March 21, 2006
Iraqi Insurgents Storm Police Station, Killing 18 Officers
By KIRK SEMPLE and JOHN O'NEIL
BAGDHAD, Iraq, March 21 -- In a bold raid at daybreak, a band of at least 100 insurgents stormed a police station in the town of Muqdadiya northeast of Baghdad today, killing at least 18 police officers, wounding four others and freeing all of the 33 prisoners being held in the station, officials in the Interior Ministry said.

The insurgents shelled the police station with mortar fire before attacking with rifle-propelled grenades, hand grenades and machine guns, the officials said. Reports of the number of insurgents killed or captured varied widely, with the Interior Ministry saying only one was killed and the American military putting the number at five.

The attackers destroyed about 20 police vehicles and set fire to the police station and a nearby courthouse before escaping, the Iraqi officials said. An Iraqi army unit that tried to reach the scene to support the police during the attack was disabled by a roadside bomb as the convoy passed through a city gate.

American ground forces and two American OH-58A Kiowa helicopters rushed to the scene in support of Iraqi troops, said Sgt. Doug Anderson, a military spokesman. The helicopters came under small-arms fire and one soldier was wounded, he said. The helicopters both landed safely.

Muqdadiya is a mostly Sunni city of about 200,000 people 60 miles from the capital. In published interviews late last year, American military commanders said that while it still was afflicted by low-level insurgent shootings and bombings, it was no longer a stronghold of al Qaeda in Iraq like the nearby city of Baquba, where larger attacks on on police and army units are common.

Today's assault comes a day after a group of 20 insurgents attacked the Iraqi Army headquarters in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, using mortar bombs and heavy machine guns, but fled after American helicopters swooped into the area, said Capt. Raed Hussein al-Jumaili of the Iraqi Army. There were no reported casualties in the firefight.

The mayor of Muqdadiya, Alewi Farhan, put the number of attackers at 200, according to Agence-France Presse. In an interview with the news service, he described a sophisticated operation lasting an hour and a half.

"The insurgents pulled off a very well-planned attack," he said, describing how car bomb sealed the eastern road to the site and a roadside bomb blocked the southern road, impeding reinforcements.

"They used the high building around the police station to get a good position against the police reinforcements," Mr. Farhan said.

The nation's security forces had concentrated in recent days on protecting the millions of Shiite pilgrims who converged on the southern holy city of Karbala to commemorate the final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, who died in A.D. 680. Several worshipers were killed during the pilgrimage, but a heavy security force patrolled Karbala on Monday and there were no reports of major violence.

The Iraqi police found nine bodies in Baghdad on Monday, each handcuffed and blindfolded with gunshots to the head, in the latest indication of a wave of sectarian vengeance sweeping the capital.

The bodies brought to more than 210 the number of victims of execution-style killings dumped and found in the streets and fetid swales of the capital in the past two weeks.

While bodies have turned up in the city periodically since the invasion, the frequency of such reports has leapt since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine last month in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad. That attack provoked an eruption of reprisals, mostly by Shiite militias in eastern Baghdad against Sunni Arabs and their mosques, leaving hundreds dead.

The authorities have not declared a motive for most of the slayings since then, but many followed a pattern usually associated with sectarian reprisal killings, with the victims, many of them Sunni Arabs, pulled from their homes by gunmen and hauled away to their death.

Police investigators in Salahaddin Province have accused American troops of executing 11 civilians, including several children, during a raid last Wednesday on a house in Ishaqi, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said Monday. According to the investigators, the Americans had lined up the civilians and shot them, then killed livestock and destroyed the house, the official said.

A local police commander in Ishaqi told Knight-Ridder Newspapers that an autopsy had detected bullet wounds in all the victims' heads.

The American military admitted at the time that it had demolished the house using a ground attack and airstrikes, but only after insurgents began firing from the building. Three civilians — two women and a child — and one insurgent were killed in the attack, American officials said, and another insurgent was captured.

"The allegations do seem unlikely to me, but obviously we'll cooperate with local authorities if they ask for our assistance," an American military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj. Tim Keefe, said Monday. He said he did not know whether the military was conducting its own investigation.

In Baghdad, an improvised bomb exploded Monday under a vehicle carrying commandos from the Interior Ministry and several detainees, killing three of the commandos and three detainees in the Karrada neighborhood, and wounding two commandos and a detainee, a ministry official reported.

The wounded were taken to Yarmouk Hospital, where commandos, angered by the death of one of their men, attacked the injured detainee, a hospital official said. As doctors and hospital guards tried to intervene, the official said, commandos began firing their weapons into the air, prompting the doctors to walk off the job until they were provided with sufficient security.

Members of the medical staff at Yarmouk have frequently complained about the interference of unruly and violent Iraqi security forces in the emergency room. Weapons are prohibited inside the building, but they are ubiquitous nonetheless.

Also on Monday, a bomb exploded inside a coffee shop in a Sunni district of Baghdad, killing 3 people and wounding 22, the police said. A bomb also exploded under a bus parked outside a restaurant in eastern Baghdad, killing 4 people and wounding 10.

The police in Kirkuk found the bodies of two Iraqi soldiers who had been kidnapped two days before. The victims had been stabbed to death, the police said.

Kirk Semple reported from Baghdad for this article and John O'Neil from New York. Ali Adeeb and Khalid W. Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk.



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March 21, 2006
New Business Blooms in Iraq: Terror Insurance
By ROBERT F. WORTH
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Twice in the past year, Muhammad Said has survived assassination attempts that left his car riddled with bullets. He works part time as a bodyguard for his father, a Baghdad city councilman, and helps a friend who has contracts with the American military. Both are very dangerous jobs.

So last month, Mr. Said, a slim, baby-faced 23-year-old, did what a small but growing number of Iraqis are doing: He walked into the offices of the Iraq Insurance Company and bought a terrorism insurance policy. It looked like an ordinary life insurance policy, but with a one-page rider adding coverage for "the following dangers: 1) explosions caused by weapons of war and car bombs; 2) assassinations; 3) terrorist attacks."

It cost him 125,000 dinars, about $90. Mr. Said paid more than most people because of his risky occupation. The payout, if he dies, is five million dinars, around $3,500, or about what an Iraqi policeman earns in a year.

That guarantee appears to be the first off-the-shelf terrorism policy in the world, insurance experts say. In most countries, of course, there is no need for it: death by terrorism is rare enough that it is usually covered by ordinary accident insurance. In Iraq it is not, partly because the state used to compensate the families of war victims directly. So the Iraq Insurance Company began stepping into the gap about a year ago.

"Am I worth only five million dinars?" Mr. Said asked wearily, after signing his policy. "It is not a solution. But Iraqis can be attacked by anyone, just walking on the street: Americans, insurgents, the Iraqi Army." The payout is not a lot of money, even by Iraqi standards. But in a country where terrorism kills hundreds of people a month and no one can rely on the government or employers to provide for their relatives afterward, it seems to be an idea with a future.

The Iraq Insurance Company, a state-owned group, has sold about 200 individual terrorism policies in the last year, and is now negotiating with several government ministries and private companies for group policies that would cover thousands of employees.

The idea of insuring ordinary people in what may be the most violent place on earth came from Abbas Shaheed al-Taiee, an executive at the Iraq Insurance Company.

"It is a kind of gift to the Iraqi people," said Mr. Shaheed, 53, a big, heavyset man with terribly serious eyes and a reputation as a master salesman. "We have expanded the principles of life insurance to cover everything that happens in Iraq."

Amazingly, the company has yet to pay out on a single claim.

"We have sold policies in Dawra, Ramadi, Falluja," Mr. Shaheed said, naming some of the most dangerous places in Iraq. "The contract is a good luck charm."

Mr. Shaheed (whose name means martyr in Arabic) emanates a gravitas that must be an asset in his line of work. He manages a sales staff of about 50 across Iraq, but also sells the policies himself, traveling from one workplace to another, like a kind of bureaucratic Grim Reaper.

He says the terrorism policy makes no distinctions between who fires the shots or detonates the bombs. He would be perfectly willing to insure an insurgent, though he has not done so to his knowledge, he said.

"It is a market here; there are no differences," he said, in his grim baritone. "We evaluate people's pockets."

In the United States and Europe, insurance companies offer customized policies to organizations sending employees to dangerous places, including Iraq (some news organizations, for example, insure their reporters this way). But those policies are highly tailored to each company's activities and risks, and they are generally expensive.

The idea of a standardized, terrorism life insurance policy appears to be unprecedented, said Robert Hartwig, the chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute in New York.

Some other insurance experts agreed that the policy was a novel one, but said they would hardly call it a good deal. "In an American context, it's very overpriced," said Robert Hunter, the director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, an association of consumer rights groups. "In America, you could probably get $100,000 worth of life insurance coverage for maybe $125 to $150," especially a healthy 23-year-old, he said. "And that would cover you no matter how you died."

Selling insurance in Iraq has never been easy. The first insurance companies here were established in the 1950's, when they competed with Western companies. But the idea never gained wide acceptance, in part because some Islamic authorities disapprove of insurance, considering it akin to gambling.

Also, many Iraqis preferred to rely on their tribes or families in case of accidents or deaths. The state also played a powerful paternal role: during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, the government generously compensated the families of soldiers who died, sometimes with a car or property as well as money.

After the Persian Gulf war in 1991 the market shrank further, because foreign reinsurance companies pulled out, forcing Iraqi companies to depend only on their own assets, said Aziz Hassan, a former deputy finance minister.

Strangely, Iraqi insurance companies have done relatively well since the fall of Saddam Hussein, despite a stagnant economy and the uncertainty over Iraq's future. Six private insurance companies were founded in 2004, and now compete with the two state-owned companies.

The Iraq Insurance Company has renovated its offices — they were looted and burned after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 — and the company now employs between 250 and 300 people. They have sold at least 2,700 life insurance policies since the fall of the Hussein government.

In 2005, the company's net income was about $2.5 million at current exchange rates. "We broke records," said Bassim Mahdi Saleh al-Sheikhli, the company's managing director. "Business has never before been so good."

The company attributes much of its success to salesmen like Mr. Shaheed, who now operate more freely — albeit more dangerously — than they did in the past.

"From my point of view, sales is an art," said Mr. Shaheed, who has worked at the Iraq Insurance Company for 18 years. "For instance, talking to a father with children is different from talking to a man still single. You have to bring out his passion to protect his family."

Because the salesmen carry money and travel, their own jobs are unusually dangerous. They do not carry guns. Many have bought terrorism insurance themselves, including Mr. Shaheed.

One rule applies to all prospective clients. "When we talk about death and risks, we refer to ourselves: 'I might die tomorrow,' " Mr. Shaheed said. "When we talk about the payment, we say, 'The company pays you.' "

Once a client has agreed to buy a policy, a price is negotiated. It ranges from 60,000 dinars for the safer professions — teachers, businessmen and the like — to 125,000 for policemen and translators for Western companies. The payout is the same regardless.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Shaheed sat at a desk in his second-floor office, chatting quietly with a potential client. Nearby on the couch sat Basmel Nafaa, a 48-year-old businessman with a bald head and an impish grin. Mr. Nafaa had already bought an ordinary life insurance policy, and was considering buying terrorism coverage too.

"He's the best we have here in Iraq," Mr. Nafaa said of Mr. Shaheed. "He's a good hunter."

Mr. Nafaa recounted how Mr. Shaheed had approached him at the wholesale market where he often works, as if by chance. The salesman chatted amiably about mutual friends, and then began telling a story about a man who had died without leaving anything for his wife and children. Before long, Mr. Nafaa was sold.

"He hardly even needs to remind you of the dangers you face," Mr. Nafaa said. "We see it everywhere."

Mr. Nafaa began offering examples. A few months earlier, his 12-year-old son Joseph was standing outside the family home waiting for a school bus that never came. The boy persuaded his mother to give him money for a taxi. Minutes later, he said, a suicide bomber in a car exploded right next to the bus stop, which is across from the home of a high-level government official. Six people were killed.

Mr. Nafaa showed photographs of his house, which was badly damaged. "I had no insurance at that time," he said.

Then Mr. Nafaa gestured across the room at his cousin, Baseem Makadsi — the other prospective client — who still has a crease on the back of his skull from where a bullet crashed through the window of his car and grazed him while he was driving to the market with his son.

"If he had not leaned over to speak to his son, he would be dead," Mr. Nafaa said. "He lost a lot of blood."

Mr. Makadsi was not yet sold on terrorism insurance. He was thinking of taking his family out of Iraq.

But Mr. Nafaa persuaded himself. "I will buy it," he said. "There is a big probability to be killed by insurgents here. Higher than anywhere else in the world."

Hosham Hussein contributed reporting for this article.



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http://www.counterpunch.org/

If This Is Not Civil War, Then God Knows What Civil War Is"

Death Squads on the Prowl; Iraq Convulsed by Fear

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Irbil, Iraq.

Iraq is a country convulsed by fear. It is at its worst in Baghdad. Sectarian killings are commonplace. In the three days after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on February 22 , some 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were picked up on the street or dragged from their cars and murdered. The dead bodies of four suspected suicide bombers were left dangling from a pylon in the Sadr City slum.

The scale of the violence is such that most of it is unreported. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, said yesterday that scores were dying every day. "It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," he said. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Unseen by the outside world, silent populations are on the move, frightened people fleeing neighborhoods where their community is in a minority for safer districts.

There is also a growing reliance on militias because of fears that police patrols or checkpoints are in reality death squads hunting for victims.

Districts where Sunni and Shia lived together for decades if not centuries are being torn apart in a few days. In the al-Amel neighbourhood in west Baghdad, for instance, the two communities lived side by side until a few days ago, though Shias were in the majority. Then the Sunni started receiving envelopes pushed under their doors with a Kalashnikov bullet inside and a letter telling them to leave immediately or be killed. It added that they must take all of their goods which they could carry immediately and only return later to sell their houses.

The reaction was immediate. The Sunni in al-Amel started barricading their streets. Several Shia families, believed to belong to the Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), were murdered later the same day the threatening letters were delivered.

"The local Sunni suspected those Shias of being behind the letters," said an informant. "Probably they called in the local resistance and asked them to kill the Sciri people."

One effect of the escalating sectarian warfare is to strengthen the Sunni insurgency as their own community desperately looks to its defenses.

It is not as if life was not already hard enough before the latest escalation in communal violence. Three years ago, most Iraqis were glad to see the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, even if they did not like the US occupation, because they wanted normal lives. They had been living in a state of war since 1980 when the Iraqi leader invaded Iran. They then had eight years of bloody conflict followed by the invasion of Kuwait, defeat by the US-led coalition, the Shia and Kurdish uprisings of 1991 and then 12 years of UN sanctions.

Instead of improving, life in Baghdad has become far more dangerous than it was under Saddam Hussein. Every facet of daily living is affected.

In the last few days, temperatures have started to soar in Iraq and people would normally be buying summer clothes. But in the shopping district of al-Mansur last week few people were on the streets. Many shops were closed because their owners are too frightened to leave their homes.

But even staying in your own house carries problems. In the torrid heat of the Iraqi summer people are dependent on air conditioning to make life tolerable. But Baghdad gets only three or four hours of electricity a day. Almost everybody has a generator, large or small, depending on what they can afford. But the price of petrol, still heavily subsidised by the government, tripled before Christmas. One friend called Mohammed complained: "Either I wait seven or eight hours in a queue to buy the fuel or I get it on the black market. But black market fuel means that I would have to spend $7-8 a day to run my generator and I simply can't afford that." Mohammed added that he had just spent 10 hours, 5 am until 3pm, queuing to buy a bottle of gas which he, like most Iraqis, use for cooking.

Iraqis have been compelled to find ways of going on living even in the most testing conditions but even their resolution is beginning to weaken.

Mohammed's brother had a job in a company selling air-conditioning units. Since this is the beginning of the summer on the Mesopotamian plain - one of the hottest places on earth - it should be a good business, but the brother has just lost his job. The company he worked for was owned by a Kurd. His life was threatened and he shut down the company before moving to Jordan with his family.

Iraqi political parties have now spent three months since the election on 15 December trying to form a government. But ask an Iraqi on the street what he wants from a new government and many reply: "What government? It never does anything for us." Supply of electricity, clean water and sewage disposal are all down from 2003. The only improvement is in electricity supply outside Baghdad but even this is sporadic. In Kurdistan, the only peaceful part of Iraq, electrical supply is currently only a few hours a day. Everywhere there are men beside the road selling black-market petrol smuggled in from Iran. Turkey has cut off supplies of refined fuel because it has not been paid.

All Iraq is suffering, but Baghdad and the central provinces are turning into a slaughter house. Normal life has long been impossible. The symbol of post-Saddam Iraq is the blast wall, giant grey concrete blocks placed end to end to create fortifications of medieval appearance. They have come to dominate Baghdad and most other Iraqi cities. They protect US positions, police and Iraqi army posts and all government buildings. They also strangle streets leading to traffic gridlock at notorious choke points.

Some Iraqis are living better than before 2003. Teachers and government officials are earning $200 a month where they used to earn $10.

There are also Kurds and Shia inhabiting provinces north and south that they wholly dominate. But elsewhere, Iraqis live lives of chromic insecurity.

In al-Khadra, a Sunni neighbourhood in west Baghdad, for instance, the insurgents are waging two wars at the same time, one against the Americans and the other against Shia militiamen, some of whom work for the Ministry of the Interior.

Last week, Sunni guerrillas attacked a car which they claimed was carrying CIA agents in a road tunnel and killed those inside. Two days later, they ambushed a convoy of vehicles of the Badr Group, the Shia militia. Four of the militiamen were killed and petrol was poured over their bodies and set alight. Soon afterwards, a bus was spotted abandoned by a highway. At first it was thought it might contain a bomb. Instead it had a more grisly cargo, the bodies of 18 Sunni tortured and killed. In districts such as al-Khadra, the civil war has already begun.

http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon03202006.html

Is There a Right Way to Wage a Wrong War?

Why are We Here?

By NORMAN SOLOMON

On Saturday, during her national radio response to the president, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the Bush administration of "incompetence" in the Iraq war.

What would be a competent way to pursue the war in Iraq? How would you drop huge bombs on urban neighborhoods in a competent way? How would you deploy cluster munitions that shred the bodies of children in a competent way? How would you take hundreds of thousands of people from their home land and send them to a country to kill and be killed -- based on lies -- in a competent way?

How do you ravage the housing and health care and education of communities across the United States, while war-profiteering corporations post bigger profits -- how would you do that in a competent way?

Senator Feinstein went on to say that it's so important, for the war in Iraq, for the United States government to "do it right."

How does one do this war right, when every day it brings more carnage? The only way to do this war right is to not do it at all.

Last Friday, reporting on a new assault by the U.S. military in Iraq, a headline on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle said: "Biggest air attack since the invasion seen as delivering a message."

Delivering a message.

Forty years ago, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said it was necessary to drop bombs on North Vietnam in order to deliver a message to the Communist leaders in Hanoi. The former war correspondent Chris Hedges, in his book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," recalls that when he was reporting from El Salvador, one morning he and other reporters woke up at their hotel and discovered that death squads had dumped corpses in front of the building overnight, and in the mouths of those corpses were written messages threatening the journalists.

In Yugoslavia, during the spring of 1999, the bombs fell with the U.S.-led NATO forces delivering a message. And when, at noontime one Friday in the city of Nis, cluster bombs fell courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and ripped into the body of a woman holding a bag of carrots from the market, that too was an instance of sending a message.

Time after time, leaders send messages by inflicting death. On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden sent a message at the World Trade Center. And in the fall of 2001 the U.S. military sent a message to Afghanistan, where the civilians who died, if we are going to count numbers, were at least as numerous as those who died at the World Trade Center.

And now, George W. Bush continues to send a message with the bombs and the bullets. And we're encouraged -- if not to avidly support -- to be passive. To defer. To be inactive.

When people across the United States gather to oppose this war, they are refusing to participate in sending the message of death.

Almost 40 years ago Martin Luther King talked about what he called "the madness of militarism." And it's with us, here and now; it's with us in the United States every time a child is malnourished, every time people need medical care and don't get it and suffer and sometimes lose their lives, while the military budgets of this country -- over half a trillion dollars a year -- are spent not on defense but on military expenditures, which dwarf anything that could be accurately described as defense. The madness of militarism that Dr. King talked about is expressed every day by the likes of Senator Feinstein, who demands "competence" in war and says that it must be done right.

We need a peace effort, not a war effort, from the United States. Instead of doing a better job of killing, there's a movement around this country to compel what is said to be our own government to do a much much much better job of sustaining life -- instead of taking it.

The problem isn't that this war may not be winnable. The problem is the war was and is and always will be wrong, and must be stopped.

At every demonstration for peace and social justice, why are we here? Because those are values we want to live for.

And why are we here on this earth? Why are any of us here? Not an easy question to answer. But activism is a way of insisting that we're not here to be part of war machinery. We're not here to be part of the killing, we're not here to aid and abet or enable those like George W. Bush who lead the charge to slaughter in the name of freedom to serve profit. We're here with a very different mission.

This article is excerpted from Norman Solomon's speech to an antiwar rally in Sebastopol, California, on Sunday, March 19.

Norman Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=8735
March 21, 2006
Conservatives Advocate a Big Government Solution to Iraq

by Ivan Eland
As the Iraq War enters its fourth year and the media reads the tea leaves to see if a “civil war” has officially begun, top officials of the Bush administration continue to try to spin their way to victory by using “happy talk.” Although public relations offensives are the way wars are fought inside the capital beltway, the sectarian groups in Iraq aren’t playing by the rules of Washington movers and shakers. The worsening civil war—in Bush administration euphemism, “sectarian violence”—is now more worrisome to the president’s battlefield commanders than the Sunni insurgency. While liberals insist that Iraq has plunged into civil war and conservatives continue to believe that the violence can only be quelled by a stronger Iraqi government, no one is looking at the important question of what direction future U.S. policy should take.

A quick look at Iraq’s history reveals that government intervention, beginning with the British government’s meddling after World War I, is primarily responsible for the country’s current problems. The British created the artificial state of Iraq from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire. Throughout its history, Iraq has been held together only by brute force of authoritarian power. Although the various ethnic and religious groups in Iraq traditionally have lived in peace, during Saddam’s rule, he deliberately stoked ethnic and religious cleavages in a “divide and conquer” strategy. After the naïve U.S. invasion removed the only brake on Iraqi centrifugal forces, Saddam’s earlier fueling of sectarian animosities has come home to roost in the current civil war between the Sunni and Shi’a. Even though the interventions of governments have caused most of Iraq’s current difficulties, the Bush administration and other conservatives, such as George Will, apparently believe that somehow stronger government is also the answer. Quite the contrary.

Will argues that in the absence of a strong central government “sectarian clustering” will occur. Sectarian clustering is not necessarily a bad thing unless compelled by force of arms. People should be allowed to live freely where they want. The problem in Iraq was that the Sunni insurgents deliberately struck Shi’ite targets to provoke Shi’ite militias into the civil war that has already begun. And the Sunnis began their insurgency for three reasons. The first was to oust the U.S. government’s occupation of their homeland and later the Shi’ite/Kurdish interim government that it was propping up. The second was to avoid paybacks for the excesses of the Saddam era by that and future Iraqi Shi’ite/Kurdish central governments. The third was to prevent the Shi’ite/Kurdish government from controlling all of Iraq’s oil wealth—which lies mainly in the northern Kurdish and southern Shi’ite regions of the country—and perhaps leaving the Sunnis without any if those regions decided to become autonomous or secede from Iraq, as seems increasingly likely.

In fact, perhaps the solution to Iraq lies in such sectarian clustering. Instead of fighting the powerful centrifugal forces in Iraq, perhaps the United States and the Iraqis should embrace them. A grand conclave of all Iraqi groups should be held to negotiate the decentralization of Iraq. Such an arrangement would probably entail a very loose confederation with a weak central government or an outright partition (with each group not necessarily inhabiting contiguous areas) with no Iraqi central government. Minimizing or eliminating the central government would eliminate the fear by Iraqi groups that the central government would be taken over by one group and used to oppress all others. To get the Sunnis to agree to such decentralization and to quell their fears that they would be left with only a rump state devoid of oil revenues, the Shi’a and Kurds would need to reach an oil revenue sharing agreement with them or actually give them territory containing oil wells. To encourage the Shi’a and the Kurds to make such concessions, the United States should announce a rapid withdrawal of the U.S. forces that are now artificially propping up the Iraqi central government.

The reality is that Iraq is already effectively decentralized. Numerous militias control large areas and cannot be disarmed. Also, the Bush administration makes the questionable assumption that the Iraqi security forces will remain national and not break up to match the sectarian divides in Iraqi society. Yet the administration and many other conservatives, who would never embrace big government solutions at home, are proponents of strengthening the Iraq government. But to really be effective in holding the fractious Iraqi society together, the central government would probably have to resume Saddam-like dictatorial powers—something that no one wants.

The United States should attempt to spur peaceful negotiations to codify the de facto decentralization on the ground rather than continuing its bid to impose an unworkable U.S.-style federation on Iraq. Current U.S. policy will continue to exacerbate, rather than dampen, the ongoing civil war.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC22Ak02.html
Fear and loathing at Iraqi crossing
By Iason Athanasiadis

IBRAHIM KHALIL, northern Iraq - Rows on rows of trucks lined the road on both sides of the border post between Turkey and war-torn Iraq's most economically successful northern part, Kurdistan.
But even in relatively stable Ibrahim Khalil, such is the unpredictability of the crossing that the lines of fuel containers waiting to pass into Iraq can stretch for up to 70 kilometers into Turkey at times of gridlock.

On the Turkish side, border guards deploy repeated random passport checks on hapless diaspora Kurds who, in the absence of direct flights, are completing the final overland stage of their long journey from Europe or the United States to reach their families inside Iraqi Kurdistan.

On the Iraqi side, Kurdish officials affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) extort US$300 bribes from dejected businessmen and truck drivers bringing Western and Turkish products across the border.

The KDP is one half of Iraq's Kurdish power equation. Its leader is veteran politician Masoud Barzani, the current president of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. His longtime rival is the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and current president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani.

Ordinary Kurds, whether at the crossing or elsewhere in Iraq, complain that their leaders - who spend most of their time nowadays in Baghdad - have forgotten them. But this seems to be a generalized phenomenon in a country gradually ripping itself apart in an orgy of sectarian hate. Meanwhile, Iraq's secular political elite appear ever more irrelevant as they huddle inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone and bicker over government appointments.

The political parties are still deadlocked over the choice of the dominant Shi'ite party, the United Iraqi Alliance, of Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister. Talabani is reported to have said he had joined Sunnis, Kurds and secular Shi'ites in wanting to stop Jaafari from becoming premier. Negotiations are continuing, even though the new parliament was sworn in last week, this after December's elections.

Distant as Ibrahim Khalil may be from the capital, it represents ground zero in the question of northern Iraq's future and Turkey's role in it. The border crossing has traditionally been the point across which Turkish tanks rumbled whenever Turkey sought to demonstrate its reach.

While such incursions have been restricted since the US-led occupation of Iraq, Ankara's threats to deal the Kurds a destructive blow should they declare independence loom large. The Kurds already have a high degree of autonomy, and the fear remains that the country might be carved into three regions, Kurds in the north, Shi'ites in the south, and Sunnis in the middle.

An unseemly controversy erupted last year when the Turkish government insisted that the federal Iraqi flag should fly at the border crossing, rather than the Kurdish one. But Kurdish officials interviewed by Asia Times Online insist that the distinctive yellow sun set against a red, green and white background will not come down. Across Kurdistan, the issue of the flag is a matter of national pride and a foreshadow of tensions to come.

At one of the many checkpoints dotting the countryside once one crosses the border, Kalashnikov-toting guards wearing standard-issue US military uniforms and boots wave vehicles along. Naqib Ziad, an Assyrian Christian on sentry duty, said Iraq's larger northern neighbor (Turkey) does not represent a threat to him. But when he was joined by Ismail Ali Ismail, a Kurdish colleague, his rhetoric changed abruptly.

"We don't like the Turks to take away the [Kurdish] flag from the crossing and put an Iraqi one in its place," he said. "If Turkey does not allow us to have a state here, we'll fight for it."

By now, night had descended over the thousands of gleaming trucks waiting their turn to cross into Iraq. Kokcal Huseyn Asim, a Turk, was trying to keep warm as he sat by his truck. On his first trip to Iraq, he claimed not to feel any fear about traveling here, even though he added the caveat that he intended not to move beyond the Kurdish area.

"I'm not scared because it's so safe here," he said. "I don't have a problem with the flag of Kurdistan flying as of the moment Kurdistan remains a part of federal Iraq. It's their right to fly their flag."

Asim's colleague, a Turkish Kurd, confessed to having stopped coming to Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as the security situation deteriorated and economic opportunities dried up. But now that he had returned, he said he felt completely safe.

"That side is Turkey and this side is Iraq," he said. "I don't see Kurdistan anywhere around here, and let's not forget that it's not just Turkey but Syria and Iran that also insist that the Kurdish flag not be raised."

It was an extraordinary statement for a Kurd standing inside the autonomous Kurdistan region to make. But the presence of his Turkish colleague Asim, who was listening to everything he said, explained his timidity.

"This guy is terrified to speak out," an Iraqi Kurdish bystander commented later. "He knows that while he may speak freely here, his colleague could turn him over to MIT [Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, the Turkish National Intelligence Agency] once they're in Turkey again."

But more commonplace concerns such as the fear of being struck by anti-US insurgents abound among the thousands of truck drivers working to keep the occupation supplied. Abdullah Ramadan Guli, a 57-year-old driver, said he has never felt more endangered in 28 years of criss-crossing Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula than now.

Guli is currently employed by the US Army, whose military base in Mosul he supplies with aircraft fuel. Turkish truck drivers such as Guli are some of the last professionals in the region to accept the risky business of working for the Americans. But even Guli is critical of the lack of security that the US Army provides on the often lethal three-hour drive down from the border to the strife-torn city of Mosul.

"Should there be an attack, the Americans just run away," he complained. "They only come back to tug the damaged trucks off the road."

In two years of driving his highly flammable truck within the 1.5-kilometer-long US convoys that cross the northern Iraqi countryside, Guli has been caught up in three attacks. So far he has been lucky, never having had his truck directly struck by insurgent fire. "Six months ago they hit us with mines and rockets, but more usually we're just pelted with stones," he said.

On the road leading away from the border toward the nearby town of Dohuk, a cluster of waiting cars revved their engines impatiently, anxious to thrust forward across the hundred or so meters of empty road separating them from a convoy of heavy vehicles filing on to the road from a separate enclosure.

Just visible through the heavy darkness that had descended was a waiting area for heavy trucks that marks the end of the border zone. Under the protection of US machine-gun-mounted military trucks and a Humvee, several hundred Turkish trucks filed out.

Loaded down with supplies for the US military camp in the medieval city of Mosul, the convoy drove through the night, its drivers vigilant for ambushes. A US military truck brought up the rear, its rear-fixed spotlight used to warn away errant vehicles that might stray too close.

Once the convoy got going, the procession of cars started its slow, ponderous journey behind the convoy toward Dohuk. Every time one of them crossed the 200-meter separating space that the Americans insisted on maintaining from civilian traffic, the gunner sitting in the military vehicle bringing up the rear flashed his powerful spotlight aggressively.

Fearing car-bombs, US convoys insist that no one overtakes them and that a clear distance be maintained from them. For more than an hour, the convoy and the traffic jam behind it made tortuously slow progress until a fork in the road was reached and the cars accelerated away defiantly.

Back in the Kurdish-dominated city of Arbil, a group of brightly dressed Kurdish schoolgirls piled into the handicrafts museum inside the medieval castle dominating the city skyline. Chattering excitedly, they rushed from display to display, examining the elaborate patters on show.

Outside, the mid-morning bustle at the ticket office was interrupted by five massive trucks powering up the driveway. Screeching to a halt, heavily armed American guards emerged from the first few trucks, aiming high-powered M-4 rifles at the bemused onlookers.

The fourth car was carrying extra tires and medical equipment, while the vehicle bringing up the rear had been specially modified to accommodate a heavy-machine-gun nest that could blow up cars judged to be behaving in a threatening manner. All the trucks were plastered with large stickers warning others cars in English and Arabic not to approach closer than 100 meters.

A foreign photographer who asked permission to photograph the convoy was bluntly told not to point his camera in its direction. Visibly frustrated by the Americans' manner, one of the photographer's US-trained Kurdish guards blurted out his anger: "We're capable of beating them but don't for the time being. But they should respect our country the way in which we respect their presence here. They shouldn't act in this disrespectful way while they're our guests."

Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Conversa...art_3_0320.html
Conversations with Machiavelli's Ghost, Part 3

Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: Monday March 20, 2006

In the final installment of a series of interviews with RAW STORY Managing News Editor Larisa Alexandrovna, controversial Neoconservative scholar and Iran Contra figure Michael Ledeen denounces his reputation as a Neo-Fascist, criticizes the Bush administration's personnel decisions with regard to high level officials, and calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The most striking comment Ledeen makes is in reference to Osama bin Laden as having died in Iran late last year, echoing already long circulated accounts that bin Laden has been presumed dead for some time now.

In describing the Iraq war, Ledeen explains that he had strongly advised against the plan, saying that the invasion of Iraq was the "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place."

Ledeen also describes National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley as in a state of permanent "deputy" status. Hadley was Deputy National Security Advisor under now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ledeen provides a rather telling comparison of the Hadley/Rice relationship by using a precursor:

"I think Hadley is to Rice as Scowcroft was to Kissinger; not inclined to think or act independently," said Ledeen.

Other highlights include Ledeen's definition of the controversial concept of "Creative Destruction," as well as his hope for a bipartisan foreign policy solution in which different view points would stop "borking" one another: "We can't keep on Borking each other, describing one another in ugly caricatures, and refusing to think through what are, after all, often very difficult issues," says Ledeen.

Part I of this series, The Democratic Revolutionary

Part II of the series, aptly titled Dymistifying Intrigue

Staffing the Deck:

Iraq through a 911 Lens

RS): I want to revisit what we briefly touched upon with regard to the Iraq war and pre-war intelligence, but I want to continue from a different vantage point. Let's begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Do you think the attacks could have been and should have been avoided? Were there enough warnings? If so, where did the failure, in your opinion, occur?

ML): Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place. As I said at the time. The key to the terror structure was and is Iran, and we should have started by supporting democratic revolution in Iran, not invading any place. And even if you decided to 'do' Iraq first, it should have been political first, and military second-if-necessary. I proposed declaring the 'no fly zones' to be 'free Iraq,' and then dropping leaflets on the country urging Iraqis to go govern themselves, preparing for the fall of the regime.

RS): Why do you think we have failed in democratic endeavors with regard to Iran?

ML): I think the CIA is both incompetent and unwilling to find and report the truth about Iran. They are afraid some president will tell them to get active in Iran, and they don't know where to start. To get the top al Qaeda people you would have to go into Iran, where most of them spend most of their time, and the CIA isn't up to that.

We still have no Iran policy, and we are trying to win a regional war while playing defense in one country alone. That is a sucker's game.

RS): Why do you think we did not and are not out chasing leads for Osama bin Laden and other high level Al Qaeda members?

ML): I wrote several weeks ago that I was told bin Laden died in Iran in mid-December, 2005. I trust the (Iranian) person who told me, but it's easy for even the best people to get such things wrong, so time will tell. Thus far there is no sign he's alive, and Zawahiri acts more and more like the commander.

RS): So will someone be letting us know about this or is the myth of him needed?

ML): Great question, to which I don't have the answer. I doubt Zawahiri wants to say he's dead (if indeed he is dead), that would not be good news. More likely we won't know for a while, unless he's alive and shows himself.

RS): What in your opinion defines a post-911 world? What separates it from a pre-911 world?

ML): The recognition by more people than before that we are under attack, as we have been for more than a quarter of a century.

RS): In responding to the attacks of 911, do you think we failed in any meaningful way to both secure the nation and to address terrorism?

ML): The world's leading supporter of terrorism, the Iranian regime, is still in power, and racing toward nuclear capacity. Ditto for the terror masters in Damascus. And it's obvious that our security systems are not as good as they should be. Have you been through an airport recently?

RS): Yes, I know what you mean, but what do you make of the Dubai port deal in this context? It seems to me that we, the US, are entering it from a point of weakness. National security has been used by this administration to justify everything under the sun, including illegal domestic surveillance programs.

The Dubai port deal has essentially exposed that national security is nothing more than a political ploy for this administration. The gamble is not worth it, especially not during such a high stakes election cycle. Why would the Bush/Cheney administration expose themselves like this if their hand was not being forced on the issue? Perhaps I am not seeing another element to this whole thing.

ML): I don't agree that national security is just a political ploy. I think the president takes it very seriously, and I also think the NSA program is legal. Obviously the Democrats now see that, since they are retreating.

RS): The NSA spying program is not legal, maybe justified in intent, but not remotely legal. Even if the FISA was not adequate, as some have argued, the White House was obligated to seek new legislation or corrections to already existing legislation, not simply ignore the law until found out. I don't know one credible legal scholar, from every side of every aisle, who would say that domestic surveillance without a warrant is legal. Again, we can speculate if it is justified or not, but it is hardly legal.

ML): I know plenty of legal scholars who think it's perfectly legal. Do you read Power Line blog? Andy McCarthy? Maybe the Supreme Court will pronounce on it some day.

RS): No, I have not read Power Line. But let's move on to the other part of my question. What about the Dubai deal? Why do you think it was pushed so hard?

ML: The problem with the Dubai deal is that they did it all wrong. It was a mid-level bureaucratic decision (no political people, hence no political sensitivity), they had a template, the case fit inside their template, and that was that. Von Mises teaches us that "bureaucrats don't solve problems, they apply the rules," and in this case they even applied the wrong rules. They should have used the old model, which would have required a kind of firewall between the U.S. operations and the foreign owners. That method has been used in dozens of cases, and satisfies most reasonable people.

Iraq In Chaos

RS): Secretary Rice, who at the time of the attacks of 911 was the National Security Advisor, was promoted. Stephen Hadley, who was at the time of the attacks the Deputy National Security Advisor, was also promoted. George Tenent was awarded with a medal. These are just a few examples of what is mind boggling in terms of incompetence and chaos.
Let's talk about Iraq against this backdrop. What do you think are the reasons that have contributed most greatly to the mess, the civil war, we are now seeing in Iraq? Is it reliance on the same circle of people who are not qualified?

ML): There is no civil war in Iraq, much as many people seem to wish. I keep saying that the Nobel Peace Prize should go to the Iraqi people. It would certainly be understandable if there were a civil war, but they have not fallen for it, despite the massacres of civilians by the terrorists.

RS): We can debate what to call the mess in Iraq, but the terrorists there are there in large numbers now and unified under a mission flag by the war we started. I don't think anyone wants this thing to fail; failure means dead bodies piling up. I don't think people would wish for so much death. What should/could we have done differently?

ML): The main failure in Iraq is to have misconceived the nature of the war, to have chosen the wrong target to begin with, and to have refused to launch a political challenge to the other terror masters. Most of the violence in Iraq would end if there were political freedom in Iran and Syria.

I agree that personnel is the weak point of this administration, and very few people have been held accountable for failure. Tenet should have been fired on the 12th of September, 2001. Rice is better than Powell, but not good enough, and Hadley is still her deputy. The NSC is extremely weak, and Rumsfeld should have been replaced long since.

RS): what do you mean Hadley is "still her deputy?" Who do you think should replace Rumsfeld? Is he not taking direct orders from Cheney, Addington, etc.?

ML): I think Hadley is to Rice as Scowcroft was to Kissinger; not inclined to think or act independently. I think the next SecDef should be a top notch manager, the Pentagon desperately needs smooth management instead of trying to function in constant crisis mode. And no, I don't think Rumsfeld is a puppet for anyone else. It's a hilarious idea, actually.

RS): Has this whole thing not turned out rather badly for Israel, as we have previously discussed? What do you think is the solution to this crisis now, given the situation, not just for Israel but for other nations in the region?

ML): Israel's stuck, as far as I can tell. The Arab-Israeli conflict cannot even be sensibly addressed until the war is over. The Palestinians cannot deliver what Israel needs, which is security, because the terrorists are in the hands of the terror masters in Tehran and Damascus and Riyadh. So what exactly are the Israelis supposed to do?

RS): You have told me before about your distrust of the CIA and other intelligence agencies regarding pre-war intelligence relating to Iraq. Is it specifically the CIA or American intelligence agencies in general? What is the history of this distrust and frustration?

ML): Pick your favorite commission report, everybody finds the same disaster. Everyone who looks seriously at our intelligence community emits a primal scream.

RS): Okay, I pick the 911 Commission Report; it is a bestseller after all. The CIA figures in here a great deal, yet the President gave Tenet a medal. But they are hardly the main character. NORAD, NSA, NSC, FAA, FBI all appear to have failed on that day, either through the leadership at the helm of each or through miscommunication based on a flawed design. So why has not a single person been fired? Why is such incompetence rewarded?

ML): Beats me, I've been yelling about it for nearly four years.

RS): Doesn't the "buck" stop at the White House, not the agencies it relies on? Ultimately, one can blame all of these agencies who failed to do their jobs on that day, but the President had ample warning from all of them, and the President ignored those warnings. Yet even after that, the President promoted most of the people in charge of those agencies. To me that smells of not only incompetence but an attempt to silence those that could expose an administratin so self-absorbed that it fell asleep at the wheel on the single most important issue for the country. There is no other way to see it, is there?

ML): There are lots of ways to see it, but you are right that the ultimate responsibility lies in the Oval Office.

Politics of Empire and Fascism

RS): Some have noted that the US has been empire building since the late seventies. Do you think we are empire building?

ML): No, quite the opposite. We are always in a rush to bring the boys (and now the girls) home. Often too early.

RS): Was Vietnam too early?

ML): I have no idea

RS): Much has been made of your identifying with neo-Fascism, specifically with the idea of perpetual war. Can you explain a reason for perpetual war and how the concept of "creative destruction" applies to perpetual war as well as peace? Is the war on terror the realization of perpetual war? If yes, do you feel that you may have contributed directly or indirectly to the process? If not, what is the war on terror then and how would you describe it?

ML): Of all the nonsense spread about me, the most outrageous is the claim that I have ever had the slightest sympathy for fascism. I spent fifteen years or so in the fascist archives, trying to figure out how such a terrible thing could have happened. I have always been an open enemy of all totalitarian movements, from fascism and Nazism to communism and jihadism. It is entirely fanciful to suggest that someone who studies evil somehow sympathizes with it. Tout comprendre is NOT tout pardonner. My work on fascism has stood up very well, several of my books are still in print, and there is now a second generation of work on subjects I was the first to identify as important, such as the efforts to create a fascist international in the late twenties and early thirties.

"Creative destruction" comes from an entirely different context. The phrase is Schumpeter's, and he used it to describe the effect of capitalism on society. I found it particularly descriptive of American character, because we are always tearing down old things and building new ones, whether in art or literature or intellectual fads or business or sports. It's part of our national DNA, as it were. And I have sometimes applied it to the happy outcomes of some of our international campaigns, as when we brought democracy to Italy, Germany and Japan after the Second World War.

I don't know what, if anything, that has to do with war and peace, those are much bigger issues. Generally, I think that man is a warlike animal. Anyone who studies human history has to agree that most of it is the history of war or the preparation for war. It's sad, but there you have it.

RS): We are tearing down a great deal, that is correct, but we rarely rebuild it. One need only look at countries that have been exploited by US creativity and corporate interests and what little is left of them when our corporations go in to rebuild the very thing they were involved in taking down. We are three years into Iraq and Halliburton is busy building something, but it is not rebuilding the basics needed for Iraq's stability.

It does apply to war and peace, but I think there is some romanticizing going on with what Germany was, for example. Germany, as we had discussed in part one of this series, was first torn down when it was already a democracy and rebuild by western interests into a war machine, destroyed again, and rebuilt into a democracy.

ML): That's not my understanding of German history. They built their own war machine.

I have obviously failed to explain what "creative destruction" is all about. Look at America alone. Look at all the corporations that used to exist, indeed that used to dominate their industries: Woolworth's, Pan Am, TWA, Bell Labs, and so on. All gone. It's the nature of American capitalism. On their graves, so to speak, we now have a galaxy of very new corporations, from Microsoft and Apple to Google and Southwest. Ditto for sports dynasties, political dynasties, buildings large and small, mafia chieftains, you name it. Americans love it when the big guys fall, and we love it when little guys rise. That's what I'm talking about. It's not "corporations" doing this or that.

RS): This may be a stupid assumption, but I don't see the corporate model you talk about. Bell Lab still exists in smaller pieces and is now trying to reform into a monolith it once was. TWA was absorbed by American Airlines in 2001. Pan Am is now in its third iteration and, again, absorbed by something bigger than itself. If anything, corporations have simply absorbed other smaller companies and emerged as mega-corporations, whereby a few large corporations have a monopoly on several markets. And now with the global marketplace, what we are seeing is not so much the rise and fall of corporations, but the subjugation of state government and its citizens to the interests of corporations.

ML): You can't find PanAm on a stock exchange, or a Woolworth's in America, while Bell Labs doesn't exist as such, it's part of other things now. Somehow you've accepted a bizarre notion of American capitalism.

LA): All of that said, you must allow that some of your comments and some of your theories on policy are very much reflective of the very philosophy you have tried to repudiate, no?

ML): No. I have always tried to advance freedom, never tyranny.

LA): Take for example:

"And we have strengths and weaknesses in this war. Our weaknesses are our poor education and our embrace of all kinds of silly ideas; foremost among which is the ideas that peace is the normal condition of mankind. Only a country devoted to the systematic ignorance of human history could believe a thing like this because war is the normal condition of mankind."
ML): That's an accurate historical statement, not advocacy. Peace is very rare, war is a commonplace.

LA): I think it is an interesting analysis and has some truth to it, but I do dispute some of it as fact, yes. While I agree that the last few centuries have been war with little peace, I do not agree that war is the normal condition of mankind. I think survival is the normal and primal condition of mankind, not violence and chaos. What separates us from animals is our ability to choose how we will survive: diplomacy vs. war and so forth. The whole point of progress is to move toward the better parts of ourselves. Most people, if asked to kill someone so that they may take that person's house, will not do it. The idea of embracing what is believed to be our inner warmonger rings very Fascist to me. Does it not to you?

ML): You keep asking when I stopped beating my wife. I am not advocating war; I am saying that it is a very common human activity. I don't like it. But it's true.

RS): Okay, no more wife beating then. What about this example:

"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence – our existence, not our politics – threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission."
What gives America the right to "undo traditional societies?"

ML): I did not say that we have a right to undo traditional societies, I said that we are a revolutionary people that constantly tears down the old order. Sometimes it's creative, sometimes it makes a mess, and sometimes it produces awful results. You really must stop suggesting that descriptions are the same thing as policy advocacy.

RS): I apologize if I have given the impression that I equate descriptions with policy advocacy. Let me try a different way. There are observations and descriptions that are codified into policy, rightly or wrongly, and those policies – either through force or through advocacy – become conditions that we later look back on as descriptions or, as you say, historic mission.

When mankind is defined to be naturally warlike and that opinion becomes coded into policy, is that not when we see the very things you describe occur?

What I am trying to ask is if you do not see how defining something as evil, for example, and then acting as an advisor on government affairs where that definition of evil becomes policy could be seen as advocacy on the part of the person defining the evil to begin with? Can you then appreciate why so many people have confused your observations and/or descriptions with Fascism, given the current US policy?

ML): It's precisely fascism and oppressive regimes that I define as evil, and seek to defeat. It's outrageous to be accused of defending the very thing I am trying to destroy, just as it's outrageous to be accused – by the likes of Vince Cannistraro – of being involved in the Niger forgeries, which is totally groundless. People just make up things, and then I'm supposed to defend myself against their fantasies.
Pfui.

We disagree on the nature of man, and I must say I admire your optimism, given that you have often seen and experienced the dark side. As for human progress, well, no one can dispute that the twentieth century was the most terrible in human history, so I remain puzzled by folks who think we're improving. I don't see it.

RS): I think we can improve if the model of man's warlike nature is not something that continues to be embraced as the natural state of man.

How would you describe democracy? Is America still a democracy? How do you describe fascism (I know you have written about it extensively, but I cannot quote whole books, so if you could simply find a way of doing a short version, that would be great).

ML): Democracy is a political system in which the people choose their own leaders and the rules by which they are governed. So yes, America is a democratic political system.

RS): What if the state and corporate interests privatize the "choosing" of leaders, thereby making it impossible for anyone to really know the truth of who was chosen? Take the last election, both here and in my former stomping ground in Ukraine. In the latter, the exit polls differed so drastically from the results that the people took to the streets and American leaders agreed with them. Here in the US, where the mathematical anomalies were seen across the nation and the exit polls vs. the actual results were so differing, what happened?

ML): I don't know about the Ukraine, probably it was a stolen election. Here, some folks went nuts over early exit polls when they shouldn't have. At AEI our polling people all said, categorically, nobody should pay any attention to them.

Fascism is a single-party dictatorship in which the dictator determines the rules and imposes them on the people, using mass mobilization as the basic method of inspiring loyalty.

That is the main difference between fascism and communism; communist regimes do not try to engage the masses in political activity.

Pre-emptive war, Iran, and WMD

RS): What do you make of the administration's policy to use, preemptively, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons?

ML): Nothing, since it hasn't happened and I haven't heard it advocated. The so-called doctrine of preemptive war is very old and the essence of common sense, since the alternative is to tell your enemies they will always have the first shot. No one running on that platform would ever win an election.

RS): It was just released by the administration. Read here.

ML): You've misread the grammar: it does not say Bush wants to use WMDs, it says we should take preemptive action against enemies who have WMD.

RS): I never said "wants to", I simply asked what you thought of the policy. In any case, can he or should he? Whether he wants to or not is not really the point, the mechanism is the point and that mechanism is lethal.

On Jews, Muslims, and the Strategy of Tension

RS): Do you think that the West has abused the rift between the Muslims and Jews by playing both sides against each other in order to create a permanent strategy of tension? If so, what do you cite as the latest example?

ML): I don't think that "the West" has played Jews and Muslims against one another. A lot of contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism came from the West, specifically from the Nazis, so in that sense one can argue that European anti-Semitism was successfully transplanted into parts of the Muslim world.

RS): America and Europe fully support the Saudi regime, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist and which funds many of the terrorist activities we see playing out, while at the same time supporting Israel. America and Europe turns a blind eye to Pakistan and its role in literally creating a nuclear Middle East, but then wants to attack Iran for purchasing centrifuge blueprints on the grounds that Iran's not-remotely operational nuke program is threatening Israel. Halliburton has offices in Tehran and works to help Iran with its not- remotely operational nuclear program, but Dick Cheney rattles the saber using Israel's survival as the reason.

I could go on and on really, everything from arming the PLO while at the same time arming Israel, to the right leaning politics of blaming American support for Israel as the reason for the attacks of September 11th.

There is something very wrong with this picture, is there not?

ML): Indeed. It seems impossible for some of our policy makers to recognize that some countries are simultaneously friends and enemies. In the Dubai debate, for example, the administration kept saying "but they are our friends, look at all the good things they have done." True enough. But they are also friends of Iran, and they have done good things for the mullahs, too, from weapons smuggling to money laundering. And they're part of the boycott of Israel.

Ditto for Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both have helped and hurt us. Both are profoundly corrupt, as Dubai. Both would behave better if we were clearer and more forceful about the things we don't like. I mean, how can we call the Saudis our friends when they fund and operate the world-wide network of radical jihadi mosques and schools that breeds the next generation of Islamic terrorists?

If we end up bombing Iran it will demonstrate a terrible failure of American policy. We should have worked for non-violent regime change years ago. And here the reactionary left has a big share of the blame, having reflexively supported the mullahs all these years.

RS): Is there any chance for a sensible bipartisan foreign policy in the United States?

ML): Only if we stop demonizing and dehumanizing our opponents. We can't keep on Borking each other, describing one another in ugly caricatures, and refusing to think through what are, after all, often very difficult issues. That means one has to have respect for the facts. I don't believe it's possible for people to call me the names I've been called if they have actually read what I have written, and at least some of it comes from people who have simply accepted hateful stereotypes of "neocons."

There are some concrete things we can do that might improve the situation. One thing is to give victims of libel a better chance to be "made whole" in court. I'm all for rough-and-tumble debate, as you've seen. But I think that when people accuse me of actions that never took place, I should be able to take them to trial, demonstrate my innocence, and collect damages.

RS): I know you are pursuing legal action against the Italian publication La Republica.

ML): …I think that might encourage people to be more careful with their accusations, and correct the record when they are exposed, or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, when they discover they have been misled. I have made mistakes in print, and I try to correct them. I am grateful to readers who correct me. I don't find that attitude among my attackers, on both political poles. Do you?

RS): I don't know in your specific case what has been said and by whom exactly. I do know in my case I have been described as having reported something I had never reported, and that straw man is then used to discount other works of mine.

ML): We badly need to change certain aspects of our behavior, and the main one is to stop trying to criminalize policy disagreements. I have fairly low expectations of human nature, so I am not surprised when people make mistakes. But when that happens, the important thing for all of us is to advance understanding, not liquidate the idiot who did it (there is a long line of similar idiots waiting for that job, after all). So even if you think that Bush has done everything wrong, your response should be to list the errors and suggest better alternatives, not to call him names or clamor for impeachment, which will only make the administration dig in deeper and make any change far less likely.

RS): The whole issue with this administration is not that they made mistakes, because as you say all people and groups of people make mistakes. The issue is really twofold: The administration will not listen to suggestions to begin with, then when things go badly, they won't correct the course they are on based on still more suggestions. We just discussed above the promotion of the very people who keep failing, failure upwards as it were. I think impeachment is not only a proper legal course when there is at best criminal negligence (lack of accountability, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, etc.) and maybe even worse, but it is ethically the thing that must be done in an actual democracy when the leadership violates domestic and international law and abuses its power. The time has passed to push for change with this administration or to make still more suggestions. That has been tried and rebuffed over and over. There is too much death, distrust, abuse of power, abuse of basic human rights, for us to now say that we should all have a group hug – not if we want to call this a democracy.

ML): If crimes have indeed been committed, they should be prosecuted and punished, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about policy disagreements that are transformed into prosecutions.

RS): Violating Geneva is not a policy disagreement, it is a crime.

http://globalparadigms.blogspot.com/2006/0...-sectarian.html
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Iraq: Civil War? Insurgency? Sectarian Violence?

Civil War

Not A Civil War


The Washington Note is providing us with an overview of the propaganda campaign led by The Cheney-led Civil War-Deniers to try to convince us that indeed what's going on in Iraq is not a civil war but just examples of honest disagreements between a few alpha males taking place in Liberated/Free/Democratic/New Iraq. The most pathetic example of these efforts that don't seem to affect the majority of the American people has been the series of dispatches from Iraq by Ralph Peters that seem to suggest that, well, forget Provence and Tuscany; choose Iraq as your next vacation destination. Well, if it looks like a civil war, and if it sounds like a civil war, it's a Civil War. That at least is the conclusions of two former U.S. intelligence guys. Larry Johnson in Smells Like Civil War? explains and illustrates:
Is there a civil war in Iraq? Let's imagine that the events, which happened on Sunday, March 12, 2006 in and around Baghdad, occur tomorrow in and around New York City. The only thing I've changed are the place names. The events are real. Would we put up for a minute with President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld idly dismissing these events as mere sectarian strife?
03/14/06 AP: A roadside bomb hit a police convoy in White Plains, New York, 35 miles northeast of New York City, killing one patrolman and wounding four others, police said
03/14/06 AP: U.S. forces also clashed with gunmen Sunday afternoon in western New York City, Interior Ministry Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said.
03/14/06 AP: In Newark, about 20 miles south of New York City, gunmen ambushed and killed a police major as he headed to work, police said.
03/14/06 Eight bodies were found with their hands tied and gun shot wounds to the head in Brooklyn, a suburb in eastern New York City, police said.
03/1406 Reuters: Gunmen ambushed and killed a local football player (Vinny Testaverde) in Elizabeth City 40 km (25 miles) south of New York City, local police said.
03/14/06 Reuters: At least 40 people were killed and 95 wounded in three apparently coordinated car bombs at two markets in the Jewish section of Brooklyn on Sunday, police said.
If it looks like a civil war, sounds like a civil war, and has casualties like a civil war it is probably a civil war. Now, imagine that these kinds of attacks continue to be the daily routine for the next thirty days (as it has in Baghdad for the last month). How would this effect the lifestyle of the average New Yorker? Do you think George Bush would still enjoy 37% favorable rating.
My point is this, until we understand what is happening in Iraq in terms of what those events would mean if they happened in the United States, we are living with the delusion that Iraq's troubles are caused by grumpy reporters who just want to focus on the negative.

And here is Pat Lang trying to explain that Insurgency=Sectarian Violence=Civil War:
There is an attempt being made at present to distinguish between the two terms in the title of this post.

Without clarifying the difference it is simply asserted that Shia-Sunni fighting is one thing one thing and that the "insurgency" is another. This is an assertion of a distinction without a difference.
The "insurgencies" in Iraq are variously:
-international jihadis who are all Sunni Muslims.
-local Iraqi Islamists (all Sunni Arabs)
-Tribals (Sunni Arabs)
-De-mobilized soldiers (overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs)
-Nationalists and Baathists (some Sunni Arabs and some secular Shia)
What are all these groups fighting for? With the exception of the "Nationalists and Baathists" who want to see the restoration of a secular and unitary state, the rest of them want to see the maintenance of the previous (a thousand years) disproportionate political power of Sunni Arab Muslims in Iraq. The international jihadis would express this as a desire for Sunni Muslim control without a focus on the Arab part of the identity.
What is different in the present "sectarian violence?" The Shia have now reciprocated in doing violence to their sectarian enemies.
That is the difference.

Bush Says Iraq Moving to Democracy as Terror Persists Bloomberg
President George W. Bush said Iraq is making progress toward democracy even as terrorist attacks persist. "We can see the outlines of a free and secure Iraq that we and the Iraqi people have been fighting for,'' Bush said in a statement opening a White House press conference in Washington. Bush said Iraq clearly is wracked by sectarian violence but is not in a state of civil war. "The terrorists haven't given up,'' and "there's going to be more tough fighting ahead,'' he said. The U.S. has battled an insurgency in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's regime fell. Sectarian violence flared anew after a terrorist bomb destroyed a Shiite shrine in Samarra Feb. 22. With U.S. military deaths in Iraq surpassing 2,300, public support for the war dropping and the cost of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan rising to $9.8 billion a month, Bush is giving a series of speeches aimed at rallying Americans behind his policies. His next one is slated for tomorrow in West Virginia. Bush today said Iraq is "making progress'' toward forming "a council that gives each of the country's major factions a voice,'' and "Iraq's leaders must take advantage of the opportunity.'' "We're making progress and that's important for the American people to understand,'' he said.

Support Sagging
The president's job-approval ratings have sunk as a growing proportion of Americans say they believe the war was not worth fighting. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released March 16 showed 37 percent of those surveyed approved of Bush's job performance -- a low point of his presidency in that survey. Other national polls have shown similar results. The Journal/NBC survey indicates that Iraq is a crucial cause of dissatisfaction: 61 percent of adults said they disapprove of Bush's handling of the conflict, 51 percent said the overthrow of Hussein hasn't been worth the cost in human and financial terms and 50 percent said the war has weakened the U.S.'s standing in the world. Bush opened his hour-long news conference today with an optimistic assessment of the conflict, now in its fourth year, and the subject dominated his exchanges with the press. Ten of 22 questions asked concerned Iraq.

'I Understand'
Pressed by reporters to respond to the sagging support for the war, the president said, "I can understand how Americans are worried'' about whether the U.S. can win in Iraq. "I fully understand the consequences of this war; I understand people's lives are being lost,'' he said. "I'm optimistic we will succeed; if I were not I'd pull our troops out,'' Bush said. The U.S. has 133,000 troops in Iraq. The president has said these forces will withdraw only as Iraqis are able to provide for their own security and that assessment will be made by U.S. commanders in Iraq. He declined to say whether American troops would be completely out of Iraq by 2009, when his tenure as president ends. Iraq's parliament was elected on Dec. 15 and results were confirmed Feb. 10. Formation of a unity government has been delayed by infighting and sectarian violence. Bush said U.S. policy is "one, get a unity government formed, and two, support the Iraqi forces if need be to prevent'' sectarian war from breaking out. Iraqi forces "have proved themselves in the face of sectarian violence,'' he said.

Talks With Iran
Bush said he welcomes talks with Iran to warn this Iraqi neighbor against fomenting the sectarian violence between Iraq's Shiite majority and the Sunni minority that ruled the country under Hussein. Iran is dominated by Shiite Muslims. The U.S. plans to "make it clear to them that attempts to spread sectarian violence or to maybe move parts that could be used'' to make roadside bombs "is unacceptable to the United States,'' he said. Bush said he gave U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad permission "a couple of months ago'' to "explain to the Iranians what we didn't like about their involvement in Iraq.''
President says he sees progress, but explaining where is difficult San Francisco Chronicle
Bush defends Iraq strategy, answers questions on war abc13.com
ABC News - Denver Post - Washington Post - Reuters.uk - all 921 related »

Bush sees troops still in Iraq in 3 years Yahoo! NEWS
George W. Bush said on Tuesday that U.S. troops may be in Iraq after the end of his presidency in three years time but he insisted there was no civil war. Though Washington has long resisted setting a timetable for withdrawal, U.S. officials have held out the prospect it would start soon and many of Bush's Republican allies seemed keen to see progress before congressional elections in November. Yet with Iraqi leaders and the U.S. ambassador warning of the imminent risk of civil war, the 133,000 heavily armed U.S. troops are seen by many as having a vital role in stemming violence. Asked when U.S. forces would finally pull out of Iraq, Bush told a White House news conference: "That will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." Bush must step down when his term ends in January 2009. As he addressed Americans' concerns on Iraq three years after the U.S. invasion, however, Iraqis voiced new complaints about alleged killings of civilians by U.S. troops. The military announced a second investigation in the space of a few days into accusations soldiers shot women and children in their homes. A U.S. army dog handler was convicted of abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison and faces more than eight years in jail. The U.S.-trained forces that Washington hopes will take on the bulk of security tasks, however, suffered one of their worst setbacks when suspected al Qaeda guerrillas killed at least 22 people, mostly policemen, and freed over 30 prisoners from jail. About 100 insurgents staged the dawn raid on two official buildings in Miqdadiya, northeast of Baghdad, officials said. Ten of the attackers were also killed, one source said.

NO CIVIL WAR
Bush dismissed comments from former U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that sectarian violence constituted civil war, saying it was a good sign that an attack a month ago on a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra failed to spark all-out conflict: "The way I look at it, the Iraqis took a look and decided not to give in to civil war," Bush said. A delegation of U.S. senators expressed American impatience with Iraqi leaders' failure, three months after an election, to form a government that could help contain the conflict. "The American people are of good heart ... but do not try in any way to deceive them or let this progress indicate to the world a less than sincere and prompt effort to bring about a new government," John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after meeting Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. "There has to be some pressure put on political leaders to reach a settlement," his opposition Democratic colleague Carl Levin said. "The American people are impatient." A U.S. soldier was shot dead in Baghdad on Tuesday, the 2,319th American serviceman to die in the three-year conflict. The U.S. military said it was investigating Iraqi police allegations that its troops shot dead a family of 11, among them five children, in their home at Ishaqi, north of Baghdad, last week. Soldiers said they killed four, including a militant. "Because of that discrepancy, we have opened an investigation," said spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson. Police Colonel Farouq Hussein said at the time the victims were all shot in the head: "It's a clear and perfect crime."

HADITHA "RAMPAGE"
The probe began after a magazine published allegations that U.S. Marines killed 15 civilians in another town last year. A criminal inquiry into those deaths was launched last week. Townspeople interviewed by Reuters on Tuesday said troops went on a rampage after a Marine was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, west of Baghdad, in November. The witnesses rejected an original U.S. account that the 15 also died in the bomb blast -- a version also now dismissed by U.S. commanders. "In this house, the whole family was killed, including children," said one resident, who declined to be named. Accusations that U.S. soldiers often kill civilians and that little disciplinary action has resulted in the few cases investigated have aroused Iraqi anger since the invasion. "The occupying forces have started to use savage methods," Sunni Arab politician Hussein al-Falluji said. "The Haditha incident tells us that U.S. patience has come to an end." Allawi, the former prime minister now tipped to be security supremo, called for Iraqi forces to be reinforced to prevent sectarian conflict exploding into all-out civil war: "We must strengthen the army, police, security and intelligence services," he told Reuters in an interview. "If not, the situation will be disastrous." After the attack on the police at Miqdadiya, the governor of Diyala province, which has a volatile ethnic and sectarian mix and has seen many al Qaeda attacks in recent months, had the police chief and other officers held on suspicion of complicity. The violence occurred as Shi'ite pilgrims, estimated by local officials at more than 2 million, concluded the rites of Arbain in the holy city of Kerbala and began to head home. The two-day mourning ceremony passed off with little incident, guarded by thousands of Iraqi police and troops.
By Tabassum Zakaria

Abu Ghraib dog handler guilty of prisoner abuse Yahoo! NEWS
A U.S. Army dog handler was found guilty on Tuesday of abusing detainees at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison and faces up to eight years and nine months in prison, an Army spokeswoman said. The sentencing hearing for Army Sgt. Michael Smith, 24, was set to begin later in the day, Lt. Col. Shawn Jirik said. Smith was charged with using his dog to harass and threaten inmates at Abu Ghraib in order to make them urinate and defecate on themselves in 2003 and 2004. Disturbing photos of inmates being intimidated by dogs and sexually humiliated were broadcast around the world after the abuses became public in 2004, undermining Washington's efforts to win support for its war in Iraq. Several of these photos were introduced as evidence in Smith's trial. Smith's lawyers maintained that he was unfairly lumped in with others on the night shift who physically abused detainees or allowed their dogs to bite them, and was acting at the request of interrogators and prison authorities. Other soldiers who worked alongside Smith have already been sentenced for up to 10 years for abusing inmates. Smith was found guilty of maltreating one adult and two juvenile detainees. He was also found guilty of conspiracy, dereliction of duty and assault. He was found not guilty of three more maltreatment charges, one conspiracy charge, and four charges of aggravated assault. Smith was also found guilty of indecent acts for having his dog lick peanut butter off a male soldier's genitals and a female soldier's breasts. A Pentagon spokesman said the verdict proved that the military is holding lawbreakers accountable. "As we've seen over the past many months, these individual cases (are) coming to trial and being disposed of in accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. One human rights activist who observed the trial said higher-ranking officials are not being held accountable. "There was more than enough blame to go around," said Avi Cover, a lawyer with the New York-based activist group Human Rights First. "I think we need to look all the way up the chain of command." Smith's trial featured testimony from the former top military intelligence officer at the prison, Army Col. Thomas Pappas, who was reprimanded and fined in part for authorizing the use of dogs for interrogation without approval. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who helped shape detention practices at Abu Ghraib, invoked his right to not incriminate himself earlier this year.
By Andy Sullivan

Bush raises possibility of years-long Iraq presence Yahoo! NEWS
President George W. Bush held out the possibility on Tuesday of a U.S. troop presence in Iraq for many years, saying a full withdrawal would depend on decisions by future U.S. presidents and Iraqi governments. Bush, struggling to rebound from low job approval ratings that he blamed largely on the war, was asked at a news conference if there would come a time when no U.S. troops are in Iraq. "That, of course, is an objective. And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq," said Bush, who will be president until January 2009. Three years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there are 133,000 U.S. troops in the country. Bush has laid the groundwork for possible U.S. troop reductions by the end of the year, saying he aims to get Iraqi forces sufficiently trained to take over by then. But until now he had not given a prediction on how long there might be an American presence. Many Arabs are concerned that the United States might want a permanent presence in Iraq, and those concerns were likely to be heightened by Bush's comments. Opinion polls show Americans have become increasingly dissatisfied over a war in which more than 2,300 U.S. troops have died. Democrats have seized on this in a congressional election year to criticize the Republican president's handling of the war. Appearing for nearly an hour at his second formal solo news conference of the year, Bush mixed his prognosis of progress in Iraq with a realistic description of events, reflecting a recent White House pattern of admitting mistakes have been made in the war. He acknowledged errors in the Iraqi reconstruction effort had cost valuable time in rebuilding and said the U.S. military was adjusting to insurgent tactics. But he insisted that his bedrock belief remained that Iraq can become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. "I'm optimistic we'll succeed," he said. "If not, I'd pull our troops out. If I didn't believe we had a plan for victory, I wouldn't leave our people in harm's way." Bush said insurgent attacks that have killed hundreds of Iraqis in recent weeks were designed in part by the attackers to create horrific images for U.S. television screens and generate doubts about the mission among Americans. "Please don't take that as criticism," Bush told reporters. "But it also is a realistic assessment of the enemy's capability to affect the debate, and they know that." Bush also said he disagreed with those who said Iraq had fallen into a civil war. Asked whether he agreed with former Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's comments that Iraq was already in civil war, Bush said: "I do not, there are other voices coming out of Iraq." "We all recognize that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence," Bush said. "The way I look at it the Iraqis took a look and decided not to give in to civil war." A Newsweek magazine poll conducted last week showed Bush's approval rating fell to 36 percent, down 21 points from a year ago, amid discontent about Iraq. The survey said 65 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with Bush's handling of the war. "I fully understand the consequences of this war. I understand people's lives are being lost," Bush said. "But I also understand the consequences of not achieving our objective by leaving too early. Iraq would become a place of instability, a place from which the enemy can plot, plan and attack," he added.
By Steve Holland

Insurgents Free 33 Inmates in Brazen Raid Yahoo! NEWS
Insurgents stormed a jail around dawn Tuesday in the Sunni Muslim heartland north of Baghdad, killing 19 police and a courthouse guard in a prison break that freed dozens of prisoners and left 10 attackers dead, authorities said. As many as 100 insurgents armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed the judicial compound in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles northeast of the capital. The assault began after the attackers fired a mortar round into the police and court complex, said police Brig. Ali al-Jabouri. At least 33 prisoners were freed in the jail break. After burning the police station, the insurgents detonated roadside bombs as they fled, taking the bodies of many of their dead comrades with them, police said. At least 13 policemen and civilians and 15 gunmen were wounded. Later Tuesday, a roadside bomb killed one policeman and wounded three in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, authorities said. Five other police were wounded in two separate roadside bomb attacks targeting patrols in northern and southern Baghdad early Tuesday, police said. A U.S. soldier with the 4th Infantry Division was killed by small-arms fire while patrolling western Baghdad, the military said. At least 2,315 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began, according to an Associated Press count. Also in the capital, gunmen killed an employee of the mayor's office while he was driving in the Dora neighborhood, and police discovered eight blindfolded corpses, some of them showing signs of torture, officials said. The execution-style killings have become an almost daily occurrence in a wave of sectarian violence that has left more than 1,000 Iraqis dead since the bombing last month of a Shiite Muslim shrine. On Monday, police found the bodies of at least 15 more people — including that of a 13-year-old girl — dumped in and near Baghdad. In Washington, President Bush said he did not agree with former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Sunday, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." Bush said others inside and outside Iraq believe the nation has stopped short of civil war. "We all recognized that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is, the Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war," Bush said during a news conference. As night fell Monday, a bomb struck a coffee shop in northern Baghdad, killing at least three people and injuring 23 others. The bomb was left in a plastic bag inside the shop in a market area of the Azamiyah neighborhood, police Maj. Falah al-Mohammadewi said. At about the same time, gunmen killed two engineers leaving work at the Beiji oil refinery north of Baghdad, police Lt. Khalaf Ayed al-Janabi said. Separately, the owner of a small grocery in downtown Baghdad was shot and killed. In southeast Baghdad, a roadside bomb blew apart a minibus, killing four pilgrims returning from the holy city of Karbala, where millions of Shiites gathered to mark the 40th and final day of the annual mourning period for Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Five pilgrims on their way to Karbala were wounded in a drive-by shooting earlier in the day, police said. Otherwise, the commemoration passed largely without incident and the bomb attacks of the past two years. Baghdad's international airport remained closed Tuesday by authorities who cited the need to protect the Karbala commemoration. Jordanian authorities closed their border with Iraq until further notice to "prevent those without valid travel documents from entering the country," said Maj. Bashir al-Da'ajah, spokesman of Jordan's Public Security Department. The New York Times reported the border was closed because Palestinians living in Iraq were trying to enter Jordan without proper documents. In Baghdad, a group of U.S. senators met with interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to discuss prospects for forming a national unity government, a step viewed as important in working toward peace and a withdrawal of U.S. troops. Al-Jaafari predicted a new government would be ready in the coming weeks. "I hope that the formation of the new government does not last beyond April," al-Jaafari said. Sen. Carl Levin, ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said such a commitment must be kept "in order for there to be continued support for the presence of American troops in Iraq." Committee chairman Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., said decisions on U.S. troops would be made not only by President Bush, Congress and other leaders, but also by the American people — a seeming allusion to declining U.S. popular support for the war. In show of Shiite support for al-Jaafari's bid for a second term as prime minister, Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi said after meeting Iraq's top Shiite cleric that "Dr. al-Jaafari is still the (Shiite) alliance nominee. The alliance has not presented anyone else." The Shiite alliance is under pressure from Kurds and Sunni Muslims to drop al-Jaafari because they say he cannot unify the country. In the holy city of Najaf, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Shiite bloc in parliament, met the top cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who told him to "speed the moves to form the new government," said al-Hakim aide Haitham al-Husseini.
By VANESSA ARRINGTON, Associated Press Writer

Maligning McCain Washington Post
John McCain has always gotten great press, especially since he started riding around New Hampshire in a bus in 1999 and conducting rolling news conferences with reporters that would last for hours. McCain fell short in that election, of course, but he emerged as the media's favorite maverick. In the first Bush term, McCain won some battles in which he challenged his own party--on campaign finance reform and an anti-torture amendment--that further burnished his legend as an independent truth-teller. John Kerry, you may recall, even begged him to run on the Democratic ticket. During that whole time, McCain never presented himself as anything other than a rock-ribbed conservative, albeit one who took moderate stances on a few issues. I lost track of the number of liberals who told me privately that they would vote for McCain, even though they disagreed with him on a whole bunch of things, because they viewed him as a leader, war hero and straight talker. But now, in the early maneuvering for 2008, the Arizona senator (who has been going out of his way to back the battered Bush) is seen in many quarters as the front-runner. And, the ridiculously early CW goes, if he gets the GOP nomination, he would be a good bet to win the White House. The result: The left is trying to rough him up a bit. He is, some commentators are shocked to discover, not just a Republican but a conservative. Maybe it was easier to romanticize McCain when he was basically a protest candidate, but now that he's a potential president . . . well, I suspect that this is only the beginning. One columnist who's gone hard after Johnny Mac is the NYT's Paul Krugman: "It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be. . . .

"But now -- at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger -- Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes. "When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. . . . Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. . . .

"When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell 'agents of intolerance,' met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law." In American Prospect, Mark Schmitt strikes the same theme, saying potential McCainiacs should "have no illusions: McCain is a very conservative Republican who has now embarked on the project of reaffirming his position as the rightful heir to Barry Goldwater's politics as well as his Senate seat. Last month, for example, McCain voted to extend the very tax cuts that he had once voted against, a move that tax-cut strategist Larry Hunter correctly described to The Washington Times as 'a further morphing of McCain into George W. Bush.' "So, with this homecoming, we bring to an end one of the most fascinating eras in American politics: the five years during which McCain, with the help of an adoring press, essentially defined and controlled the concept of 'bipartisanship.' . . .

"If there had been no McCain, perhaps there would be no campaign-finance law, no torture amendment, no progress toward action on climate change. So for all that, we should be modestly grateful. But I suspect that the Bushies signing on to McCain's campaign understand exactly how helpful his monopoly on bipartisanship has been to their sustained control, and are grateful in their own way." John Hawkins at Right Wing News reminds us that some ardent conservatives don't trust McCain either--and resent his media profile: There is no Republican up on Capitol Hill more disliked by his own GOP brethren than John McCain. That's why, despite the size of his fan club in the mainstream media, McCain seems rather unlikely to capture the party's nomination for President in 2008. "Here's a short, but sweet primer that may help explain why so many conservatives believe John McCain would be a very poor choice as the Republican nominee in 2008. "John McCain will be 72 years old in 2008, which will make him 3 years older than Ronald Reagan was when he became the oldest man to ever be inaugurated as president back in 1981. In the Senate, where doddering fossils like Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd can be elected over and over, McCain looks like a spring chicken in comparison. But, Reagan's age turned out to be a campaign issue and McCain, who would be 80 years old at the end of his 2nd term, would certainly have a lot of people questioning --with good reason -- whether he's up to the job. Were McCain to be the nominee, his age could be the deciding factor that puts a Democrat in office. "The mainstream media loves John McCain and they regularly write fawning articles referring to him as a 'maverick' and a 'straight-talker.' Because of this, McCain polls well among Democrats and Independents. "However, the reason McCain is so well liked by the media is because they're liberals and they love it when he trashes other Republicans. But, what would happen if John McCain actually became the Republican nominee? The same members of the mainstream media who gush over him today would turn on him in a Minnesota minute and once his great press ended, his poll numbers with Independents and Democrats would start to drop precipitously." A major question, it seems to me, is whether less ideological columnists defend McCain against some of these attacks, or at least point out why he is so popular (and not just with the press). The president, meanwhile, is still selling his Iraq policy: "President Bush on Monday held out the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar as an example of American success in the war," says the New York Times , "but he also acknowledged in remarks that were as grim as they were hopeful that the city's improvements were not matched in other parts of Iraq. . . .

"Over all, Mr. Bush's speech was a positive message that conceded some of the setbacks on the ground, a formulation meant to portray the president as not living in a fantasy world about the three-year-long war." Fred Barnes remains one of the most staunch Bush backers around, so if he's calling for a staff shakeup, as he does in the Wall Street Journal, it's rather telling: "It's time for President Bush to think about a third term. No, he doesn't need to overturn the Constitution. He can start the equivalent of his third term now, by filling his presidential staff and cabinet with new faces--or old faces in new positions--and by concentrating on new or forgotten initiatives. The goal: rejuvenation of his presidency by shocking the media and political community with a sweeping overhaul of his administration. The impact would be enormous because it's exactly what his foes have been demanding and exactly what he is not expected to do. And it would give him a chance to escape the political doldrums that may otherwise doom his presidency through its final 34 months. . . .

"A broad transformation, playing on the media's overreaction whenever surprised, would do more. Reporters would be forced to write stories about new officials, cover confirmation hearings, show up at press conferences they might have ignored, assess new policies, and--this is most important--take a fresh look at the president. It would be like the beginning of a new presidential term. Sure, the press and politicians would be cynical about Mr. Bush's bold moves, especially since he wouldn't be uprooting any policy or hiring Bush critics. In truth, there would be a large element of smoke and mirrors in his actions. The trade-off is that Mr. Bush might revitalize his presidency." Hey, a little smoke and mirrors never hurt anyone in politics. Kos is clearly disenchanted with Nancy Pelosi: "I think House Democrats in 2006 would be well served by casting about for a new leader, whether we win the House or not. And to think I was once a fan of Pelosi's. . . .

"These risk averse Dems think that by merely having a pulse, voters will gladly rush to them to save them from Republicans. But in reality, voters (including much of the Democratic base) are disillusioned. Why vote for Democrats who haven't shown an ounce of fight the last six years? What's the point? "The Alito filibuster was supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Somehow, their numbers didn't suffer. Murtha was going to kill Dems by making them 'look weak on defense.' But somehow, people seem to agree with him. Now, Feingold's censure resolution is supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Yet if that was the case, why are Republicans reacting so virulently against it? Bill Kristol admits the censure motion is hurting Bush." Roger L. Simon says Pajamas Media may deserve credit for the administration's decision to release a batch of Saddam Hussein documents. In the wake of the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal, involving the defense contractor MZM, the San Diego Union-Tribune has this eye-opening piece on California Rep. John Doolittle, who is among the lawmakers who have "admitted assisting either [MZM's] Mitchell Wade or Brent Wilkes, co-conspirators in the Cunningham case, at a time when the two businessmen were giving them tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions. "And at least one of the lawmakers, Doolittle, received a direct monetary benefit from those contributions through commissions paid to his wife, Julie. "Acting as her husband's campaign consultant, Julie Doolittle charged his campaign and his Superior California Political Action Committee a 15 percent commission on any contribution she helped bring in." His wife gets a commission ? How can that be kosher? Back-from-Iraq Post reporter Jackie Spinner is not that happy with management, according to the San Jose Mercury News: "I have to say, I don't think my editors at the paper have been as supportive of me coming home as I would like them to be. My fellow reporters have always been supportive. " Why haven't your editors been supportive ? "Because they don't know how to deal with somebody like me. They don't know how to deal with a reporter who has spent as much time as I've spent in a war zone. This war is unlike any we've known. " How have you changed ? "I'm jumpy. I'm angry. I'm unpredictable. I'm depressed. I have very serious post-traumatic stress disorder, which is common among people who spend 13 months in a war zone like Iraq. But unlike other reporters, I'm honest about it. A lot of journalists come back from that environment and want to seem tough, but inside they're not tough. This is not a profession that forgives people for breaking down, not that I'm breaking down." Vaughn Ververs of Public Eye, writing before Arianna's apology, is amazed that more bloggers didn't trash the Huffington Post for stitching together a couple of George Clooney interviews and passing that off as a blog posting: "If you replaced the words 'Huffington Report' with 'The New York Times' or any other MSM organization in context of the George Clooney flap of the last couple days, Arianna Huffington would be leading the charge to skewer and denounce that entity. Instead she, and the vocal bloggers always scouring news reports for the smallest mistake, have said, well, hardly anything. "What are we to take from this episode -- that bloggers operate under a separate set of rules than what they hold the MSM to? If CBS News had quoted someone by name and that person had later claimed it to be a false representation, we would have been scrambling to find out what exactly happened and would get no quarter from the bloggers until we did (that's basically what Clooney has said about a post that appeared under his name on Arianna's blog). Just a couple months ago, The Washington Post ombudsman made a factual mistake in a column which resulted in a huge controversy -- complete with cries of censorship, bias and hate speech." Several bloggers, including Eugene Volokh , have ripped this LAT op-ed by Erin Aubry Kaplan, who attempts to explain why ex-White House aide Claude Allen was allegedly ripping off Target: "Here is a man who, like most black conservatives, has had to do an awful lot of personal and political rationalizing to pay dues, which included apprenticing with then-North Carolina senator and habitual racist Jesse Helms and opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. . . .

"Loyalty has been the price of admission to this administration, and black conservatives have proved to be more loyal than most. That has unfortunately, but not always unfairly, invited comparisons to slave times, when the most loyal blacks were those who worked in closest proximity to their white masters -- house Negroes, as they were derisively known. . . . It's hard to imagine that such compromises and cognitive dissonance don't exact a psychological toll at some point, and Allen's alleged dabbling in crime might have been that point for him." This is not just psychobabble--how on earth does Kaplan know?--but babble that relies on racially charged stereotypes. Hey, can this be true? The airlines lost 30 million bags last year? Jeff Jarvis marvels once again at how the media take care of their own: "Retired WABC anchor Bill Beutel just died and the station is going overboard with coverage: Huge chunks of all its shows yesterday and again today are devoted to tributes. I'm sorry he's gone, but heads of state don't get this treatment. Then again, I always said that the only true fringe benefit of working on newspapers is that they'll run your obit. Now I have to wonder who'll die first: me or the papers that would carry my obit." I'll blog your obit if necessary, Jeff.
By Howard Kurtz

- Bush Suggests US Troops Will Still Be In Iraq In 2009
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Bush_Sugge...aq_In_2009.html

Washington (AFP) Mar 22, 2006 - President George W. Bush on Tuesday suggested that US troops will be in Iraq at least until 2009 and said he would only withdraw them if the situation appeared hopeless.

29 Killed as Gunmen Raid Iraqi Police Station:

Iraqi insurgents stormed a jail near dawn Tuesday in the Sunni Muslim heartland north of Baghdad, killing 19 police officers and a courthouse guard in a prison break that freed dozens of prisoners and left 10 attackers dead, authorities said
http://tinyurl.com/eeptz

===
27 Killed In Continuing Violence:

A Baghdad hospital received six bodies, including that of a woman, with gunshot wounds, a security guard said.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/GEO061594.htm

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U.S. Soldier Killed In Baghdad:

The soldier was killed by small-arms fire March 21 at 1:10 p.m. while patrolling in western Baghdad.
http://tinyurl.com/l2kg9

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A roster of the Iraq Resistance:

There is no consensus on the precise number of fighters, but estimates range from a few thousand to more than 50,000.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...MNG8OHRHTV1.DTL

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Iraqis Detail Deadly U.S. Marine Raid:

Shortly after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine in a western Iraqi town, American troops went into nearby houses and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old-girl, residents say.
http://www.startribune.com/722/story/318788.html

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US probes Iraqi civilian deaths :

The US military has said it is conducting a criminal investigation into allegations that US marines shot and killed 15 Iraqi civilians.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4827424.stm

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Elaborate U.S. bases raise long-term questions: Are the Americans here to stay?

Air Force mechanic Josh Remy is sure of it as he looks around Balad.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12427.htm

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Using Our Might to Keep Oil Cheap :

Conservatives have denounced the thriller Syriana, a film that explores the Machiavellian politics of Mideast oil. Pundit Charles Krauthammer, for example, says the movie exports "the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world."
http://tinyurl.com/gpcfx

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Abu Ghraib Dog Handler Found Guilty:

A jury found an Army dog handler guilty Tuesday of abusing detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison by terrifying them with a military dog
http://cbs11tv.com/national/topstories_story_080104249.html

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'Northern Iraq Ruled by Force and Fear' :

Time defended Kurdistan is a veritable police state, where the Asayeesh, the military security, has a house in each neighborhood, and where the Parastin "secret police" monitor phone conversations and keep tabs on who attends Friday prayers
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&hn=31094

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Iraqi diplomat gave U.S. prewar WMD details:

Saddam’s foreign minister told CIA the truth, so why didn’t agency listen?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11927856

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Readers Request.

This is a must watch documentary

The Power of Nightmares - Part I

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11091.htm

Part II
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11092.htm

Part III
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11093.htm

===
A must read:

Chalmers Johnson on Our Military Empire: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=70243

===
In case you missed it: :

Chalmers Johnson: Militarism and the American Empire :

Distinguished social scientist and public intellectual Chalmers Johnson, joins host Harry Kreisler for a conversation on the nature of the American Empire and its costs and consequences for the future of American democracy and power in the world. Video
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article6379.htm

Iran leader sanctions Iraq talks with US Yahoo! NEWS
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday sanctioned talks with the United States on Iraq, saying Iranian officials would tell the U.S. to leave the country. "If Iranian officials can express Iran's opinion about Iraq to Americans and make them understand Iran's views, talks on this issue are not problematic," Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, said in the northeastern city of Mashhad. "But if (talks) mean opening up an arena for deceitful Americans to continue their bullying attitude, talks with America on Iraq are banned," he said in a televised speech. U.S. President George W. Bush said on Tuesday Washington would make clear in the talks, expected this week, that it would not accept attempts to spread sectarian violence in Iraq. Tehran denies U.S. charges it is helping inflame sectarian violence in Iraq and that some components of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, used by insurgents in Iraq have been traced to Iran. "Our clear opinion on Iraq is that the American government should leave Iraq and stop provoking ethnic tensions and creating insecurity so that (Iraq) has peace and security," Khamenei said. Iraqi political sources said they expected the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, to meet with Iran's representatives this week. Bush has said he views Iran as a threat, and the United States is leading diplomatic efforts to isolate its longtime foe over Tehran's nuclear program. But the United States has said it is open to talks with Iran on what it sees as Tehran's meddling in Iraq, while the nuclear issue should be left for international negotiations.

Bush says Iraq pullout up to 'future presidents' Boston Globe
President Bush suggested yesterday that US troops might stay in Iraq beyond his presidency, which ends in 2009, saying at a press conference that the issue of removing troops from the country ''will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." The president, responding to aggressive questioning at the hastily arranged morning session, declined to give a timetable for pulling US soldiers out of the increasingly unpopular war. But he warned several times about the danger of a ''premature" withdrawal. ''There's no question that if we were to prematurely withdraw and the march to democracy were to fail, then Al Qaeda would be emboldened," Bush said. ''Terrorist groups would be emboldened. The Islamo-fascists would be emboldened." Asked whether his comments signaled that a complete pullout would not happen during the three remaining years of his presidency, Bush said the decision would be left up to the generals ''on the ground" in Iraq. Bush's comments -- widely seen as an attempt to shift public expectations away from the notion of a quick pullout -- dovetailed with comments yesterday by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the leading US ally in the war. ''This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization," Blair said, emphasizing that Iraq is just one piece of the larger war on terrorism. Faced with polls in both countries suggesting growing discontent with the war, British and American leaders have spent this week's third-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion defending their actions. In the United States, the series of speeches by Bush and key members of his administration has been met with impatience over the slow pace of progress and criticism of the administration's poor planning. Yesterday, the president appeared intense when he was asked to explain why he decided to attack Iraq. ''No president wants war -- everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true," Bush declared, bristling at a question from longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who writes for King Features Syndicate. He chided Thomas for interrupting him after he repeated his longstanding argument that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks justified aggressive action in Iraq. While some administration officials have sought to tie Hussein to the attacks, the White House has said the former Iraqi president had nothing to do with them. Bush did not blame Hussein for the attacks, but he said they led to his decision to ''use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people." ''I'm never going to forget the vow I made to the American people, that we will do everything in our power to protect our people," the president said. ''Part of that meant to make sure that we didn't allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy, and that's why I went into Iraq." At another point in the press conference -- at almost an hour, one of the longest of Bush's presidency -- he ticked off a series of his legislative victories, including tax cuts, a sweeping energy bill, and the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. But increasingly, those wins on Capitol Hill have been overshadowed by the lingering war, leading some Republicans in this election year to separate themselves from Bush. A recent CNN-USA Today poll indicated that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed the war will define Bush's presidency, compared with 18 percent who said his tenure will be remembered by the larger war on terrorism. Just 2 percent believed tax cuts would be Bush's enduring legacy. Further, while 69 percent had said the United States would be ''certain" to win when the Iraq war began three years ago, four in 10 people earlier this month said the country is certain or likely to lose. Bush yesterday rejected suggestions that Iraq is nearing a civil war. The former interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, recently noted the scores of deaths every day and added, ''If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." But Bush -- while describing Allawi, once a strong supporter of the administration, as ''a good fellow" -- said he did not agree. ''Listen, we all recognize that there is violence, that there's sectarian violence," Bush said. ''But the way I look at the situation is that the Iraqis took a look and decided not to go to civil war." The president also said he would not stand for any efforts by neighboring Iran to inflame sectarian violence in Iraq. But he added that he was open to talks with Iran on the issue. Bush stood by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, saying he has ''done a fine job." The president also took a shot at a chief administration critic, Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who is seeking to censure Bush because of what Feingold said is illegal wiretapping of US citizens. The resolution -- which has no cosponsors -- is ''needless partisanship," Bush said. Democrats hope to capitalize on Bush's low poll numbers in this year's elections, tying GOP congressional candidates to the president. While some Democrats themselves voted to authorize the war in Iraq, many have since announced that they regret their votes and were misled by the administration. ''The American people are slowly coming behind the position that the vast majority of Democrats took in the first place," said Representative Michael E. Capuano, a Somerville Democrat who opposed the war from the start. The war is ''symbolic" of the failures of Republican leadership, he said. Carl Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Democrats would not succeed in defeating GOP candidates by tying them to Bush. ''Each of these individual members is going to articulate their position" on a range of issues, Forti said. ''The Democrats running [against Bush] -- that's not going to work."
Bush sees troops still in Iraq in 3 years Reuters.uk
Bush Sees No Speedy Iraq Pullout Los Angeles Times
Middle East North Africa Financial Network - San Francisco Chronicle - Seattle Times - Forbes - all 1,115 related »

March 22, 2006
Rebels Attack Iraqi Police Station, Kill Four
By REUTERS
Filed at 6:33 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Rebels blasted an Iraqi police station with grenade and mortar fire before dawn on Wednesday, killing four policemen in Madaen, south of Baghdad, police said.

They said they had detained about 70 suspects in raids in the town after the assault, which occurred a day after at least 22 people were killed and 30 prisoners released in a similar attack on a police post northeast of the capital.

Among the detainees was a Syrian found with leaflets by the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, police said.

The violence again underlined the need for Iraq's leaders to break a deadlock over a government of national unity, widely seen as the best of hope of stabilizing the country and undermining support for a tenacious Sunni Arab insurgency.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday approved rare talks with Washington on Iraq, where Shi'ite Islamists with links to Tehran lead the interim government.

Some Iraqi officials hope U.S.-Iranian contacts could ease the political logjam, which is due partly to rifts among Shi'ite parties as well as those involving Kurds and Sunni Arabs.

However, statements by U.S. and Iranian leaders before the talks have reflected the mutual hostility and suspicion that have plagued relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

``If Iranian officials can express Iran's opinion about Iraq to Americans and make them understand Iran's views, talks on this issue are not problematic,'' Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, said in the northeastern city of Mashhad.

``But if (talks) mean opening up an arena for deceitful Americans to continue their bullying attitude, talks with America on Iraq are banned,'' he said in a televised speech.

AMERICAN CHARGES

U.S. President George W. Bush, who is leading international efforts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions, said on Tuesday Washington would tell Tehran in the talks that it would not accept attempts to spread sectarian violence in Iraq.

Tehran denies U.S. charges it is stirring communal bloodshed in Iraq or supplying material for insurgent roadside bombs.

The Iranians are also wary of helping the United States stabilize Iraq without getting a reward. They recall that they joined efforts to promote an Afghan national unity government in 2001, only for Bush to brand Iran part of an ``axis of evil,'' along with Saddam's Iraq and North Korea, early the next year.

Iraqi political sources said they expected the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, to meet Iran's representatives as early as this week.

Three months after a parliamentary election, Iraqi factions remain deadlocked over how a national unity government should function and whether it should be led by interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, nominated by the main Shi'ite alliance.

Bush also said on Tuesday that U.S. troops may be in Iraq after the end of his presidency in three years' time. U.S. officials have long resisted setting a timetable for withdrawing American forces, now 133,000-strong.

``That will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq,'' Bush told a White House news conference when asked when all U.S. forces would finally leave Iraq.

Bush must step down when his term ends in January 2009.

Any U.S. pullout hinges on how well Iraq's police and army, disbanded by U.S. authorities in 2003 and now being rapidly rebuilt, can cope with the insurgency and sectarian violence.

The attacks on police stations on Tuesday and Wednesday have dealt serious blows to the new security forces, raising more questions about their effectiveness, particularly if Iraq descends into all-out sectarian conflict.

Madaen, a mixed Sunni and Shi'ite town, is in a volatile area where communal tensions run high and insurgent attacks on Iraqi security forces are frequent.



Copyright 2006 Reuters Ltd. Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

March 22, 2006
Insurgents Captured in New Assault on Iraqi Police Station
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
and JOHN O'NEIL
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 22 — Insurgents launched a large-scale predawn assault on a police station near Baghdad today, their second in two days, but Iraqi forces fought off the attackers and captured 50 of them, Interior Ministry officials said.

And in the first major outbreak of violence connected with the pilgrimage performed by millions of the nation's Shiites this week, six people were killed and at least 50 wounded when two vehicles bringing pilgrims home were attacked by insurgents in Baghdad and a gun battle with police erupted, the officials said.

The latest attack on a police station took place at 4 this morning in Madain, southeast of Baghdad. Insurgents fired 14 mortars that landed on the station, in the former Salman Pak government center there, killing four police officers, including their commander, and wounding at least five.

Firing weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, the insurgents followed the mortar attack with an assault that turned into a two-hour firefight with Iraqi forces that rushed to the scene, according to news service reports. Iraqi officials told news service reporters that American troops had joined the reinforcements, but a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, Sgt. Doug Anderson, said he had no information on any such operation.

After the assault was repulsed, a sweep of the area led to the arrest of 50 suspected insurgents, the Interior Ministry officials said.

Also today, a group that has been linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq issued a statement claiming responsibility for an attack Tuesday on a police station. More than 200 masked insurgents had killed at least 18 police officers in a daybreak raid in Muqdadiya, freeing all the prisoners and leaving the station a smoldering wreck.

That battle had raged for nearly an hour, as the fighters blasted government buildings with mortars, grenades and machine guns, Interior Ministry officials said.

Also today, a convoy including the country's minister of electricity was attacked by gunmen in western Baghdad, wounding the manager of the minister's office and three bodyguards, an Iraqi official said.

The Associated Press reported that as mortar was fired at a government center in the northern town of Beiji during a visit by Ahmed Chalabi, a deputy prime minister. No one was injured.

And a suicide bomber blew himself up as an American military convoy passed on the highway leading to Baghdad airport this morning. There were no reports of casualties.

The large-scale attacks on police stations demonstrated that even though sectarian violence has recently emerged as Iraq's gravest concern, the antigovernment insurgency is far from over.

The attack on Tuesday showed a high degree of sophistication. Insurgents reportedly cut telephone lines and then detonated several roadside bombs to block reinforcement troops from reaching the jail.

Overwhelmed Iraqi forces radioed for help, and American helicopter gunships quickly responded. As soon as they arrived, insurgents drilled them with machine-gun fire, American military officials said, wounding one American soldier.

"It was a huge attack," said Raad Rashid al-Mula Jawad, the governor of surrounding Diyala Province. "And we will avenge it. Our sons' blood will not be lost."

More than 30 prisoners escaped. According to Tassin Tawfik, an Iraqi Army official, "All of them were insurgents." Many had been detained Sunday in a raid by security forces in neighboring towns, The Associated Press reported, leading to the raid to free them.

The governor said the local police chief and several officers might have conspired with the insurgents and helped them get away.

"I accuse them, and have ordered an investigation," Mr. Jawad said.

The raid was reminiscent of an assault on a Falluja jail in February 2004, in which more than a dozen police officers were killed and 70 prisoners were freed. That attack was one of the first signs of tactical coordination between Iraqi insurgents and Al Qaeda, which claimed credit on the Internet, through one of its splinter groups, for the jail attack on Tuesday.

In the statement posted today by the Mujahadeen Shura Council, a group that Al Qaeda has used as a vehicle for announcements in the past, the insurgents claimed to have killed 40 police officers, shot down three helicopters and to have "controlled the town completely."

Insurgents seemed to be keeping up the pressure across the country on Tuesday, singling out a number of police patrols and government buildings.

One mortar shell sailed into the Green Zone, where the American Embassy is situated, at the same time that a delegation of United States senators was meeting with Iraqi officials. No injuries were reported.

Such attacks have become so commonplace in Baghdad that children playing on a nearby swing set kept on swinging, even as a cloud of thick brown dust rose behind them.

At a news conference after the meetings, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, reiterated a point that American officials have been making ceaselessly for several weeks: the sooner Iraqi leaders settle their differences and form a government, the better, because the American government believes that the violence in Iraq is fueled by an absence of clear authority.

Iraqi voters chose a new Parliament in December, but politicians are still haggling over crucial posts.

"April is fine," Mr. Levin said, about the Iraqi leaders' plan to form a government by then. "But we need that commitment kept, in order for there to be continuing support for American troops to be kept in Iraq."

"There's been too much dawdling while Baghdad is burning," Mr. Levin said.

American military officials announced Tuesday that they were looking into an allegation that American soldiers intentionally killed 11 Iraqi civilians last week.

The inquiry, the second announced in a week, stems from an episode last Wednesday in Ishaqi, a Sunni Arab town north of Baghdad.

American officials initially said that American troops had been fired on from a farmhouse during a raid to capture an insurgent, and that they had returned fire, from the ground and the air, killing four people.

Iraqi police officials immediately rejected that account, saying 11 people had been killed after American soldiers lined up an entire family — from a 75-year-old grandmother to a 6-month-old baby — and shot them.

A local police official, Farouq Hussein, told Reuters that all the victims had been shot in the head.

"It's a clear and perfect crime without any doubt," he said.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, an American military spokesman, said the military was investigating the episode. "This is not the way we operate," he said. "We take the allegation seriously, and we're working with the Iraqis to determine the facts."

Last week, American officials announced that they were investigating an occurrence in November in which residents in a western Iraq town accused American marines of gunning down 15 civilians after a marine was killed by a roadside bomb. Military officials originally reported that the civilians had been killed by the bomb blast, but later revised their account to say that the civilians were killed by gunfire.

An American soldier was fatally shot on Tuesday while patrolling in western Baghdad. In the same area, the bodies of eight more executed men were discovered.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Baghdad and John O'Neil from New York for this article. Ali Adeeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Bush urges Iraqis to form government Yahoo! NEWS
President George W. Bush urged Iraqi leaders on Wednesday to settle differences and form a unity government and for Iraqi troops to get ready to defend their country, in a reflection of U.S. impatience. Bush attempted to rally flagging American support for the Iraq war in a speech at the ornate Capitol Music Hall. Wednesday was the fifth consecutive day he has spoken in public about the increasingly unpopular conflict, which began with a U.S.-led invasion three years ago this week. A key objective of U.S. policy is for Iraqi leaders to form a coalition government that can steer the country's fledgling democracy and get Iraqi troops trained sufficiently to allow substantial reductions of U.S. troops this year and next. A delegation of U.S. senators in Baghdad on Tuesday expressed American impatience with Iraqi leaders' failure, three months after an election, to form a government that could help contain the conflict. Bush joined that chorus, saying Iraqis had turned out in the millions to vote and expect their leaders to act. "The people have spoken. And now it's time for a government to get stood up .... That's what the people want. Otherwise they wouldn't have gone to the polls, would they have?" he asked. He said he hammered home the message during a videoconference from the White House with U.S. Iraq Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and U.S. Gen. George Casey. "We talked about the need to make it clear to the Iraqis it's time to get a government in place that can start leading this nation and listening to the will of the people," he said. Bush has set as a condition for a U.S. troop withdrawal making certain that Iraqi forces are sufficiently trained to fight the insurgency. "It's the Iraqis fight. Ultimately the Iraqis are going to have to determine their future. They made their decision politically -- they voted. And these troops that we're training, are going to have to stand up and defend their democracy," Bush said. The prospect of congressional elections in November has sharpened a debate over the war that ranges from whether the United States should shift strategy to whether it should pull out of Iraq. Bush said he would remain steady in his drive to foster a democracy in Iraq despite the threat of civil war and would not be pressured into a premature troop withdrawal. "I'll be making up my mind about the troop levels based upon recommendations of those who are on the ground. I'm going to make up my mind based upon achieving a victory, not based upon polls, focus groups or election-year politics," he said. A Newsweek magazine poll conducted last week showed Bush's approval rating fell to 36 percent, down 21 points from a year ago, amid discontent about Iraq. The survey said 65 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with Bush's handling of the war. A small group of protesters near his speech site demonstrated against him, holding signs such as, "Remember 2,315 soldiers who died." "Despite the latest White House sales campaign, the American people have rightly lost confidence in President Bush's disastrous handling of Iraq," said Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record). "America doesn't need a salesman for a dangerously incompetent policy -- we need leadership and a policy that can succeed." While Bush recently has faced some critical questions from the public in recent appearances, this audience seemed largely supportive and gave him a standing ovation. It included many family members of U.S. troops. "Thank God you're our commander-in-chief," said a father with two sons in the military, one in Iraq and one in Hawaii. There are currently about 133,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
By Steve Holland

Iraqis tired of US-run show at criminal court Yahoo! NEWS
Baghdad's new courthouse is held up by U.S. officials as a symbol of the independent legal system three years of U.S. occupation has brought, but defense lawyers are angry at what they say is summary American justice. "During Saddam's time we couldn't say a word. Now we scream and scream and nobody listens," defense attorney Thabit Zubeidi told Reuters as he waited on standby for officials to appoint him to defend those accused who had no other representation. On Wednesday, an apparently typical day at the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI), Iraqi lawyers stood aside as U.S. troops escorted shackled prisoners, who were being made to carry heavy cases of bottled water into the building. Armed American soldiers are a visible presence throughout the low rise building, once Saddam Hussein's treasure store for official gifts he received. They are also on guard inside the courtrooms, where trials on "terrorism" charges are held. U.S. military lawyers insisted the court is an Iraqi operation and their only role is to help gather evidence and observe sessions: "The Iraqi judges are the ones making the decisions," said Lieutenant Colonel John Carroll, who is a judge back home in the United States. "This is an Iraqi process." It is a central part of a strategy to defeat an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis since 2003. But defense lawyers involved in the process, in which a typical trial may consist of a single, hour-long hearing, complained they had little practical access to clients who are swept up by U.S. troops and detained for months at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail or the remote Camp Bucca in the south. "We only learn what the charges are when they arrive here," said attorney Amer al-Kinnassy, who was in court to defend five men from one family accused of possessing weapons. "Even then, the Americans do not let us talk to our clients ... If I try to walk over there and talk to my clients they won't let me."

CONVICTIONS
U.S. officials present at the court, most of them wearing security badges turned inward to conceal their identities, declined comment on the procedures. In principle, detainees are entitled to visits but lawyers say it is difficult in practice. More than 40,000 Iraqis have been detained as suspected rebels over the past three years, most from the Sunni Arab minority dominant under Saddam. Over 14,000 are now in U.S. custody, a process that can last many months or even years. The CCCI has condemned 879 people to sentences up to 30 years in 964 trials, according to data published this week by Task Force 134, the U.S. military unit overseeing detentions. Lawyers said about 20 suspected insurgents are brought to trial every day from the Abu Ghraib prison, formerly the site of prisoner abuse under Saddam and more recently by U.S. guards. In principle the heavily guarded courthouse, next to the Green Zone government compound where Saddam himself is on trial in a special court, is open to the public. Few attend, however. Clutching M-16 rifles, U.S. soldiers escorted prisoners in bright yellow uniforms, chained hand and foot, into the building. Prisoners included a woman -- a rarity in the system -- who unlike the other detainees wore a helmet and body armor. Though Iraqi guards are stationed at the courthouse, the bulk of security duties appeared to fall to American troops. A U.S. officer overseeing the troops declined to say what role he played: "All I can say is have a nice day," he said.

PRAYERS
On Tuesday, the court convicted 21 people for charges that included possession of illegal weapons and sentenced them to 7 years in jail each, the U.S. military said in a statement. In court on Wednesday, Kinnassy watched his clients -- a 50-year-old man, his three sons and his brother-in-law -- as they sat on the floor of the courtroom with their faces close to the wall. U.S. soldiers stood guard behind them. Two of them prayed in anticipation of the verdict, aware they faced a maximum sentence of 30 years. One by one, the men entered a metal pen to hear the judge read testimony from two witnesses -- both U.S. soldiers. The father, Kathim Taher, could barely speak. His sons told the judge Sunni militants had badly beaten him during 14 months in U.S. custody and he had not recovered. The family are Shi'ite Muslims, their lawyer said -- not typical of insurgent suspects. Each of the younger men said U.S. troops came to their house to search for weapons and they were handed the AK-47 assault rifle that each Iraqi family is allowed to possess. The soldiers did find a cache of rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and other weapons in farmland 300 meters (yards) away, the court was told. They brought it back to the house, placed it beside the family and took photographs. After a brief recess, the judge acquitted all five men. Others had more mixed results. But Shakir Salman still walked free. Detained for having a forged identity card, he was sentenced to six months. But the judge let him go after noting he had already been held by the Americans for a year.
By Michael Georgy

Iraqi Shi'ite pilgrims ambushed, more bodies found Yahoo! NEWS
Gunmen in Baghdad killed at least 15 Shi'ite pilgrims and wounded dozens on Wednesday, raking vehicles with machinegun fire in the latest outbreak of sectarian violence that threatens Iraq with civil war. When several vehicles returning from a major Shi'ite Muslim festival to the south were ambushed in the Amriya district, a haven for Sunni insurgents in west Baghdad, 13 people were killed, either shot where they sat or gunned down as they tried to flee down sidestreets, an Interior Ministry source said. Earlier two people were killed and dozens wounded when a bus and a truck carrying pilgrims were attacked in two incidents. Police also reported the discovery of six more bodies on the streets of the capital, all apparent victims of the bloodshed between majority Shi'ites and once-dominant Sunnis which some Iraqi officials fear could expand into open warfare. Rebels blasted a police station with grenade and mortar fire before dawn, killing four policemen in Madaen, southeast of Baghdad, in the second such attack in two days. Police said they had detained about 70 people in raids on local homes afterwards. The pilgrims were driving home a day after celebrating a major Shi'ite festival in Kerbala, south of the capital. "We were on the highway when suddenly four cars stopped near us and began shooting," a man who gave his name as Allawi told Reuters from his hospital bed after one of the early attacks. "This shows we have to strike at terrorism with an iron fist and we must unite and form a government as quickly as possible because people in the street can see there is no government," Hazim al-Araji, a senior aide to Shi'ite radical cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, told state television.

BUSH
Public holidays this week have held up negotiations among the majority Shi'ite leaders, Sunnis and Kurds on forming a government of national unity that Washington says is key to averting civil war and letting U.S. troops come home. U.S. President George W. Bush said on Tuesday that troops might still be in Iraq when he steps down in three years. He said on Wednesday he would not yield to pressure to pull out forces before congressional elections in November. But he said: "Look, I'm an optimistic guy. I believe we'll succeed. Let me put it to you this way, if I didn't think we'd succeed I'd pull our troops out." Police said 22 pilgrims were wounded and one was killed in an attack on their open-back truck in western Baghdad. In a second incident in the same area, one Shi'ite was killed and 18 were wounded when their bus was hit by machinegun fire. A police patrol rushing to the scene of one attack was ambushed by gunmen who fired a rocket-propelled grenade, killing two policemen and wounding four, police said. The surge in sectarian violence since the bombing of a major Shi'ite mosque exactly a month ago has almost overshadowed a Sunni Arab insurgency, but two attacks in the past two days were a reminder that Iraq's authorities face war on two fronts. Police said the commander of a special police unit, Colonel Ahmed Jabar, was among the four policemen killed in Wednesday's attack on the Madaen police station. They said most of the 70 people detained in the crackdown by Interior Ministry forces after the blast lived locally. There was no word on any casualties among the insurgents. The insurgents are known to operate from bases concealed in farmland and seem able to strike at will. Police said the palm groves around Madaen made it a particular haven. On Tuesday, dozens of insurgents attacked a police post and jail at Miqdadiya, northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 22 people and freeing 30 prisoners.

IRANIAN ROLE
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday approved rare talks with Washington on Iraq, where Shi'ite Islamists with links to Tehran lead the interim government. Some Iraqi officials hope U.S.-Iranian contacts could ease the political logjam, which is due partly to rifts among Shi'ite parties as well as differences with Kurds and Sunni Arabs. Three months after elections, factions remain deadlocked over whether the government should be led by interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, backed by the main Shi'ite alliance. Iraqi political sources said they expected the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, to meet Iran's representatives as early as this week in Baghdad. Tehran denies U.S. charges it is stirring communal bloodshed in Iraq or supplying material for insurgent roadside bombs.
By Ross Colvin

- Benchmarks: US Iraq Casualties Stay High
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Benchmarks..._Stay_High.html

Washington (UPI) Mar 23, 2006 - As Iraq teeters on -- or over -- the brink of civil war the pressure is not easing on the hard-pressed U.S. ground forces there. Over the past month, the average rate at which U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq has significantly fallen, the but the rates at which they are being wounded have dramatically increased.

Gunmen Kill 20 in Breakout at Iraqi Jail:

About 100 masked gunmen stormed a prison near the Iranian border Tuesday, cutting phone wires, freeing all the inmates and leaving behind a scene of devastation and carnage 20 dead policemen, burned-out cars and a smoldering jailhouse.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1753674

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Iraq: 17 Killed in Continuing Violence:

Two policemen were killed and one wounded when gunmen ambushed their patrol as they headed to the scene of one of the pilgrim attacks
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L22013000.htm

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Iraqi Shi'ite pilgrims ambushed; more bodies found:

Gunmen wounded dozens of Shi'ite pilgrims and killed two in Baghdad on Wednesday. Police also reported the discovery of six more bodies on the streets of Baghdad
http://tinyurl.com/lu7jn

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Aid agencies unable to enter Samarra:

"Our convoys sent on Sunday and Monday have been prevented from entering the city by US troops and our information from inside is that families are without food, power and potable water, particularly because they cannot leave their homes," noted Abdel Hameed, a spokesperson for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/I...e03fd40722e.htm

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Saddam's foreign minister was CIA source::

In the period before the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister Naji Sabri, was a secret paid source of the CIA, "NBC Nightly News" reported on Monday.
http://tinyurl.com/p4xy6

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Troop pullout to be decided by future presidents, Bush says:

Bush said withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq "of course, is an objective, and that'll be decided by future presidents and the future governments of Iraq."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...cs/14153853.htm

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Zbigniew Brzezinski: Iraqi Insurgency Is Wining:

"87% of the Iraqi people want us to leave."
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12441.htm

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Chomsky Calls for Iraqi Reparations:

Noam Chomsky criticized the Iraq War a yesterday, calling the occupation a bungled version of Nazi Germany in Vichy France.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12442.htm

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Sen. Feinstein calls for Rumsfeld's removal, Iraq troop reduction:

Dianne Feinstein called on President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over his handling of the Iraq war and reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq from the current 130,000 to 50,000 by year's end.
http://tinyurl.com/ryrb2

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Helen Thomas Asks President Bush Why He Went to War:

Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas asked President Bush what some analysts called the most direct questioning he’s ever received on his reasons for invading Iraq.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12437.htm

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Bush makes false claim about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda :

Olbermann: "Who does the President think he's F'n kidding?"
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/03/20.html#a7595

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Blair : Iraq Fight Is For Civilization:

TONY Blair yesterday made an extraordinary defence of invading Iraq, saying he was involved in a fight for civilisation.
http://tinyurl.com/n65oa

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Mike Whitney : Tal Afar; war crimes in Bush’s dystopia :

Bush’s March 20 speech to the City Club of Cleveland was the most derisory string of lies in modern-day oratory. Aside from the dreary repetition of terror-related slogans that appear with mind-numbing frequency, Bush droned on for a good ten minutes about America’s great success in Tal Afar.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12440.htm

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Cost of Iraq War Rises for Taxpayers :

The administration submitted another $72.4 billion request for war-related funding to Congress. NPP analyzes the request and what it means to taxpayers in your state.
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/iraqwarcost

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Dog handler jailed for Iraq abuse

Images of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison shocked the world
US army dog handler Sgt Michael Smith has been jailed for six months for abusing detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison from 2003 to 2004.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4833236.stm

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Quiet force behind Bush policies:

"Torture memo," spying, Guantanamo can all be traced to Cheney's top aide.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12444.htm

Bush Pulls Out the Stops to Save Ratings Yahoo! NEWS
Whether he's before a friendly West Virginia audience, a Cleveland club proud of its interrogation skills or a White House news conference, President Bush is drawing on his plainspoken manner in freewheeling venues to defend his Iraq strategy. Alternately serious and joking, charming and disarming in this war anniversary week, Bush is trying to counter election-year critics and reverse an approval ratings slide. In Wheeling on Wednesday, the fifth day in a row Bush devoted his remarks to Iraq, the president bantered with the locals, his shoulders bouncing up and down as they do when he's pleased with his own jokes. Then he brought down the house with his trademark I-won't-back-down pledge. "Let me put it to you this way: If I didn't think we'd succeed, I'd pull our troops out," Bush said. More than 2,000 supporters — including many active-duty military and their families — leapt from their seats and filled the gilded Capitol Music Hall with wild applause. "I cannot look mothers and dads in the eye, I can't ask this good Marine to go into harm's way if I didn't believe, one, we're going to succeed, and, two, it's necessary for the security of the United States," Bush said. Beginning with a speech last Monday in Washington. and with more planned to come, the president wants to convince Americans not only that there is reason for optimism about Iraq's future but that the situation now is better than the daily reports of strife make it appear. With national polls showing he has a tough hill to climb — and the upcoming midterm congressional elections making Republicans nervous — Bush laces his remarks with nods to both Americans' worries and the grim realities on the ground in Iraq. The insurgency remains strong, sectarian violence is spiraling and talks to form a unity government seem stalemated. The president said at least a half-dozen times here that he understands the concern about Iraq. "There was some awful violence. Some reprisals taking place. And I can understand people saying, `Man, it's all going to — you know, it's not working out,'" he said. But, Bush added, standing in front of three large blue-and-yellow "Plan for Victory" posters: "The way I like to put it is, they looked into the abyss as to whether or not they want a civil war or not and chose not to. That's not to say we don't have more work to do, and we do." The crowd in Wheeling needed little convincing. Another standing ovation was prompted by a woman who asked Bush what could be done to keep the press from ignoring progress in Iraq. "Our major media don't want to portray the good," she said. "If the American people could see it, there would never be another negative word about this conflict." Bush declined the opportunity to tell the media what to publish. "You're asking me to say something in front of all the cameras here. Help over there, will you?" he joshed. "Just got to keep talking. Word of mouth." In Cleveland on Monday, Bush did his talking at the City Club. The questions got tough at the forum known for taking on world leaders, ranging from Iraq to his warrantless wiretapping program to a new nuclear deal with India. But the exchanges allowed Bush to make his case for the war, and earned him a few laughs and several rounds of enthusiastic applause along the way. "Anybody work here in this town?" Bush joked at one point as the Cleveland questioning went on in an appearance that eventually went over 90 minutes. On Tuesday, Bush called a news conference with the Washington media. But he rejected the formal East Room in favor of going toe-to-toe with reporters in the cramped, casual White House briefing room that better suits his style. The president bantered with an outspoken critic, journalist Helen Thomas, saying he "semi-regretted" calling on her, and he teasingly accused other reporters of falling asleep during his speeches. The sessions follow a December blitz by Bush that succeeded in arresting an earlier fall in his approval ratings. This time, White House advisers hope the speaking events, even when they draw the kind of difficult questions that have occasionally come Bush's way this week, will showcase a president comfortable with his message, his strategy and his facts. "It's one of the best chances he has to be effective, to change away from the Pollyanna-ish characterizations of it being all good news," said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political scientist who has long observed Bush. However, Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis, said, "The problem is that clearly he's doing this because of the polls and that adds a level of desperation."
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer

Iraqi Insurgents' Raid on Jail Thwarted Yahoo! NEWS
Full Coverage: Iraq
Emboldened a day after a successful jailbreak, insurgents laid siege to another prison Wednesday. This time, U.S. troops and a special Iraqi unit thwarted the pre-dawn attack south of Baghdad, overwhelming the gunmen and capturing 50 of them, police said. Although the raid failed, the insurgents' ability to put together such large and well-armed bands of fighters underlined concerns about the ability of Iraqi police and military to take over the fight from U.S. troops. Sixty militants participated in the assault, which attempted to free more jailed Sunni insurgents, police said. The attack on the prison in Madain, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, began with insurgents firing 10 mortar rounds. They then stormed the facility, which is run by the Interior Ministry, a predominantly Shiite organization and heavily infiltrated by members of various Shiite militias. Four police officers — including the commander of the special unit — died in a two-hour gunbattle, which was subdued only after American forces arrived. Among the 50 captured, police said, was one Syrian. The U.S. military did not respond to a request for comment about its role in the counterattack. The raid came a day after 100 Sunni gunmen freed 33 prisoners and wrecked a jail, police station and courthouse in Muqdadiyah, a town northeast of Baghdad near the Iranian border. Madain, the site of Wednesday's attack, is at the northern tip of Iraq's Sunni-dominated "Triangle of Death," a farming region rife with sectarian violence — retaliatory kidnappings and killings in the underground conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. Police have discovered hundreds of corpses in the past four weeks, victims of religious militants on a rampage of revenge killing. At least 21 more bodies were found Wednesday, including those of 16 Shiite pilgrims discovered on a Baghdad highway, police said. Millions were returning home Wednesday at the conclusion of an important Shiite commemoration in the holy city of Karbala this week. In the northern town of Beiji, meanwhile, a mortar fell on a government facility that Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi was visiting Wednesday, an aide said. Chalabi was not harmed and later returned to Baghdad, the aide said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. Chalabi, who is also the interim oil minister, was believed to have been visiting the refinery in Beiji, the nation's largest. As U.S. officials step up pressure on Iraqi leaders to form a national unity government quickly, the United States' top military commander said he had underestimated the extent of Iraqi reluctance to come together. "I think that I certainly did not understand the depth of fear that was generated by the decades of Saddam's rule," said Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I think a lot of Iraqis have been in the wait-and-see mode longer than I thought they would." Pace said one solution was for the Iraqis to do a better job of recruiting more Sunnis into the army and for police forces to balance Shiite domination. "Units that are purely Shiite or Kurd or Sunni are looked on by various other sectors of the community as not being representative of their needs," Pace said. The Bush administration views formation of a broad-based government as a first step in quelling violence and allowing the start of an American troop withdrawal this summer. While the U.S. military has touted its progress in training the Iraqi army and police, a top expert on Iraq said the forces remained poorly matched against the insurgency and al-Qaida. "The police have almost no protected vehicles, few heavy weapons similar to those of insurgents, are often located in extremely vulnerable buildings, and have weak communications. Corruption is a major issue," Anthony H. Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a position paper released this week.
By VANESSA ARRINGTON, Associated Press Writer

March 23, 2006
At Least 56 Iraqis Dead in New Violence
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:21 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- At least 56 Iraqis died Thursday in violence, including a car bombing that killed 25 people in the third major attack on a police lockup in three days. A suicide car bomber detonated his explosives at the entrance to the Interior Ministry Major Crimes unit in Baghdad's central Karradah district, killing 10 civilians and 15 policemen employed there, authorities said.

The Interior Ministry is a predominantly Shiite organization and heavily infiltrated by members of various Shiite militias. The unit targeted Thursday investigates large-scale crimes and has about 20 suspected insurgents in custody, police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammadawi said.

He ruled out that the assault was aimed at releasing the prisoners, which was the goal of previous days' attacks on other police facilities.

Insurgents engineered a successful jailbreak that released more than 30 prisoners north of Baghdad on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the militants laid siege to a prison south of the capital, but U.S. troops and a special Iraqi unit thwarted the pre-dawn attack, capturing 50 of the gunmen, police said.

In Thursday's assault, more than 35 people, mainly employees at the crimes unit, were wounded, police said.

A second car bomb hit a market area outside a Shiite Muslim mosque in the mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood of Shurta in southwest Baghdad. At least six people were killed and more than 20 wounded, many of them children, police said.

Roadside bombs targeting police patrols killed four others -- two policemen and two bystanders -- in Baghdad and at least one policeman in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad. Dozens were wounded, police said.

Another two policemen were killed and two were wounded when gunmen ambushed a convoy in north Baghdad, an attack that police said was an aborted attempt to free detainees being transferred north to Mosul.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, two police were killed in gunbattles with insurgents and two civilians -- a private contractor and a power plant employee -- were slain in drive-by shootings.

Fourteen more bodies were found in the continuing string of shadowy sectarian killings: six in the capital and eight brought in by U.S. forces to a hospital in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, police said.

A mortar round fell on a Baghdad house wounding three civilians, police Lt. Ziad Hassan said. Another civilian was seriously wounded by an Iraqi army patrol that was shooting in the air to clear traffic in a western neighborhood, police said.

Police have discovered hundreds of corpses in the past four weeks, victims of religious militants on a rampage of revenge killing. At least 21 bodies were found Wednesday, including those of 16 Shiite pilgrims discovered on a Baghdad highway, police said. Millions were returning home Wednesday at the conclusion of an important Shiite commemoration in the holy city of Karbala this week.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Peace elusive in Iraqi city of Samarra

By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Staff Sgt. Cortez Powell looked at the shredded jaw of a dead man whom he'd shot in the face when insurgents ambushed an American patrol in a blind of reeds. Powell's M4 assault rifle had jammed, so he'd grabbed the pump-action shotgun that he kept slung over his shoulders and pulled the trigger.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12458.htm

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The “Noble Cause” that killed Casey Sheehan

By Mike Whitney

America has completely surrendered to denial; abandoning any claim to reason or clear-sighted analysis. The vast majority of people are perfectly content to ignore the tell-tale signs of looming disaster choosing instead to keep their heads firmly tucked in the sand.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12455.htm

At Least 56 Iraqis Dead in New Violence :

While fourteen more bodies were found in the continuing string of shadowy sectarian killings: six in the capital and eight brought in by U.S. forces to a hospital in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, police said.
http://snipurl.com/o1rk

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Three Iraq Hostages Freed :

British Officials say one British and two Canadian peace activists have been freed in rescue operation by multinational forces
http://snipurl.com/o1rm

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Another Civilian Massacre? :

The investigation into the killings comes hot on the heels of a US Navy criminal probe into reports that marines intentionally shot 15 civilians dead near the western town of Haditha last November.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/23/152259

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William Blum : The Anti- Empire Report:

US foreign policy does not "mean well". It's not that American leaders have miscalculated, or blundered, causing great suffering, as in Iraq, while having noble intentions. Rather, while pursuing their imperial goals they simply do not care about the welfare of the foreign peoples who are on the receiving end of the bombing and the torture
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12461.htm

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Another Abu Ghraib trial leaves top brass unscathed :

Smith, who was sentenced on Wednesday to about six months in prison for abusing detainees in Iraq with his black Belgian shepherd, had said he was merely following interrogation procedures approved by the chief intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas Pappas.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12448.htm

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The Joy of Being Blameless :

On the day that a court-martial imposed justice on a 24-year-old Army sergeant for tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his dog, President Bush said once again that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was doing a "fine job" and should stay at his post.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12449.htm

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New York Times details secret US military torture operation:

A New York Times report on March 19 details the operations of Task Force 6-26, a highly secret US Special Operations Unit whose members have reportedly engaged in torture and assassination in Iraq and Afghanistan.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12462.htm

March 24, 2006
Challenge for U.S.: Iraq's Handling of Detainees
By EDWARD WONG
CAMP JUSTICE, Iraq — The blindfolded detainees in the dingy hallway line up in groups of five for their turn to see a judge, like schoolchildren outside the principal's office.

Each meeting lasts a few minutes. The judge rules whether the detainee will go free, face trial or be held longer at this Iraqi base in northern Baghdad. But Firas Sabri Ali, squeezed into a fetid cell just hundreds of yards from the judge's office, has watched the inmates come and go for four months without his name ever being called.

He is jailed, along with two brothers and his father, solely as collateral, he says. The Iraqi forces are hunting another brother, suspected of being an insurgent. The chief American medic here says that he believes Mr. Ali to be innocent but that it is up to the Iraqi police to decide whether to free him. The Iraqis acknowledged that they were holding Mr. Ali until they captured his brother.

"I hope they catch him, because then I'll be released," said Mr. Ali, 38, a soft-spoken man who until his arrest worked for a British security company to support his wife and three sons. "They said, 'You must wait.' I told them: 'There's no law. This is injustice.' "

Such is the challenge facing the American military as it tries to train the Iraqi security forces to respect the rule of law. Three years after the invasion of Iraq, American troops are no longer simply teaching counterinsurgency techniques; they are trying to school the Iraqis in battling a Sunni-led rebellion without resorting to the tactics of a "dirty war," involving abductions, torture and murder.

The legacy of Abu Ghraib hampers the American military. But the need to instill respect for human rights has gained a new urgency as Iraq grapples with the threat of full-scale civil war and continuing sectarian bloodletting. It is not uncommon now for dozens of bodies, with hands bound and gunshot wounds to the heads, to surface across Baghdad on any given day.

The Americans are pushing the Shiite-dominated Iraqi forces to ask judges for arrest warrants, restrain their use of force and ensure detainees' rights.

The Iraqi officers at this base, the headquarters of the Public Order Forces, a police paramilitary division with a history of torture and abuse, are gradually changing their behavior, American military advisers say. Cases of detainee abuse have declined in recent months, they say.

But detainees can still languish for months without any hope of a legal appeal because of a shortage of judges or, in the case of Mr. Ali, an unwillingness by the Iraqi police to allow detainees to see a judge. Overcrowding is chronic, because the Justice Ministry has been slow in building new prisons.

"The tradition in this country of a law enforcement agency that had absolute power over people, we've got to break them of that," said Maj. Andrew Creel, the departing joint operations officer here. "I think it'll take years. You can't change a cultural mind-set overnight."

Control of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, has become one of the stumbling blocks in forming the new national government, with Sunni Arab politicians accusing Shiite leaders of running militias and death squads from the ministry.

Last fall the American military raided at least two police prisons where it said detainees had been abused. This year's State Department human rights report noted that the police, especially the paramilitary forces, had been accused of torture and killings.

Those forces number 17,500. This base — in the heart of Kadhimiya, just blocks away from a golden-domed Shiite shrine — serves as the headquarters for one of the two major paramilitary branches, the 7,700-member Public Order Forces. An 11-member American military team began advising the Iraqi commanders here last spring. It moved into the base in October and is now handing over its duties to a new team.

Here, 650 prisoners are packed into four spartan rooms. They complain of a lack of food and regular access to showers and toilets. A foul odor wafts from each holding pen. To cope with the overcrowded conditions, the police converted the dining hall into a cell; the three other areas were originally built as storage rooms.

Camp Justice was never meant to hold prisoners for more than a few weeks. Iraqi law says prisoners to be tried are to be transferred to a Justice Ministry penitentiary after interrogation. But the ministry has been unable to build enough jails to keep pace with arrests. It has 10 centers across Iraq, which hold 7,500 detainees, and an additional 7 are expected to be built, a ministry spokesman said.

So the detainee population at temporary police prisons like the one here, separate from those of the Justice Ministry, has ballooned to more than 10,000 in Baghdad alone, spread across a shadowy network of about 10 centers, an Interior Ministry official said.

That has ignited concerns among American officials. But Col. Gordon Davis Jr., the head of Camp Justice's departing advisory team, praised the Iraqi commander here, Maj. Gen. Mehdi Sabih Hashem al-Garawi, for showing a willingness to embrace human rights. The general has, for instance, assigned the Iraqi division's only medic to look after the detainees.

"I won't say he's gone 180, but he's realized that the best way of getting information is not to beat or abuse detainees," Colonel Davis said as he stood in the operations room, the walls plastered with maps of Baghdad.

"The current generation has been brought up with a certain code and a certain tolerance for abuse," he said in another interview. "They've got to be constantly worked on."

The academy for recruits to the Public Order Forces has increased the time spent on human rights training to 20 hours from about eight last October, the colonel said.

Lt. Col. Dhia al-Shammari, the chief interrogator and a supervisor of detainee operations, said: "Beating or insults, any policeman can do. Professionals don't use them. This is not allowed, and I myself reject it."

Certain Public Order units have had fearsome reputations, and residents of Baghdad and nearby towns have complained of abuse and torture. From April to June of last year, American advisers found prisoners with bruises at the headquarters of the Second Brigade every couple of weeks, Colonel Davis said.

When confronted with incidents of abuse, the colonel said, the Iraqi brigade commander told the Americans, "Are you more worried about our enemies or about us?"

That officer was replaced at the urging of the Americans. So was a commander of the Third Brigade, in Salman Pak. Prisoner abuse has been relatively rare here at the division level, the advisers say, and became even scarcer after the American team moved in last fall. Before that, the advisers had been living at an American base. If the Americans saw a bruised prisoner back then, they often kept quiet for fear of alienating the Iraqi officers, said Master Sgt. Joseph Kaiser, a medic who regularly examines the detainees.

Now the Americans can be more direct, advisers say. The Americans have trained a 32-man guard force. Sergeant Kaiser helps supervise the Iraqi medic who examines the detainees daily.

The Iraqi division's intelligence chief "said we have to treat detainees, since they're subjected to visits by the press and human rights groups," said the medic, Hazem, 32, who declined to give his full name for security reasons. "He said to me, 'Your main job is to treat the patients, not to check if they're terrorists.' If I know they're terrorists and I'm told to kill them, I'd kill them. But I do what my job requires."

Checking on the Detainees

On a balmy afternoon, as Sergeant Kaiser walked up to a holding pen to make one of his daily health checks, a blindfolded man in a brown leather jacket squatted outside the metal door. The man was awaiting interrogation, said several guards with Kalashnikov rifles.

The guards went into the cell and brought out Mr. Ali, the man whose brother is being hunted by the Iraqi police. Dressed in a blue and pink tracksuit and a black ski cap, he shuffled up to the sergeant. Because Mr. Ali speaks English, he serves as an unofficial cellblock leader.

"How are the people inside?" Sergeant Kaiser asked.

"We need to have more food," Mr. Ali said. Mr. Ali said he dreaded the idea of American advisers leaving this base one day. "That's bad," he said, shaking his head. "That's very bad. We need the sergeant or another American officer here. When we see them we say, 'Please stay here.' "

A reporter asked Mr. Ali whether detainees had been abused or tortured. "Don't ask these questions," he said, lowering his voice. "You know that."

Sergeant Kaiser said that since September, when he joined the advisory team, he had found only "a few" cases of abuse. He recalled two that he had written up. Prisoners have been brought in with baton marks, he said, but they might have been resisting arrest.

Sergeant Kaiser and Mr. Ali stepped into the cell. Some sunlight streamed in through three small windows near the roof. Three ceiling fans whirred. The 140 detainees mostly sat up on blankets; there was not enough room for them to lie down without touching each other. By the door, one detainee used an electric hair clipper to shave the head of another. A man with glasses sat reading the Koran.

The detainees complained that family visits occurred only once every couple of months. The sick lay on blankets. Sergeant Kaiser gave medicine for diarrhea to a man in gray robes and tablets for oral fungus to an inmate with yellowing teeth. He poked at the torso of a man with rib pains.

"Some are innocent," said a guard, Sabah Ali, 21, as he looked around the room. "But some have given their confessions and they are guilty. Those who are innocent, we'll release them."

But those detainees sometimes end up waiting months before being freed, because the division prefers to release detainees in large groups.

Prisoners from the division's field units are funneled to this base "so you can exploit intelligence and take any opportunity for abuse out of the field," said Lt. Col. John Shattuck, the deputy commander of the advisory team.

Seeking Arrest Warrants

Since his appointment to Camp Justice in February, Judge Majid has come for several hours almost every day. He is a nervous man dressed in a dark suit who prefers that his full name not be printed.

Detainees are marched from cells in groups of five to see him in an office. The ringing of his cellphone can keep him up at all hours — he is expected to be on call around the clock to approve an arrest warrant if the Iraqi forces suddenly come up someone they want to detain.

Arrest warrants were mandated by Interior Ministry officials starting last July to provide some accountability, especially among the paramilitary forces. It is unclear, though, how closely field units stick to the requirement.

The Iraqi operations officer at Camp Justice says warrants are needed only for apprehending people on the Interior Ministry's wanted list, not for instances in which the police may be responding to a report of suspicious activity.

Colonel Davis says the warrant policy has had some effect. Because of it, and because the Iraqis are improving their intelligence gathering, the Public Order Forces no longer round up hundreds of people on each raid, he said. On a typical operation, he added, they may take in a dozen.

After being brought here, the detainees are fingerprinted and have their retinas scanned. A photograph is taken, partly to record their condition at the time of arrest. The Americans have asked the Iraqis to deliver a daily report accounting for all detainees held throughout the division; one recent printout listed 896.

The law says detainees are entitled to have their cases reviewed by a judge every two weeks, but there are not enough judges, said Colonel Shammari, the chief interrogator.

The main question, one impossible to answer for now, is whether respect for rule of law will become deeply rooted in the Iraqi forces, despite a tradition of tyranny in this country, as the guerrilla war continues to rage.

Outside one of the prison cells, a blue-uniformed guard, Salim Abdul Hassan, 35, watched as his colleagues led blindfolded detainees to a row of outdoor toilets.

He said that the American training had been of great help, but that "it would be much better if the Iraqis worked on their own without the Americans."

"We wouldn't be tied down," he said. "Three-quarters of the terrorists ask for the help of the Americans. They want to be in the care of the Americans, not the Iraqis."

Khalid al-Ansary and Max Becherer contributed reporting for this article.



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- Rumsfeld Presses Iraqis To Form Government
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Rumsfeld_P...Government.html

Washington (AFP) Mar 24, 2006 - US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urged Iraqi leaders Thursday not to delay in forming a national unity government, warning that violence and killings continue while they deliberate. "We talk to the folks out there, of course, every day, and they feel that progress is being made. But it hasn't yet happened," Rumsfeld told reporters.

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8754
March 24, 2006
Are US Intentions More 'Base' Than Honorable?

by Jim Lobe
President George W. Bush has long assured the world that his intentions in Iraq are strictly honorable – to set the country on a clear and stable path toward democracy and withdraw U.S. troops as soon as Iraqi forces can take control, "and not one day more."

But more recent statements by top U.S. officials, including Bush himself, have cast the latter intent into some doubt, heightening the belief among both Iraqis and U.S. citizens, according to recent polls, that Washington actually intends to establish permanent military bases in Iraq.

And the description by U.S. reporters of what are being called "super-bases" that have already been built in Iraq only adds to the impression that the Pentagon has no intention of passing up an opportunity – if it can be sustained – of embedding itself deeply into heart of the oil- and gas-rich Middle East and Gulf regions for permanent strategic advantage over any possible rival.

At al-Asad base in Iraq's western desert, wrote Charles Hanley of the Associated Press earlier this week, "the 17,000 troops and workers come and go in a kind of bustling American town, with a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, and a car dealership, stop signs, traffic regulations, and young bikers clogging the roads."

"I think we'll be here forever," Hanley quotes one airman, at yet another mega-base called Anaconda at Balad, as telling him in an article entitled "Huge Bases Raise Question: Is U.S. in Iraq to Stay?" The article notes that Washington has authorized or proposed one billion dollars for U.S. military construction in Iraq this year.

The administration has long denied that it intends to build "permanent bases" in Iraq, although Pentagon briefers have talked about "enduring" bases without clarifying the difference.

As early as April 2003 – that is, less than a month after the U.S. invasion – The New York Times reported that the administration was planning to establish and maintain as many as four military bases in Iraq for an extended period of time.

Later that year, Tom Donnelly, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the new editor of the influential Armed Forces Journal, took Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to task in the neoconservative Weekly Standard for not "fess[ing] up" to the fact that bases in Iraq were entirely consistent with the changes Rumsfeld was trying to effect in Washington's global military posture.

Iraqi airfields in particular, he wrote, "are ideally located for deployments throughout the region. … There's plenty of space, not only for installations but for training," he wrote, adding, "And they are enough removed from Mesopotamia that they would not be 'imperial' irritants to the majority of Iraqis."

That, of course, was in the early days of the Sunni-dominated insurgency when the neoconservative theorists who assured the public before the war that U.S. forces would be greeted with "flowers and sweets" by grateful Iraqis were still riding high in the administration and Congress. As the insurgency has gained strength, the neocons have steadily lost influence.

Yet there is little evidence that the basic strategic goal of establishing at the very least "permanent access" to Iraqi bases has changed.

In some ways, that has always been implicit in the administration's repeated comparisons between Iraq and the occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II. Those precedents have been cited with increasing frequency by Bush and other top officials in recent months as public disaffection with the war has grown.

While Bush and his aides have cited the two Axis powers as evidence of their contention that Washington could successfully transform previously authoritarian or even totalitarian states into democracies over time, critics noted that that evolution was achieved in the context of a large U.S. military presence that persists to this day.

In fact, the postwar "status of forces" agreement with Japan was put forth as a model for a similar accord with the Iraqi Governing Council in 2004 by a Washington law firm that also represented the Iraqi National Congress.

In addition, the Pentagon has become increasingly concerned about its military position in the region, according to Middle East expert Gordon Robinson, who cited the effective expulsion of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan and growing anti-U.S. feeling in Turkey as important setbacks. He described Washington's hopes of acquiring bases in Iraq as "the elephant in the room."

Despite repeated appeals by independent analysts, including some, like Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who initially supported the war, for the administration to solemnly forswear permanent bases or anything resembling a permanent military presence as a way to reduce anti-U.S. sentiment in Iraq and thus weaken the insurgency, top officials have generally avoided doing so.

The one exception has been Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who during his confirmation hearings late last year repeatedly stressed the importance of reassuring Iraqis that Washington really did want to leave Iraq, permanently, as soon as possible.

His advice has been taken to heart by a growing number of lawmakers, Democrat and Republican alike. Indeed, in a potentially significant move last week, the House of Representatives approved a measure by voice vote to bar the Pentagon from using any funds in the most recent appropriations bill for the purpose of "enter[ing] into a basing rights agreement between the United States and Iraq."

That vote came on the heels, however, of the most explicit statement by a responsible official to date about long-term U.S. military intentions in Iraq, one that appeared to confirm that one of the original motivations for going to war there was precisely to establish a permanent military presence.

In testimony before a House committee, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, insisted that it "would be premature for me to predict" whether Washington would indeed gain permanent access to military bases in Iraq. He then proceeded to state some of the reasons why such access might serve specific U.S. interests in the future.

He cited the "need to be able to deter ambitions of an expansionistic Iran," ensure the "free flow of goods and resources on which the prosperity of our nation and everybody else in the world depend," and prosecute the "global war on terror" in the region among possible reasons.

"Clearly, our long-term vision for a military presence in the region requires a robust counter-terrorist capability," he said. "No doubt there is a need for some presence in the region over time primarily to help people to help themselves through this period of extremists versus moderates."

Bush himself added to the speculation during his press conference Wednesday when he was asked whether there would come a day when there would be no U.S. forces left in Iraq. In a departure from his "not-one-day-more" mantra, he insisted that was "an objective," but added, "And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." Bush's term ends in January 2009.

But recent opinions polls both here and in Iraq show the idea of retaining permanent bases is deeply unpopular in both countries.

Seventy-one percent of U.S. respondents, including 60 percent of Republicans, in a recent survey by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), said they opposed the creation of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.

Even greater cynicism about Bush's "not-one-day-more" promises reigns in Iraq, according to a PIPA poll released at the end of January [.pdf]. It found that 80 percent of Iraqis believe Washington intends to maintain bases there.

(Inter Press Service)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HC25Ak03.html
A balance sheet for America's Iraq
By Sami Moubayed

DAMASCUS - Three years after the US invasion of Iraq, one cannot but wonder how the Americans missed a golden opportunity to create a secure democracy in the country to replace the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

Optimists in the Arab world, especially pro-Western and particularly pro-American Arabs, defended the United States until curtain fall, saying that it truly would root out terrorism from Iraq, and bring both stability and democracy to the Iraqi people.

Every one of those beliefs has been shattered - over and over again, since March 2003. As Iraq enters its fourth year since the war began, it is safe to ask: What has been achieved?

Apart from the downfall of Saddam, not a single achievement in Iraq is noteworthy. The country today is a "democracy" in civil war - a democracy where human life is being wasted, along with the dreams and security of the Iraqi people. Inasmuch as free elections are a great asset of which all oppressed people dream, they mean nothing if security is lacking.

Liberating a country is one thing, and keeping it in order is another. History will not remember the free elections that took place in January and December 2005 as much as it will remember the notorious pictures of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The killings and the death squads that haunt the streets of Iraq will live much longer in the minds of Iraqi people than the image of Saddam's statue falling in Baghdad.

So where did the Americans go wrong? Amid a multitude of mistakes, many points stand out. First and foremost is the dismantling of the Iraqi army and security services after the fall of the Ba'athist regime. This unleashed uncontrollable chaos. Those responsible for this drastic mistake include US administrator L Paul Bremer and US stooge Ahmad Chalabi.

Other mistakes include persecution of all Ba'athists - even petty officials who had joined the party dreaming of professional development to make a better living - making them permanently vengeful of the new order. Other blunders include the permitting of looting after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, and the failure to deliver basic services such as health, electricity, sanitation and infrastructure.

Other mistakes include persecuting and firing hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs, making them collectively pay the price for Saddam's madness, although the Sunnis suffered under Saddam almost as much as the Kurds and the Shi'ites. The Americans misunderstood the Shi'ites, who they believed were their prime allies in the new Iraq, forgetting - or ignoring - Shi'ite ties to Iran.

The bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra on February 22, which can be blamed on the poor security situation, led to reprisals by Shi'ite militias on the Sunni community, accusing its leaders of ordering the attack, and the destruction of more than 100 Sunni mosques in revenge, in addition to the killing of more than 200 Sunnis.

Winners and losers
Three years after the war, one should ask, who has benefited most from the fall of Saddam? Ironically, the answers prove the exact opposite of what the Americans believed in 2002-03.

The first and ultimate victor is the Islamic Republic of Iran. What more could Iran want than the downfall of a dictator against whom it had fought for eight years in the 1980s, and his replacement with Shi'ite politicians who had been created by and in Iran in the 1980s?

The mullahs of Iran once viewed Iraq as a dangerous and aggressive neighboring country, ruled by a hostile and brutal dictatorship. Today, Iraq is viewed as a friendly neighbor, ruled by loyal allies who want to advance Shi'ite nationalism, export the Islamic revolution and strengthen Iranian-Iraqi relations.

Some of those in power in Iraq, such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), are more Iranian than they are Iraqi. Hakim, after all, fought with Iran against the army of his native Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.

The second victor is Iraqi Shi'ites, who have been transformed from a suppressed majority into a power group that controls key posts in the government and military, as well as the powerful job of prime minister.

The Americans courted them in 2003, but when they realized that Shi'ite loyalties were rooted in Iran (an obvious fact for anybody familiar with the Arab world), they decided to abandon them, weaken them, and replace them with the Sunnis, whom they had persecuted since 2003.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "I have tasted command. I love it. And I will never give it up." That is exactly the case with the Iraqi Shi'ites. They will never abandon the powerful posts they attained after the fall of Saddam, preferring to fight and plunge Iraq into civil war rather than submissively accept returning to rule of the Sunnis.

Third on the victory list - much to the surprise of the Americans - are some of the Arab regimes that neighbor Iraq. These countries were expected to collapse, according to the domino theory, once the Iraqi Ba'athists were toppled and replaced by a true democracy. Had democracy been successful in Iraq, then these regimes would have faced the wrath of their own people, who would have aspired to create similar democracies in their own countries.

But Iraq today is an ultimate failure, giving ammunition to Arab regimes that are telling activists in their own countries: "Look at what the Americans achieved in Iraq. Is this the democracy you want? It is a democracy where 30,000 people have been killed, by war and sectarian violence."

Inasmuch as some Arabs want democracy, they will always vote for stability as a high priority. It would be great if they could achieve both, but if it is a choice between a democracy with no stability and a dictatorship with stability, they will chose the latter option.

Under Saddam, an Iraqi citizen who minded his own business, who did not involve himself in politics, and who cared only for the livelihood of his family could live a secure life.

Today, an Iraqi citizen with the same characteristics runs a high risk of sending his son to school and never seeing him again because he happened to walk by a car loaded with explosives. Or he runs the risk of being in the wrong place, with the wrong people, and being blown to pieces by a terrorist attack.

On March 13, a staggering 34 corpses were discovered in Iraq. All of them had been executed "recently" - since the bombing of the Golden Mosque. The next morning, 15 more men aged 22-40 were found in the back of a pickup truck in the al-Khadra district in west Baghdad. They, too, had been executed by hanging. By daybreak, another 40 dead were found in the Iraqi capital. Finally, a massive grave, similar to the ones under Saddam, were found in a Shi'ite slum in east Baghdad. It contained the bodies of 29 men, all stripped to their underwear, who had been shot while bound and gagged.

In all, 87 bodies were discovered in Baghdad over 24 hours. Last week, Iraqi insurgents stormed a jail in a Sunni neighborhood, killing 19 police officers and a courthouse guard, freeing prisoners as they went along. Ten of the attackers were killed in the rampage and 33 prisoners were released. Another 100 insurgents stormed a judicial compound in Muqdadiyah, northeast of Baghdad. These people were a combination of Sunnis and Shi'ites, killed in attacks and counterattacks that have erupted all over Iraq since February.

The White House, taken aback by these horrific attacks on the third anniversary of the invasion, embarked on five days of public relations, defending the war as having been justified.

President George W Bush said US troops would remain in Iraq well after his presidential term ended in January 2009, saying the issue of troop withdrawal would be dealt with by "future presidents" of the United States and future Iraqi governments. "I believe we can succeed. Let me put it to you this way. If I didn't think we'd succeed I'd pull our troops out."

Iraqis immediately began asking: What kind of success did Bush have in mind, with all the blood being wasted? And Americans have their doubts too, with 65% of them, according to a survey, saying they are not satisfied with Bush's handling of the war.

Former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi said that 50-60 Iraqis were dying a day because of the conflict, adding that it was a civil war, despite Bush's assurances that it was not: "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Allawi was probably the only person capable of pulling Iraq together, because he is a strong man, with strong connections to the West and the Arab World. He is secular and strong, but he lost the race for the premiership by to the current prime minister-designate, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

The United States went to war with many interests. Part of it was to redraw the map of the Middle East. Another part was to show the world that it was still avenging the attacks of September 11, 2001. Other unannounced objectives were to control a new revenue of Arab oil, further establish itself in the Arab world and the Persian Gulf, obtain reconstruction contracts for giants such as Halliburton and Bechtel, create a new puppet state in the Arab world, further secure Israel's security, and expand the influence of US corporate companies into the Middle East.

But the Americans greatly underestimated how powerful the insurgency would be. The Institute for Foreign Policy said 48 suicide attacks took place per month in 2004, compared with only 20 a month in 2003. So the longer the US stays in Iraq, while failing to deliver, the more anti-American feeling has soared.

In August 2003, a poll conducted by Zogby International showed that two-thirds of Iraqis wanted the Americans to stay in Iraq for at least another year. Seven months later, USA Today and CNN conducted another poll, showing that one-third of Iraqis believed that the Americans were doing more harm than good. It added that 57% wanted them to withdraw immediately.

According to Iraqi Body Count, more than 30,000 Iraqis have been killed since 2003, and during the first two years of war, 20% were women and children. Additionally, the US accounted to 37% of civilian deaths, while the insurgency was responsible for 9% only.

Millions of dollars have been stolen from the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, and during Allawi's interim government in 2004 as much as $2 billion was embezzled from ministries. Shootings at checkpoints, arrests without warrants and torture in prisons have all added to anti-American feeling. The Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights showed last October that there were 24,000 detainees in Iraq, 11,500 of them held by the US Army.

The insurgency knows that it cannot win the war, but it wants to continue its guerrilla warfare to weaken the US Army to the point where it cannot afford to stay in Iraq. The more the Americans bomb Iraq, the more this encourages recruitment into the underground.

Iraq is a country scarred by Saddam's brutal dictatorship and inhabited by 25 million people. Ruling them and keeping them under control with 160,000 troops is impossible. If the Americans want to win the war, they will have to increase the number of their troops. Military analysts say the US Army would have to increase to 450,000 troops in Iraq.

They would need to become a new Saddam, and rely on spies, informers and brutal methods to bring people to submissiveness. Adding to everybody's misery in Iraq is the terrible economic condition, the lack of jobs, and the lack of investment in a war-torn country. Iraq's petroleum exports fell to an average of only 1.8 million barrels a day in 2005-06. They were 2.8 million a day under Saddam. In recent months, the number has become a low 1.1 million.

While the world digests all of these realities, the Iraqis remain occupied with the issue of who their new prime minister will be. Jaafari has been a complete failure because he has failed to bring security to the country.

He was chosen by the Iran-backed United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) last month for another term, but a rising coalition of Sunnis, Kurds and secular Shi'ites has been calling on him to step down and the UIA has been asked to nominate another candidate.

The US, which initially welcomed Jaafari because he was the most moderate among existing candidates, recalculated when he was brought to power by a last-minute vote cast by the young rebel Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Muqtada led two rebellions against the Americans in 2004. He is opposed to Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs and refuses to carve up Iraq further and create an autonomous Shi'ite district in the south, similar to the Kurdish one in the north.

He is popular among the poor and the youth, who see him as the only true patriot who has taken action to expel the Americans. But although Muqtada is relatively independent from Iran, he is a cleric with radical views on political Islam and wants to create what he calls "an Islamic democracy" in Iraq, modeled on Iran but independent of it.

This is a red line that the Americans will not cross. Jaafari is a product of an Islamic party as well, being leader of the Da'wa Party, which operated under Iranian auspices in the 1980s.

Opposing the Muqtada-Jaafari alliance are Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, the Sunnis and Allawi. An ongoing point of conflict is over the security ministries of Defense and Interior. The US has conditioned that if Jaafari remains prime minister, he must give them to "non-sectarian" politicians. These ministries have been used to arrest, torture and settle old scores with Sunnis, accusing them all of having benefited under Saddam.

Muqtada, now seen as a kingmaker in Iraq, opposes the US condition to place a non-sectarian official such as Allawi as minister of defense or interior. Muqtada's ambition of placing one of his own followers as minister is being blocked by Allawi and the Kurds, who threaten to boycott the new government if Muqtada gets his way.

Complicating matters is the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who backs the UIA, and Hakim of the SCIRI, who wants to advance Iranian interests in Iraq and insists on maintaining a prime minister from the UIA. If not Jaafari, he wants his man, the current vice president, Adel Abdul-Mehdi, for the job.

The reality of the situation is that as Iraqi politicians bicker among themselves, people are dying every day. These politicians fail to grasp that their duty before history and the Iraqi people is to bring security to Iraq - at any cost. They need a strong man to do that, but they refuse to accept one because it would remind them of Saddam.

Yet sadly, this is probably what Iraqis need - not a Saddam, but a powerful man who has the will and ability to be forceful on all sects and bring everybody under the strict authority of the central government. This is a concept that must be accepted by Iraqi politicians and the US administration.

Otherwise, Iraq will remain in a state of civil war that could become one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century - despite the thundering assurances of Bush.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

http://www.antiwar.com/bock/?articleid=8756

March 24, 2006
Iraq Three Years On

by Alan Bock
So have we learned anything after three years in Iraq and two years and 10 months after the White House created a "Mission Accomplished" sign for an aircraft carrier on which President Bush spoke?

Well, we learned, or were reminded, early on in the Iraq war, that the U.S. military long ago sloughed off the post-Vietnam syndrome characterized by self-doubt and dubious morale to become what is probably the most efficient fighting machine in history. From the "shock and awe" aerial attacks, to the remarkable race to Baghdad, to the ability to operate with "embedded" reporters, to the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, the men and women of the U.S. armed services, for the most part, showed themselves to be well-trained, equipped with some impressive weapons and materiel, personally brave, and cool and professional under fire.

But war, as the 19th century Prussian theorist Karl von Clausewitz explained with a good deal of elaboration, is politics carried on by other means. We have a solid (and healthy) tradition of civilian control of the military in this country. Civilians determine the political goals, and much about the acceptable means to be employed, for which military people then risk their lives.

We are learning, through books such as Cobra II by Michael Gordon and retired Marine Gen. Bernard Trainor, that even in the early phases military professionals who wanted to spend more time cleaning up pockets of resistance were overruled by civilian leaders in Washington who cared more about the appearance of a swift victory than a complete victory. It is hardly controversial these days that the military, or at least many in the military's upper echelons, would have preferred a larger invasion force than the civilian masters permitted. It also became apparent almost immediately that almost no planning was done for the post-invasion occupation. Indeed, many in both the civilian and military leadership did not expect an occupation to last more than six months.

It is likely that abuses like the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, which so tarnished the reputation of the United States and its military and have been widely blamed on a few lower-level grunts, are at least partly the responsibility of civilians in the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, and the White House, who were busy writing memos that blurred the reasonably clear lines between interrogation and torture found in the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions.

Pious Platitudes

Even now, three years after the invasion, the objectives outlined by civilian leaders are more pious platitudes and aspirations than concrete objectives and hardheaded strategies for achieving them. The ongoing occupation has given bin Laden-style radicals a recruiting tool, and Iraq has become an incubator for terrorists that didn't exist before – an "ultimate real-life training ground," as Charles Peña, author of the forthcoming book Winning the Un-War told me, for terrorists who are likely to afflict Europe and perhaps the United States for years to come.

Now, as conflict that may or may not be a genuine civil war rages in the wake of a temple bombing, the need for concrete objectives is more urgent than ever. Unfortunately, our civilian leadership is stuck on stock phrases and relentless optimism.

None of this suggests we should give up civilian control of military action. Even though recent experience suggests that the military as an institution is more cautious than many individuals entranced with the potential for reshaping the world through military action, over the long haul this might not hold true in all circumstances, and civilian control is still preferable. But the American people should have learned to be more skeptical of civilian leaders and determined to hold them accountable, especially when the war drums are pounding.

That's not always easy, of course. Presidents and their advisers have learned, over the years, to shape their war-inciting messages so as to appeal to most patriotic Americans who don't pay close attention to foreign developments on a day-to-day basis. And terrorists like Osama bin Laden can generally be depended on to play their symbiotic role of committing the occasional outrageous attack that keeps most Americans feeling insecure and in need of protection, even aggressive or "preemptive" protection. In fact, especially when a country is a global power with military installations and "interests" throughout the world, the rest of the world really can be a dangerous place.

Unrealistic Expectations

The United States is in this mess, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to see a face-saving way out. In large part because the president, once all the other justifications evaporated into the ether, made the establishment of democratic governance the quasi-official new goal of the assault on Iraq, a semblance of stable governance seems to be the requirement for at least beginning a draw-down of U.S. troops.

President Bush in his recent speeches and appearances has stressed the importance of Iraqis putting aside their differences and agreeing to support a national unity government. There are several reasons this is a questionable tactic.

For starters, having the president of the United States deliver this opinion is a constant reminder to Iraqis that the United States is an occupying force, that this Iraqi government is not fully sovereign in its own territory, and that any future government will have limited actual sovereignty so long as the United States has a substantial number of troops in the country and is counted on to provide a significant amount of security. In addition, there are reasons to doubt whether a strong national unity government is a workable way to deal with the problems governing that particular piece of Mesopotamian territory.

It has become all too familiar to Americans who follow Iraqi issues, but it's worth a reminder. The country as currently constituted was cobbled together by the British after World War I from provinces that the previously ruling Ottoman Empire had chosen to govern as three separate provinces. Thus there are Kurds in the north, Shia Muslims in the south (constituting a majority of the entire country), and Sunni Muslims (the ruling class under Saddam) in the center, with other minorities and many mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods and towns to complicate matters.

A straight majority-rule democracy in Iraq would give the Shia, who have plenty of valid grievances from the past and the present, fairly complete control. The governance problem is to permit majority rule without encouraging suppression and oppression of minorities. Beyond a few reassuring words, the United States has not confronted this problem openly and honestly.

The obvious solution short of outright partition is something like federalism (though there must be a term from Islamic history that means much the same) with a relatively weak central government and a great deal of local autonomy. Getting there is complicated by the fact that there are no working oil fields in the central, mostly Sunni region, so Sunnis would have to have great confidence to agree to oil revenue-sharing agreements.

There's evidence, beginning with the agreement Sunday to form a national security council outside the framework of the largely American-designed constitution, that the Iraqis understand this much better than the American government does. Having Americans repeat that the fantasy of putting aside differences for the sake of national unity is the only acceptable course discourages more realistic approaches and delays the day when Iraqis take full responsibility – and accountability – for their own political future.

Perhaps it is necessary for U.S. forces to provide a semblance of security a while longer. But the sooner the United States removes itself from the governance of Iraq, the sooner Iraqis will have to take that responsibility on themselves. That's the outcome toward which U.S. diplomats and military leaders should be working.

Effects on Neighbors

Among the long-term hopes for the war in Iraq was that ousting Saddam Hussein from power and establishing a reasonably democratic form of government would provide a model of freedom and stability that would inspire others in the region and lead eventually to a more secure region. U.S. officials still talk bravely as if this consummation is inevitable, and it could happen. But all actions have unintended consequences, and war tends to magnify them.

As of now, militancy in the region is on the rise rather than on the decline. The regional influence of an Iran that may be seeking nuclear weapons has been increased. Terrorists are using Iraq as a training base for attacks elsewhere. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey – even the United Arab Emirates, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited recently – leaders are concerned that chaos and sectarian tensions in Iraq will spill over into their countries.

"Who could possibly look at anything in Iraq and think, 'I want some of that'?" Yusif Kanni, editor of the Turkish Daily News, recently wrote.

Even Israel, the country many war critics say the war advocates were trying to protect, may be less stable (though Ariel Sharon's stroke certainly has something to do with that). Dore Gold, Israel's former UN ambassador, says the war has fueled the spread of al-Qaeda in the region. Gerald Steinberg, senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, cheers the ouster of Saddam but criticizes U.S. postwar policy. "The assumption that just being there and talking about democracy and elections would work was naive," he told Knight Ridder correspondent Dion Nissenbaum.

What lessons might the United states take from what has been a much more difficult and costly endeavor than advertised, even if it does (however unlikely it may seem now) bring a modicum of stability and decent governance in the long run?

Preemptive or Preventive?

First, Americans should learn the difference between a preemptive and a preventive war. A preemptive war occurs when there is solid evidence of an imminent attack (e.g., troop movements, bombs being loaded) and the country fearing attack strikes first. A preventive war is designed to counter a potential threat that might occur months, years, or even decades down the road. Preventive wars are morally and strategically much more difficult to justify or carry out successfully.

The attack on Iraq was clearly a preventive rather than a preemptive war, and not justified by the values the United States claims to uphold. As reprehensible as he was, Saddam Hussein did not pose an imminent or even a medium-term threat to the United States, and he wouldn't have even if he had possessed weapons of mass destruction. His neighbors were not demanding a U.S. invasion; even those who went along had doubts.

Americans would do well to learn more skepticism when their leaders are beating the war drums. Whether our leaders consciously lied during the run-up to the war may be impossible to know with certainty, but they clearly emphasized or chose to believe the evidence that validated their preferred course of action and downplayed countervailing evidence. Leaders have done likewise in the past and will do so in the future. Caveat emptor.

In the longer run, even before the fallout from Iraq clears completely, the United States should move toward a more modest conception of its role in the world. This is clearly the most powerful country in the world, but it cannot shape the future of the entire world – and attempting to do so endangers freedom here at home. It is better to lead by example than to try to establish democracy by force of arms. Moving toward a noninterventionist foreign policy, one that, as John Quincy Adams once put it, makes the United States the friend of freedom everywhere but the active protector only of its own, has become almost an imperative. It will be a tough slog.

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...22-022154-3556r

Commentary: Iraq's strategic dilemma
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
UPI Editor at Large
Published March 22, 2006


WASHINGTON -- Chased out of one Iraqi town after another, the insurgents would wait for U.S. and Iraqi troops to depart and then slowly infiltrate back. They knew the coalition and the new Iraqi army did not have sufficient numbers to stick around in every major population center. This week President Bush said the growing strength of the Iraqi army had facilitated a new strategy -- clear, hold and build.

No sooner enunciated by Bush than the more flexible insurgency came up with a riposte -- recoil, redeploy and spoil. This was a leaf out the classic guerrilla textbook: attack only when you can overwhelm with superior force. If the shoe is on the other foot and the enemy has the numbers in his favor, melt away without contact.


Hit-and-run attacks against Iraqi police stations, local prisons, recruiting centers are standard tactics in every insurgency. Tracts, pamphlets, and al-Qaida web sites that attack the established U.S. order with grievances to sway public opinion in favor of the insurgents, are all part of the mix.

Almost all Iraqis tell inquiring journalists that while they feared and despised Saddam Hussein, fear of the unknown and uncertainty about the future amid a growing sense of insecurity, generated by indiscriminate nightly killings, is a great deal worse. Youth unemployment is driving many teenagers into the ranks of the insurgency.

While the coalition has double-timed the training and fielding of Iraqi forces, the insurgency's ranks have grown correspondingly. The U.S. command's estimate of enemy guerrilla fighters has grown from 5,000 to 15,000 to 30,000, with an estimated support group of some 200,000 civilians. Why that many? Electricity alone tells the story. Under Saddam Hussein, Baghdadis had 18 hours of electric power each day. Today, it's 8. Drivers stay in line for several hours -- some days twelve hours -- to fill their gas tanks. Cheap gas was never a problem before liberation.

Since World War II, insurgencies in different parts of the world have had the nasty habit of hanging around for an average of six years. Algeria's guerrilla war of independence lasted 8 years. The IRA war against British loyalists in Northern Ireland never fielded more than 300 terrorists or freedom fighters (depending on one's viewpoint), and they kept half the British army pinned down for a quarter of a century.

Bush has recognized these unpleasant verities when he said U.S. troops would be in Iraq past the 2008 presidential election year. Their departure would have to be decided by the next U.S. president. Bush urges his visitors to take the long view of history. He firmly believes what he is doing in the Middle East is comparable to the Truman-Acheson period in Europe after World War II and the Reagan-Bush 41 era with the implosion of the Soviet empire.

While failure in Iraq is not an option for president Bush, failure remains a real possibility, especially if Democrats recapture one or both houses of Congress next November.

Last week, U.S. and Iraqi forces launched Operation Swarmer, billed as the largest operation of the war. Some 50 helicopters and 200 tactical vehicles took some 1,500 troops to the Samarra area 80 miles north of Baghdad on the Tigris river. Intelligence had indicated a target-rich area of ten square miles. Apparently overlooked was that such an operation, at least two weeks in the planning, was bound to leak out in advance. Insurgency intelligence operatives are known to have given a high priority to infiltrating the ranks of the new Iraqi army, police and intelligence agency. A few insurgency suspects were taken prisoner and several arms caches uncovered. But the enemy had melted away.

In Jan. 1966, the U.S. army launched the largest operation of the Vietnam war. Operation Masher took three brigades of the First Air Cav division (16,000 men) by C-123 troop transports and helicopters from their camp at An Khe to an area near Bong Son on the South China Sea coast where they hoped to surprise a large Vietcong unit. We reporters had been notified off-the-record a week before to be in An Khe, the Air Cav's base, "next Thursday for a big one" that would keep us in the field for several days. If the press knew in advance, chances were the enemy did too.

The only casualties in the opening phase of Masher were the 50 U.S. soldiers killed when their C-123 troop transport, the first one off the ground, crashed into a mountain. The Washington Post's Ward Just and this reporter were bumped off the same aircraft to make room for two more troopers, and scrambled onto the next one.

Village after village was surrounded, but the only action was the occasional sniper round to slow down the U.S. advance as guerrillas vanished down spider holes and tunnels. Masher was a costly failure. And the last such operation spectacular of the Vietnam War.

The high-flown Operation Swarmer in Iraq was a mini replica of Masher 45 years ago. What the counter-insurgency campaign needs is a different historical parallel -- the 1952 arrival of Gen. Gerald Templer in Malaya (before it became Malaysia) with orders to crush a Communist insurgency.

As part of a wider, Soviet-inspired drive to gain strategic and economic control of key areas of Southeast Asia, Moscow had decided to launch the 1948 campaign of murder, sabotage and terrorist mayhem, which was designed to morph into an armed revolution. Templer's recipe was part political, part psychological, part socio-economic initiatives, all with limited use of firepower.

Templer's counter-insurgency comprised aerial drops of millions of "strategic" leaflets, including handwritten letters together with pictures of surrendered guerrillas; "voice-aircraft" with personalized messages from ex-terrorists; an intelligence service with lots of spare cash for informers. MI6 operatives fluent in local languages coordinated sophisticated psyops. Templer's strategy paid off with total victory in 4 years.

In Iraq today, such an "oil stain" strategy of stability would require strong local police presence all over the country, beginning with the 14 Iraqi provinces that are relatively quiescent, before coopting the Sunni areas and splitting them from al-Qaida's foreign imports. Four more years takes on a different meaning in Iraq.

Iraq leaders meet as US presses for deal Yahoo! NEWS
Iraqi leaders held their first formal talks in several days as Washington kept up pressure on them to form a national unity government to help quell sectarian and insurgent violence that saw 29 more people killed on Friday. Twenty deaths were reported in Baghdad alone. In one attack, gunmen shot dead four workers in a bakery and left a booby trap package that killed a policeman when he opened it. A bomb killed five worshippers and wounded 17 as they left weekly prayers at a Sunni Muslim mosque at Khalis, north of the capital, police said. Gunmen shot dead four people in a Shi'ite home in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, police said. After dark, residents reported explosions and gunfire in the Dora district of southern Baghdad. U.S forces said they were conducting major sweeps against insurgents around Baghdad's western Abu Ghraib suburb -- near where three Western hostages were rescued on Thursday -- and in several villages in and around the northern city of Kirkuk. U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who has been a driving force in pressing for a unity government, said: "I am the one who's saying, 'The country is bleeding, you need to move'." Speaking to the Washington Post, he also noted that despite a suicide car bombing on Thursday that killed at least 25 people at a police headquarters, more people died in death squad-style sectarian killings in recent weeks than in bombings. The destruction of a Shi'ite shrine a month ago sparked a wave of reprisals that raised the prospect of pro-government Shi'ite militias launching Iraq into all-out civil war. The leaders of the main parliamentary parties elected in December attended. Further talks are due on Saturday. At a news conference afterwards, the leaders again committed themselves to forming a unity government, but there was little sign of progress in breaking a logjam over who will lead it. President Jalal Talabani said he was optimistic.

JAAFARI DEFIANT
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told Arabiya television he would not step down and was confident of the continued backing of his Shi'ite Alliance bloc, despite opposition from other parties. Sources within the Alliance said internal pressure and reluctance from Washington may yet force Jaafari to stand aside. "All options are up for discussion," one senior government source said, adding that even the principle the prime minister should come from the dominant Alliance was open to change. A source in one of the main Shi'ite political parties said the Alliance was resisting a suggestion that Jaafari might hold the premiership for just a year before a new cabinet reshuffle. The parallel creation of a new National Security Council, on which the main leaders would sit, had added to the permutations of jobs on offer, several senior sources said. But for now there was little progress on agreeing the administration's line-up. "Once we agree on the prime minister, we could have a government in two weeks," the Shi'ite political source said. Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, a Kurd, said forecasting a timetable was difficult but told Reuters: "Realistically if we can get a government formed before the end of April, I think we will be safe." U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld added his voice to increasingly urgent calls from Washington for a government deal to be completed -- leading senators visiting Baghdad this week lectured Iraqi politicians and spoke of American "impatience." "A good government ... would be a good thing for the country and would reduce the level of violence," Rumsfeld said. "They need to get about the task ... Until it's done, it's not done."

IRAN ROLE
In a mark of U.S. concern, Khalilzad is preparing to hold talks on Iraq with Washington's adversary Iran. There is as yet no clear sign of when and how such discussions may take place. Iraqi Shi'ite politicians say the talks partly reflect the divisions within the Alliance, saying Jaafari has had Tehran's backing but Washington is uncomfortable with him. Khalilzad renewed accusations that Iran is backing Shi'ite violence in Iraq -- some analysts say Tehran is using Iraq to deflect U.S. pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. "Training and supplying, direct or indirect, takes place, and that there is also provision of financial resources to people, to militias, and that there is presence of people associated with Revolutionary Guard and with MOIS (Iranian intelligence)," Khalilzad told the Washington Post. He said he was particularly concerned about the Mehdi Army militia of Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and said the political parties had to do more to curb their armed supporters. He said his own role in government negotiations had been reduced but that a gulf remained between Sunnis demanding a key role in decision-making and majority Shi'ites reluctant to give the once dominant minority an outright veto in cabinet. Briton Norman Kember, 74, one of three Christian peace activists rescued by British-led special forces in Baghdad on Thursday after four months held hostage, headed home on Friday.
By Alastair Macdonald and Mariam Karouny

Outcry rises over Afghan Christian convert Yahoo! NEWS
Growing international pressure on Afghanistan to respect the religious freedom of a Christian convert was met in Afghanistan on Friday by a clamor of calls for the man to be executed for denying Islam. The controversy over 40-year-old Abdur Rahman, whose trial is due to begin next week, threatens to drive a wedge between Afghanistan and Western countries that are ensuring its security and bankrolling its development. But President Hamid Karzai cannot ignore the views of conservative proponents of Islamic law or appear to bow too readily to outside pressure. A group of several hundred people, including a former prime minister and religious and former faction leaders, met in Kabul and urged that Rahman be tried under Islamic law, and threatened trouble if the government caved in to Western pressure. Rahman was detained last week for converting to Christianity and could face the death penalty if he refuses to become a Muslim again, judicial officials say. Death is the punishment stipulated by sharia, or Islamic law, for apostasy. The Afghan legal system is based on a mix of civil and sharia law. The case has sparked an outcry in North America and Europe but that appeared only to harden positions in Afghanistan. Several clerics raised the issue during weekly sermons in Kabul on Friday, and there was little sympathy for Rahman. "We respect all religions, but we don't go into the British embassy or the American embassy to see what religion they are following," said cleric Enayatullah Baligh at Kabul's main mosque. "We won't let anyone interfere with our religion, and he should be punished," he said. The United States wants Afghanistan to show that it respects religious freedom and quickly resolve the case. President George W. Bush has vowed to use U.S. leverage over Afghanistan. Several other countries with troops in Afghanistan, including Canada, Italy, Germany and Australia, have voiced their concern. Some foreign critics have urged that their troops be withdrawn. Canada said on Thursday Karzai had pledged that Rahman would not be executed. A presidential spokesman in Kabul declined to comment, but a government minister said a solution could be found. Analysts say they doubt the man will be executed and his case could hinge on interpretations of the new constitution, which says "no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam." It also says Afghanistan will abide by international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines freedom of religion.

STRUGGLE A "RELIGIOUS DUTY"
Rahman told a preliminary hearing last week he had become a Christian while working for an aid group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan 15 years ago. He was detained after his family informed authorities he had converted, apparently following a family dispute involving two daughters, a judicial official said. Virtually everyone interviewed in a small sample of opinion in several parts of the deeply conservative, Muslim country on Friday said Rahman should be punished. Religious and political figures meeting at a Kabul hotel said the government should ensure Islamic law is enforced. The group included former prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai and a senior Shi'ite cleric who commanded anti-Soviet forces in the 1980s, Asif Mohseni, who said Rahman should be executed. It said if its demands were ignored, "the Muslim people of Afghanistan would consider struggle their legal and religious duty." A cleric and member of parliament from Badakhshan province said Rahman should be executed. "It would be better to get no aid or military help from the West for 100 years than accept this affront," said Sadullah Abu Aman. A prosecutor has raised questions about Rahman's mental state, and a judge said that could be taken into account. Rahman has denied he is mentally unstable. A judge said legal proceedings were expected to begin next week.
By Sayed Salahuddin

Dozens of Insurgents Captured in Iraq Yahoo! NEWS
American and Iraqi troops swept the oil-rich region of Kirkuk for suspected insurgents and captured dozens, while drive-by shootings, roadside bombings and sectarian violence killed at least 29 people in Iraq on Friday. A bombing outside a Sunni Muslim mosque after Friday prayers killed five worshippers and wounded 15 people in the city of Khalis, northeast of Baghdad, the army said. Gunmen in vehicles killed three policemen in west Baghdad and three power station workers headed to their jobs in Taji, just north of the capital, police said. In southern Baghdad's Saydiyah district, gunmen killed four pastry shop employees, police said. Nearby, a roadside bomb killed a policeman. Retaliatory killings between Shiite and Sunni Muslims have become increasingly common in the capital since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine that unleashed the continuing rash of sectarian murders. Police said they found 13 bodies, blindfolded and shot, on Friday in the Binok, Kazimiyah and Sadr City neighborhoods. Mortar rounds fell on homes in south Baghdad and the northern city of Tal Afar, wounding about 10 people, mainly children. Meanwhile, soldiers of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division joined Iraqi troops in a sweep of five villages outside the city of Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad. Forty suspected insurgents were picked up in Hawija, police said. A day earlier, a U.S. military spokesman asserted that major violence is largely confined to just three of Iraq's 18 provinces, where fighting raged on Thursday with at least 58 people killed in execution-style slayings, bombings and gunbattles. Sunni insurgents hit a major police and jail facility for a third straight day Thursday — this time with a suicide car bombing that killed 25 in central Baghdad. The attacker struck outside the Interior Ministry Major Crimes unit, killing 10 civilians and 15 policemen, authorities said. As insurgent forces raised the stakes with the attacks, the U.S. military said late Thursday it was in the second day of an operation with Iraqi soldiers "to disrupt anti-Iraqi forces and to find and destroy terrorist caches in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad." The military statement said 1,400 personnel were involved in the operation — termed Northern Lights — and had captured "two persons of high-value interest and 16 suspected terrorists." Two large weapons caches also were discovered, the military said. Abu Ghraib, also the site of the infamous prison, is where U.S. and British forces stormed a house Thursday and freed three Christian peace activists held hostage since Nov. 26. In a rundown of recent military activity, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesman, said most violence was focused in three central provinces, including Baghdad. "There is not widespread violence across Iraq. There is not. Seventy-five percent of the attacks still take place in Baghdad, al-Anbar or Salaheddin (provinces). And in the other 15 provinces, they all averaged less than six attacks a day, and 12 of those provinces averaged less than two attacks a day." He said attacks nationwide were averaging 75 a day, a level that has been generally sustained since August. The three provinces he cited, however, are home to about 9 million people, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development — a third of the country's population of 27 million. Lynch's list omitted Diyala province, which stretches north and east of Baghdad to the Iranian border and is home to nearly 1.5 million people. It was the scene Tuesday of the first of the series of attacks on police facilities, when 100 insurgents stormed a jail and freed 33 prisoners, 18 of them their own men captured two days earlier. That attack killed 20 police and wrecked the jail, police station and courthouse in Muqdadiyah, 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. Ten insurgents were killed. As Iraqi soldiers and police have begun patrolling more territory, U.S. forces have become less visible in many areas and less easy to target. Also, the nature of the violence has shifted from assaults on American troops to battles rooted in sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. More than 1,000 people have died violently in Iraq, mainly in and around Baghdad, since the shrine bombing in Samarra, a city north of Baghdad in Salaheddin province. The sectarian-rooted deaths have been running at dozens a day. The bodies of hundreds of victims have been dumped after being shot execution-style, hands bound and bearing signs of torture. Lynch acknowledged a spike in "ethnic-sectarian incidents," saying there were 75 percent more civilian casualties from March 11-17 than in the previous week. In Baghdad alone, he said, the U.S. command recorded 58 incidents involving 134 dead in that period.
By VANESSA ARRINGTON, Associated Press Writer

Report: Russia Had Sources in U.S. Command Yahoo! NEWS
The Russian government collected intelligence from sources inside the American military command as the U.S. mounted the invasion of Iraq, and the Russians fed information to Saddam Hussein on troop movements and plans, according to Iraqi documents cited in a Pentagon report released Friday. The Russians relayed information to Saddam during the opening days of the war in late March and early April 2003, including a crucial time before the ground assault on Baghdad, according to the documents. The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing two captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians collected information from sources "inside the American Central Command" and that battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad. A classified version of the Pentagon report, titled "Iraqi Perspectives Project," is not being made public. In Moscow, a duty officer with Russia's Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the report late Friday. No one answered the phones at the Defense Ministry. A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, referred inquiries seeking comment to Central Command. At Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., officials did not immediately respond to a request. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli declined to comment. In addition to citing the Iraqi documents on the matter of Russian intelligence, the report also directly asserted that an intelligence link existed. "Significantly, the regime was also receiving intelligence from the Russians that fed suspicions that the attack out of Kuwait was merely a diversion," the report's authors wrote. They cited as an example a document that was sent to Saddam on March 24, 2003, and captured by the U.S. military after Baghdad fell. The report said the Iraqi document was titled, "Letter from Russian official to presidential secretary concerning American intentions in Iraq." The Iraqi document said, "The information that the Russians have collected from their sources inside the American Central Command in Doha is that the United States is convinced that occupying Iraqi cities are impossible," and that as a result the U.S. military would avoid urban combat. "The strategy is to isolate Iraq from its western borders," the document added. Central Command's war-fighting headquarters is at an encampment in the desert just outside Doha, Qatar. The lead author of the Pentagon report, Kevin Woods, told reporters at a briefing that he was surprised to learn that the Russians had passed intelligence to Saddam, and he said he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the Iraqi documents. "But I don't have any other knowledge of that topic," Woods added, referring to the Russian link. Brig. Gen. Anthony Cucolo, who appeared with Woods and also was closely involved in the project, said he believed such a link reflected a long-standing close economic relationship between Moscow and Baghdad. "I don't see it as an aberration," Cucolo said. "I see it as a follow-on to economic engagement and economic interests." In the end, one piece of Russian intelligence actually contributed to an important U.S. military deception effort. By telling Saddam that the main attack on Baghdad would not begin until the Army's 4th Infantry Division arrived around April 15, the Russians reinforced an impression that U.S. commanders were trying to catch the Iraqis by surprise. The attack on Baghdad began well before the 4th Infantry arrived, and the government collapsed quickly. As originally planned by Gen. Tommy Franks, the Central Command chief who ran the war, the 4th Infantry was to attack into northern Iraq from Turkey, but the Turkish government refused to go along. Meanwhile the 4th Infantry's tanks and other equipment remained on ships in the eastern Mediterranean for weeks — a problem that Franks sought to turn into an advantage by attacking Baghdad without them. Based on a captured Iraqi document — a memo to Saddam from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dated April 2 — Russian intelligence reported through its ambassador that the American forces were moving to cut off Baghdad from the south, east and north, with the heaviest concentration of troops in the Karbala area. It said the Americans had 12,000 troops in the area, along with 1,000 vehicles. Indeed, Karbala was a major step on the U.S. invasion route along the Euphrates River to Baghdad. A key bridge over the Euphrates, near Karbala, was seized on April 2, permitting U.S. forces to approach Baghdad from the southwest before Iraq could move sufficient forces from the north. The Pentagon report also said the Russians told the Iraqis that the Americans planned to concentrate on bombing in and around Baghdad, cutting the road to Syria and Jordan and creating enough confusion to force residents to flee. The Pentagon report, designed to help U.S. officials understand in hindsight how Saddam and his military commanders prepared for and fought the war, paints a picture of an Iraqi government blind to the threat it faced, hampered by Saddam's inept military leadership and deceived by its own propaganda. "The largest contributing factor to the complete defeat of Iraq's military forces was the continued interference by Saddam," the report said
On the Net: http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2006/pa032406.htm
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8CE...D5BB0DC3B45.htm

Deadly sectarian attacks hit Iraq
Friday 24 March 2006, 23:52 Makka Time, 20:52 GMT


Sectarian violence has been on the rise since 22 February

A bombing outside an Iraqi mosque has left at least five Iraqis dead and 17 wounded, while the bodies of 15 more apparent victims of sectarian violence have been found in different parts of Baghdad.

The latest bombing came as the Sunni Muslim worshippers were leaving the Saad Ibn Abi Wakkas mosque, in Khalis, 80km from the capital, after Friday prayers.

Another Sunni Muslim, in the southern port city of Basra, was shot dead by unidentified men, also on leaving a mosque after prayers.

Sectarian violence has been on the rise in Iraq since 22 February when a bomb destroyed a revered Shia shrine in Samarra, north of the capital. Hundreds have since been murdered in tit-for-tat killings.

In Baghdad, where bodies are now found on a daily basis, 15 corpses were picked up on Friday, 12 in the east and northeast of the city, and three in the west, an Interior Mministry official said. They had been tortured and shot.

In the week of 11 to 17 March, US forces tracked 58 such incidents, involving 134 dead, in the capital alone, according to US Major-General Rick Lynch, who described the killings as "ethnic-sectarian".

Policemen killed

In other violence on Friday, seven people, three of them policemen, were killed in the capital.

Armed men raided a baker's shop in the south of the capital, shooting dead four employees and wounding a fifth. When police arrived on the scene, a roadside bomb exploded, killing one police officer and wounding another.

Iraqi Shia worshippers protest on
Thursday after a deadly attack

Assailants also ambushed police in the west of the city, shooting dead two and wounding one.

Two US soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq's Anbar province, the US military reported on Friday. The statement said the soldiers, assigned to the 2/28th Brigade Combat Team, were killed on Thursday.

Their names were withheld until relatives were notified. The deaths raised to at least 2320 the number of US military personnel who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

In Copenhagen, the Danish military announced that a Danish soldier had been killed and another slightly wounded on Thursday by a bomb attack on their patrol near the town of Al Harta in southern Iraq.

This was the third killing of a Danish soldier in Iraq since August 2003.

Political progress?

Iraq's president issued a highly optimistic report on Friday on progress among politicians trying to hammer out the shape of a new unity governmen.

Jalal Talabani said the government could be in place for parliamentary approval by the end of the month, but acknowledged "I am usually a very optimistic person".

He spoke to reporters after a fifth round of multi-party talks among the country's highly polaris ed political factions.

Iraqi police recruits are a regular
target of attack by fighters

Talabani said politicians had agreed on Friday to a method for choosing the government.

Fellow Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman said the high-level talks resumed and took up a 28-point political statement that would outline the programme of any new government, once formed.

Another negotiating session was set for Saturday, he said.

The political talks resumed as some among the politicians floated what appeared to be trial balloons suggesting that the Shia bloc would seek a way out of the impasse over Ibrahim al-Jafaari, the prime minister, by naming three candidates for the premiership, politicians and officials close to the talks said on Thursday, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive juncture in the negotiations.

Among the names suggested for the post is that of Qassim Dawoud, a former national security adviser. Dawoud told The Associated Press, however, he had not heard such a suggestion.

Hostages depart

In the capital, British peace activist Norman Kember, 74, held hostage for four months by Iraqi kidnappers, began his journey home on Friday when he boarded a British military transport, said Christian Peacemakers Teams spokeswoman Peggy Gish said.

Fellow hostages Harmeet Singh Sooden, 33, and James Loney, 41, Canadians kidnapped with Kember, would be leaving the country this weekend.

March 24, 2006
Once Protected by Hussein, Palestinians Suffer Backlash
By KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 24 — The bill of death appeared overnight on Thursday, addressed to "the Palestinian traitors," and the killers were specific in their intent.

"We warn you that we will eliminate you all if you don't leave the area for good within 10 days," the leaflet said. It was signed by a group calling itself the Judgment Day Battalion, and it was scattered in front of the homes of Palestinians in Al Hurriya, a northern Baghdad neighborhood.

"We are ready to leave Iraq — if we have the chance," a Palestinian resident of Al Hurriya said today, declining to provide his name for fear of retribution. "This is the opinion of everyone here."

He added, "We feel unsafe — and today is better than tomorrow."

Two busloads of Palestinians fleeing violence in Baghdad were encamped today near Iraq's western border hoping to gain refuge in Jordan and have rebuffed the Iraqi government's attempts to draw them back to the capital. Their arrival at Jordan's gate last Sunday, and attempts to enter without proper transit permits, prompted Jordanian authorities to close the border for several days.

The Palestinian community in Iraq was once a pet cause of Saddam Hussein, who granted its members special treatment. But now, they say, they are suffering the backlash for that favoritism, and for being Sunni Arabs.

As sectarian killings have escalated in the past several weeks, the Palestinian community has been heavily targeted by Shiite death squads, some dressed in the uniforms of government security forces, several Palestinians said in interviews this week. Scores of Palestinians have been pulled from their homes in Palestinian enclaves around the capital, residents say, and many have turned up dead in the morgue.

The Palestinian observer to the United Nations has appealed to the Security Council for help, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has sounded the alarm, warning of the potential for a humanitarian crisis.

Many Palestinian families "are in a state of shock and panic," according to a report from the refugee office distributed today. "This panic may spread and lead to more Palestinians fleeing Baghdad." Many Palestinians "are feeling increasingly trapped" and have pulled their children from schools and stopped going to work, the report said.

General violence has affected every community in Iraq, which has seen an escalation in sectarian bloodshed since the bombing of a major Shiite mosque in Samarra last month. Insurgent attacks today killed 12 people, including one involving an improvised bomb that killed 5 worshippers and wounded 17 as they left a Sunni Arab mosque in Khalis, about 35 miles east of Baghdad. And the authorities recoverd 15 more corpses from the streets of Baghdad, the latest victims in a wave of mysterious execution-style slayings.

At least 225 bodies — most bound, some blindfolded and all either shot in the head or garroted — have been recovered in less than three weeks in the Baghdad area.

Some of those victims have been Palestinians, relatives said in interviews, and community members insist they are being targeted because of their special relationship with Mr. Hussein and their sectarian allegiances.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian observer to the United Nations, said in a letter to the Security Council on Thursday that 10 Palestinians were killed and several kidnapped in the past week alone.

The United Nations estimates that about 34,000 Palestinians live in Iraq, and many, if not most, were born here. They were given safe harbor during successive regional crises, beginning with the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948.

Mr. Hussein, as part of his campaign to cast himself as a Pan-Arab leader, was particularly solicitious of their support. He provided many with free schooling, and free or heavily subsidized housing. But he did not give them the right to own property or the right to citizenship — legal restrictions that remain to this day.

With the fall of Mr. Hussein's regime, many Palestinians were driven from their homes by owners whose property had been appropriated by Mr. Hussein. Others came under attack by resentful Iraqis.

Several Palestinians interviewed today said the latest generation of violent persecution began last year. At first it was gradual — an unexplained detention here, an assassination there. But since the bombing of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, violence against Palestinians, particularly in Baghdad, has radically escalated, community members say.

"Now any Palestinian, whether a child or an adult, thinks of himself as a target," said Ali Hussein, 66, a resident of an impoverished housing complex for Palestinians in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Baladiyat.

Fatma Ahmed's husband, a Palestinian, was dragged from his barber shop in Baladiyat on Jan. 15 by armed men and disappeared, recalled Ms. Ahmed. After searching for weeks, his family found his corpse in a morgue on March 8 with gunshots to his head and torture wounds on his body.

Sitting in her small, homely apartment in the Baladiat housing complex, Ms. Ahmed presented a reporter with a two-page typewritten testimony to her husband's life and still-unexplained death. "He was known as a hard worker and serious man," the document said, "and his only crime was being Palestinian."

On March 14, the United Nations' high commissioner on refugees, António Guterres, sent a letter to President Jalal Talabani of Iraq expressing his concern about reports of violence against Palestinians and "the limited capacity of the Iraqi security forces to provide effective protection" to them, according to Astrid van Genderen Stort, a spokeswoman for the commissioner's office. He suggested the creation of "a special protection office" in areas populated by Palestinians.

Last Sunday, 89 Palestinians from enclaves around Baghdad, including Al Hurriya and Baladiyat, arrived at the Jordanian border in two buses. They were turned back by Jordanian authorities, who closed the border on Monday, and they remained stranded for several days in a no-man's land between the Iraqi and Jordanian border posts.

On Wednesday, the Iraqi government relocated the Palestinians to a camp near the border, where the office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees was able to deliver supplies and a week's worth of food. Jordan reopened the border early Thursday morning, according to Nasser Judeh, the spokesman for the government in Amman.

The group is "adamant" that it does not want to return to any part of Iraq, according to a statement from the refugee office. "They said the killings, disappearance and hostage-taking affecting their families, neighbors and friends had beomce intolerable."

Mr. Mansour, the Palestinian observer to the United Nations, sent a letter to the Security Council on Thursday appealing for international intervention to protect the Palestinian community in Iraq.

Neighbors and relatives of the Palestinian travelers say they are watching what happens on the Jordanian border before they decide whether they, too, will attempt to flee. But they also fear the consequences of staying put.

A Palestinian laborer and resident in Al Hurriya, who requested anonymity, said the posted death threats have made waiting nearly unbearable. "The countdown has begun," he said darkly.

Hosham Hussein and two Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting for this article.



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Iraq on its own to rebuild, U.S. says

By Thomas Frank

The head of the U.S.-led program to rebuild Iraq said Thursday that the Iraqi government can no longer count on U.S. funds and must rely on its own revenues and other foreign aid, particularly from Persian Gulf nations.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12466.htm

===
Children Continue To Be Main Victims Of U.S. Occupation

By Dr. César Chelala

In the 1980s, Iraq had one of the best health care systems in the region. Following the 2003 invasion by the coalition forces, an ongoing cycle of insurgent violence and occupation forces’ counter-attacks have significantly damaged the basic health infrastructure in the country. As a result, Iraq’s health system cannot respond to the most basic health needs of the population.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12467.htm

===
The Road To Guantánamo

How three young men from the UK, ended up in the world's most notorious prison.

Every American Should Be Required To Watch This Video

This docudrama shows the sadism and stupidity of the US and British soldiers. The guards behave with the same cruelty you expect to see from SS officers in lurid second world war movies. It takes a moment or two to realize that these events reflect the reality of those held in Americas notorious gulag.

Windows Media File
http://www.videos.informationclearinghouse..._Guantanamo.wmv

Download Real Video
http://www.videos.informationclearinghouse...o_Guantanamo.rm

Real Video Mirror
http://www.videos.informationclearinghouse...o_Guantanamo.rm

===
Iraq: 30 Killed in Lates Violence:

Four members of a Shi'ite family, including a child, were killed and the mother was critically wounded when gunmen shot them in their house in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MOU452821.htm

===
Danish soldier killed by blast in Iraq:

A Danish soldier has been killed in southern Iraq after his patrol vehicle hit a bomb by the side of the road near the city of Basra, the Danish central army command said.
http://tinyurl.com/fso6r

===
Bush's Requests for Iraqi Base Funding Make Some Wary of Extended Stay:

"It's the kind of thing that incites terrorism," Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said of long-term or permanent U.S. bases in countries such as Iraq.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12475.htm

===
Iraqi residents say bodies in video from US raid :

A video of civilians who may have been killed by U.S. Marines in an Iraqi town in November showed residents describing a rampage by U.S. soldiers that left a trail of bullet-riddled bodies and destruction.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12471.htm

===
Mike Whitney : 60 Minutes joins the propaganda war :

The fact that 60 Minutes would stake its reputation on such a pathetic example of state propaganda illustrates the desperation that’s spreading like wildfire through the political establishment to their colleagues in the corporate media.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12473.htm

===
My heart is Iraqi:

It is because the Iraqis refuse to surrender their sovereignty to multinational corporations that Iraq is being destroyed so blatantly.
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12472.htm

===
Iraqi Woman Tours U.S. to Tell True Story of Iraq War :

Al-Araji does not mince words. She says the chaos in her country is no accident. “It’s to [the occupation’s] benefit to create conflict to stay forever in Iraq, so that the Iraqis will be confused about who is the real enemy. But the real enemy is the occupation.”
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12474.htm

===
File this under propaganda:

ABC News says Saddam OK'd bin Laden contact : The document is handwritten and has no official seal
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12468.htm

===
File this under pathetic:

Did Russian Ambassador Give Saddam the U.S. War Plan?:

Iraq Archive Document Alleges Russian Official Described Locations, Troops, Tanks and Other Forces Before Operation Iraqi Freedom Began
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12469.htm

===
Report: Russia Had Sources in U.S. Command :

The Russian government collected intelligence from sources inside the American military command as the U.S. mounted the invasion of Iraq, and the Russians fed information to Saddam Hussein on troop movements and plans, according to Iraqi documents cited in a Pentagon report released Friday.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/3746581.html

Report: Saddam got Russians' aid Berkshire Eagle
In his struggle to figure out and foil the American invasion plan as it was unfolding in late March and early April 2003, Saddam Hussein may have fielded a few tips from an old ally: the Russian government. But it seems possible the Russians' "help" created more confusion than clarity for the clueless Iraqi leader. As described in a lengthy report released yesterday at the Pentagon, Iraqi documents captured by U.S. troops say the Russians collected information about U.S. troop movements and battle plans at the outset of the invasion by tapping sources inside the American military. And they say the intelligence was passed to Saddam. But was the information useful? In at least one case, the Pentagon report suggests it did more harm than good for Saddam. In fact, it may have reinforced in Saddam's mind a mistaken impression about the timing of the U.S. ground assault into Baghdad — an impression that permitted U.S. forces to preserve an element of surprise. Referring to a Russian letter to Saddam that claimed the Russians had "sources" inside the U.S. Central Command, which planned and executed the invasion, the Pentagon report said, "Such external sources of information were only one of the fog-generators obscuring the minds of Iraq's senior leadership." That letter was dated March 24, five days into the war. The unclassified Pentagon report does not assess the value or accuracy of the information Saddam got or offer details on Russia's information pipeline. It cites captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians had "sources inside the American Central Command," and that that intelligence was passed to Saddam through the Russian ambassador.
Russia spied for Saddam in war - Pentagon report Guardian Unlimited
Russians Supplied Hussein With Intel on US Troop Movement Los Angeles Times
Free Internet Press - Voice of America - New York Times - Houston Chronicle - all 688 related »

US confirms talks with Iran on Iraq Yahoo! NEWS
The United States will talk to Iran about Washington's accusations of Iranian destabilization of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday in the first public acceptance of an Iranian offer to meet. Iran, responding to an overture by Washington last November, said last week it was open to talks on the issue with the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, but until Rice's comments U.S. officials had given no firm reply. "I'm quite certain that at some point they will meet," Rice told a Washington news conference, referring to the planned talks. She added that they would be "at an appropriate time." Washington has charged Tehran with meddling in the sectarian strife in Iraq, an accusation denied by Iran, which blames the U.S.-led forces that invaded in 2003. While U.S. talks with Iran are unusual because the two countries have no diplomatic ties, Rice noted Khalilzad -- in his former role as U.S. envoy to Afghanistan -- had held meetings with Iranian officials about that country. Analysts say both the United States and Tehran are worried about worsening violence in Iraq, pushing them to agree to talks. Iraqi political sources have said they expected Khalilzad to meet Iran's representatives this week. Iran has not announced its team. Khalilzad has renewed accusations Iran is backing Shi'ite violence in Iraq. Some analysts say Tehran is using Iraq to deflect U.S. pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. "Training and supplying, direct or indirect, takes place, and that there is also provision of financial resources to people, to militias, and that there is presence of people associated with Revolutionary Guard and with MOIS (Iranian intelligence)," Khalilzad told the Washington Post. MEHDI ARMYIran, responding to an overture by Washington last November, said last week it was open to talks on the issue with the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, but until Rice's comments U.S. officials had given no firm reply. "I'm quite certain that at some point they will meet," Rice told a Washington news conference, referring to the planned talks. She added that they would be "at an appropriate time." Washington has charged Tehran with meddling in the sectarian strife in Iraq, an accusation denied by Iran, which blames the U.S.-led forces that invaded in 2003. While U.S. talks with Iran are unusual because the two countries have no diplomatic ties, Rice noted Khalilzad -- in his former role as U.S. envoy to Afghanistan -- had held meetings with Iranian officials about that country. Analysts say both the United States and Tehran are worried about worsening violence in Iraq, pushing them to agree to talks. Iraqi political sources have said they expected Khalilzad to meet Iran's representatives this week. Iran has not announced its team. Khalilzad has renewed accusations Iran is backing Shi'ite violence in Iraq. Some analysts say Tehran is using Iraq to deflect U.S. pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. "Training and supplying, direct or indirect, takes place, and that there is also provision of financial resources to people, to militias, and that there is presence of people associated with Revolutionary Guard and with MOIS (Iranian intelligence)," Khalilzad told the Washington Post.

MEHDI ARMY
He said he was particularly concerned about the Mehdi Army militia of Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and said the political parties had to do more to curb their armed supporters. Rice's confirmation of talks with Iran on neighboring Iraq came as Iraqi leaders held their first formal talks in several days, with Washington keeping up pressure on them to form a national unity government. Sectarian and insurgent violence saw 35 more people killed on Friday, with 20 deaths reported in Baghdad alone. In one attack, gunmen shot dead four workers in a bakery and left a booby trap package that killed a policeman when he opened it. A bomb killed five worshippers and wounded 17 as they left weekly prayers at a Sunni Muslim mosque at Khalis, north of the capital, police said. Gunmen shot dead four people in a Shi'ite home in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, police said. Two U.S. soldiers were killed on Thursday west of Baghdad, the military said in a statement. U.S forces said they were conducting major sweeps against insurgents around Baghdad's western Abu Ghraib suburb -- near where three Western hostages were rescued on Thursday -- and in several villages in and around the northern city of Kirkuk. Khalilzad, who has been a driving force in pressing for a unity government, said: "I am the one who's saying, 'The country is bleeding, you need to move'." He told the Washington Post that despite a suicide car bombing on Thursday that killed at least 25 people at a police headquarters, more people died in death squad-style sectarian killings in recent weeks than in bombings. The destruction of a Shi'ite shrine a month ago sparked a wave of reprisals that raised the prospect of pro-government Shi'ite militias launching Iraq into all-out civil war.

UNITY GOVERNMENT
The leaders of the main parliamentary parties elected in December attended the talks on forming a government. Further talks are due on Saturday. At a news conference afterwards, the leaders again committed themselves to forming a unity government, but there was little sign of progress in breaking a logjam over who will lead it. President Jalal Talabani said he was optimistic. Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told Arabiya television he would not step down and was confident of the continued backing of his Shi'ite Alliance bloc, despite opposition from other parties. Sources within the Alliance said internal pressure and reluctance from Washington may yet force Jaafari to stand aside. "All options are up for discussion," one senior government source said, adding that even the principle the prime minister should come from the dominant Alliance was open to change. Amid the violence in Iraq, a Pentagon report said on Friday, quoting captured Iraqi documents, that Russia's ambassador in Baghdad gave intelligence on U.S. military movements to Iraq's government in the opening days of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The unclassified 210-page report by the U.S. military's Joint Forces Command cited an April 2, 2003, document from the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs to President Saddam Hussein as stating the Russian ambassador to Baghdad had funneled strategic intelligence on U.S. plans to Saddam's government. The document was written about two weeks after the invasion but before U.S. soldiers and Marines entered the capital.
By Alastair Macdonald and Mariam Karouny

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle...ticle353501.ece

Battle for Baghdad 'has already started'
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil
Published: 25 March 2006
The battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims for control of Baghdad has already started, say Iraqi political leaders who predict fierce street fighting will break out as each community takes over districts in which it is strongest.

"The fighting will only stop when a new balance of power has emerged," Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, said. "Sunni and Shia will each take control of their own area." He said sectarian cleansing had already begun.

Many Iraqi leaders now believe that civil war is inevitable but it will be confined, at least at first, to the capital and surrounding provinces where the population is mixed. "The real battle will be the battle for Baghdad where the Shia have increasing control," said one senior official who did not want his name published. "The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the war because the soldiers are loyal to the Shia, Sunni or Kurdish communities and not to the government." He expected the Americans to stay largely on the sidelines.

Throughout the capital, communities, both Sunni and Shia, are on the move, fleeing districts where they are in a minority and feel under threat. Sometimes they fight back. In the mixed but majority Shia al-Amel district, Sunni householders recently received envelopes containing a Kalashnikov bullet and a letter telling them to get out at once. In this case they contacted the insurgents who killed several Shia neighbours suspected of sending the letters.

"The Sunni will fight for Baghdad," said Mr Hussein. "The Baath party already controls al-Dohra and other Sunni groups dominate Ghazaliyah and Abu Ghraib [districts in south and west Baghdad]."

The Iraqi army is likely to fall apart once inter-communal fighting begins. According to Peter Galbraith, former US diplomat and expert on Iraq, the Iraqi army last summer contained 60 Shia battalions, 45 Sunni battalions, nine Kurdish battalions and one mixed battalion.

The police are even more divided and in Baghdad are largely controlled by the Mehdi Army of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Organisation that has largely been in control of the interior ministry since last May. Sunni Arabs in Baghdad regard the ministry's paramilitary police commanders as Shia death squads.

Mr Hussein gave another reason why the army is weak. "Where you have 3,000 soldiers there will in fact be only 2,000 men [because of ghost soldiers who do not exist and whose salaries are taken by senior officers]," he said. "When it comes to fighting only 500 of those men will turn up."

Iraqi officials and ministers are increasingly in despair at the failure to put together an effective administration in Baghdad. A senior Arab minister, who asked not to be named, said: "The government could end up being only a few buildings in the Green Zone."

The mood among Iraqi leaders, both Arabs and Kurds, is far gloomier in private than the public declarations of the US and British governments. The US President George W Bush called this week for a national unity government in Iraq but Iraqi observers do not expect this to be any more effective than the present government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. One said this week: "The real problem is that the Shia and Sunni hate each other and not that we haven't been able to form a government."

The Shia and Kurds will have the advantage in the coming conflict because they have leaders and organisations. The Sunni are divided and only about 30 per cent of the population of the capital. Nevertheless they should be able to hold on to their stronghold in west Baghdad and the Adhamiyah district east of the Tigris. The Shia do not have the strength and probably do not wish to take over the Sunni towns and villages north and west of Baghdad.

Though the Kurds have long sought autonomy close to quasi-independence, their leaders are worried that civil war will increase Iranian and Turkish involvement in Iraq. Mr Hussein said he feared that civil war in Baghdad could spread north to Mosul and Kirkuk where the division is between Kurd and Arab rather than Sunni and Shia.

Already Baghdad resembles Beirut at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when Christians and Muslims fought each other for control of the city.

The battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims for control of Baghdad has already started, say Iraqi political leaders who predict fierce street fighting will break out as each community takes over districts in which it is strongest.

"The fighting will only stop when a new balance of power has emerged," Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, said. "Sunni and Shia will each take control of their own area." He said sectarian cleansing had already begun.

Many Iraqi leaders now believe that civil war is inevitable but it will be confined, at least at first, to the capital and surrounding provinces where the population is mixed. "The real battle will be the battle for Baghdad where the Shia have increasing control," said one senior official who did not want his name published. "The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the war because the soldiers are loyal to the Shia, Sunni or Kurdish communities and not to the government." He expected the Americans to stay largely on the sidelines.

Throughout the capital, communities, both Sunni and Shia, are on the move, fleeing districts where they are in a minority and feel under threat. Sometimes they fight back. In the mixed but majority Shia al-Amel district, Sunni householders recently received envelopes containing a Kalashnikov bullet and a letter telling them to get out at once. In this case they contacted the insurgents who killed several Shia neighbours suspected of sending the letters.

"The Sunni will fight for Baghdad," said Mr Hussein. "The Baath party already controls al-Dohra and other Sunni groups dominate Ghazaliyah and Abu Ghraib [districts in south and west Baghdad]."

The Iraqi army is likely to fall apart once inter-communal fighting begins. According to Peter Galbraith, former US diplomat and expert on Iraq, the Iraqi army last summer contained 60 Shia battalions, 45 Sunni battalions, nine Kurdish battalions and one mixed battalion.

The police are even more divided and in Baghdad are largely controlled by the Mehdi Army of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Organisation that has largely been in control of the interior ministry since last May. Sunni Arabs in Baghdad regard the ministry's paramilitary police commanders as Shia death squads.
Mr Hussein gave another reason why the army is weak. "Where you have 3,000 soldiers there will in fact be only 2,000 men [because of ghost soldiers who do not exist and whose salaries are taken by senior officers]," he said. "When it comes to fighting only 500 of those men will turn up."

Iraqi officials and ministers are increasingly in despair at the failure to put together an effective administration in Baghdad. A senior Arab minister, who asked not to be named, said: "The government could end up being only a few buildings in the Green Zone."

The mood among Iraqi leaders, both Arabs and Kurds, is far gloomier in private than the public declarations of the US and British governments. The US President George W Bush called this week for a national unity government in Iraq but Iraqi observers do not expect this to be any more effective than the present government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. One said this week: "The real problem is that the Shia and Sunni hate each other and not that we haven't been able to form a government."

The Shia and Kurds will have the advantage in the coming conflict because they have leaders and organisations. The Sunni are divided and only about 30 per cent of the population of the capital. Nevertheless they should be able to hold on to their stronghold in west Baghdad and the Adhamiyah district east of the Tigris. The Shia do not have the strength and probably do not wish to take over the Sunni towns and villages north and west of Baghdad.

Though the Kurds have long sought autonomy close to quasi-independence, their leaders are worried that civil war will increase Iranian and Turkish involvement in Iraq. Mr Hussein said he feared that civil war in Baghdad could spread north to Mosul and Kirkuk where the division is between Kurd and Arab rather than Sunni and Shia.

Already Baghdad resembles Beirut at the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when Christians and Muslims fought each other for control of the city.

Iraqis in Tal Afar question Bush's optimism Fri Mar 24, 12:23 PM ET

U.S. President George W. Bush held up the northern town of Tal Afar this week as an example of progress being made in Iraq but many residents find it hard to share his optimism.

Bush said this week that Tal Afar has become "a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq" after U.S.-led forces freed it from al Qaeda militants in a 2005 offensive.

Although townspeople say there has been less violence since the assault, they share many of the complaints of other Iraqis watching sectarian violence tearing their country apart.

These days it is Iraq's security forces, drawn heavily from the Shi'ite majority, not Sunni Arab al Qaeda militants from nearby Syria, that make many people in Tal Afar nervous.

"When we stop at a checkpoint they ask us whether we are Sunni or Shi'ite. That is worrying. We are one people and were never divided before," said Fatma Mohammad Ali, 38, a teacher who is a member of Tal Afar's ethnic Turkmen Shi'ite minority.

U.S. and Iraqi forces said Tal Afar was used as a conduit for smuggling in equipment and foreign fighters from Syria on the way to cities across central Iraq. In doing so, they subjected many townspeople to violence and intimidation.

Al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent violence has eased in Tal Afar since September's offensive but sectarian violence elsewhere in Iraq after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra last month raised fears among many people of civil war.

"I say that Bush is 100 percent a liar because the city of Tal Afar has become a ghost town rather than the example Bush spoke about," said Ali Ibrahim, a Shi'ite Turkmen laborer.

It is hard to be sure who is behind violence that still troubles Tal Afar, 420 km (260 miles) northwest of Baghdad. A mortar round wounded six children playing in a street on Friday. Police said it was not clear who fired it.

Bush has been trying to convince a skeptical American public that he has a winning strategy for Iraq to counter fears that violence is spiraling into an all-out sectarian conflict.

"Thanks to coalition and Iraqi forces, the terrorists have now been driven out of that city," he said of Tal Afar.

"Iraqi security forces are maintaining law and order, and we see the outlines of a free and secure Iraq that we and the Iraqi people have been fighting for," he said. "The success we're seeing in Tal Afar gives me confidence in the future of Iraq."

Market bombings, roadside blasts and explosions are no longer the constant threat they were a year ago in Tal Afar. But there is still danger and the mood of many residents is grim.

A comprehensive sounding of local opinion was not possible.

But more than a dozen local people who spoke to a Reuters reporter on Friday said they had little faith in the future of their town, where the offensive fueled sensitivities in an ethnically and religiously mixed region.

Sunni Turkmen Rafat Ahmed, 35, a shop owner said: "As I'm talking now the Americans and the Iraqi army are surrounding my neighborhood. If we leave our houses we could be arrested."

The town's population of some 250,000 is dominated by Turkish-speaking ethnic Turkmen, about half Sunni Muslims and half Shiites. Most of the remaining 20 percent are Sunni Arabs.

The deployment last year of Iraqi troops, who were widely perceived locally as Shi'ite Arab outsiders, prompted the Sunni mayor of Tal Afar to tender his resignation in protest at what he described as a sectarian operation. The involvement of ethnic Kurdish forces was also a source of tension, local people said.

"Anyone who says Tal Afar is good and safe actually knows nothing because the reality is we are unsafe, even inside our houses, because we don't know when we'll be arrested," said pensioner Abdul Karim al-Anizi, 60, a Shi'ite Turkmen

Some of the anger is being directed back at the U.S. forces that pushed out the militants.

"The situation in Tal Afar is deteriorating and the smell of death is everywhere. People never know why they are killed. They only know that the Americans are the cause of their agonies," said Hussein Mahmoud, a Shi'ite Turkmen university professor.

(Reporting by a Reuters reporter in Tal Afar)



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http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=8759

March 25, 2006
Time to Leave Iraq

by Charley Reese
Last week's anniversary of the start of the Iraq War prompted loads of discussions. For some reason, journalists love anniversaries, though of course they are highly selective in which anniversaries they take note of.

Out of these discussions always comes the administration's ploy, which is that if you don't have a solution, then don't criticize the problem. That's clever sophistry. The administration starts a war on false pretenses, completely botches the aftermath, gets bogged down in a guerrilla war, so now it says to the critics, "OK, you fix it."

Well, since I'm proud of my consistent opposition to this war, I will freely admit that I don't know how to fix Iraq. I do, however, know how to fix our involvement in Iraq. That is for the American people and their elected government to recognize the truth: We, the United States, cannot fix Iraq now or ever. We can pay bribes and cajole and threaten, but in the end, the fate of Iraq is now in the hands of the Iraqis, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Three months after the election, the Iraqi politicians cannot agree on a government. Eventually, they will, but even when they do, it will be a sham. The ministries don't work, according to people knowledgeable about the situation. The army is still essentially in our hands, not in the hands of the Iraqi government. Thus, you will have a corrupt government claiming to represent three factions, with inoperative ministries, no power to enforce the laws and no money with which to repair the infrastructure.

Therefore, what the United States should do is say goodbye and leave. It's silly to say that if we leave there will be chaos. There is chaos now. It is silly to say that Iraq will become a haven of anti-Americanism. It is today. President Bush lives in a dream world that bears little resemblance to the world outside of his head.

Democracy cannot be transplanted, especially not at the point of a gun. Iraq has never been a democracy. It has always been ruled by a dictator or an authoritarian central government, either self-chosen or imposed by a foreign power. That gaggle of Iraqi politicians squabbling over how to divide the loot and the patronage is certainly not going to create a democratic government.

Furthermore, people don't have an innate craving for democracy. The end result of government, a wise man once said, is a family eating their evening meal in peace in their home. That's what the Iraqi people are craving right now. They want security. They want the electricity back on. They want the sewage and water plants to function. They want jobs. After they get all of that, then they might want to make speeches or vote for politicians.

How can the president claim we have made progress when, three years after our rule began, Baghdad has less electric power, less oil production and a whole lot less security than it had under Saddam Hussein? Attacks have increased, not decreased. Americans are still confined to their heavily fortified "Green Zone," completely isolated not only from Baghdad but also from Iraq. American casualties have lessened somewhat because most of our troops are confined to their heavily fortified bases.

Another truth we have to recognize is that the military can destroy, but it cannot build. Our military has done what the president asked it to do. It destroyed the Iraqi government. Now it's time for the soldiers to come home. What now has to be done in Iraq has to be done by Iraqis.

Whether they can do it, I don't know. If they are not in a civil war already, they are on the razor's edge of one. There is a tipping point in the affairs of humans. Nobody in America, North or South, wanted a war in 1860, but we blundered into one. The same tragedy might befall the Iraqis. If it happens, there is nothing we can do about it, whether we leave or stay, so the wise thing to do is leave now.

Of Course It's a Civil War

By Charles Krauthammer

The whole debate about Iraqi civil war is surreal. What is the insurgency if not a civil war supported by one part of Iraqi society fighting the new Iraqi state supported by another part of Iraqi society?

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

March 25, 2006
US Envoy Urges Crackdown on Iraq Militias
By REUTERS
Filed at 10:08 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. ambassador urged Iraq's divided leaders to rein in militias on Saturday as political blocs struggled again to break a deadlock on forming a unity government that they hope can avert civil war.

Zalmay Khalilzad, who is pressing hard for a government more than three months after elections, issued a tough warning on the militias, many of which have ties to powerful Shi'ite leaders and are entrenched in Iraqi security forces and police.

``More Iraqis are dying from the militia violence than from the terrorists,'' he told reporters during a visit to a Baghdad youth center newly renovated with U.S. funds.

``The militias need to be under control.''

The destruction of a Shi'ite shrine a month ago sparked a wave of reprisals that raised the prospect of pro-government Shi'ite militias pushing Iraq into all-out civil war, nearly three years after insurgents from the once-dominant Sunni Arab minority began a campaign against the U.S.-backed authorities.

The crisis has increased pressure to form a cabinet that can avert an all-out sectarian conflict but Iraqi leaders have failed so far to break the political paralysis.

Police found 10 more bodies, apparent victims of sectarian violence, in different parts of Baghdad on Saturday. Many of them showed signs of torture, including some that were garroted.

Gunmen killed a traffic policeman in central Baghdad then placed a bomb inside his booth which killed four civilians in a minibus and wounded four others, police said.

In Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, mortar bombs hit houses, killing four people and wounding 13, police said.

Khalilzad said the government would face the daunting task of easing a Sunni Arab insurgency while dealing with militias, which have flourished since Saddam Hussein's fall in 2003.

Shi'ite militias have melded into Iraqi security forces and police and they are unlikely to want to give up their weapons at a time of raging sectarian violence.

Khalilzad renewed accusations on Friday that Iran is training, supplying and funding Shi'ite violence in Iraq. Some analysts say Tehran is using Iraq to deflect U.S. pressure on Iran over its nuclear program.

IRANIAN HELP

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Friday the United States -- probably Khalilzad -- will talk to Iran about Washington's accusations of Iranian destabilization of Iraq, in the first public acceptance of an Iranian offer to meet.

Washington is eager for Iraqi leaders to stabilize Iraq so that U.S. troops can go home. But a withdrawal is contingent upon the performance of Iraqi troops, who have watched Sunni insurgents kill thousands of their comrades.

Several U.S. senators visiting Iraq on Saturday said U.S. patience was running thin over Iraq, with some suggesting a continued military presence would only fuel the insurgency.

Senator John McCain, the head of the delegation, said he was guardedly optimistic that a new government would be formed ''in weeks.'' But he suggested the conflict would drag on.

``We all acknowledge, particularly after visiting here, that this is a very long, tough enterprise and challenge that we are facing and I think the best way to treat it is to tell the American people exactly that,'' he told reporters.

Some Sunni Arabs have started forming organized forces as a counterweight to the likes of the Badr organization and the Mehdi Army, both powerful Shi'ite militias, putting Iraq on the brink of full-blown civil war.

Washington is eager to see Iraqi Shi'ite, Kurdish and Sunni politicians reach a deal on a unity government that can deliver stability and enable U.S. troops to go home.

Iraqi leaders will hold more talks on Saturday, but there are no signs they are close to breaking the deadlock.

Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said on Friday he believed the parties were now willing to compromise and urged speed.

Parliamentary polls were held in December but a row over the prime minister and sectarian violence have delayed the formation of Iraq's first full-term government since Saddam was toppled.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has said he will not step down, despite pressure to do so, and is confident of the backing of his Shi'ite Alliance bloc, despite opposition from other parties. Alliance sources said internal pressure and Washington's reluctance may force him to stand aside.



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