The war is over (except for Iraq)
Phil Reeves, The Independent, May 1, 2003
President George Bush will declare tonight the war in Iraq is all but over. But his speech, far out at sea aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which is heading back from the Gulf will not convince many Iraqis.
For the people of Fallujah where two men in their twenties, Sa'aleh al-Jumaili, and Ghanam al-Jumaili, were killed yesterday the war with the American and British occupiers seems to be just beginning. Hatred is taking hold here, and throughout Iraq. It was sown this week by US troops who fired into a demonstration, shooting dead 13 people, and sealed by soldiers who blasted into a crowd again yesterday, killing two more. This on the day that General Tommy Franks declared the main combat phase of the operation was over.
Hatred was present in the taunts of the youths goading the American troops face-to-face, calling them "babies" and waving a banner that said "Sooner or later, US killers, we'll kick you out". And it was there in the burning eyes of the man outside Fallujah General Hospital, who began bellowing about the "lies of the Western press" and the wickedness of the American occupation after we arrived to see the bloodied victims of the latest US shooting.
In a country that has lost some 2,500 civilians in the conflict, with at least 10,000 of its soldiers, resentment runs high. Still today, 40,000 of Baghdad's five million citizens rely on the Red Cross for water. [ complete article ]
Experts mourn the Lion of Nimrud, looted as troops stood by
Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, April 30, 2003
The first authoritative list of the treasures that were stolen or destroyed in the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad emerged yesterday, as experts from the world's great museums poured scorn on the Americans for the catastrophe.
Among the thousands of artefacts looted from the Iraqi national museum in Baghdad - which holds the world's greatest collection of Mesopotamian art - was the 5,000-year-old Warka Vase, a "staggering masterpiece" from Uruk carved from limestone just about the time the city's Sumerian inhabitants were inventing writing.
It was too fragile to be moved into the museum's underground vaults in the weeks leading up to the war, and like 18 other major artefacts so far confirmed missing by Iraqi experts, may already have been smuggled over the country's unguarded borders.
The Lion of Nimrud, an ivory relief of a lion attacking a Nubian, one of the museum's most prized objects and "an icon of Phoenician art", has also disappeared.
An international summit of experts at the British Museum yesterday placed much of the blame for the disaster that has befallen Iraq's heritage at the feet of coalition forces. [ complete article ]
The loyal opposition goes AWOL
Joyce Appleby, Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2003
The Bush Doctrine of preventive war is the most radical foreign policy initiative since the Spanish-American War. And how has Congress, charged by the Constitution with overseeing foreign policy, responded?
It hasn't. Last October, a majority in both houses of Congress voted for the resolution to give the president the go-ahead to use force in Iraq. Then and since, lawmakers have failed to do their constitutional duty of oversight of such military action.
President Bush's single-minded pursuit of regime change in Iraq during the last 15 months would not have surprised the unsentimental 18th century creators of our government. They expected the executive to pursue his foreign policy goals. What they would not have foreseen was Congress' supine acceptance of the president's usurpation of their constitutional authority to declare war and approve peace treaties.
It has not always been thus. [ complete article ]
Bin Laden's main demand is met
Sean O'Neill, The Telegraph, April 30, 2003
America's announcement of its intention to withdraw its military bases from Saudi Arabia answers Osama bin Laden's most persistent demand.
More than any other cause it was the presence of "crusader" forces in the land of Islam's holiest sites - Mecca and Medina - that turned bin Laden from Afghan jihadi into an international terrorist. [ complete article ]
IS "AMERICAN DIPLOMACY" AN OXYMORON?
"Let me be clear: Iraq belongs to you. We do not want to run it," said Donald Rumsfeld, addressing the Iraqi people from an ornate room in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. Unable to resist the temptation to symbolically slap his shoes on the face of his vanquished enemy, Rumsfeld had no problem using a regal backdrop to broadcast his non-imperial statement.
Rumsfeld visits Iraq as bloodshed continues
Nadim Ladki, Reuters, April 30, 2003
Even as Rumsfeld savored victory in the military campaign he planned and led, a leading Arabic newspaper published what it said was a letter from Saddam Hussein, ousted three weeks ago, in which he urged Iraqis to throw out U.S. and British forces.
Residents of Falluja, 30 miles outside the capital where 13 people were killed in a rally late on Monday night, said U.S. troops shot dead two more people during a demonstration on Wednesday.
U.S. Maj. Michael Marti told Reuters that members of a convoy returned fire after shots were fired at them from a crowd outside a U.S. command post. He said soldiers counted "potentially" two injured Iraqis.
The bloodshed in Falluja provided a grim backdrop for the visit by Rumsfeld, who recorded a radio and television message saying U.S. troops had no intention of taking over Iraq. [...]
In Baghdad Rumsfeld held a meeting with Jay Garner, the retired general in charge of American efforts to rebuild the country and launch a democratic government.
Garner told reporters after the meeting that the media should concentrate less on anti-American protests and more on the way U.S. forces had toppled Saddam with relatively little damage to Iraq's infrastructure.
"We ought to be beating our chests every day," he said. "We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: 'Damn, we're Americans'." [ complete article ]
Hypocrisy and apple pie
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 30, 2003
America is a furtive empire, afraid to raise its flag or linger too long or even call things by their real names. The U.S. is having a hard time figuring out how to wield its colonial power, how to balance collegiality with coercion, how to savor the fruits of imperialism without acknowledging its imperialist hubris. [ complete article ]
To the US troops it was self-defence. To the Iraqis it was murder
Jonathan Steele The Guardian, April 30, 2003
Lieutenant Colonel Eric Nantz was not at the scene at the time [of the shooting in Falluja] but he insisted yesterday that people in the crowd fired the first shots at troops in the school. "They came under heavy fire. The troops on the roof returned fire. We later found eight AK-47s on the ground and nearby rooftops, and over 50 expended rounds. I don't know if it was planned," he said.
Cradling a machine gun, a soldier gave a more emotional account. As well as single shots fired from their M4 rifles US troops had used machine guns, he conceded.
Monday night's incident was not the first, explained the soldier, who refused to be named. "We've been sitting here taking fire for three days. It was enough to get your nerves wracked. When they marched down the road and started shooting at the compound there was nothing left for us to do but defend ourselves. They were firing from alleyways and buildings where we couldn't see.
"Guys were standing in line with hot chow. When bullets fell into the compound, people in that chow line ran for cover. From that moment on it was all business. We started putting on body armour and went up on that roof," he said.
Asked whether the troops could have mistaken shots fired into the air to celebrate Saddam's birthday with fire aimed at the US compound, the soldier insisted bullets had been coming over the roof.
No bullet holes were visible yesterday on the school, unlike the house opposite which had several holes. [ complete article ]
We are not with you and we don't believe you
Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, April 30, 2003
Tony Blair's first public attempt to heal the diplomatic wounds of the Iraq war suffered a humiliating rebuff yesterday when Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, refused to lift UN sanctions and mocked the possibility that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. [...]
Mr Blair had been hoping to use his influence to persuade Russia to agree to the Anglo-US demand to lift sanctions on Iraq in return for giving the UN an as yet unspecified "vital role" in the reconstruction of Iraq and its new government.
But Mr Putin said Russia and its partners "believe until clarity is achieved over whether weapons of mass destruction exist in Iraq, sanctions should be kept in place". Almost mocking Mr Blair, he went on: "Where is Saddam? Where are those arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, if indeed they ever existed? Perhaps Saddam is still hiding somewhere in a bunker underground, sitting on cases of weapons of mass destruction and is preparing to blow the whole thing up and bring down the lives of thousands of Iraqi people." [ complete article ]
Matters of emphasis
Paul Krugman, New York Times, April 29, 2003
One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.'s. Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement if it is ever announced that it was a false alarm? It's a pattern of misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first place. Each administration charge against Iraq received prominent coverage; the subsequent debunking did not. [ complete article ]
Iran rejects U.S. accusation it is meddling in Iraq
Karl Vick, Washington Post, April 25, 2003
Iran today rejected a U.S. warning against becoming involved in Iraq, making light of White House advice not to "destabilize" the neighboring country's Shiite Muslim majority.
"It is very interesting that Americans have occupied Iraq and are now accusing its neighbor of interfering in that country," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said at a news conference. "Iranians have no role in Iraq, and it is up to the people of Iraq to decide on their fate and future." [ complete article ]
WAR ON TERRORISM GAINS AN OPT-OUT CLAUSE
American forces reach cease-fire with terror group
Douglas Jehl and Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, April 29, 2003
American forces in Iraq have signed a cease-fire with an Iranian opposition group the United States has designated a terrorist organization, and expect it to surrender soon with some of its arms, American military officials said today.
Under the deal, signed on April 15 but confirmed by the United States Central Command only today, United States forces agreed not to damage any of the group's vehicles, equipment or any of its property in its camps in Iraq, and not to commit any hostile act toward the Iranian opposition forces covered by the agreement.
In return, the group, the People's Mujahedeen, which will be allowed to keep its weapons for now, agreed not to fire on or commit other hostile acts against American forces, not to destroy private or government property, and to place its artillery and antiaircraft guns in nonthreatening positions.
The accord is apparently the first between the United States military -- which in early April was bombing the group's Iraqi camps -- and a terrorist organization, and it raises questions about how consistently the Bush administration intends to apply a policy that had vowed to crack down on terrorist groups worldwide.
The Iranian group, which is led by a woman and has an estimated 10,000 members in Iraq, has no known ties to Al Qaeda, but its members killed several American military personnel and civilian contractors in the 1970's and supported the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979.
It has carried out dozens of bombings that were aimed at Iranian military and government workers, but that also killed civilians.
It was added to the State Department's list of terrorist organizations in 1997.
An American military official said the group could provide intelligence regarding Iranian government activities both in Iraq, and in Iran itself. [ complete article ]
IRAN 1978, IRAQ 2003
The spark that erupted into revolution [in Iran] was a protest in Qumm on January 9, 1978. A group of students protested the visit of Jimmy Carter, the American President, and the government's attacks on Ayatollah Khomeini. In particular, they demanded that Khomeini be allowed to return to the country. The police, in an ill-conceived moment, opened fire on the students and killed seventy.
This set in motion an inescapable pattern that steadily destabilized the Shah's government and reduced its legitimacy in the eyes of both Iranians and the world. In Shi'a tradition, martyrdom requires a commemoration of the martyrs forty days after they have been killed. So forty days after the massacre at Qumm, Iranians took to the streets to commemorate the dead students and, by extension, to protest the government. Again, Iranian police opened fire on the crowd. Over one hundred people were killed in Tabriz on February 18, the fortieth day after the Qumm massacre. On March 30, forty days after the massacre at Tabriz, over one hundred demonstrators were killed in Yazd. And so on. By August, demonstrations had become constant all over Iran. [ Source ]
Iraqis say troops kill 13; U.S. says returned fire
Edmund Blair, Reuters, April 29, 2003
U.S. troops killed 13 Iraqi demonstrators west of Baghdad overnight, witnesses said on Tuesday, in bloodshed sure to inflame anti-American anger.
U.S. officers said they fired in self defense.
Witnesses in Falluja, 30 miles outside the capital, told Reuters the troops opened fire on several hundred unarmed demonstrators who had been demanding the soldiers vacate a school they were using as a barracks.
Falluja hospital director Ahmed Ghanim al-Ali said 13 people had been killed and at least 75 wounded in the late night incident. There were widely conflicting accounts of what had happened. [ complete article ]
Why Iraq is not Japan
John W. Dower, San Jose Mercury News, April 27, 2003
Who wants to be occupied?
Shigeru Yoshida, the conservative politician who served four terms as prime minister of Japan in the wake of World War II, put the matter succinctly in a later reminiscence about living under Gen. Douglas MacArthur's "GHQ" (General Headquarters). Whenever he heard the dreaded acronym, Yoshida said, he immediately thought "Go Home Quickly!" [ complete article ]
Omens of trouble in Iraq
David Ignatius, Washington Post, April 29, 2003
U.S. generals and intelligence officers have done many things right in this month's lightning victory in Iraq. But they appear to have botched their relationship with Iraq's newly ascendant Shiite Muslim majority, causing problems that could undermine U.S. postwar reconstruction efforts.
The Americans had a strategy for dealing with the Iraqi Shiite community, but it seems to have gone wrong almost from the start. The following account, drawn from conversations with Iraqi sources here and coalition officials, illustrates the dangerous landscape that is postwar Iraq. [ complete article ]
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
To listen to the neo-cons these days, you'd think that Thomas Jefferson argued for a separation of church and state because of his fear of Islam. People who seem to have few qualms about faith-based initiatives, prayer in schools or the idea of "one nation under God" are now deeply vexed by the possibility that Iraqi democracy will not be pristinely secular and that Shia clerics will exert undue influence in the reconstruction of Iraq. Their fears are couched in terms that will, they hope, shield them from charges of being Islamophobic, but the bugaboo of every US administration for the last 24 years -- the ayatollahs -- has once again reared its head.
Signatory to the Project for a New American Century's letter to George Bush on the war on terrorism, and member of the American Enterprise Institute, Reuel Marc Gerecht is a propagandist skilled in the art of fueling fear about the "threats to democracy." His warnings are telling, however, in that they reflect a genuine fear in the Bush administration that their Middle East project in democracy may lead to a political defeat almost as rapidly as it brought a military success.
How to mix politics and religion
Reuel Marc Gerecht, New York Times, April 29, 2003
Twenty-four years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini outmaneuvered Iran's religious establishment, his spiritual disciples in Iraq are attempting a similar clerical coup d'etat.
[ complete article ]
Diplomatic breakdown
John Brady Kiesling, Boston Globe, April 27, 2003
When I faxed my resignation letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 25, the United States government was on the verge of its most costly foreign policy blunder since the war in Vietnam. The primary goal the president had announced, protecting the American people from terrorism, could not be achieved through war with Iraq. The goal of establishing democracy in Iraq was one the United States had, alas, no effective legitimacy to achieve. The costs of our attainable goal cleansing Iraq of a genuinely monstrous Saddam Hussein and his likely arsenal had been concealed from the American people and their elected representatives for an excellent reason: As two previous presidents had recognized, the material, moral, human, and political costs would be so great as to cancel out the probable benefit.
I was the political counselor at the US Embassy in Athens then, 45 years old, running a section of some eight people. My mission was to advise the US ambassador on how best we could, as President Bush's personal representatives in Greece, promote and defend US interests. As the war became inescapable, so, too, became my catastrophic conviction that I could either represent the president or defend US interests, but I could no longer do both. [ complete article ]
Of courage and resistance
Susan Sontag, The Nation (via Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch), April 26, 2003
What is in the true interests of a modern community is justice.
It cannot be right to systematically oppress and confine a neighboring people. It is surely false to think that murder, expulsion, annexations, the building of walls --- all that has contributed to the reducing of a whole people to dependence, penury, and despair --- will bring security and peace to the oppressors.
It cannot be right that a president of the United States seems to believe that he has a mandate to be president of the planet --- and announces that those who are not with America are with "the terrorists."
Those brave Israeli Jews who, in fervent and active opposition to the policies of the present government of their country, have spoken up on behalf of the plight and the rights of Palestinians, are defending the true interests of Israel. Those of us who are opposed to the plans of the present government of the United States for global hegemony are patriots speaking for the best interests of the United States.
Beyond these struggles, which are worthy of our passionate adherence, it is important to remember that in programs of political resistance the relation of cause and effect is convoluted, and often indirect. All struggle, all resistance is --- must be --- concrete. And all struggle has a global resonance. [ complete article ]
After the airstrikes, just silence
April Witt, Washington Post, April 28, 2003
There are more graves than houses in Madoo.
The mosque and many of the roughly 35 homes that once made up this hamlet in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan lie in rubble. At least 55 men, women and children -- or pieces of them -- are buried here, their graves marked by flags that are whipped by the wind.
Seventeen months after U.S. warplanes bombed this village and others in the vicinity of Osama bin Laden's cave complex at Tora Bora, Madoo's survivors say they can tell civilian victims of U.S. bombing in Iraq what to expect in the way of help from Washington: nothing. [ complete article ]
Fury at agriculture post for US businessman
Heather Stewart, The Guardian, April 28, 2003
Oxfam last night launched a scathing attack on the man the US has put in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq.
Dan Amstutz is a former senior executive of Cargill, the biggest grain exporter in the world, and served in the Reagan administration as a trade negotiator in the Uruguay round of world trade talks.
Oxfam is concerned that his involvement is an example of the potentially damaging commercialisation of the reconstruction effort in Iraq, which it would prefer to see conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.
Kevin Watkins, Oxfam's policy director, said Mr Amstutz would "arrive with a suitcase full of open-market rhetoric", and was more likely to try to dump cheap US grain on the potentially lucrative Iraqi market than encourage the country to rebuild its once-successful agricultural sector.
"Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission," Mr Watkins said. [ complete article ]
Reason for war?
John Cochran, ABC News, April 25, 2003
To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war a global show of American power and democracy.
Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.
"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." [ complete article ]
NEO-CON PERSPECTIVE: RUSH TO WAR SHOULDN'T BE FOLLOWED BY RUSH TO DEMOCRACY
Daniel Pipes, recently nominated by George Bush to serve on the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, argues that Iraq now needs a "strongman" (a.k.a. a dictator) to prevent post-Saddam Iraq aligning itself with Iran. Pipes calls for a "democratically-minded Iraqi strongman" and cites as similar examples Ataturk in Turkey and Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. Perhaps closer parallels would have been Musharraf in Pakistan and the Shah of Iran. Pipes says that Iraq's strongman should steer Iraq toward "good neighborly relations." Good relations with Iran? Or good relations with Israel?
A strongman for Iraq?
Daniel Pipes, New York Post, April 28, 2003
Who should fill the all-important role of strongman? The ideal candidate would be politically moderate but operationally tough; someone with an ambition to steer Iraq toward democracy and good neighborly relations.
As for the coalition forces, after installing a strongman they should phase out their visible role and pull back to a few military bases away from population centers. From these, they can quietly serve as the military partner of the new government, guaranteeing its ultimate security and serving as a constructive influence for the entire region. [ complete article ]
For Muslims, a mixture of White House signals
Richard W. Stevenson, New York Times, April 28, 2003
When President Bush travels to Dearborn, Mich., on Monday to speak to Iraqi exiles and other Arab-Americans, he will trail behind him considerable uncertainty about his administration's intentions toward Islam.
Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Bush has consistently said that Islam is a religion of peace and warned against anti-Muslim prejudice. Yet he also recently nominated to a government institute a scholar, Daniel Pipes, who has enraged many American Muslims by suggesting that mosques are breeding grounds for militants and that Muslims in government and military positions should be given special attention as security risks.
Mr. Bush reached out to Muslims in the 2000 presidential campaign, viewing them as a potentially significant voting bloc that tends to be conservative on social issues. But he has also embraced evangelical Christian leaders who have cast Islam as evil and has adopted much of the foreign policy agenda of neoconservative thinkers who view Islamic fundamentalism as perhaps the gravest threat to national security. [ complete article ]
The real looting of Iraq may just be beginning
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, April 28, 2003
At an American military checkpoint on the road north of Kirkuk, two US soldiers are holding up placards, each of which has a message written in Kurdish. One says: "Drivers must get into one lane", the other: "Carrying weapons is forbidden".
The problem is that the soldiers, being unable to read Kurdish, have mixed up the placards so one is angrily waving his sign forbidding weapons in front of a car which has tried to jump the queue, while a hundred yards down the road a harassed-looking officer is asking drivers in English, which they do not speak, if they are armed and he is only receiving benign smiles and thumbs-up signs in return.
It is easy enough to mock ordinary American soldiers being baffled in trying to establish their authority in one of the most complicated societies in the world. But it is still extraordinary that the US should have spent so long planning a military campaign with so little thought about the likely political consequences inside Iraq. [ complete article ]
And now: 'Operation Iraqi looting'
Frank Rich, New York Times, April 27, 2003
There is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions. Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale"? Nor do we know who did it. Was this a final act of national rape by Saddam loyalists? Was it what Philippe de Montebello, of the Metropolitan Museum, calls the "pure Hollywood" scenario -- a clever scheme commissioned in advance by shadowy international art thieves? Was it simple opportunism by an unhinged mob? Or some combination thereof?
Whatever the answers to those questions, none of them can mitigate the pieces of the damning jigsaw puzzle that have emerged with absolute certainty. The Pentagon was repeatedly warned of the possibility of this catastrophe in advance of the war, and some of its officials were on the case. But at the highest levels at the White House, the Pentagon and central command -- where the real clout is -- no one cared. Just how little they cared was given away by our leaders' own self-incriminating statements after disaster struck. Rather than immediately admit to error or concede the gravity of what had happened on their watch, they all tried to trivialize the significance of the looting. Once that gambit failed, they tried to shirk any responsibility for it. [ complete article ]
From frontiersman to neo-con
Godfrey Hodgson, Open Democracy, April 24, 2003
One way of looking at the history of American foreign policy is to see it as a conflict between the instincts of the immigrant and those of the frontiersman. The immigrants came to America to find a better life. The last thing most of them wanted was to be dragged back into the stale and rancorous quarrels of the old world (among the exceptions have been Irish-Americans) The frontiersman, on the contrary, wanted to push ever further west to find new land, new resources, new frontiers. Once the frontier of free land was officially declared closed in 1890, the frontier spirit looked overseas, and Americans sought economic opportunities in Latin America, the Far East and later in Europe and the Middle East.
In the foreign policy of the Bush administration, those two themes withdrawal and advance are strangely reunited. The neo-conservatives who have captured American foreign policy make plain their contempt for foreigners, and at the same time their ambition to make the world over in the image of their rather narrow vision of America. Their interpretation of American exceptionalism that is, of the belief that America is not just different from all other societies but also more righteous, is a resolution of a kind, of two instincts that are almost as old as the United States. [ complete article ]
In a land without law or leaders, militant Islam threatens to rule
Jason Burke, The Observer, April 27, 2003
On the day Mosul fell Sheikh al-Namaa sent young men with guns to guard hospitals and homes. A few days later he successfully ordered looters to return stolen property to mosques. Elsewhere, particularly in the Shia-dominated south-west, local clerics took the lead in establishing order, organising law enforcement, the protection of property, even healthcare. And, swiftly, their moral authority assumed political dimensions.
Last week al-Namaa and several other prayer leaders formed a political party in Mosul. '[Saddam Hussein's] end was a good thing,' al-Namaa said, 'but the British and American invasion of Iraq was in the interest of Israel.' The right programme for the reconstruction of Iraq was, to al-Namaa, obvious. 'In Islam, there is the answer to every social problem.'
Some observers, notably Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, dismissed the clerics as a noisy minority who had no broad support. Others watched warily, scared that a tidal wave of Islamic sentiment was sweeping Iraq. In one sense Rumsfeld is right: the Iraqis, Shia or Sunni or Kurd, are among the most secular people in the Middle East. But he is wrong to underestimate the depth of feeling on the part of many millions of people. [ complete article ]
Concern grows over weapons hunt setbacks
Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times,April 27, 2003
Disorganization, delays and faulty intelligence have hampered the Pentagon-led search for Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction, causing growing concern about one of the most sensitive and secretive operations in postwar Iraq, according to U.S. officials and outside experts familiar with the effort. [...]
"Everybody recognizes that it's gotten off to a rocky start," said one official who helped draft the Pentagon's weapons search plans and has seen reports coming back from Iraq. "Frankly, the whole situation is very confusing at the moment."
David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector, was critical of the initial U.S. effort. "Unity of command is not present," said Kay, who is now a senior fellow at the nonprofit Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. "There's not even unity of effort.... My impression is this has been a very low priority so far, and they've put very little effort into it."
[ complete article ]
Chalabi finds ties to U.S. a boon and a barrier
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post, April 27, 2003
When Rafidain Bank managers wanted American troops to protect their branches from gun-toting looters, they went not to U.S. military headquarters but to a private club in a posh Baghdad suburb where they sought an audience with Ahmed Chalabi.
Chalabi, a suave, Iraqi-born banker who has spent the past 45 years in exile, promised he would get right on it. One of his aides raised the issue with a liaison officer from the U.S. Central Command who is stationed in the club. Another aide, based in Washington, called the Pentagon. A day later, U.S. troops were guarding several Rafidain branches.
In the hurly-burly of postwar Iraq, Chalabi has staked his claim to power with a distinct advantage -- an inside track to the U.S. military now in charge of the country. Other deep-pocketed exiles, tribal sheiks, Muslim clerics and Kurdish leaders have sought to establish themselves on the uncharted political landscape here, particularly leaders of the country's 60 percent Shiite majority. But none other than Chalabi can reach into the Pentagon and get things done. [ complete article ]
He's out with the in crowd
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 27, 2003
Washington has a history of nasty rivalries, with competing camps. There were Aaron Burr people and Alexander Hamilton people; Lincoln people and McClellan people; Bobby people and Lyndon people.
Now, since Newt Gingrich aimed the MOAB of screeds at an already circumscribed Mr. Powell, the capital has been convulsed by the face-off between Defense and State.
There are Rummy people: Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Ariel Sharon, Fox News, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the fedayeen of the Defense Policy Board -- Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Mr. Gingrich, Ken Adelman -- and the fifth column at State, John Bolton and Liz Cheney.
And there are Powell people: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Bush 41, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, Richard Haass, the Foreign Service, Joe Biden, Bob Woodward, the wet media elite, the planet. [ complete article ]
U.S. 'should back Islamic Iraq'
Steve Schifferes, BBC News, April 25, 2003
America's key adviser on a new Iraqi constitution has said that the United States should accept the country becoming an Islamic democracy.
Noah Feldman, a law professor from New York University, will be advising the future Iraqi interim authority on how to design a new constitution.
He will be working for retired US general Jay Garner - Iraq's interim leader - in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
He told BBC News Online that in his view the US should support democracy in Iraq even if it was a not a secular democracy.
Speaking in Washington before departing for the region, he argued that the separation of church and state, although a central part of the US constitution, might not be appropriate for a country which was overwhelmingly Muslim. [ complete article ]
Weapons proliferate in Baghdad bazaar
Guns sold with little U.S. interference
William Branigin, Washington Post, April 26, 2003
At the plaza on the Ad Dawrah Expressway, the lawlessness that followed the capture of Baghdad by U.S. troops has merged with an anything-goes free market to produce a dangerous juncture: an arms bazaar in which weapons of war are for sale to anyone with a little cash, with no questions asked on either side and little interference from the U.S. forces.
"We want American soldiers to come here and put a stop to this," said Sabah Michael, a college professor belonging to Iraq's Assyrian minority who lives in the neighborhood. "In Lebanon it started like this."
He stressed that he was not in the market for a weapon. "I came to look at this strange and silly practice here," he said. "This is something you do not expect to see in life. Even in a dream you don't see this."
His friend, another professor, who declined to give his name, expressed similar worries, but acknowledged having made a purchase.
"I didn't have a gun," he said. "I don't know how to use one. But now I have bought one because I can imagine what might happen in the future. . . . There's going to be a civil war if someone does not stop this." [ complete article ]
Puppets and puppeteers in Iraq
Hooman Peimani, Asia Times, April 26, 2003
Amid the growing politicization of the Iraqi Shi'ites and the rapid expansion of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), SAIRI leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer Hakim said this week in a meeting with the Russian ambassador to Iran, Alexander Maryasev, that the SAIRI did not want to create an Islamic republic in Iraq. However, although the Americans have their troops in Iraq, the rising Shi'ite political awareness with a clear anti-occupation/anti-American direction is providing the SAIRI the popular backing to demand a large share of the future Iraqi regime. It is also offering that group a high degree of political legitimacy to challenge seriously the US "regime-building" project, whether the US government likes it or not. [ complete article ]
WOLFOWITZ'S STOOGES READY TO TAKE OVER IRAQ BUT FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES
Pentagon sending a team of exiles to help run Iraq
The Pentagon has begun sending a team of Iraqi exiles to Baghdad to be part of a temporary American-led government there, senior administration officials said today.
The exiles, most of whom are said by officials to have a background in administration, are supposed to take up positions at each of 23 Iraqi ministries, where they will work closely with American and British officials under Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who is serving as Iraq's day-to-day administrator. [...]
The team of Iraqi technocrats was selected by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz but is officially employed by a defense contractor, SAIC, the officials said. The team is headed by Emad Dhia, an engineer who left Iraq 21 years ago and who will become the top Iraqi adviser to General Garner. As head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, General Garner is functioning as Iraq's civil administrator.
Victor Rostow, a Pentagon policy official who is serving as a liaison to the Iraqi team, said its task would be to help General Garner "turn over functioning ministries to the new Iraqi interim authority after a period of time." [...]
Mr. Dhia and Mr. Rostow provided the names of just seven Iraqis among the team of exiles, some of whom are now citizens of the United States or European countries where they have made their homes in exile. Mr. Rostow said that only a handful had agreed to be identified by name. "Most of these people believe that if they are seen as agents of America, they will be killed," he said. [ complete article ]
American to oversee Iraqi oil industry
David Teather, The Guardian, April 26, 2003
The US is preparing to install an American chairman on a planned management team of the Iraqi oil industry, providing further ammunition to critics who have questioned the Bush administration's agenda in the Middle East.
The administration is planning to structure the potentially vast Iraqi oil industry like a US corporation, with a chairman and chief executive and a 15-strong board of international advisers.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, it has lined up the former chief executive of the US division of Royal Dutch/Shell, Philip Carroll, to take the job of chairman.
Large scale decisions on investment, capital spending and production are likely to need the approval of the advisory board, which will act like a board of directors. The day-to-day management team will be vetted by US officials and is likely to be made up of existing and expatriate Iraqi oil officials.
The structure is likely to anger opponents of the administration who argue that the US is wielding too much power in Iraq. [ complete article ]
Clerics call for Islamic state in Iraq
Alexandra Zavis, Associated Press, April 25, 2003
Hundreds of white-clad worshippers sat cross-legged on a boulevard in this war-shattered city Friday and listened to a cleric's exhortation: Iraqis must unite to create an Islamic state.
The same message resounded across Iraq on the main day of Muslim prayers, as clerics spoke about the need to come together after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Some urged the United States to leave Iraq. [ complete article ]
Rise of Shiite religious leaders in Iraq gives U.S. pause
Robin Wright, Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2003
The rapid emergence of Shiite religious leaders as major contenders for power in postwar Iraq is causing new divisions within the Bush administration.
The U.S. goal has been a secular government with all of Iraq's major ethnic and religious communities represented. But U.S. officials now acknowledge that a democratic Iraq could transform the oil-rich country into the Arab world's first Shiite-dominated state. Whether secular or religious, the emergence of such a state would have broad repercussions in the Arab and larger Islamic worlds.
As with many aspects of U.S. policy on Iraq, the Bush administration is divided on what to do about it. [ complete article ]
OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE OLD
For help in rebuilding Mosul, U.S. turns to its former foes
Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, April 25, 2003
When 40 retired Iraqi generals showed up at an auditorium in a sugar factory this week to meet U.S. military officers, it was not to surrender but to enlist in a U.S.-led effort to rebuild northern Iraq's largest city.
"The citizens look to you, as they have for years. They will ask you what to think" about Iraq's transition, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, said to the generals. "Your attitude, I believe, will be very, very important."
Wednesday's meeting was a sign of how dramatically the U.S. military's role has shifted since the end of the war's fighting phase. The Iraqi generals were representing about 1,000 retired and out-of-work officers who had overwhelmed U.S. authorities earlier in the week by responding to a summons for help with reconstruction.
Mosul is a traditional stronghold and source of recruits for the Iraqi military; it showed little of the euphoria that swept other areas at the fall of former president Saddam Hussein. Here, U.S. forces have been chased, spit on and fired at. At least 10 Iraqis have been killed by U.S. forces in the incidents.
"The war was easy compared to this," said Lt. Col. Robert M. Waltemeyer, commander of a Special Forces group that oversaw the city until Wednesday, when the 101st took over. [ complete article ]
Keep out of town hall, Kut tells US troops
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, April 25, 2003
First the marines tried to get this dusty town's 200 police officers back to work, but 100 dropped out after local people warned them that only traitors collaborated with America.
Then the police station burned down. It was still smouldering yesterday as frustrated US troops began to realise that governing a people is much harder than defeating one. [ complete article ]
Goodbye to Baghdad
After three months on assignment, The Guardian's Baghdad correspondent files her last report
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, April 25, 2003
It was not a bad day for Saddam City, so far as it goes. A neighbourly dispute sent a bullet tearing through the gut and pelvic bones of a 12-year-old. A junior Shia cleric with a whisp of a beard roamed a hospital, hectoring female nurses and doctors to wear hijab while the director tried to find his way through an emergency that never came up at Baghdad Medical College -- should he use his last remaining cylinder of oxygen to operate on an eight-year-old boy, or wait to see what other miseries the morning would bring?
Outside, goats fed on mounds of rubbish, and gunfire crackled in the alleys between the low, mean houses. "Maybe they are celebrating because the electricity came back on," said a passer-by. "Maybe this is good shooting."
Good shooting, or bad shooting, it continues.
Two weeks after American troops took control of Baghdad and the world thought the war had ended, the gunfire goes on, and Iraqis get killed and injured at the rate of several dozen every day. When the lights came back to Saddam City for the first time in more than a fortnight, the hospital received seven gunshot victims. A woman in her late teens died from a bullet in the neck; a boy, about 12, and a girl, about 10, still had bullets lodged in their brains. Nobody recorded their names. [ complete article ]
Ya Hussein
Omayma Abdel-Latif, Al-Ahram, April 24, 2003
When Hussein Al-Sadr, the director of the London-based Islamic Institute and a prominent Shi'a leader was asked by an Arab newspaper this week to define democracy he said: "it is to give the Iraqi people the right to express their true opinions about the US presence in their country." On Tuesday, Iraq's Shi'a population -- estimated at 15 million -- demonstrated this when hundreds of thousands flocked to the city of Karbala to commemorate the battle of Karbala, in which the Prophet Mohamed's grandson, Imam Hussein, was martyred in the year 680. To Iraq's Shi'a, this public show of force marked the end of almost 25 years of systematic targeting of Shi'a institutions, leaders and rituals. According to observers of the Iraqi scene, such a massive mobilisation of Shi'a influence and power is also a political display. This was visible in many a banner during the two day demonstration of faith, which carried strong anti- American slogans. "The message is simple; the Shi'a of Iraq will not accept that Saddam be replaced by another force which denies them their basic rights and shows disrespect for their political aspirations," one Iraqi analyst told Al-Ahram Weekly on Monday.
As Iraq's different secular forces begin to re-group, organise their rank and file and promote their political activities for the first time publicly, the religious establishment emerged as the most organised structure to channel overwhelmingly anti-US public sentiment and reflect the free will of ordinary Iraqis. Indeed, fears continue to grow in Washington that the religious establishment might step in to fill the power vacuum and thus undermine the US's presence in the country. But in its attempt to curb the influence of religious leaders, the US is risking the creation of more enemies. [ complete article ]
On Howard Dean
Marty Jezer, Common Dreams, April 24, 2003
A third party presidential challenge from the left would be reactionary and traitorous in the 2004 election. The Bush Administration and the ideas it represents must be decisively defeated. That wont be easy. A terrorist attack, another jingoistic war in the Middle East or, as I suspect, a move against Cuba might set the administrations terms for the election. On the other hand, Bush can no longer position himself as a moderate or a "compassionate conservative." And more states may be bankrupt and more government programs slashed even as the wealthiest Americans reap their tax cuts.
But the Republicans play to win. They plan to spend $200 million even before the campaign begins and will likely bury the Democrats in campaign fundraising. The Republicans have scheduled their convention for New York City in September 2004 in order to appropriate the memorial services for the victims of 9-11. This may backfire, of course. Liberal New Yorkers may not appreciate right-wing Republicans turning their tragedy into a campaign photo opportunity. But the administration was able to convince a majority of Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9-11. Its not inconceivable that theyll convince that same majority that George W. Bush is Rudy Giuliani.
The New Hampshire primary in the spring of 2004 will be a shake-out for Democratic candidates. In 1968 a strong showing by Gene McCarthy forced Lyndon Johnson to give up on re-election. A strong showing by a peace candidate in New Hampshire is needed to force Democratic hawks like Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt and John Edwards from the race. Howard Dean, Vermont being New Hampshires neighbor, could be that candidate. [ complete article ]
Looking beyond the war
Robert Fisk interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, April 23, 2003
We claim that we want to preserve the national heritage of the Iraqi people, and yet my own count of government buildings burning in Baghdad before I left was 158, of which the only buildings protected by the United States army and the marines were the Ministry of Interior, which has the intelligence corp of Iraq and the Ministry of Oil, and I needn't say anything else about that. Every other ministry was burning. Even the Ministry of Higher Education/Computer Science was burning. And in some cases American marines were sitting on the wall next to the ministries watching them burn. [ complete article ]
Heading toward an historic mistake
Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star, April 24, 2003
Following the fall of the Taliban, Afghans started shaving their beards. Following the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis are growing theirs.
The sudden and unmistakable assertion of majority Shiite religious and political identity is the least expected outcome for America of the Iraq war.
The remarkable pilgrimage by about 1 million faithful, including women, to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala is the first real symbol of post-Saddam Iraq. It is of far more import than the photo-op toppling of his statue in Baghdad.
What made it even more potent was its anti-American undercurrent.
But its message was no different than the one emerging from the other segments of the diverse Iraqi nation: "Thank you for freeing us from Saddam but now, please, go home."
Can anyone recall a time in history when the liberators of an oppressed people outlived their welcome in so short a period? [ complete article ]
LEGITIMACY ELUSIVE WHILE U.S. LACKS POWER OF PERSUASION
U.S. to seek Iraqi interim authority
Karen DeYoung and Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, April 24, 2003
The Bush administration hopes to establish an Iraqi Interim Authority to begin to take over some government duties by June 3, when the current mandate of the U.N. oil-for-food program expires. Once the authority is established, administration officials said yesterday, it can begin collecting, and spending, Iraqi oil revenue
But establishment of the authority has become complicated by, among other things, the refusal of Shiite clergy representing a significant portion of the population to participate. Without their inclusion, the administration will have a hard time convincing the United Nations, or anyone else, that the authority is an adequate step toward self-government. [ complete article ]
A new war in Washington
Jim Lobe, AlterNet, April 22, 2003
It's been barely a week since the U.S. took control of Baghdad, but the Pentagon is already embroiled in a new war, this time with the State Department.
The opening salvo was delivered Tuesday morning by the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives (1995-98) and member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, Newt Gingrich, at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Gingrich, who is close to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, aimed the full fury of his rhetorical fire at the State Department, accusing it of actively subverting President George W. Bush's agenda in Iraq and beyond. [ complete article ]
Pilgrims threaten jihad against American forces
Kim Sengupta in Karbala, The Independent, April 24, 2003
The Shia pilgrimage to Karbala, one of the most potent and symbolic in recent Iraqi history, took on a strident political and martial note yesterday with demands for the establishment of an Islamic state and threats of a jihad against the "American occupiers".
The one million people commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohamed, were not only determined to take part in the rites banned by Saddam Hussein and his Baathist predecessors, but also to lay their claim for a Shia-led government.
Yesterday, the final prayers of the festival were different from the days that have gone before, with thousands of young men arriving from the cities of a de facto Shia confederacy, which is already taking shape.
The young men left their Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers in their vehicles out of respect, they said, for the holiness of Karbala.
But later, covered in blood from flagellation with chains and knife wounds they had ritually and frenziedly inflicted on themselves they roared their desire to avenge Ayatollah al-Sadr, murdered by the regime in 1999, and fight for a free, Islamic Iraq.
The show of strength was not aimed solely at the Americans or the Sunnis they accuse of oppressing them under the rule of the Baath party. Schisms have also began to appear among the Shias: the followers of the late Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr who now follow his son Muqtadar are lining up against Ayatollah al-Hakim, who now runs Karbala, and Ayatollah Ali Hamid al-Sistani, in Najaf. [ complete article ]
Show of Shia power unnerves the allies
Richard Beeston and Elaine Monaghan, The Times, April 23, 2003
Scenes of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims expressing their newfound political power on the streets of Iraq's cities are causing growing concern in Western and Arab capitals.
A fortnight after American and British troops deposed Saddam Hussein's regime, there is a growing consensus that the only credible force to have emerged in the country is the Shia clergy and its followers, many of whom advocate the creation of an Iranian-style Islamic state.
"There is real concern," a senior British official said. "The Iraqi Shia are the only group to have made any real impact so far. There was a feeling that the Shia were more secular than those in Iran. Now we are not so sure." [ complete article ]
IN "LIBERATED" IRAQ THE UNITED STATES "RETAINS ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY"
U.S. warns Iraqis against claiming authority in void
Michael R. Gordon and John Kifner, New York Times, April 24, 2003
The American military moved today to strip Baghdad's self-appointed administrator of his authority and warned Iraqi factions not to take advantage of the confusion and the political void in the country by trying to grab power.
Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of ground forces in Iraq, issued a proclamation putting Iraq's politicians on notice, saying, "The coalition alone retains absolute authority within Iraq." He warned that anyone challenging the American-led authority would be subject to arrest. [ complete article ]
NO "OUTSIDE INTERFERENCE IN IRAQ" (EXCEPT BY AMERICANS)
Bush warns Tehran to keep out of Iraq's Shia strongholds
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, April 24, 2003
The Bush administration issued a sharp warning to Iran yesterday, telling it not to interfere in largely Shia southern Iraq, amid signs that Washington has been caught off guard by the strength of radical Islam in that part of the country.
Speaking after reports that Iran the stronghold of Shia Islam in the Gulf region had sent agents across the border, the White House made clear it would not tolerate outside meddling in the daunting task of creating a stable political system from the ashes of the Saddam Hussein regime.
"We've made clear we would oppose any outside interference in Iraq's road to democracy," said Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman. Infiltration of agents to destabilise the Shia community, which makes up 60 per cent of the Iraqi population, "would clearly fall into that category". American anxieties have been heightened by the large crowds gathered for a religious festival in the Shia holy city of Karbala and by numerous rallies of protesters demanding an end to US "occupation" as leading Shia clerics fight for influence. [ complete article ]
The lessons of Lebanon
Let's not forget the mess the US made last time it tried 'nation building' in the Middle East
Charles Glass, The Guardian, April 24, 2003
People cheered when the US marines marched into the capital. At last someone would restore order, remove the thugs and murderers from the streets, and force an end to the chaos. Then a new government arrested and tortured dissidents. The US ordered the dissidents' outside backers, Syria and Iran, to stay away. Britain joined the US in policing the streets. With Washington supporting the government and training its army, the opposition strategy meant removing the Americans and the British. Syria and Iran helped the rebels. American soldiers shot and killed Shi'ite Muslims. American and British planes bombed their neighbourhoods. Soon, the American embassy and the marine headquarters were rubble. American and British civilians were taken hostage and displayed on television. Then, the American warships sailed away and took the marines with them. The experiment in nation-building was over.
This has already happened. The time: August 1982 to February 1985. The place: Lebanon. Can it happen again, on a larger scale, in Iraq?
The forces that drove the conflict in Lebanon are duplicated in Iraq. About 40% of Lebanon's 3 million people were Shi'ite Muslims, the poorest and most desperate people in the country. Of Iraq's 24 million people, 60% are Shi'ite. Most of them, after Saddam Hussein's discrimination against them and 12 years of sanctions, are also impoverished and angry. Shi'ite Muslims of both countries look to their clergy for leadership in troubled times. There are strong family links between the Shia of Iran and of Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's Hizbullah, was born in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. The mother of Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, is from a prominent south Lebanese family. Mullahs from both countries receive spiritual guidance, financial aid and military support in Iran.
In Lebanon, the United States antagonised Iran and Syria. In Iraq, the US appears to be doing the same, with American officials suggesting that both Iran and Syria are ripe for American-sponsored changes of regime. In Lebanon, the Lebanese - as well as the Americans, French, British and Italians of the multinational force - paid for US foreign policy errors in blood.
Charles Glass covered the recent war in Iraq for ABC News. He was ABC News Beirut bureau chief from 1983-85 and was held hostage by Hizbullah in Lebanon in 1987
[ complete article ]
Shiite pilgrims to US: 'Thanks. Please go now.'
Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 2003
... just as Iraq's long-repressed Shiite majority enjoy a religious reawakening, the scale of the event [in Karbala] is a show of strength for Shiite clergy who are moving quickly to fill the vacuum left by Mr. Hussein before American forces do.
"These public demonstrations are ... to express Shiite power to the Americans," says Sheikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbalai, the top Shiite cleric in Karbala.
"If America really likes Iraq, it should leave Iraqis to our fate," he says. "If it is a real liberator, it shouldn't force a government on us."
As up to a million pilgrims converge on Karbala this week, passing through the gilt-domed shrines of Abbas and Hussein, the topic of conversation is when American troops will leave Iraq - and what kind of government they will leave behind.
Politics and religion never mixed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where clerics kept a low profile, rarely wearing their robes in public, and the faithful were regularly accused of dissent and tortured by security services.
While gratitude toward America runs deep for toppling Hussein, Iraqi Shiites say they expect the US to honor promises of democracy, and to go home soon. [ complete article ]
How the UN may fit in postwar Iraq
Scott Baldauf and Seth Stern, Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 2003
In the marble-floored Royal Palace No. 7, Lakhdar Brahimi looks as if he has the future of Afghanistan on his lean shoulders. In a way, he does.
As the United Nations point man in Afghanistan, Mr. Brahimi is responsible for every single UN activity here - from emergency food relief and refugee repatriation to peacekeeping and reconstruction. That's just the easy stuff. Soon, the UN will help the Afghan government rewrite its constitution, hold national elections, and demobilize private armies that don't particularly want to demobilize.
By most accounts, the UN's efforts in Afghanistan are considered innovative, an outgrowth of lessons learned from recent UN missions - from Rwanda to Kosovo to East Timor. Here, the UN has honed its skills, taking a back-seat role and letting Afghans make all the big decisions, while UN officials offer the funding and technical expertise to act on those decisions. It's a method that, if given the chance, the UN says it could bring to Iraq when rebuilding there begins in earnest. [ complete article ]
Why the mullahs love a revolution
Dilip Hiro, New York Times, April 23, 2003
The Bush team's vision for a postwar Iraq was founded on the dreams of exiles and defectors, who promised that Iraqis would shower American troops with flowers. Now, with the crowds shouting, "No to America; no to Saddam," and most Iraqis already referring to the American "occupation," the Bush administration seems puzzled.
The truth is that the exiles had been in the West so long that they knew little of the reality inside Iraq; the defectors, in search of a haven from the cruel regime, told the eager Americans anything they wanted to hear. Now that these illusions have been shattered, American policy makers might do better to consider the history of the region. In particular, the dogged nationalism of the Iraqis that forced imperial Britain's departure in 1932; and, more recently, the events in 1979 after the downfall of the secular regime of the shah of Iran. [ complete article ]
U.S. planners surprised by strength of Iraqi Shiites
Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest, Washington Post, April 23, 2003
As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.
The burst of Shiite power -- as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala yesterday -- has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region. [ complete article ]
OIL FLOWS FASTER THAN WATER
Oil flows again from Iraq's southern oilfields
Reuters, April 23, 2003
Oil flowed from Iraq's southern oilfields on Wednesday for the first time since the country was invaded by U.S.-led forces last month, a U.S. military spokesman said. "Slowly but surely things are coming back on line," Lt. Col. Ed Worley told Reuters at U.S. Central Command war headquarters in Qatar. [ complete article ]
Search for water continues in S. Iraq
Tini Tran, Associated Press, April 23, 2003
They crowd by the hundreds along the muddy banks of a sludge-colored canal, hands outstretched to fill containers with foul-smelling water gushing from a broken pipe.
All day comes the parade: old men pushing carts piled high with metal tins, women carrying plastic washtubs, and children on rickety bicycles loaded with barrels.
Two weeks after British forces took control of Iraq's second-largest city, water still remains out of reach for many of Basra's 1.3 million residents, forcing some to resort to desperate measures. [ complete article ]
Iraqi force members arrested for looting
Fighters are part of group supported by Pentagon
Associated Press, April 23, 2003
U.S. troops arrested fighters of the U.S.-backed Free Iraqi Forces yesterday after they were found looting abandoned homes of former members of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Fighters of the group have been caught repeatedly while looting homes in an enclave in Baghdad where members of Hussein's Baath Party lived, said Army Staff Sgt. Bryce Ivings of Sarasota, Fla [...]
Some of the Free Iraqi Forces were trained, uniformed and brought to Iraq by the U.S. military to help U.S. troops.
They are the military wing of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress, which is led by Ahmad Chalabi, an exile who enjoys strong support from the Pentagon and others in the Bush administration.
The members of the military wing carry official identification cards, and some carry U.S.-issued weapons.
Telephone calls to the Iraqi National Congress headquarters in Baghdad were not answered yesterday.
The new Baghdad police chief, in his first day on the job, complained to a U.S. officer that the Free Iraqi Forces, among others, have looted homes in Baghdad and refuse to obey police orders.
"They will not respect our men, and we need the U.S. soldiers to help us control them," Zabar Abdul Razaq said. [ complete article ]
The perils of empire
Paul Kennedy, Washington Post, April 20, 2003
Eighty-six years ago, another powerful invading army had just entered Baghdad. At the same time, other divisions driving north-eastwards from Egypt were occupying Palestine. Urged on by their own strategists and intellectuals, these forces would soon advance upon Damascus. They would exercise great influence upon Iran and the Persian Gulf states. Donning the mantle of liberators, they would encourage regime change in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They would send out messages of hope that "the entire Arab world may rise once more to greatness and renown" now that its oppressors were defeated. These were folks determined to make the entire Middle East secure and stable -- a blessing to the world, no doubt, but a particular blessing to their own hegemonic nation, and that nation was Great Britain. [ complete article ]
'Good kills'
Peter Maass, New York Times, April 20, 2003
McCoy, whose marines refer to him as, simply, ''the colonel,'' was not succumbing, in his plain talk of slaughter, to the military equivalent of exuberance, irrational or otherwise. For him, as for other officers who won the prize of front-line commands, this war was not about hearts and minds or even liberation. Those are amorphous concepts, not rock-hard missions. For Colonel McCoy and the other officers who inflicted heavy casualties on Iraqis and suffered few of their own, this war was about one thing: killing anyone who wished to take up a weapon in defense of Saddam Hussein's regime, even if they were running away. Colonel McCoy refers to it as establishing ''violent supremacy.''
''We're here until Saddam and his henchmen are dead,'' he told me at one point during his march on Baghdad. ''It's over for us when the last guy who wants to fight for Saddam has flies crawling across his eyeballs. Then we go home. It's smashmouth tactics. Sherman said that war is cruelty. There's no sense in trying to refine it. The crueler it is, the sooner it's over.'' [ complete article ]
Iraqi Shi'ite leader ready to work with U.S.
Jon Hemming, Reuters, April 23, 2003
An Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi'ite leader said he was ready to work with the United States and the international community to improve the conditions of Iraqis and establish security and stability in his war-torn homeland.
But Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim, one of the most powerful voices among Iraq's majority Shi'ites, said fervent demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at the holy shrine of Kerbala showed Iraqis were able to govern themselves.
"There is no doubt we are going to cooperate with all sides and forces that have relations with the Iraqi issue," Hakim told Reuters in an interview. "Among these sides are America, Britain, the United Nations, the European Union, Arab and Islamic states."
Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), has lived in exile in Tehran for more than 20 years and has often been portrayed as a firebrand wanting to establish an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Iraq.
"We cannot make a comparison between the Iraqi and the Iranian people... the characteristics of the Iraqi people are different to those of Iranian people," he said. "We should not make a copy of the Iranian revolution and establish it in Iraq."
Hakim said there could be a separation of church and state in Iraq, unlike in his host country Iran. [ complete article ]
Americans accused of turning blind eye to killings by Kurds
Kim Sengupta, The Independent, April 23, 2003
A bitter conflict is unfolding in northern Iraq between two minority communities, with the Americans accused of turning a blind eye to killings and ethnic cleansing.
The Kurds, the victims of oppression by Saddam Hussein and previous regimes in Baghdad, are being blamed for a violent campaign of intimidation against the Turkoman population. Organisations representing the Turkomans say they want British and European troops to protect them because the Americans are acquiescing in what is taking place. [ complete article ]
The real significance of Kerbala
Kamil Mahdi, The Guardian, April 23, 2003
The massive expression of religious sentiment in Kerbala this week has political significance beyond the symbolism of the end of Saddam's repression. Saddam repressed popular religious rituals because they provided the environment for a wider expression of political and social grievances. Now the Iraqi masses are taking to civic engagement and have begun to articulate political demands that reject occupation. [ complete article ]
'No fly' list is challenged in a lawsuit
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times, April 23, 2003
Civil rights advocates demanded today that the federal government explain how hundreds of people some of them vocal critics of the Bush administration have ended up on a list used to stop people suspected of having terrorist links from boarding commercial air flights.
In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco, the American Civil Liberties Union said government officials had improperly withheld information about how people wind up on the "no fly" list, what steps are taken to ensure its accuracy and how people who are erroneously detained at airports can get their names off the list. [ complete article ]
Don't believe all the patriotic fire on American TV
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, April 23, 2003
There have been times, living in America of late, when it seemed I was back in the Communist Moscow I left a dozen years ago. Turn on the local all-news radio station, and between the war bulletins, there's Lockheed Martin running spots extolling its commitment to national security and American greatness.
Switch to cable TV and reporters breathlessly relay the latest wisdom from the usual un-named "senior administration officials", keeping us on the straight and narrow.
Everyone, it seems, is on-side and on-message. Just like it used to be when the hammer and sickle flew over the Kremlin. Those vanished Central Committee propaganda bosses would have been proud of how the Bush crowd, who operate with a similar hermetic secrecy, are running things. Then it was called democratic centralism. Here they call it the "Fox Effect". The Fox in question is the Fox News cable channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose super-patriotic coverage has been a ratings winner. Fox has taken its cue from George Bush's view of the universe post-11 September either you're with us or against us. Fox, most emphatically, is with him, and it's paid off at the box office. [ complete article ]
Hans Blix vs the US: 'I was undermined'
David Usborne, The Independent, April 23, 2003
For the first time since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, confronted the Americans openly yesterday, accusing the Bush administration of lacking credibility in its efforts to hunt down Iraq's banned weapons.
Mr Blix, 74, derided by Washington for his failure to find the "smoking gun" that would have convinced the UN to give legal backing to the war, also accused Washington and Britain of deliberately undermining his efforts before the war.
He warned the Security Council that only UN inspectors, and not the teams being assembled by America, would be able to provide an objective assessment of any materials that might be found in Iraq. [ complete article ]
As Iraqi Shiites gain clout, will U.S. interests suffer?
Barbara Slavin and Vivienne Walt, USA Today, April 22, 2003
Analysts say that the U.S. toppling of Saddam may also have unleashed violent forces beyond Washington's control and that Iraq's neighbors, in particular Iran, will take advantage. ''I think there was a blithe assumption by the administration that all this would magically fall into place,'' says Judith Yaphe, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University.
The United States is having trouble getting the lights turned back on in Iraq, let alone forming an interim government for the fractious country. Despite efforts by U.S. forces, large parts here in the Iraqi capital and in other cities have been without power and running water for weeks.
Outside the Kadhim mosque in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya, residents say they want the new government to follow stringent Islamic laws. ''This is the first year of our freedom,'' says Firas Abdulrazak, 35, a merchant at his stall in a market across the street from the mosque. ''We can have our own government now.'' He adds that that means a devoutly Islamic regime.
Kamal Najim, a laborer, agrees. ''Murderers should be killed because that is what the Koran says: an eye for an eye,'' he says. ''If a woman is with another man, the husband surely has the right to kill her immediately.'' A crowd of about 10 Shiite neighbors cheers in agreement. One draws his finger across his throat, indicating what punishment a woman should receive for adultery. ''The woman's skin becomes dirty for every other human being,'' Najim says.
An Islamic republic of Iraq, where such harsh punishments are meted out, is not what the Bush administration had in mind when it set out to overturn Saddam's dictatorship. But it is unclear how the United States will be able to prevent that outcome. [ complete article ]
Oh no, not again
Paul Belden, Asia Times, April 23, 2003
On Friday it took a fiery sermon by the Sunni cleric Dr Ahmad Al Qubaisee to unleash Baghdad's full-throated Muslim religious fury at US occupation forces.
On Monday, they didn't need a cleric at all.
Or, make that, rather, that they did need a cleric. To be precise, they needed the Shi'ite Ayatollah Muhammed Al Fartuzi - and they needed him now.
Trouble was, nobody seemed to know where he was. [ complete article ]
Putting different faces on war
James T. Madore, Newsday, April 22, 2003
While U.S. news organizations have focused throughout the war on military exploits, the press overseas has emphasized civilian casualties, most notably an Iraqi boy who lost both arms and most of his family when his home was bombed last month.
The story of 12-year-old Ali Ismaeel Abbas has saturated Europe, the Middle East and Canada, having been splashed across the front pages of newspapers and highlighted on television programs for more than two weeks. In many countries, he has become a symbol of the war.
In the United States, however, people knew little of the boy until last week when U.S. forces responded to international pressure and flew him from a Baghdad hospital to a treatment center in Kuwait. [ complete article ]
Ba'athists slip quietly back into control
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, April 21, 2003
They have quietly removed the pictures of Saddam Hussein from their sitting rooms, and reconfigured their memories to transform lives of privilege into tales of suffering. Less than two weeks after the collapse of the regime, thousands of members of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist party, the all too willing instrument of Saddam, are resuming their roles as the men and women who run Iraq.
Two thousand policemen - all cardholding party members - have put on the olive green, or the grey-and-white uniforms of traffic wardens, and returned to the streets of Baghdad at America's invitation.
Dozens of minders from the information ministry, who spied on foreign journalists for the security agencies, have returned to the Palestine Hotel where most reporters stay, offering their services as translators to unwitting new arrivals.
Seasoned bureaucrats at the oil ministry - including the brother of General Amer Saadi, the chemical weapons expert now in American custody - have been offered their jobs back by the US military. Feelers have also gone out to Saddam's health minister, despite past American charges that Iraqi hospitals stole medicine from the sick.
It has become increasingly apparent that Washington cannot restore governance to Baghdad without resorting to the party which for decades controlled every aspect of life under the regime.
It has equally become apparent that the Ba'ath party - whose neighbourhood spy cells were as feared as the state intelligence apparatus - will survive in some form, either through the appeal of its founding ideals, or through the rank opportunism of its millions of members. [ complete article ]
How American power girds the globe with a ring of steel
Ian Traynor, The Guardian, April 21, 2003
Whenever America goes to war, the spoils of victory invariably include more US military bases overseas.
Having vanquished Saddam Hussein, the Pentagon is planning to establish four US bases in Iraq, according to reports in Washington yesterday.
The Iraqi deployment plans fall into the century-old pattern of US foreign bases being built on the back of military victory. They are also the latest episode in an extraordinary surge in America's projection of military muscle since September 11. [ complete article ]
Hunt for Iraqi arms erodes assumptions
Barton Gellman, Washington Post, April 22, 2003
With little to show after 30 days, the Bush administration is losing confidence in its prewar belief that it had strong clues pointing to the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction concealed in Iraq, according to planners and participants in the hunt.
After testing some -- though by no means all -- of their best leads, analysts here and in Washington are increasingly doubtful that they will find what they are looking for in the places described on a five-tiered target list drawn up before fighting began. Their strategy is shifting from the rapid "exploitation" of known suspect sites to a vast survey that will rely on unexpected discoveries and leads. [ complete article ]
The Iraqis' idea of democracy may differ from that of Mr Bush
Lead Editorial, The Independent, April 22, 2003
From the start to the end of the war in Iraq there has been an affecting simplicity, verging on naivety, about much of what President Bush has had to say. His remarks over the Easter weekend were no exception. The liberation of Iraq, he said, would make the world a more peaceful place. With Saddam Hussein no longer in power, the Iraqi people's lives would be much better. Finally, he offered: "Freedom is beautiful. And when people are free, they express their opinions as they could not do before."
All those opinions, ventured so confidently, are now about to be tested in ways of which Mr Bush and his administration may never even have dreamt. While the US administrator, the retired general Jay Garner, marked his arrival in Baghdad by promising to repair the war damage as a matter of priority, thousands of Iraqis were using their new freedom to voice their discontent. For several thousand in Baghdad far more than have ever turned out to applaud US troops that meant protesting against the US "occupation".
Many, many other Iraqis are channelling their new freedom into religious expression, and not at all the sort of religious expression that US evangelist Franklin Graham plans to take to Iraq very soon. [ complete article ]
Shiites get their shot at power
John Daniszewski, Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2003
As women pick through a vendor's basket of ripe tomatoes near a burnt-out Iraqi tank on this busy stretch of road a few miles south of Baghdad, the sense that life is resuming after war is inescapable.
All seems normal -- except for the music blaring from the loudspeaker of the nearby mosque.
It is a rhythmic song honoring Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad, and it alternates with a message to the people from Iraq's senior Shiite Muslim leader, 73-year-old Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. "Do no harm to the Sunnis," it tells them. "But if they harm you, you may defend yourselves."
A few short weeks ago, only the Sunni-dominated Baath Party would have dared to issue edicts to the Iraqi people -- in the name of President Saddam Hussein.
But in the absence of a government since Hussein's ouster April 9, the voice of Sistani and the network of Shiite seminaries that he heads -- the Hawza I-Ilima -- is increasingly the authority that Iraqis heed.
And the unstated message to Sunni Muslims and Christians is that the era of Shiite power has come in Iraq, commensurate with their two-thirds share of the population. [ complete article ]
U.S. government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures
Ann Talbot, World Socialist, April 19, 2003
As the full extent of the looting of Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad emerges, it becomes clear that there was nothing accidental about it. Rather it was the result of a long planned project to plunder the artistic and historical treasures that are held in the museums of Iraq.
Had the National Museum of Iraq been looted by poor slum dwellers it would have been crime enough, and the responsibility would have rested with the American administration that refused, despite repeated warnings, to provide for the security of Baghdad's cultural buildings.
Once the museum staff were able to communicate with the outside world, however, it became apparent that the looting was not random. It was the work of people who knew what they were looking for and came specially equipped for the job.
Dr. Dony George, head of the Baghdad Museum, said, "I believe they were people who knew what they wanted. They had passed by the gypsum copy of the Black Obelisk. This means that they must have been specialists. They did not touch those copies." [ complete article ]
Why Iraqis talk of occupation, not liberation
Paul McGeough, The Age, April 19, 2003
Life for Iraq's 25 million people has become a struggle to find food and their feet after the Americans ripped away Saddam's regime and then stood back as the only form of life and government most of them knew was destroyed in a looting rampage that many believe was a part of the invasion plan - all functions of government are paralysed.
Americans might be offended by a comparison with September 11. But if that traumatised the US, how do we measure the impact of such a high-powered military invasion in Iraq. A tyrant is gone, but so too is the only form of order most Iraqis know. [ complete article ]
Confusion over who controls Iraq's oil ministry
Charles Clover, Financial Times, April 20, 2003
Ringed by US tanks and guarded by US soldiers with a very exclusive admission list, Iraq's oil ministry on Sunday appeared secluded from the disorder that reigns in the rest of Baghdad.
One question nevertheless provoked a great deal of confusion: who is in charge of the world's second largest petroleum reserves?
The former minister is barred from entering, as are his deputies. A man in a green suit, standing outside the barbed wire, introduced himself as Fellah al-Khawaja and said he represented the Co-ordinating Committee for the Oil Ministry, which few of the employees had heard of.
It draws its authority from a self-declared local government led by Mohamed Mohsen al- Zubaidi, a recently returned exile who says he is now the effective mayor of Baghdad.
According to Faris Nouri, a ministry section chief, the committee has issued a list of who should be allowed into the ministry by US troops guarding the building. On Sunday it was announced that Mr Zubaidi's deputy, former general Jawdat al-Obeidi, would lead Iraq's delegation to the next meeting of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. [ complete article ]
Blair 'must produce evidence for war'
Andrew Sparrow, The Telegraph, April 21, 2003
Tony Blair was under a "moral obligation" to produce evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, the Tories said yesterday.
Alan Duncan, a shadow foreign office minister, said Britain and America would forfeit the trust of the world if they could not find the biological, chemical or nuclear weapons whose existence was used to justify the attack on Iraq. [ complete article ]
Will Hollywood stop Arab-bashing?
Jack Shaheen, Los Angeles Times, April 21 2003
For far too long, Hollywood has played a paradoxically hidden role in paving the way to America's war now winding down in Iraq. We first went to war with Iraq in 1943, with a movie called "Adventure in Iraq." It depicted an American soldier's "shock and awe" bombing of what the screenplay called that Arab country's "devil worshipers." (The Arab characters were mostly played by Anglos.)
"Adventure in Iraq" was nothing new. For most of the past century, Hollywood has been conditioning audiences worldwide to internalize the defamatory message that Arabs and, by extension, all Muslims are unrelenting enemies of Western values. Major studios shortsightedly but with increasing momentum have dedicated themselves to producing films and TV programs that featured overt anti-Arab propaganda.
What remains to be seen is whether Hollywood, misled by America's swift ousting of Saddam Hussein, will misconstrue our victory as a renewed license to continue its ultimately suicidal barrage or get the real message in time to mend its ways. [ complete article ]
Give us back our democracy
Edward Said, The Observer, April 20, 2003
In a speech in the Senate on 19 March, the first day of war against Iraq, Robert Byrd, the Democrat Senator from West Virginia, asked: 'What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?'
No one bothered to answer, but as the American military machine currently in Iraq stirs restlessly in other directions, these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption, of democracy. [ complete article ]
Religion and politics converge in march of a million Iraqi Shias
Phil Reeves and Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, April 21, 2003
A vast army of Iraqi Shia Muslims and a few from neighbouring Iran, too was on the move, pouring out of the towns and villages towards one of their holiest cities in a traditional annual march that was banned under Saddam Hussein. From Baghdad, the journey takes two days. But some of those who live further afield said they had been walking for five.
This was, first and foremost, a ritual, an act of self-sacrifice to mark the 40th day of mourning for the death of the prophet's grandson, Hussein, 1,323 years ago. This red letter day in the Shia calendar falls on Wednesday.
But it is an event that also has considerable political significance. Though this was primarily a religious event, the mass march which will continue today is a de facto show of strength by Iraq's Shia majority, ruthlessly suppressed under Saddam Hussein, and now eager to lay down their marker in the political vacuum of the chaotic and dangerous post-Saddam days. In Karbala the pilgrims find a city that is operating under the rule of the Shia elders, in what could be a blueprint for other cities across Iraq.
It could equally prove to be the start of an overwhelming problem for Washington and London as they try to establish an inclusive government among the Iraqi population, of which 60 per cent is Shia.
Since the war ended, the Shias have been quietly taking control of running Shia- dominated towns. This was another tacit reminder to the US that their community whose aspirations bear little resemblance to Washington's hopes for the brave new world must be taken into account. [ complete article ]
This occupation is a disaster. The US must leave - and fast
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, April 21, 2003
Abdul al-Malaki lives opposite the gatehouse of the extravagant palace that Saddam Hussein built in his home town of Tikrit. Flanked by megalomaniac twin statues of the former Iraqi president riding a horse above four missiles, the palace arch was a daily affront to locals.
"The people of Tikrit are like the rest of Iraq. They hated Saddam Hussein. I want to kill him," the 28-year-old cafe-owner spat out his words. But as lorry-loads of US Marines trundled through the arch, he switched focus: "This is an occupation. Nothing else. We will keep quiet for a year and if they have not gone we will kill them."
The gratitude for removing Saddam Hussein on which Washington mistakenly expected to bank for years is almost exhausted. Those who warned the Bush administration against this war have been proved right. Only in the Kurdish areas of the north is there any satisfaction. [ complete article ]
Burn a country's past and you torch its future
Robert Darnton, Washington Post, April 20, 2003
It happened here, too. The British burned our national library in 1814. It wasn't much of a library, to be sure -- just a collection of about 3,000 volumes assembled for the use of senators and representatives in the new capitol being built in the wilderness of Washington, D.C. But in destroying it, the British invaders struck at the heart of what would develop into a national identity.
Do libraries really matter for a nation's sense of its self? Evidently Iraqis felt the destruction of their national library, archives and museum in the past week as a loss of their connection to a collective past, something like a national memory. When asked to explain what the National Museum of Iraq had meant to him, a security guard answered, in tears, "It was beautiful. The museum is civilization." Even some of the looters are reportedly beginning to return what they had carried off, as if in response to a need to heal a self-inflicted wound. [ complete article ]
Shiite clerics face a time of opportunity and risks
Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, April 20, 2003
[Shiite leader, Sayyid Muqtada] Sadr and other clerics stand at the center of the most decisive moment for Shiite Muslims in Iraq's modern history. It is a revival from both the streets and the seminaries that will most likely shape the destiny of a postwar Iraq.
In the streets, the end of Hussein's rule has unleashed a sweeping and boisterous celebration of faith, from Baghdad to Basra, as Shiites embrace traditions repressed for decades. In politics, the prominence of clergy -- the major institution to survive the repression of Hussein's powerful Baath Party -- has signaled that in coming years, power may be reflected through a religious prism. And for Shiite populations abroad -- including in Iran -- the community's newfound freedom may reestablish the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala as centers of religion and politics, recasting an arc of Shiite activism that began with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. [ complete article ]
Pentagon expects long-term access to four key bases in Iraq
Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, April 20, 2003
The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say.
American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north. [ complete article ]
Deadly unrest leaves Mosul's residents bitter at U.S.
David Rohde, New York Times, April 20, 2003
Just over a week ago, as a vibrant spring day bloomed on the banks of the Tigris, residents of this city woke to find that the local Baath Party leadership had fled.
Suddenly free, yet alone, residents waited for American forces to rush into Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, to keep the peace.
Instead, the city turned into the most violent place in all of postwar Iraq.
By this morning, at least 31 Iraqis were dead and more than 150 wounded in clashes, including 17 believed to have been killed by American marines in disputed shootings. Looters had destroyed the city's most treasured buildings. American soldiers had been attacked, and one had been wounded.
In the midst of the vacuum, new leaders emerged, and mosques became the center of relief efforts. There is still gratitude toward America here, but the events of the last week have fed deep suspicions of the United States. [ complete article ]
A tale of two Fridays
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, April 20, 2003
The Pentagon, a.k.a. the International Trust for Historic Preservation, has once more shown the world its deep cultural sensitivity.
Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who has branded Islam a "very wicked and evil" religion, was the honored speaker at the Pentagon's Good Friday service.
After Kenna West, a Christian singer, crooned, "There is one God and one faith," Mr. Graham told an auditorium of soldiers in camouflage, civilian staffers and his son, a West Point cadet: "There's no other way to God except through Christ. . . . Jesus Christ is alive because he is risen, and friends, he's coming back, and I believe he's coming back soon."
When Muslim groups complained that the Pentagon was "endorsing" his attacks on Islam, Mr. Graham asked for a photo op with Muslim Pentagon employees. They declined.
Muslims suspicious that America is on a crusade against Islam were inflamed to learn that Mr. Graham is taking his missionary act to Iraq. They are still scorched by his remarks to NBC News after 9/11: "It wasn't Methodists flying into those buildings, and it wasn't Lutherans. It was an attack on this country by people of the Islamic faith."
He wrote in his last book that Christianity and Islam were "as different as lightness and darkness," and recently told the Sunday Times of London, "The true God is the God of the Bible, not the Koran." [ complete article ]
Revolution city
Peter Beaumont, The Observer, April 20, 2003
On Friday there was an invisible line of demarcation between greater Baghdad and the residents of Sadr City - a place where US patrols are absent, as are the Iraqi capital's awkward new police. Its boundary marks the greatest failure of the US intervention in Iraq thus far: the failure to tackle what may be the most potent challenge to US plans for a Western-style democracy in Saddam's collapsed demesne.
Because, for all its poverty and danger, Sadr City may be the very model of the new Iraq that America is making. It has a population that is turning to its clerics, not to the political exiles who are flooding back and demanding that they be handed the reins of power.
And on Friday Sadr City belonged emphatically to the hundreds of armed men of the Sadr Movement's militia and to a second group loyal to the rival Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, both bearing arms in open defiance of the US troops who have flooded into the city. [ complete article ]
US army was told to protect looted museum
Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy and Gaby Hinsliff, The Observer, April 20, 2003
The Observer has seen documents submitted to senior US generals by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance on 26 March, listing 16 institutions that 'merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction and or pilferage of records and assets'. First was the national bank, next came the museum. The Oil Ministry, which has been carefully guarded, came sixteenth on a list of 16. [ complete article ]
Pilgrimage of sorrow: Shiite faithful bury dead
Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, April 19, 2003
From Baghdad and cities across southern Iraq, people began arriving this morning. In a procession of sorrow, they came in minibuses and pickups, in taxis and vans, with simple wood coffins lashed to the roofs. Some bodies were hardly recognizable, exhumed after days, even weeks, from hastily dug graves. Others were only recently discovered at hospitals and mosques where they had been stashed with other corpses in the chaos of war.
For those in Najaf, it was a day of piety, visiting the city that is the burial site of Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad and one of Shiite Islam's most revered figures. They reflected, on a war that remains more than a memory. And they expressed anger, at carnage that, to some, remained incomprehensible.
"Everything we have in Iraq is rich, our oil, our resources, our land," said Shamil Abdel-Sahib, a 33-year-old who performed ritual washing of the bodies as they were brought to the cemetery. "The only thing that is cheap in Iraq is its people." [ complete article ]
POWER OF PRIDE
Outside the United States, not many people will be familiar with a bumper sticker on which the declaration, "Power of Pride", is blazened across the Stars and Stripes. It is one of the many emblems of patriotism that spread like wildfire across America after September 11. The power of pride is now emerging in Iraq. Can we empathize or must we see this as a threat? Warmongers like Fox News' Bill O'Reilly call it ingratitude, but for Iraqis it is patriotism, pure and simple.
A dangerous groundswell of resentment is building up on the streets of Baghdad
Fergal Keane, The Independent, April 19, 2003
Someone in the van had the idea that we should go and attend the Friday prayers at one of the big Shia mosques. Maybe the imam would be talking about the Americans or the fall of Saddam.
We never got to the Shia district. Even from the small window at the back of the vehicle, I could see the crowds gathering outside Abu Hanif mosque. This is a place of worship for the city's Sunni population, and our attention was drawn to the men standing on the wall carrying Islamic banners. Looking closer I saw they bore slogans: "Occupiers Go Home", "No US and UK in Iraq". So, a small demo at a mosque. The initial reaction is, no big deal. I've been attending such protests for the past six weeks in the Arab world.
And then you remember that you are standing in Baghdad, where nobody has held a free demonstration in more than 25 years. Then you hear a loud noise. It grows as you walk closer to the mosque. By the time you reach the main gate it is a deafening roar. They are shouting slogans forbidden under the secular rule of Saddam, slogans which, if George Bush could hear them, would surely cause him to revolve with anxiety: "With our blood and our souls we will defend Islam."
The same slogans rattled the walls of the Shah's palaces in Iran a quarter of a century ago. I had not expected to hear them in Iraq. At the end of prayers, the crowd poured into the streets. It was a big crowd. Thousands. I couldn't tell how many but at least as many as 10,000. An imam came and asked to be interviewed. "The Americans are here in our country for one thing. They want the oil. They want to defend Israel. If they don't leave soon there will queues of mujahedin lining up to drive them out." Again it was rhetoric familiar from the streets of Cairo and Beirut. But this was Baghdad, and there were American troops just up the road. The American "enemy" wasn't a distant entity it was carrying M16 rifles a few blocks away.
Then came one of those moments that you live through with every nerve of your body vibrating. I saw young men breaking away from the main crowd and running toward a street corner. There was some shouting. Then I spotted American helmets bobbing above the crowd. "Look, buddy, I've got the gun now back off," a voice shouted. An Iraqi man was confronting an American soldier. "Go ahead and shoot me. Go ahead," the man said. A woman shouted into my face: "It's about our pride. Its just about our pride." [ complete article ]
Prove Iraqi guilt, MPs tell Blair
Nicholas Watt, Michael White, James Meek and Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, April 19, 2003
Tony Blair is facing the threat of a fresh rebellion from Labour backbenchers [non-ministerial Members of Parliament] who are growing increasingly alarmed that the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will confirm that the war was illegal.
As a 1,000-strong Anglo-American task force of inspectors prepares to search hundreds of suspicious sites, Labour MPs are demanding an inquiry to establish whether MI6 misled ministers about Iraq's weapons programme.
Backbench Labour MPs who feel they were duped into backing the war on the basis of questionable intelligence want the cross-party Commons intelligence and security committee to carry out an investigation. One well-placed former minister said: "The intelligence committee is raring to challenge the veracity of what the security services told them about Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons. They were told what he had and where it was. There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this, but they don't seem to be able to find the stuff." [ complete article ]
Our last occupation
Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian, April 19, 2003
No one, least of all the British, should be surprised at the state of anarchy in Iraq. We have been here before. We know the territory, its long and miasmic history, the all-but-impossible diplomatic balance to be struck between the cultures and ambitions of Arabs, Kurds, Shia and Sunni, of Assyrians, Turks, Americans, French, Russians and of our own desire to keep an economic and strategic presence there.
Laid waste, a chaotic post-invasion Iraq may now well be policed by old and new imperial masters promising liberty, democracy and unwanted exiled leaders, in return for oil, trade and submission. Only the last of these promises is certain. The peoples of Iraq, even those who have cheered passing troops, have every reason to mistrust foreign invaders. They have been lied to far too often, bombed and slaughtered promiscuously.
Iraq is the product of a lying empire. The British carved it duplicitously from ancient history, thwarted Arab hopes, Ottoman loss, the dunes of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan at the end of the first world war. Unsurprisingly, anarchy and insurrection were there from the start. [ complete article ]
Thousands of Iraqis protest against U.S.
Hassan Hafidh, Reuters, April 18, 2003
Unfurling banners that declared "Leave our country," tens of thousands of Baghdad protesters have demanded that the United States get out of Iraq while leaders of the oil-rich nation's neighbours meeting in Saudi Arabia also call for a speedy U.S. departure.
Muslims poured out of mosques and into the streets of Baghdad, calling for an Islamic state to be established in the biggest protest since U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein's iron-fisted, 24-year-long rule nine days ago.
Carrying Korans, prayer mats and banners, tens of thousands of people marched in a protest that organisers said represented both Iraq's majority Shi'ite Muslims and powerful Sunnis.
"Leave our country, we want peace," read one banner. "No Bush, No Saddam, Yes Yes to Islam," read another.
Meanwhile, while the United States pressed ahead with its plans for a post-war Iraq, foreign ministers of the country's neighbours meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, called on the United Nations to take a central role in rebuilding the country. [ complete article ]
Shiite demonstration heralds challenge to US authority
Peter Ford, Christian Science Monitor, April 18, 2003
Protected by hundreds of militiamen toting assault rifles, tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims poured into Baghdad Friday to celebrate their new religious liberty. The massive but orderly display of independence also heralds a challenge to US authority in Iraq.
Laying prayer mats along three blocks of an avenue cleared of trash for the occasion, the 30,000 Shiite men who knelt at noon prayers constituted the largest such gathering in Iraq since 1999, when Saddam Hussein's security forces brutally put down a Shiite revolt.
"The last time this number of people were here we were killed in this street. This is freedom", said Hussein Ali, a mosque security official, as he surveyed the crowd filling the dusty thoroughfare outside the Hekmar mosque in Saddam City. Some locals have started renaming teeming slum Sadr City, after a prominent Shiite cleric, Mohammed Sadeq Sadr. His assassination allegedly by Saddam Hussein's security police in February 1999 sparked major unrest among Shiites and scores of demonstrators were reported killed in Saddam City.
But this is not necessarily the kind of freedom that US officials who promised to liberate Iraq had in mind. The imam who preached to the massed ranks of worshippers said the time had now come to ban singing and dancing in Iraq and to oblige women to cover their heads. [ complete article ]
Experts: Looters had keys to Iraqi vaults
Jocelyn Gecker, Associated Press, April 17, 2003
Some of the looters who ravaged Iraqi antiquities appeared highly organized and even had keys to museum vaults and were able to take pieces from safes, experts said Thursday at an international meeting.
One expert said he suspected the looting was organized outside the country.
The U.N. cultural agency gathered some 30 art experts and cultural historians in Paris on Thursday to assess the damage to Iraqi museums and libraries looted in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion.
Although much of the looting was haphazard, experts said some of the thieves clearly knew what they were looking for and where to find it, suggesting they were prepared professionals. [ complete article ]
America on probation
Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, April 17, 2003
America is on probation. That, in four words, is my verdict on Gulf war II. America can still prove, by what it does over the next few years in the Middle East, that it was right in what it did during this last month of war. On what I see at the moment, I fear that the United States will show itself to have been wrong. Not grotesquely, criminally wrong, but prudentially, politically wrong. Then "the judgment of history", invoked by Tony Blair in the House of Commons on Tuesday, may come in the famous words of Talleyrand: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake." [ complete article ]
Expert thieves took artifacts, UNESCO says
Robert J. McCartney, Washington Post, April 18, 2003
Well-organized professional thieves stole most of the priceless artifacts looted from Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities last week, and they may have had inside help from low-level museum employees, the head of UNESCO said today.
Thousands of objects were lost at the museum, both to the sophisticated burglars and to mob looting, Koichiro Matsuura, director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said in an interview.
"Most of it was well-planned looting by professionals," he said. "They stole these cultural goods to make profits."
Museum officials in Baghdad told UNESCO that one group of thieves had keys to an underground vault where the most valuable artifacts were stored. The thefts were probably the work of international gangs who hired Iraqis for the job, and who have been active in recent years doing illegal excavations at Iraqi archaeological digs, according to archaeological experts working with UNESCO. [ complete article ]
PARIAH STATE
Since most Americans never set foot on foreign soil, to be told that we are now citizens of a pariah state is a claim that will just as likely provoke disbelief or indifference rather than being a cause for alarm. But those Americans who now out of desire or necessity travel overseas are repeatedly being confronted with stark choices on how to represent themselves in the face of widespread hostility. Do they venture forth as proud Americans ready to rebut false accusations and defend a noble but widely misunderstood nation? Do they try and pass themselves off as Canadians, or do they simply plead, "I'm not responsible for my government?"
Islamic world less welcoming to American scholars
Sam Dillon, New York Times, April 18, 2003
Elizabeth C. Stone, a professor of anthropology, had planned to spend the summer excavating a 2,600-year-old city surrounding an ancient citadel in eastern Turkey. But like scores of other American professors, she was forced to cancel her trip as American tanks rumbled toward Baghdad.
The war in Iraq, and the angry reactions it has aroused across the Islamic world, have disrupted work by American scholars from Tunisia to Pakistan.
In some cases, academic institutions or researchers themselves have canceled trips in response to State Department warnings of danger. In other cases, host countries have denied them study permits.
Experts say the war has caused the greatest interruption of overseas study since World War II, forcing the cancellation or postponement of hundreds of expeditions researching everything from Islamic law to the bone knives used by ancient butchers.
"I can't remember when research has been disrupted across such a wide region," said Dr. Stone, who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "The war has left a very wide footprint."
Many professors with long experience in the region fear it could be years before hostilities subside enough to allow researchers from the United States to operate overseas as they have in the past. [ complete article ]
Iraqi National Congress in Mosul emerges with own army
David Rohde, New York Times, April 18, 2003
Across this battered city, Iraqi political parties have slowly begun opening up new offices this week. But only one group shares a base with American Special Forces soldiers, has a private army trained by the Americans and is guarding a local hospital alongside American troops.
"I believe the I.N.C. will succeed," predicted Nabeel Musawi, the 41-year-old deputy director of the Iraqi National Congress. "I believe the I.N.C. is the future of Iraq."
The group, headed by the wealthy Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, has long been the focus of a split in the American government. Dismissed by officials at the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency as having too little support inside Iraq, the I.N.C. is strongly backed by the Department of Defense, in particular by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.
But in Mosul and other cities, local leaders have already expressed vehement opposition to a government headed by exiles. [ complete article ]
In broken Baghdad, photo negatives
Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, April 15, 2003
Hold two pictures in the balance: a 12-year-old boy whose arms have been blown off, and a museum official walking through the looted National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad. Both are images of foreseeable but unintended destruction. Both capture scenes that might have been worse: Broken pottery isn't so bad as dead people, and the boy with no arms is (for the time being) still alive. Yet these two images have flown around the world, stirring some of the strongest anger about the U.S.-led war in Iraq. [...]
The memory of these pictures may mark a fault line between the United States, where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has chastised journalists who focus on looting for being "Henny-Pennys," and the world, where opposition to the war has, quite naturally, led to more concern with the pity of war. As weekend newspapers in America took up the story of looting at the National Museum and the vast destruction of objects there (at least 170,000, by one estimate), news came of the rescue of American POWs. Images of seven pajama-clad soldiers hustled to freedom quickly replaced images of the litter of 7,000 years of civilization. [ complete article ]
Saddam's fall will reignite the revolutionary debate
Martin Woollacott, The Guardian, April 18, 2003
When Ayatollah Khomeini was arrested in the Iranian Shi'ite centre of Qom and packed off by the Shah to Ankara on a cargo aircraft, it was a transfer of a revolutionary personality arguably as important as that of Lenin on the famous sealed train. A year later, in 1965, Khomeini arrived in Iraq, at which point one cleric remarked to another: "This sayyid has caused havoc in Qom. We must be careful not to let him do the same in Najaf."
Nearly 40 years on, the divisions which Ruhollah Khomeini and his ideas provoked not only remain but, with the fall of Saddam Hussein, constitute a potentially volcanic fault in the world of Shi'ite Islam. [ complete article ]
Exiled Shiite chief: Iraqis should rebel
Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press, April 17, 2003
The exiled leader of the biggest Iraqi opposition group called Thursday on Iraqis to converge in the Shiite holy city of Karbala to oppose a U.S.-led interim administration and defend Iraq's independence.
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, chose the southern Iraqi city and the date -- next Tuesday -- because of their connections to Hussein, the grandson of Islam's Prophet Muhammad and one of Shiite Islam's most revered heroes.
"I call on Iraqis to converge in Karbala to oppose any sort of foreign domination and support establishment of an Iraqi government that protects freedom, independence and justice for all Iraqis," al-Hakim was quoted by state-run Tehran television as saying. [ complete article ]
U.S. awards Bechtel contract to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure
Associated Press, April 17, 2003
The government on Thursday awarded Bechtel Corp. a contract that could reach $680 million for helping rebuild Iraq's power, water and sewage systems and repairing airports and a seaport.
The U.S. Agency for International Development said the San Francisco engineering and construction company initially will receive $34.6 million. Bechtel could earn the larger figure over 18 months if Congress approves the funds.
Several Democratic lawmakers have complained the Bush administration did not allow open competitive bidding, inviting a few companies to submit proposals.
One critic, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, said the contract showed that "a troubling pattern is beginning to emerge, as some of the most powerful business interests in the country continue to receive these huge contracts without ... open, transparent bidding.''
Wyden and others are sponsoring a bill that would require a public explanation of contracts awarded under a limited bidding process. [ complete article ]
NO WAR, NO PEACE
Deadly clash raises tensions in north
David Filipov, Boston Globe, April 17, 2003
Iraq's largest northern city teetered on the brink of violent anarchy yesterday after a second straight day of deadly clashes between American troops and Iraqi civilians in Mosul killed three people and wounded 11.
American helicopters prowled the skies over Mosul, swooping low over neighborhoods and roadways in an attempt to show that US forces controlled the city. But on the ground American patrols were rare, and much of Mosul was a dangerous no-man's land. [ complete article ]
A crusade after all?
Jane Lampman, Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 2003
When President Bush called his war on terrorism a "crusade," he backtracked quickly in the face of intense reaction at home and abroad. Now many people are worried that, in the case of Iraq, that inopportune choice of words may turn out to hold more than a modicum of truth.
As Christian relief agencies prepare to enter Iraq, some have announced their intent to combine aid with evangelization. They include groups whose leaders have proclaimed harshly negative views of Islam. They are also friends of the president. The White House has shrugged its shoulders, saying it can't tell private groups what to do, though legal experts disagree. [ complete article ]
Bush cultural advisers quit over Iraq Museum theft
Reuters, April 17, 2003
The head of a U.S. presidential panel on cultural property has resigned in protest at the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum.
"It didn't have to happen," Martin Sullivan said of the objects that were destroyed or stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in a wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended President Saddam Hussein's rule last week.
Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, said he wrote a letter of resignation to the White House this week in part to make a statement but also because "you can't speak freely" as a special government-appointed employee.
The president appoints the 11-member advisory committee. Another panel member, Gary Vikan, also plans to resign because of the looting of the museum.
"Our priorities had a big gap," Sullivan told Reuters on Thursday. "In a pre-emptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for." [ complete article ]
WERE GEORGE W. BUSH AND DONALD RUMSFELD COMPLICIT IN THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY?
The day of the jackals
Rod Little, The Spectator, April 19, 2003
Stealing a country's physical history, its archaeological remains, has become the world's third biggest organised racket, after drugs and guns.
There are those who argue that it shouldn't need to be illegal at all. There are those who say, look, the free market should operate here. Why shouldn't a private collector be allowed to buy an antiquity and keep it in his bathroom, maybe next to the bidet, or as a tasteful holder for the Toilet Duck, if he wishes to do so, and if both he and the seller are happy with the price?
You will not be surprised to hear that many of those who argue this way are American. You may not be surprised, either, that shortly before the invasion of Iraq, and with the spoils of war on their mind, some of these people formed themselves into a lobbying organisation called the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP). This group want a 'relaxation' of Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. They object to what they call Iraq's 'retentionist' policy towards its archaeological treasures. (I love the pejorative use of the word 'retentionist' in this context; 'Goddam sand-niggers want to retain all their history!')
The treasurer of the group, one William Pearlstein, has said that he would support a postwar government in Iraq that would make it easier to have things 'dispersed' to, er, for the sake of argument, the United States. And, on 24 January this year, the ACCP met with the US defense department to impress this point upon the politicians and the military. I tracked down one of the people who attended this meeting, and asked what the archaeologists had to say for themselves.
'Hang on,' said Maguire Gibson, from the Oriental Institute at Chicago University, interrupting my first question, 'there was only one archaeologist there -- me. The rest were artefact collectors and lawyers, the people from the ACCP. I only went along to put my own point of view across, which was to plead for a minimising of the bombing of known archaeological sites. But I wouldn't have stood a chance of getting a meeting with the defense department without the ACCP. But I was there independently, OK?'
Sure. So, who are they, then, the ACCP, and what do they want?
'These are very, very well-connected people. They are able to get a meeting with whoever they like, when they like. You know, I believe they met with the President last week. They are very affluent people, too. One of the leading lights is a former state department man, Arthur Houghton.'
They sound terrific, I said. And Maguire replied, well, that's not all.
'You have to understand that some of the members of their organisation are among the biggest collectors and dealers of illegal artefacts in the world....'
So, here's what seems to be the deal. A very short while ago an organisation was formed in the USA representing people who enjoy a lucrative or aesthetically rewarding trade in stolen historical artefacts, as well as artefacts traded legally and above board on the open market. The organisation was formed in some haste precisely because of the forthcoming war in Iraq. That's before we, over here in Britain, knew for sure that we were even going to war.
And this organisation had the power to demand a meeting at defense department and even presidential level. [ complete article ]
Lessons from the past:
The American record in nation-building
Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 11, 2003
The record shows that democratic nation-building is among the most ambitious and difficult of foreign policy undertakings for the United States. Of the 16 over the past century, democracy was sustained in only 4 countries ten years after the departure of American forces. Two of these followed total defeat and surrender (in World War II) and two were in tiny countries (Grenada and Panama). The record also reveals that unilateral nation-building by the United States has an even lower success rate perhaps because unilateralism has led to the creation of surrogate regimes and direct American administration during the interim post-conflict period. The use of interim surrogate regimes has produced a record of complete failure. No American-supported surrogate regime made the transition to democracy and only one case of direct American administration (in Japan) succeeded in ushering in democracy. To heed the lessons of experience, the Bush administration should support a multilateral reconstruction strategy centered on bolstering political legitimacy and economic burden-sharing under the auspices of the United Nations. [ complete article ]
Why Syria is America's new target
Andrew Green, The Guardian, April 17, 2003
Syria is accused of harbouring Iraqi fugitives. Possibly so. The Syrians opposed the invasion of Iraq. The Syrian authorities cannot prevent Iraqis getting across a 400-mile desert border. It would not be surprising if, rather than accept the humiliation of handing them over to the Americans, they ushered unexpected guests towards an aeroplane.
Second, the Americans allege that the Syrians have tested chemical weapons. Not a surprise. Several countries in the Middle East are believed to possess such a capability, including Algeria, Egypt, Iran and, notably, Israel. The case for invading Iraq turned on Saddam being a crazy dictator who might pass chemical or biological weapons to terrorists. It would be hard to describe Bashar al-Assad in such terms. If Syria has chemical weapons, it is for a good reason - as a second-strike capability against Israel. It is inconceivable that the Syrians would strike first, knowing the Israelis would immediately go for nuclear retaliation.
The third American allegation is an old chestnut - that Syria is a rogue state supporting terrorism. The Syrians have long given hospitality to the political wing of Palestinian rejectionist movements. They permit the Iranians to channel through Damascus airport the arms required by Hizbullah in south Lebanon. These are regarded as potential levers in negotiations with Israel for return of the occupied Golan Heights. They also give Syria some measure of influence over the Palestinian and Hizbullah resistance. This is tough diplomacy, Middle East style; it hardly amounts to being a rogue state.
Sir Andrew Green was UK ambassador to Syria from 1991-94 and to Saudi Arabia from 1996-2000 [ complete article ]
Korea, South and North, at risk
Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch, April 17, 2003
The good news is that China has now actively rejoined Korean diplomacy to prevent a new war there. The bad news is that the American envoy assigned to conduct the talks is James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for Asia and the Pacific. The New York Times describes him as "a longtime Asia hand." This is not a characterization that any single leader in East Asia would recognize. He is an unknown Republican Party hack who has repeatedly insulted South Korean leaders by his lack of understanding of the meaning of diplomacy. Unfortunately, the United States is not using any of its experienced Korean hands like Selig Harrison of the Carnegie Foundation, former ambassador to the Republic of Korea Donald Gregg, or Professor Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago, who could solve this problem fairly easily if unencumbered by the Bush administration's ideological baggage. Given that this delicate situation is still in amateur hands on the American side, another pointless war, this time in Korea, a much more formidable country than Iraq, is still a possibility. [ complete article ]
Basra bombing 'destroyed my family'
Ryan Dilley, BBC News, April 16, 2003
The war in Iraq has cost 72-year-old Abid Hassan Hamoodi dear. The large family he once proudly headed was all but wiped out when aircraft from the US-led forces mistakenly bombed his Basra home.
"I lost 10 of my family. I once lived in that house with six other relatives, now I am alone.
"Just before the invasion started much of my family came to stay in my home, it being made of reinforced concrete and very strong.
"There was my doctor son, my daughter - a microbiologist and her three sons. My other daughter is a medical consultant and she came with her infants.
"We all slept in a very safe place at the back of the house, my bed was just a few metres away from the rest." [...]
"On 5 April at 5.30am, a plane dropped a rocket on the main road. We all woke up.
"Just five minutes after we had returned to bed, the plane returned and dived very sharply, firing its rockets. They fell just at the back of the house where we were.
"The three walls of the room fell on many of my family killing them instantly. I went to the room and saw them all covered with the bricks and concrete that had fallen." [ complete article ]
For the people on the streets, this is not liberation but a new colonial oppression
Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 17, 2003
It's going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of "liberation" has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of "liberation". [ complete article ]
Fear reigns, as one detested militia replaces another
Phil Reeves, The Independent, April 17, 2003
Many people in Iraq complain that George Bush has so far utterly failed to live up to his promises of real "liberation", but the people of Baqubah have better reason than most.
The hated Baathist bureaucrats and generals no sooner disappeared from this large, soul-destroyingly bleak town, 35 miles from the Iranian border, than another armed force sought control on the streets, inspiring unease and even outright fear. And it was not the American Marines.
Standing guard over a former Baath party administration headquarters at lunchtime yesterday, Kalashnikovs at the ready, was a band of bearded fighters from the Badr Brigade, a pro-Iranian heavily armed militia whose overall numbers are in excess of 10,000. [ complete article ]
Key Shia leader returns to Iraq
BBC News, April 16, 2003
A top Iraqi Shia opposition leader has returned to the country from Iran after 23 years in exile. Abdelaziz Hakim, the deputy head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), arrived in the southern Iraqi city of Kut on Wednesday morning.
Also on Wednesday, the leader of Sciri, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, who is still in Iran, called on Iraqis to gather in the town of Karbala next week for an Islamic anniversary.
The ayatollah said the Iraqis there "should demand a government that will bring liberty, independence and justice for all Iraqis under an Islamic regime". [ complete article ]
The Shia of Najaf seethe ominously, fearing the yoke of US occupation
Phil Reeves, The Independent, April 16, 2003
The message could not have been clearer if the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani himself had broadcast it from the battery of loudspeakers that hang above the breathtaking blue mosaics lining the walls of his mosque.
The powerful cleric's multitude of followers in Najaf, one of the holiest Shia cities, will not accept an Iraqi government run by anyone they see as a stooge of the occupying Americans.
They are not interested in retired Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, the rumbustious former missile contractor leading the effort to rebuild Iraq, who 150 miles further down the Euphrates was chairing the first meeting of selected Iraqi opposition groups. Objecting to the American general's role, the largest Shia party, the Iranian-based Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, refused to go.
And they have nothing good to say about Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi businessman, convicted fraudster and favourite of the Pentagon hawks. After decades in exile, he was spirited into Nasiriyah last week by US forces and has since formed his own militia. [ complete article ]
Familiar hawks take aim
Jim Lobe, Asia Times, April 17, 2003
Many of the same people who led the campaign for war against Iraq signed a report released three years ago that called for using military force to disarm Syria of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to end its military presence in Lebanon. [...]
The study, "Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The US Role", was co-authored by Daniel Pipes, who has just been nominated by Bush to a post at the US Institute of Peace, and Ziad Abdelnour, who heads a group founded by him called the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL). The study was released by Pipes' group, the Middle East Forum.
[ complete article ]
U.S. neglect casts dark shadow over a city without light or much love for the invaders
James Meek, The Guardian, April 16, 2003
In the darkness of unelectrified Baghdad at night, one of the brightest spots is the Palestine Hotel, where, from generator-powered floodlit marquees on the roof, the American TV networks report around the clock on their military forces' operations in the Iraqi capital.
Conveniently, the US officers trying to restore essential services in the city are based in the same hotel. It is a short walk upstairs for US military spokesmen to explain live to American audiences how they are getting the Iraqi police back on the streets, working to repair the power stations, and fixing the water pipes.
Yet a week after the US occupation of Baghdad began, if you count from the contrived symbolism of the destruction of one of the many statues of Saddam Hussein in the city - the one which happens to be closest to the Palestine Hotel - there is a bitterness and tension between citizens and occupiers.
It is not just that Baghdad has been ravaged by looting, which local people feel US forces did little or nothing to prevent. There is a growing feeling that the occupiers are obsessed with protecting themselves, to the exclusion of taking risks in protecting civilians.
Most troublingly, there is a sense that US efforts to restore essential services are more about self-boosting short-term fixes, and not about helping skilled Iraqis put the city back on its feet. [ complete article ]
Germany is no model for Iraq
Atina Grossmann and Mary Nolan, Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2003
As the United States plans its postwar occupation of Iraq, it ransacks history for successful precedents. The occupation of Germany is often cited for promoting demilitarization, denazification, democratization and capitalist development while garnering widespread support within Germany and outside. But the lessons of that earlier occupation are complex and ambiguous. Facile historical comparisons distort the postwar situation and blind Americans to the challenges ahead in Iraq. [ complete article ]
WHERE'S THE PARADOX?
Ian Fisher, writing for the New York Times, notes the paradox that the United States, having provided Iraqis with the freedom to protest, should now be the target against which many Iraqis are voicing their complaints. How ungrateful of them, many Americans may now be thinking. George Bush, however, should not be among them, for it was he who proclaimed that freedom "is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." If, as he said in the State of the Union, "freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation," the paradox that glares in the eyes of most Iraqis is that their self-declared liberators are placing the administration of "free Iraq" under the direction of a retired American general. Freedom may not be America's gift to the world, but the spigot that releases freedom is surely in America's grip. Thus far, it has shown no willingness to swiftly loosen or share its hold.
Free to protest, Iraqis complain about the U.S.
Ian Fisher, New York Times, April 16, 2003
Protests against the American forces here are rising by the day as Iraqis exercise their new right to complain -- something that often landed them in prison or worse during President Saddam Hussein's rule.
But no one here is in the mood to note that paradox, as Iraqis confront with greater clarity their complicated reactions to the week-old American military presence here: anger at the looting; frustration at the ongoing lack of everything from electricity to a firm sense of order; fear of long-term United States military occupation.
"Down, down U.S.A. -- don't stay, go away!" chanted Ahmed Osman, 30, a teacher among the several hundred Iraqis protesting today in front of the Palestine Hotel downtown, which the marines are both guarding and using as their headquarters to recruit civil servants to reconstruct Iraq's central authority. "Bush is the same as Saddam," he said. [ complete article ]
The nightmare scenario: freedom to choose rule by the ayatollahs
Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, April 16, 2003
At a bleak and barren airbase in southern Iraq yesterday, the US and British governments began the process of forging a post-Saddam government in their own image: a liberal democracy, preferably headed by a western-educated elite.
But only 10 miles from the Talil air base, where US and British representatives met selected Iraqis, thousands of Iraqis took to the streets to enjoy their new-found freedom and to demonstrate that the US-British image of government is not necessarily theirs.
About 5,000 Shia Muslims - 20,000, according to one Arab television station - marched through Nassiriya, one of the bigger towns on the banks of the Euphrates, shouting: "No to America, No to Saddam".
Like many Iraqis, they are ecstatic that Saddam Hussein has gone but they do not want the US either. They do not refer to "liberation" but to "aggression".
One Nassiriya resident said the demonstrators wanted not western-style freedom but government by their ayatollahs.
That demonstration is the clearest manifestation yet of Shia opinion, and comes after outbursts elsewhere in southern Iraq. It will alarm Washington, which faces its nightmare scenario in the Middle East: an alliance between a Shia-dominated Iraq and its co-religionists in Iran. [ complete article ]
Don't hold your breath
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, April 16, 2003
The Israeli prime minister's interview this week with the liberal Ha'aretz newspaper seemed to show a new Ariel Sharon, one ready to contemplate painful concessions. He even named the West Bank towns that Israel might have to "part with" and said he recognised the "ethical problems" inherent in Israel continuing to "rule over another people and run their lives."
No wonder the Downing Street optimists are excited. Doesn't this sound like an aged warrior who has finally seen one pivotal enemy, Iraq, removed and at last feels able to make the peace that will be his lasting legacy?
It'd be nice to think so. But - and this might be good advice for our prime minister - it's best, when gazing at the Middle East, to put aside the rose-coloured spectacles. For there is every reason to be sceptical, rather than hopeful, about the intentions of both the Israeli and US administrations. [ complete article ]
Blair's doctrine peters out in the wreckage of Baghdad
Polly Toynbee, The Guardian, April 16, 2003
Gloaters jab fingers at we who opposed the war, saying we have been proved wrong. But we might ask them, if it did so much good, why stop here when all over the world people suffer under monstrous leaders? The ease with which the most militarised dictator was toppled in Iraq shows that these regimes are all paper tigers once faced with US mega-might. Is it not a moral duty to free them all? A sweep up Africa, via Zimbabwe and Congo, would yield more freedom for the buck than anywhere. Tony Blair himself has said he would knock over Burma if he could.
That was the Blair doctrine. But can its rhetoric survive the Iraq war? For its moral authority was premised heavily on the collective authority of the UN. First declared in his great Chicago speech, stirring Clinton to save the Kosovans in 1999, it emerged again at the 2001 Labour party conference a few weeks after the burning horror of the Twin Towers. Those were emotional days and his words moved even hostile observers to hyperbolic praise. He offered an electrifying vision that out of tragedy would arise a wiser world where good was possible, with social justice and liberty for all.
"This is the moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order the world around us ... only the moral power of a world acting as a community can. By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone." [...]
There was only one problem with the Blair doctrine. It was not a speech made from the Oval Office, but from a small offshore island, a mouse roaring. Alas, the shock and awe of 9/11 had not shaken George Bush's kaleidoscope into a new wisdom, so these fine words were no more than wistful political poetry. [ complete article ]
Chaos mars talks on Iraqi self-rule
Rory McCarthy and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, April 16, 2003
The US and British governments yesterday formally began the tortuous process of steering Iraq towards a democratic future, but the first day of talks was undermined by technical delays, schisms and fierce political and religious unrest sweeping across the country. [ complete article ]
Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad
Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 15, 2003
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.
I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air. [ complete article ]
Armed Shia on streets in first sign of power tussle
James Meek, The Guardian, April 15, 2003
Armed groups of Shia citizens, acting on instructions from clerics in the holy city of Najaf, were attempting to bring order to districts of Baghdad yesterday.
Shia clerics in Baghdad said they were cooperating with the US authorities and had no objection to their presence in the city, provided it was temporary.
But the mobilisation of Shia by the Najaf hierarchy sends a signal to Washington that an organised alternative power structure already exists in Iraq, whatever coalition of exiles and local politicians emerges from meetings this week.
Some local Shia clerics made it clear yesterday that they wanted to see Iraq become an Islamic republic. [ complete article ]
War without end
David Remnick, The New Yorker, April 14, 2003
Saddam Hussein, who came to power in 1979 declaring his intention to combine the glory of Nebuchadnezzar with the methods of Josef Stalin, no longer rules Iraq, and not to feel relief at the prospect of a world without him is to be possessed of a grudging heart. In a region well stocked with tyrants and autocrats, Saddam was singular in his ambitions, though not in the way proposed by his cult of personality. His record of murder, torture, aggression, intimidation, and subjugation is inscribed in the documentary reports of Human Rights Watch and in the souls of the traumatized ex-subjects who have survived to hammer at his fallen monuments. And yet it would also require a constricted conscience to declare the Anglo-American invasion finished business while so much of the world remains alarmed or enraged at the level of its presumptionand while so many dead go uncounted. It is hard to put a name to what has happened (to what is happening still), not least because the Bush Administrations intentions, both within Iraq and beyond it, are still a question of deepest concern. [ complete article ]
It's U.S. policy that's 'untidy'
Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2003
How telling that U.S. forces so carefully protected Iraq's oil fields while ignoring the looting of Baghdad's internationally renowned museum. The complete, and by all accounts preventable, destruction of one of the world's most significant collections of antiquities is a fit metaphor for current U.S. foreign policy, which causes more serious damage through carelessness than calculation.
The notion that Iraq even has history -- let alone that 7,000 years ago this land was the cradle of civilization -- is not likely to occur to the neocolonialists running a brawny young nation barely more than 200 years old. The United States' earnest innocence is the charm that our entertainment industry markets so successfully around the world, but it is also the perennial seed of disaster as we blithely rearrange corners of the planet we only pretend to understand. [ complete article ]
Bush vetoes Syria war plan
Julian Borger, Michael White, Ewen MacAskill and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian, April 15, 2003
The White House has privately ruled out suggestions that the US should go to war against Syria following its military success in Iraq, and has blocked preliminary planning for such a campaign in the Pentagon, the Guardian learned yesterday.
In the past few weeks, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ordered contingency plans for a war on Syria to be reviewed following the fall of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, his undersecretary for policy, Doug Feith, and William Luti, the head of the Pentagon's office of special plans, were asked to put together a briefing paper on the case for war against Syria, outlining its role in supplying weapons to Saddam Hussein, its links with Middle East terrorist groups and its allegedly advanced chemical weapons programme. Mr Feith and Mr Luti were both instrumental in persuading the White House to go to war in Iraq.
Mr Feith and other conservatives now playing important roles in the Bush administration, advised the Israeli government in 1996 that it could "shape its strategic environment... by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria".
However, President George Bush, who faces re-election next year with two perilous nation-building projects, in Afghanistan and Iraq, on his hands, is said to have cut off discussion among his advisers about the possibility of taking the "war on terror" to Syria. [ complete article ]
Shiite clerics move to assume control in Baghdad
Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, April 14, 2003
Ali Shawki, a Shiite Muslim cleric with the swagger that a gun on each hip brings, strode through the no man's land that Baghdad has become and, in words and action, left little doubt that there's a new authority in town.
At the Prophet Muhammad Mosque, where he resides, the 47-year-old Shawki led prayers in a room stuffed with booty confiscated from looters rampaging through the city. His guns stayed on. With an armed retinue -- one guard carried a heavy machine gun with rounds slung around him, bandolier-style -- he pressed the flesh at a health clinic that he had ordered open after it was closed for days by war.
He described his plans for the sprawling slum once known as Saddam City: armed patrols at night that he would lead, a curfew by 8 p.m. on the turf he controls, and orders that no gunfire was allowed, which he would broadcast by mosque loudspeaker.
"We order people to obey us. When we say stand up, they stand up. When we say sit down, they sit down," Shawki said, his black turban framing the long beard of religious study. "With the collapse of Saddam, the people have turned to the clergy." [ complete article ]
Groups of Kurds are driving Arabs from northern villages
C.J.Chivers, New York Times, April 14, 2003
Two Arab mothers and their children sat forlornly in a semicircle in the dirt, one household among scattered families living in the open on the outskirts of this agricultural village south of Kirkuk.
Before them on dirty cushions were a pair of tiny, wheezing infants; one was 24 days old, the other 35 days. Both looked ill. Shiya Juma Muhammad, the mother of the younger baby, pleaded for help. "We need food," she said. "We need medical service. We need security. We need to go home."
Ms. Muhammad and her trembling infant are victims of a new wave of intimidation and crime in northern Iraq. They are among thousands of Arabs expelled from their homes by armed Kurds among the United States' most exuberant allies in this war and ordered to move away within three days.
Forced expulsion had long been a tool of the Iraqi government. Since the late 1960's, Saddam Hussein's Baath Party relocated huge segments of Iraq's population from place to place, either to suppress uprisings or to skew demographics near oil fields in favor of the ruling Arab class.
Now, days after seizing control of Kirkuk, an ethnically diverse city located astride Iraq's northern oil field, Kurds are forcing Arabs in outlying villages to move from their homes, leaving entire hamlets nearly abandoned and crowding some families into wheat fields that have become hastily erected camps. [ complete article ]
Ultimate insiders
Bob Herbert, New York Times, April 14, 2003
Let's go back some 20 years. Ronald Reagan was president. George Shultz was secretary of state. Lebanon was in turmoil. And Iraq and Iran were locked in a vicious war that had sharply curtailed the flow of oil out of Iraq.
In December 1983 Donald Rumsfeld was sent to the Middle East as a special envoy in an effort to jump-start the peace process in Lebanon and advance a presidential initiative for peace between Arabs and Israelis.
One of his stops was Baghdad, where he met with Saddam Hussein. That was unusual. Mr. Rumsfeld was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq since 1967, when Iraq and other Arab nations severed relations with the U.S., which they blamed for Israel's victory in the Six-Day War.
The primary goal of Mr. Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad was to improve relations with Iraq. But another matter was also quietly discussed. The powerful Bechtel Group in San Francisco, of which Secretary Shultz had been president before joining the Reagan administration, wanted to build an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba, near the Red Sea. It was a billion-dollar project and the U.S. government wanted Saddam to sign off on it. [ complete article ]
See also The Institute for Policy Studies' report, Crude vision: How oil interests obscured U.S. government focus on chemical weapons use by Saddam Hussein and an interview with the report's author.
Pentagon was told of risk to museums
Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post, April 14, 2003
In the months leading up to the Iraq war, U.S. scholars repeatedly urged the Defense Department to protect Iraq's priceless archaeological heritage from looters, and warned specifically that the National Museum of Antiquities was the single most important site in the country.
Late in January, a mix of scholars, museum directors, art collectors and antiquities dealers asked for and were granted a meeting at the Pentagon to discuss their misgivings. McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said yesterday that he went back twice more, and he and colleagues peppered Defense Department officials with e-mail reminders in the weeks before the war began.
"I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected," Gibson said. Instead, even with U.S. forces firmly in control of Baghdad last week, looters breached the museum, trashed its galleries, burned its records, invaded its vaults and smashed or carried off thousands of artifacts dating from the founding of ancient Sumer around 3,500 B.C. to the end of Islam's Abbasid Caliphate in 1258 A.D. [ complete article ]
Military restrictions and lawlessness shut aid agencies out of Iraq
Sandra Laville, David Blair and John Steele, The Telegraph, April 14, 2003
The plight of Ali Ismail Abbas, the 12-year-old being treated in a barely functioning hospital after losing both arms in an American air strike, has highlighted the desperate post-war need for humanitarian aid in Iraq.
But military restrictions, combined with the dangerous and lawless atmosphere in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, have severely limited the ability of aid agencies to provide relief. In Kuwait and Jordan, hundreds of frustrated aid workers have been waiting for three weeks to cross the border into Iraq. [ complete article ]
Bush turns a blind eye to the wars he doesn't want to fight
John Humphrys, The Times, April 13, 2003
It has been a truly dreadful war and it is a long way from over. The number of dead is estimated so far at 4.7m. That is more than have died in any conflict since the second world war. The vast majority of them are innocent civilians -- overwhelmingly women and children. About half a million died violently -- tens of thousands literally hacked to pieces -- and the rest from disease and starvation. This is the sort of human tragedy that, in the phrase a senior Washington official used last week in another context, "should not stand". [ complete article ]
Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
Andrew Gumbel, The Independent, April 13, 2003
It could still be that, as American forces advance on Tikrit, Saddam's home town, chemical or biological weapons may be discovered, or even deployed by diehard Iraqi troops. But if the casus belli pleaded by George Bush and Tony Blair turns out to be entirely hollow and it should be stressed that we can't yet know that what does it say about their motivations for going to war in the first place? How much deception was involved in talking up the Iraqi threat, and how much self-deception?
As Susan Wright, a disarmament expert at the University of Michigan, said last week: "This could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion." Even The Wall Street Journal, one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders, has warned of the "widespread scepticism" the White House can expect if it does not make significant, and undisputed, discoveries of forbidden weapons. [ complete article ]
A roadmap for Israel, with a detour via Damascus
Jim Lobe, Asia Times, April 12, 2003
Will it be the roadmap to Israeli-Palestinian peace or the road to Damascus that will next grab the attention of US President George W Bush's administration in the wake of its convincing conquest of Iraq?
While senior officials, including Bush himself as recently as Monday after meeting in Belfast with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have insisted that getting an Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track will be the top regional priority after the Iraq war, speculation that administration hawks have their eyes set on Syria suggests a possible detour. [ complete article ]
Jordan, Egypt leaders to meet amid concerns over civil war risk in Iraq
Agence France-Presse, April 13, 2003
Jordan's King Abdullah II is expected for talks here [Cairo] on Monday, amid concerns that the current unrest in post-Saddam Iraq could deteriorate into a full-fledged civil war and spread to other countries in the Arab world.
According to official Egyptian sources, the Hashemite monarch and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak are due to discuss "the need to restore order and security" in Iraq.
Scenes of pillaging in areas where Saddam's repressive machine has disappeared have sparked fears that the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Iraqi regime may generate unrest between Iraq's patchwork of communities.
Saddam and the elite of his Baath party which ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades are from the Sunni minority, which now fears retribution from the majority Shiite Muslims. [ complete article ]
Armed men tell Shi'ite leader to leave Iraq
Mehrdad Balali and Esmat Salaheddin, Reuters, April 13, 2003
Armed men have surrounded the house of a top Shi'ite Muslim cleric in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, giving him 48 hours to leave the country or face attack, aides to the cleric told Reuters on Sunday.
The siege of the home of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a sign of religious strife at the heart of Iraq's majority community, boded ill for national unity after the U.S.-led war to topple Saddam Hussein and set alarm bells ringing across the region. [ complete article ]
Invasion is easy. Occupation is hard
Susan Chira, New York Times, April 13, 2003
A little history is a dangerous thing. And history is being brandished like a weapon right now in Iraq to shape the terms of the peace.
Scenes of jubilant Iraqis, handing flowers to American soldiers in the streets of Baghdad, may evoke images of liberating troops in World War II, but for most of history, occupation has rarely been welcome or benign. Rather, it meant imperial conquest or retribution for defeat. Occupying armies were rapacious looters of the land and symbols of humiliation.
The question now is what it will mean for Iraqis, once the reality of a continuing foreign presence has sunk in. "We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens," President Bush told the Iraqis. "And then our military forces will leave."
If only it were that easy. In reality, even the best intended of occupations often come to grief. [ complete article ]
Mosul seethes with anger and danger
Paul Watson, Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2003
Unsure who, if anyone, was in charge of their city Saturday, Mosul residents armed themselves with assault rifles and wooden clubs to guard against looters and Kurdish fighters whom many here see as invaders.
A day after Iraqi forces surrendered Mosul, few U.S. soldiers had ventured into the city to try to stop a struggle between competing factions that has forced ordinary Iraqis to form vigilante groups to defend their neighborhoods.
Fighters from two Kurdish factions are patrolling different parts of this city of 1.7 million and coming under attack by gunmen who are apparently supporters of Saddam Hussein. [ complete article ]
A civilisation torn to pieces
Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 13, 2003
They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them down on to the concrete.
Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.
Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces. [ complete article ]
See also Tom Engelhardt's weblog for more articles on the devastation of our heritage.
Syria could be next, warns Washington
Ed Vulliamy, The Observer, April 13, 2003
The United States has pledged to tackle the Syrian-backed Hizbollah group in the next phase of its 'war on terror' in a move which could threaten military action against President Bashar Assad's regime in Damascus.
The move is part of Washington's efforts to persuade Israel to support a new peace settlement with the Palestinians. Washington has promised Israel that it will take 'all effective action' to cut off Syria's support for Hizbollah - implying a military strike if necessary, sources in the Bush administration have told The Observer.
Hizbollah is a Shia Muslim organisation based in Lebanon, whose fighters have attacked northern Israeli settlements and harassed occupying Israeli troops to the point of forcing an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon three years ago.
The new US undertaking to Israel to deal with Hizbollah via its Syrian sponsors has been made over recent days during meetings between administration officials and Israeli diplomats in Washington, and Americans talking to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem. It would be part of a deal designed to entice Israel into the so-called road map to peace package that would involve the Jewish state pulling out of the Palestinian West Bank, occupied since 1967. [ complete article ]
Not all freedom is made in America
Eric Foner, New York Times, April 13, 2003
Freedom lies at the heart of our sense of ourselves as individuals and as a nation. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind's inalienable rights. The Civil War, which began as a struggle to save the Union, became a crusade to extend freedom to four million slaves. The United States fought World War II for the Four Freedoms, the cold war to defend the free world. After a false start in which he gave the war in Afghanistan the theological title Infinite Justice, President Bush rechristened it Enduring Freedom. And we are now engaged in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Freedom quickly emerged as the official explanation for the war against terrorism. "Freedom itself is under attack," President Bush announced in his speech to Congress of Sept. 21, 2001. The National Security Strategy issued last fall begins not with a discussion of global politics or the doctrine of preemptive war, but with an invocation of freedom, defined as political democracy, freedom of expression, religious toleration and free enterprise. These, the document proclaims, "are right and true for every person, in every society."
The Bush administration did not originate the conviction that American freedom is universally applicable. Deeply embedded in our culture is the idea that the United States has a mission to demonstrate the superiority of free institutions and to spread freedom throughout the world. Colonial Puritans thought they were establishing a "city upon a hill," a model to be adopted by the rest of mankind. Thomas Jefferson described the United States as an "empire of liberty," whose territorial expansion should not be compared with Europe's imperial aggrandizement. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt promised a global New Deal based on the Four Freedoms.
Foreign observers have often been bemused, to put it politely, by Americans' refusal to consider that other people may have thought about freedom and arrived at conclusions that might be worthy of consideration. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830's, he was struck by Americans' conviction that "they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people," and "form a species apart from the rest of the human race." [ complete article ]
British mother asks Israelis: Was my son shot deliberately?
Daniel Foggo and Inigo Gilmore, The Telegraph, April 13, 2003
The family of a British peace protester, shot by an Israeli sniper as he shielded three young children, claimed yesterday that he appeared to have been deliberately targeted for assassination.
Tom Hurndall was hit in the head with a bullet from a rifle as he ushered two girls to safety in the Gaza Strip on Friday. His condition last night was still serious.
His mother Jocelyn told The Telegraph that she could see no other reason for the attack: "Tom was wearing a bright orange fluorescent jacket. Apparently the watchtower housing the soldier who shot him wasn't too far away from him either. We are worried that he may have been deliberately targeted, otherwise it seems inexplicable."
Witnesses said Mr Hurndall, 21, had helped one young boy to safety and had gone back to shepherd two young girls out of the way of advancing Israeli forces when he was shot. Doctors at the Saroka Hospital, in Beer Sheva, say he has severe damage to the left side of his brain but is off the critical list.
The mother of the boy called him a hero. Fada Barhom said that Salame, seven, was playing football with his friends when suddenly there was the sound of gunfire.
"This young British man saved my son," she said. "He is a hero, he is a martyr and we want to thank the people like him who are coming to Palestine to try to protect us. My heart aches for his mother." [ complete article ]
See also the statement issued by the International Solidarity Movement.
Now for nation change
R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, April 13, 2003
There are many reasons to expect that policing Iraq and creating the rule of law will be the coalition's biggest challenge there this year. The chief surprise in the fighting so far was how quickly some of Saddam's special security services -- numbering between 20,000 and 30,000 people in at least five separate organizations considered highly loyal to the regime -- simply faded from sight. The fear among U.S. officials is that they have burrowed into urban landscapes or desert redoubts, where they will organize campaigns of social chaos and terrorism.
If the West's experience in the Balkans and Haiti is any guide, Iraq's torturers of yesterday will be the organized criminals of tomorrow. And while U.S. forces have proven they fight superbly against armed Iraqi combatants, they haven't been trained or equipped to battle armed civilians fueled by nationalism and egged on behind the scenes by those who seek to profit from chaos or even to reclaim their power. [ complete article ]
Looting puts allied forces in a bind
Paul Richter and Sonni Efron, Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2003
Victory over Saddam Hussein came quickly, yet looting and sporadic rioting in Iraq are raising questions among Iraqis and others about whether the U.S.-led forces have taken the nation on a short journey from tyranny to anarchy.
Amid disturbances in Baghdad, Mosul and other cities, U.S. and British officials suddenly are confronting questions of how much peacekeeping duty they should assign to tired, overstretched troops who are still battling the remnants of Hussein's military and security forces.
Their successful military mission could be tarnished in the eyes of Iraqis and much of the world if the looting continues to destroy property, inflict injuries and interfere with the distribution of medical aid, food and water.
Yet they can't afford to crack down so hard that on TV that they look like the conquerors they insist they are not. [ complete article ]
Rampant looting sweeps Iraq
Daniel Williams, Washington Post, April 12, 2003
Iraqi forces fled Mosul without a fight today, completing the fall of northern Iraq and leaving U.S. or British troops in nominal control of all the country's major cities after 23 days of warfare.
Tikrit, the home town of the ousted Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, 90 miles north of Baghdad, remained outside the U.S.-British occupation, as did numerous other small communities in this now-chaotic nation of 24 million inhabitants. Some U.S. officials had expressed fear Hussein or his lieutenants could still make a last stand at Tikrit, but military officers cited intelligence from Predator reconnaissance drones showing no major troop formations there.
The apparent success of the U.S. military campaign was undercut by scenes of unchecked lawlessness and looting across the country, including in Baghdad. U.S. troops gingerly sought to restore order, imposing a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the capital. But reducing pockets of armed resistance and protecting their own forces remained their priorities.
Fearing suicide bombings, Marines at a Baghdad checkpoint opened fire on an approaching car, killing three adults and wounding a 5-year-old girl. In a similar shooting, Marines at a checkpoint at Nasiriyah, about 200 miles south of the capital, opened fire on a car that failed to heed orders to halt, killing two young children. [ complete article ]
The forgotten war shows no sign of abating
Mark Sadra, Foreign Policy in Focus, April, 2003
Less than an hour before the initial bombs and cruise missiles rained down on Baghdad in the first volleys of the Iraq war, the U.S. military launched a major attack in its other war in Afghanistan. Pentagon spokespersons insisted that the timing of the attack was "a coincidence" and that planning for the operation had been going on for months. However, it seems clear that this escalation of U.S. military activity serves a dual purpose: to assuage the fears of those concerned that the U.S. would lose interest in Afghanistan after the onset of the war in Iraq and to send a clear signal to anti-American forces in Afghanistan and the wider region that the war on terror would not lose momentum. More than anything, though, the operation illustrates that the ongoing war in Afghanistan--involving 11,000 coalition troops, 8,000 of which are American--is far from over. [ complete article ]
In Shi'ite world, anger toward US seen growing
Geneive Abdo, Boston Globe, April 12, 2003
Shi'ite leaders and Islamic scholars say Washington has ignored the profound opposition among many of the world's 150 million Shi'ites to the Western occupation of Iraq. The Bush administration seemed to assume that the sect, long persecuted under Saddam Hussein, would welcome allied troops even though their route to Baghdad was through Najaf and Karbala, the most sacred sites for Shi'ite Muslims.
Shi'ite history began in 661 when Imam Ali, a son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed, was murdered by Sunni Muslims and buried in Najaf, ending his quest to lead the Muslim community. The death 19 years later of Ali's son at the hands of the Sunnis, in the battle of Karbala, set in motion centuries of Shi'ite rebellion.
When US forces captured Najaf and Karbala last week, they reported that the Shi'ites celebrated the victory with them, at one point claiming that Iraq's leading Shi'ite cleric had issued a fatwa, or religious decree, welcoming the Americans.
But most Shi'ite clerics and political leaders have publicly opposed the invasion. In their view, American domination is no improvement over Hussein's tyranny. [ complete article ]
Death of a pro-American man of peace
Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 11, 2003
A week ago I interviewed a key Iraqi opposition leader by satellite phone as he was secretly returning from exile to his home town of Najaf.
I wrote that I would follow the progress of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a prominent Shiite cleric with a mission crucial to American hopes of building democracy in postwar Iraq.
Yesterday, al-Khoei was hacked to death near the holy shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf.
The cleric's murder is a body blow to U.S. plans for winning over Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority. It also is a stark warning of what U.S. officials are wading into as they plan to remake the political infrastructure of Iraq. [ complete article ]
Profile: Ahmed Chalabi - the saviour of Iraq, or a chancer whose time has come?
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, April 12, 2003
If Ahmed Chalabi had his way, he would at this very moment be attending a meeting of Iraqi groups in Nasiriyah, the first step on a royal progress to claim his rightful throne. Alas, things have rarely been straightforward for the best-known contender to be the first president of the gleaming new Iraq that is supposed to rise from the rubble left by America's bombs and the depredations of Saddam Hussein.
In the murk of the battlefield, nothing is murkier than the prospects of Chalabi. The meeting has been put off a few days, at least, and just who will take part, and where it will be held, is unclear. For a decade now, ever since he founded the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the most visible and vocal exile Iraqi opposition group, Chalabi has been a divisive figure. Never though has he been as polarising as now, on the eve of what will be either his greatest triumph or greatest failure.
The divisions say as much about the fissures within the Bush administration as about Chalabi himself. History makes its own rules and so it is that an otherwise unremarkable businessman, who has spent four-fifths of his life outside the country of his birth, is a pivotal figure in a struggle whose outcome will shape events in Iraq and far beyond. Chalabi is the spice of a classic Washington dish, of ambition, personal rivalries and bureaucratic quarrels. [ complete article ]
Is this freedom, ask Iraqis as chaos reigns
David Fox, Reuters, April 11, 2003
"Is this your liberation?" one frustrated shopkeeper screamed at the crew of a U.S. tank as a gang of youths helped themselves to everything in his small hardware store and carted booty off in the wheelbarrows that had also been on sale.
"Hell, it ain't my job to stop them," drawled one young marine, lighting a cigarette as he looked on. "Goddamn Iraqis will steal anything if you let them. Look at them."
But for those not helping themselves to their new-found freedom, mounting anger was being directed at the U.S. forces for doing nothing to stop the frenzy.
"For God's sake, how can they just let them do this? This is my life," one old man cried as a gang used crowbars to remove the security mesh from the Anwar electrical repair shop in the center and began carting off dozens of air conditioners.
To Iraqis, the United States appears not to have given any thought to the power vacuum created by removing Saddam Hussein. [ complete article ]
Dagger in the Arab heart
David Lamb and Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003
In editorial comments and casual conversations, Arabs struggled Thursday to comprehend the stunning events in Iraq: How could Saddam Hussein's regime crumble so quickly? Why didn't his army stand and fight? What do the Americans plan next, now that for the first time they are occupying an Arab capital?
They debated in Cairo's coffee shops and the shopping malls of Saudi Arabia but found no easy answers. The images of jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets of Baghdad appeared to change no minds about the perceived unjustness of the war. Few said Baghdad's fall offered new opportunities for a wider regional peace. Most see the United States as an imperialistic presence. And at the end of the day, Arabs felt disheartened, powerless, fearful.
"The pride the Arabs felt in the initial stages of the invasion, before those legendary 'pockets of resistance' halting the advance of the world's only superpower were revealed as a myth, has been replaced by immense shame and humiliation," Managing Editor John R. Bradley wrote in Saudi Arabia's Arab News.
"The images of U.S. soldiers taking a picnic in the heart of Baghdad will haunt the Arab psyche for a long time. The junta in the U.S. were right: Don't listen to all the talk about resistance and anger. The Iraqi army is a joke. America now rules the world, either directly or by proxy, and there is nothing anyone can do about it." [ complete article ]
It's no time to go it alone
Rajan Menon, Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003
God, Napoleon remarked, is on the side of the bigger battalions. The examples of Davids vanquishing Goliaths -- the wars of the Vietnamese communists and the Afghan moujahedeen come to mind -- are famous precisely because they are rare. History virtually assured our success in the war to oust Saddam Hussein, but it offers little reassurance as we prepare to manage the peace. Candidate George W. Bush derided nation-building; President Bush will have his fill of it.
The dubious prize for victory is responsibility for a battered country the size of California whose 23 million people are divided by religious, tribal and ethnic tensions. Iraq could become Lebanon or Yugoslavia if Sunnis and Shiites, Turkmens and Kurds, the repressed and the repressors start settling scores.
Although the U.S., having paid in blood to defeat Hussein, will not agree to be one of many in an international relief and reconstruction effort, it also cannot bear the burden alone. Nor can it expect others to finance an American dominion from the sidelines. The American role in postwar Iraq will of necessity be bigger, but other nations can and must play important parts through consultation, compromise and contributions. And the United Nations should be asked to help coordinate and legitimize the overall effort. [ complete article ]
Should U.S. pay for civilian casualties?
David Corn, The Nation, April 11, 2003
CNN showed his face. A twelve-year-old boy lying on a hospital bed. A white bandage on his head. Wide eyes. A grimace. One of the civilian casualties of the United States' successful (so far) war in Iraq. But this close-up told only part of the story. Arabnews.com posted a Reuters photograph of this boy, whose name is Ali Ismail Abbas. It was not a close-up. A viewer could see that both his arms are gone, two bandaged stumps protruding from his shoulders. And most of his burnt torso was covered with white ointment. He is liberated from Saddam Hussein's brutal regime--as are millions of others. But he will never feel with his fingers again, never hold a ball, a pen, a book with his own hands. He is one price of victory.
Does the United States owe him anything? Should it directly help him and the other civilians maimed during the war, as well as Iraqis who lost civilian family members, homes or businesses? The Bush administration, which appears to have succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein (more according to plan than not), says it is committed to Iraq's reconstruction, which will require the expenditure of billions of dollars. But that is different from ensuring that Ali Abbas will receive the medical care and artificial limbs he will need. The triumphant United States--which repeatedly claimed it was doing all it could to minimize noncombatant casualties--ought to provide compensation to Iraqi civilians seriously harmed as a result of its effective invasion. [ complete article ]
'Spiritual warfare' looms
Doug Saunders, The Globe and Mail, April 11, 2003
Washington is trying to portray its battle as one of liberation, not conquest, but Iraq is about to be invaded by thousands of U.S. evangelical missionaries who say they are bent on a "spiritual warfare" campaign to convert the country's Muslims to Christianity.
Among the largest aid groups preparing to provide humanitarian assistance to Iraqis ravaged by the war are a number of Christian charities based in the southern United States that make no secret of their desire to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ and win over Muslim souls.
The largest of these is the Southern Baptist Convention, an ardent supporter of the war as an opportunity to bring Christianity to the Middle East. It says it has 25,000 trained evangelists ready to enter Iraq. [ complete article ]
Conquest and neglect
Paul Krugman, New York Times, April 11, 2003
One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don't worry about breaking the rules. This technique brought them victory in the Florida recount battle, the passage of the 2001 tax cut, the fall of Kabul, victory in the midterm elections, and the fall of Baghdad.
But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they've won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot.
The most obvious example is Afghanistan, the land the Bush administration forgot. Most of the country is back under the control of fundamentalist warlords; unpaid soldiers and policemen are deserting in droves. (Remember that the Bush administration forgot to include any Afghan aid in its latest budget.) [ complete article ]
Privatization in disguise
Naomi Klein, The Nation, April 10, 2003
On April 6, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled it out: There will be no role for the United Nations in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The US-run regime will last at least six months, "probably...longer than that."
And by the time the Iraqi people have a say in choosing a government, the key economic decisions about their country's future will have been made by their occupiers. "There has got to be an effective administration from day one," Wolfowitz said. "People need water and food and medicine, and the sewers have to work, the electricity has to work. And that's a coalition responsibility."
The process of getting all this infrastructure to work is usually called "reconstruction." But American plans for Iraq's future economy go well beyond that. Rather, the country is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neoliberals can design their dream economy: fully privatized, foreign-owned and open for business. [ complete article ]
No quagmire, but still some questions
Michael Kinsley, Washington Post, April 11, 2003
So we've won, or just about. There is no quagmire. Saddam Hussein is dead, or as good as, along with his sons. It was all fairly painless -- at least for most Americans sitting at home watching it on television. Those who opposed the war look like fools. They are thoroughly discredited, and, if they happen to be Democratic presidential candidates (and who isn't these days?), they might as well withdraw and nurse their shame somewhere off the public stage. The debate over Gulf War II is as over as the war itself soon will be, and the antis were defeated as thoroughly as Saddam Hussein.
Right? No, not at all.
To start with an obvious point that may get buried in the confetti of the victory parade, the debate was not about whether America would win a war against Iraq if we chose to start one. No sane person doubted that the mighty U.S. military machine could defeat and conquer a country with a tiny fraction of its population and an even tinier fraction of its wealth -- a country suffering from more than a decade of economic strangulation by the rest of the world. [ complete article ]
Spoiling the victory
Lead Editorial, The Guardian, April 11, 2003
To the victor, the spoils, says the adage. But spoiling the victory is a more apt aphorism for the emerging US approach to postwar Iraq. Creating an inclusive, democratic political structure after decades of diktat is an enormous task. On this all else rests: security, aid distribution, national reconciliation, territorial cohesion, economic reconstruction and long-term prosperity. All that was foreseeable. What was unforeseen, and extraordinary, is the degree to which the Bush administration appears unprepared for the job - and oblivious to the self-defeating risks inherent in its policy. After Saddam, a window is opening in Iraq. But the opportunity is fleeting. This week's so-called "tip-over" moment, when Iraqis embraced their self-styled saviours, may eventually be followed by another, when initial welcome tips over into hostility.
High-level Washington infighting over the role in an interim authority of the Iraqi National Congress leader, Ahmad Chalabi, is one such own goal. It risks derailing attempts to assert control over a currently lawless Iraq. Dr Chalabi, recently described as a "tassel-loafered, London-based Shia aristocrat" is a man with a controversial past and no present powerbase in Iraq. But the patronage of Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks propelled him to Nassiriya this week where he plans to help host the first post-Saddam leadership council. Never mind that the state department warns against a "coronation". Never mind that the main Shia opposition has announced a boycott and other factions jostle fatally. Dr Chalabi and his backers seem intent on a preemptive strike that may turn Iraq's political reformation into the mother of all battles even before the corpses of the Ba'athist gauleiters grow cold. [ complete article ]
Beware the domino effect of North Korean nukes
William C. Potter, International Herald Tribune, April 11, 2003
Since its entry into force in 1970, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has grown to include 188 members, making it the most widely subscribed international treaty in history. That number, however, is about to decline. On Friday North Korea's withdrawal from the treaty becomes effective - the first time a state has left the treaty.
In a more peaceful international environment, such an event could be expected to generate headlines, as well as frenetic diplomatic activity. But with most of the world focused on the Iraq war, North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship and treaty defection remains a back-burner problem - not even a "crisis" in the State Department's lexicon.
The U.S. policy of hostile neglect toward North Korea would make sense if it were being used to buy time to forge a consensus for diplomatic action among U.S. allies and other key states in the region. But it is not obvious that any meaningful headway is being made. [complete article ]
Sliding towards anarchy
Julian Borger, The Guardian, April 11, 2003
Iraq's slide into violent anarchy will trigger a humanitarian disaster if US and British troops are unable to fill the power vacuum and reassert order quickly, UN and other aid officials warned yesterday.
The warning came as looting in Baghdad spread from government buildings to hospitals, embassies and private businesses, and the growing lawlessness in the capital prevented the few remaining aid workers there from delivering badly needed medical supplies and water to hospitals. [ complete article ]
Sunni or Shia, fault line runs between have and have nots
James Meek, The Guardian, April 11, 2003
The two distinct mainstream paths of Islam, Sunni and Shia, divide Iraqi society. As Sunnis and Shias emerged into the scurrying, burning, breaking madness of Baghdad yesterday, a city sacking itself, the Sunni-Shia divide was meaningless. The true gulf was economic. The have-nots were taking from the haves.
Smoke rose from burning ministries, and documents which a few days ago still meant something snowed on to the road, and Baghdad residents were confused. Yes, let Saddam be removed from power, but why did the Americans have to unleash such chaos on the capital, or at least fail to leash it? [ complete article ]
Baghdad: the day after
Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 11, 2003
It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section as a mob of middle-aged men, women in chadors and screaming children rifled through the consul's office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later.
At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of each other and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition across the floors.
The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty seem to have a different idea what liberation means. [ complete article ]
Instability plagues Baghdad
BBC News, April 10, 2003
Law and order has broken down in Baghdad one day after US troops rolled into the heart of the Iraqi capital and seized control.
There have been serious incidents of looting right across the city with two key Baghdad hospitals and many smaller ones being ransacked, International Red Cross officials said.
Shortly after darkness fell a number of US marines were killed and injured in an apparent suicide bomb attack on a military checkpoint in the area of Saddam City, a poor area in the north of Baghdad.
And despite appearing to control large parts of the city US troops have been engaged in fierce fighting throughout the day, with one US soldier being killed, as they battle pockets of resistance from die-hard supporters of President Saddam Hussein. [ complete article ]
Hawks in U.S. eyeing Syria as next target
Timothy M. Phelps, Newsday, April 10, 2003
With victory in Iraq assured, hawks outside and inside the Bush administration have begun taking a notably aggressive stance toward its neighbor to the west, Syria.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and their main ideological ally at the State Department, undersecretary John Bolton, have all made menacing public remarks about Syria in recent days.
Yesterday, Rumsfeld said Syria was harboring lower-level members of Saddam Hussein's regime. He said Syria had ignored his warnings not to help Iraq militarily and, in response to a question as to whether Syria was "next," said ominously, "It depends on people's behavior. Certainly I have nothing to announce."
One intelligence source with good access to Pentagon civilian authorities said that Rumsfeld last week ordered the drawing up of contingency plans for a possible invasion of Syria and that Defense undersecretary Douglas Feith is working on a policy paper highlighting how Syria's support of terrorist groups is a threat to the region. [ complete article ]
Spoils of war
Bob Herbert, New York Times, April 10, 2003
Follow the money.
Former Secretary of State George Shultz is on the board of directors of the Bechtel Group, the largest contractor in the U.S. and one of the finalists in the competition to land a fat contract to help in the rebuilding of Iraq.
He is also the chairman of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a fiercely pro-war group with close ties to the White House. The committee, formed last year, made it clear from the beginning that it sought more than the ouster of Saddam's regime. It was committed, among other things, "to work beyond the liberation of Iraq to the reconstruction of its economy."
War is a tragedy for some and a boon for others. [ complete article ]
The war for the White House is on
Geov Parrish, WorkingForChange, April 9, 2003
While news media are saturated with field reports from Iraq, and Congress wrestles over how much money, exactly, can be shoveled into the pockets of the already obscenely wealthy, and in how many ways, the battle that should concern everyone the most is quietly taking away from the headlines. [ complete article ]
Is Syria next?
Ammar Abdulhamid, Daily Times, April 10, 2003
The recent allegation by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that Syria is smuggling war materiel into Iraq raises the ominous prospect that America's attention will turn toward Damascus the moment it is finished with Baghdad.
Rumsfeld's charge -- vehemently denied by Syria -- now tops a long list of unresolved issues in Syria's relations with the US: Syria's open-ended military intervention in Lebanon and continued support of Hezbollah there; its supposed involvement in the 1982 suicide attack in Beirut that killed 241 US Marines; its continued support of various "outlawed" Palestinian groups; and its allegedly growing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Indeed, Syria has long been included on the US State Department's list of nations that support terrorism. [ complete article ]
Leading exile figure draws mixed reviews
Judith Miller, Michael Moss and Lowell Bergman, New York Times, April 10, 2003
To his friends in the Pentagon -- among them, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Defense Policy Review Board member Richard Perle -- Mr. Chalabi is a courageous and charismatic proponent of democracy whose vision for Iraq is in tune with the Bush administration and could also help transform autocratic, tradition-bound Arab culture.
But many officials at the State Department and the C.I.A. consider him erratic and egomaniacal. Many regard his ambitious desire to transform Arab political culture as "flaky" and potentially destabilizing not only to Iraq, but also to autocratic leaders of Middle Eastern nations that are longtime American allies. [ complete article ]
In Iraq towns, allegiances shift quickly to winning side
Charlie LeDuff, New York Times, April 9, 2003
In this conservative Shiite village just a few miles east of the Iranian border, they say allegiances flow in the order of Allah, family, village, clan, tribe. Relations are a complex stew of history and allegiances. An enemy one day may be a friend the next. A rival becomes a brother-in-law. The settling of scores will be done by the men of this village, not the men of America or Britain.
According to the Moroccan journalist Anas Bouslamti, who has studied the Middle East for 15 years and was in Kulait today, a family could not eat without some government connection, and all but the most destitute households were tethered to the regime in some way.
"In times like these when the power is collapsing, the people shift to the winning side," Mr. Bouslamti said. "When the power falls the people say they had nothing to do with it. They saw nothing. They are innocents. The same thing happened with the Nazis, the Communists and the Taliban."
This evening, black plumes of smoke billowed from the center of Al Amarah and loud explosions rumbled across the desert. The Americans had pulled back to base camps or were bivouacked on the outskirts of the city on the Tigris. The war for internal power is on. [ complete article ]
Lawlessness, chaos takes hold in Basra
Sudarsan Raghavan, San Jose Mercury News, April 9, 2003
Armed men had looted a neighboring electric plant, and then set it on fire. Their next target, Sabah Abdul Rahman feared, could be his own home.
So the rail-thin oil-industry worker marched towards a British Challenger tank parked in his neighborhood on Wednesday -- and demanded some action.
"When there's no law, when there's no police force, when there's no power, there is no safety," Rahman, 47, pleaded in English with a British soldier. "Our families are frightened. At any moment now, somebody can attack us. Please help us."
As the Saddam Hussein regime winds to an end, lawlessness and chaos is taking hold of Basra, Iraq's second largest city, even as British soldiers patrol the streets. [ complete article ]
A day that began with shellfire ended with a once-oppressed people walking like giants
Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 10, 2003
The Americans "liberated" Baghdad yesterday, destroyed the centre of Saddam Hussein's quarter-century of brutal dictatorial power but brought behind them an army of looters who unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy. It was a day that began with shellfire and air strikes and blood-bloated hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator's statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for 25 years, had grovellingly obeyed Saddam's most humble secret policeman turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground.
"It is the beginning of our new freedom," an Iraqi shopkeeper shouted at me. Then he paused, and asked: "What do the Americans want from us now?' The great Lebanese poet Kalil Gibran once wrote that he pitied the nation that welcomed its tyrants with trumpetings and dismissed them with hootings of derision. And the people of Baghdad performed this same deadly ritual yesterday, forgetting that they or their parents had behaved in identical fashion when the Arab Socialist Baath Party destroyed the previous dictatorship of Iraq's generals and princes. Forgetting, too, that the "liberators" were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq. [ complete article ]
Iraq's elite may go north for last stand
Luke Harding, The Guardian, April 9, 2003
Over the past 30 years Tikrit's Sunni Muslim families have demonstrated an unswerving loyalty to President Saddam. They have been lavishly rewarded, and occupy key government positions in the army, the Ba'ath party, and Iraq's secret police.
Iraqi opposition sources believe that the Tikritis, and in particular members of Saddam's al-Bu Nasir tribe, are among the few groups in Iraq who will fight to the death as his government collapses.
"They know that when Saddam sinks they will sink too," a member of the opposition Iraqi National Congress said. "They don't have much alternative. There is nowhere else to run to." [ complete article ]
Iraq - the most dangerous war for journalists
Ciar Byrne, The Guardian, April 9, 2003
The war in Iraq is the worst ever for journalists and could spell the end of the "independent witnessing of war", veteran war reporters and experts have claimed.
Twelve journalists have died in the conflict so far. Yesterday a Spanish TV cameraman and a Reuters cameraman were killed when US troops fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad and an al-Jazeera cameraman died when a bomb hit the TV station's office in the city.
Abu Dhabi TV was also hit, which means the US forces have attacked all the main western and Arab media headquarters in the space of just one day. [ complete article ]
Beyond the war
Paul Woodward, The War in Context, April 9, 2003
The suggestions that war against Iraq would lead to a Vietnam-like quagmire or that attacking Baghdad would end up as a rerun of the siege of Stalingrad will now be used to dismiss the credibility of this war's opponents. In as much as the movement had a narrow focus -- no to war -- it was a movement that sooner or later was destined to become irrelevant. On the other hand, the proponents of war who only a week ago were being mocked for their predictions of a "cakewalk" and streets filled with jubilant Iraqis, will now surely find it hard to resist saying, I told you so.
Nevertheless, while the peace movement was a coalition united in its opposition to war, the underlying sentiment that drew people together across the globe was a broad fear of America's far-reaching power. The fall of Saddam should only add fuel to that fear. Success in toppling the Iraqi regime will now further embolden Washingtons messianic neo-conservatives whose ambitions always extended far beyond regime change in Iraq. Already, Syria, Iran and North Korea have been put on notice and told that they should, in the words of Undersecretary of State, John Bolton, "draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq."
If the erstwhile anti-war movement is to regain its relevance it must redefine its mission starting first with Iraq. In as much as opposition to war on Iraq was an expression of concern for the welfare of the people of Iraq, our attention to their needs should not diminish once the fighting abates.
[ complete article ]
U.S. tells Iran, Syria, N. Korea 'learn from Iraq'
Philip Pullella, Reuters, April 9, 2003
The United States on Wednesday warned countries it has accused of pursuing weapons of mass destruction, including Iran, Syria and North Korea, to "draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq."
John R. Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, also appealed to Syria and other countries in the Middle East to open themselves up to "new possibilities" for peace in the region.
"With respect to the issue of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the post-conflict period, we are hopeful that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their national interest," Bolton told a news conference. [ complete article ]
U.S.-backed militia terrorises town
Charles Clover, Financial Times, April 9, 2003
Hay Al Ansar, on the outskirts of Najaf in Iraq, was glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party government, when the city was seized by US forces last week.
But they appear to be just as terrified, if not more so, of their new rulers -a little-known Iraqi militia backed by the US special forces and headquartered in a compound nearby.
The Iraqi Coalition of National Unity (ICNU), which appeared in the city last week riding on US special forces vehicles, has taken to looting and terrorising their neighbourhood with impunity, according to most residents.
"They steal and steal," said a man living near the Medresa al Tayif school, calling himself Abu Zeinab. "They threaten us, saying: 'We are with the Americans, you can do nothing to us'." [ complete article ]
'It feels like 1967 all over again'
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, April 9, 2003
As Arab TV stations finally show pictures of American tanks in Baghdad as well as Arab journalists dead or wounded from US attacks, gloom and anger are spreading across this city in clouds as thick as the smoke of burning oil. Few places in the Middle East have such a high proportion of progressive English-speaking intellectuals as Jordan's capital, Amman. Yet it is precisely among this lively elite that despondency and fury are at their heaviest.
Watching CNN and the BBC, they have known that the US and British invasion was advancing. They fear the impact on ordinary Jordanians and Palestinians as the truth sinks in. There was a week of euphoria when allied forces were caught out in false claims of victory at Umm Qasr and Iraqis were seen to be mounting an unexpected degree of resistance. Now defeat is imminent, they feel.
"It's like 1967 when I was a kid at boarding school and for three days we were told that Nasser was shooting Israeli planes down like flies. Then we cried and cried," says Mustafa Hamarneh of Jordan's Centre for Strategic Studies. "Iraq will be the first country to be recolonised for a second time. Eighty-five years after the British came, they and the Americans are back", sighs Adnan Odeh, a former Jordanian ambassador to the UN. [ complete article ]
The Wolfowitz doctrine
Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe, April 9, 2003
What a difference a week makes. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, seem poised to roll over their critics just as surely as American troops are poised for the final assault on Baghdad. Wolfowitz was all over the Sunday talk shows basking in his apparent vindication and framing the agenda for the next stage. The United States, not the United Nations, will be in charge of the rebuilding of Iraq, he made clear. Occupation comes first, Iraqi self-government will come later. And the toppling of Saddam should signal other hostile and undemocratic regimes either to get with the program or face regime change.
This grand design was laid out in writings of neo-conservative theorists like Wolfowitz over the past decade. Iraq is just the first step in a grand project, one part the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and one part the imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt, to remake the map of the Mideast. Will the hawks be vindicated here, too?
In this project, two heroic premises are taken for granted. First, democracy will flower in these nations that have never had Western-style civil societies. Second, the shift to more-democratic rule will coincide with greater friendship for the United States. [ complete article ]
Welcome to Bush's new Middle East order
Amin Saikal, Sydney Morning Herald, April 9, 2003
In a post-Saddam era, the next targets in President Bush's sights will be Syria and Iran. From his perspective, the Syrian authoritarian regime is a nuisance to the US and Israel and a source of support to the Lebanese Hezbollah which the US has declared a terrorist organisation.
Similarly, the Iranian regime is as much of an evil "unfinished business" as has been Saddam's dictatorship. No matter what Syria's non-involvement in Iraq and what the strength of Iran's pluralist reforms and its acquiescence to US military operations in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, the Bush Administration is most likely to utilise its virtual military encirclement of Syria and Iran to seek to strangle their regimes from within, without overt US military action. [ complete article ]
Hold your applause
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 9, 2003
It's hard to smile when there's no water. It's hard to applaud when you're frightened. It's hard to say, "Thank you for liberating me," when liberation has meant that looters have ransacked everything from the grain silos to the local school, where they even took away the blackboard.
That was what I found when spending the day in Umm Qasr and its hospital, in southern Iraq. Umm Qasr was the first town liberated by coalition forces. But 20 days into the war, it is without running water, security or adequate food supplies. I went in with a Kuwaiti relief team, who, taking pity on the Iraqis, tossed out extra food from a bus window as we left. The Umm Qasr townsfolk scrambled after that food like pigeons jostling for bread crumbs in a park.
This was a scene of humiliation, not liberation. We must do better.
I am sure we will, as more relief crews arrive. But this scene explained to me why, even here in the anti-Saddam Shia heartland of southern Iraq, no one is giving U.S. troops a standing ovation. Applause? When I asked Lt. Col. Richard Murphy, part of the U.S. relief operation, how Iraqis were greeting his men, he answered bluntly and honestly: "I have not detected any overt hostility." [ complete article ]
Republicans want terror law made permanent
Eric Lichtblau, New York Times, April 9, 2003
Working with the Bush administration, Congressional Republicans are maneuvering to make permanent the sweeping antiterrorism powers granted to federal law enforcement agents after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said today.
The move is likely to touch off strong objections from many Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress who believe that the Patriot Act, as the legislation that grew out of the attacks is known, has already given the government too much power to spy on Americans.
The landmark legislation expanded the government's power to use eavesdropping, surveillance, access to financial and computer records and other tools to track terrorist suspects.
When it passed in October 2001, moderates and civil libertarians in Congress agreed to support it only by making many critical provisions temporary. Those provisions will expire, or "sunset," at the end of 2005 unless Congress re-authorizes them. [ complete article ]
Victory in Iraq isn't enough: Israel holds the key to peace
Anton La Guardia, The Telegraph, April 9, 2003
In America, senior members of the Bush Administration are openly speaking of a "domino effect" in the Middle East - whereby rogue and autocratic regimes in the Middle East will succumb to Western-style democracy and make peace with Israel. Having defeated the Soviet empire and refashioned eastern Europe into pro-American democracies, the old Cold Warriors of the Reagan era now serving under George W. Bush seek to transform the Middle East.
First the regime in Baghdad will be changed, runs their thinking, then perhaps Damascus, then Teheran and Riyadh. The only question is whether the dominoes will tumble as a result of their own internal instability, or whether they will need a nudge from America. Desirable as this outcome might be, it is far from being a certainty. It also carries great risks.
Judging from Israel's experience, political change is extremely difficult to impose on the Arab world by force of arms - and can equally well instead end up creating a new strain of virulent political radicalism. [ complete article ]
'A picture of killing inflicted on a sprawling city - and it grew more unbearable by the minute'
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, April 9, 2003
Death's embrace gave the bodies intimacies they never knew in life. Strangers, bloodied and blackened, wrapped their arms around others, hugging them close.
A man's hand rose disembodied from the bottom of the heap of corpses to rest on the belly of a man near the top. A blue stone in his ring glinted as an Iraqi orderly opened the door of the morgue, admitting daylight and the sound of a man's sobs to the cold silence within.
Here were just some of the results of America's progress through Saddam Hussein's dominions yesterday, an advance that obliterated the symbols of his regime at the same time as it claimed to be liberating its people.
These were mere fragments in a larger picture of killing, flight, and destruction inflicted on a sprawling city of 5 million. And it grew more unbearable by the minute.
In two adjoining stalls of the casualty ward of Kindi hospital, the main trauma centre of eastern Baghdad, a girl, long black plait held off her forehead by a red Alice band, was laid out beside her little brother. Their mother lay across the aisle, beige dress soaked in blood from hem to armpits. Another brother slumped on the floor, insensible to the fact that he was sitting in his mother's blood. [ complete article ]
Position vacant: puppets apply
Hugh White, The Age, April 9, 2003
There will soon be a vacancy in Baghdad. Filling that vacancy is what coalition planners call Phase Four - the postwar political reconstruction of Iraq. But with Saddam apparently cornered, the shape of Phase Four is suddenly urgent. Some very big issues are not yet resolved - such as who will run Iraq when Saddam falls. And some even bigger ones are waiting down the track - such as whether America's objective of a democratic, pro-American government in Iraq is a contradiction in terms.
In the short term, Saddam Hussein will be replaced by George Bush. America will be in charge. As the leader of the coalition, America will have effective power, and direct responsibility under international law for the welfare of the Iraqi people. But for how long? And who will it hand over to? [ complete article ]
Afghan war embers flare up again
Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, April 8, 2003
It's been relegated to a back-of-the-paper story. But as the war against Iraq thunders on, that other war -- the one that we're supposed to have won -- is quietly reigniting.
That other war is the invasion of Afghanistan. Canada, along with most of the world, supported that war in the fall of 2001 as an angry United States took revenge for what it called Afghan complicity in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
At the time, it wasn't clear how bombing Afghanistan would deal with a terrorist plot cooked up in Hamburg and carried out by Saudis and Egyptians. But most countries bought the U.S. explanation that the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were too close to the terrorist Al Qaeda network and, even if they had nothing to do with Sept. 11, deserved to be overthrown anyway.
Within three months, the U.S. and its friends won that war -- or so we were told. [ complete article ]
Journalists in direct line of US fire
Al Jazeera, April 8, 2003
The deaths today of three journalists from US fire has provoked a strong reaction from press associations who fear their members may be becoming targets for trigger-happy soldiers. [...]
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said the attacks may have been war crimes. The Brussels-based lobby group also accused the United States of singling out Al-Jazeera for punishment.
"The bombing of hotels where journalists are staying and targeting of Arab media are particularly shocking events in a war which is being fought in the name of democracy," IFJ general secretary Aidan White said in a statement
Michael Massing of the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York called it a black day for journalism. [ complete article ]
See also Outcry over journalists' deaths
For Wolfowitz, a vision may be realized
Micahel Dobbs, Washington Post, April 7, 2003
Four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz made a forceful case to President Bush for expanding the war on terrorism to include the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
At the time, many people in Washington, including some senior members of the Bush administration, thought that Wolfowitz was way out on a limb. A year and a half later, Wolfowitz's long-held dream of ridding the world of a leader he regards as one of the cruelest of modern-day despots and a direct threat to the security of the United States seems on the point of being realized.
But getting rid of Hussein was only part of the Wolfowitz vision. With U.S. forces poised on the outskirts of Baghdad, an even bigger, and in some ways more controversial, challenge now awaits: creating a free, stable and democratic Iraq that will serve as an inspiration to its neighbors. [ complete article ]
Washington victory will be Pyrrhic, Syrian professor argues
Kim Ghattas, Financial Times, April 8, 2003
The US will win the war in Iraq but in terms of its consequences for the Arab world it may have already lost the peace, argues Sadeq el Azm, a well-known Syrian intellectual.
Sitting in his book-lined study in Damascus, Mr Azm asserts: "The American military victory in Iraq is going to be Pyrrhic." The more difficult it proves for the US to govern postwar Iraq, he says, the more secure other regimes in the region will feel in resisting pressures for democratic reform.
Mr Azm, one of the few openly critical voices in Syria, says that if the war had been swift, coupled with a positive outcome for the Iraqis, it could have influenced neighbouring countries for the good.
But with the conflict in its third week and with television pictures of civilian casualties being beamed into homes across the Arab world, the momentum for potential democratic change in the region has been lost as the negative aspects have been seized upon by Arab regimes.
"It's already too late, in a political sense, the US has lost the war. The war in Iraq will actually hinder reforms in the Arab world," says Mr Azm. [ complete article ]
Internationalize post-war Iraq
Ivo H. Daalder, Brookings Institution, April 7, 2003
With American tanks driving in the streets of central Baghdad, attention is turning to how Iraq will be governed. Governing post-Saddam Iraq will, even under the best of circumstances, be a highly complex and difficult task. But the Bush administration is not helping matters by going about it in a decidedly secretive and unilateralist fashion. [ complete article ]
Celebrating freedom in a spree of looting
Paul Harris, The Guardian, April 8, 2003
The big guns over Basra have at last fallen silent. For almost three weeks now every night has been punctuated by the deafening crack of British shells over the city. But on Sunday night not a single volley was fired.
Yesterday the people of Basra woke up and discovered why. Saddam Hussein's rule is over in the city. The British have finally come.
But if the big guns are quiet, the small ones are not. The battle for Basra may be won, but chaos was the main victor as thousands of people tasted sudden freedom. The rattle of gunfire echoed through the city's streets as looters ransacked official buildings and helped themselves to whatever they could find. British soldiers, still battling a few diehard militia, could do little but watch. [ complete article ]
NEWSPEAK: U.N. WILL HAVE "VITAL ROLE" IN POSTWAR IRAQ
Postwar UN role remains blurred
Matthew Tempest, The Guardian, April 8, 2003
Tony Blair and the US president, George Bush, have once more failed to clarify the UN's role in a post-Saddam Iraq, in their third meeting in less than three weeks.
Speaking at a joint press conference at Hillsborough castle in Northern Ireland, the two men were pressed repeatedly on what a "vital role" for the United Nations may mean.
Mr Bush defined it both as "food, medicine, aid, contributions" and "helping the interim government stand up until the real government shows up".
Mr Blair intervened to say that the "important thing is to not get into some battle over a word here or there, but for the international community to come together ... rather than endless diplomatic wrangles."
But, taking only four questions in a 25-minute press briefing, Mr Bush warned: "When we say a vital role for the UN we mean a vital role." [ complete article ]
No peace without surrender
Elizabeth Stanley-Mitchell, New York Times, April 8, 2003
The key to winning this war, like any war, is finding someone willing to surrender. Yet so far, discourse about the war has been dominated by green-scope travelogues and precision bomb videos. Conspicuously absent has been any discussion about who will be capitulating to the United States.
This is unfortunate, because the question of which generals, exiles or other elites are willing to negotiate will directly affect -- if not determine -- how long this war lasts, how many people will die and what the peace will look like. [ complete article ]
The last refuge
Paul Krugman, New York Times, April 8, 2003
In 1944, millions of Americans were engaged in desperate battles across the world. Nonetheless, a normal presidential election was held, and the opposition didn't pull its punches: Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate, campaigned on the theme that Franklin Roosevelt was a "tired old man." As far as I've been able to ascertain, the Roosevelt administration didn't accuse Dewey of hurting morale by questioning the president's competence. After all, democracy -- including the right to criticize -- was what we were fighting for.
It's not a slur on the courage of our troops, or a belittling of the risks they face, to say that our current war is a mere skirmish by comparison. Yet self-styled patriots are trying to impose constraints on political speech never contemplated during World War II, accusing anyone who criticizes the president of undermining the war effort.
Last week John Kerry told an audience that "what we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States." Republicans immediately sought to portray this remark as little short of treason. [ complete article ]
Leading Egyptian intellectual speaks of the Arab world's despair
Susan Sachs, New York Times, April 8, 2003
Mr. Aboulmagd is one of Egypt's best-known intellectuals, a senior aide to former President Anwar el Sadat, consultant to the United Nations and ever-curious polymath whose interests range across the fields of Islamic jurisprudence, comparative religions, literature, history and commercial law.
Like many educated Egyptians of his generation, he is a man whose views on democracy and political values were shaped by reading the United States Constitution, the Federalist papers and the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson.
For him the United States was a "dream," a paragon of liberal values to be emulated by Arabs and Muslims seeking to have a voice in the modern world.
One of his daughters lived in the United States. Mr. Aboulmagd studied there, earning a master's degree in comparative law at the University of Michigan in 1959. He served as president of the administrative tribunal of the World Bank in Washington. And he has spent more than 20 years of his life working on projects aimed at promoting dialogue between the Western, non-Muslim civilization and the Arab-Muslim world.
Yet these days, in his opinion, something has gone terribly wrong.
"Under the present situation, I cannot think of defending the United States," said Mr. Aboulmagd, a small man with thinning white hair who juggles a constant stream of phone calls and invitations to speak about modernizing the Arab world.
"I would not be listened to," he added. "To most people in this area, the United States is the source of evil on planet earth. And whether we like it or not, it is the Bush administration that is to blame." [ complete article ]
The U.S. betrays its core values
Gunter Grass, Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2003
A war long sought and planned for is now underway. All deliberations and warnings of the United Nations notwithstanding, an overpowering military apparatus has attacked preemptively in violation of international law. No objections were heeded. The Security Council was disdained and scorned as irrelevant. As the bombs fall and the battle for Baghdad continues, the law of might prevails.
And based on this injustice, the mighty have the power to buy and reward those who might be willing and to disdain and even punish the unwilling. The words of the current American president -- "Those not with us are against us" -- weighs on current events with the resonance of barbaric times. It is hardly surprising that the rhetoric of the aggressor increasingly resembles that of his enemy. Religious fundamentalism leads both sides to abuse what belongs to all religions, taking the notion of "God" hostage in accordance with their own fanatical understanding. Even the passionate warnings of the pope, who knows from experience how lasting and devastating the disasters wrought by the mentality and actions of Christian crusaders have been, were unsuccessful. [ complete article ]
Watch Woolsey
Jim Lobe, Asia Times, April 8, 2003
If you want to figure out whether the administration of President George W Bush intends a crusade to remake the Middle East in the wake of Washington's presumed military victory in Iraq, watch what happens with R James Woolsey. A former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Woolsey is being pushed hard by his fellow neoconservatives in the Pentagon to play a key role in the post-Saddam Hussein US occupation.
Less well-known than his long-time associates and close friends, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the former head of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) Richard Perle, Woolsey has long believed that Washington has a mission to use its overwhelming military power and its democratic ideals to transform the Arab world. And he has pushed for war with Iraq as hard as anyone, even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
If he soon pops up in Baghdad, you can bet that the "clash of civilizations" is imminent, if it has not begun already. To Woolsey's mind, the US is already engaged in what he and many of his fellow neoconservatives call "World War IV", a struggle that pits the US and Britain against Islamist and Wahhabi extremists like al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, Iranian theocrats, and Ba'ath Party "fascists" in Syria and Iraq. In their view, the Cold War was World War III. [ complete article ]
To young Palestinians, images of suffering are all too familiar
Molly Moore, Washington Post, April 3, 2003
Maysa Samarah, the 21-year-old daughter of a Palestinian nut vendor, spends three hours every weekend crossing the five Israeli military checkpoints between her university and her West Bank home town just nine miles away.
So when Samarah watches the daily images of American soldiers frisking Iraqis at roadblocks, or tanks clanking through city streets, or children bloodied by shrapnel from missile strikes, she does not see a foreign war.
She sees her own war.
A pair of F-16 fighter jets sliced through a cerulean sky. They were not on TV. The Israeli planes roared above Al-Quds University, which sprawls on a high plateau just a few hundred yards inside the West Bank from the Green Line, the border of pre-1967 Israel. [ complete article ]
US heavy-handedness baffles British
Daniel McGory, The Times (via News Interactive), April 3, 2003
British troops who have witnessed the Americans at close quarters in this war are baffled at their approach to Iraqi civilians. One captain in the Royal Marines, watching a US unit monitor a checkpoint, said: "The Americans are still behaving like invaders, not liberators. They behave as if they hate these people."
Many American troops speak as though they do.
You often hear them describe "Eye-rakis" in disparaging language. One US officer in charge of delivering humanitarian aid earlier this week likened the crush of people waiting to get hold of food and water to a pack of stray dogs.
His troops lashed at those pushing to the front with fists and rifle butts, even firing shots into the air. [ complete article ]
Moral authority in Iraq
Editorial, Toronto Star, April 7, 2003
From the moment the first Abrams tank rolled into Iraq, Washington insisted it was sending in an army of liberation, not an occupying force.
After the guns fall silent, the best way for the Americans to demonstrate their true sincerity would be to turn over the administration of the vanquished country to the United Nations.
Iraqis would have no reason to question the U.N.'s goal -- to assist the people in quickly building the political framework and institutions necessary for them to start governing themselves.
But the Americans see it differently. They seem to believe it is their right to control how Iraq is put back together because they and the British are the ones pulling it apart. [ complete article ]
In military win, U.S. may be planting seeds of political defeat
John Daniszewski, Baltimore Sun, April 7, 2003
With missiles whistling overhead and a U.S. warplane flying so low outside that it seemed it would touch the minaret of the neighborhood mosque, the political scientist leaned back heavily yesterday and said such force could come back to haunt the United States.
"The blood, destruction, continuous bombing," said Wamid Nadmi, who dubs himself part of the "patriotic opposition" to Saddam Hussein's regime, "these will be remembered by the Iraqis and will make it very, very difficult for the Americans to rule directly or indirectly."
The future of Iraq seemed an appropriate question to ponder on a day when the prospect of a U.S.-British military victory seemed increasingly clear. Marines had joined their Army compatriots on the outskirts of Baghdad, and Hussein himself had issued a statement suggesting that the Iraqi army is in disarray.
Nevertheless, the British-educated Nadmi warned, the United States should not expect an easy political victory in Iraq if and when the war is won. [ complete article ]
Marketing experts say war is a tough sell
Sound bites, slogans strive for image of quick, clean war
Carolyn Said, San Franciso Chronicle, March 30, 2003
With the first MBA president in the White House, the war with Iraq has showcased modern principles of marketing and image management.
Bush administration sound bites and slogans from "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to "leadership targets" attempt to frame the conflict as sanitary and tidy, remote from the ugly realities of bloodshed, marketing experts say.
" 'One sight, one sound, one sell' is classic brand management," said Peter Sealey, adjunct professor of marketing at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and former head of global marketing for the Coca-Cola Co. "When you have this kind of blizzard of intensity, you need to focus on a single proposition."
By and large, the Bush administration has done that, he said, distilling a huge geopolitical conflict with multiple underlying political causes down to a simple message of "freeing 23 million Iraqis." [ complete article ]
Baghdad doctors overwhelmed by arrival of 100 patients an hour
Paul Peachey, The Independent, April 7, 2003
Hospitals in Baghdad are in danger of being overwhelmed by the huge numbers of wounded people brought in for treatment, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned yesterday.
An average of 100 patients an hour had been taken to the Yarmouk hospital, one of about five in the city that can treat the war wounded, it said. [ complete article ]
Urban warfare erupts in Baghdad
Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Reuters, April 6, 2003
Iraqi snipers crouched behind bridges and artillery fire rang out from almost every direction on Monday as Iraqi forces defended Baghdad against U.S. troops that had thrust into its heart.
The urban warfare that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been preparing for finally began as dozens of U.S. tanks rumbled into the city of five million people and attacked two presidential compounds on the west bank of the Tigris.
The white dust of mortar mingled with a sandstorm that moved into the city on Monday morning obstructing visibility, but the thud of artillery and mortar bombs reverberated across the capital, especially toward the west and south.
"Baghdad is a battle zone now," a Reuters witness said. [ complete article ]
Muslims protest Bush nominee
Alan Cooperman, Washington Post, April 7, 2003
It's Round 3 of the bare-knuckle slugfest between Daniel Pipes and U.S. Muslim organizations.
The first round was on the Internet, and it went to Pipes. The second round was on college campuses, and it went to Muslim groups. Round 3 is at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
President Bush last week nominated Pipes for a seat on the board of directors of USIP, a nonpartisan, federal think tank established by Congress to promote "the prevention, management and resolution of international conflicts."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a D.C.-based civil rights group, called on the White House to rescind the nomination or the Senate to reject it.
Many American Muslims regard Pipes as "the nation's leading Islamophobe," the council said in an e-mail to its supporters. [ complete article ]
NEW "FACTS ON THE GROUND" -- DETOUR OFF THE ROAD MAP
Jews settle in Palestinian Jerusalem
Sharon tests Bush, Blair and the road map by letting families occupy contested district
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, April 7, 2003
Ariel Sharon has brushed aside an appeal by the White House to stop an unprecedented move by Jewish settlers into a Palestinian district of Jersualem which his critics say will further hinder a political settlement.
After more than two years of legal and political wrangling, Mr Sharon's office approved the plan last week and the first Jewish families have moved into new flats in the Ma'aleh Ha'zeitim settlement, beside the densely populated Arab district of Ras al-Amoud.
It is the first time a Jewish settlement has been built in a Palestinian area of Jerusalem since Israel seized control of the entire city in 1967.
The first settlers at the apartment complex, just a few hundred metres from the Wailing Wall, include a millionaire, Irving Moskowitz, and his son-in-law Ariel King, a far-right political activist.
More than 100 more families are expected to move in during the coming months.
Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, telephoned Mr Sharon's office and warned that letting Jews move into the settlement might raise tension during the war on Iraq and further undermine the prospect of a political settlement. [ complete article ]
The mystery of Saddam's banned arms
Jon B. Wolfsthal, International Herald Tribune, April 7, 2003
As each day passes without chemical or biological weapons being found in Iraq, questions increase. In Washington, battle lines are already being drawn about what the success or failure to find such weapons in Iraq might mean for the legitimacy of the war itself.
The Bush administration has maintained that Iraq not only possesses chemical and biological weapons, but that those weapons posed an imminent threat to the United States. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency published a report in October stating that chemical and biological weapons production was under way in Iraq. This alleged threat was the public justification for short-circuiting the United Nations inspection process and launching the military campaign against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
So far no weapons of mass destruction have been used against allied troops. Unfortunately for the Bush administration's case against Iraq, however, no such weapons have been discovered in any form. While the search is only a few weeks old, this suggests three possibilities: that U.S. intelligence may not know the exact location of such weapons; that such weapons are only in areas controlled by troops loyal to Saddam; or that none are in Iraq, as the regime asserts. [ complete article ]
U.S. plan for Iraq's future is challenged
Pentagon control, secrecy questioned
Karen DeYoung and Dan Morgan, Washington Post, April 6, 2003
As it anticipates imminent victory in Iraq, the Bush administration is facing questions, criticism and the threatened rejection of significant parts of its plan for rebuilding the country and establishing a new, representative Iraqi government.
The concerns begin with the secrecy that has surrounded the planning process and the lack of publicly released details. What is known is that President Bush, for reasons he has not made clear, has given the Department of Defense primary control over all postwar aid and reconstruction, a role that has sparked discomfort across a broad, bipartisan spectrum in Congress and among other governments.
While it has announced plans to quickly establish an "interim authority" of Iraqis on the ground, the administration has not said what that authority's responsibilities will be or how its members will be chosen. Many say it should not be created before all Iraqis untainted with association with President Saddam Hussein are free to participate, and some question whether any U.S.-created authority will be considered legitimate in the eyes of Iraqis or the rest of the world. [ complete article ]
Battle for survival is only just beginning
Ian Johnston, Scotsman, April 6, 2003
For coalition troops the end of the war is in sight, but for many Iraqi civilians the battle for survival is just beginning.
Liberation from Saddam Husseins brutal regime may mean little for millions of Iraqis unless their liberators can defeat the twin evils of disease and starvation.
After almost three weeks of battle, and as temperatures hit 100°F, water and sewage systems in the towns and cities have collapsed, electricity has been cut off, and food reserves are beginning to run low.
Some of the poorest Iraqis have been forced to sell what meagre food they have stockpiled simply to buy small quantities of polluted water. [ complete article ]
Viewing the war as a lesson to the world
David E. Sanger, New York Times, April 6, 2003
Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a stark warning to Iran and Syria last week, declaring that any "hostile acts" they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences, one of President Bush's closest aides stepped into the Oval Office to warn him that his unpredictable defense secretary had just raised the specter of a broader confrontation.
Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld's brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word -- "Good" -- and went back to work.
It was a small but telling moment on the sidelines of the war. For a year now, the president and many in his team have privately described the confrontation with Saddam Hussein as something of a demonstration conflict, an experiment in forcible disarmament. It is also the first war conducted under a new national security strategy, which explicitly calls for intervening before a potential enemy can strike. [ complete article ]
The American Mongols
Husain Haqqani, Foreign Policy, May-June, 2003
Armed with prophecy and history, Islamist movements see the humiliation of fellow believers as an opportunity for mobilizing and recruiting dedicated followers. Muslims have often resorted to asymmetric warfare in the aftermath of military defeat. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and his Fatah movement captured the imagination of young Palestinians only after Arabs lost the Six-Day War and East Jerusalem in 1967. Islamic militancy in Kashmir can be traced to Indias military victory over Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh war. Revenge, rather than willingness to compromise or submit to the victors, is the traditional response of theologically inclined Muslims to the defeat of Muslim armies. And for the Islamists, this battle has no front line and is not limited to a few years, or even decades. They think in terms of conflict spread over generations. A call for jihad against British rule in India, for example, resulted in an underground movement that lasted from 1830 to the 1870s, with remnants periodically surfacing well into the 20th century.
This fundamentalist interpretation of Islam has failed to penetrate the thinking of most Muslims, especially in recent times. But religious hard-liners can drive the political agenda in Muslim countries, just as Christian and Jewish fundamentalists have become a force to reckon with in secular nations such as the United States. And with over 1 billion Muslims around the globe, the swelling of the fundamentalist ranks poses serious problems for the West. If only 1 percent of the worlds Muslims accept uncompromising theology, and 10 percent of that 1 percent decide to commit themselves to a radical agenda, the recruitment pool for al Qaeda comes to 1 million.
[ complete article ]
White man's burden
Ari Shavit, Ha'aretz, April 6, 2003
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical. [ complete article ]
Civilization's obscene ghost
Peter Brooks, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2003
America's war with Iraq in the tender years of the 21st century comes as a shock to many of us. Like Europeans in 1914, we had come to believe that our country had to a large extent renounced war as an instrument of national policy.
This may be a short and efficient war. But already there has been death, in limited numbers among our own troops, doubtless in far greater numbers among those we call our enemies. Homes, buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed and will continue to be, however precisely aimed our bombs; there will be hunger and disease; there will be the misery of refugee camps and orphanages.
What one misses in most talk about the current war is any sense of its human cost. What is wholly lacking in current political discourse is any recognition of the obscenity of war. It's as if we'd reverted smoothly to that primitivist thinking about death identified by Freud: We must be heroes, and the death of our enemies is greatly to be wished. [ complete article ]
We see too much. We know too much. That's our best defence
John Pilger, The Independent, April 6, 2003
We now glimpse the forbidden truths of the invasion of Iraq. A man cuddles the body of his in-fant daughter; her blood drenches them. A woman in black pursues a tank, her arms outstretched; all seven in her family are dead. An American Marine murders a woman because she happens to be standing next to a man in a uniform. "I'm sorry,'' he says, "but the chick got in the way.''
Covering this in a shroud of respectability has not been easy for George Bush and Tony Blair. Millions now know too much; the crime is all too evident. Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, a Labour MP for 41 years, says the Prime Minister is a war criminal and should be sent to The Hague. He is serious, because the prima facie case against Blair and Bush is beyond doubt.
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected German arguments of the "necessity'' for pre-emptive attacks against its neighbours. "To initiate a war of aggression,'' said the tribunal's judgment, "is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.'' [ complete article ]
US peace activist shot in Jenin
Associated Press, April 6, 2003
An American peace activist who was allegedly shot in the face by Israeli troops while acting as a "human shield" in the West Bank town of Jenin was seriously ill today in an Israeli hospital, a member of the International Solidarity Movement said.
Brian Avery, 24, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, a member of the Palestinian-backed International Solidarity Movement, was shot in the face Saturday by forces in an armored personnel carrier, said Star Hawk, a fellow activist. [ complete article ]
Iraqi hospitals offer snapshot of war horror
Samia Nakhoul, Reuters, April 6, 2003
Ali Ismaeel Abbas, 12, was fast asleep when war shattered his life. A missile obliterated his home and most of his family, leaving him orphaned, badly burned and blowing off both his arms.
"It was midnight when the missile fell on us. My father, my mother and my brother died. My mother was five months pregnant," the traumatized boy told Reuters at Baghdad's Kindi hospital.
"Our neighbors pulled me out and brought me here. I was unconscious," he said on Sunday.
In addition to the tragedy of losing his parents, he faces the horror of living handicapped. Thinking about his uncertain future he timidly asked whether he could get artificial arms.
"Can you help get my arms back? Do you think the doctors can get me another pair of hands?" Abbas asked. "If I don't get a pair of hands I will commit suicide," he said with tears spilling down his cheeks.
His aunt, three cousins and three other relatives staying with them were also killed in this week's missile strikes on their house in Diala Bridge district east of Baghdad. [ complete article ]
Anti-American sentiment grows over war in Iraq
Erik Kirschbaum, Reuters, April 6, 2003
They were seen as the "good cops" who saved West Berlin, defended Western Europe during the Cold War and put an end to the bloodshed in the Balkans -- but the Iraq war has left that image of the United States in shreds.
The erstwhile defenders of freedom and democracy are now more likely to be viewed by their allies around the world as war-mongering imperialists, "bad cops" and "bullies" who lost their way by brushing aside the United Nations and attacking Iraq. [ complete article ]
Meanwhile, according to a Washington Post poll, more than two-thirds of Americans polled say that "going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do even if the United States fails to turn up biological or chemical weapons." Are we reaching a point where the promise of American victory will itself become the only required justification for war?
When to say war is won?
R.W. Apple Jr., New York Times, April 6, 2003
How and when, it seems worth asking, will the United States and its allies know they have won the Iraqi war?
In an echo of World War II, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said this week that the Bush administration would settle for nothing short of unconditional surrender. But a half-century ago the Allies were willing to pulverize German and Japanese cities to force the Axis to submit. Nothing like that is planned now.
On a number of occasions, President Bush has defined the war as an effort to bring about "regime change" in Baghdad, which sounds simple enough: Get rid of Saddam Hussein and his coterie and replace them, as soon as possible, with a more benign, proto-democratic government. But it is not just a matter of driving Saddam & Company from their offices, palaces and hideouts.
As recently as a week ago, Washington talked glibly of "decapitation." But no vainglorious pledge was made to capture Mr. Hussein, "dead or alive," as had been made with respect to the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, who is embarrassingly still at large, as far as anyone here can discover. [ complete article ]
The greater threat
A menace grows from Bush's Korean blind spot
Eric Margolis, The American Conservative, April 7, 2003
President George W. Bush looks like a man who is so obsessed with hunting a pesky but elusive mouse in his basement that he fails to notice that the top floor of his house is on fire.
Two recent events capture the bizarre, almost surreal nature of the twin crises over Iraq and North Korea that now confront the stumbling Bush administration. [ complete article ]
WASHINGTON DOUBLESPEAK
The line out of Washington right now is that it is the coalition, that has shed "life and blood," that will have the lead role in shaping the government of post-war Iraq. The other major member of the coaltion, Britain (a country that has matched the number of US troops, per capita, and experienced a disproportionately higher number of casualties) is calling for the UN to play a leading role in the reconstruction of Iraq. Early next week, as Tony Blair and George Bush meet in Northern Ireland, Blair gets to find out whether he really has the ear of the President or whether the coalition has two voices, one that gets heard while the other gets ignored.
Condoleezza Rice says U.S., not U.N. will rebuild Iraq
David E. Sanger and John Tagliabue, New York Times, April 5, 2003
President Bush's national security adviser said today that the American-led alliance had shed "life and blood" in the Iraq war and would reserve for itself -- and not the United Nations -- the lead role in creating a new Iraqi government.
In declaring that the United Nations would have a secondary role in reconstructing Iraq and leading the country toward eventual elections, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, seemed certain to fuel the latest trans-Atlantic dispute between the Bush administration and its traditional allies. [ complete article ]
Britain offers plan for U.N.'s postwar role
Colum Lynch, Washington Post, April 5, 2003
Britain has prepared a detailed plan for the postwar governance of Iraq that would legitimize the use of force by coalition powers to quell resistance and provide a key role for the United Nations in selecting a new Iraqi interim authority and managing the country's oil wealth.
The British proposals are not being presented for an immediate vote, but rather are aimed at influencing the debate on Iraq's future in Washington and at the United Nations. Britain is concerned that the Bush administration's plans to unilaterally establish an interim authority headed by U.S. officials and Iraqi exiles will undermine efforts to unify the U.N. Security Council behind an internationally backed reconstruction effort. [ complete article ]
Hearts, minds and bodybags
Iraq can't be a Vietnam, pundits insist. Those who were there know better
James Fox, The Guardian, April 5, 2003
George C Scott, as General Patton in the eponymous film, hisses: "Rommel, you sonofabitch, I read your book". The key book for the Iraqis was written by General Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant architect of the war against the French and the Americans. It was published in English in 1961, under the title People's War, People's Army, long before the US war in Vietnam hotted up. Though full of partyspeak, it shows how easy it is to hold up and demoralise a hugely superior army that has a long supply convoy. Giap exploited what he called "the contradictions of the aggressive colonial war". The invaders have to fan out and operate far from their bases. When they deploy, said Giap, "their broken-up units become easy prey". First harass the enemy, "rotting" away his rear and reserves, forcing him to deploy troops to defend bases and perimeters.
"Is the enemy strong?" wrote Giap. "One avoids him. Is he weak? One attacks him." There will never be enough troops to hold down the scattered guerrilla forces. General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, estimated that he would have needed 2 million troops to "pacify" the country. At the peak of the war he had half that number. You can apply the principle to Baghdad or the country beyond - the topography matters less than the principle. [ complete article ]
Terrorism task force detains an American without charges
Timothy Egan, New York Times, April 4, 2003
For the last two weeks, Maher Hawash, a 38-year-old software engineer and American citizen who was from the West Bank and grew up in Kuwait, has been held in a federal prison here, though he has not been charged with a crime or brought before a judge.
Relatives and friends of Mr. Hawash, who works for the Intel Corporation and is married to a native Oregonian, say he has no idea why he was arrested by a federal terrorism task force when he arrived for work at the Intel parking lot in Hillsboro, a Portland suburb. The family home was raided at dawn on the same day by nearly a dozen armed police officers, who woke Mrs. Hawash and the family's three children, friends said.
Mr. Hawash, who is known as Mike, has yet to be interrogated and is being kept in solitary confinement, his supporters say.
Federal officials will not comment on Mr. Hawash, though they have been pressed by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and by a group of supporters led by a former Intel vice president, for basic information about why he is being detained. [ complete article ]
The Pentagon's (CIA) man in Iraq
David Corn, The Nation, April 4, 2003
Toward the start of the second Persian Gulf War, I found myself in a room with R. James Woolsey, CIA chief during the first two years of the Clinton administration. A television was turned on, and we both watched a news report on the latest development in the North Korea nuclear drama. How much longer, I asked him, could this administration wait before dealing with North Korea and its efforts to develop nuclear-weapons material? A little while, but not too long, he said. Until after the Iraq war? Yes, Woolsey said, we can take care of things then. (That was when the prevailing assumption was the war in Iraq would take about as long as a Donald Rumsfeld press conference.) And, I wondered, is this a challenge that can be taken care of with, say, a well-planned and contained bombing raid, one that strikes the nuclear facilities in question? "Oh, no, " he said. "This is going to be war." War, full-out war, with a nation that might already have a few nuclear weapons and that does have 600,000 North Korean soldiers stationed 25 miles from Seoul, with 37,000 US troops in between? "Yes, war." He didn't flinch, didn't bat an eye.
Woolsey is something of a prophet of war. And the Pentagon wants him to be part of its team running postwar Iraq. [ complete article ]
Turf war rages in Washington over who will rule Iraq
Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, April 5, 2003
The Bush administration was scrambling to finalise an interim government for post-war Iraq yesterday, amid a turf war pitting the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office against the State Department and Congress in Washington.
The battle concerns not only the American officials who will supervise the new ministries, but the role of exiled Iraqi leaders and the extent of United Nations involvement. Above all, it is a struggle between Colin Powell's State Department and the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, supported by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President.
With victory in Iraq in sight, the names of the Americans who will supervise new ministries to replace the existing 23 in the crumbling regime of Saddam Hussein are still far from certain. Last week the Pentagon vetoed a State Department list of eight nominees, but whether the rejection is final is not clear. [ complete article ]
Iraq debts could add up to trouble
Warren Vieth, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2003
To hear some Bush administration officials tell it, the reconstruction of Iraq will largely pay for itself, thanks to a postwar gusher of petroleum revenue.
"The one thing that is certain is Iraq is a wealthy nation," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said.
A look at the national balance sheet tells a different story.
Iraq will emerge from the war a financial shambles, many economists say, with a debt load bigger than that of Argentina, a cash flow crunch rivaling those of Third World countries, a mountain of unresolved compensation claims, a shaky currency, high unemployment, galloping inflation and a crumbling infrastructure expected to sustain more damage before the shooting stops.
And the more oil Iraq produces to pump up its earnings, the more likely it becomes that prices will fall, leaving it no better off than before. [ complete article ]
Al-Jazeera's approach choice of many Arab-Americans
Haitham Haddadin, Reuters, April 4, 2003
Perched atop a hillside road, the Khourys' red brick house in a New York suburb blends into a neighborhood that's picture-perfect Americana: green lawns, kids playing baseball and Old Glory fluttering in the wind.
But inside, something is different. The family's 36-inch television beams images that bring tears to Ray Khoury's eyes.
Khoury gets what he calls an "unfiltered" view of the Iraq war -- with vivid images of death, destruction and gore -- beamed by the controversial al-Jazeera network and other Arabic satellite stations. The picture he and thousands of other Arab-Americans are getting is a world away from the version most Americans see, they say. [ complete article ]
Arab media portray war as killing field
Susan Sachs, New York Times, April 4, 2003
It was a picture of Arab grief and rage. A teenage boy glared from the rubble of a bombed building as a veiled woman wept over the body of a relative.
In fact, it was two pictures: one from the American-led war in Iraq and the other from the Palestinian territories, blended into one image this week on the Web site of the popular Saudi daily newspaper Al Watan.
The meaning would be clear to any Arab reader: what is happening in Iraq is part of one continuous brutal assault by America and its allies on defenseless Arabs, wherever they are.
As the Iraq war moved into its third week, the media in the region have increasingly fused images and enemies from this and other conflicts into a single bloodstained tableau.
The Israeli flag is superimposed on the American flag. The Crusades and the 13th-century Mongul sack of Baghdad, recalled as barbarian attacks on Arab civilization, are used as synonyms for the American-led invasion of Iraq. [ complete article ]
Confusion shrouds Shia 'fatwa'
BBC News, April 4, 2003
Confusion now shrouds a US claim on Thursday that Iraq's supreme Shia Muslim cleric had issued a religious decree calling on the populace not to impede coalition forces.
The US Central Command on Thursday said the Grand Ayatollah Mirza Ali Sistani had instructed the Iraqi people "to remain calm and to not interfere with coalition actions".
Such an edict would be a significant blow to Saddam Hussein's efforts to enlist the support of Shia Muslims and other Muslim Arabs in his battle against coalition forces and to present the conflict as a "holy war".
But his son-in-law and spokesman, Ayatollah Sharestani, who is based in the Iranian holy city of Qom, could not confirm that any such fatwa had been issued.
That implied that a contradictory exhortation by Grand Ayatollah Sistani last week to stand up against invading forces still stood, despite the fact it could have been issued under duress from pro-Saddam Hussein militias. [ complete article ]
Samar's story
Kim Sengupta, The Independent, April 4, 2003
Samar Hussein was in the kitchen helping her aunt Alia Mijbas to make breakfast when the missile landed. The farmhouse where they lived, like most of the homes in the area, is built of a soft, brown stone, and the explosion was close enough for shrapnel to cut through the house's outer walls like butter and slice into Samar's stomach. Alia was struck on both legs by razor-sharp fragments, while her five-year-old son Mahmood, who was drinking a glass of milk, was hit on the chest and shoulders. The blast knocked over the cooker, which burst into flames, severely burning one of Mahmood's brothers, 11-year-old Sahal. All were rushed to hospital, but Samar died before they got there. She was 13 years old.
The victims of this particular explosion were in Manaria, a village in Mohammedia district, about 30 miles south of Baghdad. Since the war began, this mostly rural area of dusty brown fields and quiet villages has seen 53 inhabitants injured and 22 killed. [ complete article ]
'Liberated' city where looters run wild and death stalks the streets
Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, April 4, 2003
Nasiriyah is a city of suffering. After some of the most intense and bloody fighting yet of this war, the United States has now declared this city of up to 300,000 people in its control the largest city in Iraq to have been "liberated". Liberation has come at a price of undoubted suffering for the people of this settlement on the Euphrates: doctors claim that up to 250 people were killed by US air strikes or artillery attacks, and that up to 1,000 were injured.
And it is not as though the Allied victory is complete. While much of the Iraqi army and Fedayeen militia may have been destroyed or forced underground, the city has been given over to lawlessness and looting. [ complete article ]
Held under house arrest by Saddam for a decade, could this cleric be a secret weapon for the Allies?
Paul Vallely, The Independent, April 4, 2003
Iraq's most senior religious leader issued a fatwa yesterday urging the country's majority Shia community not to hinder the US and British armies. It could prove as significant a development for the invading forces as any of the military victories of the past few days.
The ruling, from Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani the foremost Shia authority in Iraq called on Muslims to keep calm, stay at home, not put themselves in danger and not to fight. It could add the decisive weight to the scales of war. [ complete article ]
Hawkish lawyer to oversee Iraqi ministries
The Pentagon selects group to take power
Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, April 4, 2003
A Pentagon lawyer who sought to have US citizens imprisoned indefinitely without charge as part of the war on terrorism will supervise civil administration in Iraq once Saddam Hussein is removed.
Michael Mobbs, 54, who will take charge of 11 of the 23 Iraqi ministries, is one of several controversial appointments to the Pentagon-controlled government-in-waiting being assembled in a cluster of seaside villas in Kuwait.
Other top-level appointees include James Woolsey, a former CIA director with Israeli connections who has long pursued a theory that President Hussein, rather than Islamic militants, was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York. Another is Zalmay Khalilzad, who once sympathised with the Taliban but later changed tack.
During the Reagan administration, Mr Mobbs worked at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he became known for his hawkish views on national security and American-Soviet relations.
On these issues he was closely aligned with the assistant defence secretary at the time, Richard Perle, who is widely regarded as chief architect of the war. [ complete article ]
He's a beast, but he's their beast
Walter Reich, Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2003
Years ago, as he was honing the skills of assassin and thug that would enable him to seize power in Iraq, Saddam Hussein invited Baath Party colleagues to see his library. They were shocked to find it was filled with books about Josef Stalin. The Soviet dictator, Hussein explained, was his hero and role model.
Today, Stalin's story can teach us a lot, not only about the nature of Hussein's totalitarian rule but also about the ways in which such rule can, paradoxically, elicit genuine allegiance -- the kind for which some citizens may be willing to die. This allegiance -- as much as coercion or fear -- may explain why some Iraqi soldiers have been willing to face almost certain death by confronting our vastly more powerful troops. [ complete article ]
Coalition military accused of mistreating reporters
Ciar Byrne, The Guardian, April 1, 2003
The international press watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres has accused US and British coalition forces in Iraq of displaying "contempt" for journalists covering the conflict who are not embedded with troops.
The criticism comes after a group of four "unilateral" or roving reporters revealed how they were arrested by US military police as they slept near an American unit 100 miles south of Baghdad and held overnight.
They described their ordeal as "the worst 48 hours in our lives".
"Many journalists have come under fire, others have been detained and questioned for several hours and some have been mistreated, beaten and humiliated by coalition forces," said the RSF secretary general, Robert Menard. [ complete article ]
Military puzzle as US advances
Jonathan Marcus, BBC News, April 3, 2003
All the signs are that US troops have been ordered to press on with their rapid advance on Baghdad. But despite some local counter-attacks, the level of Iraqi resistance has been puzzling. Is the Republican Guard a phantom army? Has its armour and artillery been destroyed from the air? Or have its forces simply melted away in the face of the US advance to take up new positions closer to Baghdad?
There is no doubt that the pace and scale of the US thrust on the Iraqi capital has been remarkable. This movement will be studied in the staff colleges for many years to come, was the comment of one senior British commander here in Qatar. Key objectives have already been identified on the routes into Baghdad, and these could well be in US hands within the next couple of days if the current rate of progress continues.
But for all the precision and choreographed logistical support, there is one great mystery - where have the Iraqi formations gone? [ complete article ]
U.S., allies clash over plan to use Iraqi oil profits for rebuilding
Colum Lynch and Peter Behr, Washington Post, April 3, 2003
The Defense Department is pressing ahead with plans to temporarily manage Iraq's oil industry after the war and to use the proceeds to rebuild the country, creating a conflict with U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East, according to diplomats and industry experts.
The White House maintains that Iraq's oil revenue is essential to financing the country's postwar reconstruction. The administration intends to install a senior American oil executive to oversee Iraq's exploration and production. Iraqi experts now outside the country would be recruited to handle future oil sales. Industry sources said former Shell Oil Co. chief executive Philip J. Carroll is the leading candidate to direct production.
But the postwar oil strategy is clouded by legal questions about the right of the United States to manage Iraq's oil fields. Administration officials are searching for a legal basis to justify the U.S. plan. If the war succeeds, the United States may claim a legal right as an occupying power to sell the oil for the benefit of Iraq, people close to the situation said.
U.N. and British officials said the United States lacks the legal authority to begin exporting oil even on an interim basis without a new Security Council mandate. Iraq's oil sales before the war were controlled by the United Nations under its oil-for-food program. [ complete article ]
TOKEN INTERNATIONALISM
Tony Blair is likely to soon be confronted with the real nature of his special relationship with George Bush. Blair has long championed the international cause and continues to do so in arguing that the UN must play a central role in the reconstruction of Iraq. Current negotiations, however, lead to the expectation that any concessions made by the Bush administration will be hollow gestures. The UN will be given a seat at the table as perhaps a coordinator of humanitarian relief and fundraising. Meanwhile, the real center of power will remain inside the Pentagon and as the saying goes, power is never relinquished without a struggle.
White House signals bigger role for UN in postwar government
Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, April 3, 2003
The White House appeared to signal yesterday that it might be willing to accept a greater role for the United Nations in the interim postwar government of Iraq than previously indicated, including a special UN representative with civil administration powers.
The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, met President George Bush in Washington on Wednesday and later said he felt that the argument inside the administration "had been won by those who believe there should be a role for the UN".
"The idea of the United Nations special representative or special co-ordinator is one they feel comfortable with," Mr Downer told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Asked if such a representative would have a role in running the country, Mr Downer said he envisaged "an adviser and an assistant to the Iraqi interim administration", or a "liaison point" between the UN and Iraq's government.
But the idea of a UN figure with any governmental involvement goes further than Mr Bush's speeches to date, which have mentioned little more than that he favours the organisation having some kind of role. [ complete article ]
UN rule or UN role?
Lead Editorial, The Guardian, April 3, 2003
Tony Blair acknowledged yesterday that there are disagreements between Britain and the US over postwar Iraq. Before the war started, admissions of this kind were a no-go area. But there will be more such talk when Colin Powell sits down with his EU and Nato opposite numbers in Brussels today to discuss the issue. Washington and London disagree not just about Iraq's future. There are divisions too over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners, and over US sword-rattling against Syria and Iran. But the question is whether these interesting differences are sufficient to lead the government to draw a line; or whether, as Mr Blair characteristically says, they can be reconciled.
If experience is a guide, the government will end up supinely supporting whatever line the Bush administration finally takes. [ complete article ]
Urban warfare
Pentagon plans for worst nightmare
Oliver Burkeman, Stuart Millar, and Nick Paton Walsh, The Guardian, April 3, 2003
American and British military tacticians rarely tire of invoking the name of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war credited with laying the groundwork for everything from "decapitation strikes" to the policy of "shock and awe". But as coalition troops push north for an assault on Baghdad, through stubborn opposition from the most highly trained of Saddam Hussein's fighters, it is another aphorism of Sun Tzu's that may be ringing in the ears of their commanders. "The worst policy," he wrote, brooking no argument, "is to attack cities."
There is nothing encouraging about the list of bloody, high-casualty urban entanglements that strategists on both sides of the Atlantic have been scrutinising for lessons they might apply if drawn into a street-by-street fight for the Iraqi capital. From Stalingrad, Manila and Seoul to Beirut, Grozny and Mogadishu, the history of what the US marines call Mout - military operations on urbanised terrain, known to the British as Fibua, for fighting in built-up areas - is one of massive civilian and military casualties with incendiary effects on public opinion back home. [ complete article ]
A "clash of civilizations"? Sort of....
Peter Stephenson, Electronic Intafada, April 2, 2003
As I watch the "hourly" news and see military convoys "roll" along roads which were already ancient in the time of Jesus, I can not help but be feel overwhelmed by the irony that the very intervals of time, and modes of transport, and calculations used in the attack on Iraq were first created in this same place, along with the concept of civilization the invaders assume they are there to uphold.
Do these soldiers and their commanders actually understand that this is the cradle of civilization, and that they, too, have a stake in it? Do they understand that the very legal rights they feel themselves to be fighting for and the very kinds of food that nourishes them have their origins there? Do they know that the wheeled vehicles they ride upon come from there? Moreover, how will the residents, many of whom know much of their own luminous history, feel about the new heroes from America who have given them "Big Macs, Mickey mouse and thermonuclear war," as one Canadian writer (Paul William Roberts) recently put it? [ complete article ]
Which war am I watching?
Claude Salhani, UPI, April 1, 2003
Is this live broadcast of the mother of all battles -- the one to bring democracy to Mesopotamia -- or yet, another frightening comparison -- specters of Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon, another attempt to "liberate" an Arab nation from oppression and impose security.
Indeed the similarities between the current conflict being fought along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and Israel's Lebanese misadventure are numerous -- and one that the allies would be wise to take lessons from. [ complete article ]
Saddam's regime is a European import
Bernard Lewis, National Post, April 3, 2003
In the Western world, knowledge of history is poor -- and the awareness of history is frequently poorer. For example, people often argue today as if the kind of political order that prevails in Iraq is part of the immemorial Arab and Islamic tradition. This is totally untrue. The kind of regime represented by Saddam Hussein has no roots in either the Arab or Islamic past. Rather, it is an ideological importation from Europe -- the only one that worked and succeeded (at least in the sense of being able to survive). [ complete article ]
Britain is up to its neck in this mire
We should not pretend that we can come out of the war unsullied
Jackie Ashley, The Guardian, April 3, 2003
Our troops may be behaving professionally and well, but it is British missiles and British pilots too, who rain down death on Iraqi cities. It is British tanks and British soldiers too, who are fighting, street by street, through impoverished districts of bewildered and innocent people. It is a British war, as well as an American one, which is bringing still greater hunger, thirst, fear and death to people who had little enough to start with. And if things get even worse when we reach Baghdad, that is Britain's responsibility - our democracy, our politicians, and us as voters. The anger of the Arab world doesn't distinguish between us and the Americans. And we fool ourselves if we do, too. [ complete article ]
U.N.'s Annan says all sides will lose in Iraq War
Reuters, April 2, 2003
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday that that he saw no chance of an immediate cease-fire in the U.S.-led war in Iraq and warned all sides that they would end up as losers. [ complete article ]
Wailing children, the wounded, the dead: victims of the day cluster bombs rained on Babylon
Robert Fisk, The Independent, April 3, 2003
Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways. [ complete article ]
The message coming from our families in Baghdad
Haifa Zangana, The Guardian, April 3, 2003
The last time I managed to speak to my eldest brother, Salam, was two days before the invasion of Iraq. He told me that his daughter Rana had just given birth to a baby boy.
"But she isn't due for another month," I said.
"The doctor tried to induce labour but failed, so he had to perform a caesarean," he explained. "We had to take the risk because we hear that war is starting in few days and then there'll be no hospital to take her to." Trying to ease my horror he continued: "She isn't the only one. Hundreds of women in Baghdad are doing the same thing."
Prime Minister Tony Blair says this is a war to liberate the Iraqi people. As an Iraqi Kurd whose family and people have been bombarded continuously in Baghdad for the last 14 days, I beg to differ. [ complete article ]
Family slain at checkpoint sought safety
Associated Press, April 2, 2003
The Hassans decided to make the journey after an American helicopter dropped fliers over their farming village that showed a drawing of a family sitting at a table, eating and smiling, with a message written in Arabic.
Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Furbush, an Army intelligence analyst, said the message read: "To be safe, stay put."
But Hassan said he and his father thought it just said, "Be safe." To them, that meant getting away from the helicopters firing rockets and missiles.
"A miscommunication with civilians," said an Army report written Monday night.
The family of 17 packed into its 1974 Land Rover. Hassan's father drove. In his 60s, he wore his best clothes for the trip through the American lines: a pinstriped suit.
"To look American," Hassan said.
They planned to go to Karbala. They stopped at an Army checkpoint on the northbound road near Sahara, about 25 miles south of Karbala, and were told to go on, Hassan said.
But "the Iraqi family misunderstood" what the soldiers were saying, Furbush said.
A few miles later, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle came into view. The family waved as it came closer. The soldiers opened fire. [complete article]
The lost rebellion
Dan De Luce, The Guardian, April 2, 2003
The column of Iraqi army soldiers looked exhausted and broken. They were in retreat, making their way north from a humiliating rout in Kuwait.
"Even the Republican Guard was demoralised. They were holding two fingers down, signalling defeat," said Sayed Nour Battat, recalling the closing days of the 1991 Gulf in his home town of Basra.
"The soldiers were desperately looking for something to eat. They offered their weapons in exchange for civilian clothes," Battat said. "Suddenly, there were a huge number of guns in ordinary people's hands. With those weapons, we had the power to change things. "
Sensing Saddam Hussein was losing his grip, the Shia Moslems of southern Iraq seized their moment in 1991 in an "intifada" that erupted across southern cities in a spasm of violence and chaos.
Twelve years after that failed rebellion, Britain and the United States are hoping for Shias in Iraq to rise up again. But the scars from the last attempt run deep, and Shia exiles say they will never forgive Washington and its allies for standing by while Baghdad exacted merciless revenge. [complete article]
Perle's new world order -- and ours?
Stanley I. Kutler, Boston Globe, April 4, 2003
Where are you, Stanley Kubrick, now that we need you? Forty years ago, he gave us the classic film satire, ''Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.'' Richard Perle would have the star turn in a new Kubrick version, appearing as the second coming of the Prince of Darkness. He certainly has been a busy fellow of late.
First, Perle is the proud, hardly modest, behind-the-scenes promoter of the present Iraq policy. Then we have Perle, lobbyist extraordinaire. Several companies, charged by the Department of Defense and the FBI with dubious connections to the Chinese government, retained Perle to lobby the Pentagon in their behalf. The revelations prompted Perle to resign as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, but he remains a member -- a distinction without a difference.
Perle's real importance is in the realm of policy and strategic doctrines. He has pursued an ambitious agenda for years, which now is momentarily triumphant. Sadly, it has gone largely unnoticed and unchallenged. [complete article]
U.S. raid damages Baghdad hospital
Samia Nakhoul, Reuters, April 2, 2003
U.S. missiles damaged a Red Crescent maternity hospital in Baghdad and other civilian buildings on Wednesday, killing several people and wounding at least 25, hospital sources and witnesses said.
The attacks, which took place at 9:30 a.m. (0630 GMT), caught motorists who had ventured out during a lull in the bombing. This correspondent saw at least five burned-out and twisted cars halted in the middle of the road. Witnesses said the drivers burned to death inside. [complete article]
White House divided over reconstruction
Robin Wright, Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2003
The Bush administration is deeply riven by disputes over postwar Iraq, particularly on three key issues the role of the United Nations, who will lead the country and which elements of the U.S. government will oversee its reconstruction, administration officials say.
The fight, those involved say, is about whether Iraq is transformed through an international effort under U.N. supervision, as the State Department prefers, or through a process designed and controlled largely by the United States and designated Iraqis, as the Pentagon prefers.
So far, the Pentagon's approach is prevailing, producing intense squabbling both in Washington and at the Hilton Hotel in Kuwait, where many U.S. officials are drafting plans and preparing to head to Baghdad when the war ends.
At a meeting scheduled Thursday in Brussels, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plans to tell his European and NATO counterparts that the Bush administration wants United Nations assistance with humanitarian and reconstruction projects, and possibly a stabilization force, but seeks no help in re-creating Iraq politically, U.S. officials said. The Pentagon has championed this approach. [complete article]
'It would be O.K. if the invaders brought us water'
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, April 2, 2003
This landscape is a cross between a "Mad Max" movie and Dante's "Inferno." The highway is littered with the carcasses of Iraqi tanks, artillery and trucks, while jittery British 20-year-olds use their tanks to create a checkpoint on the edge of Basra. Iraqi snipers down the road use machine guns and mortars to plink periodically at the tanks as families of Iraqi refugees trudge steadily by with sacks of possessions slung over their shoulders, the sky behind them an apocalyptic black with smoke from raging oil well fires.
The ordinary Iraqis here seem more pragmatic than many of the U.S. officials deciding their fate. While ideologues in Washington offer sweeping judgments about what Iraqis want, many Iraqis seem less dogmatic and are willing to suspend final judgment until they see an answer to this question: Will the invasion make people's lives better?
Unfortunately, many Iraqis here are growing angry because so far the invasion has made their lives incomparably worse. They have lost food, drinking water and security. In every swamp or fetid pool of water, families are filling plastic containers with the sewage-tainted filth that is the closest they can now get to water.
"It would be O.K. if the invaders brought us water," said Munshid, a young man from Basra who, like others, did not want his full name used. "But so far they bring only thirst." [complete article]
WHO BOMBED THE SHU'ALE MARKET?
The Pentagon still denies responsibility for Friday's Baghdad market bombing but the fog of war is starting to lift. With a missile serial number, the Pentagon should be able to say where and when such missiles have been fired, where they were aimed and whether they hit their targets. In a bombing campaign of unparalled precision, it should not be difficult to put to rest any argument about whether the "evidence" that was presented to Robert Fisk was in fact planted.
The proof: marketplace deaths were caused by a US missile
Cahal Milmo, The Independent, April 2, 2003
An American missile, identified from the remains of its serial number, was pinpointed yesterday as the cause of the explosion at a Baghdad market on Friday night that killed at least 62 Iraqis.
The codes on the foot-long shrapnel shard, seen by the Independent correspondent Robert Fisk at the scene of the bombing in the Shu'ale district, came from a weapon manufactured in Texas by Raytheon, the world's biggest producer of "smart" armaments.
The identification of the missile as American is an embarrassing blow to Washington and London as they try to match their promises of minimal civilian casualties with the reality of precision bombing. [complete article]
I am angry and ashamed to be British
As a dual national of Pakistan and Britain, it is the loss of British credibility I find hardest to stomach
Jemima Khan, The Independent, April 2, 2003
Even the moderates here in Pakistan are outraged. Across the board, young and old, poor and rich, fundamentalist and secularist are united in their hatred of the US and their contempt for Britain. Such unprecedented unanimity in a country renowned for its ethnic and sectarian divides is a huge achievement.
Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the leader of the combined religious party Majlis Muttahida Amal (MMA), announced triumphantly: "The pro-West liberals have lost conviction. Islamic movements have come alive."
This new-found unity, which includes for the first time the pro-West ιlites, the liberal middle classes and the mullahs, has been boosted by a fear that Pakistan may be on the US target list. We may not be seeing burning effigies of Bush and Blair daily (although there has been some of that), but many of those with Western connections are considering severing those links. Angry and fearful, expatriate Pakistanis are returning home, and property prices are soaring despite recession. The boycott against British and US goods is growing.
The same is happening throughout the Muslim world. A previously fractured ummah is finally uniting against a perceived common foe, leaving the fundamentalists jubilant and their pro-West leaders, despite their dependence on the US, with no choice but to join the anti-war chorus. [complete article]
Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates
Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, April 2, 2003
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.
On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."
To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said.
According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody's guess.
It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses. [complete article]
Emperor George
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, April 2, 2003
This war is un-American. That's an unlikely word to use, I know: it has an unhappy provenance, associated forever with the McCarthyite hunt for reds under the beds, purging anyone suspected of "un-American activities". Besides, for many outside the US, the problem with this war is not that it's un-American - but all too American.
But that does an injustice to the US and its history. It assumes that the Bush administration represents all America, at all times, when in fact the opposite is true. For this administration, and this war, are not typical of the US. On the contrary, on almost every measure, they are exceptions to the American rule.
The US was, after all, a country founded in a rebellion against imperialism. Born in a war against a hated colonial oppressor, in the form of George III, it still sees itself as the instinctive friend of all who struggle to kick out a foreign occupier - and the last nation on earth to play the role of outside ruler. [complete article]
FREE IRAQI FORCES
On March 14, 2003, at a Department of Defense briefing, Army Maj. Gen. David Barno gave an upbeat assessment of progress that had been made in training the "Free Iraqi Forces":
"We have worked an agreement here, the U.S. government and Hungarian government, to train up to 3,000 over the calendar year that we're in right now, ending on 31 December. And I've got a Training Task Force sized to do that, so I'm prepared to train anyone up to that number, and there's certainly hundreds available that I'm seeing that are potentially in the pipeline for the program."
Two weeks later, the program has been shut down having produced less than 100 graduates. Meanwhile, other Iraqi exiles are returning to Iraq in their thousands to join the war, not as part of the "coalition of the willing" but in defense of their homeland.
US closes exiles training camp after only 100 turn up
Ian Traynor, The Guardian, April 2, 2003
A US military programme in Hungary that was to train up to 3,000 Iraqi exiles to take part in the war against Saddam Hussein was closed down abruptly yesterday after dispatching less than 100 recruits to the war zone.
The decision to abandon the programme after only two months of operation had been taken in the past few days, said Major Bob Stern, the US army spokesman for the operation at the Taszar airbase, south-west of Budapest.
While Iraqi exiles are reported to be flocking home to join the fight against the US and Britain, the failure of Washington to attract exiles to the US banner appeared to be an embarrassment. [complete article]
Damage to Iraqi holy sites would enrage Muslim world, experts say
Sacred landmarks on allies' road to Baghdad
Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 2003
Two of the largest land mines on the U.S. military's march to Baghdad are a pair of holy sites especially sacred to the Shiite branch of Islam -- Karbala and Najaf.
Iraqi fighters loyal to Saddam Hussein hope to exploit the religious significance of these two landmarks of Muslim history, while U.S. and British troops are trying to avoid damaging tombs whose destruction could enrage the Muslim world.
Karbala, the place where the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed was martyred, and Najaf, another spot known to Shiites as "the wondrous place of martyrdom," have both seen heavy fighting in recent days. [complete article]
U.N. Charter offers governing solution for post-war Iraq
Stephen B. Young, Pioneer Press, April 1, 2003
Article 77 (c) of the U.N. Charter provides a very specific way for the United States and the United Kingdom, once they establish their military power over Iraq, to place Iraq in a U.N. trusteeship for the U.N. to administer until the territory recovers its own powers of self-government.
The trusteeship agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Nations for the interim administration of Iraq must specify the "terms under which the trust territory will be administered" and must "designate the authority which will exercise the administration of the trust territory."
A commitment by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair today to withdraw from the administration of Iraq in favor of a U.N.trusteeship once regime change has been accomplished would cement the legitimacy of the intervention.
It would put the internal political affairs of Iraq under international law to restore the sovereign rights of the Iraqi people over their land and their affairs. [complete article]
Afghans hear threat from a distant war
April Witt, Washington Post, April 1, 2003
Shiragha, a 20-year-old soldier in a local militia, relishes the new freedoms the United States brought to Afghanistan along with mobile phones, Western clothes and Pepsi. But he grinned today as he predicted more deadly violence against Americans here because of the war in Iraq.
"Anywhere people see an American, they will kill him," he said. "Why not? As soon as I hear somewhere Muslims are attacked by non-Muslims, I want to kill them."
As if to emphasize the point, a man who described himself as Shiragha's commander fired a Russian-made antiaircraft weapon at a nearby hillside as shopkeepers along the dusty road to Kabul braced for trouble.
Amid a series of attacks on Westerners in recent days -- and fresh calls for jihad, or holy war -- many Afghans have said they fear that the war in Iraq will destroy the fragile, relative stability they have enjoyed since the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Taliban, the radical Islamic militia that ruled most of Afghanistan for five years.
"The only thing the Americans have brought us is peace and security in Afghanistan," Hazratullah, 40, a shopkeeper in Jalalabad's Darunta district, said. "They didn't bring a factory like we thought they would. They didn't bring a dam for electricity. The prices are increasing. Still, the government is not okay. Still, the warlords are in power. Still, there are weapons everywhere.
"Now, all the people worry that again we'll have fighting in Afghanistan and people will be hungry." [complete article]
Pentagon, State Dept. spar on team to run Iraq
Karen DeYoung and Peter Slevin, Washington Post, April 1, 2003
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has rejected a team of officials proposed by the State Department to help run postwar Iraq in what sources described as an effort to ensure the Pentagon controls every aspect of reconstructing the country and forming a new government.
While vetoing the group of eight current and former State Department officials, including several ambassadors to Arab states, the Pentagon's top civilian leadership has planned prominent roles in the postwar administration for former CIA director R. James Woolsey and others who have long supported the idea of replacing Iraq's government, according to sources close to the issue. [complete article]
Rumsfeld's design for war criticized on the battlefield
Bernard Weinraub and Thom Shanker, New York Times, April 1, 2003
Long-simmering tensions between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army commanders have erupted in a series of complaints from officers on the Iraqi battlefield that the Pentagon has not sent enough troops to wage the war as they want to fight it.
Here today, raw nerves were obvious as officers compared Mr. Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam War who failed to grasp the political and military realities of Vietnam.
One colonel, who spoke on the condition that his name be withheld, was among the officers criticizing decisions to limit initial deployments of troops to the region. "He wanted to fight this war on the cheap," the colonel said. "He got what he wanted." [complete article]
Why 2003 is not 1991
Dilip Hiro, The Guardian, April 1, 2003
When Ali Hammadi al-Namani killed himself and four American soldiers in a suicide attack near Najaf on Saturday, he put the final nail in the coffin of the "liberation" scenario of the Washington-London alliance. The invading Anglo-American forces will now have to keep all Iraqi civilians at bay, treating everyone as a potential suicide bomber - just the way Israel's occupation army treats Palestinians.
Earlier, any prospects of an uprising in the predominantly Shi'ite city of Basra disappeared on Tuesday when Grand Ayatollah Mirza Ali Sistani issued a fatwa, calling on "Muslims all over the world" to help Iraqis in "a fierce battle against infidel followers who have invaded our homeland". Sistani is based in Najaf, the third holiest place of Shi'ite Muslims, and it is likely that Nomani, a Shi'ite, was following his fatwa. As the only grand ayatollah of Iraq, Sistani is the most senior cleric for Iraqi Shi'ites, who form 70% of ethnic Arabs in Iraq. Any Anglo-American attempt to devalue Sistani's opposition to the invasion - by saying he's a Saddam stooge, for example - will boomerang because of his status; there are only five grand ayatollah's in the world.
By now it is apparent that the Anglo-American decision-makers made a monumental miscalculation by imagining that Iraqis in the predominantly Shi'ite southern Iraq would welcome their soldiers as liberators. It stems from their blind faith in the unverified testimonies of the Iraqi defectors combined with their failure to realise the complexity of the task of overthrowing President Saddam Hussein's regime. [complete article]
The smart donor's guide to aid for Iraq
Nick Cater, The Guardian, April 1, 2003
So how do you choose the right charity for your cash? As consumer experts would say: shop around, compare what they offer, and ask questions. Almost every aid agency has a website, and if you need more information, email or call them: the speed, content and quality of the responses may well help you decide.
Consider whether they are a big agency with a well-known name or smaller and more likely to value your gift. They may have a faith dimension, only respond to crises or have a wider role.
It is important to choose a charity that can use your money well because it knows Iraq, has a good track record in similar crises or performs specialist tasks others cannot. A few agencies were already operating in Iraq before the war; many more are waiting for security clearance. [complete article]
'You didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!'
Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, April 1, 2003
The invasion forces suffered another self-inflicted disaster in the battle for hearts and minds yesterday when soldiers from the US 3rd infantry division shot dead Iraqi seven women and children.
The incident occurred on Route 9, near Najaf, when a car carrying 13 women and children approached a checkpoint.
A US military spokesman says the soldiers motioned the vehicle to stop but their signals were ignored. However, according to the Washington Post, Captain Ronny Johnson, who was in charge of the checkpoint, blamed his own troops for ignoring orders to fire a warning shot.
"You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!", he reportedly yelled at them.
In another checkpoint incident this morning, US forces say they killed an unarmed Iraqi driver outside Shatra.
Meanwhile it has emerged - as a result of detective work on the internet by a Guardian reader - that the explosion in a Baghdad market which killed more than 60 people last Friday was indeed caused by a cruise missile and not an Iraqi anti-aircraft rocket as the US has suggested. [complete article]
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