Category Archives: war in Iraq

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: 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]

OPINION: Tall tales from the annals of the Bush administration

Glued to our seats in the Theater of War
By Ira Chernus, TomDispatch, September 20, 2007

Every war is bound to turn into a story. Every war is experienced as dramatic spectacle — the more mythic the better. It’s no coincidence that the military refers to a battle zone as a “theater.”

Political “battles” are high drama, too. On the campaign trail, the most gripping plot usually wins. In that context, a debate about the math of minimalist “drawdown” — how many troops should leave and how soon — is hardly the stuff of legend, the sort of thing to fuel public passions. And yet the two major parties have to conjure up the illusion of a profound, emotionally stirring difference between them. So they turn a debate like the present one about troop numbers and time frames into a contest between larger competing narratives. [complete article]

NEWS: Lawless contractors

Where military rules don’t apply
By Steve Fainaru, Washington Post, September 20, 2007

Blackwater USA, the private security company involved in a Baghdad shootout last weekend, operated under State Department authority that exempted the company from U.S. military regulations governing other security firms, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives.

In recent months, the State Department’s oversight of Blackwater became a central issue as Iraqi authorities repeatedly clashed with the company over its aggressive street tactics. Many U.S. and Iraqi officials and industry representatives said they came to see Blackwater as untouchable, protected by State Department officials who defended the company at every turn. Blackwater employees protect the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats in Iraq.

Blackwater “has a client who will support them no matter what they do,” said H.C. Lawrence Smith, deputy director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, an advocacy organization in Baghdad that is funded by security firms, including Blackwater. [complete article]

NEWS: Iraq’s refugees

Refugees in their own land: 2m Iraqis forced to flee their homes
By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, September 20, 2007

Nearly two million Iraqis have become refugees in their own land in the past year, redrawing the ethnic and sectarian map of Baghdad and other cities, a report by the Iraqi Red Crescent said yesterday.

In Baghdad alone, nearly a million people have fled their homes.

Last month saw the sharpest rise so far in the numbers of Iraqis forced to abandon their homes – 71.1%.

The forced migration raises questions about claims from the Bush administration that the civilian protection plan at the core of its war strategy is making Iraq safer for Iraqis. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: How to counter terrorism

How to counter terrorism
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, September 19, 2007

Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone is on a mission to promote to promote “religious enlightenment.” The programs he oversees as commander of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, are designed to shape Iraqi detainees and “bend them back to our will.” It sounds like Stalinism.

The idea of rehabilitating jihadists isn’t new; this just sounds like a somewhat mangled version of a program that was devised in Yemen and has been applied with great success. Yet the philosophical approach is profoundly different. Contrast Stone’s aim of bending wills in what he calls “the battlefield of the mind,” with the approach masterminded by former judge Hamoud Abdulhameed al-Hittar, who is now the Minister of Human Rights in Yemen.

This is how Hittar lays the foundation for his work:

Dialogue is a part of human nature. The first step in the creation of human beings was dialogue.

The Qur’an addresses the idea of dialogue with people we don’t agree with. The Pharaoh called himself a god. He said that he was the creator of Mankind. And even then, God granted a dialogue with the Pharaoh. This is an example for us to talk with people, regardless of how bad they are. No matter how much we agree or disagree with them, we should not avoid talking with them.

It is under this principle, that we dialogue with the people from Afghanistan [returning jihadists]. In the tradition found in all religious scriptures, as transmitted by Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Jonas, etc., dialogue is a necessity.

Continue reading →

OPINION: Iraq – who wins?

The victor?
By Peter Galbraith, TomDispatch, September 19, 2007

Iran’s role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador energetically engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the scenes, the Iranian ambassador intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not like. As it happened, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq’s central government. While the Bush administration clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people, Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian Iraqis it supported — by then established as the government of Iraq — as much power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the U.S. nor Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the US and Iran want to see the central government strengthened.)

Since 2005, Iraq’s Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries’ strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraqi government. According to a senior official in Iraq’s Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq’s daily oil exports through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of Iraq’s production. Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised to the Iraqi army. With the U.S. supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no reason to invest its own resources.

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran’s allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini’s army could not. Today, the Shiite-controlled lands extend to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a Shiite majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by these developments; but so is Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, which is home to most of the kingdom’s Shiites. (They may even be a majority in the province but this is unknown as Saudi Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The U.S. Navy has its most important Persian Gulf base in Bahrain while most of Saudi Arabia’s oil is under the Eastern Province. [complete article]

NEWS: Iraq unravelling

Future look of Iraq complicated by internal migration
By James Glanz and Alisa J. Rubin, New York Times, September 19, 2007

A vast internal migration is radically reshaping Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian landscape, according to new data collected by thousands of relief workers, but displacement in the most populous and mixed areas is surprisingly complex, suggesting that partitioning the country into semiautonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy.

The migration data, which are expected to be released this week by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization but were given in advance to The New York Times, indicate that in Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families.

The figures show that many families move twice, three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger and then making more considered calculations based on the availability of city services or schools for their children. Finding neighbors of their own sect is just one of those considerations. [complete article]

FEATURE: Robbing the world of its past

It is the death of history
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, September 17, 2007

In a long and devastating appraisal to be published in December, Lebanese archaeologist Joanne Farchakh says that armies of looters have not spared “one metre of these Sumerian capitals that have been buried under the sand for thousands of years.

“They systematically destroyed the remains of this civilisation in their tireless search for sellable artefacts: ancient cities, covering an estimated surface area of 20 square kilometres, which – if properly excavated – could have provided extensive new information concerning the development of the human race.

“Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.” [complete article]

NEWS: Blackwater operates outside the law

What happens to private contractors who kill Iraqis? Maybe nothing
By Alex Koppelman and Mark Benjamin, Salon, September 18, 2007

An incident this past weekend in which employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm that has become controversial for its extensive role in the war in Iraq, allegedly opened fire on and killed several Iraqis seems to be the last straw for Iraqi tolerance of the company. Iraqi government officials have promised action, including but not limited to the suspension or outright revocation of the company’s license to operate in Iraq.

But pulling Blackwater’s license may be all the Iraqis can do. Should any Iraqis ever seek redress for the deaths of the civilians in a criminal court, they will be out of luck. Because of an order promulgated by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the now-defunct American occupation government, there appears to be almost no chance that the contractors involved would be, or could be, successfully prosecuted in any court in Iraq. CPA Order 17 says private contractors working for the U.S. or coalition governments in Iraq are not subject to Iraqi law. Should any attempt be made to prosecute Blackwater in the United States, meanwhile, it’s not clear what law, if any, applies. [complete article]

INTERVIEW: James Carroll interviewed by Tom Engelhardt

American fundamentalisms
James Carroll interviewed by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, September 17, 2007

He’s a man who knows something about the dangers of mixing religious fervor, war, and the crusading spirit, a subject he dealt with eloquently in his book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. A former Catholic priest turned antiwar activist in the Vietnam era, James Carroll also wrote a moving memoir about his relationship to his father, the founding director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Carroll essentially grew up in that five-sided monument to American imperial power. For him, as a boy, the Pentagon was “the largest playhouse in the world” and he can still remember sliding down its ramps in his stocking feet, as he’s written in the introduction to his recent, magisterial history of that building and the institution it holds, House of War.

As a weekly columnist for the Boston Globe, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice — and warn against — a presidential “slip of the tongue” just after the assaults of 9/11, when George W. Bush referred briefly to his new Global War on Terror as a “crusade.” He was possibly the first mainstream columnist in the country to warn against the consequences of launching a war against Afghanistan in response to those attacks — now just another of the President’s missions unaccomplished; and, in September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War “lost” in print. (“The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?”) His stirring columns on the early years of our President’s attempt to bring “freedom” to the world at the point of a cruise missile were collected in Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. In those years, Carroll was a powerful, moral voice from — to use a very American phrase — the (media) wilderness until much of our American world finally caught up with him. [complete article]

NEWS: Refugees; fewer foreign fighters; more mercenaries; Sadr’s relentless rise; the toll of war

Crocker blasts refugee process
By Spencer S. Hsu and Robin Wright, Washington Post, September 17, 2007

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq warned that it may take the U.S. government as long as two years to process and admit nearly 10,000 Iraqi refugees referred by the United Nations for resettlement to the United States, because of bureaucratic bottlenecks.

In a bluntly worded State Department cable titled “Iraqi Refugee Processing: Can We Speed It Up?” Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker noted that the Department of Homeland Security had only a handful of officers in Jordan to vet the refugees. [complete article]

Fewer foreigners crossing into Iraq from Syria to fight
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, September 16, 2007

The number of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria has decreased noticeably in recent months, corresponding to a similar decrease in suicide bombings and other attacks by the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

“There is an early indication of a trend,” said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, in an interview. Border crossings from Syria that averaged 80 to 90 a month have fallen to “half or two-thirds of that over the last two or three months,” Petraeus said. [complete article]

Muqtada strikes another political blow
By Sami Moubayed, Asia Times, September 18, 2007

We have absolutely no intention of pushing Prime Minister [Nuri al-]Maliki out,” said a spokesman for the Sadrist alliance on Sunday. This came after Muqtada al-Sadr finally decided to walk out of the ruling Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA).

For obvious reasons, the prime minister did not believe the assurances, realizing that ever since he broke with Muqtada this year, the rebel-turned-politician has been bent on bringing down the entire Maliki administration in revenge.

Muqtada has been giving Maliki nightmares – serious ones. Step 1 of his “coup” was six of his supporters walking out on the Maliki cabinet, depriving it of Sadrist legitimacy and keeping key positions vacant, such as Transport, Commerce, and Health. Maliki promised a cabinet reshuffle in the summer to fill in the vacant posts, but to date he has not done so. [complete article]

‘Help wanted’ ad belies report on Iraq security
By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, September 17, 2007

A week ago today, Gen. David H. Petraeus started his rounds on Capitol Hill, reporting that security in Iraq was improving to the point that a small number of troops could begin coming home by year’s end.

But 10 days ago, his commanders in Baghdad began advertising for private contractors to work in combat-supply warehouses on U.S. bases throughout Iraq because half the soldiers who had been working in the warehouses were needed for patrols, combat and protection of U.S. forces. [complete article]

Sectarian toll includes scars to Iraq psyche
By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, September 17, 2007

Iraqis have continued to flee their homes throughout the American troop increase, which began early this year, and despite assurances that it is becoming safe to return, uncrossable lines have been left in Iraqi minds and neighborhoods. Schools, hospitals and municipal buildings are quickly losing their diversity. [complete article]

NEWS AND ANALYSIS: Who killed Abdul Sattar Abu Risha?

Super-sheikh murdered by tribal rivals?
By Noah Shachtman, Danger Room, September 14, 2007

An expert on Anbar’s tribal politics offers DANGER ROOM a different view. Tribal rivals, he says, are the most likely culprits.

Think in tribal terms. Sheikh Sattar met with the U.S. President. This reinforced the newly-won position of the Albu Risha. A number of competitor tribes could not afford for the Risha to cement and consolidate its power. The new status quo and the increased power of the Risha had to be challenged. The meeting with the President assisted the Risha and its allies in consolidating their newly gained stature. It is a matter of credibility and legitimacy — a very important component of tribal leadership, whether in terms of an individual Sheikh’s position or the tribes overall position within the tribal system, such as the Dulaymi Confederation. Timing is everything. Assassinating Sattar now was necessary or it would be even harder to dislodge the Risha later. [complete article]

Qaeda group claims killing of Iraqi Sunni leader
Reuters, September 14, 2007

An Al Qaeda-led group said on Friday it was responsible for the killing of Iraqi tribal leader Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, according to an Internet posting on Friday.

The self-styled Islamic State in Iraq called the killing of Abu Risha a “heroic operation.” Its statement could not be authenticated, but it was posted on a main Islamist Web site. [complete article]

OPINION: Deceptive or delusional?

Bush’s appalling Iraq speech
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, September 13, 2007

President Bush’s TV address tonight was the worst speech he’s ever given on the war in Iraq, and that’s saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.

The biggest fiction was that because of the “success” of the surge, we can reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq from 20 combat brigades to 15 by next July. Gen. David Petraeus has recommended this step, and President George W. Bush will order it so. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — President Bush’s basic problem as he addressed the nation last night was that his position has become untenable: he is a president who needs a front man. If General Patraeus could have given a presidential address, Bush seemed like he would happily have handed over the Oval Office.

“The war of good and evil” — phrasing that Bush would in the past have eagerly claimed as his own — this time came instead from an email from the parents of a dead soldier, Army Specialist Brandon Stout of Michigan. Then, in the ultimate act of disownership, Bush said, “now it falls to us to finish the work they have begun.”

Sorry, Mr. President, it wasn’t Americans like Brandon Stout who started this war — they simply blindly followed your lead.

Three and a half years later, faced with the consequences of their casual assent to war, many — perhaps even most Americans — would now support the idea that the president and this administration’s top officials “have to be held accountable.”

That demand also comes from elsewhere — this time from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Today he went on to say, “I have a firm belief that one day this current US president and the American officials will be tried in a fair international court for the atrocities committed in Iraq.”

Washington’s reaction would no doubt be, of course that’s what America’s nemesis would say. Yet as all the neocons and now the president himself each energetically pursue their own personal exit strategy for getting out of responsibility for Iraq, the judgment day they clearly fear is much closer than the hereafter. It comes in the ignominious fall that the mighty will always struggle to evade. Eventually, though, executives lose their privilege.

ANALYSIS: Why the Sunnis have turned against al Qaeda

Sunni world
By Marc Lynch, The American Prospect, September 13, 2007

During his visit to Iraq last week, President Bush carved out an hour to sit down with Shaykh Abd al-Sattar Abu Risha, the controversial head of the Anbar Salvation Council who had become a symbol of America’s Anbar strategy. The pictures from that photo-op were likely the Shaykh’s death warrant: Abu Risha was assassinated today, even as Bush prepared to use the Anbar strategy’s “success” to justify our continued involvement in Iraq.

David Petraeus was quick to blame al-Qaeda for the stunning murder, a leap to judgment emblematic of all which is wrong with America’s current views of the Sunnis of Iraq. In reality there are a plethora of likely suspects, reflecting the reality of an intensely factionalized and divided community which little resembles the picture offered by the administration’s defenders. Leaders of other tribes deeply resented Abu Risha’s prominence. Leaders of the major insurgency factions had for weeks been warning against allowing people such as Abu Risha to illegitimately reap the fruits of their jihad against the occupation. The brazen murder of America’s closest Sunni ally in Iraq was as predictable as it was shocking, and carries a powerful message to both Iraqis and Americans about the real prospects for the long-term success of the American project. [complete article]

See also, Abu Risha’s place in history (Badger) and Iraqi insurgents kill key U.S. ally (BBC News).

EDITORIAL: Who’s in the best position to play a constructive role in Iraq?

Who’s in the best position to play a constructive role in Iraq?
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, August 10, 2007

In his patronizing, familiar style, President Bush yesterday said he’d need to have a “heart-to-heart” with his “friend,” Prime Minister Maliki, if the latter continues to insist that Iran is playing a constructive role in Iraq. Then, to drive his message home, Bush switched from friendly to aggressive by saying, “Now, is he [Maliki] trying to get Iran to play a more constructive role? I presume he is. But that doesn’t – what my question is – well, my message to him is, is that when we catch you playing a non-constructive role there will be a price to pay.” Bush staffers were then forced to untangle Bush’s ambiguous syntax by saying that it was Iran — not Maliki — that will pay the price. Vice President Cheney has already volunteered that that price could include airstrikes against suspected training camps in Iran run by the Quds force.

With a casus belli such as “catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran,” the long-feared war against Iran now seems unlikely to start with a shock-and-awe strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Instead, a series of “incidents” spread out over a period of months might escalate into a conflict from which neither side can back down. If this happens, I would argue that it reflects a Cheney-inspired political strategy for circumnavigating high level dissent inside the Pentagon.

For some time, rumors have been circulating in Washington that a significant number of generals would resign rather than support military action against Iran. Yet in the scenario I describe, it would only be after the fact (and too late for anyone to preemptively threaten resignation) before everyone agreed that the threshold of war had already been crossed. The window of opportunity for a principled rebellion is rapidly closing.

Meanwhile, the White House’s more immediate preoccupation seems to be whether it’s going to continue treating Maliki as a friend or turn him into a foe.

If and when Maliki has this promised/threatened heart-to-heart with the president, he might consider asking Bush how Iraqis should interpret the following two contrasting images.

To Iran’s west we see an American-led reconstruction process in Iraq that after four years has yielded meager results. Oil production remains below pre-war levels, electricity supply in Baghdad is under a third of what it was, unemployment is around 50%, and 70% of Iraqis lack adequate water supplies. Until quite recently, the U.S. was characterizing “terrorism” — not Iran — as the primary obstacle to Iraq’s progress.

To the east of Iran, Herat (Afghanistan’s western-most city) is now being hailed as a demonstration of “the positive influence of Iran” — those being the words of Mohammed Rafiq Shahir, president of Herat’s Council of Professionals. Since 2001, “Herat has attracted $350 million in private investment for industry – more than any other Afghan city, including Kabul, which is some 10 times larger. In total, 250 medium- and large-scale factories have been built.” The driving force behind this economic boom has been Iran. It has built a highway to the nearby border and it has hooked Herat into the Iranian power grid.

No wonder that — unlike Bush — Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, views his Persian neighbors positively. At the same time, Nuri al-Maliki might well look forward to the day that Iraq is able to purchase cheap electricity from nuclear-powered Iranian power stations.

At the end of the day, what should be more important? Having friendly relations with your immediate neighbors or pleasing a distant, unpredictable and unreliable superpower?

NEWS: White House isn’t backing Iraq Study Group follow-up

White House isn’t backing Iraq Study Group follow-up
By Robin Wright, Washington Post, July 12, 2007

Despite an overwhelming House vote last month to revive the Iraq Study Group, the White House has blocked reconvening the bipartisan panel to provide a second independent assessment of the military and political situation in Iraq, said several sources involved in the panel’s December 2006 report.

Co-Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, several panel members and the U.S. Institute of Peace, which ran the study group, were willing to participate, according to Hamilton and the congressionally funded think tank. But the White House did not give the green light for co-chairman and former secretary of state James A. Baker III to participate, and Baker is unwilling to lead a second review without President Bush’s approval, according to members of the original panel and sources close to Baker.

White House support is critical for any follow-up review. “It is not likely to happen unless the White House approves it,” Hamilton, a Democratic former congressman from Indiana, said in an interview. “The group can’t go ahead without its concurrence or acquiescence, as we need travel support and access to documents.” [complete article]