Sequential Destruction of Muslim Nations

Now Pakistan

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN

A conspiratorial view of the world is frequently inaccurate, exposing more the paranoia of the view rather than the reality of the world. The sequential destruction of Muslim nations — Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, (and Iran is on the list) — may or may not be a conspiracy hatched in Washington D.C., but it is becoming an international reality.  It is no secret that the United States and Europe, with varying degree of mutual cooperation and some make-believe internal discord, superintend the sequential destruction of Muslim nations. This War of Sequential Destruction (WSD), despite Nobel-Laureate Barack Obama’s denials, refuses to go away.

The WSD is multi-frontal. It crosshairs Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Bashir,  Ahmadinejad, Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan. Many Western policymakers rarely see Muslim nations, including allies, with any inherent respect.  Vice President Dick Cheney described the Muslim world as “brute and nasty.” Obama advisers, though more guarded in their word choices, see Muslim nations no differently. The idea that Islam is inherently violent, openly expressed during the Bush administration, continues to animate foreign policy. The White House holds a new President but Congressional leadership and Washington policymakers are more or less the same. Anti-Islamic policies of warfare and destabilization are intact.

Therefore, the WSD will continue and gather momentum. The picture is not pretty. Palestinians are penned in misery and their territorial cage is constantly shrinking to meet the “natural growth” of vociferous settlers. Oil-rich Iraq is under American occupation and its communities have been torn apart with irreversible harm. Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, is placed under the boots of Western armies. Thousands of Afghans have been murdered, their houses bombed, their villages devastated. The International Criminal Court headquartered in Holland has indicted the first sitting head of the state, the Muslim President of Sudan. The United States and Europe, themselves armed with thousands of nuclear heads, are strategizing to punish Iran for asserting a treaty-based right to produce nuclear energy, leaving open the option of attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.

After razing Iraq and Afghanistan, the WSD has now turned to ravage an ally, Muslim Pakistan. Pakistan is a nation that the British, in 1947, carved out of India and that India, in 1971, broke into two, liberating Bangladesh from the murderous clutch of the Pakistani military. Over the past sixty-two years, Pakistan’s military and civilian rulers, one after the other, and without exception, have turned to America for military training, weapons, money, and strategic instructions.  Eager to send their sons and daughters to Western cities for education and employment, Pakistani politicians, generals, and bureaucrats all look for ways, and create the ways, to oblige Western capitals, particularly Washington D.C.  Partly for personal interests and partly out of faulty readings of geopolitical situations, Pakistani rulers, like most rulers in Muslim nations, frequently compromise national sovereignty and public welfare.

The Pakistani orientation for self-destruction serves American interests. Facing a failing campaign in Afghanistan, Obama advisers decided to expand the war into Waziristan and other parts of Pakistan.  The United States desperately solicited the Pakistani military to join the Afghan war. Pakistani rulers, this time a democratically elected government, listened to the American call. They first permitted the CIA to fly drones armed with missiles, which killed a few militants but hundreds of civilians in the tribal areas. The United States later urged Pakistan to invade Swat to kill militants. Pakistan did. Millions of civilians were made homeless.

Source// COUNTERPUNCH

AJE: Inside Iraq – Iraq’s drug challenge

Since the 2003 US-led invasion, Iraq has witnessed a dramatic rise in the cultivation and trafficking of drugs. Reports indicate that drug abuse is on the rise among Iraqi youth and that armed militias have muscled in on this lucrative trade. So how can Iraq combat this growing problem? Inside Iraq investigates.

Iraq suspended from international soccer competition

Iraq faces a year in the soccer wilderness after FIFA suspended it from all international competitions on Monday and issued an ultimatum to Baghdad.

The executive board of world soccer’s governing body announced it had imposed the ban after the Iraq government dissolved its National Olympic Committee and national sport federations in breach of FIFA and Olympic regulations.

The board will recommend that the FIFA Congress, which meets in Sydney on Friday, suspends Iraq from all tournaments for 12 months, but left the door open for a reprieve if Baghdad reversed its decision by 1400 GMT on Thursday.

A suspension would destroy Iraq’s dream of competing at the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa.

Iraq were due to play Australia in a qualifier in Brisbane on Sunday then again in Dubai next week and if they miss those matches, Australia would be given the points.

“The FIFA Executive Committee decided to suspend the Iraqi Football Association (IFA) as of today … following the governmental decree passed on May 20 which dissolved the Iraqi National Olympic Committee and all national sport federations, including the IFA,” FIFA said in a statement.

“The FIFA Executive Committee also decided … the case of the Iraqi Football Association would be presented to the FIFA Congress on May 30 for suspension until the FIFA Congress in 2009, namely one year.

“However, the suspension decided upon today may be lifted if FIFA receives by May 29, midnight (Sydney time), written confirmation from the Iraqi government that the decree has been annulled.”

In a bid to reverse FIFA’s decision, the Iraqi government notified the IFA on Monday that it was not affected by last week’s decree, although Baghdad stood by its decision to disband the administrative arm of the Iraqi Olympic Committee.

(Continue reading: Associated Press)

Iraq’s Ruined Library Soldiers On

by R.H. LOSSIN

The brutalities of the Iraq war accumulate so fast it is difficult to keep track. But in this season of fifth-year anniversaries, one largely forgotten crime demands to be recalled, in part because it relates directly to the politics of memory itself. Five years ago this month, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA)–one of the oldest and most used in the world. In Arab countries the old expression was “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.”

American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who requested protection from the GI’s were told, “We are soldiers, not policemen” or “our orders do not extend to protecting this [building].” American military orders did, however, extend to guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein’s secret police.

The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.

Despite the sack of a major cultural institution and the collapse of the society around it, the library struggles on, continuing a long tradition of resurrection from the ashes of war. The world’s first library was located in Mosul, in Northern Iraq. It was built in the 7th century BCE and produced the first known catalog in history. In 1927 a British archeological team unearthed it and, for “purposes of preservation”, carried off many of its artifacts–including the oldest known copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of world literature.

Iraq’s intellectual golden era came later and coincided with the Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258) whose capital was established at Baghdad. In 832, the construction of the Byat al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) established the new capital as an unrivaled center of scholarship and intellectual exchange.

The tradition of research there brought advances in astronomy, optics, physics and mathematics. The father of algebra, Al-Khawarizmii, labored among its scrolls. It was here that many of the Greek and Latin texts we accept as the foundation of Western thought were translated, catalogued and preserved. And it was from Baghdad that these works would eventually make their way to medieval Europe and help lift that continent from its benighted, post-Roman intellectual torpor.

In 1258, the Mongols descended on Baghdad and emptied the libraries into the Tigris, ending the city’s scholarly preeminence enjoyed for nearly 500 years. “Hence the legend developed,” as one scholar wrote, “that the river ran black from the ink of the countless texts lost in this manner, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city’s slaughtered inhabitants.”

But under the Ottoman Empire, the Library recovered and carried on. And despite decades of repression and deprivation under Saddam, intellectual accomplishments were still regarded as a major aspect of Iraq’s cultural identity.

The sacking of the library that began April 11, 2003, was a bad one. The current Director of Iraq’s National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Eskander, estimates that over three days, as many as “60 percent of the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite era documents were lost as well as the bulk of the Ba’ath era documents…. [and] approximately 25 percent of the book collections were looted or burned.” Other Iraqi manuscript collections and university libraries suffered similar fates.

Since then, Iraqis have once again tried to rebuild their library. The occupying powers have played along, but like so much about the Iraq War, their effort has been marked by ineptitude, hypocrisy and a cruel disregard for Iraqi people and culture.

Early in the occupation, L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), demonstrated an unwillingness to provide the basic funds necessary for the reconstruction of Iraq’s educational and informational infrastructure. Dr. Rene Teijgeler, senior consultant for Culture for the Iraqi Reconstruction Management office at the American Embassy in Baghdad, left his position in February of 2005, not having “the supplies of ready cash that could be used to acquire something as simple as bookshelves.” His position was left empty.

When John Agresto, the education czar of the CPA, “asked for $1.2 billion to make Iraqi universities viable centers of learning: he received $9 million. He asked USAID for 130,000 classroom desks, and received 8,000.”

So the NLA staff have looked elsewhere, occasionally finding pieces of the old collection for sale there on Al Mutanabi street, home to Baghdad’s booksellers. In fact Al Mutanabi is the source of 95 percent of the books purchased to replace the looted collection of Iraq’s National Library and Archive. But Al Mutanabi was destroyed by a car bomb in March of 2007.

In a speech to the Internet Librarian International conference in 2004, Dr. Eskander described the state of the INLA: “When I was officially appointed as the new DG, NLA faced several challenges. It was the most damaged cultural institution in the country. The building was in a ruinous state; there was no money, no water, no electricity, no papers, no pens, no furniture (apart [from] 50 plastic chairs). The morale of employees [was] very low. Three departments out of 18 were half-functioning.”

Despite this state of near-total ruin, the budget awarded by the CPA for the INLA in 2004, was only $70,000.

In addition to material and financial obstacles, Dr. Eskander has had to contend with the problems arising from the immaterial legacy of a totalitarian dictatorship. In sharp contrast to the de-Baathification of Iraqi society by the CPA, a purely negative process of removing ranking members of the party from civil service positions, the INLA has adopted a comprehensive approach to restructuring institutional relations.

“I removed all corrupt and lazy elements from positions of responsibility, while promoting a number of qualified young female staff to higher positions…The culture of taking orders was dominant,” Eskander said. “Staff members were unable to and sometimes afraid of taking initiative. I have encouraged them to be proactive and creative. The new culture has begun gradually but steadily to take root in the internal life of NLA. I radically changed the mechanisms of decision-making and implementation by democratizing them. Now, librarians and archivists elect their own representatives who will participate at the meetings of the council of managers, where decisions are made. These representatives can monitor all activities within NLA and meet the DG anytime they want.”

The INLA now provides transportation for all of its 425 employees (up from 95 and not counting a security staff of 36) despite the rising costs of private security. It houses a functional nursery in order to maintain its female staff. (American libraries, whose staff is 85 percent female and whose directors are 45 percent male, could take a cue.)

Many dedicated people have offered important solidarity. In Florence, the city government underwrote construction of a conservation lab. The Czech government funded the training of Iraqi archivists. With the exception of invaluable training sessions organized by private educational institutions such as Harvard University, American support has been limited to a relatively small number of individual scholars, a few dedicated nonprofit agencies, nominal USAID support and the cooperation of a handful of private corporations. In 2005 the American Library Association issued a resolution on the connection between the Iraq war and libraries, calling for a full withdrawal of troops and a redistribution of funding but the conversation never extended much further than the bullet points.

The US State Department has created the Iraq Virtual Science Library, which provides access to a large number of health and science databases to institutions throughout the country. But Internet access, like electricity, is intermittent at best. Iraq is, after all, a largely collapsed society.

Many other more promising projects have been abandoned or left in a state of limbo for lack of funding. Efforts at book donation have become ever more challenging as the security situation worsens and thus have largely stopped.

The British National Library has provided recently published English language social science texts and donated microfilm copies of its colonial administrative records from its last occupation of Iraq. But the replacement of physical documents largely ends here.

It would be unfair and frankly absurd to blame American librarians and their shrinking budgets, rising legal costs and increasingly costly dependence on proprietary databases for the state of Iraq’s infrastructure. But the increasingly unstable position of American libraries is actually part of the same logic that produced that war. The disdain for cultural institutions does not stop at the border–bombs there, budget cuts here.

That said, the lack of solidarity from the American community of librarians and scholars for their Iraqi counterparts is shameful. Rousseau suggested that empathy is the basis of language and communication.

If the raison d’être of the library profession is the preservation and dissemination of information, and thus the communication of ideas and the promotion of open discourse, then this question of empathy and solidarity should be the profession’s guiding purpose. Books might seem like an afterthought for people facing violent death, poverty and shattered future, yet the library now receives 750 patrons a month. If there is any hope for stability and reconstruction in Iraq, a little more library solidarity is due.

Source: The Nation

What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire

Empire or Humanity?

What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire

By Howard Zinn
Source: ZNet
Howard Zinn’s ZSpace Page

 

 

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the “Good War,” even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American “Empire.”

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called “The Age of Imperialism.” It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire — or period — of “imperialism.”

I recall the classroom map (labeled “Western Expansion”) which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called “The Louisiana Purchase” hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes — what we now call “ethnic cleansing” — so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging “civilization” and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of “Jacksonian democracy” in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the “Trail of Tears,” the deadly forced march of “the five civilized tribes” westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as “emancipation” was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln’s administration.

That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled “Mexican Cession.” This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country’s land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term “Manifest Destiny,” used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: “We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle.”

The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn’t the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word “imperialism” now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war — treated quickly and superficially in the history books — gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.

The “Sole Superpower” Comes into View

Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: “I was an errand boy for Wall Street.”

At the very time I was learning this history — the years after World War II — the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world’s leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.

In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home: “[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles.” The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.

When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.

Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.

When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country’s motives as a quest for “tin, rubber, oil.”

Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I — indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.

Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower — even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union — to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA’s overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.

Justifying Empire

The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson’s book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a “war on terrorism,” many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew — what we had in common was that we both read books — that he considered this “an imperialist war.” Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of “The American Century.” The time had arrived, he said, for the United States “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit.”

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this “influence” is benign, that the “purposes” — whether in Luce’s formulation or more recent ones — are noble, that this is an “imperialism lite.” As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: “Spreading liberty around the world… is the calling of our time.” The New York Times called that speech “striking for its idealism.”

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project — Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used “her navy and her army… as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression.” And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: “The values you learned here… will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world.”

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes — in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense — that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization — begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

Howard Zinn is the author of A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, now being filmed for a major television documentary. His newest book is A People’s History of American Empire, the story of America in the world, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle in the American Empire Project book series. An animated video adapted from this essay with visuals from the comic book and voiceover by Viggo Mortensen, as well as a section of the book on Zinn’s early life, can be viewed by clicking here. Zinn’s website is HowardZinn.org.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]

Iraq is a country no more. Like much else, that was not the plan

The death rate in Baghdad has fallen, but it is down to ethnic cleansing

‘It reminds me of Iraq under Saddam,” a militant opponent of Saddam Hussein said angrily to me last week as he watched red-capped Iraqi soldiers close down part of central Baghdad so the convoy of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, might briefly venture into the city.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the US and the Iraqi governments claim that the country is becoming a less dangerous place, but the measures taken to protect Mr Maliki told a different story. Gun-waving soldiers first cleared all traffic from the streets. Then four black armoured cars, each with three machine-gunners on the roof, raced out of the Green Zone through a heavily fortified exit, followed by sand-coloured American Humvees and more armoured cars. Finally, in the middle of the speeding convoy, we saw six identical bullet-proof vehicles with black windows, one of which must have been carrying Mr Maliki.

The precautions were not excessive, since Baghdad remains the most dangerous city in the world. The Iraqi Prime Minister was only going to the headquarters of the Dawa party, to which he belongs and which are just half a mile outside the Green Zone, but his hundreds of security guards acted as if they were entering enemy territory.

Five years of occupation have destroyed Iraq as a country. Baghdad is today a collection of hostile Sunni and Shia ghettoes divided by high concrete walls. Different districts even have different national flags. Sunni areas use the old Iraqi flag with the three stars of the Baath party, and the Shia wave a newer version, adopted by the Shia-Kurdish government. The Kurds have their own flag.

The Iraqi government tries to give the impression that normality is returning. Iraqi journalists are told not to mention the continuing violence. When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel, killing 70 people, the police beat and drove away a television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left.

More than most wars, the war in Iraq remains little understood outside the country. Iraqis themselves often do not understand it because they have an intimate knowledge of their own community, be it Shia, Sunni or Kurdish, but little of other Iraqi communities. It should have been evident from the moment President George Bush decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein that it was going to be a very different war from the one fought by his father in 1991. That had been a conservative war waged to restore the status quo ante in Kuwait.

The war of 2003 was bound to have radical consequences. If Saddam Hussein was overthrown and elections held, then the domination of the 20 per cent Sunni minority would be replaced by the rule of the majority Shia community allied to the Kurds. In an election, Shia religious parties linked to Iran would win, as indeed they did in two elections in 2005. Many of America’s troubles in Iraq have stemmed from Washington’s attempt to stop Iran and anti-American Shia leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr filling the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The US and its allies never really understood the war they won that started on 19 March 2003. Their armies had an easy passage to Baghdad because the Iraqi army did not fight. Even the so-called elite Special Republican Guard units, well-paid, well-equipped and tribally linked to Saddam, went home. Television coverage and much of the newspaper coverage of the war was highly deceptive because it gave the impression of widespread fighting when there was none. I entered Mosul and Kirkuk, two northern cities, on the day they were captured with hardly a shot fired. Burnt-out Iraqi tanks littered the roads around Baghdad, giving the impression of heavy fighting, but almost all had been abandoned by their crews before they were hit.

The war was too easy. Consciously or subconsciously, Americans came to believe it did not matter what Iraqis said or did. They were expected to behave like Germans or Japanese in 1945, though most of Iraqis did not think of themselves as having been defeated. There was later to be much bitter dispute about who was responsible for the critical error of dissolving the Iraqi army. But at the time the Americans were in a mood of exaggerated imperial arrogance and did not care what Iraqis, whether in the army or out of it, were doing. “They simply thought we were wogs,” says Ahmad Chalabi, the opposition leader, brutally. “We didn’t matter.”

In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn. A friend who had a brokerage in the Baghdad stock market told me how a 24-year-old American, whose family were donors to the Republican Party, had been put in charge of the market and had lectured the highly irritated brokers, most of whom spoke several languages and had PhDs, about the virtues of democracy.

There was a further misconception that grew up at this time. Most Iraqis were glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein. He had been a cruel and catastrophically incompetent leader, who ruined his country. All Kurds and most Shia wanted him gone. But it did not follow that Iraqis of any description wanted to be occupied by a foreign power.

Later President Bush and Tony Blair gave the impression that overthrowing the Baathist regime necessarily implied occupation, but it did not. “If we leave, there will be anarchy,” friends in the occupation authority used to tell me in justification. They stayed, but anarchy came anyway.

In that first year of the occupation it was easy to tell which way the wind was blowing. Whenever there was an American soldier killed or wounded in Baghdad, I would drive there immediately. Always there were cheering crowds standing by the smoking remains of a Humvee or a dark bloodstain on the road. After one shooting of a soldier, a man told me: “I am a poor man but my family is going to celebrate what happened by cooking chicken.” Yet this was the moment when President Bush and his Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, were saying that the insurgents were “remnants of the old regime” and “dead enders”.

There was also misconception among Iraqis about the depth of the divisions within their own society. Sunni would accuse me of exaggerating their differences with the Shia, but when I mentioned prominent Shia leaders they would wave a hand dismissively and say: “But they are all Iranians or paid by the Iranians.” Al-Qa’ida in Iraq regarded the Shia as heretics as worthy of death as the Americans. Enormous suicide bombs exploded in Shia marketplaces and religious processions, slaughtering hundreds, and the Shia began to hit back with tit-for-tat killings of Sunni by Shia militia death squads or the police.

After the Sunni guerrillas blew up the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006, sectarian fighting turned into a full-blown civil war. Mr Bush and Mr Blair strenuously denied that this was so, but by any standard it was a civil war of extraordinary viciousness. Torture with electric drills and acid became the norm. The Shia Mehdi Army militia took over much of Baghdad and controlled three-quarters of it. Some 2.2 million people fled to Jordan and Syria, a high proportion of them Sunni.

The Sunni defeat in the battle for Baghdad in 2006 and early 2007 was the motive for many guerrillas, previously anti-American, suddenly allying themselves with American forces. They concluded they could not fight the US, al-Qa’ida, the Iraqi army and police and the Mehdi Army at the same time.

There is now an 80,000 strong Sunni militia, paid for and allied to the US but hostile to the Iraqi government. Five years after the American and British armies crossed into Iraq, the country has become a geographical expression.

‘Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq’ by Patrick Cockburn is published next month by Faber & Faber

//the-independent//

‘Exhaustive’ Study: No Saddam-al Qaeda link

‘Exhaustive’ Pentagon-sponsored study finds no Saddam-Qaida link

After reviewing hundreds of thousands of captured Iraqi documents, a Pentagon-sponsored review has found no evidence of operational links between Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terror network, a McClatchy article reports.

The “exhaustive” study found that Saddam Hussein did provide some support to other terrorist groups but, as Warren Strobel writes for McClatchy, “his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.”

Strobel reiterates that the new study “found no documents indicating a ‘direct operational link’ between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion,” according to an unnamed US official. The study is due to Congress and for general release by midweek.

As is well known, President George W. Bush and his administration freely connected Saddam and al-Qaeda as a key pretense for the invasion of Iraq after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Polls indicated that a large majority of Americans believed the president’s assertion.

In the time since then, the Saddam/al-Qaeda tie has been criticized and deconstructed in the press and blogosphere and by study panels, but the upcoming Pentagon report promises to be a particularly stark and thorough refutation of one of the primary Bush administration arguments for the invasion of Iraq. The subsequent war has come at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, nearly 4,000 US troop deaths, and some half a trillion US dollars and counting.

Bush and his staff still tie Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda, despite previously released documents and reports indicating the same findings as the forthcoming extensive review. As recently as last week, Vice President Dick Cheney again asserted a link between the Iraqi dictator and the terror network.

Further excerpts from Strobel’s article for McClatchy, available in full at this link, follow…

#

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

…

The new study, entitled “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents”, was essentially completed last year and has been undergoing what one U.S. intelligence official described as a “painful” declassification review.

…

The issue of al Qaida in Iraq already has played a role in the 2008 presidential campaign. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, mocked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, recently for saying that he’d keep some U.S. troops in Iraq if al Qaida established a base there. “I have some news. Al Qaida is in Iraq,” McCain told supporters. Obama retorted that, “There was no such thing as al Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade.” (In fact, al Qaida in Iraq didn’t emerge until 2004, a year after the invasion.)

//raw story//

Iran leader’s Iraq visit eclipses US, Arab ties

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Pomp and ceremony greeted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his arrival in Iraq on Sunday, the fanfare a stark contrast to the rushed and secretive visits of his bitter rival U.S. President George W. Bush.

Ahmadinejad held hands with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani as they walked down a red carpet to the tune of their countries’ national anthems, his visit the first by an Iranian president since the two neighbours fought a ruinous war in the 1980s.

His warm reception, in which he was hugged and kissed by Iraqi officials and presented with flowers by children, was Iraq’s first full state welcome for any leader since the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

His visit not only marks the cementing in ties between the neighbours, both run by Shi’ite majorities, but is seen as a show of support for the Iraqi government and an act of defiance against Iran’s longtime enemy, the United States, which has over 150,000 troops Iraq.

A line of senior Iraqi political leaders welcomed Ahmadinejad when he arrived at Talabani’s palatial home.

Bush has visited Iraq several times, his administration keen to reduce Iranian influence in the world’s top oil-exporting region.

But that goal been made harder by a reluctance from Iraq’s mainly Sunni Arab neighbours to send high-level diplomatic representation, or even to visit, despite U.S. encouragement.

“To Iraq’s neighbours, Ahmadinejad’s visit underlines that a non-Arab country has kept its embassies open since the fall of Saddam and its leader visits Iraq,” Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Labeed Abbawi told Reuters.

Many Arab diplomats have stayed away after a suicide car bomber attacked the Jordanian embassy in August 2003, killing 17 people. Militants have killed several other diplomats, including an Egyptian who had been sent to head Cairo’s mission in 2005.

“Not a single Arab country has an embassy in Iraq and not one of their leaders has visited, despite Iraq being an Arab country,” Abbawi said.

Several Arab nations have missions in Iraq, but none has ambassadors permanently in the country.

Ahmadinejad’s motorcade took Iraq’s notoriously dangerous airport road to Talabani’s palace at the start of his two-day visit, eschewing the helicopter trip usually taken by other visiting dignitaries as a security measure.

Bush’s last visit in September 2007 was to a desert airbase in Anbar province in Iraq’s west. He flew in unannounced to ward off insurgent attacks and the visit was over in a few hours.

Washington says Tehran supplies weapons and training to Shi’ite militias in Iraq, a charge Tehran denies. Analysts say Iran seeks a stable Iraq but at the same time wants to make life difficult for occupying U.S. forces.

Ahmadinejad, whose government is at odds with Washington over Tehran’s nuclear programme, has repeatedly called for U.S. forces to leave Iraq, blaming them for violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis since the 2003 invasion.

U.S. officials in Baghdad say they will play no role in Ahmadinejad’s visit and that the U.S. military will not be involved in protecting him as he travels around unless it is asked for help.

When Ahmadinejad flew into Baghdad, his plane was controlled by Iraqi air controllers. But from his plane, Ahmadinejad would probably have seen the rows of American armoured vehicles and helicopters at a giant U.S. military base next to the airport.

via//Reuters

Disturbing New Photos From Abu Ghraib

VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, psychologist Philip Zimbardo had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves. For a presentation at the TED conference in Monterey, California, Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Wired.com obtained the video from Zimbardo’s talk, and is publishing some of the stills from that video here. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts and guards posing with decaying corpses. Viewer discretion is advised.

via//Wired

The new invasion of Iraq

Up to 10,000 Turkish troops launch an incursion which threatens to destabilize the country’s only peaceful region

A new crisis has exploded in Iraq after Turkish troops, supported by attack planes and Cobra helicopters, yesterday launched a major ground offensive into Iraqi Kurdistan.

The invading Turkish soldiers are in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas hiding in the mountains. They are seeking to destroy the camps of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) along the border between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. “Thousands of troops have crossed the border and thousands more are waiting at the border to join them if necessary,” said a Turkish military source.

“There are severe clashes,” said Ahmed Danees, the head of foreign relations for the PKK. “Two Turkish soldiers have been killed and eight wounded. There are no PKK casualties.” Turkish television said that the number of Turkish troops involved was between 3,000 and 10,000, and they had moved 16 miles inside Iraq.

But the escalating Turkish attacks are destabilizing the Kurdish region of Iraq which is the one peaceful part of the country and has visibly benefited from the US invasion.

The Iraqi Kurds are America’s closest allies in Iraq and the only Iraqi community to support fully the US occupation. The president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, said recently he felt let down by the failure of the Iraqi government in Baghdad to stop Turkish bombing raids on Iraqi territory.

The incursion is embarrassing for the US, which tried to avert it, because the American military provides intelligence to the Turkish armed forces about the location of the camps of Turkish Kurd fighters. Immediately before the operation began, the Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, called President George Bush to warn him.

The US and the Iraqi government are eager to play down the extent of the invasion. Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a US spokesman for Iraq, said: “We understand [it] is an operation of limited duration to specifically target PKK terrorists in that region.” The Iraqi Foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, claimed that only a few hundred Turkish troops were in Iraq.

But since last year Turkey has succeeded, by making limited incursions into Kurdistan, in establishing a de facto right to intervene militarily in Kurdistan whenever it feels like it.

Many Iraqi Kurdish leaders are convinced that a hidden aim of the Turkish attack is to undermine the Kurdish region, which enjoys autonomous rights close to statehood. Ankara has always seen the semi-independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurds’ claim to the oil city of Kirkuk, as providing a dangerous example for Kurds in Turkey who are also demanding autonomy.

Many Turkish companies carrying out construction contracts in the region have already left. And businesses that remain are frightened that Ankara will close Iraqi Kurdistan’s lifeline over the Harbour Bridge into Turkey.

During the 1990s the Turkish army carried out repeated attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan with the tacit permission of Saddam Hussein, but this is the first significant offensive since the US invasion of 2003. “A land operation is a whole new level,” said the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Bryza, adding that the incursion was “not the greatest news”.

The Turkish army is unlikely to do much damage to the PKK, which has some 2,500 fighters hidden in a mountainous area that has few roads, with snow drifts making tracks impassable.

The Turkish ground offensive was preceded by bombing. “We were certain yesterday after this bombing that a military operation would take place and we got ready for it,” said Mr Danees, adding that bombing and artillery had destroyed three bridges on the Iraq-Turkish border as well as a PKK cemetery.

Another reason why Turkey has launched its offensive now has as much to do with Turkish internal politics as it does with any threat posed by the PKK. The PKK launched a military struggle on behalf of the Kurdish minority in eastern Turkey in 1984 which lasted until the PKK’s leader Abdullah Ocalan was seized in Kenya in 1999 and later put on trial in Turkey. The PKK has been losing support ever since among the Turkish Kurds, but at the end of last year it escalated guerrilla attacks, killing some 40 Turkish soldiers.

Limited though the PKK’s military activity has been, the Turkish army has used it to bolster its waning political strength. For its part, the mildly Islamic government of Mr Erdogan is frightened of being outflanked by jingoistic nationalists supporting the military. Mr Erdogan has pointed out that previous Turkish army incursions into Kurdistan in the 1990s all failed to dislodge the PKK.

The area which the Turkish army has entered in Iraqi Kurdistan is mostly desolate, with broken terrain in which bands of guerrillas can take refuge. The PKK says it has left its former bases and broken up into small units. The main bases of the PKK are along Iraq’s border with Iran, notably in the Kandil mountains, to the south of where the Turkish troops entered. At this time of year the villagers, many of them herders and shepherds, leave their houses and live in the towns in the plain below the mountains until the snow melts.

via//The Independent

Rice Denies Knowing She Made False Statements in Runup to Iraq War

Rice heatedly defends her integrity on Iraq claims

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice vehemently defended her integrity on Wednesday when asked about an independent report that found she made 56 false statements on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

At a congressional hearing, Rep. Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, questioned Rice about a report from the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity that accuses Bush administration officials of making 935 false statements about Iraq, which the United States invaded in March 2003.

“This study has found that you, Madame Secretary, made 56 false statements to the American people where you repeatedly pump up the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and exaggerate the so-called relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” he said at the start of a testy exchange with Rice.

“Congressman, I take my integrity very seriously and I did not at any time make a statement that I knew to be false, or that I thought to be false, in order to pump up anything,” Rice replied. “Nobody wants to go to war.”

Bush’s statements about suspected Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were the cornerstone of his case for going to war in Iraq to topple Saddam.

No such weapons were found following the invasion. The United States now has 157,000 troops in Iraq seeking to restore stability to the country, where a vicious insurgency and sectarian violence erupted after the U.S.-led invasion.

Rice, who was national security adviser at the time of the invasion, squarely blamed the U.S. intelligence community for its erroneous conclusions that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons and was seeking to rebuild a nuclear weapons program.

When Wexler sought to cut her off, Rice spoke over him and said: “I am sorry congressman — because you questioned my integrity, I ask you to let me respond.

“Now, we have learned that many of the intelligence assessments were wrong,” she added. “I will be the first to say that it was not right.”

“At no time did I intend to, or do I believe that I did put forward false information to the American people,” she said.

The reputations of many Bush aides — including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who made the case for the war before the U.N. Security Council — have been tarnished by the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found.

via//Reuters

Chomsky: Where’s the Iraqi voice?

BY NOAM CHOMSKY

THE US occupying army in Iraq (euphemistically called the Multi-National Force-Iraq) carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. Its December 2007 report of a study of focus groups was uncharacteristically upbeat.

The report concluded that the survey “provides very strong evidence” to refute the common view that “national reconciliation is neither anticipated nor possible”. On the contrary, the survey found that a sense of “optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups … and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis.”

This discovery of “shared beliefs” among Iraqis throughout the country is “good news, according to a military analysis of the results”, Karen deYoung reports in The Washington Post.

The “shared beliefs” were identified in the report. To quote deYoung, “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of ‘occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.”

So, according to Iraqis, there is hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, responsible for the internal violence, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis.

The report did not mention other good news: Iraqis appear to accept the highest values of Americans, as established at the Nuremberg Tribunal — specifically, that aggression — “invasion by its armed forces” by one state “of the territory of another state” — is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, forcefully insisted that the Tribunal would be mere farce if we do not apply its principles to ourselves.

Unlike Iraqis, the United States, indeed the West generally, rejects the lofty values professed at Nuremberg, an interesting indication of the substance of the famous “clash of civilisations”.

More good news was reported by Gen David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker during the extravaganza staged on September 11, 2007. Only a cynic might imagine that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so that by committing the “supreme international crime” they were defending the world against terror — which increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to an analysis last year by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.

Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to show that the Iraqi government was greatly accelerating spending on reconstruction, reaching a quarter of the funding set aside for that purpose. Good news indeed, until it was investigated by the Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure was one-sixth of what Petraeus and Crocker reported, a 50 per cent decline from the preceding year.

More good news is the decline in sectarian violence, attributable in part to the success of the murderous ethnic cleansing that Iraqis blame on the invasion; there are fewer targets for sectarian killing. But it is also attributable to Washington’s decision to support the tribal groups that had organised to drive out Iraqi Al Qaeda, and to an increase in US troops.

It is possible that Petraeus’s strategy may approach the success of the Russians in Chechnya, where fighting is now “limited and sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom” after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack, CJ Chivers reports in the New York Times last September.

Perhaps some day Baghdad and Fallujah too will enjoy “electricity restored in many neighbourhoods, new businesses opening and the city’s main streets repaved”, as in booming Grozny. Possible, but dubious, considering the likely consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater sectarian violence, adding to the “accumulated evil” of the aggression. Iraqis are not alone in believing that national reconciliation is possible. A Canadian-run poll found that Afghans are hopeful about the future and favour the presence of Canadian and other foreign troops — the “good news” that made the headlines.

The small print suggests some qualifications. Only 20 per cent “think the Taleban will prevail once foreign troops leave”. Three-quarters support negotiations between the US-backed Karzai government and the Taleban, and over half favour a coalition government. The great majority therefore strongly disagree with the US-Canadian stance, and believe that peace is possible with a turn towards peaceful means. Though the question was not asked in the poll, it seems a reasonable surmise that the foreign presence is favoured for aid and reconstruction.

There are, of course, numerous questions about polls in countries under foreign military occupation, particularly in places like southern Afghanistan. But the results of the Iraq and Afghan studies conform to earlier ones, and should not be dismissed.

Recent polls in Pakistan also provide “good news” for Washington. Fully 5 per cent favour allowing US or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan “to pursue or capture Al Qaeda fighters”. Nine per cent favour allowing US forces “to pursue and capture Taleban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan”.

Almost half favour allowing Pakistani troops to do so. And only a little more than 80 per cent regard the US military presence in Asia and Afghanistan as a threat to Pakistan, while an overwhelming majority believe that the United States is trying to harm the Islamic world. The good news is that these results are a considerable improvement over October 2001, when a Newsweek poll found that “eighty-three per cent of Pakistanis surveyed say they side with the Taleban, with a mere three per cent expressing support for the United States,” and over 80 per cent described Osama bin Laden as a guerrilla and six per cent a terrorist.

Amid the outpouring of good news from across the region, there is now much earnest debate among political candidates, government officials and commentators concerning the options available to the US in Iraq. One voice is consistently missing: that of Iraqis. Their “shared beliefs” are well known, as in the past. But they cannot be permitted to choose their own path any more than young children can. Only the conquerors have that right.

Perhaps here too there are some lessons about the “clash of civilisations”.

Noam Chomsky’s most recent book is What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World. Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

via//Khaleej Times

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in secret Iraq talks with US

THE HEAD of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps slipped into the green zone of Baghdad last month to press Tehran’s hardline position over the terms of the current talks with American officials, it was claimed last week.

Iraqi government sources say that Major-General Mohammed Ali Jafari, 50, travelled secretly from Tehran. Jafari appears to have passed through checkpoints on his way into the fortified enclave that contains the American embassy and Iraqi ministries, even though he is on Washington’s “most wanted” list.

Last year Washington declared the guard a “foreign terrorist organisation” and imposed sanctions on it.

One of the accusations that led to the designation was the charge that the Quds Force, a branch of the guard, was supplying rockets, mortars and roadside bombs known as explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) to Shi’ite militias in Iraq.

In recent days there has been a sharp increase in the use of such bombs against American troops, and last weekend five Iranian speedboats were said to have harassed three American Navy ships, radioing a threat to blow them up.

On his tour of the Middle East yesterday President George W Bush put Tehran on notice over its support for the insurgency in Iraq. “Iran’s role in fomenting violence has been exposed,” he said in Kuwait.

Iran and the United States have held three rounds of talks over security in Iraq. They have made little progress so far but are considered a breakthrough because they are the first face-to-face encounters since 1980.

At the insistence of the Americans, the talks between Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, and Hassan Kazemi Qomi, his Iranian counterpart, have been kept to the issue of security in Iraq. But Tehran wants them broadened to include the release of Iranian diplomats being held in Baghdad by the Americans. It is understood Jafari was sent to Baghdad to ensure that this happened.

Video: The Hormuz clash

Nuclear recovery

SYRIA is rebuilding the site destroyed in an Israeli bombing raid last September, believed to have been used in an undercover nuclear weapons programme, writes Uzi Mahnaimi.

A satellite photograph released last week shows work is under way on a building similar to the bombed structure. Israeli experts say it could be used to hide evidence of nuclear bomb-making.

via//Times Online

Study: 151,000 Iraqis died in conflict’s violence

Surveyors face danger to count casualties from 2003 to 2006

About 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the first three years after the United States invaded, concludes the best effort yet to count deaths — one that still may not settle the fierce debate over the war’s true toll on civilians and others.

The estimate comes from projections by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government, based on door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households. Experts called it the largest and most scientific study of the Iraqi death toll since the war began.

Its bottom line is far lower than the 600,000 deaths reported in an earlier study but higher than numbers from other groups tracking the count.

The new estimate covers a period from the start of the war in March 2003 through June 2006. It closely mirrors the tally Iraq’s health minister gave in late 2006, based on 100 bodies a day arriving at morgues and hospitals. His number shocked people in and outside Iraq, because it was so much higher than previously accepted estimates.

No official count has ever been available. While the U.S. military says it does not track Iraqi deaths, it has challenged some news reports of tolls from shootings and bombings as exaggerated — indicating it does in fact monitor fatalities.

U.S. working to track better
In November, a U.S. military official said the Pentagon was working with Iraqi authorities to better track civilian casualties. One goal is to avoid duplicate reports, said Col. Bill Rapp, a senior aide to the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

The true toll may never be known. Many deaths go unreported in the chaos that has gripped the country, and the numbers may be tainted by sectarian bias; the Iraqi security forces and government are led by Shiites. Muslim burial traditions add to difficulties — many families are believed to simply bury loved ones before sundown on the day of death without ever reporting the fatality.

Still, Iraq’s minister of health, Dr. Salih Mahdi Motlab Al-Hasnawi, defended the new estimate in a telephone interview with reporters Wednesday.

“This is a very sound survey” with a large sample and good methods, he said.

Richard Brennan of the New York-Based International Rescue Committee, which has done similar research in Kosovo, Uganda and Congo, agreed.

“The goal is not to give an absolute, precise number of deaths. The goal is to give a sense of the magnitude of the problem,” he said.

Deaths in Iraq ‘tragic’
White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said White House officials had not seen the study, but called the deaths of Iraqi citizens or any troops “tragic.”

“We mourn the deaths of all people in Iraq as the country fights to defeat extremists …,” he said, contending that last year’s surge of troops is reducing civilian deaths.

The United Nations paid more than $1.6 million for the new study. Results were published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

By any count, the toll is “massive,” wrote Catherine and John Brownstein, statistics experts at Yale University and Harvard Medical School, respectively, in an accompanying essay. It likely still is low, because many Iraqis have fled and aren’t there to report deaths and because Iraq is too dangerous to survey some areas.

A poignant example: One statistician was killed during the project and another, shortly afterward.

A dangerous assignment
The survey was done by Iraq Ministry of Health employees during late 2006 and early 2007 in all 18 provinces, divided to get a valid sample of each area. But Iraqis hold a deep distrust of central authority, given the tribal nature of their society and the years they lived under Saddam Hussein, whose grip on power was built partially on a web of informers.

“We are dealing with surveys in a country where there is unrest and high insecurity situations,” said Dr. Ties Boerma, a WHO official. “Surveys are imperfect, no matter how well we do it.”

Researchers asked families whether any deaths had occurred in their households, recorded details like age and time and place of death, and assigned deaths as violence-related or not.

However, road accidents were not counted unless they were caused by a bomb — one of many ways that surveyors could have underestimated the true toll, some experts said.

Limiting the study to the time from the invasion in March 2003 to June 2006, and extrapolating results to the whole country, researchers arrived at the 151,000 estimate. The study authors say they are 95 percent certain that the true number is between 104,000 and 223,000. Iraq’s population is roughly 26 million.

That seems low, especially because the new survey saw no increase in deaths in recent years, as previous surveys did, said Columbia University’s Dr. Ronald Waldman, who has long done humanitarian research for WHO and others.

More than 100 neighborhoods, mostly in Baghdad and Anbar, could not be visited for safety reasons. So researchers estimated deaths in those areas by using a formula based on information from another group that tallies fatalities, the British-based Iraq Body Count.

The Body Count project bases its figures mostly on media reports — a method known to underestimate deaths because many go unreported. That group listed 47,668 civilian deaths from violence during the period studied in the WHO survey, and between 80,331 and 87,742 to date since the war began.

The group’s numbers do not include deaths of fighters, but the WHO survey and an earlier one published in the journal Lancet in 2006 do.

The Lancet study, by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, drew wide criticism, partly because it came out just before the 2006 congressional elections. It surveyed 1,849 households and concluded that 600,000 Iraqis had died from violence, mostly gunfire, and roughly 50,000 more from other causes like heart disease and cancer.

The WHO survey tallied only violence-related deaths, but researchers plan future reports on other health measures.

Les Roberts, a Columbia University epidemiologist involved in an even earlier survey in 2004 when he was at Johns Hopkins, believes the new toll is too low.

“This is consistent with family members not wanting to tell the government about violent deaths,” he said.

The Associated Press began tracking civilian deaths after the new Iraqi government took office on April 28, 2005.

Since then, at least 37,547 Iraqis have lost their lives due to war-related violence, according to the AP toll, which is considered a minimum since many killings go unreported or uncounted. It’s compiled from police, hospital officials, morgue workers and verifiable witness accounts, and reporters and photographers at the scenes. Insurgent deaths are not included.

via//MSNBC

McCain: As Long As It’s Iraqis Dying, We Can Stay In Iraq

McCain: Permanent Presence In Iraq Is Fine As Long As Iraqis Are The Ones Dying

Crooks and Liars posted a video of Senator John McCain saying he’d be ok with the U.S. being in Iraq for 100 years, and during his appearance on Meet The Press this morning, McCain stood by that statement and was absolutely giddy about President Bush’s surge.

As long as Americans aren’t being wounded or killed, and it’s the Iraqis who are fighting and dying, McCain believes that Americans are just fine with the United States having permanent bases there, and keeping a large military presence all over the world. He also points out that the Saudis didn’t want our base in their country, but it’s worth noting that Bin Laden was angered by our presence there as well — but according to the Republicans in last night’s debate, terrorism has nothing to do with American foreign policy.

McCain: ” It’s not American presence that bothers the American people, it’s American casualties, and if Americans are safe wherever they are in the world, American people don’t mind that. So, what I believe we can achieve is a reduction in casualties to the point where the Iraqis are doing the fighting and dying, we’re supporting them, and over time then there will be the relation between the two countries.”

Isn’t that what’s been happening for the past four years

via//Crooks and Liars