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

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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.information