A LANDMARK STATEMENT BY ONE OF ISRAEL'S POLITICAL LEADERS
A failed Israeli society collapses while its leaders remain silent
By Avraham Burg, Forward, August 29, 2003
It is very comfortable to be a Zionist in West Bank settlements such as Beit El and Ofra. The biblical landscape is charming. From the window you can gaze through the geraniums and bougainvilleas and not see the occupation. Traveling on the fast highway that takes you from Ramot on Jerusalem's northern edge to Gilo on the southern edge, a 12-minute trip that skirts barely a half-mile west of the Palestinian roadblocks, it's hard to comprehend the humiliating experience of the despised Arab who must creep for hours along the pocked, blockaded roads assigned to him. One road for the occupier, one road for the occupied.
This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won't work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism's superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.
We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the roadblocks. No wonder we don't hear the cries of the abused woman living next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in dignity. We don't even bother to count the women murdered by their husbands.
Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.
We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below -- from the wells of hatred and anger, from the "infrastructures" of injustice and moral corruption.
If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative. [complete article]
(Note - The author of this article was Speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, from 1999 until 2003, and from 1995 until 1999 was Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization.)
New terror army fulfils prophecy
By Jason Burke, The Observer, August 31, 2003
First, it was Afghanistan, then Bosnia and Chechnya, then, briefly, Afghanistan again. Now it is Iraq.
Islamic militants talk of 'theatres of jihad'. The phrase, with its dual military and dramatic senses, connotations of combat and of audience, is significant. Iraq is the latest stage on which militants can demonstrate their faith to fellow Muslims and unbelievers. It is the latest zone of battle where, in the militants' twisted world view, the aggressive West, supposedly set on subordinating and humiliating the lands of Islam, can be resisted.
Yesterday Iraqi police sources said they had seized four men whom they believed were behind the bombing of the Najaf shrine which killed 75 people on Friday. They said they were linked to 'al-Qaeda'.
Police always say this, and any claims of direct links to Osama bin Laden or those of his aides still at large should be treated with some scepticism. Al-Qaeda is a useful scapegoat. Any one with any knowledge of the practicalities of modern Islamic militancy knows that the chances of bin Laden ordering last week's attack are slim.
But, whatever the actual identity of the bombers or their commanders, the growing resistance networks in Iraq include a component made up of Islamic militants. If al-Qaeda is conceived of as the phenomenon of contemporary Sunni Muslim jihadi militancy, then al-Qaeda is indeed in Iraq. [complete article]
Policy lobotomy needed
By Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, August 31, 2003
If you think we don't have enough troops in Iraq now -- which we don't -- wait and see if the [Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish] factions there start going at each other. America would have to bring back the draft to deploy enough troops to separate the parties. In short, we are at a dangerous moment in Iraq. We cannot let sectarian violence explode. We cannot go on trying to do this on the cheap. And we cannot succeed without more Iraqi and allied input. [complete article]
Iraqis' rage at boiling point
By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2003
More at ease with the gentle voice she uses to teach elementary school students, Khawla Ahmed struggled Saturday to find diplomatic language to express her outrage at what life has become in Iraq.
But as she rattled off the mounting horrors of thieves prowling in daylight, sabotage knocking out lights in schools and water in the kitchen, and now terrorist strikes killing scores of Iraqis, her anger escalated into a venomous tirade at the country's U.S.-led administration.
"America considers itself the superpower of the world, but here it is powerless to keep any semblance of order," she said. "The Americans fired our police and our army. Now there is no security and foreign terrorists are coming across our borders." [complete article]
Bombing at Iraqi shrine appears carefully planned
By Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams, Washington Post, August 31, 2003
Investigators suspect the devastating bomb that tore through a crowded street along Iraq's most sacred Shiite Muslim shrine, killing a prominent religious leader and scores of others, was packed in a car parked for as long as 24 hours along a curbside and probably detonated by remote control, a senior U.S. official said today.
In an attempt to forestall another car bombing -- Friday's was the third in less than a month -- U.S. forces will begin patrolling the grounds of the Imam Ali shrine within days, a task they have so far avoided given religious sensitivities and the prospect of another flashpoint in a city already on edge, said Maj. Rick Hall, executive officer of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.
The recent blasts have sent a deep shudder through Iraq and badly undermined faith in officials of the U.S.-led occupation. [complete article]
'Down with America' chants crowd as Shia Muslims mourn dead
By Damien McElroy, The Telegraph, August 31, 2003
Packed into buses, pick-up trucks, taxis and cars, an estimated 500,000 mourners descended on the holy city of Najaf yesterday for the burial of Iraq's leading Shia cleric who was among at least 80 people killed by a car bomb on Friday.
From dawn, a ceaseless stream of traffic clogged the roads around the sprawling cemetery of mud brick tombs. Devastated followers of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim walked the final mile to the sacred shrine of Imam Ali where the huge blast claimed the life of the key American ally.
The crowds beat their chests in sorrow and denounced the American-led occupation of Iraq. Chants of "down with America" filled the air as two white lorries carried away the charred remains of the cars used in the attack. Some carried coffins wrapped in black shrouds bearing verses from the Koran.
In turn abject and ecstatic, mourners demanded that Iraqi Shi'ites seize control of the country. "We cannot remain silent any more," said Hassan Abu Ali. "We must do something I will not allow our enemies to sleep peacefully any more." [complete article]
Chaos reigns as Saddam's plan unfolds
By Peter Beaumont, The Observer, August 31, 2003
What we all are asking now is whether this audacious and destabilising attack [in Najaf] will plunge the country into a maelstrom of violence, from which what many now call the Saddam network can emerge victorious.
The picture of that network of terrorists and guerrilla fighters, between 5,000 and 7,000 strong, which has been emerging in the past few weeks is of groups that are organising but not yet organised, with local command structures, money, weapons and expertise. Its fighters, by and large, are ex-members of Saddam's former security forces and Baath Party, bolstered with manpower and expertise by Arab fighters joining the new jihad against America - unlikely bedfellows with the secular Baathist cause.
The network is described in recovered documents and by captured senior Saddam officials who have disclosed that, while Iraq's dictator had few military plans for opposing the coalition forces, what he left was a time bomb designed to blow up in the coalition's face. It is a campaign of attacks that reached a crucial watershed last week as the number of US soldiers to die in Iraq in the post-invasion period overtook the number killed in action in the 'war proper'. Now even that perhaps has been overshadowed by Friday's events. [complete article]
Poll: U.S. losing grip in Iraq
CBS News, August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
Although the public expresses more concern about U.S. involvement in Iraq, and American troops continue to experience casualties -- the number of American lives lost in Iraq since the war was officially declared over has now surpassed the casualties experienced during combat -- the public still supports a U.S. troop presence. Only a third want U.S. troops brought back home.
As they have for many months, Americans support a multilateral approach to rebuilding and governing Iraq, and that support has grown in this poll. 69% of Americans think the United Nations, and not the United States, should have the lead responsibility for setting up a new government in Iraq, even more than felt that way last April. 25% want the U.S. to be responsible for building an Iraqi government. [complete article]
At least 19 arrested in deadly Iraq blast
By Tarek al-Issawi, Associated Press, August 30, 2003
Police have arrested 19 men -- many of them foreigners and all with admitted links to al-Qaida -- in the car bombing of the Imam Ali shrine in the holy city of Najaf, a senior Iraqi investigator told The Associated Press on Saturday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said two Iraqis and two Saudis grabbed shortly after the Friday attack gave information leading to the arrest of the others. They include two Kuwaitis and six Palestinians with Jordanian passports. The remainder were Iraqis and Saudis, the official said, without giving a breakdown.
"Initial information shows they (the foreigners) entered the country from Kuwait, Syria and Jordan," the official said.
"All those arrested belong to the Wahhabi sect, and they are all connected to al-Qaida," the official said. Wahhabism is the strict, fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam from which al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden draws spiritual direction. [complete article]
Death and hesitation in Iraq
By Dexter Filkins, New York Times, August 30, 2003
The car bomb that killed one of Iraq's most important spiritual leaders today was apparently met by a political vacuum in the nation's capital, where the Iraqi and American officials charting the country's future seemed unsure who should respond and how.
Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a symbol of moderation in this restive land, was dead. Religious leaders called for blood and vengeance, and in some places the ayatollah's mourners took to the streets. Yet here in Baghdad, the Iraqi and American officials charged with shepherding this country toward democratic rule went about their business as if little had changed.
There were no speeches calling for calm and few public appearances by anyone in charge. L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator, was on vacation. Nobody seemed to know when exactly he would return. The American military command here said nothing. [complete article]
A top aide to Blair resigns as a dispute over Iraq rages
By Warren Hoge, New York Times, August 30, 2003
Alastair Campbell, the influential and combative director of communications and strategy for Prime Minister Tony Blair, announced his resignation today as controversy raged over his role in portraying the nature of Iraq's threat to the West. [complete article]
North Korea and Iran want the Bomb
Wouldn't you, too?
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, August 29, 2003
The remaining two axes of evil have been spinning their terrible wheels this week. The North Koreans proclaimed, at disarmament talks no less, that they will soon test a nuclear weapon. The Iranians were caught in an awkward fix, if not an outright lie, when traces of bomb-grade uranium were found on a centrifuge at a nuclear reactor that they claim to use strictly for peaceful purposes. There are ambiguities in both stories. The North Koreans also said at those talks that they would dismantle their nuclear-weapons program if the United States dropped its hostile policy and resumed economic assistance. The Iranians expressed surprise at the news about the centrifuge, explaining that they bought the equipment elsewhere and that it must have come precoated with enriched-uranium residue (dubious but not impossible, given that the source was probably Pakistan).
The world's indignant response in both cases ignores the main questions: Why shouldn't nations like Iran and North Korea try to build A-bombs? Isn't building the bomb a logical policy in the post-Cold War era? Why do some nations try to go nuclear, while other nations (even those with the technical ability) do not? And what should be done to lure the nuclear-wannabes away from their desires? [complete article]
U.S. decree strips thousands of their jobs
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, August 30, 2003
Tarik al-Kubaisy, vice-president of the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists, is a worried man. It's not just that the queue of patients suffering from severe stress disorders in Iraq's war-torn society is growing longer by the day.
Nor that a country of 25 million has fewer than 100 psychiatrists and many are planning to emigrate now that Saddam Hussein's restrictions on foreign travel have gone.
The other concern for Dr Kubaisy, who was awarded a London University PhD after four years at the Maudsley hospital, is that the Americans have taken away his job.
Like many young Iraqi professionals, he joined the Ba'ath party several years before Saddam became its leader and turned Iraq into a one-party state. But under Order Number One, issued by Paul Bremer, Iraq's US administrator - the so-called "de-Ba'athification" decree - Dr Kubaisy's position as a professor in Baghdad University's college of medicine has ended. [complete article]
Ayatollah's death deepens U.S. woes
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 30, 2003
The death of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, a rare cleric with political acumen and religious pedigree, may pose the greatest challenge yet to U.S. efforts to court Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority and bring stability to Iraq.
Hakim, 64, a member of one of Iraq's most prominent clerical families, headed the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an opposition group he founded in 1982 while exiled in Iran.
Though his ties to the Islamic government in Iran long made him suspect in the eyes of U.S. officials, his decision to enroll his movement in the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and, by default, act as a proponent of U.S. efforts here, counted as one of the true achievements of American diplomacy in postwar Iraq. [complete article]
Condi's phony history
Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq
By Daniel Benjamin, Slate, August 29, 2003
Werwolf [-- a Nazi resistance plan aimed to sabotage US occupation of Germany --] tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no resemblance to Iraq today. As Antony Beevor observes in The Fall of Berlin 1945, the Nazis began creating Werwolf as a resistance organization in September 1944. "In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils," Beevor writes. "… Werwolf recruits were taught to kill sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol with silencer. …"
In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. [complete article]
Shia leader concerned over pace of change
By Gareth Smyth, Financial Times, August 29, 2003
Friday's murder in Najaf of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim has removed one of the most important Shia Muslim leaders advocating critical engagement with the US occupation of Iraq.
Ayatollah Hakim had led the Shia Muslim group Sciri - the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq - through a tortuous political process that began with a conference of Iraqi opposition groups in London last December, continued at Salahaddin in Kurdish-held northern Iraq in February and led in July to the formation, under US supervision, of a 25-strong Governing Council.
But Ayatollah Hakim had grown uneasy with the speed of change. "Until now there is not really a state," he told the Financial Times in one of his last interviews. "This vacuum allows everyone to move - looters as well as good people. The Americans have not occupied the vacuum and they have not allowed the Iraqi parties to occupy it." [complete article]
Dreaming of Baghdad
By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, February 3, 2003
Early this year, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Jon Lee Anderson went to Tehran to meet leading members of the exiled Iraqi Shia community. Whilst there he interviewed Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who was assassinated in Najaf today.
The story of the Hakim family is one of the most tragic sagas in the bloody history of modern Iraq. Ayatollah Hakim has been waiting many years and has paid a very high price to bring about an Islamic revolution in his country. When I asked him to tell me about his early life, he shook his head, as if to say, "Where to begin?" When I insisted, he gave me an impressionistic version: "I was born in Iraq, went to a madrasah in Iraq, went to prison in Iraq, was tortured in Iraq. . . . I was married when I was eighteen; when the monarchy was toppled I was nineteen. I had grown up in a kind of poor family, but at the same time it was respected. I grew up during the Second World War, and I saw demonstrations in the streets over the establishment of Palestine" -- he meant Israel. "I saw the arrival of Communist ideas. I was pulled by a rope through the streets when I was twenty years old. And . . . things have moved this way until now. All this period was characterized by killings, imprisonments, and I was tortured. I was burned with cigarettes, electroshocked. My head was put into a metal vise; I was beaten very harshly and imprisoned in a cell where I couldn't distinguish between night and day. All of this happened when I was in my youth. When I was an older man, five of my brothers and nine of my nephews were killed. Fifty of my relatives were killed or disappeared. I've had seven assassination attempts against me, but I depend on the Almighty to cleanse my soul, and I am not tired, I will continue." [complete article]
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim: Spiritual and political leader of the Iraqi Shias
The Guardian, August 29, 2003
The death of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim marks the loss of "the most influential and charismatic religious and political leader in Iraq", according to one leading commentator.
His assassination is a major blow not only for the millions of Iraqi Shias who considered him their spiritual and political leader, but also for the campaign to establish peace and security in the war-shattered nation.
Hamid Ali Alkifaey, an expert on Iraqi affairs, said: "It is indeed bad news that Ayatullah Muhammed Baker Al Hakim has been killed. He was by far the most influential and charismatic religious and political leader in Iraq.
"With his assassination, the Iraqi religious establishment has been bereft of an astute politician as well as a senior religious leader, whose influence transcends the sectarian and political divide." [complete article]
Bush administration examining ways to change course in Iraq
By Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott, Knight Ridder, August 28, 2003
Alarmed by mounting casualties and staggering costs in Iraq, a growing number of top Bush administration officials have concluded that the current U.S. strategy is unsustainable and are looking for ways to increase United Nations involvement, American officials and foreign diplomats said.
The sharp course corrections under consideration, they said, include creating a multinational U.N. peacekeeping force with continued U.S. military command, giving the world body a larger role in rapidly transferring governance back to Iraqis, and seeking greater international financial contributions.
The proposals would mark a dramatic departure for President Bush and his top aides, who went to war in Iraq without explicit U.N. approval and have insisted on tight American control of virtually every aspect of the postwar occupation.
None of the proposals has been adopted yet. Officials in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney and some civilian officials who work for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are resisting any broader international involvement in Iraq, which, in their view, would disrupt plans for an American-initiated remaking of the Middle East. [complete article]
Iraqi Shia leader killed
BBC News, August 29, 2003
Many people have been killed by a car bomb in the holy city of Najaf - among them leading Shia Muslim politician Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim.
A local doctor told the BBC 80 people were killed and 100 injured in the bomb which blew up near the Tomb of Ali in the central Iraqi city, one of the holiest shrines for Shia Muslims.
No group has admitted carrying out the attack, which took place just as main weekly prayers were ending. [...]
The leader of an Iran-backed group, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), Ayatollah Hakim had returned to Iraq in May, after spending more than two decades in exile in Iran.
A Sciri spokesman in London, Hamid al-Bayati, told the BBC he suspected that supporters of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "could be behind this attack".
He added that when visiting Baghdad in May and June, he had told the US occupation authorities that protection of holy places and leading clerics should be stepped up.
"The allies did not respond to this proposal," Mr Bayati said. "I blame them for negligence in not protecting holy places and holy men." [complete article]
The last to know
By Ian Traynor, The Guardian, August 29, 2003
When 10 governments in central and eastern Europe lined up behind Washington last February in support of the war in Iraq, the general publics from Lithuania to Albania were the last to know.
Leading politicians and diplomats across the region, indeed, found out about their governments' backing for war from American press reports.
Hardly surprising, given that the "Vilnius declaration" of the 10 states was penned not in eastern Europe, but in New York and Washington.
In Hungary this week, the same thing happened again. A New York Times report from Baghdad triggered apprehension and bafflement in Budapest with the news that some 28,000 Iraqi policemen were to be trained by the Americans at a Hungarian airbase.
The Americans used the same base, at Taszar in south-western Hungary, earlier this year for an experiment in training an exiled Iraqi militia to help in the war. Although the plan was to train 3,000 Iraqi exiles, no more than 200 had gone through the course when the plan was abruptly dropped. Again, the Hungarians were the last to know. [complete article]
Blair: Off the hook - for now
By Polly Toynbee, The Guardian, August 29, 2003
If the prime minister had bought an evening paper as he stepped out of the law courts yesterday, there was the headline: "50th British soldier killed in Iraq as mob opens fire with guns and grenades." News from Iraq gets worse by the day, aid workers are withdrawn and all the US promises is that electricity might return to its pre-war inadequacy in a month or two. Why he took Britain to war gets more pressing every day. He is lucky the important questions are not on the agenda in the Hutton courtroom. His performance yesterday helps get the government off the Hutton hook, but his greatest political danger now lies beyond his control on the dusty ground of Iraq. [complete article]
Four-star rating for a Wesley Clark campaign
By Robert Kuttner, Los Angeles Times, August 29, 2003
Wesley Clark has told associates that he will decide in the next few weeks whether to declare for president. If he does, it will transform the Democratic race. Call me star-struck, but I think he'd instantly be in the top tier.
Clark, in case you've been on sabbatical in New Zealand, is all over the talk shows. He's the former NATO supreme commander who headed operations in Kosovo, a Rhodes scholar who graduated first in his class at West Point and a Vietnam vet with several combat medals, including a Purple Heart.
He has been a tough critic of the Bush foreign policy, including the Iraq war. His domestic positions are not as fully fashioned, but he would repeal President Bush's tax cuts and revisit the so-called Patriot Act.
More interesting, many of Clark's progressive views on domestic issues come by way of his military background. Though it is very much a hierarchy, the military is also the most egalitarian island in this unequal society. Top executives -- four-star generals -- make about nine times the pay of buck privates. In corporate life, the ratio of many chief executives' compensation to worker bees' is more like 900 times. [complete article]
See also, General poised to enter race for White House.
Socio-economic roots of radicalism?
Towards explaining the appeal of Islamic radicals (PDF format)
By Alan Richards, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, July, 2003
Why do "Islamic radicals" -- including the partisans of al-Qaeda and other followers of Osama bin Laden -- enjoy so much sympathy in the Middle East and wider Muslim world? Obviously, understanding such a phenomenon is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for crafting a strategy to cope with the murderous violence of September 11, 2001. Some analysts -- including this one -- believe that explaining this -- or any other -- large-scale social movement requires a nuanced, complex historical analysis of social, economic, political, and cultural factors. Space and professional competence sharply constrain the analysis offered here, which will focus more on economic, social, and political factors than on cultural and ideological aspects.
Any reader of journals and op-ed pages of newspapers knows, however, that perspectives such as this have hardly gone unchallenged. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, attempts at analysis of any kind were often denigrated as symptoms of cowardice or treason. Pundits and policymakers suggested that to argue that phenomenon such as al-Qaeda had social roots was to excuse, or even condone, their apocalyptic actions. As the political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon pointed out, such arguments are "grade-school non sequiturs." After all, historians who study Nazism do not justify Auschwitz, and students of Stalinism do not exonerate the perpetrators of the Gulag. Understanding is simply better than the alternative, which is incomprehension. If we fail to grasp the forces behind the attacks of September 11, we will fail to respond wisely. [complete report (PDF format)]
The conclusions of this 35-page report have been summarized by David Isenberg for Asia Times, in Exploring the roots of radicalism.
Musharraf's army breaking rank
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, August 30, 2003
...the [Pakistani] army's role in politics has been dramatically shaped by the unprecedented events of September 11, 2001. The army under Musharraf has been forced, because of the global fallout from the terrorist attacks on the United States, to make decisions that have seriously split the armed forces.
Well-placed sources within the army have revealed to Asia Times Online that recently several top officers have been arrested. These arrests have been kept secret as no charges have been laid. The officers, according to the sources, were seized after being fingered by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as probably having links with international Islamic militants.
The FBI has been given a free hand to interrogate the officers at its cell in the capital, Islamabad, or at any other location of its choosing in order to establish ties between the officers and militant networks.
Asia Times Online investigations have established the names of two of those arrested: Assistant Adjutant-General and Quartermaster-General, Lieutenant-Colonel Khalid Abbassi (posted in Kohat, North-West Frontier Province) and one Major Atta.
The investigations show that neither the family of the officers nor their subordinates know where they are being detained. Senior officers in the army, when contacted by this correspondent, remained tight lipped and their advice was, "stay away from this matter". [complete article]
On going home
By Omar al-Qattan, Open Democracy, August 28, 2003
The popular saying among Palestinians, one I have heard so often from older people when talking about the land or house or entire village they have lost, is: fishi haq bidi’ warahi mtalib – no right disappears as long as someone puts a claim to it. And it is one of the great human achievements of the last fifty or so years that the Palestinians, despite a massive disadvantage on every level, have been able to maintain this claim. We have done it through poetry, song, film, art but above all through maintaining the popular resistance to Israel’s denials and expansionism.
Yet the reality – the one that is undeniable and observable and utterly appalling – is that we own less and less of the land, have access to less of it than we did even three years ago, and are faced with one of the cruellest colonial projects of land-grabbing in modern history. [complete article]
The right of return: the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
By Ghada Karmi, Open Democracy, August 27, 2003
That initial act of dispossession [in 1948], which destroyed Palestinian society and led to the manifold depredations that have beset the Palestinians ever since: the refugee camps, the dispersal to other countries, the statelessness, the struggle for recognition of their cause, and the fight against their current occupation and repression, is the heart and basis of the conflict. By today’s estimates, the total registered refugee Palestinian population numbers 4 million (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) and Palestinian sources put it at nearly 6 million.
These sufferings have been compounded by Israel’s persistent and inflexible refusal to acknowledge any responsibility in the matter and its rejection of any notion of compensation or restitution for Palestinian losses. This is in marked contrast to Israeli demands for compensation for damage inflicted under Nazism and the holocaust. More recently, Israel has been demanding compensation from Arab countries for the losses of the Jews who left their homes there after 1948. [complete article]
Operation Perfect Storm: The press and the Iraq war
By W. Lance Bennett, Political Communication Report, Fall, 2003
If the first Iraq war was named Desert Storm, the second might be called Perfect Storm. The run-up to the 2003 war witnessed an extraordinary convergence of factors that produced near perfect journalistic participation in government propaganda operations. What comes in the aftermath of a messy military occupation -- clouded by reports of a war promoted through high level intelligence deceptions -- may well be another matter. I would not be surprised to see the press "beast" turn angrily against its former feeders. However, the main focus of this analysis is on press cooperation in implementing administration communication strategies during the period between September 11, 2001, and George W. Bush's dramatized tail hook landing of May 1, 2003 on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln -- the Top Gun moment in which Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," adding that "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001, and still goes on." [ complete article ]
U.S. finds tables turned at U.N.
By Michael Moran, MSNBC News, August 27, 2003
Having launched the Iraq War in defiance of the United Nations Security Council and repeatedly vowed to "go it alone," the Bush administration finds itself back at U.N. headquarters seeking help in stemming the costs, both in blood and dollars, of occupying Saddam Hussein's former realm.
Over the past week, efforts by senior American diplomats -- including a personal visit to U.N. headquarters last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell -- failed to win new pledges of money or troops from any of the world's major powers. With the United States determined to control both the military occupation and the distribution of reconstruction contracts, many large nations are treating Washington to a taste of its own hardball tactics. [ complete article ]
Iraqi council's most pressing task: Legitimacy
By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2003
They don't know their term of office, their resources, their compensation or their clout.
About the only thing the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council seem sure of is that American occupiers are suddenly eager to hand them a share of responsibility -- some would say blame -- for running a country suspended in a dangerous vacuum.
Appointed by the U.S. six weeks ago and viewed by some Iraqis as merely putting a local face on the occupation, the council now is being looked to by U.S. officials as the best hope for getting the idle machinery of government and industry moving. [ complete article ]
Classified spending on the rise
By Dan Morgan, Washington Post, August 27, 2003
"Black," or classified, programs requested in President Bush's 2004 defense budget are at the highest level since 1988, according to a report prepared by the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The center concluded that classified spending next fiscal year will reach about $23.2 billion of the Pentagon's total request for procurement and research funding. When adjusted for inflation, that is the largest dollar figure since the peak reached during President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup 16 years ago. [ complete article ]
All sides failed to follow 'road map'
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore, Washington Post, August 28, 2003
When President Bush announced his support of an ambitious Middle East peace plan four months ago in the Oval Office, he offered an admonition to everyone concerned: "In order for peace to occur, all parties must assume their responsibilities."
Today, a new wave of violence has erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories because none of the participants -- including the United States -- did what was expected of it or accepted responsibilities critical to advancing the peace initiative, known as the "road map," according to Israeli and Palestinian officials, diplomats and analysts. [ complete article ]
Halliburton's deals greater than thought
By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, August 28, 2003
Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents.
The size and scope of the government contracts awarded to Halliburton in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than was previously disclosed and demonstrate the U.S. military's increasing reliance on for-profit corporations to run its logistical operations. Independent experts estimate that as much as one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is going to independent contractors. [ complete article ]
U.S. suspects it received false Iraq arms tips
By Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2003
Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war.
The goal, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it." He added, "We're reinterviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the U.S." [ complete article ]
Bush's war goes global
By Naomi Klein, Globe and Mail, August 27, 2003
The Marriot Hotel in Jakarta was still burning when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's Co-ordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, explained the implications of the day's attack.
"Those who criticize about human rights being breached must understand that all the bombing victims are more important than any human-rights issue."
In a sentence, we got the best summary yet of the philosophy underlying President George W. Bush's so-called war on terrorism. Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. [ complete article ]
Arab reform minus the U.S. sledgehammer
By Ali Abunimah, Daily Star, August 27, 2003
The Arab states are in desperate need of reform. Their hundreds of millions of people -- the vast majority of them under age 30 -- lack the basic freedoms and opportunities that they crave. In no Arab country are the people free to change their government by peaceful means. No Arab country observes the rule of law, and each society is riven by fundamental inequalities that seem only to be growing. Education and scientific and social research lag, and many of the best and brightest emigrate at the earliest opportunity. [ complete article ]
A Jew among 25,000 Muslims
By Jonathan Cook, The Guardian, August 27, 2003
She makes an incongruous figure, waiting in front of the central mosque in the northern Israeli town of Tamra. There is no danger I will miss her. She has short blonde hair, in contrast to the rest of the women who cover their dark hair with scarves, and is wearing a loose-fitting floral kaftan, better suited to the streets of Wimbledon, her former home, than here in the Middle East.
The difference runs much deeper than mere looks: Susan Nathan is the only Jew among 25,000 Muslims in Tamra, one of the country's dozens of Arab communities whose council is run by Islamic fundamentalists. She is one of only two Israeli Jews known to have crossed the ethnic divide: the other is the controversial academic Uri Davis, who lives in nearby Sakhnin. [...]
But since her move from Tel Aviv [-- where she first lived after moving to Israel from London four years ago --] to work as an English teacher in deprived Tamra seven months ago, she has lost her Jewish friends. "At first they thought I was just being provocative," she says. "Then they thought I was suffering some sort of mental breakdown. Now they realise I am serious, they have turned their backs. What I have done is far too threatening." [...]
Paradoxically, her stance has also earned her the enmity of the Israeli peace movement. "The Jewish left is totally in thrall to the idea of two states for two people. What I am doing by showing that Jews and Arabs can live together in peace undermines their argument." [ complete article ]
Asia's most-wanted man lived life of a backpacker
By Mark Baker, Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2003
He liked Coca Cola, the BBC news and Marlboro cigarettes. Sometimes he would play with the children, but mostly the man in Room 10 at the Boeng Kak Guest House kept to himself.
He said he was a Thai businessman, and residents of the dollar-a-day backpacker lodge in Phnom Penh had no idea the smiling man who called himself Mizi was Asia's most-wanted. [ complete article ]
Jemaah Islamiyah in South East Asia: Damaged but still dangerous
International Crisis Group Report, August 26, 2003
Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the South East Asian terrorist organisation based in Indonesia, remains active and dangerous, despite the mid-August 2003 arrest of Hambali, one of its top operatives.
Though more than 200 men linked or suspected of links to it are now in custody in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, JI is far from destroyed. Indonesian police and their international counterparts have succeeded in seriously damaging the network, but the bombing of the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta on 5 August provided clear evidence that the organisation remains capable of planning and executing a major operation in a large urban centre.
The information emerging from the interrogation of JI suspects indicates that this is a bigger organisation than previously thought, with a depth of leadership that gives it a regenerative capacity. It has communication with and has received funding from al-Qaeda, but it is very much independent and takes most, if not all operational decisions locally. [ complete article ]
U.S. denies any chance for Iraq-Israel oil pipeline
By Amiram Cohen, Haaretz, August 27, 2003
The U.S. State Department yesterday denied plans to send Iraqi oil to Israel, refuting reports of such a possibility earlier this week.
A senior State Department source said that not only is there no such plan, but also there is no intention or possibility for such a scenario, adding that there will be no discussion of the sort in the next two years. The United States believes it is not possible that any new government formed in Iraq would immediately agree to divert oil to Israel, the source said.
Earlier this week, the Foreign Ministry's deputy director-general for economics was asked by a Pentagon official about Israel's position on the possibility of a project that would transmit Iraqi oil from Kirkuk to Haifa and the estimated cost of such an endeavor. Sources in Jerusalem yesterday said that the State Department was probably unaware of this communication. [ complete article ]
Bush, speaking to veterans, says Iraq may not be last strike
By David Stout, New York Times, August 26, 2003
President Bush defended his policy on Iraq today, declaring that the United States had struck a blow against terrorism in overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein. And Mr. Bush said the United States might carry out other pre-emptive strikes.
"No nation can be neutral in the struggle between civilization and chaos,'' Mr. Bush told members of the American Legion gathered in St. Louis for the group's convention.
"We've adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war,'' Mr. Bush said, to loud applause. "We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them in their camps or caves or wherever they hide, before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens.'' [ complete article ]
India's great divide
By Alex Perry, Time Asia, August 11, 2003
Surveying the sunset over Bombay's southern coastline from the calm of his palatial first-floor office, police joint commissioner Ahmad Javed could scarcely look less like an outsider. His uniform is stiff with starch, his shoes impeccably shined, and when the 45-year-old smoothes his neatly clipped moustache, he does so with perfectly manicured fingers. On his polished wood desk, an In tray bulges with the responsibilities of the second-most-senior policeman in India's biggest metropolis; meanwhile, outside a nervous line of saluting adjutants waits for signatures, permissions and orders in triplicate. When Javed speaks, it is with the erudite polish and faintly Victorian manner of India's finest private school, St. Stephen's College in New Delhi. The consummate insider, Javed is a man whose instincts and hopes -- whose entire being -- are governed by the system he serves. "We have a saying in the service," he says. "Once you don your khakis, they become your religion."
Looking down at the same shoreline from the top floor of a nearby hotel, 44-year-old "Umar" is reflecting on a life spent almost entirely outside the Indian mainstream. Affable, neatly bearded and smartly dressed, Umar (a pseudonym given to him by TIME) holds the senior rank of ansar, or guide, in India's loosely knit Muslim militant movement. In that capacity, he told Time, he has played a central role in a string of deadly bomb blasts that have rocked Bombay in the past eight months. Just last week, a bus was blown apart as it drove through eastern Bombay, killing three people and injuring 42. The police blame the attack on Umar's organization, an unnamed fundamentalist group made up primarily of former members of the outlawed Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
Umar and Javed, both Indian Muslims, began their careers simultaneously in the mid-'70s. But they could hardly have chosen more different paths. While the policeman was taking his civil-service exams, Umar was being admitted as a full-time activist in SIMI, a fundamentalist group formed in the late 1970s and banned by New Delhi after 9/11. [ complete article ]
(Note - This article was published three weeks prior to the recent bombings in Bombay.)
Hamas ready to meet Abbas, despite hits
By Arnon Regular, Haaretz, August 27, 2003
Hamas is prepared to continue dialogue with Palestinian Authority officials about renewing the recently-ended hudna, despite ongoing Israeli assassinations and attempted assassinations of Hamas leaders.
Hours after Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas arrived in Gaza yesterday for meetings with the Palestinian government and possibly with Hamas leaders, Israeli helicopter missiles launched at a car carrying Hamas operatives in northern Gaza City missed their target but killed a 65-year-old Jabalya man driving a donkey cart and wounded
20 others, including four children. [ complete article ]
Bremer: Iraq effort to cost tens of billions
By Peter Slevin and Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, August 27, 2003
Iraq will need "several tens of billions" of dollars from abroad in the next year to rebuild its rickety infrastructure and revive its moribund economy, and American taxpayers and foreign governments will be asked to contribute substantial sums, U.S. occupation coordinator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday.
Bremer said Iraqi revenue will not nearly cover the bill for economic needs "almost impossible to exaggerate." [ complete article ]
Even the optimists are losing heart as Iraq goes from bad to worse
By Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, August 27, 2003
I left [in late June] believing that against all the odds there was still a chance Iraq would succeed.
Nearly two months later, I have returned to Iraq and so much has changed. A wave of fury and despair among Iraqis has drowned out the few voices that filled me with hope. Those of my Iraqi friends who clung resolutely to their optimistic dreams are finally losing heart. They shrug their shoulders and begin to list the unrelenting failures of the new Iraq.
It is not that the power supply has still not improved. It has worsened. Four months after television screens across the world showed the victorious toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdous Square, power cuts are more frequent, not less. In many Baghdad homes the water that flows from the taps is brackish and undrinkable. Water treatment plants, short of electricity and poisoned by their own rusting pipes, are failing.
How could a country, the Iraqis ask, that spent $9bn (Ł5.73bn) a month fighting the war against Saddam not restore the power supply to a city within four months? [ complete article ]
Iraq's leaky border with Iran
By James Hider, The Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 2003
Iraq's border with Iran is an open door for thousands of Iranian Shiite pilgrims being smuggled across the frontier, say Iraqi police. And their numbers may also be swollen by Arab fighters.
Iraqi border police at the northeastern crossing point of Al Munthriya say that members of two leading Shiite parties in Iraq's US-appointed Governing Council are helping the illegal pilgrim trade, unwittingly aiding the passage of terrorists, spies, and saboteurs into the country.
Police say that Arab fighters from Afghanistan and members of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda may also be exploiting clandestine routes through the arid hill country on the frontier, where pilgrims dodge scant border controls with support from members of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Islamic Dawa. [ complete article ]
North Korea: Six countries in search of a solution
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus, August 26, 2003
War so far has not returned to the Korean peninsula. Negotiators from six countries--North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States--are about to sit down in Beijing to keep it that way. In a world dominated by military "solutions" to obdurate problems, even the muted vote for diplomacy represented by the upcoming Six-Party Talks should be cause for celebration.
But few are optimistic about this latest attempt to solve the current Korean crisis. Most pundits believe that the best possible outcome of the August 27-29 meetings would be a time and a date for the next parley. If one of the six doesn't storm out, the meeting will be a success. The United States has refused to offer any inducements; North Korea has not diminished its harsh rhetoric toward the United States. Japan, meanwhile, has insisted on introducing the issue of abductees, which may very well torpedo the discussions. Although South Korea, China, and Russia are eager for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue, they are the least influential of the six. [ complete article ]
Governing Iraq
International Crisis Group Report, August 25, 2003
The horrific bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003 has focused renewed attention on the question of who, if anyone, is capable of governing Iraq in the current highly volatile environment and, in particular, on what ought to be the respective roles, during the occupation period, of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the Interim Governing Council and the United Nations. This report proposes a new distribution of authority between the three – potentially acceptable to the United States, the wider international community and the majority of Iraqis – which would enable Iraq's transitional problems, including the critical issue of security, to be much more effectively addressed. [ complete article ]
U.S. exhausts seized Iraqi assets, may seek more aid
By Adam Entous, Reuters, August 26, 2003
U.S. authorities in Iraq have all but exhausted the seized assets they have used to pay Iraqi civil servants, and some administration and congressional officials said on Tuesday that extra money may be needed sooner than expected for U.S. efforts in the occupied state.
U.S. Treasury Department spokesman Tony Fratto said a cash shipment of $419 million would be made in the next week from a New York Federal Reserve account that once held $1.7 billion and this would "nearly exhaust the available vested funds."
One key U.S. lawmaker, after high-level meetings in Baghdad on the funding issue, said other ways would be found to pay Iraqi worker salaries and pensions, but a senior congressional aide called the situation "a mess." [ complete article ]
Mumbai blasts ignite mosque debate
By Ranjit Devraj, Asia Times, August 27, 2003
Monday's blasts seemed to echo a series of bombings that hit Mumbai [Bombay] in 1993 as part of nationwide sectarian violence that erupted after Hindu fundamentalist groups demolished the 16th century Babri masjid at Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state. At least 2,000 people died in the post-demolition violence.
Many Hindus believe, or have been led to believe, that the Babri masjid was built by invading Muslims over a temple which marked the birthplace of the Hindu warrior deity Ram 10,000 years ago.
In the decade since the demolition, politics in India seemed to revolve around plans to build a grand temple to Ram on the site where the mosque stood. The issue, an emotional one, helped the pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to come to power in 1998 under Vajpayee. [ complete article ]
New U.N. resolution on Iraq jeopardized by fierce resistance: U.S. officials
By Agence France-Presse, August 26, 2003
The United States is rethinking plans to press ahead with a new UN resolution that would expand the mandate of the stabilization force in Iraq after meeting fierce resistance from opponents of the war, US officials said.
Although the officials stressed the idea was not dead they said the initial reaction to US suggestions presented last week had not been positive and that their hopes for passing a new resolution in early September had dimmed. [ complete article ]
How the Taliban builds its army
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, August 27, 2003
Progress in science and technology has a direct impact on battlefields, where missile technology, supreme aircraft, nuclear bombs, chemical weapons and the like have changed the dynamics of fighting over the years.
However, despite such advancements in technology, the human element, notably inspiration, remains a decisive force in any struggle. The Taliban, perhaps, realized this a long time ago, and in their period in power in Afghanistan from 1996-2001 they placed much emphasis on generating the human resources that would be committed to their cause. [ complete article ]
Ethnic violence simmers in Kirkuk, Iraq
By Tarek al-Issawit, Associated Press, August 26, 2003
Kirkuk, until ethnic violence broke out over the weekend, appeared to be the American ideal for a postwar Iraqi city.
Rich in oil, Kirkuk seemed a law-abiding metropolis where ethnic Turks, Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians live side by side, interacting and doing business. The city is perhaps the only one in Iraq where drivers stop for traffic lights, a far cry from the chaos of Baghdad.
Scratch the surface, as Saturday's events showed, and the reality of Kirkuk is troubled with deeply rooted ethnic violence.
While U.S. troops in other Iraqi cities are busy dealing with attacks against them, in Kirkuk, a traditionally Kurdish city, they are preoccupied with acting as riot police. [ complete article ]
Key U.S. official quits ahead of North Korea talks
By Arshad Mohammed, Reuters, August 26, 2003
One of the United States' most experienced North Korea negotiators has resigned ahead of what may be the start of a key cycle of talks on ending North Korea's nuclear ambitions, U.S. officials said on Monday.
Charles "Jack" Pritchard, the U.S. special envoy to North Korea, stepped down on Friday, just days before this week's six-party talks in Beijing designed to persuade Pyongyang to give up its suspected nuclear weapons program.
The State Department praised Pritchard's "distinguished career" and said he decided to join the private sector after years of government service. But the timing of the decision was unusual, coming just as what may be the administration's first substantive talks with the communist regime were to start.
Pritchard advocated engaging the North in negotiations in an administration deeply divided on the issue. A holdover from the Clinton administration, he was viewed as an adversary by some Bush hard-liners, who have resisted talks with Pyongyang. [ complete article ]
Palestinian security feud heats up
By Ben Lynfield, Christian Science Monitor, August 26, 2003
After months of seemingly being in the background, Yasser Arafat has asserted his primacy in Palestinian politics at a critical moment in the Middle East conflict.
Following a Hamas bombing that killed 21 people in Jerusalem, US Secretary of State Colin Powell called publically last week on Mr. Arafat to make the security apparatus under his control available to Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. But Arafat appears to have moved in the opposite direction, tightening his grasp on the forces. [ complete article ]
Debunking the myth of the 'Arab street'
By Ari Melber, Baltimore Sun, August 26, 2003
Politicians in the Middle East and the United States agree on one thing: The occupation of Iraq will shape how America is viewed in the infamous "Arab street."
But any examination of public opinion in the region should begin by discarding this misleading cliche. [ complete article ]
Unprepared for peace in Iraq
By Senator Robert C. Byrd, Washington Post, August 26, 2003
Today I urge President Bush to review his options. It is time to ask the world community not only for assistance in restoring peace and security in Iraq but also for participation in moving Iraq toward self-government. While the secretary of state has opened a dialogue with the United Nations, it must be a true exchange and not a U.S. monologue.
What has become tragically clear is that the United States has no strong plan for turning Iraq over to the Iraqi people and is quickly losing even its ability to maintain order. The administration is stumbling through the dark, hoping by luck to find the lighted path to peace and stability.
Despite the best hopes for an Iraqi democracy, the Iraqi people and the world see only the worst fears of occupation. Instead of inspiring steps toward self-government, we witness hit-and-run murders of U.S. soldiers, terrorist attacks and sabotage. Our military action in Iraq has forged a caldron of contempt for America, a dangerous brew that may poison the efforts of peace throughout the Middle East and result in the rapid invigoration of worldwide terrorism. [ complete article ]
New industry in Baghdad: Kidnapping for ransom
By Robert F. Worth, New York Times, August 26, 2003
One morning last month, Martin Shukur was standing outside his family's home when a gray Mercedes-Benz sedan rolled up to the front gate with four well-dressed men inside.
"Are you Adnan's son?" one of them asked.
Martin, a tall, baby-faced 17-year-old whose father is a wealthy businessman, said yes. One of the men pulled out an AK-47 and demanded that Martin get into the car. It was the beginning of a 16-day ordeal that ended only when Martin's father paid a $30,000 ransom -- a vast sum in Iraq. Martin was returned alive, though badly beaten.
He is the latest reported victim in a wave of kidnappings, Iraqi officials say, by members of Saddam Hussein's security and intelligence services. The kidnappers are well armed and organized, and often use torture techniques similar to those used against political prisoners under the old government. The kidnappers seem to have access to information about the capital's wealthiest families and have been paid as much as $100,000 in ransom. [ complete article ]
Beware the bluewash
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, August 26, 2003
The US government's problem is that it has built its foreign policy on two great myths. The first is that it is irresistible; the second is that as time advances, life improves. In Iraq it is trapped between the two. To believe that it can be thwarted, and that its occupation will become harder rather than easier to sustain as time goes by, requires that it disbelieves all that it holds to be most true.
But those who oppose its foreign policy appear to have responded with a myth of equal standing: that what unilateralism cannot solve, multilateralism can. The United Nations, almost all good liberals now argue, is a more legitimate force than the US and therefore more likely to succeed in overseeing Iraq's reconstruction and transition. If the US surrendered to the UN, this would, moreover, represent the dawning of a fairer, kinder world. These propositions are scarcely more credible than those coming out of the Pentagon.
The immediate and evident danger of a transition from US occupation to UN occupation is that the UN becomes the dustbin into which the US dumps its failed adventures. The American and British troops in Iraq do not deserve to die any more than the Indian or Turkish soldiers with whom they might be replaced. But the governments that sent them, rather than those that opposed the invasion, should be the ones that have to answer to their people for the consequences. [ complete article ]
Shiite clerics clashing over how to reshape Iraq
By Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, August 26, 2003
The clerics who hold sway over Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority are locked in a violent power struggle pitting the older, established ayatollahs counseling patience with the occupation against a younger, more militant faction itching to found an Islamic state.
The militants are suspected of carrying out a series of attacks, including one over the weekend, engineered to eliminate or at least unsettle Najaf's religious scholars just as Shiites feel their moment has come. The bloodshed started in April with the murder of a prominent young cleric, Abdel Majid al-Khoei, inside the city's most holy shrine. That slaying remains such a tinderbox issue that the police and prosecutors only reluctantly confirmed for the first time today that some 12 suspects had been rounded up this month and more arrests were pending.
The tense standoff, as described by clerics from both factions, is playing out among the twisting alleyways of this holy seat, a battle for the leadership of Iraq's Shiite community, which accounts for 60 percent of the country's population of about 25 million. [ complete article ]
Fear hangs over funeral for cleric's aides in Najaf
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 26, 2003
Hundreds of mourners surged through this holy city today, the stifling air laden with their sweat and grief. Green, red and white flags symbolic of Shiite Muslim devotion flew over the crowd. Some called for revenge for a bombing that slightly wounded a senior cleric and killed three of his bodyguards. Others chanted simply, "There is no god but God."
In the funeral march that wound toward the cleric's house, Nizar Yusuf stayed quiet. He was glum, he said, and afraid.
"It's already started," said Yusuf, wearing the white turban of a Shiite cleric and the youthful beard of the religious students who call this southern city home. "We know from reading history that when it becomes bad, it only gets worse."
The bombing Sunday that tore a four-foot hole in the brick-and-plaster wall of the office of Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed Hakim sent a shudder through this city, the spiritual home of Iraq's Shiite majority. Rumors about who was responsible swirled through the streets. Religious leaders called for calm and unity. But from the shrine of Imam Ali, which makes Najaf sacred, to the shops along its warren of alleys, there was anxiety over what lay ahead. [ complete article ]
For Al Qaeda, Iraq may be the next battlefield
By Nicholas Blanford and Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 2003
Jihad in Iraq? The devastating Al Qaeda-style suicide bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad has given new heft to declarations by US officials that there is mounting evidence of Islamist fighters crossing Iraq's borders.
It's also spurring analysts to ask if Iraq is becoming the new Afghanistan - a magnet for Islamic extremists bent on waging jihad against the United States in the heart of the Arab world.
"Iraq is developing as Al Qaeda's new battlefield," says Rohan Gunaratna, an author and terrorism expert. "Without a theater of jihad, they cannot produce terrorists for operations anywhere else. They lost Afghanistan, so they needed a new combat theater in which to train and inspire. And the US invasion gave it to them." [ complete article ]
Groping in the dark
By Evan Thomas, Newsweek, September 1, 2003
Iraq may be spinning out of control, but in the Bush administration, the spin was strictly controlled. From Baghdad to the White House, administration spokesmen went to elaborate lengths to argue that the presence of terrorists in Iraq was somehow a positive development.
Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, adopted a tone of "we've got 'em right where we want 'em." Bremer said: "Better to fight it here than to fight it somewhere else, like the United States." At a White House briefing, a senior administration official echoed, "I would rather fight them in Baghdad than in New York." If Al Qaeda has popped up in Baghdad, the Bushies defiantly proclaimed, it only goes to show that the administration was right all along to label Iraq as a terrorist haven. "Those who said there was no link between Iraq and the war on terror were dead wrong," said the White House official. (Writing in The New York Times, Harvard lecturer and former Clinton national-security official Jessica Stern caustically observed, "America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.") [ complete article ]
The face of Afghanistan's resistance
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, August 26, 2003
The significant increase in the number and nature of attacks on US targets, as well as on the Afghan administration, provides indisputable evidence that the Taliban are back with a vengeance, especially in the south of the country. It is now as clear as broad daylight that neither an indigenous force nor a foreign force (not even one with massive bombers ruling the skies) can control the resistance movement.
On the face of it, the Taliban are the most isolated guerrilla fighters in the world, with no moral or material help from outside the country. However, there is an intriguing world within Afghanistan and Pakistan that supports and facilitates the struggle against foreign troops. [ complete article ]
A tally of U.S. taxpayers' tab for Iraq
By David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 2003
Looking at Iraq alone, one congressional expert puts the cost for this fiscal year (ending next month) at $80 billion, of which $62 million is charged to the Defense Department.
That works out to $281 per man, woman, and child in this country. This sum doesn't include the extra gasoline and other fuel costs, nor Afghanistan.
Most experts expect the occupation costs to continue indefinitely. [ complete article ]
Fractious Shiites keep U.S. invasion forces guessing
By Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2003
Another of the great unknowns in Iraq's postwar equation raised its ugly head at the weekend when a crude gas-cylinder bomb exploded outside the home of a prominent Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf.
In a country where the remnants of the former regime are accused of everything, it came as no surprise that followers of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Said al-Hakim blamed the attack on members of the outlawed Baath Party, accusing them of attempting to divide the powerful and majority Shiites.
But already there are deep divisions in the Hawza, the combined Shiite religious movement. It sits like a time bomb on the table at every planning meeting in which the Americans wrestle for control of Iraq.
The great unknown is how the Shiites will place their bets in the coming months. [ complete article ]
The philosophers of chaos reap a whirlwind
By William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, August 23, 2003
The intensification of violence in Iraq is the logical outcome of the Bush administration's choice in 2001 to treat terrorism as a military problem with a military solution - a catastrophic oversimplification.
Choosing to invade two Islamic states, Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which was responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inflated the crisis, in the eyes of millions of Muslims, into a clash between the United States and Islamic society.
The two wars did not destroy Al Qaeda. They won it new supporters. The United States is no more secure than it was before. [ complete article ]
A weapons cache we'll never see
By Scott Ritter, New York Times, August 25, 2003
Some 1,500 American investigators are scouring the Iraqi countryside for evidence of weapons of mass destruction that has so far eluded them. Known as the Iraq Survey Group and operating under the supervision of a former United Nations weapons inspector, David Kay, they are searching mostly for documents that will help them assemble a clear, if somewhat circumstantial, case that Iraq had or intended to have programs to produce prohibited weapons.
It is a daunting task. And according to many Iraqi scientists and officials I have spoken to, it is not being done very well. [ complete article ]
Intelligence agencies in a swamp of doubt
By Jonathan D. Pollack, Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2003
On Wednesday, diplomats from six nations will convene in Beijing in the most ambitious attempt to date to resolve the festering North Korean nuclear crisis. Among the crucial questions to ask: What nuclear capabilities does Pyongyang have? What can it produce and when? And how can the United States judge North Korea's answers?
Enter the American intelligence process. But after the controversial estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, will the intelligence community be able to deal with these questions, and with what degree of confidence?
For many reasons, political ones not the least, the community's track record does not offer much encouragement. [ complete article ]
Shi'ites march in Iraqi city after attack on cleric
By Michael Georgy, Reuters, August 25, 2003
Thousands of Shi'ite Muslims thronged the streets of the holy city of Najaf Monday for the funerals of three bodyguards killed in a bomb attack on the office of a top cleric.
Carrying posters of Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, who suffered light neck wounds in Sunday's bombing, some blamed the attack on supporters of rival Shi'ite leader Moqtada al Sadr and called for revenge.
"This was Moqtada al Sadr. His people did it," said 60-year- old Muslim Raadi, part of the angry crowd of at least 2,000 which swarmed behind the three wooden coffins.
"Now there will be revenge. The only way to stop this is for the people of Najaf to stop it. We will have to form our own militia."
Power struggles in Najaf are a key influence on the political future of majority Shi'ite Iraq. [ complete article ]
Red Cross cuts Iraq operations
By BBC News, August 24, 2003
The International Committee of the Red Cross is cutting back its operations in Iraq after warnings that it could be targeted for attack.
The number of foreign staff in Baghdad is being reduced to about 50 as the level of violence throughout the country has failed to abate and the organisation fears that US-led forces cannot ensure security. [ complete article ]
Iraqis celebrate 'martyrs' of the resistance movement
By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, August 24, 2003
When Azadeen Abdullah Ani was buried, thousands poured out to celebrate a new martyr.
Azadeen died trying to kill American soldiers. Part of a festering and, by all accounts, widening guerrilla resistance to U.S. occupation, Ani, 44, one evening last month stood on a ramshackle market street not far from his brothers' house, pointed a grenade launcher at a convoy of U.S. military vehicles and opened fire. The Americans gunned him down immediately.
At the funeral, men fired guns into the air and shouted "Allahu akbar!" -- "God is great!" -- as they converged on the New Samarra Cemetery. Hours earlier, Ani's brothers had retrieved his bloodied body from the hospital morgue and put up the black posters announcing his death.
They received hundreds of neighbors paying visits to express not condolences, the brothers stressed, but congratulations. [ complete article ]
U.S. recruiting Hussein's spies
By Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams, Washington Post, August 24, 2003
U.S.-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
The extraordinary move to recruit agents of former president Saddam Hussein's security services underscores a growing recognition among U.S. officials that American military forces -- already stretched thin -- cannot alone prevent attacks like the devastating truck bombing of the U.N. headquarters this past week, the officials said.
Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the past two weeks, one senior U.S. official said, despite sometimes adamant objections by members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, who complain that they have too little control over the pool of recruits. While U.S. officials acknowledge the sensitivity of cooperating with a force that embodied the ruthlessness of Hussein's rule, they assert that an urgent need for better and more precise intelligence has forced unusual compromises. [ complete article ]
A war without end? - Any illusion that the occupation might be working lies in the ruins of the U.N.'s H.Q.
By Justin Huggler, The Independent, August 24, 2003
Bulldozers are still carefully sifting through the rubble of the Canal Hotel, the UN's headquarters in Iraq, in case there are any more bodies to find from last week's bombing. Those UN staff brave enough to stay on are working in tents outside the wreckage, under the searing sun.
But more than just the Canal Hotel is in ruins. Down among the rubble lay the last illusions that the American occupation of Iraq might be working. After a week in which Iraq's main oil pipeline to the north was set on fire, the water supply to Baghdad was sabotaged, and the UN's chief envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was murdered along with at least 22 other people in what many are calling the worst attack on the UN in its history, no one doubts any more that the occupation here is in trouble.
It was made clear in the most savage way last week that the Americans and their allies are facing ruthless and organised resistance to their occupation. Yet it was also one of the Americans' most successful weeks in terms of their hunt for the former members of Saddam's regime. Both Saddam's former vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, and, more importantly, Al Hassan al-Majid, the man known as Chemical Ali, were captured. That the news of their capture was overshadowed by the week's other events shows how successfully those responsible for the bombing of the UN headquarters have been able to change the agenda in Iraq. The story is no longer about the hunt for Saddam and his henchmen - it is about an occupation in danger of turning into a nightmare. [ complete article ]
Bomb targets key Iraqi Shiite cleric
By Steven R. Hurst, Associated Press, August 24, 2003
A bomb exploded outside the house of one of Iraqi's most important Shiite clerics on Sunday, killing three guards and injuring 10 others. The fresh violence comes as the U.S.-led coalition quietly recruits former Iraqi spies to work with American intelligence officials in the country, according to Iraqis.
The gas cylinder bomb was placed along the outside wall of the home of Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim in Najaf, one of Shiite Islam's holiest cities. It exploded after noon prayers.
The cleric suffered scratches on his neck, said Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, a member of Iraq's U.S.-picked Governing Council and leader of what was the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, headquartered in Iran before the war. [ complete article ]
NEO-CONS CHANGE THEIR TUNE
Even while Rumsfeld continues to insist that the U.S. has enough troops in Iraq, leading neo-conservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan are making a u-turn on their pre-war assumptions.
Do what it takes in Iraq
By William Kristol and Robert Kagan, The Weekly Standard, September 1, 2003
...while it is indeed possible that, with a little luck, the United States can muddle through to success in Iraq over the coming months, the danger is that the resources the administration is devoting to Iraq right now are insufficient, and the speed with which they are being deployed is insufficiently urgent. These failings, if not corrected soon, could over time lead to disaster. [ complete article ]
Ethnic tensions flare in northern Iraq
By Joseph Logan, Reuters, August 24, 2003
Iraqi police patrolled the streets of Kirkuk Sunday after ethnic violence in northern Iraq left several dead, stoking further tension in a country already grappling with lawlessness and a guerrilla insurgency.
Clashes between Kurds and Turkmen erupted Friday in the town of Tuz Khurmatu, and unrest spread on Saturday to Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city that is a key oil industry hub.
Funerals for some of those killed in the violence were due to be held on Sunday, creating more potential flashpoints.
The mayor of Tuz Khurmatu, about 40 miles south of Kirkuk, said the fighting was sparked when Turkmen accused Kurds of desecrating a revered Shi'ite shrine outside the city. [ complete article ]
Taking Arabs seriously
By Marc Lynch, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2003
For the hawks in the Bush administration, one of the keys to understanding the Middle East is Osama bin Laden's observation that people flock to the "strong horse." Bush officials think U.S. problems in the region stem in part from "weak" responses offered by previous administrations to terrorist attacks in the 1980s and 1990s, and they came into office determined to reestablish respect for U.S. power abroad. After nearly two years of aggressive military actions, however, the United States' regional standing has never been lower. As the recent Pew Global Attitudes survey put it, "the bottom has fallen out of Arab and Muslim support for the United States."
The failure to find dramatic evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has spurred widespread debate in the Middle East about the real purpose of the recent war, which most Arab commentators now see as a bid by the United States to consolidate its regional and global hegemony. U.S. threats against Iran and Syria play into this fear, increasing a general determination to resist. And the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad, the escalating Iraqi anger at what is always described as an American occupation, and the seemingly ambivalent U.S. attitude toward Iraqi democracy have reinforced deep preexisting skepticism about Washington's intentions. [ complete article ]
Three Turkmen shot dead in Kirkuk after Turkmen-Kurd fighting in nearby town
By Agence France Presse, August 23, 2003
Three Turkmen were shot dead by police in Iraq's northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, Kirkuk Governor Abdul Rahman Mustafa said.
The deaths came a day after fighting between Turkmen and Kurds in nearby Tuz Khurmatu left eight dead on both sides, while two more Turkmen were killed by US soldiers as the US-led coalition faced the spectre of growing ethnic fighting. [ complete article ]
The Pyongyang games
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, August 21, 2003
Finally, George W. Bush seems to be facing the reality he has tried to avoid for the past nine months -- that the only practical way to stop North Korea from building atom bombs is through diplomacy. Negotiations begin this Wednesday in Beijing, with delegates from the six key powers -- the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia -- and time set aside for informal but crucial bilateral talks between the Americans and North Koreans, as well. [ complete article ]
Sergio Vieira de Mello's final words: 'Don't let them pull the U.N. out of Iraq'
By Theola Labbe, Washington Post, August 23, 2003
As soon as he could pick himself up off the floor of his room and remove the shard of glass embedded in his right leg, Army 1st Sgt. William von Zehle rushed toward the sound of the explosion.
The 52-year-old retired fire chief from Wilton, Conn., surveyed the rubble and carnage. As he pondered what to do, a man in a blue U.N. baseball cap approached. "We have two people trapped! Sergio and Gil are trapped!" the man said.
The names meant nothing to von Zehle, he recalled today. But he went to look.
Sergio was alive, conscious and in excruciating pain. For the next three hours, von Zehle worked to set him free. He had no rope, no bucket, no flashlight, none of the equipment that could be found on any firetruck in Wilton.
All the while, the two men talked. Von Zehle did not realize he was listening to the last words of the U.N. special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello. [ complete article ]
Inside Israel's secret prison
By Aviv Lavie, Haaretz, August 22, 2003
Detainees are blindfolded and kept in blackened cells, never told where they are, brutally interrogated and allowed no visitors of any kind. Dubbed 'the Israeli Guantanamo,' it's no wonder facility 1391 officially does not exist.
M, who serves in the Intelligence Corps reserves, remembers the first time he was sent to do guard duty at Camp 1391. Before climbing to the top of the observation tower he received an explicit order from the responsible officer: "When you're on the tower you look straight ahead only, outside the base, and to the sides. What happens behind you is none of your business. Do not turn around." [ complete article ]
Inside story of the hunt for Bin Laden
By Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, August 23, 2003
With the US election nearing and mounting concerns about Washington's second great military project - Iraq - George Bush more than ever needs the incalculable political boost that Bin Laden's capture would bring.
The Saudi's last known hiding place was in the caves of Tora Bora in the Spin Ghar mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It was December 2001 and the Taliban regime was collapsing across Afghanistan under the weight of America's bombing campaign.
Hundreds of al-Qaida fighters were holed up in the caves, where Bin Laden was heard making a radio address exhorting his men to fight. He also made a 33-minute video recording. Looking gaunt and tired, he described the September 11 attacks as "blessed strikes".
"We say that the end of the United States is imminent," he said. It was the last the world saw of him. [ complete article ]
Aid groups reduce operations in Iraq
By Daniel Williams, Washington Post, August 22, 2003
Independent humanitarian operations in Iraq began to erode today as the United Nations announced a reduction of about a third of its Baghdad headquarters staff, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that an unspecified number of foreign workers would be withdrawn and other organizations considered changes in personnel or security arrangements. [ complete article ]
Hollywood isn't holding its lines against the Pentagon
By Jonathan Turley, Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2003
With the reality of entrenched opposition in Iraq resulting in increasing U.S. fatalities there, the opposition at home to the occupation is hardening by the day. The military appears to have come up with a solution: Change reality.
In what has been described as a "Pentagon infomercial," the Defense Department has hired a former producer of the TV show "Cops" to film postwar Iraq from its perspective. Though producer Bertram van Munster has denied that he is shooting a propaganda piece, it is clear that the Pentagon is gearing up to frame its own account -- and history -- of the Iraq war.
The Pentagon has a long history of propaganda efforts. Indeed, the Pentagon is hard at work participating in a number of movies that will deliver its message on the legitimacy of the war and its own conduct in Iraq. [ complete article ]
Will Lebanon's horror become Iraq's?
By Robert Baer, Washington Post, August 24, 2003
As soon as I heard about the truck bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, my first thought was, oh, no, here we go again, the nightmare of Beirut, 1983.
The U.N. bombing has all the markings of a professional terrorist attack, the same expertise we saw in Lebanon during the '80s, even the same delivery system that was used to kill 241 U.S. servicemen in their Beirut barracks on Oct. 22, 1983 -- the strike that brought U.S. policy in Lebanon to a halt and altered the course of Middle East politics.
Like the one in Beirut, the U.N. truck bomb was expertly placed. It wasn't just designed to do massive damage -- although it did. It was apparently intended to hit the office of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. secretary general's special representative to Iraq. Using a suicide bomber ensured that the bomb went exactly where it was supposed to go. The attack may even have been timed to coincide with a news conference underway inside the building so that the bomb would kill as many people as possible. [ complete article ]
U.S. heads fail to win Iraqi hearts
By Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald, August 22, 2003
The escalating selection of targets by the resistance is as menacing as it is studious.
Initially, the hits were small-time and almost exclusively on US troops; then low-key sabotage of infrastructure; a few foreign contract workers and a couple of journalists; then the embassy of Jordan (one of the weakest governments that the US might attempt to bully into providing troops to put an Arab face on the occupation); more daring strikes on infrastructure (oil and water); and now the UN itself - the big daddy of the army of humanitarian organisations that flock to people and places in crisis.
Speculation on the next target is endless while speculation about the perpetrators, particularly by key members of the American administration, is veering dangerously towards a fundamental error in understanding the challenge confronting the US in Iraq. [ complete article ]
A price too high
By Bob Herbert, New York Times, August 21, 2003
How long is it going to take for us to recognize that the war we so foolishly started in Iraq is a fiasco -- tragic, deeply dehumanizing and ultimately unwinnable? How much time and how much money and how many wasted lives is it going to take?
At the United Nations yesterday, grieving diplomats spoke bitterly, but not for attribution, about the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. They said it has not only resulted in the violent deaths of close and highly respected colleagues, but has also galvanized the most radical elements of Islam.
"This is a dream for the jihad," said one high-ranking U.N. official. "The resistance will only grow. The American occupation is now the focal point, drawing people from all over Islam into an eye-to-eye confrontation with the hated Americans.
"It is very propitious for the terrorists," he said. "The U.S. is now on the soil of an Arab country, a Muslim country, where the terrorists have all the advantages. They are fighting in a terrain which they know and the U.S. does not know, with cultural images the U.S. does not understand, and with a language the American soldiers do not speak. The troops can't even read the street signs." [ complete article ]
Iraq: U.S. seeks U.N. help, offers 'arrogance'
By Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service (via Yahoo), August 22, 2003
''The issue of ceding authority is not an issue we have had to discuss today,'' Powell told reporters [after he came to the United Nations on Thursday to explore support for a new U.S. resolution that would convince reluctant member states -- including France, Russia, India, Pakistan and Turkey -- to provide troops for a proposed multinational force for Iraq].
''You have to have control of a large military organization. That's what U.S. leadership brings to the (U.S./U.K.) coalition,'' he said.
Powell added that he was working on ''language'' in the resolution that would call on U.N. member states ''to do more."
One observer labeled that as ''trademark arrogance''.
''The Bush administration believes that it can strong-arm or purchase votes in the Security Council for a resolution that gives the United Nations much responsibility, but little authority,'' said Chris Toensing, editor of Middle East Report and executive director of the Middle East Research and Information Project.
The request, he told IPS, is driven by domestic politics: as congressional and presidential elections approach next year the administration needs to offer the public ''good news'' about Iraq. [ complete article ]
Security may not be safe issue for Bush in '04
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, Washington Post, August 22, 2003
The wave of violent death this week in Iraq, Israel, Gaza and Afghanistan brought to the fore a reality that President Bush has been reluctant to discuss: Peace is not at hand.
A confident Bush stood in the Rose Garden less than a month ago, saying, "Conditions in most of Iraq are growing more peaceful," boasting of "dismantling the al Qaeda operation" and pronouncing "pretty good progress" toward Middle East peace and a Palestinian state within two years.
Those sunny characterizations may yet prove true, but Bush allies and foes alike are coming to the conclusion that the progress may not be noticeable by the time Bush faces the voters again in 15 months. For a president who has staked his reputation on making "a tough decision to make the world more peaceful," this could be a big problem. [ complete article ]
The Sunni insurgency in Iraq
By Ahmed S. Hashim, Middle East Institute, August 14, 2003
This paper addresses the insurgency that broke out after the official end of hostilities. Specifically, it attempts to do four things. First, it will seek to ascertain the nature of the violence that took place in Iraq after the end of hostilities: is it insurgency, guerilla warfare, or terrorism? Terminology is important. Second, the paper will address the origins, goals, and operational art of the insurgency. Third, it will look at prospects for the insurgency: will it remain decentralized and low-level, characterized by harassing attacks, or transform itself into a national liberation struggle? Fourth, this paper addresses the U.S. response to the insurgency and makes recommendations about how to respond effectively and what it might be done to prevent a full-fledged war of national resistance.
The Power of Terminology: Insurgency, Guerrillas, Terrorists, Partisans?
The term one chooses to define or characterize the ongoing violence in Iraq matters for many reasons; my concern is the power of terminology.
First, the term one chooses to refer to something such as the ongoing violence in Iraq betrays one's political biases and stance. The Administration's views are politicized, in that to admit that there is resistance by Iraqis beyond regime supporters is to admit that a wide range of Iraqis are fighting occupation. This is not something that Administration officials wish to hear, given the constant refrain that one of the key goals of the war was the liberation of the Iraqis from an evil dictatorship.
Second, terminology matters because the term one chooses may determine the solution to a problem. If Administration officials continue to believe that the cause of the ongoing violence is solely the former regime, we will fall prey to focusing exclusively on groups or individuals associated with the defunct regime. By rooting them out the violence will cease, so goes the logic. That might not be the case, but it explains why the deaths of 'Uday and Qusay in July were greeted with euphoria by the Administration and why U.S. forces are relentless in their pursuit of the former Iraqi leader, Saddam.
Third, terminology also matters because if we characterize it incorrectly, we will devise and implement the wrong methods to deal with it. The views of U.S. senior officers who have characterized the insurgency as "classical guerilla warfare" – a position which is at the opposite end of the spectrum from those of senior administration officials -- are overly pessimistic and even more importantly, possibly erroneous in a number of ways as will be discussed below. [ complete paper ]
Killing of Hamas leader ends truce
By Chris McGreal, The Guardian, August 22, 2003
Five Israeli missiles incinerated Ismail Abu Shanab in Gaza city yesterday, killing one of the most powerful voices for peace in Hamas and destroying the ceasefire that Palestinian leaders believed would avert civil war.
Israeli helicopters struck the car carrying the third highest Hamas leader in retaliation for Tuesday's suicide bombing of a Jerusalem a bus on Tuesday, killing 20 mostly orthodox Jews, including six children.
But the missiles also buried a seven-week ceasefire already strained by Israeli killings of Islamic militants and retaliatory suicide bombings, and threw the US-led road map to peace deeper into crisis. [ complete article ]
Abu Mazen cannot commit suicide
By Danny Rubinstein, Haaretz, August 22, 2003
Not even the bloody suicide bombing in Jerusalem will bring Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to relentlessly pursue the activists of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. He and his ministers in the Palestinian government will not use force to restrain the Islamic fanatics; they will not even confiscate their weapons. Abbas and his Minister of State for Security Affair Mohammed Dahlan are no doubt under great pressure from the Americans to do just that and the Israeli government is also insisting on it - but in the present reality in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it is simply not possible. [ complete article ]
Anger and fear mix in capital
By Pamela Constable, Washington Post, August 21, 2003
Across an edgy and horrified capital today, Iraqis from all walks of life denounced the bombing of the main U.N. facility at the Canal Hotel, expressing appreciation for the agency's humanitarian mission and contempt for the terrorists who carried out the brazen attack.
But while the world mourned Sergio Vieira de Mello, 55, the popular U.N. special representative who was crushed in the rubble, and condemned the assault on a symbol of international aid and cooperation, Iraqis' outrage was sharpened by the fact that many victims of the blast, which injured more than 100, were unarmed fellow Iraqis.
Many people in the capital said they now felt more personally vulnerable than ever before, even during three decades of repressive rule under Saddam Hussein. A surprising number said that although they were glad to be free of the ousted president, a growing sense of chaos and instability was beginning to make them long for the orderly atmosphere of his police state. [ complete article ]
Afghan violence snares civilians
By Scott Baldauf, Christian Science Monitor, August 21, 2003
The apparent ambush on police here in Logar province is just one of a spate of attacks that have left more than 90 people - the vast majority of them Afghan civilians - dead in the past 10 days alone. From the bombing of a minibus full of women and children in Helmand Province to the nighttime assault on a border security post in Khost, these recent attacks are part of what US and Afghan officials say is a pattern of shifting attacks away from well-armed US bases and toward more vulnerable civilians, aid workers, and local officials.
Whatever the origin of these attacks, the effect is being felt across Afghanistan, as foreign aid organizations pull out foreign staffers, and Afghans lose hope that the international community will ever rebuild their country. [ complete article ]
SOUNDS FAMILIAR?
The occupying power can't thwart terrorist attacks. Rather than admit that the security problem demands a political solution, a scapegoat is found in the form of an impotent council. The council lacks the resources, power, or credibility that it would need to impose authority, but it serves as a good whipping boy for occupiers who refuse to admit the political weakness that is hidden behind their military strength.
U.S. official tells Iraqis to assert more authority
By Dexter Filkins and Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, August 21, 2003
Sharp differences emerged today between the top American administrator in Iraq and the country's interim government as the United States sought to calm a city unnerved by the truck bomb that killed 20 people in the United Nations headquarters.
Iraqi officials described a tense meeting between L. Paul Bremer III and the Iraqi Governing Council. Mr. Bremer, they said, demanded that the 25-member Council exert more authority, condemn the bombing strongly and communicate better with the Iraqi people.
Mr. Bremer's office did not respond to a request for comment. But a memo prepared by two of his staff and dated today listed measures that the Iraqi Council should be encouraged to take, including calling on Iraqis to "take responsibility for their own security" by joining a newly created Iraqi civil defense force and holding "town hall meetings" in their local districts.
The confrontation clearly reflected a growing American conviction that a greater and more visible Iraqi involvement in government might allay some hostility to the American-led occupation. Iraqi officials said the Council had responded by saying it lacked authority to convince Iraqis it was effective or relevant. [ complete article ]
International organizations tighten security, evacuate staff
By Carol J. Williams and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2003
Olive-colored U.S. Army cranes, bulldozers and dump trucks removed wreckage from the U.N. headquarters here Wednesday, and international organizations scrambled to protect their staffs from a repeat of the truck bombing that destroyed it.
Rescue workers scoured the wreckage for possible survivors. At least one more body was pulled from the tangled ruins. Atop the devastated compound, the blue-and-white U.N. flag stood at half-staff, limp in the leaden, 110-degree heat.
Officials of the U.S.-led occupation administration kept a low profile, remaining within their fortress-like headquarters at the former presidential palace. Cellular and satellite telephones were answered with recordings stating that the numbers were temporarily unavailable. [ complete article ]
Muted feelings for 'martyr' with a grudge
By Chris McGreal, The Guardian, August 21, 2003
Praise for the mass murder [exacted in Jerusalem by Raed Mesk - who disguised himself as an ultra-orthodox Jew so he could kill 20 people, including six children] was muted even in [Hebron,] a city with a bitter history at the hands of a few hundred deeply religious and well armed Jews who have embarked on a kind of ethnic cleansing of the town centre.
The hall hired for the suicide bomber's wake, without his body, was largely empty, perhaps in part because the army had arrested 17 relatives. It was also surprisingly devoid of the Hamas flags which usually adorn such events. In terms of numbers of dead, the Jerusalem bombing was the costliest attack on a bus in the past three years of intifada.
Yet many Palestinians kept their distance. Some said they feared the slaughter would mean an end to the six-week-old ceasefire and faltering peace process, which offers the only glimmer of hope for an end to the conflict.
Others privately speculated that the Hamas leadership had not authorised the attack, and that it had been carried out unilaterally by the Hebron faction.
But whatever the Palestinians' views on the bombing, there was common agreement that the Israelis had brought the attack on themselves.
"The ceasefire means nothing to the Israelis," said Abdul al-Nsary, an uncle of the suicide bomber. "The assassinations didn't stop, the barriers and roadblocks didn't disappear, the settlers are still attacking us. If only they stopped one thing - assassinating militants - the ceasefire would be a success. But the Israelis won't give it this chance." [ complete article ]
De Mello knew sovereignty, not security, is the issue
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, August 21, 2003
"My time here could come to an abrupt end," Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN's special representative to Iraq, commented just three weeks ago as I sat on a sofa in the Baghdad office which on Tuesday became his tomb. He never seriously imagined he would be an assassin's target, and his reference to an "abrupt end" was delivered with a smile.
It was a standard line in the conversations he enjoyed having with journalists whom he knew and trusted, leaving it to us to decide what was on or off the record at the risk of jeopardising his job. That trust was one element in the gamut of qualities, along with charm, brilliance, accessibility, dedication and compassion, that made him the "best public servant in the world", as one American admirer described him yesterday. For three decades de Mello had worked as a UN official at human rights trouble-spots in every continent, combining diplomatic flair and tough negotiating skills with barely concealed anger at the suffering he witnessed.
In Iraq, the point that dominated his thinking was that Iraqis had to recover their independence. The primary issue was not security, but sovereignty. Only if Iraqis began to feel the occupation of their country was coming to an speedy end would there be a reduction in the sense of humiliation which helped to sustain the resistance. [ complete article ]
Repeat: Iraq is not a modern-day Germany
By R.S. Zaharna, Christian Science Monitor, August 21, 2003
When Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990, the US put together an international coalition to end the occupation. Now, the Iraqis find themselves under occupation by the US as it tries to forge an international contingent to sustain its own occupation. And, unlike the Japanese and Germans, who had declared war on the US, the Iraqi people may be wondering what they did to forfeit their national sovereignty. They were neither defeated nor victorious. And why, they ask, with more than 5,000 years of history behind them as the birthplace of civilization, are they now not capable of governing themselves? [ complete article ]
To many Arabs, the U.S. and U.N. are one entity
By Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2003
The silence said the most: Aside from a chorus of official sympathy and condemnations, the devastation of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad drew barely a shiver on the Arab street and in the Middle Eastern media Wednesday.
In a shift made blazingly clear with the bombing, the United Nations' status has become so thoroughly degraded in the Arab world that many people here no longer draw a distinction between the international body and the United States. It has long been criticized as puny and has traditionally been mistrusted in these parts, but the U.N.'s inability to stop the war in Iraq has sowed new seeds of resentment.
"Didn't they see it coming?" Mohsen Farouk, a 36-year-old carpenter from Cairo, demanded. He decried the deaths of innocent people but insisted that nobody should be surprised. "It was just a matter of time," he said. "The U.N. is just a puppet of the U.S., and anyone who is angry with the U.S. is likely to consider the U.N. a target." [ complete article ]
Guerillas ensuring U.S. pleas for help fall on deaf ears
By Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald, August 20, 2003
The plan is working. This dramatic escalation of the guerilla war in Iraq is about isolating the United States.
Washington has been shopping for governments and aid agencies that will join what it calls "the mission" without questioning America's absolute control or nagging about a greater oversight role for the UN.
But the UN withdrew from prewar Afghanistan in the face of violence that was a pinprick by comparison with the carnage at Baghdad's Canal Hotel and despite an initial statement that the UN will be staying in Iraq, The Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, will be seriously examining a complete withdrawal. So will dozens of other aid agencies.
And governments, especially in the Arab world, will be even more reluctant to respond to United States' pleas for troops.
That is the resistance's message to the world - keep out.
If it has to deal with an occupation force, the Iraqi fighters do not want a diffuse identity - just Washington, thank you. [ complete article ]
U.S. options: more troops or more help
By Howard LaFranchi, Christian Science Monitor, August 21, 2003
The deteriorating sense of order in Iraq presents the United States with two possibilities it had hoped to avoid: increasing the number of US forces there, or taking steps to internationalize security forces on the ground.
For the Bush administration, dipping deeper into the military reserves may be politically unpalatable - and may not yield, in any case, the kind of personnel a postwar reconstruction requires. At the same time, the resistance of countries to have their troops operate under US auspices means Washington would have to accept some international controls to get more foreign participation - something that is anathema to the Pentagon in particular. [ complete article ]
Who wants to go to Iraq now?
By Robert Fisk, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 20, 2003
What United Nations nation would ever contemplate sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq now? The men who are attacking the United States' occupation army are ruthless, but they are not stupid. They know that President Bush is getting desperate, that he will do anything -- that he may even go to the dreaded Security Council for help -- to reduce U.S. military losses in Iraq.
But yesterday's attack on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad has slammed shut the door to that escape route.
Within hours of the car bomb explosion, we were being told that this was an attack on a "soft target," a blow against the United Nations itself. True, it was a "soft" target, although the machine gun nest on the roof of the U.N. building might have suggested that even the international body was militarizing itself. True, too, it was a shattering assault on the United Nations as an institution. But in reality, yesterday's attack was against the United States. [ complete article ]
Who is behind the violence in Iraq?
By Faleh A. Jabar, BBC News, August 14, 2003
The violence appears to be well-organised and continuous. It benefits from a general atmosphere of discontent, wounded national sensibilities, penalised marginal groups, Arab and Iranian media agitation, good funding, and the CPA's self-imposed isolation from the public and the cultural blunders it has made in dealing with local communities.
Although political and ideological violence is still detached from mainstream institutional engagement or peaceful street politics, it may well gain strength if and when hardships continue.
The war to win peace, to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis, and, above all, to help them return to normality and regain ownership of their own country, has become a decisive issue. [ complete article ]
Iraq the ungovernable
By Paul Reynolds, BBC News, August 20, 2003
The UN has been in a difficult position in Iraq - one which, if not redefined, may become impossible.
It has been subservient to the US and UK and has not restricted itself to humanitarian operations only. If it had, there might not have been an attack.
But, using its mandate under Security Council resolution 1483, it has played an advisory role in setting up the Iraqi Governing Council, many of whose members are anti-Saddam veterans.
According to Iraq specialist Toby Dodge, Senior Research Fellow at Warwick University, UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello himself, who died in Tuesday's bomb, was "clearly associated with the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council.
"This helped to make the UN a target," he told BBC News Online.
"The attack might also have been intended to block off any American retreat using the UN. This was a potent and diabolical message - that even the UN is unacceptable." [ complete article ]
A life devoted to the victims, the hungry and the silenced
By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2003
The killing of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the secretary-general's special representative and the U.N.'s top diplomat here, leaves a hole in the effort to help Iraqis rebuild and reconcile. His calm, evenhanded interventions in volatile hotspots won respect for the United Nations and built a legacy that colleagues insist proves he did not die in vain.
Vieira de Mello "was the U.N., in a way," said Salim Lone, his spokesman here. "Wherever there was suffering, he was there."
He was also often there for the healing. His shepherding of East Timor from bloody ethnic chaos to joyous independence last year drew praise and admiration from a wide spectrum of political, ethnic and religious leaders.
East Timor President Jose Alexandre Gusmao said his country was shocked by the death of the man he called a "courageous friend and great leader."
"Sergio Vieira de Mello endeared himself to the people of East Timor with his common touch, sensitivity, sense of humor and charisma," Gusmao said. "As a leader he fought tirelessly for democracy, human rights and sustainable justice." [ complete article ]
How America created a terrorist haven
By Jessica Stern, New York Times, August 20, 2003
Yesterday's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.
Of course, we should be glad that the Iraq war was swifter than even its proponents had expected, and that a vicious tyrant was removed from power. But the aftermath has been another story. America has created -- not through malevolence but through negligence -- precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs. [ complete article ]
Blast highlights U.S. failure to end chaos in Iraq
By Robert Collier, San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 2003
The truck bomb explosion that wrecked U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday thrust the U.S. occupation of Iraq deeper than ever into chaos and uncertainty.
Amid the horror, many things were unclear -- the identity and aims of the group that carried out the attack, the effect on a jittery Iraqi public, the response of the world community.
What was clear was that Iraq has become a complete mess in which U.S. troops suffer casualties almost every day and the American-led civilian administration has failed to bring economic revival or even a basic sense of law and order. [ complete article ]
U.N. was wary of role under U.S.
By Dafna Linzer, Associated Press, August 19, 2003
The United Nations went into post-war Iraq with more trepidation than usual -- there was little security, the United States had waged a war without U.N. backing and relations with Washington were at an all-time low.
The strains led the U.N. Security Council to authorize a loosely defined mission which was forced to work with the U.S.-led occupation. The cooperation and a dependence on U.S. security may have compromised U.N. neutrality, many suggested.
But Tuesday's bombing, which took the lives of at least 20 people at the U.N.'s Baghdad headquarters, may have cost the organization even more. For the first time, U.N. employees, willing to brave war and disease to help the world's needy, demanded the United Nations leave Iraq and spoke angrily about having gone there in the first place. [ complete article ]
Staff in shock after explosion claims the life of the U.N.'s own 'action man'
By Anne Penketh, The Independent, August 20, 2003
Sergio Vieira de Mello's last telephone call was to summon rescue workers to the wreckage of his office where he lay dying after yesterday's bomb blast.
It was clear from the moment of the blast that the top UN envoy in Iraq must be seriously hurt, because the bomb exploded right outside the window of his third floor office, destroying that section of the Canal Hotel where the UN headquarters are located.
News that one of the most respected figures in the UN system was critically injured shocked thousands of international staff, who watched the tragedy unfold live on television. [ complete article ]
Overcoming terror
By Philip Zimbardo and Bruce Kluger, Psychology Today, July 24, 2003
Log on to the Department of Homeland Security's Web site, ready.gov, and click on "nuclear blast."
Thanks to the recently formed agency, ordinary citizens can now get a crash course in emergency preparedness in the event that a big bomb is dropped on their block.
Step one, says the terse tip sheet, is to "take cover." Step two: "Assess the situation." Step three? "Limit your exposure to radiation."
While the well-meaning 300-word document goes on to reveal a few other curious dos and don'ts for a doomsday scenario (e.g., ingesting potassium iodide is definitely a bad idea when radioactive iodine is coursing through the atmosphere), what's missing from the text is an acknowledgment of the psychological damage that such cursorily assembled, blithely disseminated information can wreak on the public. Presumably intended as a mental health balm in this time of unprecedented global stress, these simplistic big-blast CliffsNotes merely skate atop the frozen pond of the nuclear nightmare, ultimately leaving the befuddled citizen to wonder--and often panic--about the real and present danger that lurks just beneath the ice. [ complete article ]
Why the U.N. is a target
By Paul Reynolds, BBC News, August 19, 2003
The attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad, in which the Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello died, might have been carried out not only because the Iraqi resistance objects to all occupiers.
There could have been a specific reason as well, tied to a vote in the Security Council last week.
On 14 August the Council gave its approval to the recently formed Iraqi Governing Council and it also approved the establishment of a United National Assistance Mission in Iraq (Unami).
The UN might therefore have been seen by the Iraqi resistance as an instrument of the United States and Britain in their occupation of the country. [ complete article ]
Canadian crossroads at the invasion of Iraq
By Norman Madaraszi, Islam Online, August 19, 2003
As a committed member of the United Nations Organization, Canada opposed the unilateral decision taken by the US and England to invade Iraq. How have the terms of its lengthy relationship with the US been affected by this internationalist stance?
The information age has made the USA every country's neighbor. With foreign military bases gripping the planet like ants on a sugar cube, the US President is a ruler whose decision-making now literally has implications for most sovereign peoples.
At an earlier time, when communication was not computed in gigas and traveling was confluent with spatial distance, only a handful of countries could lay claim to literally being a neighbor of the US. Canada was one of them. In the words of Canada's former Prime Minister, the late Pierre Trudeau, this privilege was "in some ways like sleeping with an elephant." [ complete article ]
Related article Discontent Americans consider Canada.
Bus blast in Israel deals deadly blow to truce
By Barry Moody, Reuters, August 19, 2003
A suspected Palestinian suicide bombing ripped apart a bus in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish area of Jerusalem Tuesday, killing at least 20 people including children and dealing a deadly blow to a truce.
The sides of the bus were ripped apart, and a coach nearby was also badly damaged. Severed limbs lay across the street and an acrid smell of burning hung in the air.
"There are 20 dead," Avi Zohar of the Magen David Adom ambulance service told Reuters at the scene.
Israeli media said at least 100 others were wounded in the blast. A spokesman for rescue workers said the dead included three children. [ complete article ]
Chief U.N. envoy in Baghdad killed in blast
By Evelyn Leopold, Reuters, August 19, 2003
Sergio Vieira de Mello, 55, the top U.N. envoy in Iraq and a rising star in the United Nations leadership, was killed on Tuesday in a Baghdad bomb blast on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, chief U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard announced.
Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian, who had frequently been mentioned as a candidate for secretary-general, had been trapped under the rubble with rescuers trying in vain to reach him.
U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan confirmed with "deepest regret" the death of Vieira de Mello, his special representative in Iraq, Eckhard said..
The tough, debonair Brazilian, fluent in English, French, Spanish and his native Portuguese, has handled some of the world body's most difficult missions, from Kosovo in the Balkans to East Timor in the Pacific. [ complete article ]
U.S. shifts aim from Kabul to Baghdad
By Bryan Bender, The Age, August 19, 2003
As the hunt for Saddam Hussein grows more urgent and the guerilla war in Iraq shows little sign of abating, the Bush Administration is continuing to shift highly specialised intelligence officers from the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to the Iraq crisis, according to intelligence officials involved.
The activity, involving both analysts in Washington and specially trained field operatives, followed the transfer of hundreds of elite commandos from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pentagon officials said. It reflected the priority of capturing Saddam quickly, ending the guerilla war, and locating possible weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
It also gives further ammunition, however, to critics who have long claimed that fighting the Iraq war would divert resources and attention from the hunt for bin Laden and other al-Qaeda fugitives. [ complete article ]
Afghan democrats face threats
By Dan Morrison, Christian Science Monitor, August 19, 2003
During the dark years of Taliban rule, members of Afghanistan's opposition Republican Party worked underground, fearful of beatings, arrest, and execution.
Twenty-one months after a US-led coalition drove the radical Islamic movement from Afghanistan, they are still underground.
"The police threaten us all the time,'' says Faiz Mohammad Ghori, a student member the Republican Party in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. "We have to keep our heads down - you never know when they're coming back.''
Afghanistan's fledgling opposition parties say the Northern Alliance factions that helped oust the Taliban in 2001 are using threats and force to keep them out of elections scheduled for next year. [ complete article ]
Iraq becomes a battleground in war on infidels
By Robin Gedye, The Telegraph, August 19, 2003
Muslim fundamentalists from throughout the Middle East are being drawn to Iraq for a protracted guerrilla war, senior military officials said yesterday after a wave of weekend sabotage attacks.
"Far from a new Vietnam, we appear to be heading for a new Afghanistan, Somalia or Chechnya as the next battleground between Islam and the infidels," said one official in Washington. [ complete article ]
Silent witnesses reveal the growing lawlessness of Baghdad
By Harry De Quetteville, The Telegraph, August 18, 2003
At Baghdad's central mortuary, a host of silent witnesses give the lie to coalition claims that Baghdad is becoming a safer place to live.
Despite Gen Ricardo Sanchez's assertion that violence here is "no worse than in any American city", the blood-stained stretchers, coffins and bullet-torn bodies have piled up here in recent months. Some new arrivals wait outside the building in the searing sun while space is found for them in the coolers inside. [ complete article ]
U.S. admits cameraman was shot dead at close range
By Justin Huggler, The Independent, August 19, 2003
The American army admitted yesterday that its soldiers killed an award-winning Reuters cameraman. Mazen Dana, a Palestinian, was shot dead by a US tank crew at close range while trying to film outside Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison on Sunday, after a mortar attack on the prison.
The Americans claimed that the soldiers mistook the camera Mr Dana was holding for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher - a claim that was immediately rejected by journalists who witnessed the killing.
"We were all there, for at least half an hour. They knew we were journalists," said Stephan Breitner of France 2 television. "After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don't think it was an accident. They are very tense. They are crazy. They are young soldiers and they don't understand what is happening." [ complete article ]
Blast rips through UN headquarters in Baghdad
By Reuters, August 19, 2003
A car bomb explosion tore through the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, destroying part of the building, and witnesses said at least three people were killed and dozens wounded. [ complete article ]
Why the lessons of Vietnam do matter
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, August 20, 2003
Just as it took a few years for the Americans to lose the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese, it took them only a few weeks to lose the hearts and minds of the majority of Iraqis - which ultimately means losing the war, whatever the strategic final result. Topographic denials - this is the Mesopotamian desert, not the Indochinese jungle - don't work, nor do denials saying that the Iraqis are not as politicized as the Vietnamese were by communism. These totally miss the point: as happened in Vietnam, what is happening now in Iraq has everything to do with patriotism and nationalism. [ complete article ]
Israelis worry about terror, by Jews against Palestinians
By Ian Fisher, New York Times, August 19, 2003
Two and a half years ago, a 10-month-old Israeli girl, Shalhevet Pas, was shot to death in her stroller by a Palestinian sniper here in Hebron, a city where the competing claims of Jews and Palestinians to the land, holy places and the past grind together with particular pain. Last month, her father, Yitzhak Pas, a settler who lives here, was arrested with almost 10 pounds of explosives in his car.
Investigators have not publicly linked the two events, but the little they have said about Mr. Pas hints at something more than revenge against his daughter's killer. Rather, their remarks suggest, he and five others, including three arrested last week, are members of a Jewish underground group who were aiming to carry out attacks on Palestinians.
The case is so delicate that it is under a gag order, and Mr. Pas and another suspect were arrested on a secretive military warrant, rarely used against Jews though often against Palestinians suspected of carrying out terror attacks.
But at the faltering start of a peace effort opposed by many right-wing Israelis, worry about terror attacks by Jews is growing. In the last two years, a top Israeli security official said, at least 7 Palestinians have been killed and 19 wounded in unsolved shootings attributed to Israeli civilians in the West Bank. The major source of that concern, the official said recently, is dozens of "hill people" -- radical Jewish settlers in the West Bank, like some of those who live here -- who present a "very serious situation for the democracy of Israel." [ complete article ]
Israeli pits U.S. politics against 'road map' plan
By Julia Duin, Washington Times, August 18, 2003
Israeli tourism minister Benyamin Elon has embarked on a "Bible Belt tour" to exploit evangelical Christian enthusiasm for Israel, to lure Christian tourists back to Israel and to derail President Bush's "road map" to Middle East peace.
Mr. Elon visited in Memphis, at the juncture of Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, as his first stop.
Some evangelical Christian leaders say the "road map," which they argue puts Israel at a disadvantage in the Middle East, must go if the president retains his Christian base in next year's presidential elections.
"We either have to oppose the road map or oppose the Bible," says Mike Evans, founder of the Jerusalem Prayer Team, a coalition of 1,700 churches. "Evangelicals have no debate on this issue." [ complete article ]
Israeli law targets 'mixed' families
By Joshua Mitnick, Washington Times, August 18, 2003
More than 20,000 Arab families face the agonizing choice of breaking up or leaving Israel after passage of a law banning Palestinian spouses of Israelis from obtaining citizenship or residence permits.
The amendment to the national citizenship law, passed two weeks ago, mainly affects Palestinians who have married Arab Israelis and joined them in Israel without obtaining the proper papers from Israel's Interior Ministry, often for years or even decades.
Salwa Abu Jaber, an Israeli Arab mother of four, said she lies awake at night waiting for police to come for her husband, Mahmoud, whom she married more than 10 years ago. [ complete article ]
Judy Miller's war
By Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, August 18, 2003
Lay all Judith Miller's New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003 and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists.
And while Miller, either under her own single by-line or with NYT colleagues, was touting the bioterror threat, her book Germs, co-authored with Times-men Steven Engelberg and William Broad was in the bookstores and climbing the best seller lists. The same day that Miller opened an envelope of white powder (which turned out to be harmless) at her desk at the New York Times, her book was #6 on the New York Times best seller list. The following week (October 21, 2001), it reached #2. By October 28, --at the height of her scare-mongering campaign--it was up to #1. If we were cynical...
We don't have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller's major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam's palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration's propaganda drive towards invasion.
What does that make Miller? She was a witting cheer-leader for war. She knew what she was doing. [ complete article ]
Ten policemen killed in worsening Afghan violence
By Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters, August 19, 2003
Taliban guerrillas have killed 10 policemen, including a provincial police chief, taking the death toll to more than 90 in one of Afghanistan's bloodiest weeks since U.S.-led forces overthrew their strict Islamic regime in 2001.
Abdul Khaliq, police chief of Logar province, and several other senior police officers from the province south of Kabul were among those killed in an ambush on Monday, Logar's military commander Fazlullah Mojadidi told Reuters.
He said the police chief had been returning from a funeral for two family members of a police officer who were killed in a rocket attack blamed on the Taliban.
"They were in their cars when the incident happened," Mojadidi said. "There is no doubt that the Taliban were behind it." [ complete article ]
Hambali: The driven man
By Baradan Kuppusamy, Asia Times, August 19, 2003
Last week's capture of Hambali, 38, who real name is Riduan Issamuddin, has in effect ended the career of a successful and dedicated Islamic militant who was fired by zeal at the age of 20 to leave his Indonesian village and go off to defeat the "enemies of Islam".
He never returned.
When arrested in Thailand, Hambali, who hails from the village of Sukamanah in Cianjur, West Java, was the most wanted terrorist suspect in Southeast Asia. Intelligence agencies and police from Indonesia, Malaysia and the United States, as well as testimony by those arrested for the October 12 bombings in Bali, put Hambali as the mastermind of those blasts and the one who handled US$36,000 to finance the operation.
Captured operatives have called him the operational head of the Jemaah Islamiya group, which seeks to create a pan-Islamic state in the region, and the Southeast Asian leader of the al-Qaeda network. [ complete article ]
Baghdad on the Hudson
By Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, August 15, 2003
Imagine that the blackout that struck the United States on Thursday was a daily phenomenon. And imagine that the New York City police force was only a third its authorized strength, that criminals walked the streets and that gun battles could be heard at night.
The power disruptions that Americans have endured in the Northeast the last couple of days provide a taste of the new and very unsettling experience that many Iraqis have endured for months now. And it is an enormous problem for the American-led coalition.
If ending the threat of weapons of mass destruction was the Bush administration's sole reason for intervening, it could proclaim its job done and turn over the administration of Iraq to the United Nations.
But the administration also wants to establish a pro-American government in Baghdad and reshape the political contours in the region. Winning the support of the Iraqis is thus not a secondary objective. It is a part of the core mission. [ complete article ]
Iraq’s SCIRI, caught between Tehran and Washington
By Mahan Abedin, The Daily Star, August 19, 2003
One of the more encouraging features of the occupation of Iraq has been Washington’s desire to co-opt the country’s Shiites into the post-Baathist polity in a way that reflects their majority status. This has led the US to deal with the most well-organized Shiite force in the country: the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
However, this uneasy alliance has been beset with problems from the start. The raiding of numerous SCIRI offices and safe houses after the fall of Baghdad came amid a general harassment of SCIRI cadres and sympathizers, particularly members of its armed wing, the Badr Corps. Yet there are also strong indications SCIRI will prove to be a reliable partner for the US as it seeks to forge some kind of representative government in Iraq. [ complete article ]
The e-mails, the rewritten dossier and how Blair made his case for war
By Kim Sengupta and Nigel Morris, The Independent, August 19, 2003
The extent to which Downing Street sought to convince a doubting British public of the need to go to war in Iraq was exposed before the Hutton inquiry yesterday.
Hitherto unpublished official papers disclosed at the inquiry showed grave doubts at the highest level of government about its own case for supporting the invasion of Iraq.
Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff, admitted a week before the publication of the Iraq weapons dossier that it did "nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam", the inquiry was told yesterday. [ complete article ]
Baghdad welcome going sour for U.S. soldiers
By Andrew Cawthorne, Reuters, August 18, 2003
When U.S. soldiers first rolled into Baghdad and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iraqis embraced them but as civilian deaths mount they have become widely shunned and feared.
Rather than hailing occupying troops as liberators, many of Baghdad's five million residents sullenly cross streets with their heads down at the sight of a U.S. soldier or tank.
"We are full of fear, bad fear. They were in my area for one month and I did not have any contact with them. They see us, we see them, nothing more," businessman Ammar Abbas said.
"We cannot live here together, us and the American forces. They should go now." [ complete article ]
Delays, politics, underfunding stymie struggle against nuclear, other doomsday arms
By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press (via San Francisco Chronicle), August 16, 2003
The global machinery for confronting the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons -- the machinery of treaties and sanctions, inspectors and detectors -- is sputtering and stalling, just as the dangers seem more real by the day.
In Vienna, a U.N. agency struggles through its 19th year with a frozen budget as it works to keep nuclear bombs from spreading worldwide. In a neighboring glass tower beside the Danube, experts hired to detect secret nuclear tests close up shop over weekends. Their treaty is on hold.
Plans to burn thousands of tons of fearsome chemical weapons, in the United States and Russia, have quietly slipped years into the future. The U.N. chemical inspector corps, meanwhile, is understaffed and politically handcuffed.
As for biological arms, negotiators recently labored for seven years on an enforcement regime -- inspectors -- for the 1975 treaty banning germ weapons. But the United States has now shut down those talks. [ complete article ]
U.S. says it doesn't know how many detainees in Cuba
Reuters, August 12, 2003
The US government said today it had neither an exact count nor all the names of hundreds of people captured in Afghanistan over a year ago and now detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
US government lawyers made the disclosure during a court hearing in a case on behalf of Falen Gherebi, a Libyan national believed to be in US custody in Cuba.
In May, a US District Court said it did not have the authority to consider whether Gherebi was being held lawfully and remanded the matter to an appeals court.
At the appeals court hearing on Monday, the planned debate over the government's right to hold Gherebi dissolved into a more basic discussion over whether the US government even had kept complete records on the people being held. [ complete article ]
The power beyond their grasp
By Vivienne Walt, Washington Post, August 17, 2003
Ali Hassan shook his head in dismay at the current state of his life. "Twenty-three years I worked in the Ministry of Justice," he said. "I was an accountant in the ministry's auditing department. Now where am I?
"Two weeks ago I sold our refrigerator and television just to get some money. I have four children at home," said the small, gray-haired man, standing among 300 or so demonstrators outside Baghdad's new Union of Unemployed Iraqis. "I'm happy Saddam is gone -- but I need a job."
And to whom did he and the other demonstrators turn? Chanting their demands for work, they marched toward Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace, headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority -- the almost all-American body, headed by L. Paul Bremer III, that runs Iraq. When I asked one of the organizers why they didn't go to their own leaders in the Iraqi Governing Council, he looked blank. "We don't know where they are," he said.
That's no surprise. One month after the council's 25 members were handpicked by Bremer's office, its members work in a largely empty office building, surrounded by American military cordons and coils of barbed wire. They carry American-issued MCI cell phones, with an American area code (914). [ complete article ]
Suicide bombers can be stopped
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, August 25, 2003
Scholars who have studied the phenomenon tend to look at the personal profiles of suicide bombers for some sign of a pattern. Generally, they are Muslim (with the exception of the Sri Lankan rebels), young, single, and have some religious education. They are usually not newcomers to their political cause, or to terror tactics. All this is interesting, but why do some choose this path and not others? After all, there are tens of millions of young, single Muslims and only a few hundred suicide bombers, who are found in a few specific places. In searching for better answers, I have been struck by two phenomena -- the rise of suicide bombings in Russia, and their decline in Turkey. [ complete article ]
Raiders of the night find the pickings are slim
By Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald, August 18, 2003
Chomping on a fat cigar during a late night interview, Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Rabena declares [Aadamiyah, the southern tip of what the Americans have dubbed the Sunni-triangle] to be Baghdad's Gotham City. He talks of the nightly raids on Iraqi homes as "precision surgery" that, in his view, has reduced the Iraqi resistance to a dying effort. [...]
A few nights later their target is a former senior Baath party official. He is not at home, but while the women and young men of the house are detained on the rooftop and patted down for concealed weapons, even in their hair, the house is ransacked for documents and weapons.
And, it seems, money. The Herald photographer Jason South watches as one of the US soldiers pockets a small wad of US cash from a handbag he comes across as he goes through the contents of a wardrobe in a ground-floor room.
A week later, as Colonel Rabena's men mount up, one of them declares to his mates, all of them incongruously sucking on a ChupaChup lollipop: "I hope I get to kill an Iraqi tonight." [ complete article ]
Killed Reuters cameraman grew up in conflict
Reuters, August 17, 2003
Most foreign journalists in Iraq can dream of the safety of home when things get tough, but for Mazen Dana, a Palestinian cameraman for Reuters killed in Baghdad on Sunday, home itself had proved dangerous enough.
Dana, killed by a bullet on the outskirts of Baghdad, spent most of his decade with Reuters working in his strife-torn home town of Hebron on the West Bank, where he was shot at and beaten numerous times. [ complete article ]
Sabotage threatens Iraq's economy
By Justin Huggler, The Independent, August 18, 2003
Sabotage left two fires burning out of control on the main pipeline exporting Iraqi oil to Turkey yesterday and the main pipe supplying water to Baghdad was bombed, flooding a motorway and leaving the city of five million without water. And, last night, a Reuters cameraman was shot dead while filming outside Iraq's main prison, which had earlier come under mortar attack.
The American-led occupation is going badly wrong before our eyes. Already US soldiers are dying daily in attacks and there is anarchy on the streets. As of yesterday, the Americans appeared to be facing an all-out assault on another front - on their efforts to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq. [ complete article ]
With friends like these...
By Peter Kilfoyle, The Guardian, August 18, 2003
Diplomatically, the gains of many decades have been frittered away by our blind obedience to the American administration's wars. Huge numbers of people view the British prime minister as Bush's poodle, and see Britain as no more than the errand boy for the American neo-conservatives. What price British influence in the world if Albion has no influence with its American godfather? [ complete article ]
Saudi Arabia to question '12,000 citizens'
By Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, August 15, 2003
Saudi Arabian authorities have embarked on a vast anti-terrorism operation in which up to 12,000 citizens will be questioned at the behest of the US, a Saudi opposition group has told the Guardian.
"The Saudi government is doing a full-scale sweeping activity," said Saad al-Fagih, of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia.
"This is causing occasional confrontations with members [of militant groups] who have taken a decision not to surrender themselves."
Several sources in the kingdom had told him of a "substantial list", provided by the US, naming Saudi citizens to be questioned or arrested, he said. [ complete article ]
Afghan insurgents fight police; 22 killed
By Todd Pitman, Associated Press, August 17, 2003
Insurgents attacked a police headquarters in southeastern Afghanistan, sparking a battle Sunday that killed at least 15 fighters and seven Afghan police, a police chief said. It was part of a disturbing new surge of violence in the country.
The siege began shortly before midnight Saturday when about 400 guerrillas attacked the police headquarters in the town of Barmal in Paktika province, about 125 miles southeast of Kabul, said provincial governor Mohammed Ali Jalali.
The fighters, firing rockets, grenades and heavy machine guns, took over the office and held it until 5 a.m. Sunday before destroying the building and retreating amid a gunbattle with police, said police chief Daulat Khan.
The attack was the latest in a wave of violence that has underscored just how unstable Afghanistan still is after the Taliban were toppled in late 2001. Sixty-four people were killed in various attacks last Wednesday, believed to be the single deadliest day in the country since the Taliban's ouster. [ complete article ]
Tips, traced call led to capture of Al Qaeda suspect
By Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress, Washington Post, August 16, 2003
Hambali, the top strategist for al Qaeda in Southeast Asia and the region's most wanted fugitive, was done in by suspicious neighbors and a telephone trace, regional security officials said today.
Around 11 p.m. Monday, about a dozen undercover Thai agents burst into Apartment 601 at a building in a city north of Bangkok, surprising the slumbering Indonesian cleric and his wife, security officials said. Hambali had a handgun, but did not have time to shoot, they said.
Aided by the CIA, authorities found him in Ayutthaya, a city about 45 miles north of the Thai capital, by tracking one of his phone calls while he was there. They were also tipped off by Muslim Thais in the community, who were wary of the foreigner who attended the local mosque and Internet cafe, but did not speak Thai. [ complete article ]
Arms and the man
By Peter Landesman, New York Times, August 17, 2003
Profile of Victor Bout, by most accounts the world's largest arms trafficker -- C.I.A. and MI6 agents on the ground in Africa first picked up Bout's scent in the early 1990's, when his fleet of planes began crisscrossing the continent. In the early days, they transported gladiolas; later, frozen chickens and then diamonds, mining equipment, Kalashnikov assault rifles, bullets, helicopter gunships and even, Bout says, U.N. peacekeepers, French soldiers and African heads of state. The names of the men Bout came to count as his personal friends and customers included Massoud, Mobutu, Savimbi, Taylor, Bemba. It was not until the summer of 2000 that the N.S.C. realized it had stumbled on not only the most prolific arms trafficking operation in Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan but probably the best connected (and protected) private-weapons transport and brokering network in the world.
Smith and others took their information to Richard C. Clarke, then the chief of counterterrorism for the N.S.C. ''Get me a warrant,'' Clarke responded.
But because Bout's reputed crimes were committed outside United States borders, the N.S.C. had no U.S. law to use on him. Instead, the N.S.C. initiated an operation that drew on the resources of intelligence agencies in at least seven countries and sparked cabinet-level diplomacy on four continents. Belgium issued its own warrant for Bout's arrest a year later -- not for arms trafficking but for crimes related to money laundering and diamond smuggling. In the end, the pursuit failed. Victor Bout is still at large, a fugitive from international justice. But unlike Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, he lives in plain sight -- in Moscow, under the apparent protection of a post-Communist system that has profited from his activities as much as he has. [ complete article ]
Iraqi clerics unite in rare alliance
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 17, 2003
A popular Sunni Muslim cleric has provided grass-roots and financial support to a leading anti-American Shiite cleric, a rare example of cooperation across Iraq's sectarian divide that has alarmed U.S. officials for its potential to bolster festering resistance to the American occupation, senior U.S. and Iraqi officials say.
The ties mark one of the first signs of coordination between anti-occupation elements of the Sunni minority, the traditional rulers of the country, and its Shiite majority, seen by U.S. officials as the key to stability in postwar Iraq.
The extent of the cooperation remains unclear between Ahmed Kubeisi, a Sunni cleric from a prominent clan in western Iraq, and Moqtada Sadr, the 30-year-old son of a revered Shiite ayatollah assassinated in 1999. But ideologically and practically, it represents a convergence of interests between the two figures, who were left out of the Iraqi Governing Council named last month and, in their own communities, have emerged as influential if still minority voices of opposition to the four-month-old occupation. [ complete article ]
Disruption in Iraq amid sabotage fears
By BBC News, August 17, 2003
Repairs to a key oil pipeline in northern Iraq could take up to a month following a suspected sabotage attack just three days after it reopened.
A fire engulfed a section of the pipeline at Baiji, north of Tikrit - hometown of ousted President Saddam Hussein - on Friday and burned for 24 hours.
The US governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer, says the closure of the pipeline will lose the country $7m a day in badly needed revenue for post-war reconstruction.
Meanwhile, a major water pipe in Baghdad has been holed amid reports of sabotage - cutting off supplies to areas in the north and flooding surrounding streets. [ complete article ]
Iraq's Shiites impatient with U.S.
By Agence France Presse, August 17, 2003
"America does not want to acknowledge it is incapable of controlling the situation and rebuilding Iraq," said Akram al-Zubeidi, spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, one of the top four Shiite clerics in the holy city of Najaf, 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of the capital.
"Every day, we receive dozens of complaints from Iraqis asking us to declare a fatwa against the Americans and we say no. But this 'no' will not last forever," he said, quoting the grand ayatollah. [ complete article ]
Iran praises U.S. move against dissidents
By Associated Press (via The Guardian), August 16, 2003
Iran conferred rare praise on the United States on Saturday when its foreign minister said the State Department's closure of the offices of Iranian dissidents was a ``positive'' act.
Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday shut down the Washington offices of the National Council of Resistance of Iran and the Mujahedeen Khalq. The council claims to be an umbrella organization for dissident groups, including the Mujahedeen Khalq, but U.S. government officials say the two are virtually interchangeable.
Mujahedeen Khalq is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, but the United States allowed the council to operate on their territories with little interference. Following Powell's order, the U.S. Treasury froze the council's nearly $100,000 worth of financial assets in the United States. [ complete article ]
New evidence shows crucial dossier changes
By Glen Rangwala, The Independent, August 17, 2003
The Government changed the title of its September 2002 dossier on Iraq at the last minute, to portray a situation in Iraq that some of its most senior experts did not accept as valid.
Documents released by the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly show not only that the claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were strengthened in the two weeks before the dossier's release, but also that a crucial alteration was made to the title. The last draft of the dossier available to the inquiry from 19 September was entitled "Iraq's programme for weapons of mass destruction". But the title on both the Downing Street website and printed versions is simply "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction".
Referring to a weapons "programme" does not imply they exist or are being produced. The most it indicates is that production could begin in future. UN weapons inspectors in Iraq throughout the second half of the 1990s focused on uncovering the potential for Iraq to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as there was little evidence that actual weapons existed or that production was taking place.
Tony Blair claimed repeatedly that Iraq had these weapons and was producing more, and that this made Iraq a serious threat. [ complete article ]
Dangerous brinksmanship heats up the Levant
By Nicholas Blanford, Christian Science Monitor, August 15, 2003
Diplomats and United Nations peacekeepers in south Lebanon fear fighting might soon resume unless a diplomatic solution is reached that will end the dangerous brinkmanship between Hizbullah and the Israeli military.
But Israel's staging of mass overflights by military jets in Lebanese airspace Wednesday has dampened hopes of an imminent breakthrough. The overflights are fueling suspicion that Israel is seeking to goad the Islamic party into an open conflict. Many Lebanese also suspect Israeli involvement in the recent assassination of a senior Hizbullah military commander in Beirut. [ complete article ]
Advice from Baghdad: Coping with a blackout
By John Tierney, New York Times, August 16, 2003
Do not try to repair the Northeast grid yourselves. Entrusting the job to Americans, Iraqis warned, would only result in more blackouts and endless excuses about "sabotage" and "neglected infrastructure." Thamir Mahmoud, a retired clerk, said he was especially worried by President Bush's promise to fix the problem. "If the American government is involved," he said, "you must be prepared to be patient. They work very slowly."
Some Iraqis suggested inviting the United Nations to supervise the reconstruction, but others had a more radical idea. Put Saddam Hussein in charge of the grid. "Saddam had the electricity back two months after the last war," said Maythum Hatam, a computer-science student. "With his methods, you would have electricity right away, but you must expect to lose some workers." [ complete article ]
U.S. troops provoke Afghan anger
By Saeed Ali Achakzai, Reuters, August 15, 2003
When U.S. forces entered a remote Afghan village recently to hunt Taliban and al Qaeda rebels, locals hurriedly hid their Korans in a sack.
Baffled soldiers who discovered the copies of Islam's holy book asked an elder what was happening. He told them that villagers feared they would be killed merely for being Muslims.
The misunderstanding underlines the depth of confusion and mistrust caused by foreign troops in Afghanistan, particularly in rural areas in the south and east where the coalition is most active in its hunt for "terrorists".
In many cases that mistrust has turned to hatred, as aggressive search tactics and a general sense among Muslims of being under siege plays into the hands of the very people the U.S. military is trying to wipe out. [ complete article ]
Inside the resistance
By Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald, August 16, 2003
The Pentagon, the US military and American analysts are reluctant to acknowledge popular support for the Iraqi resistance. But the chaos has tribal sheiks, Baghdad businessmen and many ordinary Iraqis speaking in such harsh anti-American terms that it is hard not to conclude there is a growing body of Palestinian or Belfast-style empathy with the resistance.
If the accounts of the resistance given to the Herald in interviews in the past 10 days are accurate, US intelligence is way behind understanding that what is emerging in Iraq is a centrally controlled movement, driven as much by nationalism as the mosque, a movement that has left Saddam and the Baath Party behind and already is getting foreign funds for its bid to drive out the US army. [ complete article ]
Foreign investors take a pass on Karzai's Afghanistan
By Marc W. Herold, Cursor, August 14, 2003
Since the "end" of the war in Afghanistan, no major foreign equity investment in either the goods or the resources-producing sectors has been made, notwithstanding President Karzai's frantic travels abroad seeking to woo investors.
This contrasts sharply with Afghanistan under the Taliban [1996-2001], when both the giant U.S. oil firm UNOCAL, committed to building a trans-country gas pipeline and a private New Jersey-based enterprise, Telephone Systems International Inc., secured a license from the Taliban to set up an integrated, high-tech communications network costing $240 million.
The Taliban for all their faults, were able to put in place a degree of political stability and means to enforce contracts - after all, in one year they reduced poppy cultivation to next to nothing. [ complete article ]
Lacking water and power, Iraqis run out of patience in the searing summer heat
By Jamie Wilson and Owen Bowcott, The Guardian, August 16, 2003
Millions of Iraqis are frustrated. They are deprived of fuel, electricity and water, the basics of life. These deprivations have sparked protests throughout the country, angry voices made louder by the searing summer heat. The chaos has sharpened demands for improvements in the crippled infrastructure. Coalition administrators say they recognise their failure to tell people what is being done to repair the economy. The World Bank and UN are completing a needs assessment which they will present to a conference on Iraq in October. It is hoped that the survey will establish a clearer timetable for the work to be done and build confidence in the future. Some aid workers in Britain believe reconstruction is proceeding at a faster pace than in Kosovo and Afghanistan. But their optimism is little comfort to exasperated Iraqis. [ complete article ]
45-minute claim on Iraq was hearsay
By Vikram Dodd, Nicholas Watt and Richard Norton Taylor, The Guardian, August 16, 2003
Tony Blair's headline-grabbing claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so was based on hearsay information, the Guardian has learned.
The revelation that the controversial claim is even weaker than ministers and officials have been saying will embarrass No 10, already reeling after the first week of the Hutton inquiry into the death of weapons expert David Kelly. [ complete article ]
Baghdad clerics decry a U.S. 'war against Islam'
By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2003
Shiite Muslim clerics in a poor neighborhood of northeast Baghdad said Friday that the U.S. military had declared war against Islam and warned American forces to stay out of the district, where U.S. troops opened fire on a crowd this week.
Tens of thousands of worshippers carrying religious banners thronged to Friday prayers in the center of the slum, sending a powerful signal about the level of anger in the community over Wednesday's shootout between protesters and troops, which happened after an American helicopter dislodged a religious banner from a tower.
"America and Zionism have declared war against Islam and its sanctuary. That is why one of their helicopters tried to remove the banner of righteousness," Sheik Abdul-Hadi Darraji told the crowd before prayers. [ complete article ]
The making of an Iraqi guerrilla: one man's tale
By Cameron W. Barr, Christian Science Monitor, August 15, 2003
One night at the end of June, a young Iraqi man goes out to ambush an American convoy near the central Iraqi town of Fallujah.
He is wearing his favorite blue tracksuit. He is a small guy, solid and compact, with cropped dark hair and a chin that juts out slightly. He likes tough sports, especially handball. He can stub out a cigarette on the calluses of his left palm. It will be his first time in combat.
Although he has trained only fleetingly for what he is about to do, he is not afraid. "If I die for a reason, that's a nice thing," he says later.
Since President Bush declared major hostilities in Iraq over on May 1, a rising tide of ambushes, explosions, and small-arms attacks has killed 60 Americans.
The man's motivations for attacking the convoy are simple: to resist the American "insult to Iraqi and Arab tradition." [ complete article ]
U.S. warned not to enter Baghdad slum
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 15, 2003
In a sermon to thousands of worshipers in Baghdad's largest slum, a militant Shiite Muslim cleric warned American forces today not to reenter the neighborhood and dismissed as insufficient an apology from U.S. officials for the toppling of a religious banner that set off a protest this week in which an Iraqi was killed.
The statement was the latest in a back-and-forth between U.S. officials and influential clerics in the neighborhood, whose numbers alone -- 3 million residents -- make it pivotal in the politics of Baghdad. U.S. officials have said gusts from a low-flying helicopter accidentally knocked over the black flag, which fluttered atop a transmission tower. Residents, already disenchanted with the lack of electricity and basic services, said they saw a soldier either kick or try to cut it down.
In the protest that ensued Wednesday, U.S. forces killed one Iraqi -- a boy of 10 or 11, residents said -- and wounded at least three. Both sides say the other fired first. U.S. officials have said they are investigating the incident, which marked some of the sharpest tension between U.S. forces and Iraq's Shiite majority since the overthrow of president Saddam Hussein's government on April 9. [ complete article ]
Iraqis offer tips over U.S. blackout
By Niko Price, Associated Press, August 15, 2003
Iraqis who have suffered for months with little electricity gloated Friday over a blackout in the northeastern United States and southern Canada and offered some tips to help Americans beat the heat.
From frequent showers to rooftop slumber parties, Iraqis have developed advanced techniques to adapt to life without electricity.
Daily highs have soared above 120 degrees recently as Iraq's U.S. administrators have been unable to get power back to prewar levels. Some said it was poetic justice that some Americans should suffer the same fate, if only briefly. [ complete article ]
The black turbans' 'counterrevolution'
By Mustafa El-Labbad, Al-Ahram Weekly, August 14, 2003
Hussein Khomeini has added fuel to an already fiery domestic situation in Iran, with his vehement attack on the "rule of the clerics", the underlying principle of government in Iran since shortly after that country's Islamic Revolution in 1979. Moreover, Hussein's words should be assessed with regard of the added weight of the lineage factor in a society and polity in which 90 per cent of the populace are Shi'ite Muslims. Lineage is of fundamental importance to the Shi'ite creed which holds that the nephew of the Prophet Mohamed, Ali, and his descendants had been usurped of their right to inherit the command of the faithful. The Shi'ites have elevated the family and descendants of the Prophet to a position of sacred authority, and, today, among the Shi'ite communities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, the Ashraf (descendants of the family of the Prophet) are still distinguishable by their black turbans, as opposed to the white turbans worn by other members of the Shi'ite clergy. The charismatic leader of the Iranian Revolution Ayatollah Rohallah Khomeini, the Spiritual Guide of the Revolution Ali Khameini and the current President of Iran Mohamed Khatemi all wore black turbans. [ complete article ]
Iraq's cleric who would be heard
By Nir Rosen, Asia Times, August 16, 2003
Unlike other Shi'ite leaders, whose education and age bestows on them a rich vocabulary and an eloquent fus-hah, or classical Arabic, Muqtada [al-Sadr, from Sadr City in Baghdad] speaks in a strong amia or colloquial Arabic, replete with slang and street expressions. His associates are all young like him, and have the same arrogance when dealing with others, as if acknowledging that they do not deserve all the attention they are receiving. [...]
He is the young upstart of the Shi'ite world, taking on the establishment, showing no respect for his elders, or his betters. In the eyes of the Shi'ite establishment embodied in the Hawza, or religious academy based in Najaf, Muqtada is just an arrogant street punk benefiting from his father's reputation and universal admiration. But he cannot be so easily ignored. [ complete article ]
'It was punishment without trial'
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, August 15, 2003
After 24 days [11-year-old Sufian Abd al-Ghani]'s ordeal [-- being imprisoned without charge by coalition authorities --] was over, but he regularly has nightmares. However, his case is not the worst in the four months since the Americans occupied Iraq. Several children have been shot dead, some as passengers in cars which fell foul of American checkpoints, some mistaken at night for adults. But if those deaths were the result of accidents, how is it that an 11-year-old could be held for over three weeks without anyone in authority asking questions?
The answer is: easily. Sufian's detention highlights the problems faced by hundreds of Iraqis: arrests followed by incompetent interrogation, or none at all; the lack of an efficient trial-or-release system; shocking prison conditions; constant buck-passing; and sloppy paperwork by the coalition authorities. The result is that in almost every case families take weeks or months to find out where their loved ones are being detained. [ complete article ]
Afghan security crisis deepens
By Pam O'Toole, BBC News, August 14, 2003
Two aid workers from the Afghan Red Crescent Society have been killed and three others injured in an ambush south-west of the capital, Kabul.
In a separate incident, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, announced that it was suspending operations in Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan after a rocket was fired near one of its compounds.
The UN and a number of other aid agencies had already suspended activities in parts of southern Afghanistan following a flurry of attacks in those areas.
The latest incidents come amid a deteriorating security situation and followed one of the bloodiest days in Afghanistan in the past year.
Some 60 people were killed in violent incidents on Wednesday. [ complete article ]
'Bring Them Home Now' speakers rip U.S. policy on Iraq
By Patrick J. Dickson, Stars and Stripes (the "hometown newspaper" for the U.S. military), August 14, 2003
They wanted their message to be clear: It's possible to support the troops and not support the war they're fighting.
Several family members of U.S. troops in Iraq spoke out Wednesday against what they see as shortsighted policy on the part of the Bush administration.
They said that the Bush camp lied about the reasons for going to war, has misled the media about what's happening on the ground and has kept troops in the dark about their mission and how long they'll be there. [ complete article ]
No pay cut for troops in Iraq, Afghanistan - Pentagon
By Charles Aldinger, Reuters, August 14, 2003
Moving to quash a political firestorm, the Pentagon on Thursday denied that it will cut the pay of nearly 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by $225 on Sept. 30 when special military pay hikes approved by Congress are due to expire. [ complete article ]
Stark message of the mutiny
By Naomi Klein, The Guardian, August 15, 2003
What does it take to become a major news story in the summer of Arnie and Kobe, Ben and Jen? A lot, as a group of young Philippine soldiers discovered recently. On July 27, 300 soldiers rigged a giant Manila shopping mall with C-4 explosives, accused one of Washington's closest allies of blowing up its own buildings to attract US military dollars - and still barely managed to make the international news.
That's our loss, because in the wake of the Marriott bombing in Jakarta and newly leaked intelligence reports claiming that the September 11 attacks were hatched in Manila, it looks like south-east Asia is about to become the next major front in Washington's war on terror.
The Philippines and Indonesia may have missed the cut for the axis of evil, but the two countries do offer Washington something Iran and North Korea do not: US-friendly governments willing to help the Pentagon secure an easy win. Both the Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri have embraced Bush's crusade as the perfect cover for their brutal cleansing of separatist movements from resource-rich regions - Mindanao in the Philippines, Aceh in Indonesia. [ complete article ]
Rough justice
By Rod Nordland, Newsweek, August 18, 2003
As many as 8,000 people have disappeared since Saddam's regime collapsed, and many relatives are searching for answers about their fate. More than 5,000 are in U.S. custody; others may be among those killed by fellow Iraqis, and in some cases by American troops. Those who have been detained are nearly always held incommunicado, without access to lawyers or even the right to contact their families. In most cases their loved ones can't find out where they are. With Iraqi prisons looted and destroyed, captives are jailed in barbed-wire compounds, converted warehouses and vast tent camps. Conditions are primitive; at their worst they amount to what Amnesty International describes as "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."
But the lack of a proper justice system is not just a human-rights issue. It also raises questions about whether the U.S. military, in its campaign to stamp out the Iraqi resistance, is creating new enemies. [ complete article ]
Troops in Iraq face pay cut
Pentagon says tough duty bonuses are budget-buster
By Edward Epstein, San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 2003
The Pentagon wants to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, who are already contending with guerrilla-style attacks, homesickness and 120- degree-plus heat.
Unless Congress and President Bush take quick action when Congress returns after Labor Day, the uniformed Americans in Iraq and the 9,000 in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of $75 a month in "imminent danger pay" and $150 a month in "family separation allowances."
The Defense Department supports the cuts, saying its budget can't sustain the higher payments amid a host of other priorities. But the proposed cuts have stirred anger among military families and veterans' groups and even prompted an editorial attack in the Army Times, a weekly newspaper for military personnel and their families that is seldom so outspoken. [ complete article ]
Hutton lifting the lid on Blair government
By Fraser Nelson, The Scotsman, August 14, 2003
Tony Blair has made a grave mistake. England's courts are lined with supine judges who could have heard the inquest into Dr David Kelly's death in a "helpful" way. Lord Hutton could not have been a worse choice.
This 72-year-old judge and James Dingemans, his QC, are breaking all the traditions of the political whitewash. They are moving at breakneck speed, ploughing through witnesses to leave a harvest of hard evidence.
In the space of three days, we know more about the doubts behind the Iraq dossier than the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was able to establish in three months. The Hutton inquiry is so far surpassing all expectation. [ complete article ]
Complete transcripts of each day's hearings can be read at The Hutton Inquiry web site.
Is Elliot Abrams evolving?
By Philip Weiss, New York Observer, August 14, 2003
[In his book, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, published in 1997, Elliot Abrams, President Bush's top advisor on Middle East affairs, writes:] "Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart -- except in Israel -- from the rest of the population."
Mr. Abrams adds, though, that such apartness means "no disloyalty" to the land in which he lives.
Mr. Abrams is a conservative, and one can't quarrel with the sincerity of his beliefs. His opposition to secularism is often persuasive; his vision of religious pluralism, in which Christians do their thing and Jews theirs (and presumably Muslims do their thing, too, though his only references to Muslims are to describe their involvement in anti-Semitism), is compelling.
The problem is when parochialists get political power. America can tolerate sects: Amish separatists are honored for their choice; black separatists and white separatists are allowed their often obnoxious views. Even when sects achieve economic power, they're tolerated, and maybe should be (the Mormons in Utah, say).
But Americans have been justly leery when parochial practices edge their way into national politics. [ complete article ]
U.S. apologizes for sparking Baghdad protest
By Andrew Marshall, Reuters, August 14, 2003
The U.S. Army said Thursday it had apologized for provoking furious protests in a Baghdad slum neighborhood, but Shi'ite residents vowed more violence unless American troops withdrew from the district. [ complete article ]
Eleana Benador: The Andean condor among the hawks
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times, August 15, 2003
When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so much easier than it might have been. [...]
But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible.
Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months. [ complete article ]
MIDDLEMAN - BUT IN THE MIDDLE OF WHAT?
Less than meets the eye?
By Brian Ross, ABC News, August 13, 2003
Administration officials are leaving out key facts and exaggerating the significance of the alleged plot to smuggle a shoulder-launched missile into the United States, law enforcement officials told ABCNEWS. They say there's a lot less than meets the eye.
The accused ringleader, British national Hemant Lakhani, appeared today in federal court in Newark, N.J., and was ordered held without bond on charges of attempting to provide material support and material resources to terrorists and acting as an arms broker without a license.
Outside the courtroom, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie called Lakhani an ally of terrorists who want to kill Americans.
"He, on many occasions, in recorded conversations, referred to Americans as 'bastards' [and] Osama bin Laden as a hero," said Christie.
But what he did not say was just how much of the alleged missile plot was a government setup from start to finish. [ complete article ]
WHO NEEDS THE U.N. WHEN YOU STILL HAVE A COALITION OF THE WILLING?
While the United States is currently spending over $125 million a day on the occupation of Iraq, the administration is not seeking wider U.N. support. Instead it will rely on support from countries such as Albania (whose total annual military spending is $56.5 million) and Latvia ($87 million) while seeking additional support from countries such as Moldova ($6.4 million) and Mongolia ($23 million). (Military expenditure figures come from the CIA Factbook.)
U.S. abandons idea of bigger U.N. role in Iraq occupation
By Steven R. Weisman and Felicity Barringer, New York Times, August 14, 2003
The Bush administration has abandoned the idea of giving the United Nations more of a role in the occupation of Iraq as sought by France, India and other countries as a condition for their participation in peacekeeping there, administration officials said today.
Instead, the officials said, the United States would widen its effort to enlist other countries to assist the occupation forces in Iraq, which are dominated by the 139,000 United States troops there.
In addition to American forces in Iraq, there are 21,000 troops representing 18 countries. At present, 11,000 of that number are from Britain. The United States plans to seek larger numbers to help, especially with relief supplies that are coming from another dozen countries. [ complete article ]
Israel's new barrier cuts old ties
By Nicole Gaouette, Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 2003
It's no dream house, the cinderblock hut Sharif Omar now calls home, but he won't leave it anytime soon.
When the West Bank farmer and his wife married 36 years ago, they moved in with his brother. Mr. Omar promised one day to build her a house of her own. This year, he finished it, moved the family in and promptly left for this squat shed in his olive groves, not far from 31 other families camping on their own farms.
It's an exodus born of determination. Israel's separation barrier slices through Jayyus, neatly severing the town from its fields. Israel has taken local land in the past and farmers here worry the barrier's path is the first step toward the loss of their livelihood. They aim to hold on. [ complete article ]
Flag is flash point in a Baghdad slum
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 14, 2003
The U.S. military helicopter flew low over Baghdad's largest slum today, about an hour before noon prayers. For a while, it hovered near a transmission tower. Then, Sheik Ahmed Zarjawi said, a U.S. soldier tried to kick the black flag that fluttered atop the tower, inscribed in white letters with the name of one of Shiite Islam's most revered figures.
"How can we sleep at night when we see this?" he recalled asking.
There followed a day of anger and fervor in a Shiite neighborhood already on edge. Protesters incensed at what they saw as a religious insult poured out of houses and shops. In some of the worst unrest since Baghdad fell to U.S.-led forces on April 9, clashes erupted with an American patrol, killing one Iraqi and wounding at least three others. [ complete article ]
Democracy might be impossible, U.S. was told
By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, August 14, 2003
US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops. [ complete article ]
Women's rights become a struggle in Iraq
By Pamela Hess, UPI, August 13, 2003
Like Saddam Hussein, Yanar Mohammed tries not to sleep every night in the same place.
"For a different cause," she notes dryly, in the run-down barebones office she borrows from the Worker's Communist Party of Iraq.
Yanar, 42, left the safety and comfort of her life as an architect, wife and mother in Toronto to return to Baghdad to fight for Iraqi women's rights.
This is not an equal pay for equal work debate, or a campaign for a child-care subsidy. Her platform is elemental: Women must not be abducted, sold and raped. Those that eventually return to their families must not be murdered to restore the family's honor. Women must not be forced to wear an opaque veil over their faces and bodies.
She will not say where she sleeps because her life has already been threatened. She does not move without her bodyguard. [ complete article ]
U.S. military pioneers death ray bomb
By David Adam, The Guardian, August 14, 2003
American military scientists are developing a weapon which kills by delivering an enormous burst of high-energy gamma rays, it is claimed today.
The bomb, which produces little fallout, blurs the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons, and experts have already warned it could spark a new arms race. The science behind the gamma ray bomb is still in its infancy, and technical problems mean it could be decades before the devices are developed. But the Pentagon is taking the project seriously.
The plans are getting under way at a time when the Bush administration is seeking ways to expand its arsenal of unconventional weapons, and could well fuel charges that Washington risks triggering a new arms race. [ complete article ]
For more details see the New Scientist article, Gamma-ray weapons could trigger next arms race.
Bus blast, clashes kill 58 in Afghanistan
By Noor Khan, Associated Press, August 13, 2003
An explosion ripped through a bus and heavy fighting erupted between government soldiers and Taliban remnants Wednesday, one of the bloodiest days in Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces ousted the hard-line Islamic regime.
The bus bombing killed 15 civilians -- six of them children; the death toll for Wednesday -- including two explosions and gunbattles in two provinces -- was 58.
The deaths were part of a trend of stepped-up attacks and killings that are increasing the pressure on the fragile Afghan government and creating an atmosphere of constant fear in the country. [ complete article ]
DANIEL PIPES
Pipes the propagandist
By Christopher Hitchens, Slate, August 11, 2003
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms. [ complete article ]
Bush to sidestep Muslim groups, Senate on scholar
By Adam Entous, Reuters, August 12, 2003
Over objections from some Muslim American groups, President Bush plans to sidestep Congress and appoint a Middle East scholar who has been derided by critics as anti-Muslim to a federally funded think tank, congressional sources said on Tuesday.
Bush's expected recess appointment of Daniel Pipes could spark a backlash from some Muslim Americans and Democrats in Congress, who oppose his nomination to serve on the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was created by Congress to promote peaceful solutions to world conflicts.
Bush has sought to improve relations with the Muslim American community since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Pipe's nomination has been stalled for months in the Senate, where key Democrats objected to his controversial statements and writings defending racial and religious profiling and suggestions that mosques in America should be targets of police surveillance. [ complete article ]
Calling out Colin
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, August 12, 2003
[With virtually all the "evidence" presented by Colin Powell before the UN Security Council on February 5 now appearing highly questionable, t]his leaves one piece of Powell's briefing that remains, to this day, puzzling. It involved two intercepted phone conversations that Powell played and translated. One, recorded Nov. 26, the day before U.N. weapons inspections were to resume, was said to be between a colonel and a brigadier general in the Iraqi Republican Guard. The general says, "I'll come see you in the morning. I'm worried you all have something left." The colonel replies, "We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left." The implication is that the Iraqis have removed illegal materials from a site to be inspected to the next day.
The other conversation, which Powell said was recorded Jan. 30, was supposedly between two commanders of the 2nd Republican Guard Corps. One reads aloud an instruction, as the other writes it down, phrase by phrase: "Remove the expression 'nerve agent' wherever it comes up in wireless communications." [..]
It has been well known since last fall that the Bush administration was actively seeking intelligence that would show Iraq had two things: weapons of mass destruction and a connection with al-Qaida. When the CIA and DIA failed to come up with the goods, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a handful of his top aides formed their own intelligence network to search more carefully. If the word had gone out, to friends far and wide, that Rumsfeld was looking for this sort of evidence, is it not conceivable that someone with an interest in seeing Saddam overthrown -- and there were many parties who had such an interest -- might have "staged" a phone conversation that they knew the National Security Agency would intercept?
Maybe this is far-fetched. If so, the administration should finally tell us who these officers were. Surely there is no point keeping this information classified; revealing their identities would not put them in any danger. These tapes form the last shred of possible evidence that Iraq might have had chemical or biological weapons in the past nine months -- that, in other words, the war had any legitimate cause. If the officers were real, name them. [ complete article ]
Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve
By Julian Borger, The Guardian, August 13, 2003
A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".
As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.
All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".
Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.
"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin. [ complete article ]
See also Political conservatism as motivated social cognition (37-page document in PDF format)
Agencies unite against global threat
By Richard Norton-Taylor, Colin Blackstock and David Teather, The Guardian, August 13, 2003
The international sting operation which led to the arrest of a Briton who allegedly believed he was selling an anti-aircraft missile to a Muslim extremist in the US is a message to arms dealers and terrorists in a new era of cooperation among the world's intelligence agencies. It is highly significant that the operation was sanctioned by Russia's president, Vladmir Putin, who for years has told the west that whatever differences he may have with it, including Iraq, terrorism is a common enemy. [ complete article ]
The Hudna on the cross road
By Sa'id Ghazali, The Independent, August 13, 2003
After the assassination of two of its leaders in the Askar Refugee Camp in Nablus, West Bank, last Friday Hamas' military wing began plotting its revenge.
And yesterday as two Palestinian suicide bombers, one a member in al Aqsa Martyrs brigades and the other a Hamas militant, took the lives of two Israelis, that revenge was furious and threatening.
But the failure of the Hudna, as Palestinians refer to the ceasefire - was not so surprising at all. [ complete article ]
Kurds adapt to a new order in Iraq
By Pamela Constable, Washington Post, August 12, 2003
The highway to this prosperous Kurdish city is lined with rolling, well-irrigated wheat fields. The first gas station is a designer fantasy of glittering blue glass. The main boulevard is a parade of Internet cafes, half-built mansions and a familiar-looking "Madonal" restaurant that features "Big Macks."
For the past 12 years, while the rest of Iraq struggled under dictatorship and foreign sanctions, the isolated north and its ethnic Kurdish population enjoyed a privileged period of political autonomy, international aid and rapid economic development under skies patrolled by Western warplanes enforcing a "no-fly" zone.
But with the toppling of President Saddam Hussein, that special status is no longer assured, and Kurdish leaders are scrambling to preserve benefits they fear will be lost in the ethnic, religious and political free-for-all of post-Hussein Iraq. [ complete article ]
Rising tide of Islamic militants see Iraq as ultimate battlefield
By Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, August 13, 2003
In much the same way as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan stirred an earlier generation of young Muslims determined to fight the infidel, the American presence in Iraq is prompting a rising tide of Muslim militants to slip into the country to fight the foreign occupier, Iraqi officials and others say.
"Iraq is the nexus where many issues are coming together -- Islam versus democracy, the West versus the axis of evil, Arab nationalism versus some different types of political culture," said Barham Saleh, the prime minister of this Kurdish-controlled part of northern Iraq. "If the Americans succeed here, this will be a monumental blow to everything the terrorists stand for."
Recent intelligence suggests the militants are well organized. One returning group of fighters from the militant Ansar al-Islam organization captured in the Kurdish region two weeks ago consisted of five Iraqis, a Palestinian and a Tunisian.
Among their possessions were five forged Italian passports for a different group of militants they were apparently supposed to join, said Dana Ahmed Majid, the director of general security for the region.
Long gone are the bearded men in the short robes believed worn by the Prophet Muhammad that the Arabs who went to Afghanistan favored. Instead, the same practices that allowed the Sept. 11 attackers to blend into American society are evident. [ complete article ]
$20,000 bonus to official
who agreed on nuke claim
By Paul Sperry, WorldNetDaily, August 12, 2003
A former Energy Department intelligence chief who agreed with the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its defunct nuclear-arms program was awarded a total of $20,500 in bonuses during the build-up to the war, WorldNetDaily has learned.
Thomas Rider, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September.
His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say.
Rider ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting. [ complete article ]
U.S. military families push to bring Iraq troops home
By Niala Boodhoo, Reuters, August 12, 2002
A group of about 600 U.S. military families, upset about the living conditions of soldiers in Iraq, are launching a campaign asking their relatives to urge members of Congress and President George W. Bush to bring the troops home.
"We're growing more and more disturbed about the conditions that are developing. Our concerns are both for our troops and the people in Iraq," said Nancy Lessin, a founder of Families Speak Out, formed last fall to oppose the war in Iraq. [ complete article ]
Will Israel strike Iran?
By Jim Hoagland, New York Post, August 13, 2003
A grim warning from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to President Bush that Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than U. S. intelligence believes has triggered concern here that Israel is seriously considering a pre-emptive strike against Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor.
Sharon dramatized his forecast by bringing Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, a three-star army officer who serves as his military secretary, to a meeting with Bush in the Oval Office two weeks ago, U.S. and Israeli sources tell me. Galant showered a worried-looking Bush with photographs and charts from a thick dossier on Iran's covert program. [ complete article ]
Baghdad Blogger
The temperature is rising. And Baghdad, Basra and Nasiriyah have all erupted on the same day
By Salam Pax, The Guardian, August 13, 2003
As you go into Baghdad from the west there is graffiti on the walls that says "Welcome to the Republic of Darkness and Unemployment".
Baghdad had no electricity for a whole day. Call me the master of all whiners but do you have any idea what it feels like to sleep in 50C? I guess with the current heat wave [in Europe] you have a taste. Today's office stories: Muhammad, one of the drivers, decided the best place for his family to sleep was in the car with the engine running and the air-conditioning on. Shihab was up every couple of hours getting water for his kids because he was afraid they would totally dehydrate. Everyone who got into the office today had bags under their eyes and a bad headache. Haifa, the nice lady who makes sure we have coffee in the morning, was ranting about having to watch "this Paul something" give us lies on TV everyday. She actually described Paul Bremer as another Saddam; we see him every day on TV, and the news is all about what he says and what he does. Next we'll have statues of him in the streets. Somehow you feel like he lives in a bubble and has absolutely no idea what the people are saying. [ complete article ]
In Basra, worst may be ahead
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 12, 2003
An uneasy calm returned to Basra today after two days of unrest -- some of the worst in Iraq since U.S.-led forces overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein on April 9. But no one in this weary southern city -- neither the British officials blamed for its plight, nor residents whose mounting frustration mirrors the spiraling temperatures -- seemed to think that the worst was behind them.
In interviews, residents of Iraq's second-largest city almost uniformly expressed anger and incredulity at the shortages of gasoline and electricity and the skyrocketing black-market prices that have accompanied them. British officials in Basra, openly frustrated themselves, questioned the priorities of the U.S.-led reconstruction. And many feared that remnants of Hussein's government or militant Shiite Muslim groups were prepared to capitalize on the disenchantment. [ complete article ]
What is a neo-conservative anyway?
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times, August 12, 2003
With all the attention paid to neo-conservatives in the global media today, one would think that a standard definition of the term would exist. Yet, despite their now being credited with a virtual takeover of U.S. foreign policy under President George W. Bush, a common understanding of 'neo-cons' remains elusive.
A brief description of their basic tenets and origin can help distinguish them from other parts of the ideological coalition behind the administration's neo-imperialist trajectory; namely, the traditional Republican Machtpolitikers (Might Makes Right), such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and the Christian Rightists, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft, Gary Bauer, and Pat Robertson. [ complete article ]
Basra: 'betrayed' and pushed to the brink
By Jamie Wilson, The Guardian, August 12, 2003
If Iraq has had it bad over the past three decades, then Basra has had it the worst. Parts of the Iran-Iraq war were fought virtually at the gates of the city. In 1991 an estimated 250,000 people died in the uprising against Saddam Hussein.
As a punishment the regime left the city to rot, and it shows. The buildings are crumbling, and the canals, which once led to the city being compared favourably to Venice, are filled with rubbish.
The city was due a bit of good luck, and most people thought the British and the Americans would bring it.
But four months on things are, many say, no better, and whether by political design or through pure frustration exaggerated by the intense heat, some citizens decided at the weekend that it was time to have a say. [ complete article ]
The war's new front
By Brian Bennett, Time, August 10, 2003
When Fayek Kudayar Abbas quit his job translating for U.S. troops at the end of May, he thought the threats against him and his family would end. Abbas had worked for the Americans because the $40-a-week salary went a long way toward taking care of his wife and daughters. At first he tolerated harassment from some of his neighbors, who accused him of betraying his country by cooperating with the occupying forces. But as resistance to the U.S. intensified, Abbas found himself in even greater danger. A month after he stopped working with the Americans, his name showed up on a list of "traitors" being circulated among anti-U.S. insurgents. Then a grenade exploded in his garden, and someone scrawled abbas must be killed on the wall of his home.
Abbas, 58, was standing last week in an alley a block from his house in Samarra, 20 miles south of Tikrit, when two men with red scarves wrapped around their heads turned the corner on a black Jawa motorcycle. One of them shot Abbas in the leg and sped off. Abbas lay bleeding in the alley for an hour until an ambulance arrived. None of his neighbors went to his aid. "They were frightened," he said later from his hospital bed, his right leg bandaged up to his waist, "that maybe they would be the next on the list." [ complete article ]
Postwar Iraq likely to cost more than war
By Alan Fram, Associated Press, August 11, 2003
The U.S. bill for rebuilding Iraq and maintaining security there is widely expected to far exceed the war's price tag, and some private analysts estimate it could reach as high as $600 billion.
The Bush administration is offering only hazy details so far, and that is upsetting Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers.
The closest the administration has come to estimating America's postwar burden was when L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of occupied Iraq, said last month that "getting the country up and running again" could cost $100 billion and take three years. [ complete article ]
What North Korea wants: Rescue its economy
By Michael E. O'Hanlon, New York Times (via Brookings Institution), August 6, 2003
Now that the United States and North Korea have finally agreed to talk, the issue is what to talk about. A priority of the Bush administration, as well as its predecessors, has long been the dismantling of the North's nuclear-weapons program. This goal is realistic, but only if the United States is prepared to engage North Korea on a wide range of issues -- especially its failed economy. [ complete article ]
Bottled water drains military
By David Wood, Newhouse News Service (via The Star Ledger), July 29, 2003
What began in 1990 as a generous but temporary expedient, handing out bottled water to troops gathering in Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm, has grown into a financial and logistics nightmare that runs counter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's drive to make the military lighter and more agile.
And while GIs consider bottled water an entitlement, some generals regard it as coddling.
"Spoon-feeding troops bottled water -- a mistake," Gen. John Keane, the Army's vice chief of staff, growled in an interview. "We want them to have mental toughness." [ complete article ]
U.S. troops' newest foe in Iraq: the heat
By Hannah Allam, Knight Ridder, August 11, 2003
Temperatures rose to a scorching 135 degrees across Iraq last week, causing a U.S. soldier's death Saturday and sending dozens more to seek emergency treatment for dehydration, heat exhaustion and heatstroke, military officials said.
All over Iraq, troops who sweat rivers underneath 30 pounds of body armor and equipment reluctantly rose from under palm trees to search people at checkpoints Sunday. Some sported blisters from the ever-present tubes that snake from their mouths to backpack water bottles. [ complete article ]
Not all yearn to be free
By Joshua Mitchell, Washington Post, August 10, 2003
"Peoples always bear some marks of their origin. Circumstances of birth and growth affect their entire career." So Alexis de Tocqueville tells us. And in the United States our origin involves the tale -- somewhat fanciful but nevertheless salutary -- of local citizens and great leaders declaring their freedom from King George III in the late 18th century. Nearly 250 years later, American foreign policy in Afghanistan and in Iraq is driven by an idea so inscribed into the American psyche that it amounts to a syndrome: Cast off the tyrannical leader, then citizens and leaders alike will band together to bring about the freedom that a tyrant's presence alone precluded. It happened in America; surely it will happen everywhere else. Thus our war of liberation, to free Iraq of its King George III.
In both Afghanistan and in Iraq we have won the war, but we stand in danger of losing what we won because our foreign policy suffers from the King George Syndrome. Freedom is neither a spontaneous nor a universal aspiration. Other goods captivate the minds of peoples from other lands, order, honor and tribal loyalties being the most obvious. And because these other goods orient these people no less powerfully than freedom orients us, we are apt to be sorely surprised when peoples who are liberated turn to new tyrants who can ensure order; to terrorists who die for the honor of their country or of Islam; and to tribal warlords whose winner-take-all mentality is corrosive to the pluralism and toleration that are the very hallmarks of modern democracy. [ complete article ]
Who will save Abu-Mazen?
The U.S. leaves him hanging
By Uri Avnery, Counterpunch, August 11, 2003
Abu-Mazen will fall before the end of October--this conviction is gaining ground in leading Palestinian circles.
This forecast is based on the belief that Abu-Mazen will not get anything, neither from the Americans nor from Sharon. No release for most of the prisoners, no complete removal of the checkpoints inside the Palestinian territories, no stop to the building of the wall, no total withdrawal of the army from Palestinian towns, no lifting of the blockade on President Arafat, no freeze of the settlements, no dismantling of the settlement outposts that were put up in the last two and a half years (as stipulated by the Road Map).
If they had wanted to "help Abu-Mazen", to quote the formula current in Washington, they would have fulfilled at least some of these demands. But nothing of the sort has happened. The well publicized release of a handful of prisoners, most of whom where due to be released anyhow, only highlighted the absence of goodwill and increased the anger.
Abu-Mazen became Prime Minister because the Americans demanded it. The Palestinians hoped that the Americans would give him things that they were unwilling to grant Yasser Arafat. This would have meant the US exerting real pressure on Sharon in order to compel him to deliver the goods. This has not happened. The terrible conditions of life in the occupied territories have not improved. In some places they have even deteriorated. [ complete article ]
Preventive war 'the supreme crime'
By Noam Chomsky, ZNet, August 11, 2003
September 2002 was marked by three events of considerable importance, closely related. The United States, the most powerful state in history, announced a new national security strategy asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently. Any challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq. And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would determine whether the administration would be able to carry forward its radical international and domestic agenda. [ complete article ]
What liberation?
By Kimberly Sevcik, Mother Jones, July/August, 2003
Walking the streets of Herat, Afghanistan's second-largest city, you would never guess that women here live in fear. Life in the city seems peaceful -- families ride, four to a bicycle, down wide, cypress-lined boulevards, and the bazaars are crowded with shoppers buying oranges and almonds and foil-wrapped toffees imported from Iran. "Life in Herat is better than life is for women in most parts of Afghanistan," says 40-year-old Aysha Jalili, who returned last year from Canada to help rebuild her native country. "Women once again have opportunities here."
Behind closed doors, however, women tell other stories -- stories of a place where daily life is still governed by restrictions that recall the morality policing of the Taliban. A gynecologist, who asks to be called Dr. Afzali for fear of retribution, tells me that she is called to Herat's hospital at least five times a week to perform "chastity tests" on women who have been arrested for talking to men who are not their husbands, brothers, or fathers. [ complete article ]
Inside an enemy cell
By Scott Johnson, Newsweek, August 18, 2003
Inside one of the Soviet-style houses, up a flight of stairs, was a small family apartment where three Iraqi resistance fighters had agreed to be interviewed. They emerged from a back room, armed with AK-47s and grenades, their faces hidden by red-and-white kaffiyehs. Seating themselves on floor mats, they talked about the war against America. Their group, calling itself the Army of Mohammed, has claimed responsibility for the deaths of at least 15 U.S. soldiers since the fall of Saddam Hussein. "We did kill U.S. soldiers and we destroyed some of their vehicles and equipment," said the leader of the three, calling himself Mohammed al-Rawi. "We will do it again."
Such threats worry Bush officials more than they want to admit. "We've made good progress," the president said last week, marking the 100th day since he declared an end to major combat. "Iraq is more secure." Nevertheless, 56 Americans were killed in action during those 100 days, an additional 404 Coalition forces were wounded badly enough to be knocked out of duty, and there's no sign that the attacks are letting up. On the contrary, the resistance seems to be getting bigger, smarter and more organized. U.S. officials in Baghdad have estimated its total strength in the thousands, and recently acknowledged that its efforts may be coordinated at the regional level, if not nationally. [ complete article ]
Iran-Contra, amplified
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times, August 12, 2003
A specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Even some of the people and countries are the same. And the methods - particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy - are definitely the same. [ complete article ]
He saw it coming
The former Bushie who knew Iraq would go to pot
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, August 5, 2003
Among the many remarks that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz no doubt wishes he hadn't made, the following, from prewar congressional testimony last February, stands out:
"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine."
It's one thing to be wrong. It's another to be incapable of imagining yourself wrong. Much of what has gone wrong in the Bush administration's postwar Iraq policy can be attributed to a failure of imagination. But there was no excuse for this particular failure. In the previous dozen years, U.S. armed forces had taken part in five major post-conflict nation-building exercises, four of them in predominantly Muslim nations. There is a record of what works and what doesn't. Had Wolfowitz studied the record, or talked with those who had, he wouldn't have made such a wrongheaded remark. [ complete article ]
A call to arms, a troubled scientist and the unravelling of a mysterious death
By Paul Vallely, The Independent, August 11, 2003
Almost a year has passed since Tony Blair's Government issued its first fateful dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was not what became known as the "dodgy dossier". That came later. But, as it happened, the controversy surrounding the first dossier on the threat from Saddam Hussein was far more grave.
Dr David Kelly, a former Porton Down scientist and UN weapons inspector in Iraq, was among those involved in compiling it. He had worked for the Ministry of Defence as an expert on biological warfare for the past four years. The dossier was published on 24 September 2002. It contained the portentous warning that Saddam Hussein had chemical or biological weapons ready to use within 45 minutes of the order being given.
We now know, that David Kelly was expressing reservations about this core claim. We know this - even before the Hutton Inquiry takes its first evidence today - because since Dr Kelly's body was found near his Oxfordshire home on 18 July a stream of intriguing new details have emerged. [ complete article ]
A debate over U.S. 'empire' builds in unexpected circles
By Dan Morgan, Washington Post, August 10, 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament." [ complete article ]
A villager attacks U.S. troops, but why?
By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 11, 2003
American officials contend that the vast majority of the attacks [against U.S. troops] are driven by remnants of former president Saddam Hussein's government and the Baath Party he used for 35 years to hold power. Men like Khalaf [who was killed on August 1, while trying to fire rocket-propelled grenades at a U.S. convoy], they say, are the foot soldiers lured by bounties that run as high as $5,000, perhaps motivated by loyalty to the fallen government, or by fear from threats to their family if they refuse to fight.
But the portrait of Khalaf that emerged from interviews last week suggests a more complicated figure.
A 32-year-old father of six, he was an army deserter who, villagers say, had nothing to do with the Baath Party. He prayed at the mosque on Fridays, although he was not a fervently religious man. His hardscrabble life was shaped by the grinding poverty of his village, whose burdens have mounted since the government's fall on April 9. In the end, many here speculated he was changed irrevocably by the perceived day-to-day humiliations of occupation.
To some of his friends and family, he represents an Iraqi everyman, a recruit whose very commonality does not bode well for U.S. troops battling a four-month guerrilla campaign in northern and western Iraq that few in Albu Alwan seem to believe will end soon. [ complete article ]
Family shot dead by panicking U.S. troops
By Justin Huggler, The Independent, August 10, 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers. [ complete article ]
Depiction of threat outgrew supporting evidence
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, August 10, 2003
His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.
An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.
At issue was Iraq's efforts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. The U.S. government said those tubes were for centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. But the IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets.
Joe described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie. According to people familiar with his presentation, which circulated before and afterward among government and outside specialists, Joe said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was "overspecified," "inappropriate" and "excessively strong." No one, he told the inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a rocket.
In fact, there was just such a rocket. According to knowledgeable U.S. and overseas sources, experts from U.S. national laboratories reported in December to the Energy Department and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was manufacturing copies of the Italian-made Medusa 81. Not only the Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the fraction of a millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes. [ complete article ]
Meetings with Iran-Contra arms dealer confirmed
By Bradley Graham and Peter Slevin, Washington Post, August 9, 2003
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged yesterday that Pentagon officials met secretly with a discredited expatriate Iranian arms merchant who figured prominently in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s, characterizing the contact as an unexceptional effort to gain possibly useful information.
While Rumsfeld said that the contact occurred more than a year ago and that nothing came of it, his aides scrambled during the day to piece together more details amid other reports that Rumsfeld's account may have been incomplete.
Last night, a senior defense official disclosed that another meeting with the Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, occurred in June in Paris. The official said that, while the first contact, in late 2001, had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to an Iranian government offer to provide information relevant to the war on terrorism, the second one resulted from "an unplanned, unscheduled encounter."
A senior administration official said, however, that Pentagon staff members held one or two other meetings with Ghorbanifar last year in Italy. The sessions so troubled Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the official said, that he complained to Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser. [ complete article ]
Faith & Reason: Forget Osama bin Laden, the real brains behind al-Qa'ida is back
By Ian Linden, The Independent, August 9, 2003
In the Boy's Own paper prose reserved for such matters we were told that the "Number Two to Bin Laden at the top of the al-Qa'ida terror network" resurfaced last week. At least a recent tape of his did. "We tell America one thing: what you have seen so far is nothing but the first skirmishes," said Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a chilling warning for the United States if any of the al- Qa'ida prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are harmed. Given international concern over the legality of their detention, it was not a naďve statement.
Everyone needs a name to flag up a news story and nobody likes things complicated. The point is not to understand but condemn and demonise or idolise. And the one and only name that instantly denotes "Islamic" international terrorism today is Osama bin Laden. But it's the wrong name. Or, at least, the spotlight is misdirected. For the privileged, rich young Saudi Osama brought mainly money and an eager activism to the formation of al-Qa'ida, while the Egyptian al-Zawahiri brought the ideas, the intellectual weight and behind-the-scenes leadership. Money talks of course. Ideas grab hold of people. You can freeze assets. But not ideas. [ complete article ]
HAS RUMSFELD'S OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS ADVANCED FROM INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS TO INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS?
Pentagon official's clearance stripped
By Knut Royce, Newsday, August 3, 2003
A Pentagon official associated with a controversial Pentagon unit run by foreign policy hawks has been stripped of his security clearance after the FBI linked him to a Lebanese-American businessman under federal weapons investigation, according to administration officials and intelligence sources.
The official, F. Michael Maloof, came to the attention of the FBI and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (BICE) shortly after a .45-caliber handgun was seized from the businessman, Imad el Hage, at Washington's Dulles International Airport in January. It was the handgun that led the FBI to Maloof, the sources said. [ complete article ]
U.S. revokes security clearance for Pentagon employee
Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder, August 1, 2003
A veteran Pentagon employee who was a key player in the effort to find links between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida has been stripped of his security clearance, according to senior U.S. officials.
The employee, F. Michael Maloof, is associated with a Lebanese-American businessman who is under federal investigation for possible involvement in a gun-running scheme to Liberia, the West African nation embroiled in civil war. The businessman, Imad El Haje, approached Maloof on behalf of Syria to seek help in arranging a communications channel between Syria and the Defense Department. [ Complete article ]
U.S. admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq
By Andrew Buncombe, The Independent, August 10, 2003
American pilots dropped the controversial incendiary agent napalm on Iraqi troops during the advance on Baghdad. The attacks caused massive fireballs that obliterated several Iraqi positions.
The Pentagon denied using napalm at the time, but Marine pilots and their commanders have confirmed that they used an upgraded version of the weapon against dug-in positions. They said napalm, which has a distinctive smell, was used because of its psychological effect on an enemy.
A 1980 UN convention banned the use against civilian targets of napalm, a terrifying mixture of jet fuel and polystyrene that sticks to skin as it burns. The US, which did not sign the treaty, is one of the few countries that makes use of the weapon. It was employed notoriously against both civilian and military targets in the Vietnam war. [ complete article ]
On terrorism, Methodism, Saudi "Wahhabism" and the censored 9-11 report
By Gary Leupp, Counterpunch, August 8, 2003
Two scandals unfold simultaneously: the larger, centering on administration lies concerning the threat posed by Iraq, and concerning Baghdad's supposed connections to al-Qaeda; the smaller (which might be a tempest in a teapot) on alleged connections between al-Qaeda and Saudi officialdom. They may well impact one another as Congress resumes its investigations next month. While it seems implausible that Riyadh would deliberately promote terrorist attacks on the U.S., the neocons running the show in Washington have asserted propositions equally improbable, and (so far) gotten away with it; and they would very much like to see regime change in Saudi Arabia. Conceivably, as they feel the heat of investigations and mounting public concern about the results of the war on Iraq, they will feel the need to create a distraction. What better way to do that than to whip up fears about Saudi Arabia, which some of them consider the real "kernel of evil" in the Middle East? [ complete article ]
'Bring us home': G.I.s flood U.S. with war-weary emails
By Paul Harris and Jonathan Franklin, The Observer, August 10, 2003
Susan Schuman is angry. Her GI son is serving in the Iraqi town of Samarra, at the heart of the 'Sunni triangle', where American troops are killed with grim regularity.
Breaking the traditional silence of military families during time of war, Schuman knows what she wants - and who she blames for the danger to her son, Justin. 'I want them to bring our troops home. I am appalled at Bush's policies. He has got us into a terrible mess,' she said.
Schuman may just be the tip of an iceberg. She lives in Shelburne Falls, a small town in Massachusetts, and says all her neighbours support her view. 'I don't know anyone around here who disagrees with me,' she said.
Schuman's views are part of a growing unease back home at the rising casualty rate in Iraq, a concern coupled with deep anger at President George W. Bush's plans to cut army benefits for many soldiers. Criticism is also coming directly from soldiers risking their lives under the guns of Saddam Hussein's fighters, and they are using a weapon not available to troops in previous wars: the internet. [ complete article ]
Point by point, a look back at a 'thick' file, a fateful six months later
By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press (via San Diego Union-Tribune), August 9, 2003
On a Baghdad evening last February, in a stiflingly warm conference room high above the city's streets, Iraqi bureaucrats, European envoys and foreign reporters crowded before television screens to hear the reading of an indictment.
In a hushed U.N. Security Council chamber in New York, Secretary of State Colin Powell unleashed an 80-minute avalanche of allegations: The Iraqis were hiding chemical and biological weapons, were secretly working to make more banned arms, were reviving their nuclear bomb project. He spoke of "the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world."
It was the most comprehensive presentation of the U.S. case for war. Powell marshaled what were described as intercepted Iraqi conversations, reconnaissance photos of Iraqi sites, accounts of defectors, and other intelligence sources. Since 1998, he told fellow foreign ministers, "we have amassed much intelligence indicating that Iraq is continuing to make these weapons."
In the United States, Powell's "thick intelligence file" was galvanizing, swinging opinion toward war.
But in Baghdad, when the satellite broadcast ended, presidential science adviser Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi appeared before the audience and dismissed the U.S. case as "stunts" aimed at swaying the uninformed. [...]
How does Powell's pivotal indictment look from the vantage point of today? Powell has said several times since February that he stands by it, the State Department said Wednesday. Here is an Associated Press review of major elements, based on both what was known in February and what has been learned since: [ complete article ]
Shooting down Missile Defense
Even the Pentagon admits the program is in trouble
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, August 7, 2003
If the generals in charge of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency followed the wispiest trail of logic, they would have slashed the program and moved on to more promising pursuits long ago. This month brings yet another bit of news indicating not only that the program has scant chance of producing a workable missile-defense system, but that its managers know of its dim prospects.
The latest flash, from the Aug. 1 edition of the trade journal Defense News, is that the agency has suspended one of the program's most crucial components on the grounds that the technology it involves is "not mature enough" to fund.
The component is called the space-based kinetic-energy boost-phase interceptor, a name that sounds too esoteric to deserve notice (and, indeed, no mainstream paper seems to have picked up on the report of its suspension), but in fact the news is a bombshell. [ complete article ]
Shiite divisions give the U.S. breathing room
By Juan Cole, Daily Star, August 9, 2003
Most Shiite leaders in Iraq have made a tactical decision not to resist the Anglo-American occupation during the coming year. They hope the US, in recreating Iraq as a parliamentary democracy, will give them the political power they deserve by virtue of their numbers. If not, or if the Americans overstay their welcome, the Shiites might well turn against them. It is not, however, clear that the community is united enough yet to effectively close ranks against coalition forces.
As a result of their differences over the shape of a future Iraq, Shiite clerics have fallen to fighting an underground guerrilla war against one another. The chief prizes are the populous neighborhoods of eastern Baghdad and the revered shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. [ complete article ]
WHEN A NATION FORGETS ITS ROOT...
Not a terrorist, but still doing 9/11 time
By Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times, August 8, 2003
Nearly two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, a time when most foreign detainees have been sent home, Ansar Mahmood is desperate to remain in America.
A hard worker who delivered pizzas in upstate New York, he saved his money and supported his family in Pakistan. Like many immigrants, he found promise in the American dream.
But then he became one of countless Muslim immigrants picked up in a sweeping government dragnet. His life fell apart three weeks after the attacks, when he was suspected of being a terrorist because he had wanted his picture taken on a scenic Hudson Valley overlook that happened to be near a local water plant.
He was cleared of any terrorist intentions. But like most of the detainees, the government found other reasons to hold him -- he was convicted on a felony charge of helping friends who came here illegally from Pakistan. For that, he was sentenced to six days in jail. So far, he has served nearly 19 months while authorities seek to deport him.
Mahmood's plight represents a post-Sept. 11 reality in America: Immigrants have always faced difficulties. But now it is all the harder to chase prosperity, even for people like Mahmood, who came here with his papers in order, worked 12- and 18-hour days to gain a foothold and still was able to send much of his money to his needy family back home. [ complete article ]
Sunnis find the back seat uncomfortable
By Ferry Biedermann, Inter Press Service, August 8, 2003
Historically, Iraq has always been dominated by Sunnis, whether under the Abbasid Caliphs, the Ottoman Turks or the Hashemite monarchs.
That Sunni dominance is under direct threat for the first time now under the Coalition Provisional Council (CPA) that rules Iraq in the name of the U.S. and British occupation.
The Governing Council of Iraqi politicians appointed by the CPA reflects the Shia Muslim numerical majority. There has never been a census dividing Iraq's population along sectarian lines, but most experts agree that Shias have a majority.
Of the 25 members on the new Council, only five can be described as Arab Sunni.
"It is asking for trouble", says Mudar Shawkat, a leader of the broad-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), whose chairman Ahmed Chalabi, nominally a Shia, is a member of the Governing Council. Shawkat, a Sunni, says it is unacceptable to suddenly change a balance that has existed for such a long time.
"Arab Sunnis have been involved in the Iraq establishment for hundreds of years," says Shawkat. "They will never accept that somebody puts them aside."
Political scientist Saad Jawad, a professor at Baghdad University, agrees with Shawkat. They both argue that it is folly to assign seats on the Governing Council along sectarian lines. [ complete article ]
Behind the barrier
By Nicole Gaouette, Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 2003
Yusif Josef Ramsi is still farming, if you can call it that. The West Bank farmer, never a major landowner, once tended his seven-acre plot of fig and olive trees with pride.
Now, what's left of his patrimony sits in a few dozen black plastic buckets.
"The rest is all over there," says Mr. Ramsi, pointing a gnarled hand beyond the sleek gray expanse of Israel's security barrier, just a few feet away.
At 26 feet high, the barrier around Qalqilya is the most striking example of Israel's attempt to physically separate itself from the Palestinians. [ complete article ]
The U.S. is starting a nuclear fight that will be hard to stop
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, August 9, 2003
The ambiguities clouding US policy towards North Korea date back to the early days of the administration, when George Bush put a damper on former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine policy" of detente with the North. Since 9/11 and Bush's "axis of evil" speech, matters have just gone from bad to worse.
The planned talks in China, also involving South Korea, Japan and Russia, are viewed in the region and beyond as a crucial opportunity to arrest this apparently inexorable downward spiral. The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, and others have suggested that North Korea might initially freeze its nuclear arms programmes in return for a sort of US non-aggression pact.
But such compromises may not suit the likes of Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, and other hardliners, including perhaps Bush himself - who has professed personal loathing for Pyongyang's communist leader. For them, it seems, nothing less than Kim's overthrow will ultimately suffice, although it may have to wait until a second Bush term. [ complete article ]
"A JEWISH NATION-STATE WILL NOT TAKE HOLD HERE"
THE NATIVE STATE: A VISION OF ENDURING PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi have each arrived at the same conclusion: The creation of a Jewish sovereign state is a failed enterprise. Peace in the Middle East will depend on Jews and Arabs being able to live side by side, with equal rights in a land from which neither excludes the other.
Haim Hanegbi: In the past couple of years I realized that I made a mistake; that, like the Palestinians, I too was taken in. I took Israeli talk seriously and didn't pay attention to Israeli deeds. When I realized, one day, that the settlements had doubled themselves, I also realized that Israel had missed its one hour of grace, had rejected the rare opportunity it was given. Then I understood that Israel could not free itself of its expansionist pattern. It is bound hand and foot to its constituent ideology and to its constituent act, which was an act of dispossession.
I realized that the reason it is so tremendously difficult for Israel to dismantle settlements is that any recognition that the settlements in the West Bank exist on plundered Palestinian land will also cast a threatening shadow over the Jezreel Valley, and over the moral status of Beit Alfa and Ein Harod. I understood that a very deep pattern was at work here. That there is one historical continuum that runs from Kibbutz Beit Hashita to the illegal settler outposts; from Moshav Nahalal to the Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip. And that continuity apparently cannot be broken. It's a continuity that takes us back to the very beginning, to the incipient moment. [...]
When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds.
There is something genetic here that doesn't allow us truly to recognize the Palestinians, that doesn't allow us to make peace with them. And that something has to do with the fact that even before the return of the land and the houses and the money, the settlers' first act of expiation toward the natives of this land must be to restore to them their dignity, their memory, their justness. [ complete article ]
Meron Benvenisti: I think the time has come to declare that the Zionist revolution is over. Maybe it should even be done officially, along with setting a date for the repeal of the Law of Return. We should start to think differently, talk differently. Not to seize on this ridiculous belief in a Palestinian state or in the fence. Because in the end we are going to be a Jewish minority here. And the problems that your children and my grandchildren are going to have to cope with are the same ones that de Klerk faced in South Africa. The paradigm, therefore, is the binational one. That's the direction. That's the conceptual universe we have to get used to. [ complete article ]
Bush administration paralyzed over Iran
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times, August 9, 2003
Does the administration of US President George W Bush still consider al-Qaeda and its associates the main target in its almost three-year-old "war on terrorism", or has its military victory in Iraq whetted its appetite for bigger game?
That is in effect the question that the powers-that-be in Iran appear to be posing to Washington at a critical moment in the war's evolution. The administration appears deadlocked over an answer.
According to a series of leaks by US officials, Iran has offered to hand over, if not directly to Washington then to friendly allies, three senior al-Qaeda leaders and might provide another three top terrorist suspects that Washington believes are being held by Tehran.
But its price - for the US military to shut down permanently the operations of an Iraq-based Iranian rebel group that is on the State Department's official terrorism list - might be too high for some hardliners, centered in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, who led the charge for war in Iraq. [ complete article ]
Salt of the earth
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, August 8, 2003
Since we're stuck in Iraq indefinitely, we may as well try to learn something. But I suspect that our current leaders won't be receptive to the most important lesson of the land where cities and writing were invented: that manmade environmental damage can destroy a civilization.
When archaeologists excavated the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, they were amazed not just by what they found but by where they found it: in the middle of an unpopulated desert. In "Ur of the Chaldees," Leonard Woolley asked: "Why, if Ur was an empire's capital, if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?" [ complete article ]
EUROPEAN-MIDEAST-AMERICAN BALANCE OF POWER
While the neocons still insist that the "liberation" of Iraq provides a beachhead for the democratization of the Middle East, when it comes to Turkey, Washington is more inclined to trust old generals -- the guarantors of strong Turkish-Israeli-U.S. ties -- than less predictable populist Islamic democrats.
Warning shot for Turkey's military
By K. Gajendra Singh, Asia Times, August 9, 2003
Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a former head of the Constitutional Court, signed into law this week a harmonization package that was passed by Turkey's parliament last week. It will help bring the country closer to Europe Union (EU) norms in preparation for an EU decision towards the end of next year on Ankara being given an accession date to talk about joining the body. [...]
Leaders and the media in European capitals have praised the latest reforms, and the 15-nation EU welcomed the changes, but said that it would closely watch how they were implemented on the ground. Since last year, many senior EU officials have openly demanded that Turkish politics be freed from the military's influence, and its laws aligned to match European constitutions for it to qualify for entry into the union. [ complete article ]
Meanwhile, the neocons fear the consequences of Turkey losing the "steady hand" of a politically powerful military. See Daniel Pipes' The Islamic Republic of Turkey?
Hawks circle Sharon as scandals widen
Likud politicians seen preparing for battle of succession
By Chemi Shalev, Forward, August 8, 2003
Israeli politicians have begun gearing up for a battle of succession as Prime Minister Sharon struggles against a mounting wave of legal investigations and charges of corruption that could potentially drown his political career, perhaps in the coming months.
During the last two weeks, hardly a day has gone by without another serious blow to Sharon's image and standing. The prime minister is described by ministers, officials and close observers as increasingly preoccupied and short-tempered, as befits a man who, so goes the growing speculation among insiders, has begun to fear that the end is nigh. [ complete article ]
A call to violence
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, August 7, 2003
As President Bush met with Palestinian premier Mahmoud Abbas and his Israeli counterpart Ariel Sharon in Washington last week, one of Bush's closest allies in Congress was in Israel. Tom DeLay, the influential leader of the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives was accorded the privilege of addressing members of the Knesset on 30 July. His speech was so extreme it prompted Labour Party lawmaker Danny Yatom to comment, "Geez, Likud is nothing compared to him."
In his speech, DeLay, a representative from a suburban district near Houston, Texas, dismissed the unilateral cease-fire by Palestinian factions, which has resulted in a virtual cessation of violence against Israeli civilians and occupation forces, as nothing more than a "90-day vacation" for "terrorists" and "murderers". He urged Israel to ignore the truce and go on killing Palestinian activists. DeLay informed the Israeli lawmakers that he was an "Israeli at heart", and acknowledged that Palestinians "have been oppressed and abused", though only by their own leaders, never by Israel. DeLay's central point was that the entire burden of ending the decades-old conflict lay on the shoulders of the Palestinians. Knesset members gave DeLay a standing ovation. [ complete article ]
Battle-scarred Baghdad quarter wants U.S. troops out
By Joseph Logan, Reuters, August 8, 2003
If Iraq's occupiers truly want to restore order, say residents of a Baghdad neighborhood caught up in a deadly confrontation between gunmen and U.S. troops, their first step is simple -- leave.
In Karada, where U.S. forces killed an Iraqi bystander on Thursday during a firefight after a bomb rocked their vehicle, many Iraqis have had enough of soldiers they say are too quick to fire on people they are supposed to be protecting.
"They disgust me. They are ignorant and terrified, so they shoot at random, at anything, at a house with 14 people in it," said 43-year-old Sadeq, pointing to the bullet-riddled house where he and his family huddled during the two-hour gun battle. [ complete article ]
Iraq war's 20,000 wounded civilians ignored
By Andrew Cawthorne, Reuters, August 7, 2003
Around 20,000 civilians were wounded in the Iraq war and the U.S.-British occupiers are ignoring their suffering, a research group said on Thursday in what it termed the first study of the conflict's casualty toll.
"The maimed civilians of Iraq have been brushed under the carpet," the Iraq Body Count (IBC) said.
The Anglo-American group of academics and peace activists chided U.S. and British postwar administrators for failing to set up programs for the wounded or pay them compensation. [ complete article ]
Al Qaeda brand of terror wins Asian recruits
By Jane Macartney, Reuters, August 8, 2003
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network has been described by experts as a terror chain with franchises worldwide.
But this week's Jakarta bombing, if it turns out to be the work of an al Qaeda affiliate, suggests that head office may not need a strong grip on its distant outposts.
Despite public revulsion at indiscriminate violence that kills people from the local community and designated targets alike, some analysts believe there will be no shortage of new recruits to the cause.
"Smiling bomber" Amrozi's broad grin and thumbs-up gesture after a court in Bali sentenced him to death on Thursday for last year's nightclub bombings on the island must have chilled victims, their relatives and moderate Muslims alike. [ complete article ]
As ordered, it's about oil
By Ruth Rosen, San Francisco Chronicle, August 8, 2003
President Bush has signed a slew of executive orders that have gone unreported for weeks or months -- most notably, changes to environmental regulations and restricted access to former presidential papers and Freedom of Information Act information.
Now, a potentially explosive executive order has just been discovered by SEEN, the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network. Signed on May 22, it appears to give U.S. oil companies in Iraq blanket immunity from lawsuits and criminal prosecution. [ complete article ]
U.S. clamps secrecy on warnings before 9/11
By Marie Cocco, Newsday, August 7, 2003
It's not just the Saudi secret that's being kept.
The recent report of the joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon reveals what the Bush administration doesn't want Americans to know about the American government. [ complete article ]
Embassy blast raises specter of terrorism in Baghdad
By Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, August 7, 2003
The car bomb that ripped apart the Jordanian Embassy here has brought terrorism to the heart of Iraq's capital and presented the American-led coalition with a new and unpredictable threat.
American forces have repeatedly come under attack from small teams armed with rocket-propelled grenades and been attacked by an array of homemade mines and explosive devices.
But this attack was different. The blast was not directed against well-armed American forces but against what the military calls a "soft target," a vulnerable and undefended structure. The goal was not to alter the military equation but to produce a large number of civilian casualties.
This, experts said, was terrorism in its rawest form and a blow against the new order the American-led coalition is struggling to build. [ complete article ]
Taliban kill six soldiers in Afghanistan
By Noor Khan, Associated Press, August 7, 2003
In one of the most brazen and well-organized attacks in recent months, 40 suspected Taliban fighters armed with assault rifles shot up a government office in southern Afghanistan, killing six Afghan soldiers and a driver for a U.S. aid organization.
The violence followed a series of other attacks on foreign troops, government forces and aid workers, hampering agencies that are trying to rebuild the impoverished, war-shattered country. [ complete article ]
Birth of a free nation: Etats-Unis d'Amerique
By Paul Woodward, The War in Context, August 7, 2003
Most of the time, I'm content to sit in the background on this blog, pointing readers in interesting directions, but sometimes I just can't keep quiet. First, we had Rummy with his, what's happening in Iraq is like the aftermath of the American Revolution, and "freedom is untidy." Now Condi Rice tells us is it's like the fight for civil rights.
Here's what it's like: It's like an American Revolution led by the French. Wouldn't that have been dandy?
Why Bush likes tall tales
By Yossi Sarid, Haaretz, August 7, 2003
The day is not far off when Abu Mazen and his government will fall. It's only a matter of time. Then, Ariel Sharon will get Yasser Arafat back, and he will be relieved to be rid of Abu Mazen's moderation. Sharon always had huge difficulties speaking to moderate Palestinians, while he swims like a fish in a sea of Palestinian extremism. There's a problem with moderates. You have to encourage and strengthen them, offer them real proposals and make a real start on the famous "painful concessions." Sharon doesn't have any such intentions. All he wanted to do is get home from Washington in one piece.
Sharon's behavior is not surprising to anyone who has known him for many years. The surprise is President Bush, who has evinced a strange passion for tall tales. It is completely unclear why the American president has decided to consume overflowing portions of complete lies served up to him by Ariel Sharon. Therefore, when Abu Mazen falls, and his government with him, the blame will fall on Sharon, but mainly on Bush, who maintains the pretension of an "honest broker." [ complete article ]
How Jordan became a target in Iraq
By Paul Reynolds, BBC News, August 7, 2003
The history and politics of Jordan have been intricately linked to those of its neighbour, Iraq, and the car bomb outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad indicates that this is still the case.
"As always, Jordan occupies an uneasy middle ground," said James Reeve, a Middle East analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in London.
He told BBC News Online: "King Abdullah has been hedging his bets over Iraq. Jordan is financially and militarily dependent on the US, so it can't stray too far from the American line.
"But the King's domestic audience is fiercely critical of the American occupation and this cannot be ignored." [ complete article ]
Dealing with Al-Daawa and its controversial legacy
By Mahan Abedin, Daily Star, August 7, 2003
The recent co-option of the secretive Al-Daawa Party into the Iraqi governing council came as a surprise to observers of Iraqi politics. While Al-Daawa is Iraq’s oldest Shiite party and was ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s most serious enemy, in fighting the Baathist regime the party also struck at its then Arab and Western allies, particularly the US. Moreover, the party has the unenviable reputation of having pioneered the use of suicide bombings. [ complete article ]
How neo-cons influence the Pentagon ...
By Jim Lobe, Asia Times, August 8, 2003
An ad hoc office under US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq. [ complete article ]
An axis of junkies
By Julian Borger, The Guardian, August 6, 2003
Whoever had the bright idea of classifying [the 28 pages removed from the 9-11 congressional report] should have known that, just like Nixon's missing minutes [in the Watergate tapes], those pages would attract more attention than the other 800-plus put together.
Consequently, attention has been focused on a subject that the Bush administration would prefer to be ignored: the strange, dysfunctional and incestuous relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia. The bond is far more relevant to the events of September 11 2001 than the absurdly-hyped connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. [ complete article ]
Welcome home
By James Meek, The Guardian, August 7, 2003
Twenty-two years ago Mazzin al-Khazragi fled Iraq to escape Saddam Hussein and military service. He has been living in Cardiff [Wales] ever since. With the end of the regime it became safe to go back.
There is no grand entrance to Baghdad; it creeps up around you. The roads are busy, many shops are open, and the detritus of battle has been cleared. Traffic is often gridlocked none the less. Baghdadis seem to be spending half their time queuing for petrol and the other half stuck in jams caused by the queues.
It is mid-afternoon. There is a lot of weeping. Maz breaks down at Salam's house at the cries of Salam's family. Salam's father, wheelchair-bound, has not seen his son for 23 years and cannot speak a few words without sobbing.
Maz and I are to stay at the home of his aunt Sabihah, in a rougher part of town. Maz made three short visits to Iraq before the war but it is still an emotional moment when the metal gate of the tiny courtyard judders open and his cousin Fatin reaches out to embrace him.
Baghdad is a city in which the citizens have lost all the broader frames of reference; of truth, of reality, of the significance of memory, of law. All they have left is the narrower reference points of family, the Koran and survival. The future and, indeed, the past are unpredictable places. The reemergence of independent newspapers and the hungry dash for newly permitted satellite TV only adds to the simmering stew of legend, testimony and twisted polemic which makes up Iraqis' perception of what is going on. Few people can express the totality of Saddam's crimes, but everyone tells the story, apocryphal or true, of the executed boy whose body was recently excavated from a mass grave, his dead hand still clutching the marbles he was holding when he was shot. [ complete article ]
Operation Iranian freedom
By Tariq Ali, The Nation, July 31, 2003
In Washington, the hawks and vultures are beginning to gaze at Iran with greed-filled eyes. The British attack dog is barking and straining at the leash. And the Israeli ambassador to the United States has helpfully suggested that the onward march of the American Empire should not be brought to a premature halt in Baghdad. Teheran beckons, and then there is always Damascus. The only argument summoned by the blood-mottled "doves" is that the occupation of Iraq should be sufficient to bring the Iranian mullahs to heel. Naturally, this latter view does not satisfy the would-be Shah or his followers in Los Angeles. The Young Pretender is appearing regularly on the BBC and CNN these days, desperate to please and a bit too eager to mimic his father and grandfather. Might the empire put him back on the Peacock Throne? And, if so, how long would he last? [ complete article ]
Legal scholars call U.S. detention policy grave threat
By Tom Brune, Newsday, August 6, 2003
Accused "dirty bomb" terrorist suspect Jose Padilla has been isolated in a naval brig for more than a year, ever since President George W. Bush classified him as an "enemy combatant" and called him a "threat to the nation."
But last week, nine thick friend-of-the-court briefs were filed in Padilla's appellate case, arguing against what they see as just as serious a threat to the nation: Bush's assertion that he can, as commander-in-chief, order the military to detain an American citizen picked up on U.S. soil indefinitely without charges, a trial or access to a lawyer.
"The precedent the executive asks this court to set, represents one of the gravest threats to the rule of law, and to the liberty our Constitution enshrines, that the nation has ever faced," said one brief by 14 retired federal appellate judges and former government officials, including Abner Mikva, Harold Tyler and Philip Allen Lacovara. [ complete article ]
'Dr Strangeloves' meet to plan new nuclear era
By Julian Borger, The Guardian, August 7, 2003
US government scientists and Pentagon officials will gather today behind tight security at a Nebraska air force base to discuss the development of a modernised arsenal of small, specialised nuclear weapons which critics believe could mark the dawn of a new era in proliferation. [ complete article ]
For Iraqis, a struggle to recoup loss
By Brian MacQuarrie, Boston Globe, August 6, 2003
Jasin Abd Nabey leaned over a clerk's shoulder on the crowded sidewalk outside a Baghdad court, talking excitedly and gesturing as the man composed Nabey's petition in the best legal language he could muster.
''The Americans took my car for nothing,'' said Nabey, recalling on Saturday how US troops seized the automobile 10 days earlier when Nabey became embroiled in a roadside altercation. ''I will get permission from the judge to get it back.''
Nabey entered the front door of the hectic courthouse with hope, but he was destined to be disappointed. No one inside the fractured legal system that is the postwar Iraqi judiciary can retrieve his confiscated car, and American military officials who could compensate Nabey are doing little to spread the word that they can. [ complete article ]
Iraqis increasingly view U.S. troops as foreign occupiers
By Drew Brown, Knight Ridder, August 5, 2003
Nearly four months after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime, the euphoria most Iraqis expressed over their leader's ouster largely has evaporated, replaced by growing resentment of the American presence.
The discontent suggests that, even as U.S. officials claim they are closing on in the deposed dictator with a $25 million bounty on his head, capturing or killing Saddam won't help restore order in the country the way some U.S. leaders have suggested.
Many Iraqis increasingly view American troops as foreign occupiers. And as attacks against U.S. troops continue, the low-level guerrilla war that American military officials say is being waged by former regime loyalists, foreign terrorists and criminals threatens to escalate into a wider nationalist struggle. [ complete article ]
Iraqis deny al-Qaida involved in attacks
By Scheherezade Faramarzi, Associated Press, August 5, 2003
Senior American officials are sending a message that violence against U.S. soldiers in Iraq is increasingly the work of foreign fighters-- by implication, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
But Iraqis and American officers on the ground say the evidence is stronger that Iraqis angry at American occupation and Saddam Hussein loyalists are behind most attacks.
The U.S. officers blamed the persistent resistance on disgruntled Iraqis or officials of Saddam's Baath Party who lost out when his regime crumbled. Iraqis say American heavy-handedness in conducting searches and making arrests were recruiting local people to the insurgency.
Still, a drumbeat of comments by Bush administration officials depict the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq as part of the larger war on terrorism and seek to turn the focus away from the threat of Saddam's still unfound weapons of mass destruction. [ complete article ]
In Iraq, every picture tells a story
Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, August 6, 2003
The Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim emerged as a leading figure in the Shi'ite community through his untiring struggle against the Saddam Hussein regime. But now his position as the leader of the most organized Shi'ite grouping faces a challenge from sections opposed to his perceived pro-US stance.
Hakim, 63, returned to Iraq in early May after more than two decades of exile in neighboring Iran. There he had formed a movement advocating theocratic rule for Iraq and conducted a low-level, cross-border guerrilla war against the regime of Saddam. His movement, the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), was directly supported with funds by Tehran and with arms by Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.
But now one of Hakim's SAIRI members, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, is a part of the 25-member Governing Council appointed by the United States to help the US civil administration run Iraq until the country is handed over to a democratically elected government, and to give the country's majority Shi'ites a voice after being largely denied by Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime.
This willingness on the part of Baqir al-Hakim to participate in the US process presents many Shi'ites with an awkward dilemma. On the one hand his religious pedigree is excellent, while on the other his political judgment now appears flawed. [ complete article ]
Richard Perle libel watch, week 20
Jack Shafer, Slate, August 5, 2003
Almost five months ago, Richard Perle put Seymour Hersh on notice that a libel suit was coming his way in retaliation for his piece in The New Yorker. But rather than filing his suit in, say, a court of law, Perle picked a friendlier venue -- the news pages of the neoconservative New York Sun -- to air his first pleading.
Perle told the Sun he would sue Hersh in Britain because it's easier to win a case there, a legal strategy the Sun conveyed to its readers with all the art and subtlety of a press release. If the Sun were a court of law and Sun co-owner Conrad Black were its judge, Hersh would be pounding rocks on Devil's Island right now.
But the Sun isn't, nor is Black, and as a consequence, Hersh prowls the earth a free man, stirring up trouble for the Bush administration. And Perle? He still hasn't sued Hersh, and almost once a month the big fella steps in a gooey brown pile, after which the press and legislators pummel him with conflict-of-interest charges. [ complete article ]
Energy rep at Iraq meeting lacked intelligence savvy
Human resources manager not prepared to argue labs' case against nuclear claims
Paul Sperry, WorldNetDaily, August 6, 2003
The official who represented the Energy Department at a key prewar intelligence meeting on Iraq's alleged new nuclear-weapons program was a human resources manager with no intelligence experience, and was easily swayed by Bush administration hawks, say department insiders.
Though Energy disputed a critical piece of evidence – that Baghdad sought aluminum tubing to make nuclear materials – it nonetheless agreed with the White House's conclusion that Baghdad was reconstituting a nuclear-weapons program. The State Department, in contrast, dissented on both counts.
The conclusion formed the cornerstone of last fall's 90-page Top Secret intelligence report used to justify preemptive war on Iraq.
The Energy official who attended the September meeting at CIA headquarters to debate the draft of the report was ill-prepared to argue the technical merits of the case against the White House's position made by Energy's nuclear-weapons research labs, sources say.
It turns out the official, Thomas Rider, is a long-time human resources bureaucrat who lacks experience in the intelligence business. [ complete article ]
Hiroshima mayor lashes out at Bush on atomic bombing anniversary
Agence France-Presse, August 6, 2003
Hiroshima's mayor lashed out at the United States' nuclear weapons policy during ceremonies marking the 58th anniversary of the city's atomic bombing, which caused the deaths of over 230,000 people.
Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba said the United States worshipped nuclear weapons as "God" and blamed it for jeopardising the global nuclear non-proliferation regime.
"The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the verge of collapse," Akiba said in an address to some 40,000 people.
"The chief cause is US nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research into mini-nukes and other so-called 'useable nuclear weapons,' appears to worship nuclear weapons as God," he said. [ complete article ]
Kidnap gangs add to Iraqis' insecurity
Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2003
In the security vacuum that followed the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, looting came first, followed by carjackings. Now the appearance of highly organized kidnapping gangs sends a worrying message to U.S.-led occupation authorities, suggesting a level of criminal planning and commitment well beyond the spasm of thievery that followed the regime's fall.
The kidnappings have a dark, ruthless quality, often targeting children and teenagers, usually from Iraq's tiny Christian community where no tribal networks exist to fight back against the gangs.
In many cases, the only sons of large middle-income or wealthy families are seized. The abductions, which are often committed in broad daylight, add to Iraqis' sense that nowhere is safe, day or night. [ complete article ]
Iraqis flock to Mahdi's Shia army
Harry de Quetteville, The Telegraph, August 6, 2003
As evening falls in the poor Shia suburb of Baghdad once known as Saddam City, dozens of volunteers queue under the watchful gaze of a local imam to sign up for the army.
But this is not the new Iraqi army sponsored and approved by the American-led administration. These soldiers will receive no monthly salary of Ł40. Here, prospective warriors are ready to serve, and die, for nothing.
This is "Mahdi's army", a growing militia of mostly Shia men who have responded to the fiery call to arms made by a maverick young cleric, Muqtader al-Sadr, two weeks ago in the Shia holy city of Najaf.
Since then al-Sadr has led anti-US demonstrations and encouraged worshippers to resist the US "invaders" and Iraq's "Zionist" governing council, appointed by the coalition.
Now the ranks of this religious army, named after an ancient imam who Shias believe will return to save the world, have swollen into tens of thousands, perhaps more. [ complete article ]
The Pentagon has some explaining to do
Karen Kwiatkowski, Houston Chronicle, August 3, 2003
After eight years of Bill Clinton, many military officers breathed a sigh of relief when George W. Bush was named president. I was in that plurality. At one time, I would have believed the administration's accusations of anti-Americanism against anyone who questioned the integrity and good faith of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
However, while working from May 2002 through February 2003 in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in which decisions about post-war Iraq were made.
Those observations changed everything.
What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline. If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of "intelligence" found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. [ complete article ]
Let Iraqis decide what to privatize
Moshe Adler, Washington Post, August 5, 2003
The plan of L. Paul Bremer, chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, to sell government-owned companies to private investors assumes two things: that privatization is what free people anywhere prefer, and that it's what's good for them. Neither assumption is true.
In fact, when it comes to government ownership, highly developed democracies have made very different choices. Its 10 million American customers may be surprised to learn that the German government owns 44 percent of T-Mobile, the cellular phone service provider. In France the government owns 54 percent of Air France, 21 percent of the company that owns RCA and 27 percent of the car manufacturer Renault, which in turn owns 37 percent of Nissan and 70 percent of Samsung. The British government owns 100 percent of the BBC. In Finland the government is the owner of all the liquor stores and 60 percent of an energy company that owns retail gas stations. In Sweden the government is the owner of all pharmacies and several iron mines. It is clear that no assumption can be made regarding what the people of Iraq would want to do with the companies they own. The answer will be known only when Iraq has a fully functioning democracy. [ complete article ]
Treasury Dept. to refuse Senate a list of Saudi suspects
Timothy L. O'Brien, New York Times, August 5, 2003
The Treasury Department said yesterday that it would decline to provide the Senate with a list of Saudi individuals and organizations the federal government has investigated for possibly financing Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
The action was the second in two weeks to set the White House and Congress at odds about the Saudis and federal intelligence-gathering related to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Moreover, the move contradicted an assertion made on Thursday by a senior Treasury official, Richard Newcomb, who told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing on Saudi sponsorship of terrorism that the list was not classified and that his agency would turn it over to the Senate within 24 hours. [ complete article ]
School days with a Qaeda suspect
Richard Wolffe, Newsweek, August 11, 2003
He stood out from the rest of our class for being so small and frail. Sure, he could run like the wind, which kept him out of trouble. And he won friends with his bright, wide smile. Yet he was also awkward, easily teased and slightly old-fashioned. Perhaps it was his pin-striped trousers and his platform shoes. Or his dark talk about his mother’s grave. But while most of us obsessed about "Starsky and Hutch" or "Star Wars," he could be deadly serious.
One close friend recalls his staging an intense debate about religion. Islam, he said, was superior to all other faiths because it valued charity so highly. It was a remarkable comment for any 10-year-old schoolboy. But Moazzam Begg stood out for another reason. He was a Muslim boy in a Jewish school.
Muslim charity carried Begg a long way from our middle-class neighborhood in Middle England, and the school that first shaped us. Begg now sits at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he is one of six detainees heading toward a military trial among 680 suspected foot soldiers of Al Qaeda held in Camp Delta. While some of my classmates grew up and immigrated to Israel or the United States, Begg packed up his wife and three young children in the summer before the 9/11 attacks and went to live under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. His family says he just wanted to help his impoverished fellow Muslims by opening a school there. The U.S. government believes he was a part of something far more sinister. [ complete article ]
Is Iran sick of being a nuclear 'have-not?'
Louis Charbonneau, Reuters, July 29, 2003
In terms of military might, the world is divided between those who have nuclear weapons and those who don't.
Due to the advances of nuclear science over the last half century, the eight or nine "haves" are an elite club of nations with almost 30,000 nuclear weapons and the ability to blow the Earth to bits many times over.
The "have-nots" are the rest of the world -- countries who either lack the technical capacity to make atomic weapons, do not want them or are staying true to a vow never to acquire them. Some have security agreements with members of the nuclear bomb club and do not need what is usually called "The Bomb."
Then there are the "have-nots" who envy the power and respect the "haves" enjoy and are working secretly to join the club. This is how the United States views Iran and North Korea. [ complete article ]
Israel suspends pullback from occupied areas
Chris McGreal, The Guardian, August 5, 2003
Israel's defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, called a halt to the military withdrawal from Palestinian cities yesterday following the wounding of a Jewish settler and her three children near Bethlehem on Sunday.
Mr Mofaz also said there would be no further prisoner releases in addition to the 342 Palestinian detainees to be freed tomorrow as a "goodwill gesture" towards the road map peace process.
After Israel published the names of those to be released on the internet, to give "victims of terror" the opportunity to raise legal objection, the Palestinian leadership accused the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, of betraying pledges to free more prisoners.
The list of 342 fell about 200 short of the number the Israelis said they would free. It included about 100 common criminals and large numbers of security detainees who were to have completed their sentences in weeks and months. Hundreds more have been arrested in the meantime. [ complete article ]
Lack of intelligence
Douglas Pasternak, US News and World Report (via Yahoo), August 3, 2003
The United States has invested $200 billion over the past four decades developing and operating its supersecret spy satellite programs. In this new age of terrorism, and as the nation faces bellicose regimes like North Korea (news - web sites) and Iran, these programs are more important than ever. But there's a problem. The agency that builds and operates the satellites, a little-known outfit called the National Reconnaissance Office, is in crisis. Despite its $7 billion annual budget, its satellites don't always work as promised. Its projects run billions in the red and years behind schedule. Some national security experts say the place just doesn't work. [ complete article ]
Shadowy Islamic group blamed for many Indonesia blasts
Reuters, August 5, 2003
No claims of responsibility have been made for the huge bomb blast on Tuesday at a luxury hotel in Jakarta but many in Indonesia immediately suspected a shadowy group with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Jemaah Islamiah (Islamic Community), once little known outside Southeast Asia, has become notorious around the world after it was named in connection with last October's Bali bomb blasts that killed 202 people and wounded hundreds.
Like in Bali, Tuesday's blast was also believed to have been caused by a car bomb, police said. At least 10 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in the explosion at the Marriott Hotel in the centre of the city's business district.
Even before the latest attack, the spotlight had been on Jemaah Islamiah this week with the first verdict in the Bali trials, that of a mechanic called Amrozi, due on Thursday.
Following is a snapshot of Jemaah Islamiah based on information from Western and Asian intelligence officials and analysts. [ complete article ]
Only the UN can give Iraq security and sovereignty
Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, August 5, 2003
One out of every four Americans wants US forces to withdraw from Iraq now, according to a Gallup poll. Some worry over the mounting rate of casualties. Others sense they were duped over the need for war. Some are traditional isolationists who want no American part in foreign affairs. Others oppose the Bush administration's new imperialism with its doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes and its contempt for other nations' opinions - the two vices which led to the attack on Iraq.
Whatever their motives, American calls for "US troops out" raise the same questions that rack the minds of Iraqis as they enter the fourth month of the occupation. What would happen if the Americans indeed pulled out abruptly? Would there be a security "vacuum" and who would fill it? [ complete article ]
North Korea won't recognize State Dep't. ideologue
Jim Lobe, OneWorld (via Yahoo), August 4, 2003
To the North Koreans, he is "human scum" and a "bloodthirsty vampire."
To former ultra-right U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, he is "the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."
His name is John Bolton; his title, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security; and he is widely seen as the reliable fifth columnist within the State Department for the right-wing and neo-conservative hawks who led the drive to war in Iraq from their perches at the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
North Korea, which last week agreed to engage in multilateral talks with its Northeast Asian neighbors and the United States on its controversial nuclear program, announced Sunday that it will have nothing to do with Bolton and will not even recognize his status as a U.S. diplomat. [ complete article ]
How to sell a war
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, In These Times, August 4, 2003
Public relations firms often do their work behind the scenes, and Rendon -- with whom the Pentagon signed a new agreement in February 2002 -- is usually reticent about his work. But [John Rendon's] description of himself as a "perception manager" echoes the language of Pentagon planners, who define "perception management" as "actions to convey and (or) deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning. … In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover, and deception, and psyops [psychological operations]."
The paradox of the American war in Iraq, however, is that perception management has been much more successful at "influencing the emotions, motives, and objective reasoning" of the American people than it has been at reaching "foreign audiences." When we see footage of Kuwaitis waving American flags, or of Iraqis cheering while U.S. Marines topple a statue of Saddam, it should be understood that those images target U.S. audiences as much, if not more, than the citizens of Kuwait or Iraq. [ complete article ]
Afghans on edge of chaos
Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2003
U.S. forces have their hands full trying to subdue attacks in Iraq. But with the slow buildup of a national Afghan army, an inadequate U.S. and coalition presence and poor progress on reconstruction projects, Afghanistan is spiraling out of control and risks becoming a "narco-mafia" state, some humanitarian agencies warn.
Already the signs are there -- a boom in opium production, rampant banditry and huge swaths of territory unsafe for Western aid workers. The central government has almost no power over regional warlords who control roads and extort money from truck drivers, choking commerce and trade.
If the country slips into anarchy, it risks becoming a haven for resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. And the point of U.S. military action here could be lost -- a major setback in the war against terrorism. [ complete article ]
Palestinians get thirstier under Israeli clampdown
Mark Heinrich, Reuters, August 3, 2003
Palestinians, especially in the arid southern West Bank, ration and improvise to offset water shortages aggravated by Israel's closure of their area, imposed after suicide bombings.
Arduous, roundabout routes inflate delivery prices for people already impoverished by the closure that, along with worsening drought, has highlighted a long unequal contest to control water that is central to Middle Eastern conflict.
Israel takes 80 percent of the West Bank's mountain aquifer, one of two major renewable water sources in the territory it seized in a 1967 war.
The other source, the Jordan River dividing the West Bank from Jordan, is dominated by Israel for nearby Jewish farms.
Water will be a thorny "final status" issue in a U.S.-backed peace "road map" aiming at an independent Palestinian state. [ complete article ]
With Iraqi courts gone, young clerics judge
Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times (via Yahoo), August 4, 2003
When Saddam Hussein disappeared in the face of the American invasion, the entire Iraqi state disappeared with him. Those who want to establish an Islamic system of government in Iraq similar to the one in neighboring Iran stepped quickly into the vacuum, establishing courts in this holy city and in Baghdad to deal with a welter of legal problems.
Their docket covers all types of criminal and civil cases that normal courts would hear if they were functioning: murder, divorce, spouse abuse, property disputes. The religious courts have also asserted a special right to grant permission sought by people seeking revenge against the former ruling Baath Party of Mr. Hussein.
The Islamic court's decisions, which include permission to kill, could have dubious legality in the regular court system, assuming it is restored.
Nonetheless, many aggrieved Iraqis, feeling that they have no other place they can trust for legal rulings, have flocked to these courts. It does not seem to matter that the courts have no enforcement power and are not recognized by either the American occupation forces or Iraq's other Muslim religious authorities. [ complete article ]
Bitterness grows in Iraq over deaths of civilians
Vivienne Walt, Boston Globe, August 4, 2003
In numerous interviews, Iraqis said that more than factors like unemployment, fuel shortages, or electricity blackouts, civilian casualties since the war's end have raised the level of bitterness against US soldiers and could prolong or widen armed resistance.
''It has increased our hate against Americans,'' said Ali Hatem, 23, a computer science student at the University of Baghdad. ''It also increases the violence against them. In Iraq, we are tribal people. When someone loses their son, they want revenge.'' [ complete article ]
Taliban are killing clerics who dispute holy war call
Carlotta Gall, New York Times, August 4, 2003
The assassination, witnesses said, was trademark Taliban: two men on a motorbike, the passenger opening fire with a Kalashnikov rifle, the driver making a quick getaway.
But the choice of victim signaled a new turn for the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic movement that was ousted from power and has been running a campaign of attacks against foreign and Afghan government troops in southern Afghanistan for months. This time, the assassinated person was Maulavi Abdul Manan, known as Maulavi Jenab, a member of the local district religious council, shot as he left his mosque last week. He was the third senior Muslim cleric killed by Taliban assassins here in the last 40 days. [ complete article ]
Iran: Won't hand over Al Qaeda members to U.S.
Reuters, August 4, 2003
Iran publicly acknowledged for the first time last month that it was holding some senior al Qaeda figures and said it planned to extradite some of them to "friendly countries."
On Saturday the New York Times quoted a U.S. official as saying Washington had approached Tehran with a request to hand over al Qaeda men in Iranian custody, including Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian thought to be al Qaeda's security chief.
The paper said Iran wanted the United States to hand over members of the People's Mujahideen Iranian opposition group, currently under U.S. control in Iraq, in return.
But Iran's government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told a news conference on Monday Tehran was not interested in such a deal.
"Iran has never asked for such a swap. We never make deals or act selectively regarding terrorism," he said.[ complete article ]
ANOTHER WAR? THE NEO-CONS ARE READY
The next Korean war
R. James Woolsey and Tomas G. McInerney, Wall Street Journal (via Frontpage Magazine), August 4, 2003
The key point is that the base infrastructure available in the region and the accessibility of North Korea from the sea should make it possible to generate around 4,000 sorties a day compared to the 800 a day that were so effective in Iraq. When one contemplates that the vast majority of these sorties would use precision munitions, and that surveillance aircraft would permit immediate targeting of artillery pieces and ballistic missile launch sites, we believe the use of air power in such a war would be swifter and more devastating than it was in Iraq. North Korea's geriatric air defenses--both fighter aircraft and missiles--would not last long. [ complete article ]
The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded
Julian Borger, The Guardian, August 4, 2003
US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media.
Since May 1, when President George Bush declared the end of major combat operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the total number of US deaths from all causes is much higher: 112.
The other unreported cost of the war for the US is the number of American wounded, 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. [ complete article ]
Bumbling Bush may have given Osama an open goal
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, August 4, 2003
Bush is accused of many things - but never of being imaginative. From the very start, and despite much spin and waffle about fighting a new kind of conflict by unconventional means, Bush has opted for the obvious.
In Afghanistan, nebulous al-Qaida networks posed a complex and subtle challenge. Bush's solution? Invade the country and overthrow its rulers. The Taliban may have had it coming; but that is hardly the point. This was the old-style "overwhelming force" approach long favoured by US presidents, Daddy Bush included.
The Iraq campaign was conducted, for whatever reason (and many were given), on much the same principle: kick the door down, then charge in - and to hell with the wider consequences. While such behaviour brings quick, short-term results and may be superficially gratifying, innovative or imaginative it definitely is not.
These tactics bear little relation to an effective defence against terrorism in the round, let alone to tackling its root causes. Many al-Qaida in Afghanistan were merely dispersed; now they are returning. As for Iraq, they were never there in the first place. [ complete article ]
The protean enemy
Jessica Stern, Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2003
Having suffered the destruction of its sanctuary in Afghanistan two years ago, al Qaeda's already decentralized organization has become more decentralized still. The group's leaders have largely dispersed to Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world (only a few still remain in Afghanistan's lawless border regions). And with many of the planet's intelligence agencies now focusing on destroying its network, al Qaeda's ability to carry out large-scale attacks has been degraded.
Yet despite these setbacks, al Qaeda and its affiliates remain among the most significant threats to U.S. national security today. In fact, according to George Tenet, the CIA's director, they will continue to be this dangerous for the next two to five years. An alleged al Qaeda spokesperson has warned that the group is planning another strike similar to those of September 11. On May 12, simultaneous bombings of three housing complexes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killed at least 29 people and injured over 200, many of them Westerners. Intelligence officials in the United States, Europe, and Africa report that al Qaeda has stepped up its recruitment drive in response to the war in Iraq. And the target audience for its recruitment has also changed. They are now younger, with an even more "menacing attitude," as France's top investigative judge on terrorism-related cases, Jean-Louis Brugui, describes them. More of them are converts to Islam. And more of them are women. [ complete article ]
Crime casts fear in Iraq
John Daniszewski, Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2003
Murder is stalking this city [Baghdad]. In the aftermath of the U.S. campaign to oust Saddam Hussein, residents who have no memory of violent street crime during his iron-fisted rule are now being terrorized by killers -- not to mention thieves and vandals -- whose motives range from retribution to rapaciousness. The crime wave poses a challenge for the U.S.-led occupation as it grapples with a multitude of problems -- electricity shortages, joblessness and a guerrilla campaign among them -- that have destabilized this shattered country. Iraqi police have started to work, but ineffectually. They defer to the U.S. soldiers, who often have no clue about what is going on in the streets and alleys around them. [ complete article ]
Questions grow over Iraq links to Qaeda
Peter S. Canellos and Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, August 3, 2003
Shortly after his now-discredited report that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium in Africa, President Bush asserted in his State of the Union address that ''evidence from intelligence sources, secret conversations, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda.''
The link between Hussein and Al Qaeda was a component of Bush's larger assertion that Hussein was an imminent threat to the United States -- that ''secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists.''
But a review of the White House's statements and interviews with current and former intelligence officials indicate that the assertion was extrapolated from nuggets of intelligence, some tantalizing but unproven, some subsequently disproved, and some considered suspect even at the time the administration was making its case for war. [ complete article ]
Iraqis struggle to retrieve goods from G.I.'s
Shaila K. Dewan, New York Times, August 3, 2003
After the war, American soldiers referred to Iraqi looters as "Ali Babas." Now, the name is more commonly used by Iraqis to describe the soldiers.
This notion is flickering through the capital, propelled by word of mouth and amplified by anti-Western elements ready to exploit any hint of American misbehavior. Many Iraqis are convinced that the soldiers are here to rob them of money, jewelry and cars.
American military officials refused to discuss specific charges of theft by soldiers and disciplinary actions, but said that in most instances property believed stolen was more likely to have been confiscated during raids or at checkpoints.
That distinction matters little to Iraqis trying to recover their property.
Sgt. Thad Farlow, a civil affairs officer whose unit runs a civilian assistance center, said the complaints he heard stemmed from a mixture of negligence and actual misconduct. "It's kind of hard to win the hearts and minds when soldiers are taking $650 Thuraya phones," he said, referring to a type of satellite telephone. [ complete article ]
U.S. may lose chance to negotiate with Iran
Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott, Knight Ridder, August 1, 2003
A terrorist group based in U.S.-controlled Iraq continues to broadcast propaganda into Iran, purchase equipment and move about the country without interference from American authorities, despite a White House order banning any U.S. support for the group, according to senior administration officials.
The officials said the continued operations of the Mujahedeen Khalq, or MEK, could cost the United States an opportunity to negotiate a deal with Iran's theocratic regime to turn over five senior leaders of the al-Qaida terrorist network who are being held by Iranian authorities in what one American official described as "some kind of preventive detention."
Iranian envoys have approached U.S. intermediaries and offered to turn over the terrorism suspects - including Osama bin Laden's son Saad and Saif al Adel, who's wanted in connection with attacks that killed Americans in East Africa and Saudi Arabia - in exchange for putting the MEK out of business, the officials said. [ complete article ]
America silences Niger leaders in Iraq nuclear row
David Harrison, The Telegraph, August 3, 2003
America has warned the Niger government to keep out of the row over claims that Saddam Hussein sought to buy uranium for his nuclear weapons programme from the impoverished West African state.
Herman Cohen, a former assistant secretary of state for Africa and one of America's most experienced Africa hands, called on Mamadou Tandja, Niger's president, in the capital Niamey last week to relay the message from Washington, according to senior Niger government officials.
One said: "Let's say Mr Cohen put a friendly arm around the president to say sorry about the forged documents, but then squeezed his shoulder hard enough to convey the message, 'Let's hear no more about this affair from your government'. Basically he was telling Niger to shut up." [ complete article ]
U.S. anti-war activists hit by secret airport ban
Andrew Gumbel, The Independent, August 3, 2003
After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.
The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised "no-fly" list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.
The strong suspicion of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is suing the government to try to learn more, is that the second list has been used to target political activists who challenge the government in entirely legal ways. The TSA acknowledged the existence of the list in response to a Freedom of Information Act request concerning two anti-war activists from San Francisco who were stopped and briefly detained at the airport last autumn and told they were on an FBI no-fly list. [ complete article ]
The honeymoon continues for George
Robert Reich, The Observer, August 3, 2003
Since his election in 1997, Tony Blair has based much of his appeal on claims of integrity and sincerity, coupled with promises to improve domestic services. Now two-thirds of the British public doesn't trust him, and he's compelled to show how well he's done on domestic issues apart from the attention he's given to foreign affairs. But in an America that is still reeling from the terrorist attack of 11 September, Bush's appeal has been based largely on his determination to fight back. Americans haven't cared very much about the details of Bush's strategy, as long as it's sufficiently bold. In fact, a large portion of the American public continues to believe that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attack. As long as the administration seems to be making 'progress' by tracking down or killing his key assistants, including his sons, and fighting the remnants of his forces, most Americans are satisfied.
The American public would have preferred that we go into Iraq with more of our allies, of course. And there's lingering concern that neither Saddam Hussein nor Osama bin Laden has yet been captured or killed. But Bush needs only to demonstrate resolve against the forces of evil - or, as he did last Wednesday, merely to mention that terrorists might be planning another attack similar to 9/11 - and questions about the quality of the intelligence underlying his decision to go into Iraq don't seem to register on the public's mind. [ complete article ]
Defying peace plan, Israel approves new Gaza construction
Gavin Rabinowitz, Associated Press, July 31, 2003
Israel on Thursday published building tenders to expand a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip -- defying a stipulation in the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan that says construction in Jewish settlements must stop.
The tender, published in a newspaper by the Israel Lands Authority, offers rights to build 22 new housing units in the Neveh Dekalim settlement and fulfills a key bureaucratic step in the expansion of settlements. It is the first such tender for a Gaza settlement in about two years.
Palestinians and Israeli peace activists blasted the move -- which follows meetings in recent days by both sides' leaders with President Bush -- as a blow to the nascent peace efforts. [ complete article ]
Report on 9/11 suggests a role by Saudi spies
James Risen and David Johnson, New York Times, August 2, 2003
The classified part of a Congressional report on the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, says that two Saudi citizens who had at least indirect links with two hijackers were probably Saudi intelligence agents and may have reported to Saudi government officials, according to people who have seen the report.
These findings, according to several people who have read the report, help to explain why the classified part of the report has become so politically charged, causing strains between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Senior Saudi officials have denied any links between their government and the attacks and have asked that the section be declassified, but President Bush has refused. [ complete article ]
Report from the ruins: Gaza during the ceasefire
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, August 1, 2003
It's difficult to understand why dozens of houses were demolished in Beit Hanun. According to the IDF [Israeli Defense Force], "We didn't enter with the purpose of demolishing houses," and "every building from which there was shooting, the definition was to demolish it, and that also meets the definitions of international law." But so many houses? And why the cars along the side of the road? And why the cinder block factories that provided a bare living in hungry Gaza? And the packing house for fruits and vegetables? And why the brick-making machines? To ensure that the houses will not be rebuilt? Or did they think the machines were lathes for making Qassam rockets and that the packing houses were headquarters of Hamas? The results seem to be due to the caprices of the bulldozer drivers here, or of their commanding officers.
"The commander in the field was the driver of the bulldozer," says Rami Zaanun, from the devastated house. The IDF denies this and says everything was done under the supervision of senior commanders, and that the bulldozer drivers did nothing without authorization. Well said: it's not the grunt who's to blame this time.
As far as is known, the well-to-do Zaanun family, owners of orchards, 14 people in their ruined house, did not hurt anyone. There are no wanted individuals or detainees in the family, only acres of orchards on the land across the way. Now the house is in ruins and only stumps remain of the orchards. The family lost 300 trees. The house of Ahmed Zaanun, a neighbor and uncle, was also demolished and its pink walls transformed into heaps of rubble. [ complete article ]
U.S. strategy: Isolate Kim Jong Il
Robert Marquand, Christian Science Monitor, August 1, 2003
Ten months into a nuclear standoff with North Korea that has consumed the energies of Northeast Asia, influential US hawks in the Bush administration feel the time is ripe to focus steadily on Kim Jong Il, leader of the isolated North, as Asia's main antagonist.
Ironically, the strategy of isolating Mr. Kim as the principal culprit comes amid a multinational effort to get that same Kim to the negotiating table. [ complete article ]
U.S. soldiers pray for safety on Baghdad streets
Cynthia Johnston, Reuters, August 1, 2003
Every time Private Kyle Jason leaves his Baghdad barracks, he asks God to protect him from attacks that have killed 19 U.S. soldiers in the past two weeks.
"I just say a little prayer to myself. I just ask him to watch over me and keep me safe, to let me see my family again," said the U.S. soldier from Detroit who has just turned 19.
"I feel there is danger... I feel a threat every time I walk out the gates, and I ask God to watch over me."
The streets of the capital have grown deadlier for U.S. soldiers as shadowy attackers try to drive out the forces occupying Iraq since the invasion that deposed Saddam Hussein.
Fear also stalks Iraqi civilians who never know when they might be caught in the crossfire -- the U.S. military has admitted killing up to five innocent people who strayed into the path of troops hunting for Saddam in a Baghdad house this week. [ complete article ]
Wolfowitz the censor
Robert Fisk, The Independent (via Counterpunch), July 30, 2003
Only a day after US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed that the Arabic Al-Jazeera television channel was "inciting violence" and "endangering the lives of American troops" in Iraq, the station's Baghdad bureau chief has written a scathing reply to the American administration, complaining that in the past month the station's offices and staff in Iraq "have been subject to strafing by gunfire, death threats, confiscation of news material, and multiple detentions and arrests, all carried out by US soldiers..." [ complete article ]
Two Iranian journalists arrested, other foreign media harassed
Reporters Without Borders, July 31, 2003
Reporters Without Borders today deplored the worsening attitude of US troops towards journalists in Iraq and called for US Administrator Paul Bremer to explain exactly why two Iranian newsmen, Said Aboutaleb and Soheil Karimi, of the public TV station IRIB, have been held since 1 July for alleged "security violations."
It said confiscations of equipment, arrests of journalists and incidents between the media and US soldiers had increased in recent days.
"The US-British forces must provide convincing evidence that the Iranians have violated security or else release them at once," said Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard. He expressed concern at worsening conditions for journalists and recent statements by US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz accusing pan-Arab satellite TV stations Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya of putting out reports encouraging violence against US troops. [ complete article ]
U.S. admits killing civilians in Baghdad raid. No apology
Reuters, July 31, 2003
Four days after U.S. troops killed several passers-by in Baghdad during the hunt for Saddam Hussein, the U.S. commander in Iraq admitted Thursday that innocent people had died, but stopped short of accepting blame.
"On the issue of the innocent civilians that were killed and injured in that raid, we established some...traffic control points to isolate the area that we were operating in," Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told a news conference in answer to questions about the bloody raid.
Angry neighbors accused the Task Force 20 special unit hunting Saddam's inner circle of failing to block all the side roads leading to a house they were raiding Sunday in Baghdad's upscale Mansour neighborhood. When a car strayed into the fire zone, soldiers blasted it with machineguns.
U.S. soldiers and medical staff at a nearby hospital told Reuters five men, including a teen-ager, were killed. [ complete article ]
Grabbing the nettle
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, August 1, 2003
The Pentagon held an all-day meeting a couple of weeks ago seeking ways to restrain North Korea. At the end of it, one expert turned to another and summed it up: "In other words, we're" doomed -- except he used a pungent phrase I can't.
It was a fair judgment. North Korea was always more terrifying than Iraq, and now the situation is getting worse.
It's true, as the administration enthusiastically announced yesterday, that we seem to be moving toward a new round of multiparty talks with North Korea, and that's great. But it's very unclear what North Korea is demanding and when the talks will take place. In any case, no one thinks that this round of talks will produce much more than possible photo-ops.
Meanwhile, the North seems to be proceeding steadily, perhaps as fast as its rusty technology will allow, to build nuclear weapons, using both plutonium and uranium methods. [ complete article ]
Radical Sunni Islam rears its head in Iraq
Agence France Presse, August 1, 2003
A radicalised current of Sunni Islam is emerging in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq , as the community which ruled for decades watches the long-oppressed Shiites asserting their will by virtue of sheer numbers.
Most fight the Americans in the name of Saddam Hussein, but some have picked up arms as an assertion of their Sunni identity, in anger over the US designs to radically alter their world with plans for Western-style democracy. [ complete article ]
Soaring costs of 'rescuing' Iraq
Martin Sieff, UPI, July 31, 2003
The liberation of Iraq was to have been the war that paid for itself in spades, and gave U.S. corporations the inside track on the greatest energy bonanza of the 21st century. Instead, it has become a fiscal nightmare, a monetary Vietnam that already accounts for around 15 percent of the U.S. annual budget deficit, a figure likely to only grow remorselessly into the unforeseeable future.
The unforeseen cost of the war is already attracting powerful and influential critics, most worryingly to U.S. President George W. Bush, from within the GOP itself. [ complete article ]
U.S. fostering sinister sort of democracy
Robert Fisk, The Independent (via NZ Herald), August 1, 2003
Paul Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the new Iraq" well. He wears a business suit and combat boots. As the pro-consul of Iraq, you might have thought he'd have more taste.
But he is a famous "antiterrorism" expert who is supposed to be rebuilding the country with a vast army of international companies - most of them American, of course - and creating the first democracy in the Arab world.
Since he seems to be a total failure at the "anti-terrorist" game - 50 American soldiers killed in Iraq since President George W. Bush declared the war over is not exactly a blazing success - it is only fair to record that he is making a mess of the "reconstruction" bit as well. [ complete article ]
Conflict 'may have driven Muslims into arms of al-Qa'ida'
Ben Russell, The Independent, August 1, 2003
The war to topple Saddam Hussein may have damaged the campaign against international terrorism by driving Muslims into the arms of al-Qa'ida, an all-party committee of [British] MPs said yesterday.
The Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee said al-Qa'ida remained a "significant threat" to Britain, after hearing that the terrorist network may still have the loyalty of more than 17,000 militants in up to 60 countries.
In a report that raises questions about an important part of the justification for war, MPs said the campaign in Iraq might have "enhanced the appeal of al-Qa'ida to Muslims living in the Gulf region and elsewhere". [ complete article ]
Family forced by neighbors to execute family member suspected as U.S. informant
Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, August 1, 2003
In the simmering guerrilla war fought along the Tigris, U.S. officials say they have received a deluge of tips from informants, the intelligence growing since U.S. forces killed former president Saddam Hussein's two sons last week. Acting on the intelligence, soldiers have uncovered surface-to-air missiles, 45,000 sticks of dynamite and caches of small arms and explosives. They have shut down safe houses that sheltered senior Baath Party operatives in the Sunni Muslim region north of Baghdad and ferreted out lieutenants and bodyguards of the fallen Iraqi president, who has eluded a relentless, four-month manhunt.
But a shadowy response has followed, a less-publicized but no less deadly theater of violence in the U.S. occupation. U.S. officials and residents say informers have been killed, shot and attacked with grenades. U.S. officials say they have no numbers on deaths, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the campaign is widespread in a region long a source of support for Hussein's government. [ complete article ]
Payments for Perle
Ari Berman, The Nation, July 31, 2003
An odd thing happened in February when a European television station approached Richard Perle for an interview. Millions of antiwar protesters had rocked the globe a week prior, and the station badly wanted Perle, as chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board, to articulate the Pentagon's Iraq policy. But Perle, as he continues to do today, demanded a fee. Though startled by the request, the news station violated its strict no-pay policy for interviews and obliged the chairman. [ complete article ]
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