If I may, let me pop in a few pieces from newspapers around the world. This is rather serious shit and we as a people are eating it.
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If I may, let me pop in a few pieces from newspapers around the world. This is rather serious shit and we as a people are eating it.
Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil10/18/06 "AlterNet" -- -- Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set.The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue.
Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as "the prize."
By Joshua Holland
Iraq's energy reserves are an incredibly rich prize. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq contains 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the second largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia), along with roughly 220 billion barrels of probable and possible resources. Iraq's true potential may be far greater than this, however, as the country is relatively unexplored due to years of war and sanctions." For perspective, the Saudis have 260 billion barrels of proven reserves.
Iraqi oil is close to the surface and easy to extract, making it all the more profitable. James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, points out that oil companies "can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1, including all exploration, oilfield development and production costs." Contrast that with other areas where oil is considered cheap to produce at $5 per barrel or the North Sea, where production costs are $12-16 per barrel.
And Iraq's oil sector is largely undeveloped. Former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam Chalabi (no relation to the neocons' favorite exile, Ahmed
Chalabi) told the Associated Press that "Iraq has more oil fields that have been discovered, but not developed, than any other country in the world." British-based analyst Mohammad Al-Gallani told the Canadian Press that of 526 prospective drilling sites, just 125 have been opened.But the real gem -- what one oil consultant called the "Holy Grail" of the industry -- lies in Iraq's vast western desert. It's one of the last "virgin" fields on the planet, and it has the potential to catapult Iraq to No. 1 in the world in oil reserves. Sparsely populated, the western fields are less prone to sabotage than the country's current centers of production in the north, near Kirkuk, and in the south near Basra. The Nation's Aram Roston predicts Iraq's western desert will yield "untold riches."
Iraq also may have large natural gas deposits that so far remain virtually unexplored.
But even "untold riches" don't tell the whole story. Depending on how Iraq's petroleum law shakes out, the country's enormous reserves could break the back of OPEC, a wet dream in Western capitals for three decades. James Paul predicted that "even before Iraq had reached its full production potential of 8 million barrels or more per day, the companies would gain huge leverage over the international oil system. OPEC would be weakened by the withdrawal of one of its key producers from the OPEC quota system." Depending on how things shape up in the next few months, Western oil companies could end up controlling the country's output levels, or the government, heavily influenced by the United States, could even pull out of the cartel entirely.
Both independent analysts and officials within Iraq's Oil Ministry anticipate that when all is said and done, the big winners in Iraq will be the Big Four -- the American firms Exxon-Mobile and Chevron, the British BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell -- that dominate the world oil market. Ibrahim Mohammed, an industry consultant with close contacts in the Iraqi Oil Ministry, told the Associated Press that there's a universal belief among ministry staff that the major U.S. companies will win the lion's share of contracts. "The feeling is that the new government is going to be influenced by the United States," he said.
During the 12-year sanction period, the Big Four were forced to sit on the sidelines while the government of Saddam Hussein cut deals with the Chinese, French, Russians and others (despite the sanctions, the United States ultimately received 37 percent of Iraq's oil during that period, according to the independent committee that investigated the oil-for-food program, but almost all of it arrived through foreign firms). In a 1999 speech, Dick Cheney, then CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, told a London audience that the Middle East was where the West would find the additional 50 million barrels of oil per day that he predicted it would need by 2010, but, he lamented, "while even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."
Chafing at the idea that the Chinese and Russians might end up with what is arguably the world's greatest energy prize, industry leaders lobbied hard for regime change throughout the 1990s. With the election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000 -- the first time in U.S. history that two veterans of the oil industry had ever occupied the nation's top two jobs -- they would finally get the "greater access" to the region's oil wealth, which they had long lusted after.
If the U.S. invasion of Iraq had occurred during the colonial era a hundred years earlier, the oil giants, backed by U.S. forces, would have simply seized Iraq's oil fields. Much has changed since then in terms of international custom and law (when then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did in fact suggest seizing Iraq's Southern oil fields in 2002, Colin Powell dismissed the idea as "lunacy").
Understanding how Big Oil came to this point, poised to take effective control of the bulk of the country's reserves while they remain, technically, in the hands of the Iraqi government -- a government with all the trappings of sovereignty -- is to grasp the sometimes intricate dance that is modern neocolonialism. The Iraq oil grab is a classic case study.
It's clear that the U.S.-led invasion had little to do with national security or the events of Sept. 11. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that just 11 days after Bush's inauguration in early 2001, regime change in Iraq was "Topic A" among the administration's national security staff, and former Terrorism Tsar Richard Clarke told 60 Minutes that the day after the attacks in New York and Washington occurred, "[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq." He added: "We all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan."
On March 7, 2003, two weeks before the United States attacked Iraq, the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein's cooperation with the inspections protocol had improved to the point where it was "active or even proactive," and that the inspectors would be able to certify that Iraq was free of prohibited weapons within a few months' time. That same day, IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei reported that there was no evidence of a current nuclear program in Iraq and flatly refuted the administration's claim that the infamous aluminum tubes cited by Colin Powell in making his case for war before the Security Council were part of a reconstituted nuclear program.
But serious planning for the war had begun in February of 2002, as Bob Woodward revealed in his book, Plan of Attack. Planning for the future of Iraq's oil wealth had been under way for longer still.
In February of 2001, just weeks after Bush was sworn in, the same energy executives that had been lobbying for Saddam's ouster gathered at the White House to participate in Dick Cheney's now infamous Energy Task Force. Although Cheney would go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep what happened at those meetings a secret, we do know a few things, thanks to documents obtained by the conservative legal group JudicialWatch. As Mark Levine wrote in The Nation($$):
… a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of "Iraq oil foreign suitors" were the center of discussion. The map erased all features of the country save the location of its main oil deposits, divided into nine exploration blocks. The accompanying list of suitors revealed that dozens of companies from 30 countries -- but not the United States -- were either in discussions over or in direct negotiations for rights to some of the best remaining oilfields on earth.Levine wrote, "It's not hard to surmise how the participants in these meetings felt about this situation."
According to the New Yorker, at the same time, a top-secret National Security Council memo directed NSC staff to "cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy." The administration's national security team was to join "the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."
At the State Department, planning was also underway. Under the auspices of the "Future of Iraq Project," an "Oil and Energy Working Group" was established. The full membership of the group -- described by the Financial Times as "Iraqi oil experts, international consultants" and State Department staffers -- remains classified, but among them, according to Antonia Juhasz's "The Bush Agenda," was Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, who would serve in Iyad Allawi's cabinet during the period of the Iraqi Governing Council, and later as Iraq's oil minister in 2005. The group concluded that Iraq's oil "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war."
But the execs from Big Oil didn't just want access to Iraq's oil; they wanted access on terms that would be inconceivable unless negotiated at the barrel of a gun. Specifically, they wanted an Iraqi government that would enter into production service agreements (PSAs) for the extraction of Iraq's oil.
PSAs, developed in the 1960s, are a tool of today's kinder, gentler neocolonialism; they allow countries to retain technical ownership over energy reserves but, in actuality, lock in multinationals' control and extremely high profit margins -- up to 13 times oil companies' minimum target, according to an analysis by the British-based oil watchdog Platform (PDF).
As Greg Muttit, an analyst with the group, notes:
Such contracts are often used in countries with small or difficult oilfields, or where high-risk exploration is required. They are not generally used in countries like Iraq, where there are large fields which are already known and which are cheap to extract. For example, they are not used in Iran, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, all of which maintain state control of oil.In fact, Muttit adds, of the seven leading oil producing countries, only Russia has entered into PSAs, and those were signed during its own economic "shock therapy" in the early 1990s. A number of Iraq's oil-rich neighbors have constitutions that specifically prohibit foreign control over their energy reserves.
PSAs often have long terms -- up to 40 years -- and contain "stabilization clauses" that protect them from future legislative changes. As Muttit points out, future governments "could be constrained in their ability to pass new laws or policies." That means, for example, that if a future elected Iraqi government "wanted to pass a human rights law, or wanted to introduce a minimum wage [and it] affected the company's profits, either the law would not apply to the company's operations or the government would have to compensate the company for any reduction in profits." It's Sovereignty Lite.
The deals are so onerous that they govern only 12 percent of the world's oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency. Nonetheless, PSAs would become the Future of Iraq Project's recommendation for the fledgling Iraqi government. According to the Financial Times, "many in the group" fought for the contract structure; a Kurdish delegate told the FT, "everybody keeps coming back to PSAs."
Of course, the plans for Iraq's legal framework for oil have to be viewed in the context of the overall transformation of the Iraqi economy. Clearly, the idea was to pursue a radical corporatist agenda during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority when the U.S. occupation forces were a de facto dictatorship. And that's just what happened; under L. Paul Bremer, the CPA head, corporate taxes were slashed, a flat-tax on income was established, rules allowing multinationals to pull all of their profits from the country and a series of other provisions were enacted. These were then integrated into the Iraqi Constitution and remain in effect today.
Among the provisions in the Constitution, unlike those of most oil producers, is a requirement that the government "develop oil and gas wealth … relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment." The provision mandates that foreign companies would receive a major stake in Iraq's oil for the first time in the 30 years since the sector was nationalized in 1975.
Herbert Docena, a researcher with the NGO Focus on the Global South, wrote that an early draft of the constitution negotiated by Iraqis envisioned a "Scandinavian-style welfare system in the Arabian desert, with Iraq's vast oil wealth to be spent upholding every Iraqi's right to education, health care, housing, and other social services." "Social justice," the draft declared, "is the basis of building society."
What happened between that earlier draft and the constitution that Iraqis would eventually ratify? According to Docena:
While [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad and his team of U.S. and British diplomats were all over the scene, some members of Iraq's constitutional committee were reduced to bystanders. One Shiite member grumbled, "We haven't played much of a role in drafting the constitution. We feel that we have been neglected." A Sunni negotiator concluded: "This constitution was cooked up in an American kitchen not an Iraqi one."With a constitution cooked up in D.C., the stage was set for foreign multinationals to assume effective control of as much as 87 percent of Iraq's oil, according to projections by the Oil Ministry. If PSAs become the law of the land -- and there are other contractual arrangements that would allow private companies to invest in the sector without giving them the same degree of control or such usurious profits -- the war-torn country stands to lose up to 194 billion vitally important dollars in revenue on just the first 12 fields developed, according to a conservative estimate by Platform (the estimate assumes oil at $40 per barrel; at this writing it stands at more than $59). That's more than six times the country's annual budget.
To complete the rip-off, the occupying coalition would have to crush Iraqi resistance, make sure it had friendly people in the right places in Iraq's emerging elite and lock the new Iraqi government onto a path that would lead to the Big Four's desired outcome.
Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil (Part Two)
With 140,000 U.S. troops on the ground, the largest U.S. embassy in the world sequestered in Baghdad's fortified "Green Zone" and an economy designed by a consulting firm in McLean, Va., post-invasion Iraq was well on its way to becoming a bonanza for foreign investors.But Big Oil had its sights set on a specific arrangement -- the lucrative production sharing agreements that lock in multinationals' control for long terms and are virtually unheard of in countries as rich in easily accessible oil as Iraq.
The occupation authorities would have to steer an ostensibly sovereign government to the outcome they desired, and they'd have to overcome any resistance that they encountered from the fiercely independent and understandably wary Iraqis along the way. Finally, they'd have to make sure that the Anglo-American firms were well-positioned to win the lion's share of the choicest contracts.
Dealing with the most likely points of opposition began almost immediately. While the Oil Ministry, famously, was one of the few structures the invading forces protected from looters in the first days of the war, the bureaucracy's human assets weren't so lucky. With a stroke of the pen, Coalition Provisional Authority boss L. Paul Bremer fired hundreds of ministry personnel, ostensibly as part of the program of "de-Baathification." But, as Antonia Juhasz, author of "The Bush Agenda," told me, "it wasn't an indication that they were a party to Saddam Hussein's crimes … they were fired because they could have stood in the way of the economic transformation." Some fraction were certainly hard-core Baathists, but they were all veterans of the country's oil sector; they knew the industry, they knew what the norms in neighboring countries were and they had no loyalty to the occupation forces. Some had to go.
That was true at the top as well. Serving as oil minister in the Iraqi Interim Government was Thamir Ghadbhan, a British-trained technocrat who at one time had been chief of planning under Saddam Hussein and was widely respected for his political independence and his opposition to the previous regime (Saddam had ended up imprisoning him at Abu Ghraib). But despite working closely with American advisors, Ghadbhan was replaced with Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, a close associate of Ahmed Chalabi, the exile favored by some war planners to run the country as a kindler and gentler -- but no doubt just as corrupt -- version of Saddam Hussein.
According to Greg Muttit, an analyst with the British oil watchdog Platform, Uloum at first seemed to be a malleable figure. He told the Financial Times that he personally favored PSAs and giving priority to U.S. oil companies "and European companies, probably."
But Uloum would later publicly protest the elimination of fuel subsidies, a key provision of the country's economic restructuring, saying, "This decision will not serve the benefit of the government and the people. This decision brings an extra burden on the shoulders of citizens." He was, as the Associated Press reported, given "a forced vacation." It was, in the end, a permanent vacation; Chalabi, who was deputy prime minister at the time, took over the job himself (as "acting" minister for 30 days, but his term would last a year). Chalabi had no previous experience in the oil biz, but was a reliable, pro-Western figure with little in the way of nationalist zeal to get in the way of being a good lap dog. As leader of the Iraqi National Congress, he had said he favored the creation of a U.S.-led consortium to develop Iraq's oil fields. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," Chalabi told the Washington Post in 2002.
According to Alexander Cockburn, Chalabi also orchestrated the ouster of Mohammed Jibouri, executive director of the state's oil marketing agency, who had offended the Swiss giant Glencore by telling its executives that they couldn't trade Iraqi oil after their extensive dealings with Saddam Hussein.
An emerging, although still fragile, civil society was another source of potential trouble. Iraqi trade unions were a thorn in the side of the CPA -- shutting down the port of Khor az-Zubayr in protest of a rip-off deal with the Danish shipping giant Maersk, halting oil production in the south to demand the rehire of laid-off Iraqi workers and kicking Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root out of their refineries. Perhaps it's not a coincidence, then, that the only significant law that Paul Bremer left on the books from the Hussein era was a prohibition against organizing public-sector workers. Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi analyst with the NGO Global Exchange, told me, "They're having a lot of legal problems."
Of course, none of that guaranteed that the Iraqis would stay on the preferred path, especially after the election of an ostensibly sovereign government.
And that's where the most common -- almost ubiquitous -- tool of neocolonialism, debt, came into play. In this case, massive, crushing debt run up by a dictator who treated himself and his cronies to palaces and other luxuries, spent lavishly on weapons for Iraq's war with Iran -- fought in part on behalf of the United States -- and owed Kuwait billions of dollars in reparations for the 1990 invasion.
To put Iraq's foreign debt in perspective, if the country's economy were the size of the United States', then its obligations in 2004, proportionally, would have equaled around $55 trillion, according to IMF figures (and that doesn't include reparations from the first Gulf War).
Clearly, that amount of debt was unsustainable, and the Bush administration launched a full-court press to get creditor nations to forgive at least part of the new government's debt burden. Former Secretary of State James Baker, long the Bush family's "fixer," was dispatched on a tour of the world's capitals to cut deals on behalf of the Iraqis.
The administration raised eyebrows in the NGO community when it adopted the language of debt-relief activists to frame their pitch. Bush, and Baker, called it "odious" debt, debt that financed the whims of a brutal dictator and used against the interests of the Iraqi population. Under international law, "odious" debt, in theory at least, doesn't need to be forgiven; it's written off as a dictator's illicit gains. As one might expect, wealthy creditor nations have long resisted the concept.
Debt-relief activists Basav Sen and Hope Chu wrote that the move "seemed inexplicable at first." But it soon became clear that Iraq's debt-relief program was, in fact, a way of locking in Iraq's economic transformation.
The largest chunk of debt, $120 billion, was owed to the Paris Club, a group of 19 industrialized nations. Baker negotiated a deal whereby the Paris Club would forgive 80 percent of Iraq's debt, but the catch -- and it was a big one -- was that Iraq had to agree to an economic "reform" package administered by the International Monetary Fund, an institution dominated by the wealthiest countries and infamous across the developing world for its painful and unpopular Structural Adjustment Protocols.
The debt would be written off in stages; 30 percent would be cancelled outright, another 30 percent when an elected Iraqi government accepted an IMF structural reform agreement and a final 20 percent after the IMF had monitored its implementation for three years. This gave the IMF the role of watchdog over the country's new economy, despite the fact that its share of the country's debt burden was less than 1 percent of the total.
Among a number of provisions in the IMF agreement, along with privatizing state-run companies (which resulted in the layoffs of an estimated 145,000 Iraqis), slashing government pensions and phasing out the subsidies on food and fuel that many Iraqis depended on, was a commitment to develop Iraq's oil in partnership with the private sector. Then-Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mehdi said, none too happily, that the deal would be "very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies." The Iraqi National Assembly released a statement saying, "the Paris Club has no right to make decisions and impose IMF conditions on Iraq," and called it "a new crime committed by the creditors who financed Saddam's oppression." And Zaid Al-Ali, an international lawyer who works with the NGO Jubilee Iraq, said it was "a perfect illustration of how the industrialized world has used debt as a tool to force developing nations to surrender sovereignty over their economies."
The IMF agreement was announced in December of 2005, along with a new $685 million IMF loan that was to be used, in part, to increase Iraq's oil output. The announcement came a month after Iraqis went to the polls to vote for their first government under the new Constitution in order, according to the Washington Post, to spare Iraqi "politicians from voters' wrath." That was a wise idea; immediately following the agreement, gas prices skyrocketed and Iraqis rioted.
The icing on the cake is that the deal James Baker negotiated with the Paris Club refers to Iraq as an "exceptional situation"; no precedent was set that would allow other highly indebted countries saddled with odious debt from their own past dictators to claim similar relief.
The deadline the Iraqi government must meet for the completion of its final oil law in December is a "benchmark" in the IMF agreement.
In an investigation for the Nation, Naomi Klein discovered that Baker had pursued his mission with an eye-popping conflict of interest. Klein discovered that a consortium that included the Carlyle Group, of which Baker is believed to have a $180 million stake, had contracted with Kuwait to make sure that the money it was owed by Iraq would be excluded from any debt-relief package. When Baker met with the Kuwaiti emir to beg forgiveness for Iraq's odious debt, he had a direct interest in making sure he didn't get it.
Another major creditor was Saudi Arabia. The Carlyle Group has extensive business dealings with the kingdom and Baker's law firm, Baker Botts, was representing the monarchy in a suit brought by the families of the victims of 9/11.
The most recent IMF report (PDF) shows how successfully he failed: "While most Paris Club official creditors have now signed bilateral agreements, progress has been slow in resolving non-Paris Club official claims, especially those of Gulf countries," it says. It's likely that Iraq, a country occupied for three years, devastated by 12 years of sanctions and with a per capita GDP of $3,400, will end up paying reparations to Kuwait, a country with a per capita GDP of over $19,000, for the five months Saddam occupied his neighbor in late 1990 and early 1991.
Iraq will still face a mountain of debt even if it meets all of the "benchmarks" required of it -- the IMF expects the country's debt service to equal five percent of its economic output in 2011 and warns that even a minor price shock in the oil market "would require significant borrowing from the international markets to close the financing gaps."
"Sovereign" debt is transferable between governments; if a new strongman arises or Iraq becomes a loose federation, the debt will remain on the books and defaulting on it, while a possibility, has serious long-term consequences.
All of this is about bringing different forms of pressure onto Iraq's nascent government, not controlling it, and it's an important distinction. Before and since the "handover" to Iraq's government, the Green Zone has been overrun with "advisers" from Big Oil. Aram Roston wrote, "It's clear that there is not just the one Iraqi Oil Ministry, but a parallel 'shadow' ministry run by American advisers." In business, that's known as "positioning."
Phillip Carroll, a former chief executive with Royal Dutch/Shell and a 15-member "board of advisors" were appointed to oversee Iraq's oil industry during the transition period. According to the Guardian, the group "would represent Iraq at meetings of OPEC." Carroll had been working with the Pentagon for months before the invasion -- even while the administration was still insisting that it sought a peaceful resolution to the Iraq crisis -- "developing contingency plans for Iraq's oil sector in the event of war." According to the Houston Chronicle, "He assumed his work was completed, he said, until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called him shortly after the U.S.-led invasion began and offered him the oil adviser's job." Carroll, in addition to running Shell Oil in the United States, was a former CEO of the Fluor Corp., a well-connected oil services firm with extensive projects in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and at least $1.6 billion in contracts for Iraq's reconstruction. He was joined by Gary Vogler, a former executive with ExxonMobile, in Iraq's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
After spending six months in the post, Carroll was replaced by Robert E. McKee III, a former ConocoPhillips executive. According to the Houston Chronicle, "His selection as the Bush administration's energy czar in Iraq" drew fire from congressional Democrats "because of his ties to the prime contractor in the Iraqi oil fields, Houston-based Halliburton Co. He's the chairman of a venture partitioned by the … firm."
The administration selected Chevron Vice President Norm Szydlowski to serve as a liaison between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Now the CEO of the appropriately named Colonial Pipeline Co., he continues to work with the Iraq Energy Roundtable, a project of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, which recently sponsored a meeting to "bring together oil and gas sector leaders in the U.S. with key decision makers from the Iraq Ministry of Oil."
Terry Adams and Bob Morgan of BP, and Mike Stinson of ConocoPhillips would also serve as advisors during the transition.
After the CPA handed over the reigns to Iraq's interim government, the embassy's "shadow" oil ministry continued to work closely with the Iraqis to shape future oil policy. Platform's Greg Muttit wrote that "senior oil advisers -- now based within the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO) in the U.S. Embassy ... included executives from ChevronTexaco and Unocal." After the handover, a senior U.S. official said: "We're still here. We'll be paying a lot of attention, and we'll have a lot of influence. We're going to have the world's largest diplomatic mission with a significant amount of political weight."
The majors have also engaged in good, old-fashioned lobbying. In 2004, Shell advertised for an Iraqi lobbyist with good contacts among Iraq's emerging elites. The firm sought "a person of Iraqi extraction with strong family connections and an insight into the network of families of significance within Iraq." According to Platform, just weeks after the invasion, in a meeting with oil company execs and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in London, former British Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind promised to personally lobby Dick Cheney for contracts on behalf of several firms, including Shell.
Meanwhile, major oil firms were positioning themselves so that they'd have the best contacts in the new government. According to the Associated Press, "The world's three biggest integrated oil companies" -- BP, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch/Shell -- "struck cooperation or training deals with Iraq" in 2005. "It's a way to maintain contact and get the oil officials to know about them," former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam Chalabi told the AP. And it seems to have worked; in May, Iraq's current oil minister, Husayn al-Shahristani, said that one of his top priorities would be to finalize an oil law and sign contracts with "the largest companies."
Washington has its hands all over the drafting of that law. Early on, in 2003, USAID commissioned BearingPoint, Inc. -- the new name for the scandal-plagued Arthur Anderson Consulting -- to submit recommendations for the development of Iraq's oil sector. BearingPoint was the firm that designed the country's economic transformation under a previous USAID contract, so it was no surprise that its report reinforced the preference for PSAs that "everybody [kept] kept coming back to" during meetings of the State Department's "Future of Iraq Project."
In February, just months after the Iraqis elected their first constitutional government, USAID sent a BearingPoint adviser to provide the Iraqi Oil Ministry "legal and regulatory advice in drafting the framework of petroleum and other energy-related legislation, including foreign investment." According to Muttit, the Iraqi Parliament had not yet seen a draft of the oil law as of July, but by that time it had already been reviewed and commented on by U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, who also "arranged for Dr. Al-Shahristani to meet with nine major oil companies -- including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips -- for them to comment on the draft."
All of these points of pressure are only what we can see in the light of day. There is certainly much more occurring under the table. Raed Jarrar told me that he "was personally familiar with the kind of intimidation that can be brought by both the U.S. military and civilian" personnel, and that he would be shocked if "multiple millions of dollars in bribes" were not changing hands. The IMF noted in its latest report (PDF) that "corruption related to the production and distribution of refined fuel products was rampant." Last March, 450 Oil Ministry employees were fired for suspected corruption, and Mohammed al-Abudi, the Oil Ministry's director general for rrilling, said that "administrative corruption" was pervasive. "The robberies and thefts are taking place on a daily basis on all levels," he said, "committed by low-level government employees and by high officials in leadership positions of the Iraqi state." The same day that the U.N. legitimized the occupation, George Bush signed Executive Order 13303 providing full legal immunity to all oil companies doing business in Iraq in order to facilitate the country's "orderly reconstruction."
Yet, despite a five-year effort, Big Oil still sits on the sidelines, wary of the disorder and violence that's plagued the country. Ironically, it appears that China may well receive the first deal in post-Saddam Iraq (although it's one negotiated with Hussein's government before the war). The Kurdish autonomous zone has signed three PSAs -- none with the majors -- although there is some dispute about their validity (and, at this writing, there are reports that the Kurds are in negotiations with Royal Dutch/Shell and BP, among others).
At this point, the situation is very fluid. Last week, Iraqis were shocked when a controversial measure that might lead to the country's effective breakup was passed by Parliament by one vote. The major Sunni parties and Muqtada al Sadr's ministers boycotted the vote in outrage. Muddying the waters further is a heated debate about whether a somewhat ambiguous provision in the Iraqi Constitution already gives provincial governments the right to hold on to oil revenues rather than send them to the central government. The results of all of these debates will have an enormous impact on Iraq's chances to build an autonomous and potentially prosperous country down the road.
It's possible that the administration and its partners badly overplayed their hand. Iraq's new government stands on the verge of a complete meltdown, faced with a crisis of legitimacy based largely on the fact that it is seen as collaborating with American forces. Overwhelming majorities of Iraqis of every sect believe the United States is an occupier, not a liberator, and is convinced that it intends to stay in Iraq permanently. "If you go in front of Parliament, Raed Jarrar told me, "and ask: 'who is opposed to demanding a timetable for the Americans to withdrawal?' nobody would dare raise their hand." The passage of a sweetheart oil law could prove to be a tipping point. It's also possible Iraq's government won't make it to December; at this writing, rumors of a "palace coup" are swirling around Baghdad, according to Iraqi lawmakers.
What is clear is that the future of Iraq ultimately hinges to a great degree on the outcome of a complex game of chess -- only part of which is out in the open -- that is playing out right now, and oil is at the center of it. It's equally clear that there's a yawning disconnect between Iraqis' and Americans' views of the situation. Erik Leaver, a senior analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, told me that the disposition of Iraq's oil wealth is "definitely causing problems on the ground," but the entire topic is taboo in polite D.C. circles. "Nobody in Washington wants to talk about it," he said. "They don't want to sound like freaks talking about blood for oil." At the same time, a recent poll asked Iraqis what they believed was the main reason for the invasion and 76 percent gave "to control Iraqi oil" as their first choice.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
Baghdad-Bodies
Police officer killed, 20 bodies found in Baghdad
Baghdad, Oct 18, (VOI) – Unknown gunmen shot dead an Iraqi police officer in eastern Baghdad while 20 bodies were found dumped in different places in Baghdad city during the last 24 hours, Iraqi interior ministry sources said on Wednesday.
“Gunmen shot dead on Wednesday morning the police captain Imad Abbas in Baladiyat neighborhood, east of Baghdad,” one of the sources told the independent news agency Voices of Iraq (VOI).
“20 bodies were found dumped in different places in Baghdad city during the last 24 hours,” an interior ministry source said.
Most of the bodies “were unidentified and some bore torture marks while most were killed with gunshots in different parts of the body,” said the source who declined to be named.
The death toll has been on the rise with an escalation in sectarian killings. The United Nations estimate that about 100 people are killed everyday in Iraq
Study of Iraqi Dead Shocking, But Sound Science
By AScribe Newswire
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 (AScribe Newswire) -- The Statistical Assessment Service ( http://www.STATS.org ) - a non-profit, non-partisan media research organization affiliated with George Mason University and committed to correcting scientific misinformation in the media - finds the study estimating 650,000 excess Iraqi casualties since American forces entered the country to be methodologically sound.
In an analyis released today, STATS Director of Research Dr. Rebecca Goldin defended the research technique of cluster sampling behind the study, writing that "the methods used by this study are the only scientific methods we have for discovering death rates in war torn countries without the infrastructure to report all deaths through central means. Instead of dismissing over half a million dead people as a political ploy ... we ought to embrace science as opening our eyes to a tragedy whose death scale has been vastly underestimated until now."
She goes into great detail about both the strengths of the research, as well as the arguments against it.
- Prior Support from the Scientific Community:
While the Lancet numbers are shocking, the study's methodology is not. The scientific community is in agreement over the statistical methods used to collect the data and the validity of the conclusions drawn by the researchers conducting the study. When the prequel to this study appeared two years ago by the same authors (at that time, 100,000 excess deaths were reported), the Chronicle of Higher Education published a long article explaining the support within the scientific community for the methods used.
- The Methodology of "Cluster Sampling":
Cluster sampling is a well-established in statistics, and is routinely used to estimate casualties in natural disasters or war zones. For the Iraq study the researchers randomly chose people to interview about deaths in their families, interviewed a cluster of households around them, and then extrapolated the results to the whole population. There is nothing controversial in the method itself, though people can certainly question whether the sampling was done correctly.
- Attacks on Study are Ideological, not Scientific:
There has been a wealth of material on the web attacking the Lancet study. Most of it is devoid of science, and ranges from outrage at the numbers (it's impossible to believe it could be so high), to accusations of bias based on the authors' views of U.S. foreign policy. Interested parties such as the Iraqi government responded quickly by calling the numbers "inflated" and "far from the truth", rather than putting forward any real reasons why these numbers are unlikely to have occurred. President Bush, for one, says he does "not consider it a credible report."
Click here to read Dr. Goldin's analysis in its entirety
Since its founding in 1994, the non-profit, non-partisan Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) has become a much-valued resource on the use and abuse of science and statistics in the media. Its goals are to correct scientific misinformation in the media resulting from bad science, politics, or a simple lack of information or knowledge; and to act as a resource for journalists and policy makers on major scientific issues and controversies. To find out more about STATS, visit STATS.org - home page.
CONTACT: Matthew Felling mfelling@cmpa.com
8 courts-martial ordered in rape, murder cases
4 U.S. soldiers face charges over girl's death in Iraqi town of Mahmoudiya
https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gifAli Mamori / AP file
Mohammed al-Janabi, uncle of the girl allegedly raped and killed by U.S. soldiers, displays death certificates and IDs on his niece's grave in Mahmoudiya, north of Baghdad, on Thursday.
Suicide attacks and murders due to sectarian conflict continue around Iraq. See how residents live their lives amid the attacks.
https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gif
EVANSVILLE, Ind. - Four soldiers from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division will be court-martialed for the alleged rape of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her family, and two will face the death penalty, the military ordered Wednesday.
The charges against the Fort Campbell soldiers stem from rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi in her family's home in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad — a case that sparked international outrage and added more fuel to claims of abuse by U.S. forces in Iraq.
The charges came as the military announced that a total of eight soldiers would be court-martialied, with the four others to be tried in a separate court martial on charges of murdering Iraqi prisoners in northern Iraq's northern Salahuddin province during a raid on a village.
In the rape and murder case, military authorities said they would seek the death penalty against Sgt. Paul E. Cortez and Pfc. Jesse V. Spielman.
Spc. James P. Barker and Pfc. Bryan L. Howard are also accused in the rape and murders but will not face the death penalty, the military said in a statement.
Former Pvt. Steven Green, who was discharged for a personality disorder and arrested in North Carolina, will be tried in federal court in Kentucky. Green has pleaded not guilty to one count of rape and four counts of murder.
Military prosecutors have said the five — all from the division's 502nd Infantry Regiment — planned the attack from a checkpoint near the family's home, changed their clothing to hide their identities and set the girl's body on fire to destroy evidence.
In the other case, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard and Spc. Juston R. Graber are accused of murdering three Iraqi men taken from a house May 9 on a marshy island outside Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
This breaking story will be updated.
"Now watch that drive" - GW Bush 2003
English Translation of Saddam Hussein Letter
Dated October 15th, 2006
10/18/06 -- -- Translation By Roads to Iraq
In the name of God the Merciful God who gives us patience and takes our souls as Muslims” Qur’an 40:51
To the great nation, to honorable Iraqi ladies, to the heros of our armed forces, to our glorious nation.
Dear friends in the world. Peace upon you, God’s mercy and blessings.
To Humanity, this set its duty towards itself and others on the basis of fraternity, equality, rejection of superiority, sordid exploitation and exclusion of wills.
Friends, around the world, peace upon you, and God’s mercy and blessing.
On the occasion of month Ramadan which emerged on us this year and our lives in a very difficult situation, exposed to injustice, aggression and embargo since 1991until now, our people experience hard times under the occupation, the killing, the destruction and looting everything alive in Iraq except its faith and its pride which rejects humiliation, treachery and aggression from far and near neighbors some them came as invaders across the Atlantic inspired by the treacherous Zionist ambitions, unjustified interests and aggressiveness.
Some of them are coming from the east of our land, they are bad as usual, you know brother i am a free in my thoughts and opinions but because I am detained by the invading forces. So, my chances are limited and restricted to express my feelings and my will, especially when I direct them to you [Iraqis] through the media, or during this farce court if they don’t close the microphone to block a right opportunity to address the people at the same time when their vanity media is trying to eat your flesh alive
Here I am addressing you today in this holy month saying:
Resisting the invaders is the right and duty, the same goes to the people who collaborated with western or the eastern enemy. But I ask you, brothers and comrades under different titles and names in the brave Iraqi resistance and the people of proud Iraq to consider truth and justice in your Jihad, and don’t let overreacting mislead you. I ask you to keep the door of forgiveness rather than tolerance with the one who lost the true path, if they show some hope that they can be right guided, and remembers you have the duty to save him from himself and show him the right path. Keep the door of forgiveness open to everyone until the instant precedes the liberation which is coming soon in God allow it.
Remember and don’t forget that your goal is to liberate your country from the invaders and its collaborators and striking the enemy is easier to forgive it even if they chose to retreat, whether internal or external enemy. You recall that after every war there is peace, after each difference there is unity, after separation there is reunion, and after all hatred God will return it as familiarity. Humanity is the same, and you people are one great nation, learned in the cradle of the our land the greatest principles of human beings, and the purist religion, your spread monotheistic to civilizations, and rescued them from their ignorance and savagery. You sacrificed before for these values and sacrificed today for the same values, ahead of it the great unified Iraq, not fragmented under any color, group or allegation, this fact is the candle inside us dispel the darkness.
Brothers, my heart and tongue does not allow me to speak with you and addresses by your colors and titles, which made by the foreigners, Iraq was never been a symbol of separation, we all remember it in its beautiful colors which represent the situation in one great Iraq Arabs, Kurds and from every religion, sect or minority, we were proud that we are one nation.
Dear brothers, you have been oppressed by the invaders, their follower and their associates, so don’t oppress anybody, because you will loss God’s right, and make it easy for the opportunists to distort your struggle, and this is a big loss if its happened, and if you win then remember it is God’s victory and you are his soldiers. You have to show forgiveness and put the blood of your sons and brother (under the carpet), even the sons of Saddam Hussein, forgiveness with no return, we recall the tales of our merciful profits, Mohammad and Jesus, they forgave even the ones who insulted them, don’t forget that Mohammad forgive the pagans in Mecca after he accomplished victory. I know the heart of the freedom fighter and love to his nation, his people after his love to God, I expect you to heal the wounds and not to open new wounds.
Brothers, after you forgive the perpetrators, act to apply the law fairly and firmly, so your nation can enjoy the blessing of stability, security and flourish with culture, science and law, peaceful happy life. In this glorious month and you know that there no authority above me but the authority of the truth…. Saddam Hussein is not to be threaten, Saddam Hussein, as you know and he will stay as your knew him. God is great… God is great … … Glory to God, our nation, our people and the mujahideen … God is great and long live Iraq … Long live Iraq … Long live Palestine … Long live our glorious nation’s in Every year, our people, our nation and the peace-loving people … God is greater.
Saddam Hussein
President of Iraq and Commander in Chief of Iraq’s Arms Forces
15 / October / 2006
Iraq orders US to release Shia activist
(AFP)
18 October 2006
BAGHDAD - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki ordered the release Wednesday of a leading member of radical Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr’s political organisation who was detained by US troops, state television said.
Relatives and supporters of Sheikh Mazen Al Saedi confirmed he had been released, while a Sadr spokesman said Iraqi interior ministry vehicles brought him to the Shia movement’s offices in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad.
Sadr’s organisation, which includes several thousand armed fighters, complained Tuesday that Saedi, one of the party’s precinct captains in Baghdad, had been arrested by US troops along with five of his supporters.
The US military has thus far refused to confirm or deny the arrest but state television quoted Iraq’s national security adviser, Muwaffaq Al Rubaie, as saying the prime minister had ordered his release.
“He was released,” confirmed Sadr spokesman Hamdallah Al Rikabi, accusing US forces of trying to provoke the movement into armed confrontation.
“Everybody knows that the Sadr Movement is a patriotic movement seeking to fight terrorism. The occupation forces always choose to detain our members, and only our members, because they want a confrontation.
“We are not too weak to face the occupier, but our leadership wants us to remain quiet,” he added, demanding that the Iraqi government issue a statement to explain Saedi’s brief detention.
American commanders privately accuse Sadr’s Mahdi Army of being one of the main forces behind Iraq’s recent descent into sectarian bloodletting, and a rise in the number of fatal attacks on US troops.
Maliki, however, warns it will be difficult to disarm a militia with such popular support and has said that he vetoed a US plan to invade Sadr’s stronghold in the impoverished east Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.
Before news of the release emerged, several hundred Sadr supporters gathered in the Shuala district of eastern Baghdad to protest Saedi’s alleged detention and demand both his release and ”the end of the occupation”.
Activists chanted: “No, no to America! No, no to Israel!”
There were no weapons on display at the protest, unlike at some previous rallies in Baghdad, where assault rifles and rocket launchers have been openly paraded by masked Mahdi Army fighters.
“The occupiers have begun arresting the sons of this injured country. The occupiers have never been defenders of freedom,” said protest leader Sheikh Hadi Al Mohammedawi, who had not heard the report of the release.
“They arrest the people of this area, which is a shelter for poor and displaced, and leave the regions of terror,” he alleged, implicitly comparing Shia east Baghdad to other areas roamed by Sunni insurgents.
Nevertheless, a threatened strike, which was to have been organised in Baghdad’s hospitals and schools did not materialise, and the protest leader read out a letter from Sadr himself calling it off.
That's good news....what's the point of this thread?:confused:Quote:
Even as Iraq verges on splintering into a sectarian civil war, four big oil companies are on the verge of locking up its massive, profitable reserves, known to everyone in the petroleum industry as "the prize."
no offence mate, but that goes down as the most stupid question i have ever been asked. if you are having a laugh, thats cool, but if you asked that question in earnest then go and do yourselfQuote:
Originally Posted by spliff
One Crime Too Many
By Mike Whitney
10/19/06 Iraq is the great tragedy of our generation. Every day men and women are brazenly killed in their own homes or cities by foreign troops who occupy the country without justification.
In Baghdad, “liberation” has become a permanent state of martial law where one can never be certain if his door will suddenly be kicked in and he will either be shot or dragged off to some remote prison for torture.
Entire cities are now under siege; surrounded by concertina-wire and massive walls of dirt. The townspeople are forced to exit and enter through American-run checkpoints and forced to verify their identity to their foreign jailors.
The country has become so unsafe that it is impossible for independent journalists to gather the information the world needs to grasp the horror of what is taking place under the rubric of “democracy”. Meanwhile, “embedded” journalists continue to reiterate the same, worn fictions, generated in the Pentagon or right-wing think tanks, that somehow the Iraqi people are to blame for the massive tragedy which was created by the invasion.
Iraqi blogger Riverbend summarizes the mood in Iraq saying:
“There are women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins again”.
Iraq is in a permanent state of bereavement. The suffering we have caused is immeasurable.
In Washington, President Bush has brushed aside a new survey which shows that over 600,000 Iraqis have been butchered in his “war of choice”. The “peer-reviewed” epidemiological study appeared in “The Lancet” and has thus-far been supported by every reputable analyst familiar with the methodology used to determine the number of casualties.
As Dr. Curren Warf, professor of pediatric medicine and board member of the Physicians for Social Responsibility, said:
“I wish to set the record straight. “The Lancet” study is superb science. The study followed a strict, widely accepted methodology to arrive at its sobering conclusion. The study is being attacked not on scientific grounds, but for ideological reasons.”
To Bush, it makes no difference whether the number is 600,000 or 6 hundred million; the cost in human terms is irrelevant. In America, the life of one microscopic stem-cell is of more value that the entire population of Iraq. That’s what happens when racism merges with apathy; the dead simply don’t count.
Compare Bush’s indifference to the Iraqi death-toll to his “pro-life” rhetoric at home. Consider how he cancelled his Crawford vacation to speed back to Washington to sign legislation to save the life of Terri Schiavo even though Schiavo was showing no mental-activity and 19 courts had already ruled in her husband’s favor to allow her to die peacefully. Later, an autopsy confirmed that her brain had calcified and shrunk to half its normal size.
Still, Schiavo’s political value was of greater importance to Bush than the 650,000 men, women and children he has slaughtered in Iraq.
There’s simply no way to measure this degree of cynicism.
And “what if the 600,000 number is wrong,” Riverbend asks? “What if the minimum number is correct: nearly 400,000? Is that better? Prior to the war Bush kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.”
Bush’s crimes and the crimes of the United States are far greater than Saddam’s. Saddam had no intention of dismantling the government, the army, the civic institutions; of looting the museums and killing the teachers and intellectuals, of ethnic cleansing the Christians and the Sunnis, and inciting violence between the sects. Saddam had no plan to increase malnutrition, to reduce the flow of clean water, to cut off the electricity, to remove the social-safety net, to increase the poverty and unemployment, or to set Iraqi against Iraqi in a vicious struggle for survival. Saddam did not abide by the neoconservative theory of “creative destruction”, which deliberately plunged an entire nation into chaos destroying the fabric of Iraqi society and leaving the people to flock to militias for safety.
Saddam was a brutal, cold-blooded dictator, but compared to the calculated viciousness of Bush, he looks like a pillar of virtue.
America will never atone for its part in the genocide in Iraq. We have compromised our moral authority for the promise of oil, and lost both in the process. The mission is unraveling and the vulnerabilities of the empire have been thoroughly exposed. We will not prevail.
The occupation of Iraq is “one crime too many”.
Note: Colin Powell stated that “genocide” was taking place in Darfur when the figures showed that approximately 200,000 Sudanese had been killed. Applying Powell’s standard to Iraq, which has half the population of Sudan, The Lancet statistics prove that the United States is perpetrating genocide in Iraq.
Reflections on the Eve of Another Rigged Election
By Ernest Partridge
10/19/06 The Bush administration can not allow the Democrats to take control of either house of Congress. And they are in a position to prevent it, regardless of the will of the American voters.These are the two controlling facts that make all other conditions of the coming election trivial in comparison, or even irrelevant. The failure of the media and even the Democratic Party to acknowledge and deal with these facts in no way diminishes their significance. Quite the contrary.
And why can’t the Busheviks allow the loss of even one house of Congress to the Democrats? Such a loss might, of course, result in the halting and even some reversal of the Bush/GOP agenda. But that is the least of their concerns. Far more important would be the reestablishment of Congressional oversight -- of investigations, with the penalties of perjury and contempt of Congress, into vast array of crimes committed by the Bush administration. Among these crimes are bribery, the disappearance of billions of dollars in Iraq, war crimes, the disregard of acts of Congress, lying to Congress, and fraudulent elections. In a new, Democratic, House of Representatives, the incorruptible Henry Waxman, as the new Chair of the Government Affairs Committee, would doggedly examine and expose the corruption of the Bush Administration, and John Conyers, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, would, at long last, energetically investigate the issue of stolen elections. Accordingly, Bush and his partners in crime face far more than a curtailment of power; they face possible indictment, prosecution, and prison sentences for their crimes.
How, then, might the Busheviks avoid accountability for their crimes by remaining in control of the Congress? The same way that they seized control of the White House in 2000, and maintained control of Congress and the White House in 2004, namely by rigging these elections through their surrogates in “the election industry.”
The accumulated weight of evidence has moved e-vote fraud well beyond the status of mere accusation. To those willing to examine that evidence scrupulously and objectively, it is now a proven fact. The refusal of the media to deal with this issue and the pathetically weak rebuttal-by-ridicule of the debunkers has not mitigated the force of the evidence. Because I have written repeatedly and at length about the stealing of the national elections, I will not argue the point here. Those still unconvinced are urged to examine these sources. Significantly, despite the aforementioned media silence and weak rebuttals, a Zogby poll reports that less than half the public is “very confident that Bush won [the 2004 election] fair and square,” and a third if the public is “not at all confident that he won fair and square.”
Given the likelihood of another rigged election, does this mean that those of us who desire a Democratic victory – apparently a sizeable majority of likely voters – should simply give up, accept the inevitable, and stay at home?
By no means. We should redouble our efforts. For even if the GOP retains control of Congress through still more of the same electronic vote fraud combined with their familiar vote-suppression schemes, this could be the election that finally exposes and puts an end to the paperless, non-verifiable e-vote scam. If the election precincts are flooded with crowds of angry citizens demanding the ouster of the Republican majority in Congress, the GOP just might be made to pay an exorbitant price for one more rigged election. For all their advantages, including their control of the election processes, the GOP faces a daunting dilemma: on the one hand, steal one more election and risk, at long last, exposure of this crime, or on the other hand, “allow” the Democrats to take control of one house of Congress with the expectation that the crimes of the Bush administration, including election fraud, will be rigorously investigated.
I expect that the GOP strategists will opt for the former course of action. Even so, it is just possible that the GOP will still lose the House, although, given their control of the e-ballots, their continued the Senate is a lock for the Republicans. To win the Senate, the Democrats must lose no seats while winning almost all of the contested seats. Should the GOP “fix” just three close elections, say in New Jersey, Missouri and Ohio, their control of the Senate is assured. Even so, that might not be the end of it. If, by over-reaching this time, the election-fraud machinery is finally exposed, those ill-gained Senate seats might be contested and overturned by court challenges. And these would be decided by state courts, out of reach of the GOP packed federal courts.
The House of Representatives, however, is a different story. If the election is close, the Republicans, by “fixing” from one to two dozen of the most endangered seats, will salvage their majority. That many individual electoral finagles are quite do-able.
But if as many as a hundred GOP seats are at risk, this may overwhelm the resources of the Dieboldian (etc.) shock troops. Moreover, the more individual contests on the “fix-list,” the larger the circle of election conspirators and the greater the risk that one of these scams will misfire and blow open the e-voting crime wave. Then a chain-reaction of disclosures might follow, reaching back to Ohio in 2004, Georgia in 2002, and Florida in 2000, to mention just a few electoral crime scenes.
And it appears now that a tsunami of voter discontent might strike the ballot boxes on November 7. The latest Newsweek poll reports that “fully 53 percent of Americans want the Democrats to win control of Congress next month..., compared to just 35 percent who want the GOP to retain power.” This 18% gap is considerably more than that which preceded the 40 seat sweep of the “Republican revolution” of 1994.
Accordingly, Paul Krugman observes thata huge Democratic storm surge is heading toward a high Republican levee. It's still possible that the surge won't overtop the levee -- that is, the Democrats could fail by a small margin to take control of Congress. But if the surge does go over the top, the flooding will almost surely reach well inland -- that is, if the Democrats win, they'll probably win big.And the much-respected and non-partisan observer, Charlie Cook notes thatFor Republicans, it is a time to defend every seat, no matter how secure those seats appear. If things don't change, GOP incumbents, who never even contemplated having a difficult race, may well lose this year. And if I were a Republican, I'd start praying that something happens to take the spotlight away from Iraq and scandals, because this current issue mix is lethal.If that “tsunami” strikes on November 7, just as the “fixers” are at work on the presumably “endangered” seats, a strange and suspicious profile will emerge: close “contested” seats will be won overwhelmingly by the Republicans, while many “safe” Republican seats will be lost to the Democrats.
Now suppose that despite the polls and the well-publicized discontent of the voters, the Republicans retain control of both houses of the Congress. Suppose further, that this is the result of numerous allegedly “miraculous upsets,” none by Democratic candidates, and all by GOP candidates who overcome fifteen to twenty point polling deficits. (Among these, Ken Blackwell, the Ohio Secretary of State who “administered” the 2004 Ohio election, now a candidate for Governor, is trailing his opponent Ted Strickland by eighteen points).
Should this occur, can the dirty secret of stolen elections still be contained? Or might not, instead, the backbone of public denial and media silence finally be broken?
If, this time, the GOP control of the vote counting once again frustrates the will of a large majority of the voters, the proportion of doubters (half of the population, according to Zogby) will likely increase. Perhaps then much more than half will seriously doubt the validity of the elections, while many more “somewhat” doubt these results. At some point of no-confidence, the public at large will finally come to realize that the government of the United States no longer rules with “the consent of the governed” and thus lacks the legitimacy to govern.
What then? Worst case: Bush imposes the dictatorial powers given him by the Patriot Act and by the Military Commissions Act (of September 28), and the United States becomes in fact what it is now implicitly, a dictatorship. Best case: the people, united, overthrow the illegitimate regime. This has happened recently, in Ukraine in 2004 and in the Soviet Union in 1991. Most significantly, it happened in July, 1776, justified by a document known as “The Declaration of Independence,” which proclaimed:That to secure these Rights [to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That, whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...It is not without justification that some have called the upcoming election of November 7, 2006 the most significant non-presidential election in the history of the United States of America.
Now, at long last, the balance of power might be turning against the Busheviks, as their “establishment” corporate supporters and traditional conservatives seem to be having second thoughts, and as these qualms are reflected in the mainstream media.
Traditional conservatives, such as Richard Viguerie, Paul Weirich, Bruce Fein, and Joe Scarborough, are publicly proclaiming that the Bush administration has abandoned their core principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility, and that a Democratic victory in November, and the resulting divided government, “might not be a bad thing.” Dissenting opinions are becoming ever more conspicuous in the media, among them Bob Woodward (at long last!), and the disaffected evangelical Christian and former official of Bush’s “Faith Based Initiatives,” David Kuo, both of whom appeared in successive appearances in CBS’s 60 Minutes.
As I have repeatedly suggested, where the Bush regimes leads, enlightened corporate and media interests should not choose to follow. These interests flourished under the Clinton administration, during unprecedented economic growth when the United States and its political principles were respected throughout the world. Moreover, these same “establishment” interests must appreciate that in the coming collapse of the United States economy, there will be no winners.
Who could have predicted a month ago the present disarray of the GOP and the decline of its prospects in the upcoming election? The Foley scandal and its aftershocks were nowhere in sight, and continuing Republican control of the Congress seemed secure. Likewise, we can only guess at what surprises might suddenly appear in the remaining four weeks of the campaign.
When it is all over, we may discover that this contest will have been won by the side that responded to these developments, promptly, intelligently, and decisively.
This is no time for apathy, despair and surrender.Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He has taught Philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (Environmental Ethics and Policy: "The Online Gadfly") and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org). His book in progress, "Conscience of a Progressive," can be seen at www.igc.org/gadfly/progressive/^toc.htm . Send comments to: crisispapers@hotmail.com .
Oct 19 (Reuters) - Following are security and other developments in Iraq as of 1630 GMT on Thursday:
*KHALIS - A roadside bomb ripped through a busy market, killing 10 people and injuring 20 shortly before the evening Iftar meal when Muslims break their fasting in the month of Ramadan, Interior Ministry sources said. The bomb hit the town of Khalis, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad.
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed five people -- three policemen and two civilians -- and wounded 12, nine of them civilians, in Baghdad's southern Dora district, an Interior Ministry source said. BAGHDAD - Gunmen attacked a police station and killed four policemen and wounded 10 civilians, an Interior Ministry source said.
KIRKUK - A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol wounded a civilian in Kirkuk, police said.Asterisk denotes a new or updated item.
BAQUBA - Three Iraqi policemen were killed in clashes with gunmen near the volatile town of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. MOSUL - Six suicide bombers in vehicles, including one in a fuel truck, attacked Iraqi police and U.S. patrols, and insurgents fired mortars and clashed with police, U.S. officials and police said. The violence killed at least 20 people in the city 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad.
KIRKUK - A suicide car bomber killed at least eight people and wounded 70 others in the oil city of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad. It targeted Iraqi army troops collecting salaries from a bank, police said. KIRKUK - A suicide car bomb killed two Iraqi soldiers and wounded four more some 35 km (22 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, police and the army said.
KIRKUK - A car bomb killed one person and wounded eight others in Kirkuk, police said.
NEAR KHALIS - Gunmen killed four labourers and wounded four others in a drive-by shooting near the town of Khalis, 80 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - A car bomb and a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed a civilian and wounded five others, including two policemen, in the New Baghdad district in the east of the capital, an Interior Ministry source said. MAHMUDIYA - The bodies of five people were found with gunshot wounds in the town of Mahmudiya, 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. MAHMUDIYA - Several mortar rounds landed in a residential district of the town of Mahmudiya, killing two people and wounding three from the same family, police said.
NEAR MAHMUDIYA - Several mortar rounds landed on a town near Mahmudiya, killing two people and wounding four others, police said. BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed an employee in the Ministry of Higher Education in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Gunmen shot dead police Colonel Basim Qasim in Baghdad's southern Saydiya district, an Interior Ministry source said. ANBAR PROVINCE - A U.S. soldier died on Wednesday from wounds sustained in combat in the western Anbar province, the U.S. military said on Thursday.
BAGHDAD - Two roadside bombs wounded two people near the Iraqi National Theatre in central Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.
DIWANIYA - Gunmen killed a man as he left his house in Diwaniya, 180 km (112 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
KIRKUK - A roadside bomb targeted a police patrol and wounded three policemen in the city of Kirkuk, police said.
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS *BAGHDAD - The top American commander in Iraq, General George Casey, has ordered a review of a U.S.-led crackdown in Baghdad, a spokesman said on Thursday, as reinforcements have failed to ease violence and the U.S. death toll has spiked this month.
Upon Red Rivers of Genocide Living Inside Hell on Earth
By Manuel Valenzuela
10/19/06 -Daily upon the rivers that birthed civilization can the flow of crimson colored blood be seen journeying over liquid roadways through the land of Mesopotamia, its accumulated and growing volume the result of scattered bodies, bullet hole riddled men and bloated humans, all silent witnesses to the devastation that has cursed the Iraqi people.
Tainted with the flow of human wickedness, the Tigris and Euphrates spread their polluted waters over the entire culture of Iraq, like sewers of human waste contaminating land, water and air, their toxins of evil and torture and murder and suffering spreading a noxious fog over cities and towns, its cocktail of death and destruction infecting the fabric of society, the very foundation of Iraq cracked and shattered by the spillage of human energy, that crimson liquid granting life.
Upon red rivers of genocide do twenty five million human beings sip out of, forced to endure the aftertaste of rotting flesh, drinking from the chalice of human violence, swallowing the red liquid of their nation’s blood, bathing in its corrupted waterways as their country slowly, yet surely, hemorrhages to death. Unable to close a gaping and now pussing wound, unable to stitch back together lacerated flesh, millions upon millions of human beings have become the gangrened body infected by America’s disastrous debacle, slowly rotting from within, turning vile in color and putrid in smell with each passing day, their only salvation the amputation of the whole, the division of their nation, the destruction and partition of Iraq.
To twenty five million Iraqis hell on Earth has been introduced to their land by the demons roaming the halls of American power that care not an ounce for the misery and wickedness now roaming like a vulture over Iraq’s skies. For human evil has been imported into the Cradle of Civilization, an export birthed, nurtured and molded by Old Glory itself, under the watchful eyes of Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington, crafted by debasement and corruption, becoming the most successful product launch America has sent abroad in many, many years. For the war culture has perfected the art of sadistic mass murder, a new edition introduced like a software program, resurrected every few decades to enrich war profiteers and greed mongers while making comfortable the lives of those residing inside the belly of the beast. Like a virus the American angel of death has spread far and wide, free of antidotes or miracle cures, given the freedom that is denied Iraqis, like a haze enveloping almost every city and town, village and farm, infecting madness and hatred and vengeance and anger into the minds of millions, injecting civil war upon Iraq and genocide upon the Iraqi people.
Upon the affliction that has befallen them, born of lies, deceit and criminality, against all precepts of human and international law, rising out of smoldering ashes and destroyed skyscrapers, fashioned by incompetent daydreamers and pathological deviants, Iraqis – whose only true curse is having evolved for millennia in the lands pregnant with the devil’s excrement – find themselves stuck in a nightmare whose waking hour will not come and whose terror cannot be made to disappear. To them, the nightmare is all too real, as evident as the smell of burning flesh or the concussion of the next explosion, as real as the searing shrapnel tearing and ripping open body parts or the decapitated and mangled head of a loved one.
This nightmare does not wake, nor does it allow eyes to open, becoming as real as the destruction of homes, livelihoods or rape of an older sister. Whether murdered execution style with a bullet to the head or murdered by an American smart bomb, the Iraqi nightmare seems only to end upon the last breaths of life, upon the expiration of human energy. Only then does fire and phosphorous and bullets and missiles and beheadings turn to nothingness; only then does hell on Earth subside and peace prosper.
The omnipotent darkness of genocide, American style, has been resurrected in lands ancient and mesmerizing, where history began and where humanity was nurtured and reared. From the fertile bosom and succulent nectars of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers humankind took a great leap forward, advancing in civilization, growing in numbers, evolving in time. Today, from rivers once offering life only death and the products of human malevolence can be seen, courtesy of greed, arrogance and apathy, of the self-aggrandized narcissism and inexperienced idiocy that blinds and insulates populations smeared in comfort and willful ignorance. Through the silence and acquiescence of Americans, through the complete indifference to the plight of 25 million Iraqis, genocide has become America’s foreign policy in Iraq, becoming Iraq’s new normal, rising to the present as it once did in the past, a disease thriving wherever America’s armies land, just as it once did in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, where in the span of a century the lives of tens of millions of human beings were systematically erased from the face of Earth.
Genocide, that most malevolent of human activities, that most common of historical realities, that most useful of American foreign policy objectives, a demon that invariably never fails to leave our mammalian psychology, becoming as common to our history as music is to our culture, has been birthed in the land of sand and dunes, becoming as common as scorching temperatures, rising like ancient Babylon once did to lay claim to Mesopotamia. Upon rivers that once brought life now only death floats by; where fertile mud once flowed now human blood gushes. Where sustenance once flourished only misery can now be irrigated; where once fish were pulled out in bountiful amounts now bodies of rotting human flesh are fished out of the water.
For what can you call what is happening in Iraq in the first decade of the twenty-first century anything but genocide, the complete and systematic decimation – the annihilation – of an entire culture, of an entire society, of an entire nation? What do you call the death, mostly by violent murder, state sponsored terrorism, American birthed civil war, sectarian violence and counterterrorism operations, of 655,000 human beings if not mass murder, genocide, the genesis of Holocaust? Two to three percent of the Iraqi population has been exterminated, never to breathe life again, never to see children grow up, never to see mothers give birth or see fathers become proud grandfathers. Two to three percent of Iraq’s people lie six feet under, buried under the massive and monstrous American military machine. If two to three percent of America was killed in the span of three years, a number reaching 6 to 9 million individuals, what would happen to the United States? What would happen if a city the size of Los Angeles or New York or Chicago was wiped off the face of the nation? The equivalent of this hypothetical is happening today in Iraq.
Entire families have disappeared, entire ways of life extinguished; the devastation of daily anarchy, occupation, chaos, thirst for vengeance and civil war results in several hundred deaths by murder every single day in Iraq. Every month in Iraq at least 3,000 civilians die at the hands of human wickedness, creating an Iraqi 9/11 every 30 days, every 720 hours. Rivers and puddles of blood flowing through Iraq’s streets never seem to run dry, with each new day spawning the next bloodbath of body parts and devastated flesh. The Iraqi genocide refuses to relent, thriving off of human psychology, off of a culture of revenge and honor, off of a brutal guerilla resistance to foreign occupation. In each case of murder, torture or intolerable suffering, the common denominator is always the invasion of Iraq by America and the subsequent occupation that has become a catalyst to the horrors facing average Iraqis today. Each day only seems to make things worse; each year only cements the continuing decent into human Hell. From the bowels of hell the demons of mankind have risen in the land of Mesopotamia.
Children rise one day to innocence only to fall asleep to malevolence. Teenagers once full of idealism, hope and love are now possessed by hate, anger and psychological maiming. Young adults hoping for a fruitful life now have only the memories of the past to sustain them, their potential and opportunity now eroded, their talents and abilities quashed. Mothers and fathers once hoping for a better tomorrow for their children now see nothing but decades of decimation to come. Grandmothers and grandfathers look at the present and remember the past, cursing the devil’s excrement, condemning the Anglo-American world, shedding tears over the crushed vibrancy of a destroyed society. Through the eyes of babies a world of violence and murder becomes routine, along with bloated bellies and diseased bodies, hungry mouths and depleted brain power. Through the eyes of babies Iraq and its cities burn in a fiery inferno of man killing man, its pillars crumbling under the weight of the evil birthed through American intervention. This, today, is reality and truth to 25 million Iraqis, or to those who remain, unable to flee.
Genesis of Holocaust
The lives of 25 million human beings lie in ruins, destroyed like the rubble and mortar that lines city streets and boulevards. The Iraqi genocide is what we at present see, a reality fated to continue well into the future, without a hint of when it will stop, a direct and proximate cause of America’s war crimes and its illegal and immoral occupation. The curse upon Iraqis, begun with the act of economic genocide called sanctions, imposed, implemented and supervised by America in the 1990’s – which resulted in the death of up to 1.5 million Iraqis, 500,000 of them children lacking proper nourishment or medicines – and continued with Bush’s Crusade against Iraq, an operation of blatant terrorism disguised under the state’s veil of Lady Liberty and Old Glory, has in the span of a decade and a half become a shameful and criminal Holocaust, resulting in the death of perhaps two million human beings. If the mass murder by radiation through America’s weapon of mass destruction, depleted uranium munitions, is added to the calculations, the Iraqi Holocaust approaches some of the worst crimes of human civilization in the brief history of our species.
The monster engendered by George W. Bush, the military-energy industrial complex and the neocons has become an unstoppable force whose momentum has spiraled out of control, its life growing and evolving not in accordance with the commands from Washington but rather from the vicious cycle of devastation now feeding its unquenchable appetite for blood and malice. Like a hurricane it gains speed and strength from warm liquid, in this case human blood, becoming a vicious circle of mass murder that cannot be halted.
Has the greed and hunger for unsurpassed wealth and power been worth the genocide of Iraqis? Has it been worth the indescribable pain and suffering and anger and hatred emanating from millions of Iraqis against the United States? To you and me the answer is surely no; to the war mongers and greed addicts in power, however, it has been worth every penny, for they care nothing for ordinary Iraqis, having not one drop of remorse or empathy or humanity in their ice cold veins from where only the green of the Almighty dollar and the thick black oil of the devil’s excrement is allowed to flow. To them, the Iraqi genocide is seen only through the macabre vision of dollar signs and enhanced power. To these individuals, they would just as easily squash a cockroach than care about 300 deaths a day in Iraq.
How high will the final tally of dead Iraqis reach? How much killing and murder and maiming and destruction is left to achieve? How much longer will the blueprint for Central America during the Cold War be implemented in Iraq, with its counterinsurgency operations full of torture, disappearances, mass executions and death squads? Will the final death count approach the two to three million dead that were recorded in Vietnam, that the American military left in its wake as it retreated from its embassy’s rooftop? Will the killing stop only when there is nothing left to kill, only when the enemies of America have exhausted destroying each other, when they realize that they have been made to fight each other so as not to unite and fight the common enemy, just as the pathological occupiers desired in a classic example of divide and conquer?
The Iraqi genocide will not be destroyed until America is kicked out of Iraq, until its bases are overrun, until the Green Zone is sacked, until the last remaining Americans are evacuated with helicopters from the rooms of Saddam’s old palaces, for it will never leave voluntarily. It has created a mess it cannot extricate itself out of, both strategically and financially. It has invested too much precious treasure, to say nothing of blood, in the pursuit and control of Iraq’s energy resources. It has built more than a dozen permanent bases, it has firmly planted itself in a most geostrategic location, the easier to wage battle against tomorrow’s rivals, Russia and China. America has made the first move in the great chess match for control of Earth’s remaining petroleum. It cannot now simply pack up and leave, no matter how costly the enterprise, no matter how much blood is spilled. With its reputation in tatters, with its military trapped in quicksand, with its leaders as incompetent and arrogant as they are unwise, America will, like a spoiled and undisciplined child of wealth, thinking itself privileged and enveloped under hallucinations of chosen grandeur, refuse to listen to reason, preferring to suffocate under the immense weight of the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the nation than declare defeat and retreat.
The killing and destruction will continue, with America as catalyst, as the malignancy destroying the invaded nation with the cancer of human wickedness, until the term genocide is replaced by the word Holocaust, until millions lie in graves, their bodies returning to dust and earth and grass, the winds carrying radiation poisoning becoming the silent reminders and perpetual killers of America’s foray into the Iraqi deserts. Millions of Iraqis, those already born and those yet to come, are destined to die at the hands of what America wrought. Thousands will die of bullet holes to the head, while thousands more will be murdered by bombs and missiles. Still many more will die of preventable disease, dead for lack of sanitation, lack of potable water, lack of electricity, medicine and nutritious food. Tens of thousands will die of lack of security, as anarchy and chaos and civil war devastate Iraqi culture and society. Untold numbers of Iraqis will die of cancers and diseases resulting from radiation poisoning caused by the use of hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions. Thousands of newborns will be born mutated or deformed, distorted in ways human babies have never looked before; thousands more will never be born at all, for stillborn will they enter this planet, becoming the lucky few to escape the human hell their parents must confront and escape.
Up to a million Iraqis, those lucky enough to possess some form of infinitesimal wealth, have fled their native country, never to return to their homes, their lives left behind. Displaced by America’s occupation and the resulting insecurity and guerilla warfare, uncounted millions have decided that it is better to risk leaving Iraq than remaining under the real threat of becoming one more statistic in a Baghdad morgue. The Iraqi Diaspora has begun, with those allotted a little luck in money and fate creating a mass exodus from Mesopotamia, choosing poverty abroad rather than insecurity and constant threat at home. Already hundreds of thousands of professionals have left the cities, from professors to doctors, leaving Iraq a desolate and anemic society, never to return to the nation of their birth. As a result, hundreds of thousand of students are without teachers, millions of civilians are without doctors.
Yet for the poor of Iraq, for those comprising the salt of the earth, the great majority of Iraq’s citizens whose resources prevent escape from the gates of hell on Earth, only the certainty of living in constant fear of death or injury awaits, their lives reduced to an understanding that the last breath they take could very well be their final gasp of air. For the poor of Iraq, America and its brutal occupation, with its massive debacle of historical proportions, makes Saddam Hussein seem like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Indeed, how many Iraqis today wish Saddam was still in power? Iraq, after all, was safe, secure and at peace with him at the helm, a reality that today does not exist.
While brutal and a dictator, he was nonetheless the fulcrum upon which all of Iraq stood united, in control, free of terrorism, a non-threat to its neighbors, much less to George W. Bush’s America. Yet even today his war crimes pale in comparison with those unleashed by George W. Bush, yet it is Saddam that will soon hang from a noose. It was Saddam that acted as the thread and needle needed to stitch Iraq together. Without him the entire deck of cards has come tumbling down. With a western created nation such as Iraq, with borders delineated according to European interests and not ethnic or religious realities, only a strong-arm despot sponsored by the west could maintain control, becoming the thread holding the nation together. Unfortunately for America, George W. Bush and his neocon handlers have no interest in learning history or its many lessons.
The Folly of Ignoring History’s Lessons
What those who discard or ridicule the study of history fail to realize is that history – not the kind that is written by powers or winners but by reality – is but the decoded pattern of repeated psychologies and behaviors of our past and the blueprint for understanding our present and future. It is our demons, mistakes, lessons, triumphs, wonders and evolution as a civilization outlined for us to learn from and study, to absorb fully into our existence. For it is indeed true that those who fail to learn history are utterly, and faithfully, condemned to repeat it, which is what has happened in the American disaster in Iraq, as well as in the brewing failure in Afghanistan. Had the history of the region been taken seriously, had it been studied and learned from, Iraq would have never become the inferno it is today. Quite simply, Iraq should have never been invaded and occupied. Yet wisdom and intelligence are almost always mutually exclusive from politicians, elites and their legions of yes-men and women.
By throwing away the readily available history of Mesopotamia, with its plethora of lessons and warnings for arrogant yet ignorant imperial seekers saturated with the honey of hubristic honey, America and her so-called leaders embarked on a course towards debacle from the very beginning, preferring to believe those whose minds dwell in fantasy, delusion and theory espoused in books over those whose decisions are based on history, experience, wisdom and reality. America’s so-called leaders chose to smell the sweet yet delusional aroma of being greeted as liberators, believing they would be welcomed with flowers, candy thrown at their feet. Instead, they were greeted with AK-47s, rocket propelled grenades and IED’s, along with the collective and growing anger of the Iraqi people. Because of this gross incompetence, because of complete negligence and disregard for reality, American soldiers were sent into a hornet’s nest, straight into a pit of quicksand designed to meticulous tear apart one soldier at a time, trapping citizen soldiers in a guerilla war that was never going to be won and was always going to end in disaster.
Because of the complete ignorance festering at the top of America’s pyramid of hierarchy and inside the decrepit neocon nest of vultures, in three years 655,000 Iraqis have died, more than a million Iraqis have become refugees, countless more have suffered maiming of both body and mind, and an entire society has been decimated, raped of its vibrancy and usurped of its peace and unity. With years yet to go before the madness is halted, with America unable and unwilling to extricate itself from the tar pit it has nosedived into, the genocide now taking place will only grow, easily surpassing the present evil in the Darfur, the past wickedness in Rwanda and the Congo, and threatening to reach levels of genocide America created and furthered in both Vietnam and Cambodia, which resulted in millions of deaths.
If this is the case, the time honored American tradition of waging invasion and occupation against a concocted enemy nation will continue, as always biting off more than it can chew, refusing to change the course, through guerilla war waged by resistance forces being forced to retreat, in the process engendering and furthering genocide, creating a bloodbath in the process, and eventually leaving the nation it originally invaded a wasteland of destruction, suffering and death. Its time honored tradition of killing millions through invasion, occupation and through a barrage of state sponsored terrorism every two or three decades will thus continue. Which country, which people, we should all wonder, will be next to become the blood needed by the Pax Americana to gorge on? Which nation will be next to suffer the wrath of American genocide that invariably helps sustain the comfortable standard of living of those residing inside the belly of the beast?
For those residing in the reality based community and not the fantasy based bubble of delusion, the Iraq debacle has become even greater than originally thought, becoming, in the span of three years, a disaster of monumental proportions, a comma of history that will be studied and analyzed as the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the United States. It will become the comma of history that is used, along with that other comma called Vietnam, as a case study of how not to hand incompetent greed addicts and war mongers the reigns of military power, becoming, as all disaster usually is, a harsh lesson taught future generations so that they do not repeat the mistakes and disasters of their forefathers. Unfortunately, the same was once said of the Vietnam experience.
Forever Remembered, Never Forgotten
The Iraq genocide from 1991 through the Bush Crusade will forever be remembered in history books, just as the president wanted, though not for the reasons those who concocted and furthered it thought. It will be remembered not for triumph or grandeur or to memorialize America or its leaders but rather for the crimes against humanity, for the war crimes, the horrible suffering and the genocide perpetuated by America along with the shameful indifference, acquiescence and silence of an American people that have lost all sense of shame, or decency, preferring to bask under the glow of purposeful ignorance than have their lives of comfort and materialism interrupted by the destruction and genocide their country is committing in the Middle East.
The Iraq/Bush Crusade will be remembered for the greed and lust for oil of the American people, of millions upon millions driving gas-guzzling SUVs while Iraqis were forced to spend entire days in line to fill up their cars. It will be remembered for a housing bubble that granted Americans inflated and borrowed comfort, allowing them the opportunity to purchase enormous cookie cutter homes and a myriad number of toys, wants and luxuries, even as our war machine destroyed the lives of 655,000 human beings, even as our beautiful minds placed the entire decimation of another nation by our government out of sight and out of mind.
The Bush Crusade will be seen for what it has become: the utter failure of the American people to act during our most loathsome hour. At a time when America hit the nadir of morality and virtue, the American people of the first decade of the 21st century will be judged guilty of complicity in the first mass genocide of the new millennium. Our callous complicity in supporting criminals and murderers, while living lives of gluttony and apathy, have made us all guilty in what has certainly become a crime of the highest order. But for our terrible passivity in the face of an illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, obvious war crimes, and the decadence of American virtue and principles, perhaps the Iraq genocide might have been avoided, saving the lives of millions of human beings, both Iraqi and American, and perhaps saving our honor and reputation as well.
As a result of this most incompetent of administrations, Iraq and its valiant resistance has disemboweled the grand American military machine, gutting its power, re-opening the large scab that refuses to heal, bringing the American imperial project to its knees and proving to humanity, yet again, that asymmetric guerilla warfare cannot be defeated by a conventional military, no matter how arrogant or powerful it claims itself to be. In the streets of Iraq battles are waged according to the dictates of the resistance, a fragmented amalgam of native mujahadeen whose knowledge of Iraq, patience in attacking, discipline in retreating and noble cause in fighting off a brutal occupation, have allowed it to bruise and make bloody the American military on a daily basis, slowly, yet surely, tiring out the powerful giant.
With 95 percent of the resistance born and bred in Iraq, fighting for the independence of their nation and not for an al-Qaeda ideology, with 90 percent of the civilian population supporting them, America will never defeat the insurgency, no matter how hard it tries to divide and conquer, no matter how many times it tries to foment sectarian violence and civil war, no matter how many billions it spends on a monthly basis, no matter how many permanent bases it decides to build. Shiite and Sunni may be fighting each other, yet their common enemy remains America.
A culture of vengeance and of honor, a society brimming with anger and a people thirsting for freedom from America cannot be defeated, no matter how many times the occupier decides to stay the course on a most defective ship. Iraqis fight for freedom and independence; they fight to prevent their oil from being stolen; they fight for family and honor, for the death of loved ones and against the dehumanization by the occupier. They have reason to fight, possessing passion knowing they are in the right, which cannot be said of American soldiers. What does America fight for? What cause guides it forward? What passion drives its momentum? How is America in the right? This war is all about control of oil, all about greed and engorging the bank accounts of the military-energy industrial complex. The Bush Crusade is about pillage of resources, plundering of the treasury and securing for tomorrow the oil fiefdoms that will further enrich and empower the American elite and its corporations. How do you get American soldiers to believe in a cause and fight for a war based on lies, deceit, manipulations and for the greed and power of a tiny minority that have sent them to become the cannon fodder of the wealthy?
The Shame of America
Make no mistake, America will prefer to stay the course, for to its alpha male leaders it can never “cut and run.” Her so-called leaders will always choose to sacrifice thousands of sons and daughters of poverty so leaders’ and their reputations and legacies survive intact. It is not their sons and daughters bleeding to death, it is not their relatives being maimed in body and mind. No, America never loses a war, it never suffers defeat, for in the national narrative, in the fables and myths told the masses, America is blessed by the Christian god, she is good and everything else evil, she is right and all else wrong, her soldiers fight only for freedom and democracy, not for corporate and elite power. In the national fiction a war on terror exists and Iraq is the central front, the place where evil must be confronted because it hates us for our freedoms, not our foreign policy.
Sure, the appearance of withdrawal of forces will be concocted to appease the grumbling masses, enough to satisfy their beautiful minds, yet tens of thousands of troops will remain, protecting pipelines, refineries, permanent bases and the oil fields that now fly the great red, white and blue. You do not think the American state would spend a trillion dollars in the Bush Crusade simply to expel a despot from power, right? You do not think a trillion dollars will in the end be spent to bring freedom and democracy to a partitioned tri- state, do you? Because of oil and its strategic location in the Middle East and near Central Asia, Iraq will remain an American colony for decades to come or until that time that Iraq’s oil fields run dry. It will be infested with American troops protecting America’s corporate interests until the day arrives when America and her military are forced out of the nation by a resistance that continues to gain momentum, strength and support. Only by force, and with her tail between her feet, will America stubbornly relent and retreat in the face of a perpetual bloodbath.
To her leaders, as well as to most of her citizens, the Iraqi genocide is of no more significance than last week’s episode of Survivor. Out of sight and out of mind, hundreds of millions of Americans could care less about Iraqis and their plight. To America’s so-called leaders, genocide is part of doing business, part of war profiteering and greasing the engine of perpetual war for perpetual profit. To most Americans, both leaders and civilians, Iraqis are subhuman dark skinned Arabs and the death of 655,00, or the displacement of one million, are of little importance or consequence, whether or not the American state perpetrated crimes against humanity in their name.
Why be bothered by the misery and suffering of Arabs in the Middle East when a pedophile was just forced to resign from the Congress? Why feel any ounce of sympathy for the plight of Iraqis when Democrats will only continue the massacre when they regain control of the legislative branch? Why feel extreme sadness and guilt and shame at what is done in our name when we have trouble even finding Iraq on a global map? Why feel indignation at the genocide taking place when more than 40 percent of Americans still think Iraq was involved in the inside job of 9/11?
As a result of what America has unleashed upon Iraq, given the silent passivity and blind acquiescence of the masses, given the loyal support granted Bush by 59 million voters in 2004 and the perpetual support of 30 percent of American sheeple, given the reprehensible indifference and racist xenophobia towards Iraqis by many Americans, given the astounding mortality figures rising out of Iraq in the last fifteen years as a result of American involvement, it is both a shame and an embarrassment to consider oneself American. In this day and age, to consider oneself proud to be an American is to be in serious need of psychological assistance, psychotropic medication, or both. It is to be so brainwashed and manipulated by the state and the corporate media that the labeling of someone as ignorant is a valid affirmative defense.
To show no remorse against the myriad number of crimes against humanity and the war crimes perpetrated by the American government and its president is to lack the basic tenets of what it is to be human. It is to dwell in the land of sheeple and lemmings, immersed in a population of pathological sadists more concerned for the health of fictional television characters than in the genocide of hundreds of thousands of real human beings. To salute the red, white and blue today is to give comfort to terrorists and blind loyalty to criminals. It is to support the destruction of the Constitution, of democracy, international law and human decency. In short, saluting the American flag today is to declare war and commit treason against all the United States has ever stood for, all it has ever fought to preserve. It is to appease the real terrorists, aiding war criminals and granting blind loyalty and faith to the United Corporations of America, a nation of, by and for the corporate world and the elite that control it.
How sad that in the worst cluster of years in our history the American people decided to do nothing, preferring to sit on our ever expanding buttocks hypnotized by the corporate media, failing to act at the most important moment of our lives, our only contribution being remaining silent to the avalanche of war crimes and crimes against humanity that have laid waste to Iraq. How sad and pathetic Americans have become, in the first decade of the 21st century, becoming the ignorant, fearful, xenophobic, acquiescent and indifferent army of good Americans. A once virtuous and honorable people, at one time possessed of intelligence and free thinking minds have, in the span of a few decades, been transformed into the epitome of cattle, sheep and any other unthinking creatures of group mentality, today lacking the cognitive qualities used to reason and use logic to think independently of what the state and the corporate world inculcate.
Ignorance has prevailed over knowledge, eroding the very foundation of democracy, for an unthinking populace cannot possibly question its leaders, their motives, or be given the vital responsibility of electing representatives to act in their interest. With a population bred over decades for ignorance, incurious about the world, unaware of other cultures or lands, conditioned to fear what is not known, the state can act without accountability or restraint, for the blind masses have become too numb minded to even care or be concerned. This is the reality in America today, and the reason genocide goes silent, why it goes unquestioned or why it remains relatively unknown, much like that mass murder that took place in Vietnam. The truth is that Americans would rather not know what their government does in their name, fearing their comfortable lives would become upset with the knowledge of what is transpiring in Iraq at the hands of the American military machine.
Unthinking and easily manipulated, those residing inside the belly of the beast are mere clay in the hands of the powerful, easily molded into the cookie cutter drones of the corporatist state. Combined with the xenophobia, patriotism and nationalism spawned by 9/11, a dumbed down populace thus cares nothing for genocide committed in their name, regressing down a few steps down the evolutionary ladder, devolving into a knuckle dragging proto-primate only a nose hair separated from our chimp cousins. To the average American citizen, better a dead Iraqi than a night without the comfortable glare of the omnipresent television monitor. Better 655,000 dead subhuman Arabs than a day living without a gas-guzzling SUV tank.
To the 25 million Iraqis whose lives have been condemned to hell on Earth, courtesy of the United States, please accept this man’s sincere apology for what this wicked nation has done to your land and people, to your daily lives, culture and society. I know I speak for many who live in the United States when I say that I lower my head in shame at what is done in my name. Today, more than ever, I am ashamed to be American. I am ashamed for what this nation has done, for what it will continue doing, for what it has become and for the continued and silent acquiescence of the American people.
As much as words can traverse entire oceans and deserts, as much as they can never replace lives lost or family members buried, as much as they can never make right what has been wronged, please accept this digital apology for a horror many of us detest and abhor. I am truly sorry, from the bottom of my heart, for the curse that has befallen your beautiful land and culture. I apologize for the 30 to 40 percent of Americans that are one-step away from complete mental retardation. I apologize for the lazy, gluttonous and complacent millions whose only experience with life is the nightly glow of television. I apologize for the tens of millions of so-called Christians that call themselves the culture of life even as they drool with glee at the genocide taking place in your nation. I apologize that the Bush Crusade has not been stopped, that the American people have not hung the neocon cabal from the rafters and that the war culture will only continue laying waste to the peoples of the world.
The Iraq Genocide is a curse upon us all, a shame for all humanity, a crime of the highest order that should bring those responsible to deserved justice. In a more perfect world, there would be confidence that criminals and murderers and malfeasant authoritarians would be brought to justice. In the real world, however, they are promoted, elected and made much more powerful. They are given bonuses and pats on the back, allowed to join the elite membership of privilege and power. Such is human civilization that the genocide of 1.5 million a few years ago, 655,000 Iraqis the last three years, perhaps that of millions tomorrow, will be glossed over and forgotten, becoming one comma of history, not unlike many others that have come before, not unlike many others that are sure to follow, becoming yet one more reality of this self-destructive species called humankind. Genocide comes in many shapes and sizes, monopolized by nobody, suffered by all. Upon red rivers of genocide is Iraq being flooded with, released by America through its spigots of human wickedness.
May we one day be forgiven for the madness that has contaminated us. May Iraqis one day offer us the humanity we seem to have lost. May we find our way, if not for us, then for our progeny. May our children learn from our ways, evolving a better culture than we are leaving behind. Shame on us all for what we have allowed our government to become. Shame on us all for what we have allowed it to do in our name. Shame on America. Shame. Shame. Shame.
Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet essayist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.comas well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net.
it makes awful reading
I will continue to trawl the press and net.
If this is not to your taste please let me know.
What happened to "mission accomplished" and "democracy in the middle east"?Quote:
- The top American commander in Iraq, General George Casey, has ordered a review of a U.S.-led crackdown in Baghdad, a spokesman said on Thursday, as reinforcements have failed to ease violence and the U.S. death toll has spiked this month.
If Bush/Rumsfeld & co had a single moral fibre left in them, they'd be jumping around with their feet in their fekking mouths 24/7.
I apologise for that remark. It was uncalled for. I was a bit stressed at the time and now wish to climb down from my high horseQuote:
Originally Posted by seth106no offence mate, but that goes down as the most stupid question i have ever been asked. if you are having a laugh, thats cool, but if you asked that question in earnest then go and do yourselfQuote:
Originally Posted by spliff
After Pat’s Birthday
By Kevin Tillman
Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document.
10/20/06 "TruthDig" -- -- It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.
Much has happened since we handed over our voice:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.
Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.
Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.
Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.
Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.
Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.
Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.
Somehow torture is tolerated.
Somehow lying is tolerated.
Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.
Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.
Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.
Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.
Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.
Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.
Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.
Somehow this is tolerated.
Somehow nobody is accountable for this.
In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.
Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.
Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman, Kevin Tillman
Guardian Unlimited | Video | Sean Smith in Iraq
flash movie from the Guardian and the BBC
Medics beg for help as Iraqis die needlessly
Half of all deaths preventable, say country's medics Reconstruction seen as disaster More than 2,000 doctors and nurses are killed 18,000 more leave the nation. Even the most basic treatments are lacking
By Jeremy Laurance
Health Editor
10/20/06 "The Independent" -- -- The disintegration of Iraq's health service is leaving its civilians defenceless in the continuing violence that is rocking the country, Iraqi doctors warn today.
As many as half of the civilian deaths, calculated at 655,000 since the 2003 invasion, might have been avoided if proper medical care had been provided to the victims, they say.
In separate appeals, the doctors beg for help to stem the soaring death rate and ease the suffering of injured families and children. They say governments and the international medical community are ignoring their plight.
In the first 14 months after the 2003 invasion almost $20bn (?11bn) was spent on reconstruction by the British and American funds, including hundreds of millions on rebuilding and re-equipping the country's network of 180 hospitals and clinics.
But billions went missing because of a combination of criminal activity, corruption, and incompetence, leaving Iraqis without even the essentials for basic medical care.
The violence for which the Allied forces failed to plan has meant a $200m reconstruction project for building 142 primary care centres ran out of cash earlier this year with just 20 on course to be completed, an outcome the World Health Organisation described as "shocking".
In March, the campaign group Medact said 18,000 physicians had left the country since 2003, an estimated 250 of those that remained had been kidnapped and, in 2005 alone, 65 killed.
Medact also said "easily treatable conditions such as diarrhoea and respiratory illness caused 70 per cent of all child deaths", and that " of the 180 health clinics the US hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed and none opened".
Writing in the British Medical Journal today, Dr Basssim Al Sheibani and two colleagues from the Diwaniyah College of Medicine in Iraq says that, as the violence escalates, "the reality is we cannot provide any treatment for many of the victims."
"Emergency departments are staffed by doctors who do not have the proper experience or skills to manage emergency cases. Medical staff ... admit that more than half of those killed could have been saved if trained and experienced staff were available."
They say equipment, supplies and drugs are in many cases unobtainable. " Many emergency departments are no more than halls with beds, fluid suckers and oxygen bottles."
They add: "Our experience has taught us that poor emergency medicine services are more disastrous than the disaster itself. But despite the daily violence that is crushing Iraq, the international medical community is doing little more than looking on"
The shortages were graphically highlighted in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary made by GuardianFilms, and broadcast in February. It revealed that children with diarrhoeal disease were dying of dehydration because hospitals lacked the right sized needles to inject them with fluids.
In Diwaniyah children's hospital, doctors were shown struggling to give drugs by ventilation to a two-day old girl, Zehara, who was born with underdeveloped lungs, because they had the wrong sized plastic mask. Masks costs pennies but, like all other equipment, are in short supply.
Zehara's father was dispatched on to the streets to try to buy Vitamin K on the black market, urgently needed for an injection. But it was too late - by the time he returned, she was dead and her twin brother also passed away shortly afterwards.
In a separate report yesterday, Peter Kandela, an Iraqi doctor who has practised as a GP in Surrey for 30 years, travelled through Jordan and Syria interviewing Iraqi medical staff who had escaped the violence.
"The current Iraqi brain drain is the worst the country has seen in its modern history," he writes
"In the new Iraq there is a price tag linked to your position and status. Those doctors who have stayed in the country know what they are worth in kidnapping terms and ensure their relatives have easy access to the necessary funds to secure their speedy release if they are taken."
He describes a kidney surgeon seized by a group of armed men, despite the presence of security guards who he had hired to protect himself, whose first act was to go through his contacts book for other potential victims. " They had the audacity to suggest that in return for receiving better treatment inn captivity I should recommend others for kidnapping", the surgeon said.
He was released unharmed after a ransom of $250,000 was paid by his wife.
In Baghdad where no one can escape violence, hospitals provided the last refuge. But they are now unsafe and Iraqis are avoiding them. Public hospitals in the city are controlled by Shiia - who have come under suspicion for allowing death squads to enter them to kill Sunnis.
Abu Nasr, the cousin of a man injured in a car bomb who was dragged from his hospital bed and riddled with bullets, told the Washington Post: "We would prefer now to die instead of going to the hospitals. I will never go back to one, never. The hospitals have become killing fields."
Medical notes
34,000 The number of Iraqi physicians registered before the 2003 war.
18,000 The estimated number of Iraqi physicians who have left since the 2003 invasion.
2,000 The estimated number of Iraqi physicians murdered since 2003.
250 The number of Iraqi physicians kidnapped.
34 The number of reconstructive surgeons in Iraq before the 2003 invasion.
20 The number who have either been murdered of fled. 72 per cent of Iraqis needing reconstructive surgery are suffering from gunshot or blast wounds.
164 The number of nurses murdered - 77 wounded.
$243,000,000 The amount of money set aside by US administration to build 142 private health clinics in post-invastion Iraq.
20 The number of such clinics built by April 2006.
$0 The amount of money left over.
$1bn The amount of money the US administration has spent on Iraq's healthcare system.
$8bn The amount of money needed over the next 4 years to fund the health care system
70 the percentage of deaths among children caused by "easily treatable conditions" such as diarrhoea and respiratory illnesses.
270,000 The number of children born after 2003 who have had no immunisations.
HEALTH INDICATORS:
68 per cent of Iraqis with no access to safe drinking water.
19 per cent of Iraqis with sewerage access.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
The End of Maliki?
Will a Coup Unravel Iraq
By Robert Dreyfuss The clock is ticking for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the hapless, feckless leader of the Shiite fundamentalist party Al Dawa. From Washington, London, Baghdad, and other capitals come rumors that Maliki's government will soon be overthrown by a nationalist general or colonel or that he will resign in favor of an emergency "government of national salvation."
A coup d'état in Iraq would put a period -- or rather an exclamation point -- at the end of the Bush administration's bungled experiment with democracy there. And it would open an entirely new phase in that country's post-2003 national nightmare. Would it result in the creation of a Saddam-like strongman to rule Iraq with a heavy hand? Or would it force the warring parties (Sunni insurgents, Iranian-backed Shiite militias, and Kurdish warlords) to intensify the bloody civil war that is tearing Iraq apart? No one knows.
As the carnage in Iraq reaches new heights of barbarism, what's clear is the utter uselessness of Maliki's government. It is simply incapable of staunching the bloodletting. Despite weeks of blunt warnings from U.S. officials that time was running out for him, on Sunday the Prime Minister announced yet again that efforts to disarm Iraq's militias would be postponed. "The initial date we've set for disbanding the militias is the end of this year or the beginning of next year," he said, according to USA Today. Still, whatever form it might take, a coup d'état stands an excellent chance of making a horrible situation worse. Rather than toy with yet another misstep, the capstone in a seemingly endless series of errors in Iraq, the Bush administration -- including the increasingly powerful "realist," anti-neoconservative policy types now emerging in Washington -- would do far better to start planning for a quick exit.
Despite the bloodbath fears that are constantly raised about an Iraq without American troops, a U.S. exit need not consign that country to years of Rwanda-style ethnic slaughter or a Congo-style civil war. Even as it leaves, there are plenty of things the United States could do to ameliorate the state of post-occupation Iraq, including beginning real negotiations with the Iraqi resistance and launching diplomatic efforts to get neighboring countries, especially Iran and Syria, to stay out of the conflict.
Even though a military coup might seem to some desperate policymakers a tempting option, it's one of those quicksand ideas. In a paper just written for the Middle East Institute, the sagacious Wayne White -- who headed the State Department's intelligence effort on Iraq until last year -- specifically warns that it's time for the United States to "back off" in Iraq:
"A series of apparent U.S. ultimatums and veiled political threats aimed at the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in recent weeks -- especially Maliki himself -- is but the latest example of excessive U.S. involvement in the Iraqi political process. "[But] it is time that setting the overall direction of Iraqi politics must be left to Iraqis, for better or worse. Washington must recognize that it cannot orchestrate political success in that tortured land through still more heavy-handed political tampering. And stepping back from the Iraqi political fray is a prerequisite for any overall exit strategy."Is a Coup in the Cards?
I first raised the possibility of a coup d'etat in an October 6 column, "Coup in Iraq?" for TomPaine.com. It followed a drumbeat of comments and statements from Bush administration officials, U.S. military officers, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton -- co-chairman with James A. Baker III of the Iraq Study Group -- all of whom warned Maliki ominously that he had only a matter or weeks or months to get a handle on Iraq's paramilitary armies, militias, and death squads. The consequences for the Prime Minister of failing to do so were left unsaid, but the warnings were so explicit that Maliki spoke to George W. Bush this week about how he should interpret the barrage of deadline-like statements, and the President replied, according to spokesman Tony Snow, "Don't worry, you have our full support." (Think: Heck of a job, Maliki!) In fact, whatever consoling words the President might have had for him, the Iraqi Prime Minister has almost no reservoir of support left either in Washington or among U.S. military commanders in Iraq.
Over the weekend, rumors began to fly thick and fast. In a piece headlined "Iraqis Call for Five-Man Junta to End the Anarchy," Marie Colvin wrote in the Sunday Times of London:
"Iraq's fragile democracy, weakened by mounting chaos and a rapidly rising death toll, is being challenged by calls for the formation of a hard-line ‘government of national salvation.' "The proposal, which is being widely discussed in political and intelligence circles in Baghdad, is to replace the Shi'ite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, with a regime capable of imposing order and confronting the sectarian militias leading the country to the brink of civil war. Dr. Saleh al-Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni politician, traveled to Arab capitals last week seeking support for the replacement of the present government with a group of five strongmen who would impose martial law and either dissolve parliament or halt its participation in day-to-day government."Mutlaq, who is sympathetic to, if not affiliated with, the Iraqi resistance and its former Baathist leaders, explicitly called for Maliki to step down.
Colvin quoted Anthony Cordesman, an uber-realist, conservative U.S. military analyst, claiming that there is a "very real possibility" Maliki will be toppled. "There could be a change in government, done in a backroom, which could see a general brought in to run the ministry of defense or the interior."
David Ignatius -- an exceedingly well-connected reporter at the Washington Post -- wrote a column on October 13 citing Mutlaq as well, and suggesting that Iraq's own intelligence service (created, funded, and run by the CIA) is involved:
"The coup rumors come from several directions. U.S. officials have received reports that a prominent Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, visited Arab capitals over the summer and promoted the idea of a national salvation government, suggesting, erroneously, that it would have American support. Meanwhile, top officials of the Iraqi intelligence service have discussed a plan in which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would step aside in favor of a five-man ruling commission that would suspend parliament, declare martial law and call back some officers of the old Iraqi army. "Frustration with Maliki's Shiite-led government is strongest among Iraq's Sunni minority, which dominated the old regime of Saddam Hussein. But as sectarian violence has increased, the disillusionment has spread to some prominent Shiite and Kurdish politicians as well. Some are said to support the junta-like commission, which would represent the country's main factions and include former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi -- still seen by some Iraqis as a potential ‘strongman' who could pull the country back from the brink."To be sure, Allawi -- in London -- denied any reports in an interview with Newsweek that he is involved in plotting a coup d'état. "Total nonsense. To plot a coup, I don't sit in London," huffed Allawi, a long-time asset of the CIA and British intelligence. "I would be sitting in Baghdad trying to make a coup."
Allawi's denials aside, when I spoke to a former CIA officer with wide experience in the Middle East, far from pooh-poohing the idea he had this to say:
"It's being talked about in Washington. One scenario is, the Iraqis do it themselves, some Iraqi colonel who's fed up with the whole thing, who takes over the country. And it would take the United States forty-eight hours to figure out how to respond, and meanwhile he's taken over everything. The other side of the coin is, we do it ourselves. Find some general up in Ramadi or somewhere, and help him take over. And he'd declare a state of emergency and crack down. And he'd ask us to leave -- that would be our exit strategy. It's a distinct possibility. I've raised this with a number of foreign service and intelligence people, and most of them -- remembering the days of the coups d'état in the Middle East -- say, ‘Hear, hear!' "And you know what? I think Rumsfeld would jump on this idea in five minutes."Of course, no coup will happen at all -- no general or colonel would dare try -– without, at the very least, a wink and a nod from the CIA, the U.S. military, or Ambassador Khalilzad. And most likely, it would take significantly more than a wink, something like explicit support and promises of assistance.
But, according to my reporting, that is precisely what is being discussed in Washington, even among the inner councils of James Baker's Iraq Study Group, the realist (that is, anti-neoconservative) commission set up last spring to figure out what to do about Iraq.
Salah Mukhtar, a former top Iraqi official who served as Iraq's ambassador to India and then Vietnam in the period just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is not a spokesman for the Iraqi resistance. But he is very well plugged in to the thinking of that country's insurgent leaders. When I spoke to him this week by telephone, he assured me the resistance is well aware that elements in the Bush administration might be planning a coup. According to him, the main focus of such a coup -- even one fostered by the United States -- would be to mobilize the Iraqi Army against the Shiite militias:
"The increase in the volume of mass killing in Iraq is creating a willingness among the people to accept a military coup. I would say that 80% of Iraqis are willing to accept it, to accept anything that would help to crush the Iranian gangs [i.e., the militias of the Shiite religious parties, such as the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army]. "The United States is making contacts with some old Iraqi generals in Jordan. They are former Baathists. The United States is looking for people to topple the government of Maliki. Some of them are in Iraq, and some of them are based in Jordan. Some of them turned down the U.S. offers, but some of them accepted.The Unraveling of Iraq?
"If there is a military coup in Iraq, that coup will be [sympathetic to] the Baathists. If its leader is not pro-Baathist, there will be a second coup against that leader. So either way, it will result in a pro-Baathist government… It would be a crazy move by the United States. It shows that they don't understand Iraq."
What does all this mean? As a start, it probably represents a belated Washington wish-list that contains quite a disparate, if not conflicting, set of ideas about the American future in Iraq. Some top officials are surely eyeing the possibility of a last-ditch effort to establish a government that would stabilize the country, put down the resistance, and create a secure environment for President Bush's "victory" strategy in Iraq -- even though that victory would have nothing to do with democracy. Others in or around the administration are undoubtedly drawn to the idea of a coup, or at least of the forced removal of Prime Minister Maliki in some fashion because it would present a fig leaf for an American "redeployment" (read: withdrawal from Iraq). Under this scenario, the United States could exit as gracefully as circumstances allow, leaving behind a strong Iraqi central government that might still be an ally of some sort.
Indeed, as early as mid-August, a New York Times piece suggested that at least some officials in the White House had given up on the idea of democracy in Iraq and were ready to look at "alternatives":
"Some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq's democratically elected government might not survive. "'Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,' said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity."Whatever fantasies officials in Washington or Iraq may harbor, however, a coup d'état in Baghdad would by no means be a silver bullet to end Iraq's anarchy. Quite the opposite, it might just add to the bloody unraveling of the country. The problem is, as one experienced Middle East hand told me, "In order to mount a coup, you have to have a state. And there is no state in Iraq."
Iraq is utterly anarchic, a Mad Max world of clashing paramilitaries, gangs, warlords, sectarian fighters, death squads, criminal enterprises, government-backed mafias, and several hundred thousand Army men, police, Interior Ministry commandos, and special units like the Facilities Protection Service that are only loosely under the control of the central government. So how would a prospective coup-maker, even with Washington's fervent backing, impose his will on all that?
The answer is: He couldn't. If a coup happens, it will likely signal that the center of gravity inside Baghdad's Green Zone has shifted from the Shiite majority (and its religious parties, such as Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) to a more centrist, more pro-Sunni, less sectarian, less religious, and less ideological bloc. It might be seen as an attempt by the CIA and the U.S. military to re-install a more Saddam-like regime in Baghdad, perhaps with the intent of undoing the damage that has been done to Iraq's unity and stability by the neoconservatives. But like all too-clever-by-half strategies, this one would probably make things not better but a lot worse in a country that has already been torn to shreds by the U.S. invasion and occupation.
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post, Tomdispatch, and other sites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report, at his website.
Copyright 2006 Robert Dreyfuss
Oct 22 (Reuters) - Following are security and other developments in Iraq as of 1910 GMT on Sunday: Asterisk indicates new or updated item.
HADITHA - Four people were killed and five wounded in clashes between U.S. forces and gunmen in Haditha, west of Baghdad, police said.
* BAQUBA - A bomb blast and an ambush by gunmen on a convoy of buses near Baquba killed 13 police recruits and several more recruits were kidnapped, a local official said. Another 25 recruits were wounded in the ambush on the buses which were taking the recruits to Baghdad from a base attacked by insurgents using mortars and rifle fire on Saturday. There were 80 casualties, including many dead, from Saturday's attack, the official said. * BAGHDAD - The Interior Ministry said 50 bodies had been found in Baghdad over the past 24 hours.
* MOSUL - Three bodies were found in Mosul, a hospital source said. SALAHEDDIN PROVINCE - A U.S. soldier was killed and three more wounded as a result of enemy action in Salaheddin Province, the military said.
ANBAR PROVINCE - A U.S. Marine was killed in combat in western Anbar province on Saturday, the U.S. military said on Sunday, bringing to 79 the number of U.S. military deaths in October, the deadliest for American troops this year.
BAGHDAD - A suicide bomber killed six people and wounded 20 on Palestine Street in central Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - A bomb under a vehicle killed three people and wounded six in a market in Al Rashid street in central Baghdad, police said.
MAHMUDIYA - Gunmen killed a man police said was responsible for bicycle bomb and mortar attacks on Saturday that killed 16 and wounded 60 in a market in Mahmudiya, a town in the Sunni insurgent "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad.
MADAEN - Sunni and Shi'ite tribes clashed between Madaen and Suwayra, south of Baghdad, on Saturday, police said. On the Shi'ite side, six people were killed and three wounded, and three Sunnis were also killed, police said.
KUT - Interfax-Ukraine said a blast killed a Ukrainian and wounded another on Friday, 45 km (30 miles) west of Kut in southern Iraq. They were working as contractors for a British firm. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry was unavailable to confirm the report.
BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed two street cleaners in the western Baghdad district of Yarmuk, an Interior Ministry source said.
MOSUL - Two bodies were found with gunshot wounds in Mosul, one of them a police officer, a hospital source said.
NEAR MAHAWEEL - A roadside bomb near Mahaweel, 75 km (50 miles) south of Baghdad, killed a civilian whose car was hit by the blast, police said. BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed a barber in Amil, in southern Baghdad, police said. KUT - Gunmen killed a former member of the Baath Party in Kut, 170 km (105 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - Two blasts wounded several people in eastern Baghdad. Police said four were wounded and attributed the blasts to a car bomb and a roadside bomb. An Interior Ministry source said 14 were wounded and said it was a car bomb and a mortar.
BAGHDAD - Gunmen kidnapped two Shi'ite tribal leaders as they were driving into Baghdad from the south, police said, adding their families had received a ransom demand for $500,000.
BAGHDAD - The Defence Ministry said 29 suspected insurgents had been arrested around Iraq in the past 24 hours.
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad wounded a civilian, police said.
God bless America's armed forces and our efforts to establish a stable democracy in Iraq!
Bloody battle for Amarah a glimpse of future
By Kim Sengupta
Published: 21 October 2006
The militia headed by the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr yesterday took over the southern Iraqi city of Amarah, recently vacated by British forces, after a day of heavy fighting which left dozens killed, almost 100 injured and widespread damage to buildings.
In what is being seen as a symbolic flexing of muscle, heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters in black uniforms stormed and took over the three main police stations and flattened them with explosives.
British troops were put on standby to move back into Amarah last night as Mr Sadr's militia battles the rival Shia Badr Brigade for the control of the south and its lucrative oil fields.
Amid conflicting reports about who exactly was controlling the capital of Maysan province two companies of the Iraqi army with British "advisers" were despatched from Basra. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nour al-Maliki, sent a high-powered delegation from Baghdad to seek talks with Mr Sadr's representatives.
In a string of towns in western Iraq, Sunni fighters held "victory parades".
The US authorities have effectively admitted they have lost the battle for Baghdad despite pouring in 12,000 troops. Major-General William Caldwell said the operation, called Together Forward, "has not met our overall expectations in sustaining a reduction in the level of violence".
More than 100 people were killed in Balad, an hour's drive north of Baghdad, in two days of sectarian violence after the town had been handed over to Iraqi forces.
The Amarah confrontation is especially worrying for Britain because it threatens to jeopardise the exit strategy under which forces have been withdrawn from a several areas with maintenance of security handed over to Iraqi forces. The threat of violence has increased with plans to devolve the country into a federal structure, a move bitterly opposed by Mr Sadr.
Defence sources say this fear of being "sucked back in" was one reasons behind the decision by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the Army, to speak out about disengagement from Iraq last week.
The fighting in Amarah began after Qassim al-Tamimi, the head of police intelligence for Maysan and a member of the Badr Brigade was killed by a roadside bomb. The brigade, said to have strong links with Iran, retaliated by kidnapping the brother of Sheikh Fadel al-Bahadli, the Mahdi Army commander in the province and demanding the handover of al-Tamimi's killers.
Mohammed al-Alaskari, an official with the Iraqi defence ministry, said: "All the parties have started a truce but the situation remains very tense and we have dispatched two companies from Basra."
Dr Zamil Shia, director of Amarah's department of health, said 22 civilians, three of them children, have been killed in the clashes. He said his staff were able to cope for the time being, but may need more supplies if the fighting continues.
The militia headed by the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr yesterday took over the southern Iraqi city of Amarah, recently vacated by British forces, after a day of heavy fighting which left dozens killed, almost 100 injured and widespread damage to buildings.
In what is being seen as a symbolic flexing of muscle, heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters in black uniforms stormed and took over the three main police stations and flattened them with explosives.
British troops were put on standby to move back into Amarah last night as Mr Sadr's militia battles the rival Shia Badr Brigade for the control of the south and its lucrative oil fields.
Amid conflicting reports about who exactly was controlling the capital of Maysan province two companies of the Iraqi army with British "advisers" were despatched from Basra. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nour al-Maliki, sent a high-powered delegation from Baghdad to seek talks with Mr Sadr's representatives.
In a string of towns in western Iraq, Sunni fighters held "victory parades".
The US authorities have effectively admitted they have lost the battle for Baghdad despite pouring in 12,000 troops. Major-General William Caldwell said the operation, called Together Forward, "has not met our overall expectations in sustaining a reduction in the level of violence".
More than 100 people were killed in Balad, an hour's drive north of Baghdad, in two days of sectarian violence after the town had been handed over to Iraqi forces.
The Amarah confrontation is especially worrying for Britain because it threatens to jeopardise the exit strategy under which forces have been withdrawn from a several areas with maintenance of security handed over to Iraqi forces. The threat of violence has increased with plans to devolve the country into a federal structure, a move bitterly opposed by Mr Sadr.
Defence sources say this fear of being "sucked back in" was one reasons behind the decision by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the Army, to speak out about disengagement from Iraq last week.
The fighting in Amarah began after Qassim al-Tamimi, the head of police intelligence for Maysan and a member of the Badr Brigade was killed by a roadside bomb. The brigade, said to have strong links with Iran, retaliated by kidnapping the brother of Sheikh Fadel al-Bahadli, the Mahdi Army commander in the province and demanding the handover of al-Tamimi's killers.
Mohammed al-Alaskari, an official with the Iraqi defence ministry, said: "All the parties have started a truce but the situation remains very tense and we have dispatched two companies from Basra."
Dr Zamil Shia, director of Amarah's department of health, said 22 civilians, three of them children, have been killed in the clashes. He said his staff were able to cope for the time being, but may need more supplies if the fighting continues.
The Independent
DAMASCUS, 22 October (IRIN) - More than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing what the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) describes as a "very bleak future" after the agency's budget for offices across the region was halved for the coming year. Andrew Harper, coordinator for the Iraq unit at UNHCR in Geneva, told IRIN that funds for the agency's Iraq programme have been drastically reduced for 2007 because of donors scaling back their contributions. As Iraq makes up a significant proportion of UNHCR's work in the Middle East, Lolles said this cut in funds for Iraq roughly halves a region-wide budget that is already "totally insufficient to provide tangible results". "Iraq has seen the largest and most recent displacement of any UNHCR project in the world, yet even as more Iraqis are displaced and as their needs increase, the funds to help them are decreasing," said Harper. "This growing humanitarian crisis has simply gone under the radar screen of most donors."Harper added that this reduction of funds had led to the suspension of a number of priority UNHCR projects. These include work to identify and aid the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, including single mothers, the sick and the elderly. UNHCR estimates that more than 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, including some 800,000 who fled their homes prior to 2003 and 750,000 who have fled since. A further 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees in neighbouring countries, the majority in Syria and Jordan.Donations to UNHCR's Iraq programme from the United States, European Union nations, Japan and Australia have been in free fall since the start of the US-led occupation of Iraq, despite the ever-increasing numbers of refugees fleeing the deadly violence there. From a high of US $150 million in 2003, the UNHCR budget for its Iraq programme fell to just $29 million in 2006. One quarter of that budget is allocated to meeting the needs of Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. Syria hosts the largest Iraqi refugee community in the region. Before the fall of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the number of Iraqis living in Syria was estimated to be 100,000. Local NGOs estimate the current Iraqi community in Syria to be 800,000. A report released in May by UNHCR, the UN's children's agency (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme concluded that an some 450,000 Iraqis in Syria "are facing aggravated difficulties" related to their "ambiguous legal status and unsustainable income". The population of Syria is nearly 19 million. On 20 October, Ron Redmond, UNHCR chief spokesman, said some 40,000 Iraqis are now arriving in Syria each month.Among Iraqi refugees living in the capital, Damascus, there is a sense of desperation that a vital lifeline looks set to be cut. "We do not have jobs because there are thousands of Iraqis in Syria and without this help we are going to have to beg for money in the streets," said Haj Jamal, a 62-year-old Iraqi refugee living in Damascus."I urge in the name of all Iraqi refugees in Syria that the United Nations looks after this situation and remembers that without this support, thousands of newly poor people will be walking the streets of Syria next year," he added.Laurens Jolles, UNHCR acting representative in Damascus, told IRIN that his office had requested a 2006 budget of $1.3 million but received only $700,000. This means its budget for 2006 amounted to less than one dollar a year to spend on each Iraqi refugee in Syria, without taking into account the refugee agency's operating costs and its expenditure on non-Iraqi refugees. The majority of Iraqi refugees in Syria live in the suburbs of Damascus, in deteriorating socio-economic conditions. They have access to public schools and health care but have to travel out of the country every six months to renew their visas and cannot hold work permits, resulting in high unemployment. "When Iraqis first came here they brought resources and many were not in need of assistance. Two years on, that situation has changed and many refugees are no longer able to look after themselves," said Jolles. "The situation in Iraq is getting worse and there is no prospect of return. Without providing sufficient resources to help the host governments contain the refugee population there will be a secondary displacement of refugees to Europe. The time to do something is now."UNHCR is now calling on donor countries to extend their funding of the Iraq programme to a budget of around $25m for 2007.
U.S. official admits "arrogance" in Iraq
By Claudia Parsons
10/22/06 "Reuters" -- -- The United States has shown "arrogance" and "stupidity" in Iraq, a senior U.S. diplomat said in an interview aired on Sunday, after U.S. President George W. Bush said he was flexible on tactics, if not strategy.
U.S. military deaths in Iraq in October reached 78 this weekend, making it the most deadly month for Americans this year and raising pressure ahead of Congressional elections in November where Bush's Republican party could lose its majority in both houses halfway through his second term as president.
"We tried to do our best (in Iraq) but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq," senior U.S. State Department official Alberto Fernandez told Al Jazeera speaking in Arabic in a broadcast heard on Sunday by Reuters.
The State Department -- which has long been at odds with the Pentagon over Iraq according to several recent books -- had said earlier that a translation of the comments posted on Al Jazeera's English language Web site had misquoted its director of public diplomacy in the bureau of Near Eastern affairs.
"What he (Fernandez) says is that it is not an accurate quote," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. Asked whether he thought the United States would be judged as being arrogant, McCormack said "No".
Al Jazeera's English language Web Site also quoted Fernandez as saying Washington was ready to talk with any Iraqi group except al Qaeda in Iraq to end violence.
The Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been meeting Shi'ite clerics this week to enlist their support in calming militia infighting in southern Iraq as well as sectarian violence between Shi'ites and Sunnis.
Disarming militias such as the Mehdi Army, loyal to powerful young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is seen as crucial by the United States but has proved difficult for Maliki who relies on the support of the political groups linked to the militias.
BUSH SAYS FLEXIBLE ON TACTICS, GOAL UNCHANGED
On Saturday Bush held a videoconference involving Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, top White House officials and U.S. military officials in Iraq, who have admitted that a two-month plan to secure Baghdad has failed to rein in violence and that the strategy is under review.
In his radio address on Saturday, Bush said: "We will continue to be flexible, and make every necessary change to prevail in this struggle."
He added, "Our goal in Iraq is clear and unchanging."
The White House has drawn a distinction between flexibility on tactics and a big overhaul of the strategy in Iraq, and officials have suggested such a broad revamp was not imminent.
Longtime Bush family friend and former Secretary of State James Baker is leading a panel that is preparing recommendations for alternative strategies in Iraq.
But the Iraq Study Group's report will not be issued until after the Nov. 7 elections, at which some polls suggest Republicans could lose control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, where Democrats and some Republicans are already saying it is time to reassess U.S. policy in Iraq three years after the invasion.
Some have suggested the administration might use the bipartisan group's findings as cover for an exit strategy.
Jeffrey White, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, suggested a substantial policy revision was being weighed.
"It looks to me like this supertanker is turning," he said. "It takes a long time but I think the turn is beginning to be made."
Bombs rigged to bicycles followed by a barrage of mortars killed 16 people and wounded 60 on Saturday in a market in Mahmudiya, a town in the Sunni insurgent "Triangle of Death" bastion south of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.
Gunmen killed a man there on Sunday who the police said was responsible for the attacks, a Reuters photographer in town said.
That came after several days of Shi'ite infighting and sectarian clashes in towns such as Amara and Balad, both of which were handed over to Iraqi security forces in recent months as part of U.S. efforts to gradually transfer responsibility.
There were reports of several roadside bombs, car bombs and shootings in Baghdad and around the country on Sunday, but it was a relatively calm day ahead of the Eid holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan which is expected to start in the coming days.
A roadside bomb under a vehicle killed three people and wounded six, including a police officer, as they were shopping in a market in Al Rashid street in central Baghdad ahead of the holiday, police said.
(Additional reporting by Ibon Villelabeitia, Mariam Karouny, Aseel Kami in Baghdad, Caren Bohan in Washington and Ghaida Ghantous in Dubai)
© 1998-2006 Reuters Limited.
Iraqi youth want U.S. troops to withdraw
By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press Writer
10/22/06 "AP" -- -- WASHINGTON - Majorities of Iraqi youth in Arab regions of the country believe security would improve and violence decrease if the U.S.-led forces left immediately, according to a State Department poll that provides a window into the grim warnings provided to policymakers.
The survey — unclassified, but marked "For Official U.S. Government Use Only" — also finds that Iraqi leaders may face particular difficulty recruiting young Sunni Arabs to join the stumbling security forces. Strong majorities of 15- to 29-year-olds in two Arab Sunni areas — Mosul and Tikrit-Baquba — would oppose joining the Iraqi army or police.
The poll has its shortcomings; regional samples are small and the results do not say how many people refused to respond to questions. The private polling firm hired by the State Department also was not able to interview residents of al-Anbar, a Sunni-dominated province and an insurgent stronghold.
But the findings of the summer survey — circulated to policymakers last month and obtained by The Associated Press last week — nevertheless provide a solemn reminder of the difficulty that the U.S.-backed Iraqi government faces as it tries to add ethnic diversity to its security institutions.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press
The Sunday Times October 22, 2006
Iraq is no Vietnam – it's far worse than that
Andrew Sullivan
https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gif V, it turns out, is not for vendetta. It’s for Vietnam. In the long, bitter debate before the Iraq war it was always war opponents who brought the V-word up. Many of us who never lived through that nightmare shrugged it off. It was another baby-boomer neurosis, we thought. America had fought and won wars since then, notably the first Gulf war. America had liberated Afghan Muslims and protected Bosnian Muslims, without the “quagmire” so many warned about. It became a point of pride for war supporters to deny outright any Vietnam comparison as preposterous. So it made news when last week the president himself confirmed that the analogy had some bite. He was asked about a recent analogy from Thomas Friedman, a columnist, who had compared the current moment in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive when Vietcong guerrillas in the south and North Vietnamese troops launched a joint attack and prompted a collapse in morale in the American heartland. “He could be right,” George W Bush said. “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence and we’re heading into an election.”
NI_MPU('middle');
The president didn’t mean, mind you, that the United States was losing. He was reiterating what has long been a common view among neoconservatives: that the Tet offensive was a military failure for the Vietcong, which was crushed, but a profound PR success for the communist North. The lesson neoconservatives drew was that America will not falter, as it did in Vietnam.
“The full context was that the comparison was about the propaganda waged in the Tet offensive,” the White House explained later. “The president was reiterating something he’s said before — that the enemy is trying to shake our will.”
Consider it shaken. The polls suggest plummeting support for the war and deep discontent with the president and Congress. And the reason, it must be conceded, is similar to the reason in the Vietnam war. The US is now in a classic counter-insurgency war, just as it was in Vietnam. Its superior firepower is of no use in such a situation, just as carpet-bombing Vietnam and Cambodia couldn’t turn the Vietnamese population into allies of a foreign intervention.
Worse, the military has even less knowledge and intimacy with the culture and history of Iraq than it did in Vietnam. It has no South Vietnamese to deploy as spies and informants. Without that knowledge, and without support from a functioning government on the ground, the military risks becoming paralysed by a maze of tribal, sectarian and religious forces that it can neither understand nor master.
On a practical basis this means that American soldiers can clear a town of insurgents but when the Americans leave the insurgents return and, in the absence of a powerful central government, the inhabitants have no option but to co-operate with the enemy. The government’s own forces are either incompetent or infiltrated by the very militias that are fomenting the sectarian conflict in the first place. And so the war grinds on, with little chance of victory.
A political solution, the only secure way to achieve peace in Iraq, has slipped across the horizon, as Sunni Arabs, Shi’ite Arabs and Sunni Kurds recoil into the protection of the clan, the tribe and the ethnic or religious family. After each round of violence a cycle of revenge follows.
And so the Iraqi civilian casualties mount to something like 3,500 a month. We can argue about numbers but it remains indisputable that the number of deaths in Iraq is now surpassing the murderous levels of the previous dictatorship. The Americans look on, fighting hard in some places, resigned to stalemate elsewhere.
If you look up such a situation in a dictionary, you’ll stumble across the V-word eventually. But the analogy still doesn’t hold. In terms of American casualties there is no comparison. The toll in Vietnam was 20 times that of Iraq — and there was a draft (conscription to you Brits), so the cost of warfare was brought home powerfully across America. Today’s volunteer military both minimises such casualties and protects most Americans from the war’s terrible toll.
In other respects the analogy is flawed because the situation in Iraq is worse than Vietnam. When South Vietnam fell, the consequences were largely restricted to the region. They were awful — as the toll of communism culled hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and Vietnam. But they ended at the ocean.
In Iraq the consequences of American withdrawal could be a full-scale civil war, widespread ethnic cleansing, and the involvement of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and even Egypt in a potentially catastrophic Sunni-Shi’ite conflagration. Add to that the possibility of Turkey intervening in Kurdistan and you could have the region with a chokehold on the world’s energy supplies turning into a corpse-ridden, Balkan desert.
Worse, withdrawal could allow for a failed state — or even region, like Anbar province — to become a training camp for jihadists to wage war on the West from a safe haven in the Middle East. Unlike Vietnam, this could bring the war home to America’s own cities. Or to London. Or Paris or Madrid or Tel Aviv.
If victory is impossible and defeat unimaginable, what can America do? One answer is the one given by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary: denial. Last week Cheney said the government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, was doing “remarkably well”. Sadly for Cheney the number of Americans willing to believe this is now much lower than the number who believe the Earth was made in seven days 6,000 years ago.
And so the smart money in Washington, especially if the Democrats retake part or all of the Congress on November 7, is on some sort of deal with the neighbouring regimes to stabilise and police Iraq.
The Bush family consigliere, James Baker, has been asked to come up with a plan. It may take talking directly to Iran and Syria, something that will represent a real volte-face for the White House. It may mean reaching out to Jordan, the Saudis, and even the Russians for direct or indirect negotiation with the various factions in Iraq — or with Iran and Syria.
Just as a chastened America will have to cede managing the North Korean crisis to China, so it will have to pass on some of the burden for containing Iraq to its neighbours. It’s a high-risk strategy — but so are all the alternatives.
More important: it will be an acknowledgment that the project as it has been understood for the past three years is now over. But we will have to wait until after the elections to know exactly what lies ahead.
Now we know what we know, why is Blair still in office?
As more evidence of his role in the Iraq debacle emerges, it beggars belief that the Prime Minister hasn't been impeached
Henry Porter
Sunday October 22, 2006
The Observer
Over the course of little more than a week, we have learned that civilian casualties so far in the Iraq war may be more than 600,000; that Britain's Chief of the General Staff believes the conflict could break the army apart; that a federal solution to the growing chaos involving the effective dismemberment of the country is being openly discussed in America; that the US Iraq Study Group, headed by Republican grandee James Baker, is recommending that the US military withdraws to bases outside Iraq and seeks Iranian and Syrian help; and that Britain is now the number one al-Qaeda target, partly, it seems clear, as a consequence of events in Iraq.
There should be at least one universal response to this in Britain. Why is Tony Blair still Prime Minister after leading his country into such a disastrous war? Any large company would by now have got rid of a managing director guilty of a mistake on that scale. Any institution you care to name would have done the same. Why is Blair immune from the normal requirements of high office?
Why, instead of being allowed by the cabinet to establish six new policy committees designed to entrench his legacy, has he not been impeached and thrown out of office? Even if his Iraq policy was formed in good faith, the scale of the error surely requires us to ask him and all those concerned with this disaster to leave.
It doesn't matter now whether you were pro-war, strongly opposed to it or somewhere in between, the policy in the Middle East has been an unmitigated failure, an outcome that was built into the earliest planning for the enterprise. People's views four years ago don't count now because Britain is at the heart of a world-changing catastrophe and as far as our interests go, there has not been a single advantage, not even the one of keeping the special relationship alive.
How did we get here? The answer is still not entirely clear. We think we know that Blair manipulated the situation, but we still don't have all the evidence. What is needed is for people to come forward and for the past to be examined more intensively than before.
For instance, it is well worth returning to a memo written by a young diplomat named Matthew Rycroft, which is still significantly undervalued as evidence of the Prime Minister's drive to war and of the innate negligence of American planning for the period after the invasion.
Rycroft is now safely tucked away in Sarajevo as British ambassador to Bosnia. But in the summer of 2002, aged 34, he was Tony Blair's private secretary for foreign affairs. In this capacity, he attended a secret meeting at Downing Street which included Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, and Blair's military chiefs and the sofa cabinet - Alastair Campbell, Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell. He then wrote a memo to his boss, Sir David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser.
It is really a minute of the meeting. The crucial passage reads: 'C [Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [the US National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.'
The Downing Street Memo, as it became known, was published in the Sunday Times on 1 May 2005, five days before the general election. It certainly made an impact but by the end of that week, it had been washed away with the rest of the pre-election clamour. Blair had won a third term and his mysterious hold over the British electorate managed even to vanquish these revelations about British and American thinking eight months before the war.
It took a while for it to surface in the press in the US although its consequence was immediately grasped in the blogosphere. In Britain, the memo became part of the inconclusive miasma of the Hutton report into David Kelly's death and of the Butler review of intelligence on WMD; and it decomposed in the public's understanding at roughly the same rate. Indeed, one often wonders if Blair has been saved by the amount of material produced by public inquiries (Hutton is 740 pages; Butler 192). The more that is published, the more the issues blur.
But the memo is the goods. It establishes Bush's resolve to find a pretext for war, regardless of the facts on WMD and Saddam's links to terrorism. It further makes plain that there was little or no thinking about the postwar period, an error that now must be regarded as equal to or greater than the invasion. No surprise is expressed in Rycroft's account of the meeting about what was going on in America, which leads one to assume that among a very small group, the idea of invasion was a fully fledged possibility, even though Blair was assuring the public and cabinet colleagues outside the inner circle that nothing had been decided.
There was much more in the original Sunday Times report on the meeting. Jack Straw and Lord Goldsmith had doubts about the legal case for war, while Blair was committed from the outset to supporting US plans for regime change. At the time, no one seems to have remembered what Tony Blair had said in his evidence to Lord Butler's report into the intelligence on WMD, published eight months before the memo came to light. Blair said: 'I remember that during the course of July and August, I was increasingly getting messages saying, "Are you about to go to war?" and I was thinking, "This is ridiculous" and so I remember towards the end of the holiday actually phoning Bush and saying we have got to put this right straight away... we've not decided on military action.'
If not a direct lie, it is hardly the truth.
On the September dossier, Tony Blair said: 'The purpose of the dossier was simply to say, "This is why we think there is intelligence that means that this is not fanciful view on our part."'
It is clear now that he knew the Americans were fixing their intelligence for war and that he had to get his act together. In all the emails that emerged during Lord Hutton's inquiry, the pressure to make this case is clear. Here is one from young Rycroft: 'Part of the answer of "why now?" is that the threat will only get worse if we don't act now - the threat that Saddam will use WMD, but also the threat that Iraq's WMD will somehow get into the hands of terrorists.' Rycroft was helping to build the dishonest case he knew was being forged on the other side of the Atlantic.
There is a lot still to be discovered. I believe we need to know exactly what happened in 2002 in order to decide what we are going to do now. The collapse of allied purpose is clear, Iraq is in free fall, yet we still have not found out exactly how a small group of politicians and officials hijacked policy and took us to war against the clear wishes of the nation.
As the situation deteriorates in Iraq, Britain's need to distance itself from Blair's policy increases by the day. We need more answers. The call on the political establishment outside Number 10 is urgent. The House of Commons must show it is not been entirely debauched by party politics and bring the government to account and that includes Labour members.
In the meantime, my mailbox is open all hours for the slightest information that may cast light on the path to war.
henry.porter@observer.co.uk
CBS) More than half a billion dollars earmarked to fight the insurgency in Iraq was stolen by people the U.S. had entrusted to run the country's Ministry of Defense before the 2005 elections, according to Iraqi investigators.
Iraq's former minister of finance says coalition members like the U.S. and Britain are doing little to help recover the money or catch suspects, most of whom fled the country. The 60 Minutes investigation also turned up audio recordings of a suspect who seems to be discussing the transfer of $45 million to the account of a top political adviser to the interim defense minister.
Correspondent Steve Kroft reports on this mother of all heists.
"We have not been given any serious, official support from either the United States or the U.K. or any of the surrounding Arab countries,”" says Ali Allawi, who was confronted with the missing funds when he took over as Iraq’s finance minister last year.
He thinks he knows why Iraqi investigators have gotten little help. "The only explanation I can come up with is that too many people in positions of power and authority in the new Iraq have been, in one way or another, found with their hands inside the cookie jar," says Allawi, who left his post when a new Iraqi government was formed earlier this year. "And if they are brought to trial, it will cast a very disparaging light on those people who had supported them and brought them to this position of power and authority," he tells Kroft.
One of the people praised in former U.S. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer's memoirs is a major suspect in the case. Ziad Cattan was in charge of military procurement at a time when the ministry of defense went on a $1.2 billion buying spree. Allawi estimates that $750 to $800 million of that money was stolen. Judge Radhi al-Radhi, head of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, which investigates official corruption, tells Kroft that a lot of the money that wasn't stolen was spent on outdated, useless equipment.
"It isn't true," says Cattan, whom 60 Minutes found in Paris and who was recently convicted in absentia in Iraq for squandering public funds. He showed Kroft documents and pictures of equipment that he says is now in Iraq. An official from Jane's, one of the world’s foremost experts in military hardware, says the documents Cattan provided were too vague to prove anything.
Audio recordings obtained by 60 Minutes reveal Cattan talking to an associate in Amman, Jordan, in 2004 about the distribution of Iraqi funds. According to two independent translations, he is discussing payoffs to Iraqi officials.
One possible payoff the recordings allude to is the transfer of $45 million to the account of a top political adviser to the defense minister, a man who is also identified on the recordings as a representative of the president and the prime minister of the interim government. Cattan acknowledged his own voice was on the recordings. Three translators say he specifically mentions "45 million dollars," but he disputes the translation. "I don't say dollars," he tells Kroft. "I don't remember what the matter was."
Cattan maintains that U.S. and coalition advisors at the Iraqi Ministry of Defense approved everything he did and says the recordings have been doctored. Audio experts consulted by 60 Minutes could not find any evidence of that. Judge Radhi also has a copy of the recordings and says a former employee of the ministry of defense confessed after hearing them.
60 Minutes has learned that Cattan is building himself a villa in Poland. Another suspect, Naer Jumaili, principal in a middle-man company that handled much of the $1.2 billion in Iraqi military contracts, is said to be buying real estate in Amman, Jordan, and building himself a large villa, even though he is wanted by Interpol. Judge Rahdi believes the fugitive suspects are bribing their way to freedom and says countries like Jordan and Poland have been "no help at all" in apprehending the suspects or recovering the money.
The case is one of 2,000 Iraqi government corruption cases the judge’s commission is handling that, all told, involve $7.5 billion.
No one in the U.S. government would speak on camera about the case. But U.S. officials say this was Iraqi money spent by a sovereign Iraqi government and therefore is the Iraqis' business.
Produced by Andy Court and Keith Sharman
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
October 18, 2006
MEDIA ALERT: DEMOCRACY AND DEBATE - KILLING IRAQ
The Lancet Reports 655,000 Excess Iraqi Deaths As A Consequence Of The Invasion
How do we judge the health of a free society? How do we distinguish the appearance of democracy from the reality?
There are no hard and fast rules, no scientific methodologies. But as a rule of thumb it is safe to suggest that we can learn much from a society’s willingness to address the humanitarian crimes for which it is responsible.
In a totalitarian society, we would expect such a discussion to be absent in any meaningful sense. But in a genuinely free society, we would expect a thorough, detailed and unrestrained debate. Although this second expectation is itself based on an important assumption: namely, that individual freedom implies moral concern, a sense of responsibility for the suffering of others. We assume that to be a free human being means, also, to be free from the bonds of selfishness and indifference.
October 11 and 12 were significant dates, then, for anyone seeking to establish something of the truth of our own society. On October 11 news organisations began reporting the results of an article published by the Lancet medical journal: ’Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey.’ The study was led by Gilbert Burnham of the prestigious Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The survey itself was conducted by eight Iraqi doctors led by Riyadh Lafta of Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad. The doctors collected data from 1,849 households comprising 12,801 individuals in 47 population clusters across Iraq. The survey findings were staggering:
“We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which... constitutes a humanitarian emergency.” (Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts, ‘Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey,’ http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf)
The scientists estimate that the most probable number of excess deaths is 654,965. They also estimate, with 95 per cent certainty, that the actual number lies between 392,979 and 942,636.
It is important to note that the standard figure for Iraqi deaths offered by the mainstream media is that supplied by Iraq Body Count (IBC). At time of writing, the “maximum” IBC figure stands at 48,783. There has long been great confusion among journalists about exactly what this figure represents. Many believe it describes the maximum possible total of Iraqi dead, or of all Iraqi civilians killed. In fact it is the figure solely for Iraqi civilian victims of violence as reported by at least two (mostly Western) media as selected by IBC for use in their study.
So although the latest Lancet study measures a much broader range of deaths, the difference is nevertheless enormous, particularly for the many journalists who assume the studies measure much the same thing. Likewise, the Lancet figures must strike the public as astonishingly high given that they have been repeatedly reminded of IBC’s 48,000 death toll and George Bush’s 30,000 figure.
As we will see, the Lancet’s latest study has inherent credibility. The reasons were explained in a rare US press editorial on the matter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) on October 15:
“Here is one of the world's most respected medical journals publishing a peer-reviewed study by epidemiologists backed by Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health, part of one of the world's most respected medical schools.” (‘Methodology in madness,’ October 15, 2006)
In sum, a free press in a free society would simply +have+ to investigate this study in depth, if only to resolve the confusion of a bemused and concerned public in response to an inherently credible report.
The Front Pages
In the event, the story failed to appear on the front pages of most newspapers on October 12. We collected a pile of dailies that day and noted the following front pages:
Daily Mirror: ‘Terror in the tower’ and ‘Sex swap Jacko? - Showbiz exclusive.’
The Daily Telegraph: ‘The tagged prisoners freed to kill.’
The Daily Mail: ‘Britain’s taxes soaring’ and ‘But landlord Hamza is doing very nicely out of this country.’
The Times: ‘Race quotas “needed to end divide in schools“,’ and ‘10/11 - New York plane hits building.’ (Six news stories were also briefly summarised linking to pages inside the paper: ‘Lib Dem donor was fraudulent,’ ‘Poland’s future,’ ‘Visa splits in two,’ ‘Richest woman,’ ‘Libel victory,’ and ‘Disappearing act.’)
Daily Express: ‘Oh no not again - Plane hits New York tower block.’
The Daily Star: ‘My BB date rape hell.’
The Sun: ‘Apauling.’ [relating to an England football match]
The Financial Times: ‘Visa bows to pressure and unveils IPO move.’
Only the Independent and Guardian made the report their front page lead stories:
The Independent: ‘655,000 the toll of war in Iraq.’
The Guardian: ‘One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion.'
A LexisNexis database search (October 18) found that the words ‘Jack Straw’ and ‘veil’ have been mentioned in 348 articles over the last week. The words ‘Madonna’ and ‘adoption’ have been mentioned in 219 articles. The words ‘Iraq’ and ‘Lancet’ have been mentioned in 44 articles. The words ‘Lancet’ and ‘655,000’ have been mentioned in eight national newspaper articles.
The Times devoted a third of a page to the Lancet story on page 45. The Daily Mail had three-quarters of a page on page 2. The Daily Express had a two-inch wide column on page 6 dwarfed by the adjacent story: ‘”Ageist” birthday cards banned from the office.’ The Daily Telegraph had 422 words on page 5. The Financial Times had 609 words on page 7. Of these newspapers, only one has since published any follow up reporting or commentary - 35 words in the Financial Times as part of a round-up of the week’s events on October 14.
The Observer devoted 43 words in a single sentence in a comment piece by Mary Riddell (October 15) and a single sentence in a news piece on page 8. The Independent on Sunday referred to the story in one sceptical paragraph in a comment piece by John Rentoul on page 40 and in one sentence of an article by Patrick Cockburn (October 15).
The Daily Mirror and Daily Star have made no mention of the report at all.
The Independent covered the story on October 12 in a news piece, an editorial, and in a brief examination of how Lancet editor Richard Horton “has turned a once-staid academic journal into a publication at the centre of a string of controversies“. (Ben Russell, ‘”Lancet” back at centre of controversy,’ The Independent, October 12, 2006) The Independent has since mentioned the story in two sentences on October 13 and October 18.
The Guardian gave 930 words to the story on October 12 in a news piece and 214 words in a brief explanation of the methodology behind the study. The paper also published a comment piece defending the report by Lancet editor, Richard Horton. Since then, there has been Ben Rooney’s 200-word round-up of web-based debate on the story (October 13) and a single sentence in an article by Simon Tisdall (October 17). The Guardian also mentioned the study in an October 12 leader - in a single sentence. Remarkably this was an aside in a piece focusing on the “chaotic travesty” of Saddam Hussein’s trial:
“Judicial procedure and decorum may seem irrelevant in a country that is reeling under seemingly unstoppable sectarian violence. Even if the human toll since March 2003 is less than the horrific, if contentious, new estimate of 655,000, Iraq seems to be bleeding to death and falling apart. Still, when Saddam was captured in December 2004, trying him was seen...” (Leader, ’Trials and errors,’ The Guardian, October 12, 2006)
With the evidence of our own vast crimes before their eyes, that was all the Guardian editors had to say. Instead, the focus of their concluding paragraph was elsewhere:
“The old tyrant may be getting a far better deal than anything that existed when he was in charge. But that is not saying much. And it is not nearly good enough.”
So much for the progressive credentials of the country’s “leading liberal newspaper”.
Huge Gaps - An Exchange With The BBC
The BBC linked to the story from the front page of its website. The BBC1 13:00 News (October 11) spent 19 seconds on the topic. On the 18:00 News celebrity anchor Natasha Kaplinsky described the figures as ”shocking and controversial”. Baghdad correspondent Andrew North reassured viewers: “It is only an estimate.” On the News at Ten, anchor Huw Edwards explained that the report was "controversial" and that while the report was serious the figures were "controversial though". Reporter David Shukman declared: "We'll never know the figures, it's too dangerous [in Iraq]." The study, he added, had "weaknesses", such as “the margin of error".
Huw Edwards turned to world affairs editor John Simpson for his view. Simpson thought hard and concluded that it was "difficult to be certain" about the death toll. The figures were “possible", he said, but "nobody can tell".
George Bush’s comment on the report, "The methodology is pretty well discredited”, was widely broadcast and printed. A great moment in TV history was missed when journalists failed to seek clarification on the exact nature of the president’s problem with the methodology.
In fact Bush‘s claim that the methodology had been discredited was a lie, as the people who told him what to say are surely well aware. Richard Brennan, head of health programmes at the New York-Based International Rescue Committee, told Associated Press:
"This is the most practical and appropriate methodology for sampling that we have in humanitarian conflict zones."
Brennan’s group has conducted similar projects in Kosovo, Uganda and Congo. He added:
"While the results of this survey may startle people, it's hard to argue with the methodology at this point." (Malcolm Ritter, ‘Bush Dismisses Iraq Death Toll Study,’ Associated Press Online, October 12, 2006)
Professor Mike Toole of the Centre for International Health, Melbourne, said:
“The methodology used is consistent with survey methodology that has long been standard practice in estimating mortality in populations affected by war. For example, the Burnet Institute and International Rescue Committee (IRC) used the same methods to estimate mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The findings of this study received widespread media attention and were accepted without reservation by the US and British governments. The Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health's Centre for International Health endorses this study." (Toole, The Age (Melbourne), letters to the editor, October 14, 2006)
Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report, told the Christian Science Monitor:
"I loved when President Bush said ‘their methodology has been pretty well discredited‘. That's exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don't think there's anyone who's been involved in mortality research who thinks there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there's a better way to do it." (Dan Murphy, 'Iraq casualty figures open up new battleground,' Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 2006)
John Zogby, whose New York-based polling agency, Zogby International, has done several surveys in Iraq since the war began, said:
"The sampling is solid. The methodology is as good as it gets. It is what people in the statistics business do." (Anna Badkhen, 'Critics say 600,000 Iraqi dead doesn't tally,' San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2006)
Zogby said similar survey methods have been used to estimate casualty figures in other conflicts, such as Darfur and the Congo. Zogby also noted that US critics accept the method for opinion polls, which are based on interviews with around 1,000 Americans in a country of 300 million people.
Frank Harrell Jr., chair of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, called the study design solid and said it included "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data". (Ritter, op., cit)
Steve Heeringa, director of the statistical design group at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, said:
"Given the conditions (in Iraq), it's actually quite a remarkable effort. I can't imagine them doing much more in a much more rigorous fashion." (Ibid)
BBC Newsnight interviewed Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Oxford, who described the study as "statistically reliable". (Newsnight, October 11, 2006)
Professor Sheila Bird of the Biostatistics Unit at the Medical Research Council said:
"They have enhanced the precision this time around and it is the only scientifically based estimate that we have got where proper sampling has been done and where we get a proper measure of certainty about these results." (Channel 4 News, October 11, 2006)
Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, commented:
“It is worth emphasising the quality of this latest report, as judged by four expert peers who provided detailed comments to editors.” (Clive Cookson and Steve Negus, ‘Survey says 600,000 have died in Iraq war,’ Financial Times, October 11 2006)
By contrast, Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman, commented that the Lancet "seems to be a medical organization that has politicized itself". (Julie Hirschfeld Davis, ‘Bush disputes estimates of Iraqi deaths,’ Baltimore Sun, October 12, 2006)
General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, commented:
“I have not seen the study. That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I’ve not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so, I don’t give that much credibility at all.”
Asked about the source of his 50,000 figure, Casey replied:
“I don't remember, but I’ve seen it over time.” (‘Co-Author of Medical Study Estimating 650,000 Iraqi Deaths Defends Research in the Face of White House Dismissal,’ October 13, 2006; http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/145222)
Any “controversy“ surrounding the study is clear, then - professional epidemiologists and other experts in the field consider the report credible while the politicians and generals responsible for the bloodbath detailed in the study dismiss it out of hand.
No matter, BBC Online chose to focus on the “controversy”, and alleged “huge gaps” in the study (October 12). We wrote to the BBC’s world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds, author of the article:
Hi Paul
I've read your report, 'Huge gaps in Iraq death estimates,' (BBC News Online, October 12, 2006) with interest.
You cite critics of this week's Lancet report and of the earlier 2004 report: Michael O'Hanlon, Frank Kaplan, Margaret Beckett, George Bush and Gen George Casey. You also mention that the "IBC reaction to the Lancet report is awaited."
As BBC world affairs correspondent - a senior BBC journalist - what prevents you from approaching professional epidemiologists and other recognised experts in the field, such as Bradley Woodruff, Michael Toole, David Meddings, Richard Garfield and Patrick Ball? Why do you cite only the criticisms of non-experts in response to what is, after all, an extremely complex and involved field of scientific inquiry?
Best wishes
David Edwards
Reynolds replied:
“I quoted those people because they are players.” (October 13, 2006)
We sent Reynolds some of the expert opinion cited above and asked him:
“Do you honestly believe BBC Online readers would have found these views less important and credible than, say, those of General Casey and Fred Kaplan? If so, why? If not, why did you ignore them?”
Reynolds responded that he had amended the article to include expert commentary “from Prof Burnham of JH [Johns Hopkins] and another from Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia“. (October 13, 2006)
Reynolds added: “If you send me Les Roberts' address I will question him direct.”
Conclusion
The media response to the latest Lancet report consisted of initial, relatively high-profile coverage in the broadcast media and more subdued coverage in some print media. Coverage focused heavily on government dismissals and on the alleged ‘controversy’ surrounding the figures. Expert commentators were few and far between, with journalists exhibiting the usual confusion on the methodology behind, and significance of, the figures. Passing mentions aside, the story was dropped within 24 hours from media coverage, with essentially zero meaningful follow up reporting or analysis since.
Journalists did respond with considerably less scepticism than after the 2004 Lancet report was published. However, the extent of coverage has, if anything, been less than in 2004. To its credit, Newsnight interviewed Les Roberts - a rare chance for one of the report’s co-authors to defend the study. On his BBC blog, Newsnight editor Peter Barron revealed that internet-based activism had been a factor in Newsnight’s coverage of the story:
“When the story broke of the Lancet report into civilian deaths in Iraq it was accompanied by a rash of e-mails from anti-war groups urging us to run the story. Did that influence us?
“Well, yes in the sense that I learned of the story from an anti-war campaigner who e-mails me regularly. But also no. When I took the report into our morning meeting where none of the producers had yet seen it, there was instant and unanimous agreement that - while the claim was in some people's view not credible - it was easily the most significant development of the day.”
Barron added:
“Are these unsolicited interventions helpful or unhelpful? The former, I think, as long as we read them with eyes wide open. You might argue that it would be purer to ignore the pressure from all quarters, but I think lobbying can actually improve our journalism, as long as it's not corrupt, that access to the editors of programmes is equally available to everyone (via e-mail it is) and that we question everything we're told.”
(BBC NEWS | The Editors)
But Newsnight’s coverage was a rare departure from the norm of stunning media indifference. Where are the in-depth media analyses, expert interviews and investigations? Where the leaders, documentaries and news specials comparing the various death tolls reported from Iraq?
Where are the articles and programmes examining US-UK responsibility under international law, as occupying powers, for the catastrophe in Iraq? Where the discussions of the abject failure of modern democracy to offer either the British or American people any semblance of meaningful choice on foreign policy?
We have been monitoring and reporting media performance for five years, since July 2001. The current media response to a credible report that our government is responsible for the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis is the most shocking and outrageous example of media conformity to power we have yet seen.
The implications are clear - no crimes of state are too monstrous or extreme for mainstream journalism. There is no limit to their willingness to obscure the depredations of power. The corporate media, the liberal media very much included, is a grand lie - an apparent source of reason and hope that betrays the people it serves at every turn.
SUGGESTED ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Ask the editors below why they have given so little coverage to the credible report that the March 2003 British and American invasion of Iraq has resulted in the excess deaths of 655,000 Iraqis.
Write to Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times
Email: lionel.barber@FT.com
Write to Will Lewis, editor of the Daily Telegraph
Email: will.lewis@telegraph.co.uk
Write to Richard Wallace, editor of the Daily Mirror
Email: richard.wallace@mirror.co.uk
Write to Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Write to Observer editor, Roger Alton
Email: roger.alton@observer.co.uk
Write to Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent
Email: s.kelner@independent.co.uk
Write to Helen Boaden, director of BBC News
Email: HelenBoaden.Complaints@bbc.co.uk
Write to Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News Online
Email: steve.herrmann@bbc.co.uk
to much to read, sorry...
I just went through titles and few sentences, this just to point out that you only choose western news...
would be good to hear a little about the other region news titles as well...
Some arab news are in english, should we just ignore them ?
More Iraq news.
Here is a very interesting piece concerning the activities of private corporations in Iraq. iraq for sale - Google Video
Did you know that the likes of Haliburton charge the military 50 USD for a coke and 100 USD for a laundry. Now I know what they mean when they say that the war in Iraq is expensive.
good point mate. The articles chosen here are ones i stumble across, that are considered reputable. My knowlege of arabic websites is small. I do watch the news from Gulf states on Link TV, but my knowlege of the print media there is, as I say, small. any links would be gratefully recievedQuote:
Originally Posted by forreachingme
Iraqi Forced To Drink Urine By British Occupation Forces
By Associated Press.
10/23/06 --- LONDON (AP) — An Iraqi civilian detained by British troops in Iraq told a military court Monday that he was beaten and forced to drink urine by his captors.
Muhanned Thaher Abdullah al-Mansouri said he had been repeatedly beaten and forced to lie face down over an open toilet while detained as a suspected insurgent in Basra in September 2003.
Seven soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment are standing trial for abusing the Iraqis. One of the detainees, Baha Mousa, 26, died.
"I asked for water so he (a soldier) urinated in a bottle and said 'water water water' and placed it on my mouth," Abdullah said through an interpreter.
"He forced me to drink it. When I spat the urine out of my mouth two of them started hitting me for 20 minutes."
Abdullah said he told an army doctor he was suffering from asthma. The doctor said he would bring oxygen but instead sprayed insect repellent in his face and started laughing, Abdullah said.
Six of the soldiers deny the charges against them. One, Cpl. Donald Payne, 35, admitted the war-crimes charge of treating Iraqi detainees inhumanely, making him Britain's first acknowledged war criminal. He denies two other charges of manslaughter and perverting the course of justice.
The court-martial, which is expected to continue for several more weeks, is being held at a military base in Bulford, England, about 85 miles southwest of London.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.
The Exodus: 1.6m Iraqis have fled their country since the war
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 23 October 2006
Iraq is in flight. Everywhere inside and outside the country, Iraqis who once lived in their own houses cower for safety six or seven to a room in hovels.
Many go after they have been threatened. Often they leave after receiving an envelope with a bullet inside and a scrawled note telling them to get out immediately. Others flee after a relative has been killed, believing they will be next.
Out of the population of 26 million, 1.6 million Iraqis have fled the country and a further 1.5 million are displaced within Iraq, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In Jordan alone there are 500,000 Iraqi refugees and a further 450,000 in Syria. In Syria alone they are arriving at the rate of 40,000 a month.
It is one of the largest long-term population movements in the Middle East since Israel expelled Palestinians in the 1940s. Few of the Iraqis taking flight now show any desire to return to their homes. The numbers compelled to take to the roads have risen dramatically this year with 365,000 new refugees since the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samara in February.
Rich and poor, both are vulnerable. "I'll need more than five bodyguards if I am to live in Baghdad," said one political leader who has left Iraq. "The police came to my antiques shop and drove me around Baghdad," said an antique dealer from the formerly well-off district of Mansur. "They wanted money or they'd charge me with illegal traffic in antiques. I gave them $5,000 [£2,650] in cash, closed my shop and went with my brother to Jordan the same night. I haven't been back."
One well-established consultant doctor escaped his kidnappers in Baghdad and fled to the Kurdish capital of Arbil where he reopened his surgery. Bakers, often Shias, have been frequently targeted. Some now make bread with a Kalashnikov rifle propped against the wall beside them. Many have left Sunni districts in some of which it has become difficult to buy bread.
Former pilots who are Sunni and served in the air force believed they were being singled out by Shia death squads because they might once have bombed Iran; many have fled to Jordan. Jordanian immigration authorities are more welcoming to Sunni than Shia Iraqis. The latter find it easier to go to Syria. Every day heavily laden buses leave Baghdad for Damascus.
All sorts of Iraqis are on the run. But the Christian minorities from Karada and Doura in Baghdad are also fast disappearing. Most of their churches are closed. Many leave the country while the better off try to rent expensive houses in Ain Kawa, a Christian neighbourhood in Arbil.
Nobody feels safe. Some 70,000 Kurds have taken flight from the largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul. Among their cruellest persecutors are Arabs, settled in Kurdish areas by Saddam Hussein over the past 30 years, who were in turn expelled by returning Kurds after the US invasion in 2003. In Basra, the great Shia city of the south, Sunni are getting out after a rash of assassinations.
Baghdad is breaking up into a dozen different cities, each under the control of its own militia. In Shia areas this usually means the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. In Sunni districts it means that the insurgents, who are also at war with the Americans, are taking over. The Sunnis control the south and south-west; the Shias the north and east.
The worst slaughter is happening in the towns on the outskirts of Baghdad where Sunnis and Shias live side by side. Shias are fleeing from Mahmoudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, to Suwaira and Kut. The Iraqi army does little to help, and Shias complain that the US is more intent on attacking the Mehdi Army than rescuing villagers. According to one report from the Mahmoudiyah area: after two days of fighting a platoon of Iraqi soldiers "was dispatched from the Suwaira base to break the siege. They turned up for two hours and evacuated some of the women and children to the safe zone of Suwaira, but had to turn back as they were not fully equipped to handle the situation without [US] air support."
The Shias also accuse the US of attacking their own defensive lines. In Mahmoudiyah yesterday, 19 people were killed in a bombing and mortar assault blamed by the main Sunni bloc on the Mehdi Army.
Shias do have relatively safe areas to flee to (so far as any part of Iraq is safe) in east Baghdad or the Shia south of Iraq. But Sunni areas are beset so they may move only a few streets to a house they deem more secure. Otherwise they must leave the country.
Flight often brings a host of difficulties with it. Much of the Iraqi population is unemployed and depends on state-funded rations bought from a single, local grocery shop. A refugee in Baghdad cannot go to another shop even if he has taken up residence elsewhere. The lumbering state bureaucracy only shows flexibility on receipt of a bribe. Sometimes a man may move out of a district but still have his job there which he dare not give up (60 per cent of Iraqis are unemployed); 10 days ago, 14 Shia workers from the Shia town of Balad north of Baghdad were found with their throats cut in the nearby Sunni town of Dhuluiya where they had been working. In retaliation the Shias of Balad hunted down and killed 38 Sunnis.
An e-mail from a Sunni friend in Baghdad that I received in April is worth quoting in full. It reads in shaky English: "Yesterday the cousin of my step brother (as you know my father married two) killed by Badr [Shia militia] troops after three days of arresting and his body found thrown in the trash of al-Shula district. He is one of three people who were killed after heavy torture. They did nothing but they are Sunni people among the huge number of Shia people in the General Factory for Cotton in al-Qadamiyah district ... His family couldn't recognise his face but by the big wart on his left arm."
There is the total breakdown of law and order. Kidnappings are rife. Businessmen pay for the assassination of their rivals. Sunni militants kill women wearing trousers and men wearing shorts.
Rival Shia militias fight pitched battles for control of oilfields. American soldiers often shoot at anything. No wonder so many Iraqis have left their homes or fled their country.
The refugees' stories
MOHAMMED, SUNNI TRADER
Mohammed was living in the al-Jihad neighbourhood of west Baghdad. A self-confident, energetic man who was a small trader in motor parts and a driver, he does not frighten easily. But, two months ago, he decided he had no choice but to leave his pleasant home and is now living with his wife and three daughters in a single cramped room in the house of a friend.
Earlier this year, as sectarian killings increased after the destruction of the al-Askari mosque in February, he and his family fled to Syria for safety. Al-Jihad has four districts, only one of which is Sunni, and Mohammed was living in a Shia district which was increasingly dangerous for him.
Damascus was safe but too expensive. Mohammed went back to Baghdad. But when he got to his house there was bad news. His neighbours said that while he was away the Mehdi Army, the Shia militia, had come to his home. They had asked if he was Sunni or Shia. They were told he was a Sunni. They left a message saying Mohammed must go or he would be killed. He immediately took his family to the solidly Sunni al-Khadra quarter also in west Baghdad where he now lives.
LEILA MOHAMMED, SHIA MOTHER OF THREE
"Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of the four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, the mother of three children in the city of Baquba in strife-torn Diyala province north east of Baghdad. She and her family are Shia by religion and Kurdish by ethnic origin.
The men who threatened her were Sunni. One of them offered her children chocolate to find out the names of the men of the family.
Leila fled to Khanaqin, a Kurdish enclave also in Diyala. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded in fruit in the local market, said: "They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later, I went back to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin with no way of making a living.
MOHAMMED AL-MAWLA, REFUGEE IN SYRIA
Mohammed al-Mawla is adjusting to life in his new home as an Iraqi refugee living in Syria. He operates an internet café outside Damascus and sends his two children to Syrian schools. But al-Mawla, 42, fears the comfort he has found in Syria after escaping the violence in Iraq could quickly disappear if the money he has saved runs out, forcing him to leave his new home in search of work.
Iraq is in flight. Everywhere inside and outside the country, Iraqis who once lived in their own houses cower for safety six or seven to a room in hovels.
Many go after they have been threatened. Often they leave after receiving an envelope with a bullet inside and a scrawled note telling them to get out immediately. Others flee after a relative has been killed, believing they will be next.
Out of the population of 26 million, 1.6 million Iraqis have fled the country and a further 1.5 million are displaced within Iraq, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In Jordan alone there are 500,000 Iraqi refugees and a further 450,000 in Syria. In Syria alone they are arriving at the rate of 40,000 a month.
It is one of the largest long-term population movements in the Middle East since Israel expelled Palestinians in the 1940s. Few of the Iraqis taking flight now show any desire to return to their homes. The numbers compelled to take to the roads have risen dramatically this year with 365,000 new refugees since the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samara in February.
Rich and poor, both are vulnerable. "I'll need more than five bodyguards if I am to live in Baghdad," said one political leader who has left Iraq. "The police came to my antiques shop and drove me around Baghdad," said an antique dealer from the formerly well-off district of Mansur. "They wanted money or they'd charge me with illegal traffic in antiques. I gave them $5,000 [£2,650] in cash, closed my shop and went with my brother to Jordan the same night. I haven't been back."
One well-established consultant doctor escaped his kidnappers in Baghdad and fled to the Kurdish capital of Arbil where he reopened his surgery. Bakers, often Shias, have been frequently targeted. Some now make bread with a Kalashnikov rifle propped against the wall beside them. Many have left Sunni districts in some of which it has become difficult to buy bread.
Former pilots who are Sunni and served in the air force believed they were being singled out by Shia death squads because they might once have bombed Iran; many have fled to Jordan. Jordanian immigration authorities are more welcoming to Sunni than Shia Iraqis. The latter find it easier to go to Syria. Every day heavily laden buses leave Baghdad for Damascus.
All sorts of Iraqis are on the run. But the Christian minorities from Karada and Doura in Baghdad are also fast disappearing. Most of their churches are closed. Many leave the country while the better off try to rent expensive houses in Ain Kawa, a Christian neighbourhood in Arbil.
Nobody feels safe. Some 70,000 Kurds have taken flight from the largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul. Among their cruellest persecutors are Arabs, settled in Kurdish areas by Saddam Hussein over the past 30 years, who were in turn expelled by returning Kurds after the US invasion in 2003. In Basra, the great Shia city of the south, Sunni are getting out after a rash of assassinations.
Baghdad is breaking up into a dozen different cities, each under the control of its own militia. In Shia areas this usually means the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. In Sunni districts it means that the insurgents, who are also at war with the Americans, are taking over. The Sunnis control the south and south-west; the Shias the north and east.
The worst slaughter is happening in the towns on the outskirts of Baghdad where Sunnis and Shias live side by side. Shias are fleeing from Mahmoudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, to Suwaira and Kut. The Iraqi army does little to help, and Shias complain that the US is more intent on attacking the Mehdi Army than rescuing villagers. According to one report from the Mahmoudiyah area: after two days of fighting a platoon of Iraqi soldiers "was dispatched from the Suwaira base to break the siege. They turned up for two hours and evacuated some of the women and children to the safe zone of Suwaira, but had to turn back as they were not fully equipped to handle the situation without [US] air support."
The Shias also accuse the US of attacking their own defensive lines. In Mahmoudiyah yesterday, 19 people were killed in a bombing and mortar assault blamed by the main Sunni bloc on the Mehdi Army.
Shias do have relatively safe areas to flee to (so far as any part of Iraq is safe) in east Baghdad or the Shia south of Iraq. But Sunni areas are beset so they may move only a few streets to a house they deem more secure. Otherwise they must leave the country.
Flight often brings a host of difficulties with it. Much of the Iraqi population is unemployed and depends on state-funded rations bought from a single, local grocery shop. A refugee in Baghdad cannot go to another shop even if he has taken up residence elsewhere. The lumbering state bureaucracy only shows flexibility on receipt of a bribe. Sometimes a man may move out of a district but still have his job there which he dare not give up (60 per cent of Iraqis are unemployed); 10 days ago, 14 Shia workers from the Shia town of Balad north of Baghdad were found with their throats cut in the nearby Sunni town of Dhuluiya where they had been working. In retaliation the Shias of Balad hunted down and killed 38 Sunnis.
An e-mail from a Sunni friend in Baghdad that I received in April is worth quoting in full. It reads in shaky English: "Yesterday the cousin of my step brother (as you know my father married two) killed by Badr [Shia militia] troops after three days of arresting and his body found thrown in the trash of al-Shula district. He is one of three people who were killed after heavy torture. They did nothing but they are Sunni people among the huge number of Shia people in the General Factory for Cotton in al-Qadamiyah district ... His family couldn't recognise his face but by the big wart on his left arm."
There is the total breakdown of law and order. Kidnappings are rife. Businessmen pay for the assassination of their rivals. Sunni militants kill women wearing trousers and men wearing shorts.
Rival Shia militias fight pitched battles for control of oilfields. American soldiers often shoot at anything. No wonder so many Iraqis have left their homes or fled their country.
The refugees' stories
MOHAMMED, SUNNI TRADER
Mohammed was living in the al-Jihad neighbourhood of west Baghdad. A self-confident, energetic man who was a small trader in motor parts and a driver, he does not frighten easily. But, two months ago, he decided he had no choice but to leave his pleasant home and is now living with his wife and three daughters in a single cramped room in the house of a friend.
Earlier this year, as sectarian killings increased after the destruction of the al-Askari mosque in February, he and his family fled to Syria for safety. Al-Jihad has four districts, only one of which is Sunni, and Mohammed was living in a Shia district which was increasingly dangerous for him.
Damascus was safe but too expensive. Mohammed went back to Baghdad. But when he got to his house there was bad news. His neighbours said that while he was away the Mehdi Army, the Shia militia, had come to his home. They had asked if he was Sunni or Shia. They were told he was a Sunni. They left a message saying Mohammed must go or he would be killed. He immediately took his family to the solidly Sunni al-Khadra quarter also in west Baghdad where he now lives.
LEILA MOHAMMED, SHIA MOTHER OF THREE
"Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of the four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, the mother of three children in the city of Baquba in strife-torn Diyala province north east of Baghdad. She and her family are Shia by religion and Kurdish by ethnic origin.
The men who threatened her were Sunni. One of them offered her children chocolate to find out the names of the men of the family.
Leila fled to Khanaqin, a Kurdish enclave also in Diyala. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded in fruit in the local market, said: "They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later, I went back to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin with no way of making a living.
MOHAMMED AL-MAWLA, REFUGEE IN SYRIA
Mohammed al-Mawla is adjusting to life in his new home as an Iraqi refugee living in Syria. He operates an internet café outside Damascus and sends his two children to Syrian schools. But al-Mawla, 42, fears the comfort he has found in Syria after escaping the violence in Iraq could quickly disappear if the money he has saved runs out, forcing him to leave his new home in search of work.
https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gif
Alleged corrupt arms deals cost Iraq US$800m
NEW YORK (AP) - Iraq's former finance minister alleged in a U.S. television report aired Sunday that up to US$800 million meant to equip the Iraqi army had been stolen from the government by former officials through fraudulent arms deals.
The former minister Ali Allawi told "60 Minutes" that the arms fraud is "one of the biggest thefts in history" and that corrupt former Iraqi officials are now "running around the world hiding and scurrying around."
He did not name the officials who allegedly stole the money. But Iraqi investigators are probing several weapons and equipment deals engineered by former procurement officer Ziad Cattan and other defence officials.
Tapes obtained by "60 Minutes" from a former associate of Cattan allegedly captured Cattan talking about paying large bribes to Iraqi officials.
Cattan, wanted by Iraqi authorities and now living in Paris, was interviewed in the same "60 Minutes" broadcast and said he can account for some US$1.2 billion he used to purchase weapons.
"I have documentation. I give it to you in your hands," Cattan said.
He said the tapes, excerpts of which were played on the broadcast, had been doctored and were not authentic.
Experts at Jane's, a leading authority on military hardware, told "60 Minutes" that the documentation Cattan provided did not prove whether any of the weapons he ordered - paid for in advance - had been delivered to Iraq.
Most of the fraudulent arms purchases were allegedly made during the term of former interim Prime Minster Ayad Allawi, who took office after occupation authorities turned over sovereignty to Iraqis on June 28, 2004. When new Defence Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi took office in May 2005, an investigation was opened into several alleged cases of corruption.
Iraqi government officials could not be immediately contacted by The Associated Press.
But Sheik Sabah al-Saadi, chairman of the Iraqi Parliament's Integrity Commission, told the AP said he had written to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on Sunday, asking it to contact Interpol to detain all those involved in the defence corruption case, including former Defence Minister Hazim Shaalan.
He said he had documents that show the theft of $2.2 billion dollars from the time of Saddam Hussein's ouster in 2003 until now.