Author Archives: Paul Woodward

NEWS: Ahmadinejad, the flinty populist

Ahmadinejad hailed in Middle East
By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2007

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flinty populist in a zip-up jacket whose scathing rhetoric and defiance of Washington are often caricatured in the Western media, has transcended national and religious divides to become a folk hero across the Middle East.

The diminutive, at times inscrutable, president is a wellspring of stinging sound-bites and swagger for Muslims who complain that their leaders are too beholden to or frightened of the Bush administration. Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York Sunday ahead of a U.N. General Assembly meeting, is an easily marketable commodity:a streetwise politician with nuclear ambitions and an open microphone.

“I like him a lot,” said Mahmoud Ali, a medical student in Cairo. “He’s trying to protect himself and his nation from the dangers around him. He makes me feel proud. He’s a symbol of Islam. He seems the only person capable of taking a stand against Israel and the West. Unfortunately, Egypt has gotten too comfortable with Washington.” [complete article]

See also, 60 Minutes interview with President Ahmadinejad (CBS video) and Iran’s Ahmadinejad: No attack on Israel (AP interview).

NEWS: Brzezinski warns about risk of war

Brzezinski: U.S. in danger of “stampeding” to war with Iran
CNN, September 24, 2007

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski likened U.S. officials’ saber rattling about Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions to similar statements made before the start of the Iraq war.

“I think the administration, the president and the vice president particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq,” Brzezinski told CNN’s “Late Edition” on Sunday. [complete article]

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Israel’s success story

Israeli air strike did not hit nuclear facility, intelligence officials say
By Larisa Alexandrovna, The Raw Story, September 24, 2007

Israel did not strike a nuclear weapons facility in Syria on Sept. 6, instead striking a cache of North Korean missiles, current and former intelligence officials say.

American intelligence sources familiar with key events leading up to the Israeli air raid tell RAW STORY that what the Syrians actually had were North Korean No-Dong missiles, possibly located at a site in either the city of Musalmiya in the northern part of Syria or further south around the city of Hama.

While reports have alleged the US provided intelligence to Israel or that Israel shared their intelligence with the US, sources interviewed for this article believe that neither is accurate. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — If an explanation for the purpose of the Israeli attack could be derived from understanding the nature of the target, by this point I think that the veil of secrecy would have been lifted. The fact that it hasn’t may have more to do with how little rather than how much the veil conceals. Indeed, it suggests that the physical target in Syria may well have had much less to do with Israel’s political objectives than has been assumed.

As former Clinton administration Middle-East envoy, Dennis Ross notes:

Statecraft involves using all the tools of the state to affect the behavior of friends and foes alike. Israel’s raid against the Syrian plant reflects the use of a military instrument applied quite selectively to affect the psychologies of many different actors on the world stage. Whether it will have the affect [sic] the Israelis desire remains to be seen. But for now, the Israelis have made a statement without triggering a wider conflict in the process.

The statement seems to be: Israel can conduct a regional military operation at a time and place of its choosing and suffer no adverse consequences. As if to underline this sense of impunity, Israel announced today that it welcomes the US’s oblique invitation for Syria to join the upcoming Mideast peace conference. (How comforted Bashar al-Assad must feel, knowing that Olmert harbors no lingering hostility!)

As Ross points out, “had Israel taken credit for the raid, Arab states would have felt duty-bound to condemn it, Israel’s resort to force, and its unilateral effort to impose its will once again.” Not only that, but skepticism about the conference might then likely have led to non-cooperation.

But the message of Israel’s success — success deriving from what didn’t happen — also resonated clearly in Washington where:

…administration hawks had closely studied the international fallout from Israel’s clandestine raid on Syria… as a guide to how military action against Iran would be received.

“Their attitude is: where was the fuss? Some of them think they would get away with it in Iran,” the source said.

As for what conclusions Syria and Iran draw from this episode, neither the Israelis nor Americans seem to care — for as long, that is, that they can continue to spin their success story.

OPINION: Murky oil deals for Bush cronies

Iraq oil deal gets everybody’s attention
By Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post, September 24, 2007

The oil deal signed between Hunt Oil and the government in Iraq’s Kurdish region earlier this month has raised eyebrows, in no small part because it appears to undercut President Bush’s hope that Iraq could draft national legislation to share revenue from the country’s vast oil reserves. Making the deal more curious is that it was crafted by one of the administration’s staunchest supporters, Ray Hunt.

Hunt, chief executive of the Dallas-based company, has been a major fundraiser and contributor to Bush’s presidential campaigns. He also serves on the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, putting him close to the latest information developed by the nation’s intelligence agencies.

If Hunt is signing regional oil deals in Iraq, critics ask, what does he know about the prospects for a long-stalled national oil law that others don’t? [complete article]

NEWS: Killing on suspicion

U.S. aims to lure insurgents with ‘bait’
By Josh White and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, September 24, 2007

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

In documents obtained by The Washington Post from family members of the accused soldiers, Didier said members of the U.S. military’s Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later passed along ammunition boxes filled with the “drop items” to be used “to disrupt the AIF [Anti-Iraq Forces] attempts at harming Coalition Forces and give us the upper hand in a fight.”

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a baiting program should be examined “quite meticulously” because it raises troubling possibilities, such as what happens when civilians pick up the items.

“In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,” Fidell said. [complete article]

OPINION: Cost of war in Iraq

What it may cost to stay in Iraq
By David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor, September 24, 2007

The latest estimates of the cost of the Iraq war by Steven Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, puts the cost of the Iraq war so far (measured by congressional appropriations) at $450 billion, and that of the Afghanistan operation at $127 billion. By the end of fiscal year 2008, about a year away, the combined bill will be $808 billion.

“The war in Iraq, alone,” notes Mr. Kosiak, “has already cost the US more in real [inflation-adjusted dollars] than the 1991 Gulf War and the Korean War, and it will almost certainly surpass the cost of the Vietnam War by the end of next year.”

If the two military operations drag on for a decade, the cost could amount to between $1.09 trillion and $1.62 trillion, he speculates, depending partly on what level of military forces are left in the two nations.

Those numbers, admits Kosiak, don’t include the cost of the extra debt piled up by Washington to pay for the operations. Those would add “several hundred million” more to the bill in the next decade. He says the Bush administration has put the cost of the operations “on the national credit card.” [complete article]

NEWS: A military-corporate axis of corruption

Graft in military contracts spread from base
By Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmidtt, New York Times, September 24, 2007

Pentagon officials are investigating some $6 billion in military contracts, most covering supplies as varied as bottled water, tents and latrines for troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The inquiries have resulted in charges against at least 29 civilians and soldiers, more than 75 other criminal investigations and the suicides of at least two officers. They have prompted the Pentagon, the largest purchasing agency in the world, to overhaul its war-zone procurement system.

Much of the scrutiny has focused on the contracting office where Major Cockerham worked at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, a world away from Castor in more than miles. Until the buildup to the war in Iraq, it was a tiny outpost with a staff of 7 to 12 people who awarded about $150 million a year in contracts, according to Bryon J. Young, a retired Army colonel and the current director of the Army Contracting Agency.

But when tens of thousands of soldiers began pouring through Kuwait, Mr. Young said in an interview, his agency was forced to entrust nearly $4 billion over the next four years to what he described as a B team of civilians and military officers with limited contracting experience. It was a setting flush with money, he said, but lacking the safeguards to prevent contracting officials from taking it. [complete article]

NEWS: Nukes gone AWOL

Missteps in the bunker
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, September 23, 2007

Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.

The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane’s wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.

That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.

The episode, serious enough to trigger a rare “Bent Spear” nuclear incident report that raced through the chain of command to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and President Bush, provoked new questions inside and outside the Pentagon about the adequacy of U.S. nuclear weapons safeguards while the military’s attention and resources are devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [complete article]

NEWS: Criticism for AG nominee

Post-9/11 cases fuel criticism for nominee
By Philip Shenon, New York Times, September 24, 2007

The 21-year-old Jordanian immigrant was in shackles when he was brought into the courtroom of Judge Michael B. Mukasey in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

It was Oct. 2, 2001, and the prisoner, Osama Awadallah, then a college student in San Diego with no criminal record, was one of dozens of Arab men detained around the country in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks as potential witnesses in the terrorism investigation.

Before the hearing, Mr. Awadallah told his lawyer that he had been beaten in the federal detention center in Manhattan, producing bruises that were hidden beneath his orange prison jumpsuit. But when his lawyer told this to Judge Mukasey, the judge seemed little concerned.

“As far as the claim that he was beaten, I will tell you that he looks fine to me,” said Judge Mukasey, who was nominated by President Bush last week to be his third attorney general and is now facing Senate confirmation hearings. “You want to have him examined, you can make an application. If you want to file a lawsuit, you can file a civil lawsuit.”

Even though Mr. Awadallah was not charged at the time with any crime and had friends and family in San Diego who would vouch that he had no terrorist ties, Judge Mukasey ordered that he be held indefinitely, a ruling he made in the cases of several other so-called material witnesses in the Sept. 11 investigations. A prison medical examination later identified the bruises across his body. [complete article]

NEWS: Olmert under investigation – again

Israel orders Olmert corruption probe
By Jacques Pinto, AFP, September 24, 2007

Israel ordered a criminal graft probe of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over a real estate deal on Monday, in the latest scandal to hit the premier who had been steadily regaining popularity.

Attorney General Menahem Mazuz “has decided to order the police to open a criminal probe in the Cremieux Street affair,” a justice ministry statement said.

The Israeli premier is suspected of having received an effective bribe when he and his wife purchased the west Jerusalem home in 2004 for an estimated 300,000 dollars below market price, the statement said. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Why the nuclear story isn’t nuclear

Why the nuclear story isn’t nuclear
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 23, 2007

“Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid,” blares the headline in The Sunday Times. After two weeks of furious speculation about the purpose and significance of Israel’s September 6 attack on a target in eastern Syria, we finally know that this really was something really big that went down: it was nuclear! The Syrians had “nuclear materials” that have been traced to North Korea. Except… “nuclear materials” turns out to be a headline (and first paragraph) paraphrase. “Nuclear materials” turns out to be short for “nuclear-related” material — almost certainly no fissile material, nor even anything radioactive. And no one has forgotten that the most famous example of nuclear-related material turned out to be no such thing. Continue reading →

OPINION: The rise of political Islam

Democracy, not terror, is the engine of political Islam
By William Dalrymple, The Guardian, September 21, 2007

The Bush administration proclaimed in 2004 that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East would be a major foreign policy theme in its second term. It has been widely perceived, not least in Washington, that this policy has failed. Yet in many ways US foreign policy has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against the corrupt monarchies and decaying nationalist parties who have ruled the region for 50 years. The irony is that rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed, Muslims have lined up behind parties most clearly seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention.

Religious parties, in other words, have come to power for reasons largely unconnected to religion. As clear and unambiguous opponents of US policy in the Middle East – in a way that, say, Musharraf, Mubarak and Mahmoud Abbas are not – religious parties have benefited from legitimate Muslim anger: anger at the thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq; at the blind eye the US turns to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and colonisation of the West Bank; at the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the incarceration of thousands of Muslims without trial in the licensed network of torture centres that the US operates across the globe; and at the Islamophobic rhetoric that still flows from Bush and his circle in Washington.

Moreover, the religious parties tend to be seen by the poor, rightly or wrongly, as representing justice, integrity and equitable distribution of resources. Hence the strong showing, for example, of Hamas against the blatantly corrupt Fatah in the 2006 elections in Palestine. Equally, the dramatic rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon has not been because of a sudden fondness for sharia law, but because of the status of Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah’s leader, as the man who gave the Israelis a bloody nose, and who provides medical and social services for the people of South Lebanon, just as Hamas does in Gaza. [complete article]

NEWS & OPINION: Blackwater’s killing spree

The real story of Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday
By Kim Sengupta, The Independent, September 21, 2007

The eruption of gunfire was sudden and ferocious, round after round mowing down terrified men women and children, slamming into cars as they collided and overturned with drivers frantically trying to escape. Some vehicles were set alight by exploding petrol tanks. A mother and her infant child died in one of them, trapped in the flames.

The shooting on Sunday, by the guards of the American private security company Blackwater, has sparked one of the most bitter and public disputes between the Iraqi government and its American patrons, and brings into sharp focus the often violent conduct of the Western private armies operating in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, immune from scrutiny or prosecution.

Blackwater’s security men are accused of going on an unprovoked killing spree. Hassan Jabar Salman, a lawyer, was shot four times in the back, his car riddled with eight more bullets, as he attempted to get away from their convoy. Yesterday, sitting swathed in bandages at Baghdad’s Yarmukh Hospital, he recalled scenes of horror. “I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot,” said Mr Salman. “But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10 leaping in fear from a minibus, he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him, she jumped out after him, and she was killed. People were afraid.”

At the end of the prolonged hail of bullets Nisoor Square was a scene of carnage with bodies strewn around smouldering wreckage. Ambulances trying to pick up the wounded found their path blocked by crowds fleeing the gunfire.

Yesterday, the death toll from the incident, according to Iraqi authorities, stood at 28. And it could rise higher, say doctors, as some of the injured, hit by high-velocity bullets at close quarter, are unlikely to survive. [complete article]

Iraq’s ‘Dirty Harrys’
By David DeVoss, Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2007

Blackwater. The name says it all, conjuring images of imminent danger, hidden predators and night terror. From the moment Blackwater USA arrived in Iraq to protect L. Paul Bremer III’s Coalition Provisional Authority until last week, when its guards killed 11 Iraqis and wounded 13 more while escorting a diplomatic convoy through Baghdad, the North Carolina-based private security company has been known for its swaggering image and “Dirty Harry” demeanor.

All the U.S. private security armies in Iraq may be cut from the same khaki cloth, but each has its own personality. When I arrived in the country in September 2004 as a senior information officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, bodyguards with Kroll Inc., whose credo is “in risk there is opportunity,” met me at the airport. They were British and Irish veterans of Belfast’s “Troubles” and viewed terrorists with a world-weary stoicism.

Our convoy had pulled onto the airport highway and was heading for the Green Zone when three black Chevy Suburbans flashed past. The rear door of the trailing vehicle was open, and inside sat a man dressed in black cradling a large-caliber machine gun. Bandoleers crisscrossed his chest, several handguns and a large knife dangled from his weapons harness and an enormous handlebar mustache covered most of his face.

The look was designed to inspire dread, but it was carried to such cartoonish extremes that the man resembled Yosemite Sam more than the Terminator. “That’s Blackwater,” said the Kroll driver disdainfully. “You’ll see a lot of them while you’re here.” [complete article]

OPINION & FEATURE: Middle East refugees

Alterman: Iraq refugees (and my thoughts)
By Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark, September , 2007

The Iraqi refugee problem isn’t just about American moral obligations – it needs to be understood as a deep strategic problem shaping both internal Iraqi and regional political outcomes. I don’t think there’s been enough thought given to the complex ways in which this issue could reformulate Iraqi and regional politics over the next few decades.

Alterman lays out the destabilizing impact around the region. I’d go further than the immediate effects on regime stability. If the Iraqi refugee problem is not dealt with, it will likely “default” into precisely the conditions which have made the Palestinian issue so potent and so destabilizing over the decades: a large population of permanently de facto stateless persons spread across multiple Arab countries, whose personal and communal traumas resonate deeply with core political narratives (Arabist or Islamist or sectarian). [complete article]

Unsettling the categories of displacement
By Julie Peteet, MERIP, Fall, 2007

The Middle East has long had the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s major producers of refugees. By the beginning of 2007, the Middle East was generating 5,931,000 refugees out of a world total of 13,948,800. [complete article]

NEWS: Big Brother is watching

Collecting of details on travelers documented
By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post, September 22, 2007

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department’s Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Deconstructing the neocon nuclear narrative

Deconstructing the neocon nuclear narrative
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 21, 2007

Why can the neocons never get their story straight?

Because they’ve figured out the ending but they’re still working on the plot.

The end is the end of the Islamic State of Iran, but the first draft of the narrative that was supposed to lead there — through Baghdad — took a major detour, providing Iran with the opportunity to become more powerful than ever.

Even so, a few lessons have been learned from the atrociously written Iraq story.

Don’t talk about “WMD,” is one such lesson. The only weapons worth talking about (as frequently as possible) are nuclear. Fortunately (if you’re a neocon) the press continues to be as obliging as ever in repeating whatever you say. Continue reading →

OPINION: Why the Israel lobby isn’t good for Israel

It’s lobbying, but is it really pro-Israel?
By M.J. Rosenberg, Haaretz, September 21, 2007

I spent almost 20 years as a Congressional aide and can testify from repeated personal experience that senators and House members are under constant pressure to support status-quo policies on Israel. It is no accident that members of Congress compete over who can place more conditions on aid to the Palestinians, who will be first to denounce the Saudi peace plan, and who will win the right to be the primary sponsor of the next pointless Palestinian-bashing resolution. Nor is it an accident that there is never a serious Congressional debate about policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Moreover, every president knows that any serious effort to push for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement based on compromise by both sides will produce loud (sometimes hysterical) opposition from the Hill.

Walt and Mearsheimer mostly limit themselves to exploring whether all this is good for the United States (and to a lesser extent, Israel). The question I ask today, and not for the first time, is whether this type of behavior is good for Israel. Forty years after the Six-Day War, the occupation continues, the resistance to it intensifies, and Israelis in increasing numbers question whether they have a future in the Jewish state.

Has “pro-Israel” advocacy consistently produced “pro-Israel” ends? At several critical moments, it most certainly has not. [complete article]

NEWS: U.S. kidnaps another Iranian

Kurds denounce U.S. detention of Iranian
By Jay Price and Yaseen Taha, McClatchy, September 20, 2007

U.S. troops arrested an Iranian man during an early morning raid on a hotel in this northern Iraqi city Thursday and accused him of helping to smuggle a deadly type of roadside bomb into Iraq.

But the Kurdistan Regional Government in a statement called the arrest “illegitimate,” said the man was a member of a trade delegation that had been invited to Sulaimaniyah by the local government and demanded that he be released.

“Actions like these serve no one,” the statement said.

The United States has detained several Iranians in Iraq in the past year and accused them of training Iraqi insurgents and providing weapons to them. In January it took five Iranians into custody in Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital, and accused them of being members of the Iranian military. They’re still being held. Eight other Iranians who were detained last month in Baghdad were quickly released, however. [complete article]