Iraq:

The US coalition in Iraq saw its size dwindle today as Ukraine and Bulgaria said all of their troops had left the country while Poland said it would remain, but reduce its number of troops by 600 next year.
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?...516&p=y67z4zzzz

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U.N. Official: Iraqi Elections Credible By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer
46 minutes ago



A United Nations official said Wednesday that Iraq's recent elections were credible and there was no justification for a rerun of the vote that gave a strong lead to the Shiite religious bloc dominating the current government.

In violence Wednesday, an inmate in a Baghdad prison grabbed an assault rifle from a guard and opened fire, killing eight people, police said. One American soldier was injured in the attempted prison break, the U.S. military said.

The Shiite bloc held talks with Kurdish leaders and said preparations were being made to choose a candidate for prime minister — who they have said must come from their governing United Iraqi Alliance.

"We set up the mechanism to elect the new prime minister but have not started it yet. Any member of the Alliance has the right to be nominated for that post," Alliance leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim told the Kurdish parliament.

Alliance officials have indicated likely candidates were current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who heads the Islamic Dawa party, and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who belongs to the other main Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Al-Hakim also discussed who should get the top 12 government jobs, as thousands of Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites protested what they say was a tainted vote.

Two Sunni Arab groups and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National List have threatened a wave of protests and civil disobedience if fraud charges are not properly investigated.

In another of continuing political demonstrations across the country, more than 4,000 people rallied Wednesday in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, in favor of the major Sunni Arab party, the Iraqi Accordance Front. Demonstrators carried banners say "We refuse the election forgery."

The United Nations official, Craig Jenness, said at a news conference organized by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq that the U.N.-led international election assistance team found the elections to be credible and transparent. "Turnout was high and the day was largely peaceful, all communities participated."

His statement and the negotiations between Iraqi factions come at a critical time, with the United States placing high hopes on forming a broad-based coalition government that will provide the fledgling democracy with the stability and security it needs to allow American troops to begin returning home.

Iraqi officials said they had found some instances of fraud that were enough to cancel the results in that place, but not to hold a rerun. There were more than 1,500 complaints made about the elections, with about 50 of them considered serious enough to possibly result in the cancellation of results in some places.

"After studying all the complaints, and after the manual and electronic audit of samples of ballot boxes in the provinces, the electoral commission will announce within the next few days some decisions about canceling the results in stations where fraud was found," said Abdul Hussein Hendawi, an elections official.

He said fraud had been discovered in the provinces of Baghdad, Irbil, Ninevah, Kirkuk, Anbar and Diyala.

Jenness said the number of complaints was less than one in every 7,000 voters. About 70 percent of Iraq's 15 million voters took part in the elections. He added that the U.N. saw no reason to hold a new ballot.

"Complaints must be adjudicated fairly, but we in the United Nations see no justification in calls for a rerun of any election," he said.

In Wednesday's prison escape attempt, the prisoner fired indiscriminately after grabbing an AK-47, killing four guards and four inmates, said Iraqi army Brig. Gen. Jalil al-Mehamadawi. The Interior Ministry said one guard and three prisoners were wounded.

The U.S. military's account was slightly different. A statement by Sgt. Keith Robinson said "it was reported that 16 prisoners attempted to escape the facility after first storming the armory and obtaining an undetermined number of weapons." U.S. forces are often stationed alongside Iraqis in prisons.

Robinson said in addition to the eight deaths that one U.S. soldier and five prisoners were injured, but the U.S. statement did not mention the assault rifle.

Guards overtook the gunman and restrained him, al-Mehamadawi said. The prison was a Justice Ministry facility that also housed foreigners, officials said.

Police in Karbala said 31 bodies had been unearthed in a mass grave discovered this week that is believed to date back to a 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein. Officials hoped to identify the bodies through DNA testing.

The negotiations between the majority Shiites and Kurds were seen as part of an effort to force the main Sunni Arab organizations to come to the bargaining table. All groups have begun jockeying for position in the new government, and the protests are widely considered to be part of an attempt by Sunni Arabs to maximize their position.

Sunni Arabs formed the backbone of Saddam's government, and the Bush administration hopes to pull them away from the insurgency that has ravaged the country with daily bloodshed.

Preliminary results from the Dec. 15 vote have given the United Iraqi Alliance a big lead, but one unlikely to allow it to govern without forming a coalition with other groups. Final results are expected early next month, but the Shiite religious bloc may win about 130 seats in the 275-member parliament — short of the 184 seats needed to avoid a coalition with other parties.

___

Associated Press reporters Jason Straziuso in Baghdad and Yahya Barzanji in Irbil contributed to this report.



Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

UN Rejects Sunni Challenges to Iraqi Election Results New York Times
A United Nations official today announced publicly for the first time that he believed the results of the Dec. 15 Iraqi parliamentary election appeared valid, and he said demands by some groups for a new vote were unjustified. The announcement, made at a news conference in Baghdad, is bound to disappoint some Sunni Arab political parties, which had claimed that ballot-box stuffing and other fraud distorted the election results. Although it does not have the power to overturn results of the election, the United Nations figured prominently in organizing the vote, and its public show of support bolstered Iraqi authorities' claims that the vote was legitimate. "The U.N. is of the view that these elections were transparent and credible," said the official, Craig Jenness, who led the agency's election coordination effort here. He added that although all complaints must be weighed thoroughly, "we at the U.N. see no justification in calls for a re-run of the elections." Several Sunni parties, as well as some secular groups, have called for the authorities to hold a new vote, but that demand now looks unlikely to be met. Abdul Hussein al-Hindawi, an electoral commission board member, read a statement at the conference that said the commission planned on canceling some ballots in some areas, but that it had all but ruled out holding a new vote because it had not found evidence of widespread forgery. "There are individual violations without wide, systematic forgery operations," Mr. Hindawi said. Even as the Iraqi authorities appeared to be closing the door on complaints of fraud, Sunni Arab parties continued to press their demands. Demonstrations that have been organized to protest the results of the election over the past week continued today, with a large crowd filling an area near the government building in Samarra, north of Baghdad, and protesters gathering in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. Dhafir al-Ani, the spokesman for the main Sunni alliance, the Iraqi Consensus Front, which has been vocal in its criticism of the results, said that his group rejected the conclusion put forth by Mr. Jenness, and that they would continue to ask for a new vote. "Several international workers sitting inside the Green Zone are not able to evaluate the election matter," he said by telephone today. "We still believe that huge fraud happened in the Iraqi election and it completely changed the results." Mr. Jenness said the United Nations team that assisted the election was made up of 50 international experts. The vote was also monitored by 120,000 observers, he said. Mr. Hindawi said that the commission would cancel forged ballots in polling stations in Baghdad, the northern cities of Erbil, Kirkuk, and the provinces of Anbar in the west, Nineveh in the north and Diyala in central Iraq. In addition, two teams of investigators are reviewing results in the southern cities of Babel and Basra. The results of the ballot reviews are expected to be announced within the next few days, Mr. Hindawi said. In Baghdad today, an inmate in a high-security prison in the Kadhimiya neighborhood grabbed an AK-47 from a guard during a routine morning outing, shot him dead, and began freeing other prisoners, including a citizen of Saudi Arabia, officials said. Iraqi solders eventually quelled the revolt, which began at around 6 a.m., said Brig. Gen. Jaleel Khalaf, a commander who was among the forces. About 16 prisoners were involved in the revolt, according to a statement from the American military, which participated in bringing the incident under control, and all of them were accounted for. The prison holds about 215 high-security inmates and is located within an Iraqi Army base. In all, nine people, including four prisoners, an interpreter and four prison guards, were killed. One American soldier and five prisoners were injured, the military said. The military also reported the death of an American marine, who was killed by small-arms fire in Khalidiya in the volatile western province of Anbar on Dec. 26. In Dhibai, a village about 40 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen killed two soldiers and wounded seven in an ambush on an Iraqi army patrol on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Insurgents first struck the patrol with a roadside bomb, and then fired on the soldiers. The election developments came as Shiite and Kurdish leaders met in northern Iraq to discuss forming a government that would include representatives from all of Iraq's religious and ethnic groups. Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Shiite coalition that is expected to capture the largest share of votes that were cast in the election, met with Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party, and said that he had held "preliminary consultations" on the formation of a government but that talks were still in the very early stages. He indicated that the Sunnis were not yet involved. "We need to evaluate the previous alliance and study its weaknesses and strengths," Mr. Hakim said at a news conference with Mr. Barzani, The Associated Press reported from the city of Erbil in the Kurdish enclave. "Then we will try to include the others."
Eight killed in attempted Iraqi prison break International Herald Tribune
UN Official Says Iraq Vote Should Stand Forbes
Voice of America - Christian Science Monitor - San Francisco Chronicle - CBC News - all 1,762 related »

Kurds plan to invade South

By Tom Lasseter

Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11397.htm

20 killed during failed jailbreak: Twenty Iraqi detainees have been killed attempting to break out of a prison in the Baghdad district of Kadhamiyah.
http://tinyurl.com/b24sm

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16 Killed In Continuing Violence:

Four inmates and five security personnel were killed in a shootout at a Baghdad high-security jail after at least one prisoner grabbed a weapon and opened fire
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MOU851127.htm

===
U.S. Bombs Kill Three Civilians Including 12 Year Old Girl:

At midnight Tuesday, U.S. warplanes launched an air raid killing three Iraqis in Al-Dolouieya, 90 kilometres north of Baghdad, a police source said. Police captain Yassine Khalaf told dpa that an Iraqi and his two daughters, one aged 12, were killed when their house was destroyed by U.S. warplanes.
http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=75163

===
U.S. army patrol kills 2 Iraqi civilians :

In al-Khalidiya, 80 kilometres west of Baghdad, a U.S. army patrol opened fire on an approaching vehicle Wednesday killing two Iraqi civilians and critically wounding two others, a police source said.
http://tinyurl.com/duw7h

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Many Iraqi soldiers see a civil war on the horizon:

"I see Iraq gradually becoming three regions that will one day become independent," said Jafar Mustafir, a close adviser to Iraq's Kurdish interim president, Jalal Talabani, and the deputy head of Peshmerga for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two major Kurdish parties. "I see us moving toward the end of Iraq."
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgere...ld/13495252.htm

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Israel Ex-commandos Training Kurds in North Iraq:

Report: Dozens of former Israeli commandos have been training Kurdish security forces in northern Iraq, supplying them with equipment worth millions of dollars, Yedioth Aharonot newspaper reported
http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/20...article05.shtml

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In case you missed it:

SEYMOUR M. HERSH: PLAN B:

Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that America had lost in Iraq; according to an American close to Barak, he said that Israel “had learned that there’s no way to win an occupation.” The only issue, Barak told Cheney, “was choosing the size of your humiliation.”
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040628fa_fact

===
Freed German hostage says Iraq captors not criminals :

A former German hostage who spent 24 days in the hands of unknown captors in Iraq said her kidnappers were not criminals and had demanded humanitarian aid for Sunni Arab regions.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051226/wl_mi...qgermanyhostage

===
Propaganda:

Pro-War Group Takes to the Airwaves:

Newly found Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax and mustard gas, and had "extensive ties" to al Qaeda. The discoveries are being covered up by those "willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions."
http://tinyurl.com/72rm9

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1227-22.htm


Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2005 by the Boston Globe
How Will the Iraq War End?
by H.D.S. Greenway

On one level, of course, there is no comparison between America's lost war in Vietnam and the current enterprise in Iraq. After all, Vietnam is in Southeast Asia and Iraq is the Middle East. That conflict was fought in rain forests, this one in desert towns. One was fought by draftees, this one by a volunteer army. The list goes on.

Yet, although the Bush administration takes pains to deny it, the comparison keeps creeping into the national conversation, and the most obvious link is the word ''quagmire." For the dwindling band of reporters who covered the war in Vietnam, a trip to Baghdad cannot help but bring forth ghosts.

America fought in Vietnam to contain communism. In this war the reasons for fighting keep shifting, but the central idea seems to have been to create a friendly democracy in the heart of the oil-producing Middle East that could transform the region by example.

Forty years ago the ''best and the brightest," as David Halberstam called them, got us into Vietnam to prevent other neighboring countries from falling like dominoes, or so the theory went. The best and the brightest this time around believed in a domino theory in reverse -- the transformative power of democracy. Lots of talk about an ''Arab Spring" by prowar professors is beginning to sound a little hollow, however.

Both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice. Neither Saddam Hussein nor Ho Chi Minh threatened the United States directly, but in both cases our leaders in Washington took the road to intervention to further perceived American interests. In Vietnam, however, there really was a communist threat, while in Iraq, Islamic extremism was not a problem before we got there, nor did Saddam Hussein possess the means to harm us.

In Vietnam then and in Iraq now, the administration finds itself engaged in a war it is unable to win and reluctant to lose. The American people are walking away from this war, as they did in Vietnam, and the Bush administration knows that staying the course is not a long-term option. The recently announced troop drawdown is a reflection of this domestic pressure, not conditions in Iraq.

But Bush today, as did Lyndon Johnson before him, vows to fight on until victory, and some of the same ridiculous rhetoric prevails -- such as that we are fighting them there so we won't have to fight them at home. In Iraq, war is actually helping Al Qaeda to recruit terrorists to one day attack us at home.

Both Vietnam and Iraq saw monumental miscalculations on the part of our war leaders. Hubris played a big role in both. It seemed inconceivable to both Johnson's and George W. Bush's defense departments that these weak opponents could stand up to America's modern arms. In both cases it was thought that the Americans could prevail quickly and go home.

As Richard Nixon's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, recently wrote: ''Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception." To deception, add willful self-deception as well. For in both wars there was a tendency to ignore those who could tell our government about what Vietnam and Iraq were about. Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, would confess years later that he didn't know anything about Vietnamese culture and history, but as far as I know he hasn't confessed that he went out of his way to ignore people who could have informed him as to the difficulties ahead.

Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way to ignore the advice of those who knew something about Iraq. In both cases any information that would get in the way of doctrine was unsought and unheard.

America's former viceroy, Paul Bremmer, and his young ideologues ran Iraq in blissful ignorance. I am told that making sure that there was no room for abortion in Iraq's Constitution was a goal -- likewise a flat tax for Iraq. John Negroponte's team would later call Bremmer's people ''the illusionists."

Consider the author of ''The Assassins' Gate," George Packer's account of briefings in Baghdad: Daily press conferences ''about the coalition's intentions toward the rebels that were usually at odds with the facts, on occasion flatly untrue, and often in direct contradiction to statements made a day or a week earlier. . ." Packer might have been describing the ''5 o'clock follies" briefings in Saigon.

Likewise, in Saigon of old, there were bright young people working long and hard hours to have the Vietnamese do things in the American way totally removed from the reality of the country around them.

That being said, however, compared to Iraq there were quite a few Vietnamese speakers among the Americans who got themselves out and about in the countryside in Vietnam. In comparison, Americans in Iraq live in near total isolation with few Arab speakers and very little contact with Iraqis outside their fortified compounds. The civilian theorists and intellectuals that came to power with George W. Bush, and promoted this war, had almost to a man no military experience. They had ''other priorities" than to fight for their country, as Vice President Cheney so famously put it.

Although President Bush is finally admitting to some problems in Iraq, Washington's dreary drip of propaganda has the same Vietnam-era ring. The famous ''light at the end of the tunnel" of the Vietnam War is reflected in all the overly optimistic statements from the Bush White House about the Iraq insurgency's bitter-enders and last gasps.

Today the training of an Iraqi Army is being pushed at a frantic pace so that we can withdraw, much in the same way President Nixon's ''Vietnamization" was supposed to prop up Vietnam so that we could bring our armies home.

It is not that there is no progress being made in Iraq. There is. But the question is, as it was in Vietnam: What does this progress mean for our ultimate goals? In Vietnam it became all to clear that no matter how many wells we dug or schools we built, there would be Vietnamese who might drink from the wells and accept the schools, but remain adamantly opposed to Americans in their country.

The same strikes me as true in Iraq. It is perfectly logical for an Iraqi to have opposed Saddam yesterday and oppose us today. As nationalism became our adversary in Vietnam, more so than communism, so is nationalism in Iraq growing against us.

US troops, with their reliance on fire power, caused great destruction and loss of civilian life in both wars. The Nixon administration also agonized about how atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam would hurt the war effort, and how the information could be contained. The Bush administration's handling of the Abu Ghraib horrors are hauntingly similar.

Melvin Laird wrote that, in Vietnam, ''elections were choreographed by the United States to empower corrupt, selfish men who were no more than dictators in the garb of statesmen." It may be too early to make that same judgment in Iraq, but it is clear that too many Iraqi politicians are cast in the same mold as were our Saigon politicians.

And that old chimera the ''body count," which the Americans first avoided in Iraq, is creeping back into usage -- as if the number of insurgents we killed today had any bearing on whether we are actually winning the war.

Likewise the search-and-destroy missions that General William Westmoreland employed in Vietnam seem to be in vogue today in Iraq. But then as now, the insurgents melt away before our armies and come back again when we have passed on. And somehow they always seem to know when we are coming.

It was interesting for someone like me who spent years in Vietnam to meet even US generals in Iraq who are too young to have fought in Southeast Asia. But then as now, it is clear that this protracted war is putting tremendous strain on the US Army. It was something that General Creighton Abrams worried about aloud to me in Saigon, and it worries our military commanders today. It took years for the US Army to recover from Vietnam, and it will take years for it to recover from the strains put upon it in Iraq. But the most haunting parallel to me is that it will be possible to win every battle in Iraq and yet lose the war.

US involvement in Iraq will not end with American helicopters flying from the roof of the embassy. But it may end badly with Iraq split among ethnic and sectarian warlords, empowering those who wish America ill -- destabilizing the Middle East rather than transforming it.

Or Iraq could emerge united with some kind of representational government. But ultimately, all that will be up to the Iraqis, not the Americans, who do not, and cannot, control events. Once again, as in Vietnam, we are learning the limits of American power.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© 2005 The Boston Globe

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 29, 2005
Sunnis and Secular Groups Demand Review of Iraq's Election
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:32 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Sunni Arab and secular groups refused Thursday to open discussions with the Shiite religious bloc leading in Iraq's parliamentary elections until a full review of the contested results is carried out.

Their refusal could deepen the political turmoil following a U.N. observer's endorsement of Iraq's Dec. 15 elections. The official said the results were credible and that the results should stand.

''We are not taking part in discussions,'' said Nasser al-Ani, a senior official in the main Sunni Arab coalition -- the Iraqi Accordance Front.

Preliminary results from the vote have given the governing Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, a big lead -- but one which still would require forming a coalition with other groups. Al-Ani told The Associated Press that his political group favored participating in broad-based coalition government, but would not begin contacts ''until we get a clear picture about the results of the investigation.''

Mehedi al-Hafidh, a senior member of the secular Iraqi National List headed by former Shiite Premier Ayad Allawi, raised similar concerns.

''We confirm that we are not part of this process of consultations to form a new government,'' al-Hafidh told The AP.

The Bush administration and many Iraqi officials hope the elections will lead to a broad-based government that will include minority Sunni Arabs as well as secular Shiites such as Allawi, and allow for a drawdown in U.S. and coalition forces. On Thursday, Polish President Lech Kaczynski approved extending the country's military mission in Iraq for another year, the country's prime minister said.

''The issue is closed and taken care of,'' Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told all-news station TVN24.

Marcinkiewicz's government requested Tuesday that Kaczynski reverse plans by the previous government to bring home troops serving with the U.S.-led coalition in early 2006.

The U.N. endorsement came on Wednesday after opposition groups demanded international intervention and an independent review of more than 1,500 complaints about irregularities.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq renewed an invitation Thursday for international organizations and local political representatives to review the Dec. 15 poll. An official for the commission, Safwat Rashid, said they could ''evaluate what happened during the elections and what's going on now. We are highly confident that we did our job properly and we have nothing to hide.''

In violence Thursday, gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite family near Latifiyah, a Sunni Arab-dominated town about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Police Capt. Hussein Shamil said the men were taken from their homes, packed into a minivan and shot. No further details were available.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt on a street near the Interior Ministry, killing one police officer and wounding four, police said. Gunmen in Baghdad assassinated an Iraqi driver working with a French company, police Capt. Qassem Hussein said, adding that a university student in northwestern Baghdad was killed in a drive-by shooting.

U.S. airstrikes launched by two F-16 fighter jets in Kirkuk province killed 10 insurgents on Tuesday, the military said Thursday.

The military said the pilots saw three men planting roadside bombs. The pilots killed the three and seven others with them after dropping two 500-pound, laser guided bombs, the military said.

Also Thursday, a spokesman for Iraq's oil ministry said the country's largest oil refinery had suspended operations after insurgents threatened to kill drivers and blow up trucks that distribute its oil products across Iraq.

The 140,000 barrel-a-day refinery in the northern town of Beiji, about 155 miles north of Baghdad, suspended production Dec. 24 ''because drivers of trucks have received death threats from terrorists,'' Assem Jihad told Dow Jones Newswires.

The United Nations official, Craig Jenness, said his U.N.-led international election assistance team found the elections to be fair, remarks that represented crucial support for Iraqi election commission officials, who refused opposition demands to step down. They have said they had found some instances of fraud that were enough to cancel the results in some places but not to hold another vote in any district.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni candidate who has joined forces with Allawi to protest what they have described as rampant fraud, said he was angered by Jenness' remarks.

He said without elaboration that the U.N. should ''check our complaints and then express its views.''

Allawi said the election commission should also take into account political violence before the vote.

''There were assassinations. We had numbers of people on my slate who had been killed, shot and killed, and supporters who have been killed. There were attempts to assassinate others, and they were badly injured,'' Allawi told CNN.

Also Thursday, gunmen kidnapped a Lebanese engineer in Iraq, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said. The ministry's statement gave no other details on the disappearance of Camile Nassif Tannous, who works for the Schneider engineering firm.

Militants have kidnapped more than 240 foreigners and killed at least 39 of them during the past two years.

On Wednesday, militants released a video of a French engineer kidnapped in Iraq three weeks ago. Insurgents are also holding four Christian humanitarian workers -- two Canadians, a Briton and an American.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called Thursday for the immediate release of the engineer, Bernard Planche, emphasizing that France has no military presence there.

Militants who released the video of Planche denounced the ''illegal French presence'' in the country, the news channel Al-Arabiya reported. The video did not include any threats, demands or deadlines.

------

Associated Press reporters Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report from Baghdad.



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December 30, 2005
U.S. to Intensify Army Oversight of Iraqi Police
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 29 - American commanders are planning to increase significantly the number of soldiers advising Iraqi police commando units, in part to curtail abuse that the units are suspected of inflicting on Sunni Arabs, a senior commander in Iraq said Thursday.

Under the plan, which the officer said he expected would be formally approved in a few weeks, the number of advisers working with the Iraqi units would be greatly expanded. The advisers themselves would be under the command of American officers.

American advisers now accompany commando units as part of the vast effort to train and equip security forces to take over the fight against the insurgency and to maintain order.

But the number of advisers is relatively small: currently, groups of about 40 American soldiers each are attached to seven of the nine special Iraqi police brigades.

Under the new plan, which would be put in force in and around Baghdad, all the Iraqi units would get American advisers, and the advisers' total number would be increased by several hundred, said the commander, who spoke to reporters in Baghdad only on condition of anonymity.

In one case, he said, an entire American battalion, typically with more than 500 soldiers, will be attached to a particular Iraqi brigade.

The increase is seen as a way to exert firmer control over the commando units, which are suspected of carrying out widespread atrocities against civilians in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. Human rights groups here say the units may be guilty of murdering and torturing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Sunni Arab men of military age.

The conduct of the commandos has become a source of intense friction between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and American officials, who say the reports of the atrocities are jeopardizing the campaign to persuade Sunnis to stop supporting the insurgency.

The plan to increase the number of American advisers is a significant departure from the overall American strategy of giving the Iraqis the lead role in fighting the insurgency. Indeed, the allegations of atrocities arose only after Americans began to give the Iraqi units more freedom to act on their own.

Even as he talked about the increase in advisers, the officer confirmed details of a shift to fewer American troops covering more Iraqi ground.

The Fourth Infantry Division, which is now preparing to deploy in Baghdad and central Iraq, is being given a substantially larger piece of Iraqi territory than the unit it is replacing, and with fewer troops. The Americans are hoping that Iraqi units can pick up the slack; Iraqi forces operating more or less independently now are in charge of securing 60 percent of the capital.

Many of the Iraqi commando units are thought to be filled by gunmen drawn from the military wings of Shiite political parties, including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or Sciri, which forms part of the Shiite coalition that is expected to lead the next government. The Mahdi Army, a militia run by the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, is also believed to have hundreds of gunmen working in the Iraqi police and commando units.

As a result, the units, which are ostensibly under the control of the Interior Ministry, are thought to be all but indistinguishable from Sciri's militia, known as the Badr Brigade, and from the Mahdi Army.

American officials say it is unclear whom the units are taking orders from, the ministry or militia commanders. The minister of the interior, Bayan Jabr, is a senior member of the Badr Brigade.

Mr. Jabr is fighting the American plan to place more advisers in the Iraqi commando units, according to the senior American commander. "We'd know exactly what they are doing, and we'd have some more control," the commander said.

A spokesman for the American headquarters in charge of training in Iraq, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, confirmed that preparations for an increase in advisers were under way.

A similar plan is already in place with the Iraqi Army, whose soldiers have a reputation among Iraqis as being more humane than the commandos.

The police commando units and public order brigades, which together contain about 15,000 troops, are considered to be some of the most effective Iraqi fighters against the insurgency.

In contrast to conditions in the new Iraqi Army, American supervision of the commandos has been lax; some units, which include former members of the Iraqi Army, came together and began fighting the insurgency on their own, without formal American or Iraqi approval.

"The commandos and the public order brigades sort of grew like Topsy, very quickly, without much control, and without much training, but with lots of influence from the Ministry of the Interior and the Sciri-Badr organization," the American commander said. "The exact roles and responsibilities of those units is not clear to us."

Indeed, the commander painted a troubling picture of security in Baghdad, where some armed militias appear to act with the backing of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense.

"It is not easy to identify that some operation tonight was legitimately directed by somebody in the security organization of M.O.I. or M.O.D.," the commander said, "or whether it was some people in stolen uniforms, or somebody's posse or militia or projection cell who decided to attack someone's opposite number in some other tribe or neighborhood."

A police commando unit was thought to be responsible for running the secret underground prison raided by Americans in November. Nearly 170 Iraqis were found inside, some bearing signs of torture.

With that, the Americans vowed to clamp down on human rights abuses by the police and military and have since raided two more prisons, one in Baghdad and the other in Tal Afar. Inmates in both of those prisons showed signs of abuse, American officials said.

American commanders here say that such practices, while abhorrent in their own right, tend to provoke consequences almost precisely the opposite of what is desired. Rounding up young Sunni Arab men and killing them will only spur the growth of the insurgency, they say.

"You are making new enemies here," the American commander said. "You've got to be more moderate. You must follow the rule of law."

The commander also gave a snapshot of progress against the insurgency in and around Baghdad, and of the shifting role of American and Iraqi forces.

American soldiers in and around Baghdad are still being attacked an average of 28 times a day, and as many as 18 soldiers a month are being killed. Still, the number of suicide and car bombings has fallen sharply, from about 20 a week in April and May, to about 6 now.

The Third Infantry Division, whose 30,000 troops are deployed over 1,600 square miles around Baghdad, will soon be replaced by about 25,000 soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division, who will take over a much larger area. The Fourth Infantry, which is returning for its second tour in Iraq, will be responsible for the territory between Taji, north of Baghdad, all south to the Saudi border - a huge area including Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala.

Iraqi forces will be counted on to give more support to the Americans. Twelve Iraqi battalions are now responsible for their own territory inside Baghdad. As the Iraqi battalions take over in Baghdad, the commander said, the American units will be able to move to areas outside Baghdad.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

December 30, 2005
Monitor Group Says Team Will Review Voting Results
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 29 - An international elections monitoring group that gave a preliminary endorsement to Iraq's parliamentary vote two weeks ago has agreed to send observers back into Iraq to investigate allegations by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite parties that widespread vote-rigging tainted the results.

The International Mission for Iraqi Elections, a Jordan-based monitor, said it would dispatch two investigators from the League of Arab States and one from Canada and one from a European nation. The group previously said that based on early indications, the Dec. 15 election appeared to have "generally met international standards."

The move follows demands for new elections by two main opposition groups, the Sunni Arab coalition called the Iraqi Consensus Front and the Iraqi National List slate of candidates backed by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister. Iraqi elections officials and United Nations observers have rejected those demands, saying that while fraud occurred in some places, the ballot was generally transparent and credible.

Even though a United Nations team has backed the election, Secretary General Kofi Annan said late Thursday that sending in new monitors was important because "it is critical that those Iraqi groups who have complained about the conduct of the election are given a hearing." He said the new team "was not involved in the conduct of the elections" and could offer an "independent evaluation of these complaints."

The American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said the observers would arrive immediately, and he applauded what he called the willingness of Iraqi elections officials to "be as open as possible."

The move appeared to mollify Mr. Allawi, who urged the new monitors to investigate "acts of armed aggression against polling centers and members of the Iraqi National List and other lists, the prevention of citizens from casting their votes freely and the possibility of tampering with ballot boxes."

While the appointment of the new team was a victory for Mr. Allawi and the Sunni consensus party, both groups had signaled earlier on Thursday a new willingness to join negotiations to form a government after final vote tallies are released next week.

Both said they were not taking part in discussions with the ruling Shiite and Kurdish coalition, which continued on Thursday in Kurdistan. But each was careful to leave open the door for negotiations once the final vote is published in a few days.

Mahmoud al-Mashadani, a senior official in the Sunni slate, said his party has so far not accepted an invitation to participate in the talks but that a delegation may be dispatched soon. He said party officials planned to poll Sunni Arabs throughout Iraq about what steps to take next. The poll questions, Mr. Mashadani said, would include whether to participate in the political process, and if so, whether to do so as an opposition party or as part of the ruling coalition.

In an interview, Mr. Mashadani said Sunni leaders would support any political deal that "carried out the Consensus Front's ambitions."

Speaking on an Arab satellite television network, Mr. Allawi pointedly said that having further investigations into alleged voting fraud was not a condition for his group to participate in the political process. He said he hasn't been invited to participate in talks with Shiite and Kurdish leaders, but that, if asked, he would.

After the final tallies are released and complaints of wrongdoing are exhausted, Mr. Allawi added, "We think the time will come to talk about the formation of the government."

The political developments came amid continued heavy violence that included the massacre of a dozen family members in Latifiya, a dangerous town of mixed ethnicity south of Baghdad. The killers, dressed as Iraqi troops, took the men from their home and handcuffed and shot them in the back of the head, according to an Iraqi ministry of interior official.

In eastern Baghdad, an American soldier was killed when his vehicle was struck by a homemade bomb. And the United States military said that American warplanes used bombs to kill 10 men near Kirkuk after the men were spotted trying to plant homemade bombs.

At a briefing in the capital, Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, a military spokesman, said that total attacks now averaged roughly 75 per day, down from 90 a few months ago. But while the number of car bombings have diminished, he said, the rate of assassinations and insurgent small-arms attacks have been on the rise.

"This increase in small-arms fire attacks, the targeting of specific individuals and assassinations, those numbers have gone up," General Alston said. "This is just another attempt by the terrorists and foreign fighters to find another way to try to expose another vulnerability, another method to try to derail the Democratic process in Iraq."

A coalition of Shiites and Kurds controls the current government while largely excluding Sunni Arabs, who boycotted the last election. But the recent ballot saw huge Sunni Arab turnout, and the main Sunni parties are expected to win around one-fifth of the 275 seats in parliament. Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite closer to Sunni leaders on some issues than he is to the conservative ruling Shiite alliance, put together a slate expected to win around 10 percent of seats.

The dominant Shiite alliance is believed to have won slightly less than 50 percent of the seats, while the primary Kurdish slate won around 20 percent. It takes a two-thirds majority to select a prime minister and form a new government.


Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Khalid

al-Ansary and Omar al-Neami

contributed reporting for this article.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Pace: U.S. to Launch Phased Iraq Pullout
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

The U.S. will carry out planned withdrawals of American troops in Iraq only from regions where Iraqi forces can maintain security against the insurgents, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said Thursday.

Gen. Peter Pace said the current force of 160,000 would drop to below 138,000 by March, then U.S. commanders on the ground would work with the Iraqi government to determine the pace of future pullbacks in areas that have been secured by local security forces.

"The bottom line will be that the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police will gain in competence, that they will be able to take on more and more of the territory, whether or not there are still insurgents in that area," he said in an interview with a small group of reporters, including The Associated Press, aboard a military plane en route to the United Arab Emirates.

Amid congressional pressure and growing public opposition to the war, the Bush administration last week announced plans to reduce U.S. combat troops in Iraq to below the 138,000 level that prevailed most of this year.

The number of American forces in Iraq was raised to about 160,000 to provide extra security during the October referendum and December parliamentary elections, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said those extra troops would be leaving soon.

The exact size of the additional troops cuts has not been announced, but senior Pentagon officials have said the number of American troops in Iraq could drop to about 100,000 by next fall.

The decision where to cut troops "will be based on the Iraqi units in that area and the threat that exists in that area," Pace said earlier at a news conference in Bahrain.

The key, he stressed, "is the Iraqis' ability to control that area."

Pace has said American units will steadily hand off more security duties in the coming months to Iraqi forces and stressed the U.S. military needs to be flexible, but his comments offered a detailed glimpse of the administration's plans.

Pace's tour of the region came two weeks after Dec. 15 Iraqi parliament elections, which the United States considered a key step toward stability that could allow a drawdown of troops.

But violence has not stopped in Iraq. On Thursday, gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite Family south off Baghdad and a suicide bomber killed a policeman in the capital.

Complaints by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups of widespread fraud and intimidation during the vote also have threatened to spark a serious crisis that could set back hopes for a broad-based government that could have the legitimacy necessary to diminish the insurgency — a key part of any U.S. military exit strategy from Iraq.

Pace said efforts were under way to recruit Sunnis into the Iraqi security forces, "especially on the officers' side."

Pace, who was making his first official visit to the region since becoming the first Marine to be named chairman of the joint chiefs of staff three months ago, said the withdrawals of two brigades in the coming months would provide a test for the decision to pull out troops.

"We are going to have to watch how these drawdowns go to see if we have judged it properly," he said.

Pace, who was traveling with his wife, Lynne, and a group of entertainers to offer holiday cheer to U.S. troops in the region, began his weeklong trip Wednesday in Qatar. He also planned stops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the East African nation of Djibouti.




Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Palestinians in Iraq Pay the Cost of Being 'Saddam's People'

By Doug Struck

BAGHDAD -- For years, Saddam Hussein harbored a small population of Palestinians in Iraq, trotting them out to cheer whenever he went to war -- which he routinely justified as essential to Arab nationalism and the Palestinian cause.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Attacks Halt Production At Iraq's Largest Refinery

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Salih Saif Aldin

BAGHDAD, Dec. 29 -- Under a mounting insurgent offensive against Iraq's gasoline supply, the country's largest fuel refinery sat idle Thursday. Gas station owners in surrounding communities in northern Iraq hung up their dry nozzles. A police chief put out a no-patrol order to his men to conserve...

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Word Spreads in Iraq of Refinery Shutdown ABC News
A child watches Iraqi Shiites during Muslim Friday prayers at al-Sadr city in Baghdad, Preliminary results from the Dec. 15 elections have given the governing Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, a big lead, but one which still would require forming a coalition with other groups.
Review of the year: Iraq Independent
NO RE-RUN OF IRAQ ELECTION Special Broadcasting Service
Xinhua - Guardian Unlimited - BBC News - Kansas City Star - all 2,031 related »

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4A6...0FF775FDAC7.htm

Deadly explosions shake Baghdad
Friday 30 December 2005, 21:04 Makka Time, 18:04 GMT


Iraqi security personnel are a frequent target of bomb attacks
A car bomber and a mortar attack have killed five people and injured 10 others in two separate attacks in Baghdad, Aljazeera reports.


On Friday the car bomber blew himself up next to a police patrol in a commercial area on al-Kifah street, killing three Iraqi civilians and injuring two police officers, Lieutenant Ali Mitaab said.

The mortar landed in Baghdad's Shourja market and killed three Iraqi civilians and injured 21 others, police Lieutenant Thaer Mahmoud said. The market was closed because of the Friday holiday.

Also, two US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, one in the western city of Falluja and the other one in the capital, the military said on Friday.

A bomb killed one soldier on Friday in Baghdad when it struck his vehicle as it was on patrol in the southern part of the capital, an announcement said. The second soldier died on Thursday in Falluja after being wounded by small arms fire while on combat operations.

On Thursday, an international team agreed to assess Iraq's parliamentary elections, and on Friday leaders of Iraq's Sunni and secular communities gave a cautious welcome to the plan to bring foreign experts to Baghdad to review the results of this month's election, which they say was fraudulent.

They said they would cooperate with the experts and still hoped to join Shias and Kurds in a grand coalition government capable of healing Iraq's sectarian wounds and providing its people with the basic services they so badly lack.

Free and fair

"It is important that the Iraqi people have confidence in the election results and that the voting process, including the process for vote counting, is free and fair," Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador, said on Thursday.

The UN team was coming despite a UN observer's endorsement of the 15 December vote, which gave the Shia religious bloc a big lead in preliminary returns.


Initial reports have given Shia
and Kurdish parties a big lead

The observer, Craig Jenness, said on Wednesday that his team - which helped the Iraqi election commission organise and oversee the poll - found the elections to be credible and transparent.

Sunni Arabs and secular Shias rejected Jenness' findings, saying their concerns - which included political assassinations before the elections - were not addressed.

The Iraqi Accordance Front, which is the country's leading Sunni Arab group, applauded the decision, as did the secular Iraqi National List headed by Ayad Allawi, the former interim prime minister.

It was unclear if the review would further delay the release of final results, now expected in early January.

The presence of two Arab experts on the International Mission for Iraqi Elections team could go far in helping to convince Iraqis that the review of the vote will be fair.

Korean pullout

Meanwhile, South Korea's parliament has approved a government plan to bring home one-third of the country's troops in Iraq but extended the overall deployment for another year.

The plan endorsed on Friday calls for the withdrawal of about 1000 of the 3200 South Korean military personnel who are helping rebuild a Kurdish area of northern Iraq.


South Korea will withdraw about
1000 of its military personnel

In other developments, the daughter and brother of a French engineer taken hostage in Iraq pleaded for his release in an interview with an Arab TV news channel broadcast on Friday.

Bernard Planche, who worked for a non-governmental organisation called AACCESS, was kidnapped on 5 December on his way to work at a Baghdad water plant.

"He came to help the reconstruction for the Iraqi people. We have faith and are sure that you won't hurt him," his daughter Isabelle said on Al-Arabiya network.

"Please free him. He's my father and I love him," she said, sitting alongside Planche's brother, Gilles.

Excerpts of the interview aired on French TV.

Plea for release

Captors on Wednesday released a first video of Planche - shown sitting between two armed men - and denounced the "illegal French presence" in Iraq, Al-Arabiya reported.


Planche was seized on his way to
work in Baghdad on 5 December

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called on Thursday for the immediate release of Planche, stressing that France has no military presence in Iraq.

On Thursday, armed men kidnapped a Lebanese engineer in Iraq, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Camile Nassif Tannous, who works for the Schneider engineering firm, was kidnapped "in Iraq in the past few hours", the statement said, giving no further detasils.

The statement added that the Lebanese charge d'affaires in Baghdad, Hassan Hijazi, had been instructed to make "the necessary contacts" to secure Tannous' release.


Aljazeera + Agencies

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 31, 2005
In Iraq, Rich in Oil, Higher Gasoline Prices Anger Many
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 30 - A fuel crisis in Iraq deepened on Friday when the oil minister was suspended for objecting to steep government-imposed price increases for gasoline and cooking oil.

Angry drivers waited in quarter-mile lines at stations in Baghdad, brought by fears of more price increases and electricity failures, which have led them to siphon fuel for use in power generators.

There was also concern over problems with refineries, including a shutdown at a major refinery in Baiji, 130 miles north of Baghdad.

The oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, had been outspoken in his opposition to the decision earlier this month to triple the price of the most common type of gasoline while raising prices for diesel ninefold. He said that while some increases were needed, such large ones would put far too heavy a burden on Iraqis.

But upon returning from vacation outside Iraq this week, Mr. Uloum learned that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari had ordered him to give up his post for the next 30 days, according to an Oil Ministry spokesman.

"When he came back he was astonished to find that the prime minister issued a letter ordering Dr. Ibrahim to stay 30 more days on holiday because of his disagreement and his threats to resign from office," said the spokesman, Asim Jihad.

Mr. Uloum has been replaced by Ahmad Chalabi, the deputy prime minister and onetime White House favorite who served as interim oil minister earlier this year. An aide to Mr. Chalabi said it was not clear how long he would stay in the post or whether Mr. Uloum would return.

The scramble for gasoline in the capital was set off by several factors.

The ministry shut the refinery in Baiji last week after insurgents threatened to kill drivers who trucked gasoline and other products across Iraq. And the oil pipeline that feeds the Dora refinery in Baghdad was damaged recently by insurgents, Mr. Jihad said. He said he did not know when the two plants would operate at capacity again.

Drivers interviewed on Friday said they were rushing to fill up after hearing rumors of more looming price increases for gasoline. Mr. Jihad denied that any additional increase was imminent.

The drivers also said the availability of electricity had been so spotty - even by Baghdad standards - that they had been forced to hoard gasoline and siphon it from tanks for use in electricity generators.

The long lines began four days ago, said Capt. Akeel Rashid, commander of a security force guarding a large filling station in eastern Baghdad. Normally the wait is 20 minutes; now it is two hours or more, he said. "The electricity is very bad now," Captain Rashid said. "People come once for their cars and once for their generators."

In the continuing violence in Iraq, insurgents killed 5 Iraqi civilians on Friday and wounded 23 more when a bomb hidden inside a parked car detonated near a bus station used by Shiite commuters, the Iraqi police said.

Later, gunmen in an Opel sedan opened fire on Iraqis drinking alcohol and relaxing on a street in the Sunni district of Adhamiya in the capital, killing one and wounding five others.

A soldier assigned to the Second Marine Division died after being shot by insurgents in Falluja on Thursday, and another soldier was killed in Baghdad on Friday by a roadside bomb, the American military said.

News agencies also reported that Sudan would close its Baghdad embassy in an attempt to save the lives of six employees who were kidnapped by members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The kidnappers have threatened to kill the employees unless the mission is shuttered.

Though Iraq sits atop huge oil reserves, its refineries remain in poor shape, damaged by constant insurgent attacks and dilapidated from years of underinvestment.

The refineries can produce only a portion of the gasoline needed here, forcing Iraq to import more than $5 billion worth every year, a process that supports widespread smuggling. At the same time, Iraqi drivers are used to very inexpensive gasoline - roughly 6 cents a gallon under Saddam Hussein - because of heavy subsidies by the government.

Earlier this month the government raised the price of regular domestic gasoline to about 40 cents a gallon, and to about 70 cents for special imported gasoline. (By comparison, regular gasoline sells on the black market - which avoids gas lines - for almost $1 a gallon.) Diesel fuel and canisters of liquefied cooking gas also had large increases, enraging drivers and homeowners in a country where many families make less than $100 a month.

The increases were part of a deal Iraqi leaders struck with the International Monetary Fund to eventually wipe out the debts that Mr. Hussein accumulated. As much as 80 percent of $120 billion in debts could eventually be canceled, according to Western officials in Baghdad.

But for Iraqis that comes at a very steep price. The deal with the I.M.F. calls for Iraq to eventually increase fuel prices to levels in line with the rest of the Middle East, where the average price of gasoline is about 87 cents a gallon. Though that is below the true cost, Iraqis already furious over price increases this month face another doubling of prices in the next year or two.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=8326

December 31, 2005
Coalitions Reject Election Results

by Dahr Jamail
(With Arkan Hamed)

BAGHDAD - Many Iraqis are demanding a new poll after more than 1,500 cases of election fraud and forgery were reported in the Dec. 15 elections, at least 30 of them "extremely serious."

The results so far indicate a strong win for Shi'ite religious groups. There are widespread complaints that many of the instances of fraud favored Shi'ite religious groups that led the interim government which conducted the poll.

In Baghdad, the most important district in the poll with more than a fifth of the seats in parliament, the Iranian-backed Shi'ite alliance took a surprising 57 percent of the vote, as opposed to 19 percent for the Sunni coalition.

With final election results expected next week, the number of cases of fraud constituting the largest fraud in a new democracy to date led to at least 42 Sunni and secular Shi'ite political parties demanding a review of complaints by an independent international body.

Many complaints relate to false ballot box stuffing and intimidation of voters.

After the United Nations rejected a review, the coalition of Sunni and secular Shi'ite parties, al-Maram, issued a joint statement threatening to boycott the new legislature. Large demonstrations are continuing across Iraq.

Tens of thousands of worshippers who support al-Maram gathered at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad Tuesday this week. The Imam called for a protest demonstration after busloads of people from across the capital city arrived to attend his sermon.

"Please God remove the invaders from Iraq with the hands of the mujahideen," he said. "And honorable prayers, we call for you to deny the elections, which were a fraud."

He appealed against any domination of Iraq that would separate Sunnis from Shi'ites. "Iraqis don't support separation of their citizens," the Imam said. "My tribe (al-Jabouri) is both Sunni and Shi'ite. We are all cousins and are not separated by these elections."

Concern is rising among these groups over Iranian domination. "We ask almighty God to save us from being under the control of the Iranians," 45-year-old Baghdad resident Nadham al-Doury told IPS. Al-Douri who joined thousands of others in a march after the sermon said the election results would be forged, and that the current leaders of Iraq were "fascists."

Some banners at the rally read, "Yes to Real Nomination...No to False Nomination" and "We are Calling for Re-Elections." Demonstrators in the mile-long procession chanted slogans like "Baghdad Will Be Free...Iran Should Stay Out" and "They are Playing with a Flame Which Must Burn Them."

With the main Shi'ite coalition rejecting calls for another poll, tensions across Iraq are rising.

Many parties are asking for the Independent Higher Commission for Elections in Iraq (IHCEI) to be replaced with a new commission whose members have no ties with the parties in power. Some Sunni and secular Shi'ite political parties have renamed the IHCEI the 'Independent Higher Commission for the Islamic Revolution' that is biased towards the dominant Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Demonstrations began Dec. 22, a week after the elections. Countless mosques across Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq called for demonstrations against widespread fraud. Tens of thousands came out to protest in the days following.

"I have won my seat in the parliament, but we don't accept it," Salaeh Al-Mutlak, head of the secular National Dialogue Front told IPS. "The elections should be canceled because they were not legitimate."

Sheikh Mahmoud al-Sumaidaei, spokesman for the influential Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, told followers, "You have to be ready during these hard times, and combat forgeries and lies for the sake of Islam." The elections, he said, were "a conspiracy built on lies and forgery."

Arabs are disputing the results also in Kirkuk in Kurdistan to the north. They say Kurdish parties brought in voters from other areas to vote for them.

The United States and Britain, who wanted the election to install a secular, pro-Western democracy in Iraq, are now left with what looks more and more like a pro-Iranian, anti-Western Islamic state.

Iraq suspends oil minister as gasoline fears deepen
By Richard A. Oppel Jr. The New York Times

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2005


BAGHDAD A fuel crisis in Iraq deepened Friday as the nation's oil minister was suspended for objecting to steep government-imposed gasoline and cooking fuel price increases.

Drivers formed lines 400 meters, or a quarter of a mile, long at gasoline stations in Baghdad, spurred by fears of more price hikes, electricity outages that have forced them to siphon gas for use in power generators, and talk of refinery outages in Bayji and Baghdad.

The oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, had been outspoken in opposition to the decision to triple prices for the most common type of gasoline. He said that while some increases were needed, a change of that magnitude would put far too heavy a burden on most Iraqis.

But upon returning from a vacation abroad this week, Bahr al-Uloum found a note waiting for him in which Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari ordered him to give up his post for the next 30 days, according to an Oil Ministry spokesman.

"When he came back he was astonished to find that the prime minister issued a letter ordering Dr. Ibrahim to stay 30 more days on holiday because of his disagreement and his threats to resign from office," the spokesman, Asim Jihad, said in an interview Friday.

The ministry shut down a major refinery in Bayji, north of the capital, after insurgents threatened to kill tanker drivers who truck gasoline and other refined products from the refinery to markets across Iraq, the Oil Ministry spokesman said.

The oil pipeline that feeds the Dora refinery in Baghdad was also damaged by terrorists, curbing production there, he said. The spokesman added that he did not know when the facilities would be back operating at full capacity.

Drivers interviewed on Friday said they were rushing to fill up after hearing rumors of another looming gas-price increase. The Oil Ministry spokesman denied that any additional increase was imminent. But the drivers also said that lately the availability of electricity had been so intermittent that they had been forced to hoard gasoline and siphon it out of their tanks for use in electricity generators at their homes.

On Friday afternoon, at least five Iraqi civilians were killed and 23 were wounded when a bomb hidden in a parked car detonated near a bus station frequented by Shiite commuters, the Iraqi police said.

U.S. Death Toll in Iraq Nears 2004 Level By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer

Two more U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq as the year wound down Friday, putting the American military death toll at 841 so far — just five short of 2004's lost lives despite political progress and dogged efforts to quash the insurgency.

Violence continued on Saturday with gunmen raiding a house near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad, and killing five members of a Sunni family, army Col. Hussein Sheyaa said. A roadside bomb also exploded in Baghdad, killing five policemen, 1st Lt. Nadum Nuaman said.

In addition, five members of the Iraqi Islamic party died when a roadside bomb exploded near their headquarters in Al-Khalis, 10 miles east of Baqouba, police said.

In Baghdad, hundreds of cars lined up at gas stations as word spread that Iraq's largest oil refinery shut down two weeks ago because of threats of insurgent attacks. Nearly three years after the U.S.-led invasion, a fuel crisis again threatens to cripple a country with the world's third-largest proven oil reserves.

At least 17 people were killed in shootings, mortar attacks and a suicide car bombing in Baghdad on Friday. In the most serious incident, police said nine people were killed in a drive-by shooting — apparently because they were drinking alcohol in public. Two Iraqi army captains were also gunned down in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, as they drove home.

A senior Sudanese diplomat said his country closed its embassy in Baghdad in an effort to win the release of six kidnapped employees — including one diplomat.

"A statement was issued by the Sudanese government to close the embassy in Iraq to win the release of our kidnapped citizens," Charge d'affairs Mohamed Ahmed Khalil told The Associated Press. He added that the embassy's 12 employees would leave Monday.

Al-Qaida in Iraq had threatened Thursday to kill five Sudanese on Saturday unless the country removed its diplomatic mission from Iraq.

The Sudanese Foreign Ministry reported on Dec. 24 that six of its embassy employees were kidnapped — including the mission's second secretary, Abdel Moneam Mohammad Tom. It was not clear if the al-Qaida statement was referring to the same group.

The two new deaths of U.S. military personnel were announced Friday by the American military. A bomb killed one soldier when it struck his vehicle in Baghdad on Friday, while the second soldier was shot and killed in the western city of Fallujah.

Their deaths brought the number of U.S. military members killed so far in 2005 to 841, of whom 64 died in December. A total of 846 troops died in 2004 and 485 in 2003. The worst month in 2005 was January with 106 fatalities, followed by November with 96 and August with 85.

The United States hopes that as more Iraqi police and army forces are trained, they will slowly take over responsibility for security from American troops. Much of that expectation hinges on the ability of Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups to form a broad-based government that will have the legitimacy to deflate the Sunni Arab-led insurgency.

In Beiji, some 155 miles north of Baghdad and near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, the deteriorating security situation led authorities to shut down Iraq's largest oil refinery Dec. 18, former oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum told the AP.

Al-Uloum said the facility "is considered one of the vital refineries in Iraq" and produces about 2 million gallons of gas a day.

As word of the shutdown spread through the country, abut 1,000 vehicles waited at one of Baghdad's biggest gas stations, known as the Jindi al-Majhoul, or Unknown Soldier station.

Ahmed Khalaf, 33, said he left his home at dawn and was still in line at noon. He expected to wait a few more hours before getting fuel.

"After the rise in gas prices, now we have a gas shortage," he said. "I left my work early, and I don't think I will have the opportunity to return to work today because of this long line. Dark will come soon and I cannot work at night."

Ali Moussa, a 51-year-old tanker truck driver, said he and his colleagues were working in a dangerous situation.

"We demand that the government provide security and protection," he said. "The Beiji storage tanks are full and there isn't any shortage of gas there. The problem is that drivers are too afraid to go there unless they are protected."

Baghdad in particular has been suffering from a shortage of refined fuel, much of which is already imported because of the country's diminished refining capacity. A number of demonstrations have already been held around Iraq because of a Dec. 19 increase in gas prices.

At the time, the price of imported and super gasoline was raised from about 13 cents a gallon to about 65 cents a gallon.

The oil crisis has already cost one job, that of al-Uloum, the oil minister, who was given a 30-day vacation last Wednesday and replaced with Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi. Al-Uloum had opposed a recent decision to raise prices for fuel and cooking oil as much as ninefold.

Iraq's proven oil reserves, estimated at about 110 billion barrels, are the world's third largest after Saudi Arabia and Canada. Analysts have predicted that Iraq's oil production will average about 1.8 million barrels per day this year, about 10 percent less than 2004 levels of about 2 million barrels — and just over half the 1990 level. One reason is frequent insurgent attacks on pipelines and refineries.

___

Associated Press reporter Sinan Salahheddin and Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.



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Iraq's Oil Exports Virtually Halted!

December 28, 2005, 11:08 PM (GMT+02:00)

DEBKAfile Intelligence

Iraq’s oil exports have been virtually halted by an explosion Thursday at the northern pipeline to Turkey and storms off the Basra offshore terminal in the south since Dec. 25

Iraq’s biggest refinery at Baiji north of Baghdad is shut by the security situation. Fuel shortages in the country are acute.

Bush resolves to stay on the offensive in Iraq in 2006

US President George W. Bush has resolved to remain "on the offense" in the new year to install a stable and independent democracy in Iraq.

"The United States has a vital interest in the success of a free Iraq, so in the year ahead, we will continue to pursue the comprehensive strategy for victory," Bush said Saturday in his last weekly radio address of the year, from his Texas ranch.

"Our coalition is staying on the offense, finding and clearing the enemy out of Iraqi cities, towns and villages, transferring more control to Iraqi units, and building up the Iraqi security forces so they can increasingly lead the fight to secure their country," Bush said.

Speaking of Iraq's political and economic reconstruction and elections there and in Afghanistan, Bush stressed: "These are amazing achievements in the history of liberty."

He did not address the issue of reducing US troop levels, nor did he discuss his strategy for Iraq, which has increasingly come under fire.

But the president did mention US economic priorities and deficit reduction.

"During 2005, thanks to our tax relief, spending restraint and the hard work of the American people, our economy remained the envy of the world," Bush said, citing growth and new jobs as well as low inflation.

"To keep our economy moving forward, we must continue to pursue sound policies in Washington and be wise with taxpayers' money," he said. "In the new year, we must also make permanent the tax relief that has kept our economy growing.

"We will work to expand free and fair trade, so America's farmers, workers and businesses can enjoy the opportunities the global economy offers," Bush added.




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Bush and Blair Plot Their Exit Strategy, as the Nation Falls Apart at the Seams
The Year in Iraq
By PATRICK COCKBURN

This was the year in which the US admitted it was not going to defeat the insurgency. It was the ebb tide of American and British power in Iraq. By the end of the year both countries were urgently looking to withdraw their troops in circumstances not too humiliating to themselves and without precipitating the complete collapse of the Iraqi state.

The failure of the US and Britain to win the war does not mean that the two-and-a-half year uprising among the Sunni Arabs has achieved all its aims. The beneficiaries from President George W Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003 are not the Sunni but the Iraqi Shia and the Kurds. Outside Iraq, the country which has gained most from the fall of Saddam Hussein is Iran.

The year began and ended with elections. The first, on January 30, was critical in demonstrating the electoral power of the Shia community. The United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shia parties, triumphed. This was hardly surprising since the Shia make up 60 per cent of the Iraqi population. But it was a political earthquake in Iraq after so many centuries of Sunni dominance. The verdict of the January poll was confirmed by the election on December 15 for the National Assembly, which will sit for four years.

The political landscape of post-Saddam Iraq is becoming clearer but the country still looks as if it will be a very violent place. A striking feature of present-day Iraq is that there are multiple centers of power, which as they conflict create numerous friction points. Authority is fragmented. The US has power, but so do the three main communities: the Sunni and Shia Arabs and the Kurds.

This much is very evident on the ground in Baghdad. In a Sunni district of west Baghdad, the local police pack up and go home at 8pm. "I am leaving now and the resistance will take over," explained one policeman as he got into his car. "If I stayed around here I would be killed." In Ramadi, the capital of rebellious Anbar province, west of Baghdad, insurgents took over the city centre for four hours in December, despite the presence of powerful US and Iraqi military units.

Precisely where real power lies in Iraq is not always obvious. In Basra the British forces are supposedly helping to build up the local police, but a confrontation in October sparked when two British soldiers, working undercover and in disguise, were arrested by the Iraqi police and then rescued by the Army, demonstrated the real state of affairs. Film of a British soldier, his clothes burning as he jumped from a blazing armored vehicle, was shown around the world. It is the Shia political parties and their militias in and out of the police who are the real masters of Basra and southern Iraq.

The growing power of the militias is evident everywhere; so too is the influence of Iran. At some point, a new balance of power between the main communities, the militias, political parties, the foreign powers, the insurgent groups and the secret intelligence services will emerge in Iraq. It has not happened yet. The new rules of the game are not yet agreed. To give one example: the government has declared that the weekend will now fall on Friday and Saturday. But in western Iraq insurgents say it falls on Friday alone, and anything else is un-Islamic. They have threatened to kill headmasters who do not open their schools on Saturdays.

There are also more serious disagreements. In northern Iraq, territory is disputed between Arabs and Kurds. The Kurds captured the oil city of Kirkuk, the so-called jewel of Kurdistan, in the war of 2003. They will not give it up. The future of the city and of the Turkoman and Arab communities living there is still disputed.

But not all divisions in Iraq are getting wider. Sunni and Shia leaders now appreciate, in a way that they did not two years ago, that the Kurds, 20 per cent of the Iraqi population, already have quasi-independence. Most Kurds in the street would prefer outright autonomy. The main reasons their leaders want to stay inside Iraq for now is fear of neighbours like the Turks, the need to keep in with the US - and access to oil revenues.

The US is learning to play communal politics. The US ambassador Zilmay Khalilzad, appointed this summer, is far more adept at this than the preceding envoys. The US has learned in the last two-and-a-half years that it may have been easy to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but it is dangerous to buck the Kurds, the Shia or the Sunni. During the rancorous negotiations on the new Iraqi constitution, President Bush even called Abul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shia religious party, asking for concessions. In 2003 the US viewed SCIRI, not entirely wrongly, as a dangerous stalking horse for Iran, and US soldiers raided its Baghdad offices.

But the US has begun to learn too late. Iraqis know that whatever Bush and Blair say, the political will to stay in Iraq is weakening in the US and Britain. The British role in Iraq is in any case small, however great it may loom in domestic politics. The 8,500-strong force was never going to be enough to confront the Shia militias in southern Iraq.

The US was able to stick to its timetable for elections on January 30 and December 15, as well as the constitutional referendum on October 15. But this was primarily because it met the wishes of the Shia and Kurdish leaders. Even these "successes" had their price. The constitution was passed in the teeth of Sunni resistance, though the US tried to mitigate this with some last-minute cosmetic concessions. Under these the constitution can be amended by the newly elected National Assembly, although the Sunni parties are unlikely to have the votes to do so.

The constitution institutionalizes the fragmentation of Iraq. The Kurds will have autonomy close to independence. They can drill for oil and will own what new reserves are discovered. But the surprise of the year is that the Shia leaders asked for and got the same concessions. There will be a Shia super region established, covering nine provinces in southern Iraq. This represents half of the 18 provinces in the whole country. One Iraqi minister lamented that the central government of Iraq might end up as a few buildings in the Green Zone.

After the war in 2003, Arab Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia, would deride comparisons between Iraq and countries divided by sectarianism such as Northern Ireland and Lebanon. They pointed out that Sunni and Shia in Iraq were often married to each other. They did not have a history of massacring each other. These claims for Iraqi Arab solidarity were always a little exaggerated. Sunni friends claim to love the Shia, aside, of course, "from those that are really Iranians or their agents". The Shia, for their part, said they saw all Iraqi Sunni as their brothers "aside from those that are really Baathists". Claims of communal amity are made less often today. The divisions between them are deepening because Iraq was a Sunni state and is becoming a Shia one. The Sunni are fighting the US occupiers and the Shia are, for the moment at least, loosely allied to the US. Iraq's al-Qa'ida suicide bombers have repeatedly targeted Shia civilians such as day laborers waiting for jobs in the Khadamiyah district of Baghdad. Would-be army and police, almost always Shia, have been slaughtered again and again.

So far the Shia response has been restrained. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the supreme religious leader who is vastly influential over the Shia, has forbidden retaliation. But the powerful Ministry of the Interior, once controlled by the Sunni, is now in the hands of the Shia. The minister, Bayan Jabr, was previously a leader of SCIRI's militia, the Badr Brigade.

They dominate the fearsome paramilitary police commandos whom the Sunni see as nothing more than licensed death squads. At the end of the year, US troops raided an Interior Ministry bunker in the Jadriyah district of west Baghdad, where they found 158 tortured and starved prisoners, all allegedly Sunni. Bodies of men shot in the head and their hands in handcuffs are routinely found on dumps and beside the road in Baghdad.

Many ministries have become the domain of a single sect or party. The health ministry under the interim government became famous for being run by the Dawa Shia Muslim group, while the transport ministry portfolio is held by a follower of the nationalist cleric, Muqtada al- Sadr. This has a disastrous impact because the government begins to resemble that of Lebanon. Ministers are representatives of their communities. They cannot be fired, however crooked or incompetent.

The impact of the insurgency is exaggerated because the state in Iraq remains so weak. This remained strikingly true during 2005, when the government did extraordinarily little for its people. The electricity supply remains poor in Baghdad; kidnapping is rife; security is limited and Iraqis spend much of their time surviving from day to day. The police are not seen as protectors. Earlier this month, a student called Muammur Mohsin al-Obeidi said: "The Iraqi people know nobody is going to save them from criminals. They believe nobody will punish them. If gangsters are arrested they have enough money to bribe their way out of prison. There is no real government." It is a lament heard again and again from people in the streets of Baghdad. They believe government scarcely exists - and certainly not for their benefit.

There have been three administrations of Iraq since the US invasion, and all have failed. There was the Coalition Provisional Authority, fairly undiluted US imperial rule, under Paul Bremer, which helped provoke the Sunni rebellion. On 28 June 2004, the US formally turned power over to the interim government of Iyad Allawi, whose administration was notoriously corrupt. On April 7, 2005, Ibrahim al-Jaafari became Prime Minister but his government has proved fractious. These divisions largely mirrored those between the contending groups in Iraq. In all three administrations, corruption was on a scale attributed to states like Nigeria in the past. In 2005 the entire defense procurement budget of $1.3bn disappeared in return for a few unusable helicopters and armored vehicles. This degree of corruption is now more difficult because ministers cannot spend money without authorization.

There is a further reason why the Iraqi state is weak, which is not at first obvious. The US and Britain foresaw an Iraqi state whose armed forces were equipped only to cope with internal dissent. They have been determined not to hand over heavy weapons or modern equipment.

The US has not been as generous in transferring power to Iraqis as might appear from formal announcements. The main intelligence service has no budget, but is paid for and run by the CIA. The US has tried to keep control of the Defense Ministry and the new Iraqi army, which is supposedly being built up to take the place of US forces when they are withdrawn. The US military speaks of the triumphs and failures of training and equipping Iraqi troops (they have given less attention to the police). But there is another problem that the US has not really tackled.

The question is not just about the ability of the new army to fight, but about loyalty. Who, at the end of the day, will the soldiers fight for? Polls by Britain's Ministry of Defence show that the occupation is overwhelmingly unpopular among Shia as well as Sunni Iraqis. In the long run, the US cannot create an officer corps loyal to America. Then there is also the question of how far the army is a national institution. Its 115 battalions are reportedly 60 Shia, 45 Sunni, 9 Kurdish and one mixed. Over the next year we will see if Iraq is going to remain a single state or turn into a confederation. There are forces for unity as well as disintegration. Most Iraqi Arabs want to live in one country. But political observers fear that a Bosnian solution is on the cards, in which Baghdad will play the role of Sarajevo.

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Dec 31, 7:49 AM EST

Sign Tallying Military Deaths Upsets Army

By PATRICK CONDON
Associated Press Writer

DULUTH, Minn. (AP) -- Scott Cameron never imagined his modest memorial to American troops in Iraq would transform a quiet street here into the latest front of the nation's tense debate about the war in Iraq.

His sign tallying the war's dead and wounded rests feet from the local Army recruiting office, and Cameron's refusal to take it down despite Army requests has drawn national attention. The fuss is giving the Vietnam veteran a chance to air a view he wishes he'd expressed long ago.

"The way veterans have been treated in this country is shameful," Cameron said this week.

His tribute has irritated the military recruiters next door, who dislike the daily reminder of friends lost. Staff Sgt. Gary Capan, the post's commander, requested that the sign come down for his colleagues' benefit.

"They're saying, 'Why should we have to look at that? We lost people over there,'" said Staff Sgt. Gary Capan, the post's commander. "It's not just a number to them."

Some of Cameron's supporters believe the sign will hurt recruiting.

"You're a young kid and you see those stark numbers, you might realize there's a cost you didn't consider," said Gary Tonkin, a Vietnam veteran.

It all started a month ago, when Cameron, a volunteer for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Kelley, posted a sign in the window of the campaign's local office. It reads, "Remember the Fallen Heroes," and contains three tallies: the number of American troops killed in Iraq, the number wounded and the days passed since the war began.
"The sacrifices our troops and their families are making are an important part of Minnesotans' lives right now," said Kelley, one of several Democrats seeking to unseat Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty next year. "If this draws attention to that, it's all to the good as far as I'm concerned."

As of Friday, the sign reported 2,177 troops had been killed and 16,155 injured, after 1,017 days in Iraq. Capan said the sign hasn't hurt recruiting: "We had three people sign up just today," he said earlier this week.

It's not the first dust-up over the U.S. military's continued presence in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed there, camped outside President Bush's Texas ranch for weeks.

Duluth seems an unlikely location for the latest flare-up. The city of brick mansions and steep hills rising off Lake Superior in northeastern Minnesota is a stronghold of blue-collar progressivism mixed with old-fashioned Midwestern patriotism.

Many residents seem uncomfortable with the controversy.

"This really shouldn't be that big a deal," Sam Johnson said. His companion, Lisa Whitestone, said, "I think it's a fair thing to be reminded that there's a cost for us to be over there."

Cameron said he never intended to discourage recruiting efforts - but he's not particularly concerned if it does.

A native of Spokane, Wash., he went to Vietnam at 19. He was injured when AK-47 fire ripped through the floor of a helicopter he was riding in, hitting his spine and collapsing his left lung.

He's had nearly four dozen surgeries since then, he said, and supports himself with his disability pension.

Cameron said he's always regretted not speaking out against Vietnam after his injury. He's hoping to steer media attention over the sign toward veterans' problems. He wants Congress to pass legislation that would prevent future cuts in benefits.

He said he's contacted several manufacturers to produce and market a line of signs like his that war opponents could post on their lawns or elsewhere. A portion of the profits would go to veterans organizations.

"I'm in awe of what's happening here," Cameron said. "If that sign can be used as a force for good, then it's worth it."

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January 1, 2006
Death Toll for the American Military in Iraq in 2005 Is 844
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 31 - At least 844 American service members were killed in Iraq in 2005, nearly matching 2004's total of 848, according to information released by the United States government and a nonprofit organization that tracks casualties in Iraq.

The deaths of two Americans announced by the United States military on Friday - a marine killed by gunfire in Falluja and a soldier killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad - brought the total killed since the war in Iraq began in March 2003 to 2,178. The total wounded since the war began is 15,955.

From Jan. 1, 2005 to Dec. 3, 2005, the most recent date for which numbers are available, the number of Americans military personnel wounded in Iraq was 5,557. The total wounded in 2004 was 7,989.

In 2005, the single bloodiest month for American soldiers and marines was January, when 107 were killed and nearly 500 were wounded. At the time, American forces were conducting numerous operations to secure the country for the elections on Jan. 30. The second worst month was October, when 96 Americans were killed and 603 wounded.

More than half of all 2005 American military deaths, 427, were caused by homemade bombs, most planted along roadsides and detonated as vehicles passed. American commanders have said that roadside bombs, the leading cause of death in Iraq, have grown larger and more sophisticated. Many are set off by remote detonators and are powerful enough to destroy heavily armored tanks and troop carriers.

The totals were compiled by Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a nonprofit group that tracks American service members killed and wounded in Iraq. The Associated Press, which keeps its own statistics, reported the year's death toll as slightly lower, saying that 841 had been killed.

Death totals for Iraqis have been more difficult to estimate, and vary widely. Iraq Body Count, an independent media-monitoring group, estimates that about 30,000 Iraqis have died since the war began in 2003.

On Saturday, violence flared across Iraq. In Khalis, north of Baghdad, a bomb killed five members of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni political party that defied insurgent threats and fielded candidates in the Dec. 15 election. Since 2003, at least 75 party members have been killed.

In central Baghdad, a roadside bomb struck an Iraqi police patrol, killing two officers.

At Camp Victory, the American military headquarters just outside Baghdad, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged Iraqi political leaders on Saturday to form a new government as quickly as possible to avoid the kind of delay that stalled the political momentum after the vote last January.

"Clearly, the sooner that they're able to come to agreement on who their leaders are going to be, the sooner that those leaders then can act to appoint the rest of the country's key leadership," General Pace told reporters traveling with him on a troop visit.

In historical terms, the number of casualties in Iraq is still relatively small. At the height of the Vietnam War, the American military was sustaining 500 killed and wounded each week. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, about 58,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded on the first day.

In interviews, American commanders have said the relatively unchanging number of deaths in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 belies the progress that had been made here against the guerrilla insurgency and in setting up democratic institutions. Three nationwide votes were held this year.

Although the number of attacks against American and Iraqi forces in and around Baghdad has grown over the past year - to about 28 per day now from about 22 a year ago - only about 10 percent of those attacks inflict casualties, said Maj. Gen. William G. Webster Jr., the commander of American forces in and around Baghdad.

A year ago, about 25 percent of attacks inflicted casualties.

More than 400 car and suicide bombs struck the country in 2005, although the number has dropped sharply in recent months. In April, for instance, there were 66 suicide and car bomb attacks, compared with 28 in November.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Camp Victory, Iraq, for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed from Baghdad.



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January 2, 2006
Islamic Leaders Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda
By DAVID S. CLOUD and JEFF GERTH
WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 - A Pentagon contractor that paid Iraqi newspapers to print positive articles written by American soldiers has also been compensating Sunni religious scholars in Iraq in return for assistance with its propaganda work, according to current and former employees.

The Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations company, was told early in 2005 by the Pentagon to identify religious leaders who could help produce messages that would persuade Sunnis in violence-ridden Anbar Province to participate in national elections and reject the insurgency, according to a former employee.

Since then, the company has retained three or four Sunni religious scholars to offer advice and write reports for military commanders on the content of propaganda campaigns, the former employee said. But documents and Lincoln executives say the company's ties to religious leaders and dozens of other prominent Iraqis is aimed also at enabling it to exercise influence in Iraqi communities on behalf of clients, including the military.

"We do reach out to clerics," Paige Craig, a Lincoln executive vice president, said in an interview. "We meet with local government officials and with local businessmen. We need to have relationships that are broad enough and deep enough that we can touch all the various aspects of society." He declined to discuss specific projects the company has with the military or commercial clients.

"We have on staff people who are experts in religious and cultural matters," Mr. Craig said. "We meet with a wide variety of people to get their input. Most of the people we meet with overseas don't want or need compensation, they want a dialogue."

Internal company financial records show that Lincoln spent about $144,000 on the program from May to September. It is unclear how much of this money, if any, went to the religious scholars, whose identities could not be learned. The amount is a tiny portion of the contracts, worth tens of millions, that Lincoln has received from the military for "information operations," but the effort is especially sensitive.

Sunni religious scholars are considered highly influential within the country's minority Sunni population. Sunnis form the core of the insurgency.

Each of the religious scholars underwent vetting before being brought into the program to ensure that they were not involved in the insurgency, said a former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Lincoln's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities. The identities of the Sunni scholars have been kept secret to prevent insurgent reprisals, and they were never taken to Camp Victory, the American base outside Baghdad where Lincoln employees work with military personnel.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, declined to comment.

After the disclosure in November that the military used Lincoln to plant articles written by American troops in Iraqi newspapers, the Pentagon ordered an investigation, led by Navy Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk.

Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, said that a preliminary assessment made shortly after the military's information campaign was disclosed concluded that the Army was "operating within our authorities and the appropriate legal procedures."

Admiral Van Buskirk has finished his investigation, several Pentagon officials said, but it has not been made public.

Lincoln recently sought approval from the military to make Sunni religious leaders one of several "target audiences" of the propaganda effort in Iraq. A Lincoln plan titled "Divide and Prosper" presented in October to the Special Operations Command in Tampa, which oversees information operations, suggested that reaching religious leaders was vital for reducing Sunni support for the insurgency.

"Clerics exercise a great deal of influence over the people in their communities and oftentimes it is the religious leaders who incite people to violence and to support the insurgent cause," the company said in the proposal, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.

In some cases, "insurgent groups may provide Sunni leaders with financial compensation in return for that cleric's loyalty and support," the proposal said, adding that religious leaders are motivated by "a need to retain patronage" and a "desire to maintain religious and moral authority."

Unlike in many other Middle Eastern countries, sermons by Iraqi imams are not subject to government control, enabling them to speak "without fear of repercussions," the document said.

The Special Operations Command said in a statement that it did not adopt the Lincoln plan, choosing another contractor's proposal instead. When the Lincoln Group was incorporated last year, using the name Iraqex, its stated purpose was to provide support services for business development, trade and investment in Iraq.

But the company soon shifted to information warfare and psychological operations, two former employees said. The company was awarded three new Pentagon contracts, worth tens of millions of dollars, they said.

Payments to the scholars were originally part of Lincoln's contract to aid the military with information warfare in Anbar Province. Known as the "Western Missions" contract, it also called for producing radio and television advertisements, Web sites, posters, and for placing advertisements and opinion articles in Iraqi publications. In October, Lincoln was awarded a new contract by the Pentagon for work in Iraq, including continued contact with Muslim scholars.

Lincoln has also turned to American scholars and political consultants for advice on the content of the propaganda campaign in Iraq, records indicate. Michael Rubin, a Middle East scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research organization, said he had reviewed materials produced by the company during two trips to Iraq within the past two years.

"I visited Camp Victory and looked over some of their proposals or products and commented on their ideas," Mr. Rubin said in an e-mailed response to questions about his links to Lincoln. "I am not nor have I been an employee of the Lincoln Group. I do not receive a salary from them."

He added: "Normally, when I travel, I receive reimbursement of expenses including a per diem and/or honorarium." But Mr. Rubin would not comment further on how much in such payments he may have received from Lincoln.

Mr. Rubin was quoted last month in The New York Times about Lincoln's work for the Pentagon placing articles in Iraqi publications: "I'm not surprised this goes on," he said, without disclosing his work for Lincoln. "Especially in an atmosphere where terrorists and insurgents - replete with oil boom cash - do the same. We need an even playing field, but cannot fight with both hands tied behind our backs."

Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad, Iraq, for this article.



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January 2, 2006
Iraq's Oil Exports Hit Lowest Level Since War Began
By REUTERS
Filed at 12:20 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's oil exports hit their lowest level since the war, according to figures released on Monday, heightening a sense of crisis as fuel supplies grow scarce and political leaders struggle to form a government.

Iraq exported 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil in December, a senior official said -- less than any month since exports resumed in mid-2003 after the U.S. invasion and about half the level seen during sanctions under Saddam Hussein.

Sabotage is damaging plants and blocking investment, keeping exports at a fraction of targets officials say should be met if Iraq's vast reserves are to provide its people with the prosperity that might draw the sting of civil conflict.

The oil official was speaking after Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum announced his resignation in opposition to fuel price rises imposed last month as part of an aid deal with the International Monetary Fund that demands big cuts in subsidies.

The price rises have been unpopular among Iraqis, already struggling with poor basic public services and appalling violence on their streets.

At least 12 people, including two children, were killed by bombs and bullets on Monday. In the bloodiest incident, a suicide bomber rammed his car into a bus full of policemen, killing seven and wounding 13.

Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders met in the north to discuss the formation of a government capable of addressing these daunting problems in the wake of last month's election, which many Sunnis say was fraudulent.

If the new government is to revitalize the economy, economists say, it must harness Iraq's vast proven oil preserves -- the third largest in the world.

But successive governments have struggled to do so since the fall of Saddam, and the latest export figures suggest things are getting worse.

December's 1.1 million bpd was down from 1.2 million the previous month, said Shamkhi Faraj, Director General of Economics and Oil Marketing, who oversees Iraq's oil exports.

That compares with a post-war peak of around 1.8 million bpd in early 2005 and is well below exports under Saddam, when Iraq regularly exported 1.8-2.5 million bpd. Officials say Iraq could sell some 3 million bpd if the industry were not under attack and could double that in time.

Since the U.S.-led invasion, production has been hampered by guerrilla attacks on pipelines and refineries.

The government closed the country's main refinery in the northern city of Baiji last month following sabotage of a pipeline and threats of attacks against truck drivers.

That triggered a rush to petrol pumps as people feared they would be left without fuel.

OLD-STYLE COUP

Uloum's resignation as oil minister came after what looked like an old-style ministerial coup last month, when he was placed on leave against his will and replaced by Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi.

Uloum had opposed the December 19 fuel prices rises, saying they should have been introduced more gradually. The price of premium gasoline went up by 200 percent, with other fuels doubling in price. However, given the level of subsidy, further price rises seem likely under the IMF's strictures.

The government remains committed to cutting fuel subsidies further to meet the demands of the International Monetary Fund, which agreed a landmark credit arrangement with Iraq on December 23.

The violence which claimed the lives of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 850 U.S. soldiers in 2005 continued, with a suicide car bomber targeting a bus full of policemen on a road between Baquba, north of Baghdad, and Kurdish Sulaimaniya.

Firemen found the charred bodies of seven policemen inside.

Two children were killed when gunmen opened fire on a car between the cities of Tikrit and Kirkuk.

In Baghdad gunmen attacked the convoy of the Turkish ambassador. Nobody was hurt.

In the latest of a series of bilateral discussions aimed at forming a new government, leaders from Iraq's main Sunni Arab parties traveled north to meet Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.

They said afterwards they remained committed to joining a national unity government of Kurds, Sunni Arabs and the majority Shi'ites, whose representatives dominated the December 15 election.

The Sunnis, who were also expected to meet President Jalal Talabani later, welcomed the imminent arrival of four international monitors to check the results of the election.

Their findings are not however expected to have a major impact on the results, which suggest Iraq's next government will once again be dominated by Shi'ite Islamists.

Electoral Commissioner Farid Ayar insisted the team, whose international body has already declared the election fair, would not re-count the ballots but simply review the processes used.



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January 2, 2006
Occupation Denies Validity of Election

by Brian Conley
(with Isam Rashid)

BAGHDAD - The Dec. 15 election may have marked a turning point for the involvement of Sunnis in the new political process. But while many Sunnis turned out to vote, resistance groups have said they will continue fighting as long as the United States maintains a presence in Iraq.

Despite these comments by the mainly Sunni resistance, this election showed a very different response by Iraqi Sunnis than was exhibited in the previous January election. The Dec. 15 election was the most well attended of the three elections that have been held since the fall of Saddam's regime.

In all 10.8 million people are said to have voted. Sunni participation followed a desire to participate in the political process in the new Iraq. Since January Sunnis have repeatedly complained of being denied a place in deciding the direction of Iraq's affairs of state.

Previously the Sunnis boycotted the election, hoping that this would help invalidate it. The refusal of anti-occupation Shi'ites to follow suit detracted from the impact of the Sunni boycott.

"I did not go to the last election on 30 January, because the United States troops were bombing Fallujah," 36 year-old civil engineer Ahmed Ali told IPS. "We hoped the Shi'ites would do the same to send a message to the U.S. army and show them how we have strong solidarity, but they didn't."

This led many Sunnis to become disenchanted with refusal as a strategic response to what they see as the illegitimacy of a government established and protected by the United States.

Ahmed and other Sunnis went to the polls in force. "Suddenly we found the Sunnis pushed out of the Iraqi government," Ahmed said. "Because of that, we decided to go to the new election, we voted for the Sunni list."

The Sunni parties worked hard to bring their constituents to the polls, hoping that there would not be a repeat of the January election where many Sunnis were kept out of the political process. The elections have been marred by hundreds of allegations of fraud, and currently the Electoral Commission overseeing the elections is investigating these claims.

Dr. Huda al-Nuaymi, a representative of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi National Dialogue party, told IPS that "we asked all Iraqi people to come and vote in this election. After the election happened we discovered there was a lot of fraud."

In the face of the fraud, many of the smaller opposition parties have joined together to oppose the results. "Because of the fraud, the Iraqi National Dialogue party joined with 35 other political blocs and issued a statement asking the Iraqi government to cancel the election and to have a new vote," Nuaymi said.

United Nations officials have said they think the election has been fair, but an international mission will travel to Iraq in order to verify the results.

The revelations of fraud and inconsistency have confirmed many Sunni Iraqis' support for armed resistance. They say armed resistance is the only way to end the occupation.

"I did not believe the election would make the situation in Iraq better, because we are under occupation," said Alaa Adel, a 32-year-old guard at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad. "I'm sure only real resistance will force the occupation forces to end their occupation."

The coalition forces failed in Iraq because "there is no security, no petrol, no electricity, no water, no nothing," a resident said, asking not to be named. "Now they want to make a fake government to serve them and a fake democracy and run away as quickly as possible."

The resident said he did not vote. "After all that how can I go to this election. Of course I didn't go, because if I went I would serve the occupation forces."

Alaa Adel said that only after the occupation has ended will Iraq have a fair election. "There is no democracy in Iraq under occupation. After that, we can make real election between real Iraqi people."

(Inter Press Service)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January 3, 2006
Sunni Group Near Deal With Kurds on Iraqi Government
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 2 - The largest Sunni Arab political group in Iraq unexpectedly moved close to agreement with Kurdish leaders Monday on a broad framework for a coalition government. The group, the Iraqi Consensus Front, also said it would abandon claims that national elections last month had been rigged once international election monitors finish their review of the allegations.

The move drew a rebuke from other Sunni Arab political leaders who accused the Sunni consensus party of violating an agreement to press ahead with claims of Sunni disenfranchisement during the vote on Dec. 15 and to not bargain on their own for a role in the new government.

"They violated an agreement with us that they will not go alone to talk about the government," Saleh Mutlak, a leader of the Iraqi National Trend, another leading Sunni Arab political group, said Monday night.

The Sunni consensus party and the Kurds remain far apart on at least one crucial issue: the Kurds support introducing federal states throughout Iraq, while the Sunnis, who fear the loss of revenue from large oil fields in the Shiite-dominated south, want only the Kurds in the north to have a semi-autonomous state.

A Sunni consensus party official, Ahmad Rushdi, said that meetings in Iraqi Kurdistan between the party and the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani yielded "an agreement that the results from the international monitoring committee" - which is examining the vote - "would be approved." After results are final, he said, "discussion will continue about the formation of the upcoming government."

Also late Monday, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said he would not object if the dominant Shiite political alliance were to once again select Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister. Mr. Talabani and Mr. Jaafari have clashed, but Mr. Talabani said Monday that the problems were in the past. Mr. Jaafari's top rival for the post is a fellow Shiite, Adel Abdul Mahdi, a member of the most influential Shiite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The current government is controlled by Shiites and Kurds and largely excludes Sunni Arabs. But in the election last month, Sunnis turned out in force, and the consensus party is expected to win around 40 of 275 seats in Parliament. The Kurds are expected to win more than 50 seats, while the Shiite coalition is expected to win more than 130 seats. It takes a two-thirds majority to form a government.

Sunnis have pressed allegations of widespread election fraud. But Iraqi and United Nations officials said that despite some fraud the elections were credible.

Baghdad continued to struggle with a gasoline shortage on Monday. Iraqi leaders insisted the worst of the crisis had passed, but new data disclosed by Iraqi officials underscored the grave problems facing an energy infrastructure plagued by insurgent attacks and dilapidated facilities.

The new figures show that the gasoline shortages in Baghdad are as much as 1.6 million gallons each day - nearly as much fuel as the capital uses in a normal day. The imbalance has been driven by acute electricity shortages and insurgent attacks or threats on two large refineries.

Iraqi officials also reported Monday that oil exports remained at postwar lows again in December amid electricity failures and rough seas in the Persian Gulf where tankers load oil. The departing oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, estimated in an interview that exports averaged 1.3 million barrels per day last month. But other officials still working at the Oil Ministry told news agencies that the actual average was about 1.1 million barrels per day.

Mr. Bahr al-Uloum formally resigned Monday, days after Mr. Jaafari ordered him suspended after he criticized government price increases that tripled the cost of gasoline as part of a deal with the International Monetary Fund to restructure Iraq's debt.

The Iraqi government said Monday that trucks were again transporting gasoline to the capital from the large northern refinery at Baiji under guard of Iraqi soldiers. Drivers had refused to make the journey because of threats from insurgents.

Mr. Bahr al-Uloum estimated that only 15 trucks made the journey on Sunday. As many as 90 trucks are needed to ship up to 800,000 gallons of gasoline the refinery normally sends to Baghdad daily, he said. Whether the refinery can ship its full allotment "depends on the security situation," he said.

It remained unclear how long other major factors in Baghdad's fuel crisis would go unresolved. Demand for gasoline in the capital has soared by half a million gallons a day - to about 12.4 million gallons - because of severe electricity shortages, Mr. Bahr al-Uloum said. Residents are hoarding gas at filling stations for use in fueling electricity generators.

Mr. Bahr al-Uloum also said the Dawra refinery in Baghdad, the other major source of gasoline for the capital, is operating at 30 percent of its normal capacity of up to half a million gallons daily. The slowdown is a result of the sabotage of a pipeline. The remaining gasoline supply for Baghdad typically comes from imports and other refineries, he said.

For years, Iraq provided gasoline to its citizens at a fraction of its true cost. While Mr. Bahr al-Uloum says prices must be increased somewhat, he said the I.M.F. agreement was draconian. "We have to have a balance between the Iraqi people and the requirements of the I.M.F.," he said. "We know there is a problem with the price scheme, but the only way to do it is to go gradually."

Across Iraq, insurgents renewed attacks on Iraqi security forces, striking a busload of police recruits with a suicide car bomb near Baquba, north of Baghdad, killing seven. Three of the dead were identified as police recruits but the other four were burned beyond recognition, according to the Interior Ministry.

At Al Asad, an American air base in western Iraq, four American contractors were killed Sunday when their bus was struck by a seven-ton truck, the military said in a statement.

In Baghdad on Monday, the Turkish ambassador dodged an assassination attempt near the airport. And in Kirkuk, where there were riots over fuel prices on Sunday, a would-be car bomber and the insurgent who intended to photograph the attack both died when their car detonated prematurely, said Col. Bakhtiar Abdullah of the Iraqi Army.

Last year, 1,693 members of the Iraqi security forces were killed, according to ministry statistics obtained by Agence-France Presse.

Yet Iraqi ministry figures have proven in the past to be far understated. An independent group that tracks the deaths of Iraqi forces, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, estimates that 2,590 Iraqi police officers and soldiers were killed last year.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Khalid al-Ansary, Qais Mizher, Omar al-Neami and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Iraq



The Times January 03, 2006

Iraq must rebuild itself after £11bn fund is exhausted
From Stephen Farrell in Baghdad



THE United States is nearing the end of its $18.4 billion (£11 billion) fund for rebuilding Iraq, with little prospect of further multibillion-dollar injections.
In language mirroring the planned reduction of troops, US officials in Baghdad have begun talking of “drawdown”, “transition” and the “wind-down” of American reconstruction projects. Instead they plan to focus on building up the Iraqi Government’s capacity to manage its own affairs.



Outlining what he called the “drawdown”, one American official said: “US reconstruction is basically aiming for completion (this) year. No one ever intended for outside assistance to continue indefinitely, but rather to create conditions where the Iraqi economy can use reconstruction of essential services to get going on its own.”

Realisation that the last of the US money will be allocated by the summer, with work continuing well into 2007, will dismay ordinary Iraqis. Millions remain frustrated at what they see as a paucity of large-scale projects such as power stations, and still expect the US-led coalition to rebuild the shattered country’s electricity network and essential services.

Standing in the Baladiyat district of Baghdad amid heaps of sewage and rubbish Hamza Abbas, a casual labourer, said: “There isn’t any construction. The only construction is piles of trash. Even if anything is rebuilt it will be sabotaged and the money will be in vain.”

In the nearby slum of Sadr City, Jassem Zawaed, a traffic policeman, conceded that international and Iraqi efforts had begun paving roads and treating sewage, but cautioned: “There has been a good start, but it’s only the beginning.”

Brigadier-General William McCoy, commander of the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Gulf, confirmed that contracts for 80 per cent of the $18.4 billion had already been issued. Those for the remaining $1.7 billion will be issued by the summer. Asked if more sizeable tranches of congressional money were expected he replied: “No. Our intent always was that as they began to generate their own revenue and stabilise their own economy and stabilise the security situation that they would take this over.”

General McCoy, who also heads the Project and Contracting Office in Baghdad, insisted that the Iraqis’ own ability to reconstruct had “developed quite well”. Whereas 60 per cent of reconstruction contracts were once carried out from design to completion stage by international companies, nearly 77 per cent were now awarded to Iraqi contractors, he said.

US officials say that experts will remain to train Iraqi ministries to manage their budgets. The aim is to decentralise and free up the sclerotic Iraqi economy through privatisation and subsidy reductions, and to improve the business climate.

They also aim to replace the current poorly targeted ration system with a welfare network designed for the “poorest of the poor”, the 25 per cent of Iraqis living on less than $1 (about 60p) a day. But Iraqis complain that nearly three years after the war Iraq still produces only 4,800 megawatts of power, little more than the 4,000 before the war, and far short of its needs. Baghdad remains a special problem, receiving only three hours of electricity a day because of sabotage to oil and electricity lines.

Insurgents have exploited the public anger, timing a series of attacks on the vulnerable electricity and oil lines to coincide with the Shia-led Government’s recent decision to increase petrol prices fivefold. The price rises caused riots and tyre-burning protests among Iraqis accustomed to having the cheapest petrol in the world.

Although General McCoy insisted that the trend of attacks was down, he confirmed that last week was the worst so far for the US-led reconstruction team, with six killed in attacks or accidents, four wounded and two kidnapped. But he said his team, especially its Iraqi members, remained “resilient”.

POWERED UP


Contracts have been awarded for 80 per cent of the US Government’s $18.4 billion Iraq relief and reconstruction fund

Three power plants have been completed


7.7 million Iraqis have access to sewage treatment compared with 2.8 million pre-war


91 contractors working with the US Government killed since June 2004

Most cities have 10-13 hours of power daily, but Baghdad has 3 hours

Chalabi likely to succeed in new Iraq government, despite controversyEven though Ahmad Chalabi apparently lost badly in last month's parliamentary election here, the former Pentagon favorite is still likely to be a big player in the next Iraqi government. The Dec. 15 vote went largely to ethnic and sectarian coalitions at the expense of secular slates, including his, preliminary returns indicate. That could leave him without a seat in parliament.
The full article will be available on the Web for a limited time:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13535019.htm
© 2006 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

Learning Activity: Considering Consequences CNN
Your students will learn about the Florida teenager who made an unauthorized trip to Baghdad, and they will consider the possible consequences of his actions from multiple perspectives.

Procedure
As a class, have students review what they know about 16-year-old Farris Hassan's recent journey to Baghdad, Iraq. Pose the following questions to guide the discussion:

• 1. How old is Farris Hassan and where does he live?
• 2. Why did Hassan want to visit Iraq?
• 3. What countries did he visit during his trip?
• 4. When did Hassan tell his parents about his decision to visit Baghdad?
• 5. What obstacles did he encounter en route to Iraq?
• 6. What did Hassan do once he got to Baghdad?
• 7. How did staff from the Associated Press and the U.S. Embassy respond to his situation?

Following the review, have students consider the actual and potential consequences of Hassan's actions for Hassan, his family, coalition forces in Iraq, Iraqi civilians, the Iraqi government and the U.S. government. List their responses on the board. Then ask students:

• What is your view of Hassan's actions?
• What other paths might he have taken to achieve his goal?
• In your view, which of these paths would have had the fewest consequences?

After the discussion, instruct students to write short essays outlining what consequences, if any, they think that Hassan should face as a result of his actions. Have students share their essays with the class and consider the pros and cons of the different consequences.

Curriculum Connections
Life Skills: Thinking and Reasoning
Standard 5. Applies basic trouble-shooting and problem-solving techniques
Level III [Grade: 6-8]

Benchmark 1. Generates alternative courses of action and compares the possible consequences of each alternative

Standard 6. Applies decision-making techniques
Level III [Grade: 6-8]

Benchmark 2. Secures factual information needed to evaluate alternatives and uses it to predict the consequences of selecting each alternative
Level IV [Grade: 9-12]

Benchmark 2. Analyzes current or pending decisions that can affect national or international policy and identifies the consequences of each alternative
Content Knowledge: A Compendium of Standards and Benchmarks for K-12 Education (Copyright 2000 McREL) is published online by Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) (http://www.mcrel.org/standards-benchmarks/external link), 2550 S. Parker Road, Suite 500, Aurora, CO 80014; Telephone: 303/337-0990
Fla. Teen Resting After Iraq Trip, Mom Says ABC News
Teenager who ran off to Iraq is home safe The Herald
Forbes - CNN International - USA Today - Miami Herald - all 1,250 related »

Business Times - 03 Jan 2006
To help stabilize Iraq, The US looks headed for confrontation with Iran

But it doesn't have the military means and political support for a full-scale attack

By LEON HADAR
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT

I'VE been embarrassed a few times in the past with my predictions (for example, that it was going to be US President John Kerry in 2004), but I've also been right on a few occasions (for example, my book, Quagmire: US in the Middle East, was published in 1992). So let me put again my credibility as a political analyst on the line, and make another forecast: The news this year will be dominated by the growing confrontation between Washington and Teheran (if that doesn't happen, well, I promise not to remind you about that early next year...).

Notice that I'm hedging my bets here. I refer to 'confrontation' like in diplomatic and military confrontation, and not to war, like the war with Iraq. I don't think that the United States at this point has the needed military resources and the necessary political support at home and abroad for launching a full-scale attack on Iran, including the possible American occupation of that country (or even parts of it).

In short, don't replace the 'q' with an 'n' and expect a re-run of Iraq in Iran. The military and political realities are quite different than it was three years ago when the Bush administration decided to oust Saddam Hussein from power. One doesn't have to be a veteran military expert or a diplomatic observer to recognise that the US armed forces are overstretched in Mesopotamia (150,000) and around the world, that the Bush administration wouldn't be able to persuade even Tony Blair to invade Iran.

Most important of all, the American public is exhausted with the war in Iraq. Hence, short of a 9/11-like terrorist attack that could be linked (really, that is, and not through deceptive 'intelligence') to the Ayatollahs in Teheran, Congress is not going to provide President Bush with the green light to send US ground troops to Iran, especially since none is really available (there are less than 400,000 combat troops in the US army and only 150,000 of those are on active duty).

A total war with Iran, the world's second oil producer, in 2006 and its consequences could also lead to such a huge hike in petrol prices in the United States that would make it less likely that the American SUV owner would re-elect a Republican Congress in the November mid-elections.

But a US confrontation with Iran is inevitable for several reasons. Much of the public attention had been focused of course on the US-led drive, backed by the European Union (EU), to block what seems to be Iran's drive to speed up its nuclear-development programme. The recent American efforts have been taking place through multilateral channels, suggesting to some observers that the Bush administration has been adopting a 'realist' strategy. The EU-3 groups (Britain, France, Germany) have been negotiating on and off with Iran, and meetings between the Americans and the other 34 members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) governing board have produced resolutions calling on Iran to adopt a more cooperative approach.

But the Bush administration agreed last November to go along with a European recommendation to delay asking the IAEA board members to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for action, after Russia and China indicated that they would have would block UN action to punish Teheran.

And while the EU-3 negotiations with Iran seem to be reaching a dead-end, there have been signs of growing tensions between the Iranians and the Israelis. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly threatened to eliminate Israel and suggested that the Jewish Holocaust didn't take place.

At the same time, Israeli officials have stressed that they would not permit Iran to develop a nuclear military capability, igniting some reports that the they are planning an attack against Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor similar to the Israeli raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear site in 1981.

But it seems very unlikely that under the conditions that exist today in the Middle East - with the United States occupying Iraq, a state that borders Iran - that Israel would take military action against Teheran that could affect US direct interests without receiving go-ahead for its patron in Washington. The Israeli tail won't be allowed to wag the US dog.

More likely, the Israeli threats serve the US strategy of pressing Iran to make concessions over the nuclear issue. In fact, recent reports in the German media that the Bush administration was preparing its NATO allies for a possible military strike against suspected nuclear sites in Iran in 2006, which appeared after similar news was published in the Turkish press, should be regarded as part of the US campaign to pressure Teheran to agree to make compromises during the negotiations with the EU-3 and the IAEA.

Most observers are speculating that without any breakthrough in the talks with Iran, Washington would demand that the UN Security Council impose sanctions on Iran, and if the Russian and/or the Chinese decide to veto a resolution along those lines, the Bush administration would urge the Europeans and other governments to join in a ban on export of embargo on technologies that Iran can use in its nuclear programme.

Both the Americans and the Iranians are aware that such moves, assuming the Europeans and others would back them, would have very little effect on Iran. With the continuing rise in oil prices, the Iranians are now awash with oil and money while the Russians, the Chinese and probably the Indians, remain important trade partners of the Iranians and could be expected to reject a US call to isolate Iran and to continue to make major economic deals with Teheran on energy and arms.

Moreover, the Iranians are familiar with the argument made above, that the United States won't be able to 'do an Iraq' in Iran, among other reasons because of the high military and economic costs for the United States involved in maintaining the occupation of Iraq. If anything, if they seek to do that, the Iranians could probably raise those costs for the Americans by encouraging their political and military allies in the majority Shiite community in Iraq, some of whom are now in power in Baghdad, to make life miserable for the occupiers through violence (the use of the Shiite militias) or by sabotaging moves towards political accommodation in Iraq.

As an Iran expert suggested to me: 'All the Iranians need is to push their Shiite button, and Iraq would explode in the face of the Americans.' Indeed, note the irony here. By ousting Saddam Hussein and his Arab-Sunni allies in Baghdad and by destroying Iraq's military power, the Americans have removed the major regional counter-balance to Iran's power in the Persian Gulf on which other Sunni-Arab regimes in the region, including Saudi Arabia, have counted on as a way of containing the Shiite Ayatollahs in Teheran who seem to have adopted an even more radical style and policies.

Compounding this sense of irony is the fact that democracy and free election in Iraq - under US occupation! - is bringing to power a Shiite political coalition with strong ties to anti-American Teheran (where another exercise in democracy led to the election of the Holocaust denier and anti-American Ahmadinejad).

It's not surprising, therefore, that the Saudis and other Arab Gulf states, not unlike the Israelis, have been putting pressure on the Americans to 'do something' about Iran before an regional Shiite bloc led by Iran would emerge in the Gulf and threaten the interests of the Saudis (who also have a large Shiite minority).

All of which means that if the Americans want to make sure that Iraq under the Shiite rule doesn't turn into a satellite of Iran, they need to use their own diplomatic and military power to contain Teheran while continuing to occupy Iraq.

The Iranians, however, assume that they are in a win-win situation. They can drag the negotiations with the EU-3 and the IAEA, create a sense of a diplomatic brinkmanship, and make a few last-moment, minor concessions on the nuclear issue. That option would leave Washington isolated and with no support to take action against Teheran.

Or the Iranians could decide to raise the diplomatic ante and reject any compromise, counting on the Russians and/or the Chinese to block UN action and on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and other anti-American Third World nations to join them in countering US diplomatic moves, which in turn, will put enormous pressure on oil prices.

Doing nothing on Iran would not only demolish what remains of the US-led nuclear arms control regime, it will turn the balance of power in Iraq and the Persian Gulf against the United States and create incentives for the Saudis and others to make deals with Teheran.

Short of trying to open direct diplomatic channels to Iran (very unlikely), the United States will probably try to increase the diplomatic and military pressure on Iran in the coming months, demonstrating that the Pax Americana project in the Middle East is becoming more expensive.

That the central banks of China and other Asian economies are paying for it, is probably the most intriguing element in this evolving story.

Copyright © 2005 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All rights reserved.




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The Twin Crises Of 2006
Robert Dreyfuss
January 03, 2006


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.

The two most pressing foreign policy problems for the Bush administration in 2006—indeed, they might be called twin crises—are, first, the unraveling of Iraq and the emergence of a theocracy in Baghdad under the control of the Shiite religious parties, and second, the serious (though somewhat overblown and artificial) showdown that is looming over Iran's alleged nuclear program. Not surprisingly, the crises in Iraq and Iran are closely related, not least because Iran's ruling clergy is closely allied to the theocrats in Baghdad.

Handled expertly, both crises might be defused. The war in Iraq could end, meaning that by the end of 2006 the United States could be out of Iraq, leaving behind a unitary state with a semblance of political stability. And the crisis in Iran might be resolved, in the form of a package deal giving broad political and economic concessions to Iran, in exchange for Tehran's agreement to end its nuclear program and accept a Russian-led compromise arrangement.

Handled clumsily, the two crises will become one. Iraq will break up, leaving a majority Shiite-led theocracy (with nearly all of Iraq's oil) in place in southern and eastern Iraq. That regime would align itself closely with Iran, forming a fundamentalist Iran-Iraq axis that would assume an increasingly anti-American (and anti-Saudi) character. Were that to happen, or if the Bush administration's hawks decide to preempt it, the United States will find itself at the end of 2006 fighting a mostly Sunni, Baathist-led insurgency in western Iraq while simultaneously battling a formidable Shiite Iraq-Iran partnership to the east.

Based on its track record, we can count on the Bush administration to take the path of unfettered clumsiness.

On Iran, there are dangerous rumblings that the United States and Israel, possibly in coordination with NATO and other regional powers, are preparing military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. Over the past few days, various news reports (in newspapers in Germany, along with Israel's Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post ) reported that Washington is consulting with NATO, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan and Oman about an assault on Iran's nuclear installations. In Israel, too, top officials have issued rather alarmist warnings over the past few days that Iran will soon reach the point of no return in its quest for a nuclear weapon, while asserting that Israel has no intention of attacking Iran.

The White House continues to argue that Iran is backing Iraq's insurgency, that Iran is a key state sponsor of world terrorism and that Iran harbors Al Qaeda officials. And, according to The New York Times, the United States has imposed unilateral sanctions on Chinese, Indian and Austrian companies accused of arming Iran, an action that could torpedo efforts to solve the Iran crisis peacefully. Noted the Times : "New U.S. sanctions against nine foreign companies accused of aiding Iran's weapons programs could signal a harder line toward Tehran by the Bush administration and could hinder diplomatic efforts by Europe to end the standoff over Iran's nuclear program, EU officials and analysts said Wednesday."

At this stage, it's likely that talk of attacking Iran is just saber-rattling, since such an attack would have incalculable, destabilizing repercussions throughout the region, and among them would be an all-out Iranian effort to overthrow the U.S. mission in Iraq. And an attack on Iran would be strongly opposed by Russia, China, India and most of Europe and the Arab world. But neoconservatives in the United States, and co-thinkers in Israel (notably, Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud bloc and his allies in the military), undoubtedly are looking for an opening to press for an attack on Iran. And fueling the fire is the bombastic rhetoric from Iran's President Ahmadinejad questioning whether the Jewish Holocaust happened and suggesting Israel be "wiped off the map." In an environment so volatile, it is foolish to dismiss the possibility of a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran sometime in 2006.

It would be wrong to take comfort in the idea that the Bush administration neocons are contained or weakened and that realists and cooler heads such as Secretary of State Rice are in control. Perhaps, at the moment, the State Department's realists have the upper hand. But that could change in a flash—after, say another major terrorist incident or some bungling provocation by Iran's admittedly unstable, even deranged leadership.

So what does this mean for Iraq?

In Iraq, Iran's cat's-paws—namely, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, its paramilitary Badr Brigade, the Al Dawa party of Prime Minister Jaafari, and, to some extent, the forces of Muqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army—are in control. They can cement their alliance with the Kurds (who, like the Shiite religious parties) want virtual independence (under the guise of federalist "autonomy") by refusing to amend Iraq's absurd and dangerously divisive constitution to meet Sunni concerns. Since the Dec. 15 election, Shiites and Kurds have been busy putting together a government that excludes the Sunnis.

And for their part, the Sunnis have accused the Shiites of rigging the vote, and have organized demonstrations of tens of thousands of people to denounce the Dec. 15 result, meanwhile accusing the Shiite militias of death squad activity, torture and even a hit list targeting many prominent Sunni moderates and secular Shiite politicians. At least five Shiite-run torture prisons have been uncovered thus far. And there are signs, reported by Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter, that the Kurds are preparing a blitzkrieg to seize control of oil-rich Kirkuk province and add it to their fiefdom.

Ambassador Khalilzad is scrambling in an effort to force the Shiites and Kurds to make broad concessions to the Sunnis and to include both Sunni and secular Shiite leaders in the new government coalition. But I suspect he will have little or no success. Those few Sunnis who decide to join the regime—and who are in turn allowed to join by the Shiite mafia—will immediately become targets of the resistance fighters. And the Shiites are not making it any easier. In the latest provocation, the Iraqi election commission unilaterally decided that more than a hundred Iraqis who ran for election on Dec. 15, many of whom were actually elected, are ineligible to serve because they have alleged ties to the Iraqi Baath Party.

So, despite the last-minute (and apparently desperate) efforts by Khalilzad, it seems likely that the new (permanent) Iraqi government that is formed sometime in the next month or so will be overwhelmingly dominated by SCIRI, Dawa and the Mahdi Army. If so, it will adopt an increasingly pro-Iranian character.

For the United States, that means that either Washington will have to accept a pro-Iran regime in Baghdad or opt to confront it. And confronting it means challenging both the Shiite religious parties in Iraq (ironically, Washington's own creation) and, at the same time, taking on Iran. Such a confrontation would be made immensely worse were the United States or Israel to attack Iran's nuclear plants, since that would solidify the Iran-Iraq axis, strengthen the ultra hardliners in Iran's ruling elite, and give this rising new Shiite power enormous credibility in the region. In other words, rather than a retreat from Iraq, the United States would be drawn into a wider conflict.

As of now, the U.S. military—undoubtedly disgusted with the neocons and their bungled war in Iraq—is quietly angling for a drawdown of American forces in Iraq as part of a slow-motion, undeclared exit strategy. No doubt, some of President Bush's political advisers would prefer to see the same, in the hopes that voters would stop blaming Bush for the debacle in Iraq. But the Trotskyite, permanent-revolution neoconservatives won't be having any of that. Maybe those neocons will in the end be no more than a speed bump on the exit road from Iraq. But it would be wrong to count them out.

Meanwhile, there are few signs that the United States has any intention of doing the one thing most necessary to get out of Iraq while leaving that battered country relatively intact—namely, negotiating a truce with the Baathists, the ex-military and the rest of the non-Al Qaeda resistance. Aside from a few fits and starts, hints of talks and some field operations, the United States appears unwilling to risk a break with the SCIRI-led bloc by stating its intention to bring the resistance into a deal. Khalilzad seems not to realize that a handful of unrepresentative Sunnis, or a party such as the Sunni, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Iraqi Islamic Party, cannot deliver the Sunni population. Indeed, in ongoing talks with the Sunni but non-Arab Kurds, the IPP has seemingly abandoned the rest of the Sunni bloc to hint that it is ready to join the majority Shiite religious government.

As a result, the prognosis for Iraq is a continuing insurgency, a new Iraqi government that leans toward Iran and a regime in Iran unified around the notion of pursuing its nuclear option. So the questions that remain are: Will Iraq, only, get worse in 2006? Or will that include Iran, too?
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Controversy Over US Airstrike in Northern Iraq
By VOA News
03 January 2006




Search for the bodies of victims of U.S. airstrike in Bayji

Iraqi police say a U.S. airstrike on a home in northern Iraq late Monday killed a number of people from the same family, but there are conflicting reports about the incident.

Residents in the town of Bayji say at least seven bodies were pulled from the rubble. Locals say there may be several more people inside.

U.S. military officials have not commented on the Iraqi police report. But the military issued a statement saying three men who were observed planting roadside bombs in Bayji later went to a nearby building, which was fired on by U.S. aircraft using precision-guided munitions.

Separately, Iraq's election commission and international observers are now in Baghdad to review fraud allegations from last month's parliamentary vote. Final election results are not expected until after the visiting experts complete their work.

Some information for this report provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.