Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Somewhere in Washington is the Congressional Research Service. Somehow they have produced something of great awe and mystery, just in the nick of time. It is perhaps the best (only?) study of the structure of the Coalition Provisional Authority produced by the federal government. The study cannot determine if the CPA is part of the DoD, because apparently it isn't a government agency. Also the CPA essentially has to contract out its contracting in the outlying areas, because it can't manage the process... There is direct evidence of Ahmed Chalabi's cronies getting plum contracts that later failed to adequately train the Iraqi police force.
Also note closely the description of how the Secretary of Defense can control administrative functions at all levels of the CPA, but the money pots are never clear (and apparently these people can sit in Mesopotamia for a year without spending a damned dime on irrigation projects)
The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origin, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities" by L. Elaine Halchin, Congressional Research Service, April 29, 2004.
Enter this one under 'primary sources.' Wow. Credit where credit is due to the Federation of American Scientists and their Project on Government Secrecy!
Establishment of CPADetailed information that explicitly and clearly identifies how the authority was established, and by whom, is not readily available. Instead, there are two alternative explanations for how it was established: one version suggests that the President established CPA; the other suggests that it was established pursuant to a United Nations (U.N.) Security Council resolution. While these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, the lack of a clear, authoritative, and unambiguous statement about how this organization was established and its status (that is, is it a federal agency or not) leaves open many questions, particularly regarding the area of oversight and accountability....
....According to this excerpt, the authority is an entity of the federal government. Nonetheless, questions remain regarding how CPA was established, who established it, the precise nature of its relationship to DOD (including DOD components) and other federal entities, and whether CPA is a federal agency or some other type of government organization. Another unanswered question concerns the scope of CPA’s authority when functioning in its capacity as an entity of the U.S. government. Information provided by CPA itself indicates that its sector program management offices (SPMOs) are part of the federal government. (The CPA’s PMO is supported by six SPMOs.) In a written response to a question asked at a January 21, 2004, pre-proposal conference on contracting opportunities, the CPA stated that “the Sector Program Management Office (SPMO) is a Government entity.”
.....Lending support to the notion that the authority is not a federal agency, but instead is an amorphous international organization, are statements by the Department of the Army. In 2003, two protests were filed with the General Accounting Office (GAO) by Turkcell Consortium, which challenged CPA’s issuance of licenses for mobile telecommunications services in Iraq. GAO dismissed both protests without having to rule on the status of CPA.Given that P.L. 108-106 and other government documents state that CPA is a U.S. government entity, the Army’s response raises questions. Arguably, the Army was concerned that some would assume, precisely because of references to the authority as a government entity, that CPA is a federal agency. Another possibility is that the Army, as the executive agent for the authority (discussed below), has assumed responsibility for certain procurement activities and tasks, such as responding to protests, and thus argued strongly for excluding CPA from the GAO protest process.
Legislative language might contribute to questions about the status of the authority. The FY2004 emergency supplemental refers to CPA as “an entity of the United States Government.” 38 In the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2004, Section 1203(b)(1) mentions “civilian groups reporting to the Secretary [of Defense], including” ORHA and CPA. 39 Section 1203(b)(3) refers to the “relationship of Department of Defense entities, including” ORHA and CPA. 40 The House report accompanying H.R. 1588 (P.L. 108-136), the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2004, in its comments on the section that became Section 1203, mentioned “Department of Defense (DOD) civilian and military activities in post-conflict Iraq.” Eschewing the word “agency” in favor of “entity,” “group,” and “activities” in legislation and congressional documents could be a reflection of the Administration’s approach, an acknowledgment that CPA’s status is uncertain, or a sign that Congress agrees that CPA is not an agency.
The following description of a DOD executive agent indicates that executive agents are assigned responsibility for DOD missions, activities, or tasks:
The Head of a DoD Component to whom the Secretary of Defense or the Deputy Secretary of Defense has assigned specific responsibilities, functions, and authorities to provide defined levels of support for operational missions, or administrative or other designated activities that involve two or more of the DoD Components. The nature and scope of the DoD Executive Agents responsibilities, functions, and authorities shall ... be prescribed at the time of assignment [and] ... remain in effect until the Secretary of Defense or the Deputy Secretary of Defense revokes or suspends them. 54This definition would arguably cast CPA as a DOD component. A broad interpretation, though, might allow the Secretary, or Deputy Secretary, to appoint an executive agent for a non-DOD entity or even a non-governmental entity.
......
Another possible reason why CPA is limited to monitoring contracts may be that government officials ascertained that the authority does not have enough personnel, or enough personnel with sufficient experience in the types of work to be done in Iraq, to develop solicitations and evaluate proposals for seven major sectors, the PMO, and the SPMOs. The fact that CPA needs contractor support for its PMO and SPMOs tends to support the notion that it does not have enough resources to perform all of the necessary procurement tasks.
......
CPA’s award of a contract to Nour USA to equip the Iraqi armed forces and the Iraqi civil defense corps also has been the subject of protests.... In a press release dated January 31, 2004, CPA announced that it had awarded a contract for $327 million to Nour USA.In mid-February, it was reported that two companies, Cemex Global Inc. and Bumar Group, had filed separate protests, which were combined by GAO into one protest, challenging the awarding of this contract to Nour USA. Among their concerns were (1) the relatively low cost of the Nour USA proposal, which was $231 million lower than the Bumar Group’s proposal; (2) the fact that Nour’s president is A. Huda Faouki, who allegedly is a friend of Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council; and (3) the belief that Nour USA, which apparently was established in May 2003, has no experience in performing the work necessary to fulfill the terms of the contract.
Perhaps this ambiguity allows the authority to perform multiple roles, each with its own chain of command, stakeholders or constituents, funding, and accountability policies and mechanisms. A statement in the FY2004 emergency supplemental — “in its [CPA] capacity as an entity of the United State government” — suggests that U.S. government entity is only one of CPA’s roles. Other roles might include temporarily aiding in the governing of Iraq and serving as part of a coalition. Possibly, the mix of arrangements allows CPA to operate with greater discretion and more authority, and have access to more resources than if it was solely a federal agency, or an arm of the United Nations. 109 CPA personnel also might be able to work more efficiently and effectively under this mix. By operating under more than one set of laws, regulations, and policies, CPA possibly could expand the scope and reach of the organization’s authority beyond what it would be otherwise......There's shell games and shell games.... I look at it this way: they stole their website from the Brookings Institution, and that's about all that needs to be said.Potential drawbacks of this arrangement are that the lines of authority and accountability could become tangled, or even obscured. CPA personnel possibly could find it difficult to understand and delineate clearly — on a daily basis — the organization’s different roles and associated funds, laws, and rules. Personnel might be hampered by this tangle of resources, laws, and documents, and could find themselves engaging in questionable, if not unethical or criminal, activities. This scenario also could prove challenging for organizations that are attempting to monitor CPA and its activities. When the authority makes a decision or expends funds, it might not be clear to external parties under what authority it is acting. Without transparency, the CPA might give the appearance of shifting funds, personnel, and tasks among different roles. Further compounding the problem, oversight initiatives might be met with the response that the activity in question was carried out under an authority over which the oversight body — Congress — has no jurisdiction.
Andy sent me this link to the MNDoT online traffic report right now. The peak is coming down now, fortunately, but the West metro is really terrible. This afternoon I saw the Hiawatha project office, and it's coming along nicely. They will soon be officially announcing that the line partially opens in late June, as the plan stands so far.
Also the Northstar commuter rail line is coming together, as well, I think along Highway 10, which as you can see is badly jammed, even so far from the core of the metro, at 6 PM. Interesting stuff. Could two rail lines make a dramatic impact?
I have two term papers to write, so I probably won't be able to make posts for a while, perhaps until Tuesday. Yes that sucks, as there are exciting things going on with Bush's testimony, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. etc. I heard about Abu Ghraib prison torture and that's just incredible. I think I'll have to watch the 60 Minutes II special, which should be tonight. Also a large corp is preventing their TV affiliates from broadcasting the Nightline tribute to fallen soldiers. What the hell...
As ongoing sources I still recommend War In Context, Billmon, Talking Points Memo, Juan Cole, the Agonist.
I am alarmed about the increasing waves of ... I don't know what to call it, angry energy ... oscillating between Fallujah, Fox News, Jerusalem and Najaf. On Fox they are all angry retired colonels all the time who've reached the firm consensus that the jihadis must be slaughtered in Fallujah wholesale, while the rest of the Arab world shimmers and buckles under the immense political pressure that Bush and Sharon generated by officially refuting the refugees and gaining the "Israeli population centers."
I'll cite a couple stories that I found interesting this evening. Firstly a piece on Tech Central Station positing the theory of a world-historical shift emerging through Islamic militancy in the middle east, conceived not as 'terrorism' or 'radicals vs moderates' but rather the new Islamist project or 'renovatio' of bringing down all the corrupt regimes and angling towards a new pan-Islamic caliphate. This kind of thing seemed a lot more far-fetched, what, a year ago?
WaPo says that a lot of soldiers are surviving injuries that would have been lethal, so of course it's a lot more living wreckage.
The Fallujah folks (of today's fallen minarets, no less) have sprouted a political arm affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. (could this be linked to Islamist disgruntlement in Syria??)
This feature from the journal Foreign Policy deflates a lot of myths about Al Qaeda, helping to illustrate that it's a sort of 'venture capital' kind of outfit rather than a coherent organization.
Suicide bombings have less to do with fundie indoctrination than sociological conditions: witness the Tamil Tigers, according to a political scientist. (not that this field doesn't attracts more than its share of preposterous poli sci fiends)
A writer in the Lebanese Daily Star is really just trying to get our attention, how could he have ever reached such silly conclusions:
Without being unduly alarmist, it is safe to predict that the coming weeks and months are likely to be exceedingly dangerous. It feels as if the whole planet is threatened by an imminent volcanic eruption. Such is the thirst for revenge and the level of frustration in the Arab and Muslim world that explosions of violence are to be expected in widely scattered locations....And don't forget: Bush didn't really plan for the impact Iraq might have on the domestic economy, either!! (reg. req'd) Sweetness.Recent actions and statements by US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as well as by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have been so grossly offensive to a large segment of Arab and Muslim opinion that they seem bound to trigger a violent response. By resorting to force and by ruling out a peaceful settlement of regional disputes, whether in Iraq or Palestine, these leaders have legitimized terror. Consciously or not, they have in fact provoked it....
Israel lies at the heart of the present international disorder. Its supporters in Washington conceived the war against Iraq and pressed for it to be waged, in the mistaken belief that it would help Israel defeat the Palestinians. Differences over how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict have become the main subject of discord between Europe and the United States. Europe has been powerless to make itself heard, largely because of the large-scale, high-level penetration of the American government by "friends of Israel." This is a striking feature of contemporary politics.
Meanwhile, Israel's daily slaughter of Palestinians continues to outrage the conscience of the civilized world, yet no one knows how to stop it. Memories of the Holocaust, together with an unmatched worldwide propaganda machine, have given the Jewish state a wide measure of immunity. Yet Sharon's cynical strategy is crystal clear. To seize more land on the West Bank, he is exploiting to the full the support of a weak American president, anxious for the votes of American Jews and fundamentalist "Christian Zionists" in an election year.
These links have been shamelessly pilfered from the superb WarInContext.org so please direct accolades and cash money to them; they work hard.
I guess all these articles really caught me as alarm bells that we are staring down a major sea change across the political system of the Mideast, like it or not. The question is which batshit apocalyptic militarists are going to call the shots on each side. (crossposted on DKos)
It's getting Syrious...
There were reports today that some force attacked some installations in Syria, although what exactly happened isn't clear. The BBC has a number of comments published from people who witnessed what happened, but whether this signals greater instability in the last Baathist republic or merely another incident is very unknown. Al Jazeera claims that "foreign special forces" implied to be the Americans did this operation and fled into the city. I really don't know what to make of that:
It is widely known coalition special forces based out of Iraq are in operation inside the Syrian side of the Iraqi boarder to stem the flow of foreign fighters. This incident is the first which has targeted the capital Damascus.Maybe...
(my following speculation was posted to the Kos this afternoon, now slightly updated and better linked)
Just to run down the menu, since the invasion of Iraq, Israel has bombed an abandoned/dormant Palestinian training camp about 30 miles outside Damascus, towards Lebanon. This location was roughly at the center of the Syrian 'regional presence' if you include the places they occupy in Lebanon. Also at one point in the past year the US army chased a set of retrofitted gas trucks into Syria from Iraq, killing about 20 people and seizing four Syrian border guards, who were later released. (I'm going from memory here, so I might be mistaken) That whole incident turned out to be based on bad intel, but it got the US military raising havoc in the territory, which was, I think we all have to admit, a prime objective of neoconservative strategy.
The thing about Syria that everyone forgets is that their government is fundamentally opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda type political forces, and they've been in conflict for decades. Syria also provided a great deal of al Qaeda intelligence to the CIA after 9/11 as Seymour Hersh reported. But that didn't save them from losing the oil that Saddam was surrepiticiously pumping to them after the war.
Syria is probably one of the most badly calcified and repressive states in the world, but at the same time it is against Al Qaeda. And after all, until four years ago Israel was occupying south Lebanon, as well as the annexed Golan Heights. All this military activity forced Syria to remain a state mobilized for war, vesting more power in the dictatorship and less in civil society.
I don't really think this is the popular revolution at the gates like everyone's speculating... However how the hell can we even decode what's happening in a secretive place like Damascus when Hezbollah and Hamas are chillin there?
Yes, the Israelis would like to see it destabilized. I don't really think that Mossad did it, but maybe they helped some crazy Arabs get bombs and such. They are that impulsive these days, but there are plenty of other parties.
On the other hand, the only other big news from Syria lately is that some Kurds fought with the government in the wild eastern section of the country after a soccer game. It would not be surprising at all if the Kurdish militants are taking advantage of their greater freedom and Iraqi basing to go after the Syrian Baathists. After all, the remote sections of Syria are as much part of their heritage as Damascus'. (and for that matter, the free-for-all in Iraq provides a great deal of terrorist-haven space to attack the Saudis and Jordanians from, as well, which is a prime reason that Iran is generally interested in peacefully stabilizing Iraq)
There's the whole issue of Syria letting foreign (read Arab) fighters come across the border to fight the United States since before the war. I would be interested in someone explaining to me why it was morally wrong for them to leave the border open. There are a lot of cross-border Sunni tribal connections, and I would suspect that much of the resistance in al-Anbar province is supported by Arabs with Syrian family ties, perhaps especially Sunnis who got completely screwed when Bremer dissolved the Iraqi military.
Also it is worth noting that Pentagon Office of Special Plans schemer David Wurmser wrote a funny and wildly inaccurate report alongside the famous Clean Break document called "Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli balance of power strategy for the Levant" which makes all these weird claims about Syria evaporating in the desert. ('Western and Israeli balance of power' couldn't possibly mean Israeli-American hegemony, could it??! How silly!)
In the Clean Break, Perle, Feith, Wurmser declared that 'rolling back' Syria was a principal objective of Israeli policy that could be accomplished by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Is this chaos part of that scheme, or merely the waves of wreckage stemming from their incredibly poor and Sunni-hostile postwar management?
This is not a situation with a great deal of 'moral clarity,' let me put it that way.
A whole bunch of British government diplomats have released a letter criticizing Tony Blair's strategies on Iraq and Israel/Palestine, saying that he has been heedless of civilian casualties in Iraq while undermining and unbalancing the British approach to the Arab world by abandoning the Road Map plan. Reuters summarizes the 'unprecedented letter' while Juan Cole reprints it in full. I would characterize this as pretty much the whole British Arabist establishment flaming Blair. Reuters:
The diplomats criticised the toll of the war and apparent lack of a plan for life in the country post-Saddam. "The Iraqis killed by coalition forces probably total between 10,000 and 15,000," they said, estimating the number killed in the last month in Falluja alone at several hundred.Or rather, as Iraqi-Palestinian Raed in the Middle put it about a week ago:"There was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement...To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful."
On the Middle East, the diplomats said big powers had waited for U.S. leadership to advance a "road map" for peace that had raised expectations of a lasting Israeli-Palestinian settlement. "The hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence. Britain and the other sponsors of the road map merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain," it said.
"Worse was to come," they continued, attacking Bush's decision this month to endorse an Israeli plan to retain some settlements in the West Bank as an illegal and one-sided step. "Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land."
I am ANGRY!!! VERY ANGRY!!! I am a secular leftist! But I am angry!!!!And earlier:
Can you imagine what do other millions of right winged religious people feel????
I can’t even concentrate and don't know if my words will make any sense!!The hate and anger of the Arab people today is unbelievable!!!, Palestinians Iraqis Jordanians Egyptians Syrians … the hate against Bush and his administration is huge now… enormous … ENORMOUS!!!!!!
Everyone believes that Bush is giving the green light for Sharon to kill their leaders, and everyone thinks that Iraq, Falluja, Najaf and every other city would face the same Palestinian destiny if they didn’t fight Against the American army now …. They would be put under siege and assassinated one by one by the American helicopters!!!
Everyone thinks that it is better to start fighting from now!!! Everyone is full of HATE!!! EVEN ME!!!When the Iraqi fighter kills more American soldiers now… he has the images of Ahmad Yasin and Ranteesi in his mind
Can you imagine a community that is boiling?! Like a volcano?!
....
I am losing faith that words can solve anything when Bush and Sharon are ruling the world, and I can feel that explosion that will destroy everything is coming; it will destroy us and destroy you.The explosion is coming.
The volcano of the Middle East is not going to sleep forever.
So, after the huge defeat and failure, Bush decided to make a move today… he announced the neo-Balfour Declaration, and gave the house of my grandfather as a gift to Sharon. Please! UN resolutions? Road map? anyone? hello?I mean… where is the point? How can someone donate something that he doesn’t own? It’s like me announcing that I give the house of Bush as a gift to my father!
I just ran my web server logs and yet again the numbers show that the site is still fairly popular and still catching hits from military (.mil) computers, as well. (specifically Navy computers!)
The current list of different countries includes the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, UK, France, Australia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, New Zealand, Switzerland, Turkey, Macedonia, Portugal, Hungary, Belgium, Argentina, Italy, Austria, South Africa, Singapore, Mexico, Spain, Ukraine, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Israel, Czech Republic, Denmark, Russia, Thailand, Lithuania, Seychelles and Hong Kong.
Right here you can see the full access report, now including referrers.
Not all of these different countries appeared since the last log analysis. However traffic is still high, and April 23rd was my busiest day so far, with 547 page requests. The Googlebot really likes to visit, as well.
Now that the referrers are being listed, billmon.org, where I leave comments sometimes, as well as Technorati provide a lot of incoming hits. Technorati is a somewhat arrogant kind of rate-yourself sort of enterprise that I decided to get a listing on. Through the Technorati service, I can see that my site is listed on at least 19 other sites on the Internet, a much higher number than I thought. Primarily the sites list me on the 'blogroll' as a DailyKos blogger, and they tend to call me 'Hong Pong.' Oh well... network effects on the increase!
Thank you to everyone who continues visiting! I'll keep trying to improve the functions and features of the site, and I hope everyone likes that the front page now loads much more quickly!
I am really getting into term paper time here, so it's quite difficult to write a whole lot. However, I would suggest that you spend a while looking at Raed in the Middle. He has some great ideas about how to drive Iraqi reconstruction, but as a Palestinian living in Iraq he has a peculiar sense of how horrible things are becoming in Iraq and Palestine. His friend also went to Fallujah and wrote about it.
In class today some students proposed an Iraqi confederation and wouldn't you know it, here's a proposal to do just that.
Here is an old article that Raed's brother wrote about Chalabi's militia, the supposed "Free Iraqi Forces."
This is kind of cool: "Another day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America" by Kurt Nimmo.
Empire Notes is back in Austin, TX, rounding up what happened to him in Iraq.
Alliances are shifting dramatically. Is soft power evaporating?
Check out this sweet satirical Halliburton poster.
For the mercenary file a slightly hyperbolic piece on "the rising corporate military monster" from CounterPunch. That is what I have to go read about right now, thank you very much.
One presentation due Wednesday, one term paper draft due Friday, two papers due Monday. Here we go!
There's been a hella lotta news over the past couple days. However, Saturday is Springfest, and I fully intend to immerse myself in the music, because I haven't been keeping tabs on pop culture as well as I should be. I don't want to think about all the damn news for a little while. So let this summary suffice for Saturday; there's plenty of interesting things to look at, radical and more conservative.
Remind us why the war happened. This animation has some rather jarring imagery but nonetheless it's worth looking at. A tacky style or propaganda of the 21st century?
UN Iraq man Lakhdar Brahimi condemns Israel's policies, generating conflict with the Israelis and surely making the Pentagon a happy bunch of fellas, reports BBC.
CS Monitor reporter on the deterioration in Iraq and how it has made journalists increasingly unable to wander about the country:
The United Nations envoy to Iraq has sparked a row after describing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as "the big poison in the region". Lakhdar Brahimi told French radio there was a link between Israeli actions and the recent upsurge of violence in Iraq. He said that the handover of power in Iraq was being complicated by Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza.UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesman has reportedly described the comments as "unacceptable".
....
Mr Brahimi said his job was made more difficult by Israel's "violent and repressive security policy" and its "determination to occupy more and more Palestinian territory". He added that people's perception in the region was of the "injustice" of Israeli policy compounded by the "thoughtless support" of the US.The UN secretary general's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, told Israeli radio it was not acceptable for senior UN officials to make such comments about a member nation.
In essence, I feel we've become boiled frogs. Toss the frog into boiling water, and he jumps right out again, or at least tries. But put him in lukewarm water and slowly turns up the heat and he barely notices until he's cooked. Rather than overestimate the problems (a common journalistic temptation), I've begun to wonder if we're not understating them, notwithstanding the letters from readers who accuse our paper, and many others, of being Chicken Littles.Phil Carter of Intel Dump has an insightful article on Slate about how the Iraq invasion has basically paralyzed the ability of the US military to respond to things elsewhere, crunching logistics and all that. He's a more conservative guy but he knows his stuff really well.To be sure, in a wartime environment like Iraq's there is rarely a constant arc of progress, or descent into chaos. Violence ebbs and flows, incidents flare and then almost inexplicably, vanish. This froggy is leaving on a reporting trip outside Baghdad today - the first trip out of the city in more than a week. It feels safer again.
I wanted to throw in some things from CounterPunch: this April 10 piece by Robert Fisk describing how the Bush administration attacks its critics on Iraq, this jolly rambling report on 'Pseudoconservatives' by an anonymous defense analyst. Rahul Mahajan is a very intrepid journalist that I've mentioned recently, having written this piece on a visit to Fallujah and also writing the very interesting Empire Notes from Baghdad. Also Tariq Ali weighs in with his New Leftist sort of thing on "The Iraqi Resistance: a new phase." What seems to be his key point:
Its no use for Westerners to shed hypocritical tears for Iraq or to complain that the Iraqi resistance does not meet the high stands of Western liberalism. Which resistance ever does?Then there is Fisk again on the Bush-Sharon plan, "Bush Legitimizes Terrorism." The piece is a tad overwrought, but I can only imagine how bitter someone like him would be having seen the middle east burn itself to bits for decades, never even thinking that it would come to this today. On the front page today is a humorous "Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation" by Paul de Rooij.When an Occupation is ugly, the resistance cannot be beautiful, except in a Hollywood movie or an Italian comedy.
Here are the now-famous photos of deceased American soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base (on a fast mirror). These pictures are the rather explicit negation of a finely tuned, decade long Cheney policy to remove critical images of the reality of American warfare from the array of visual images that the public can actually see. In other words, their strategy was to prevent you from seeing these pictures. Now you can and should look at them to understand more fully the situation.
Mr Marshall is following a couple interesting developments. Firstly he says that plans to invade the southern Iraqi oilfields were ordered at the same time in the same document as the plans to invade Afghanistan in late 2001. Hot damn, cause and effect! He is also following the upcoming changes in the Iraqi government, and the apparent distancing of Ahmed Chalabi from the reins of power, both within Iraq and the ludicrous perks accorded to him by the U.S., such as his enormous personal stash of incriminating Baathist documents that by all rights should belong to the Iraqi people, not a lying, intel spoofing embezzler.
The topic is the new Iraqi government now being planned and organized jointly by the US and the UN and the fact that the decision has been made to toss overboard most if not all of the folks we put on the Interim Governing Council. At the top of the list of those to get the heave-ho is Ahmed Chalabi.According to the article, the administration is seriously considering cutting off the amazingly ill-conceived $340,000 a month subsidy we still give Chalabi. Meanwhile, his role as head of the de-Baathification committee has just been publicly criticized by Paul Bremer.
David Corn has some reactions on the administration shifting Afghanistan money getting to possibly illegal Iraq war preparations.
The Hawkington Times says that "US sees Syria 'facilitating' insurgents." Oh well.
One conservative columnist in the Chicago Tribune flames Bush to a crisp over the war. I strongly think this is worth checking out, as it is not the new leftist claptrap of Counterpunch! :) Since no one wants to register for the Tribune, why not read it on the Agonist message boards?
They repeatedly tell us, in only slightly different ways, that this leadership group--or, better said, "court"--is one of "irregulars." At every opportunity, they went around our official government, around our institutions, and likely enough around the law. Across their history from the 1970s until today, this Bush neo-conservative group, backed by elements of the radical right and American supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, created alternate power centers to bypass traditional American ones. In short, they are true radicals. Think "Robespierre."Bob Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack," for instance, how Douglas Feith, one of the most radical of the Bush-Rumsfeld courtiers, lobbied for the special intelligence planning board within the Pentagon to bypass traditional intelligence that warned against going to war in Iraq. This fact is widely known, but Woodward importantly explains: "It was a different way of doing things, first because the planners would be the implementers"--they would become the "expeditionary force" within Iraq after the war. Definitely not kosher!
There is a huge feature on the public radio series Marketplace about the Spoils of War, the reconstruction cash money millionaires and all that. You can listen online, and it will certainly go in the Mercenary File as well. Speaking of mercenaries here is a feature on them from earlier in the month.
As far as marvelous news go you can't ask for more than the respected news service Jane's. Recently published and partly accessible for free: World Oil Crisis Looms:
Other companies and even governments have hyped up the estimates of how much oil they have, which is a vital factor in measuring their economic health. If exaggeration proves to be widespread, it would have an immense impact on the Middle East, whose economic weight is almost totally dependent on oil and natural gas.It is worth considering that a great proportion of the world's remaining oil exists in a roughly triangular basin between Oman, Kirkuk in northern Iraq and southeastern Iran. Easy territory. Also if the Ghawar fields in eastern Saudi Arabia continue to steeply decline then that country will really feel the pinch.
....
Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that internal documents and other data indicated that Shell had over estimated its proven oil reserves in Oman by as much as 40 per cent. But that seems to have been done because everyone hoped that the latest drilling techniques would reach more deposits than in the past and merit upgrading the estimates of reserves.The Oman estimates were based on assessments made in May 2000 by a senior Shell executive who was subsequently fired. He was among several executives who were said to have known about the unrealistic estimates of reserves and to have done nothing about it.
If the exaggeration is confirmed, the estimate of recoverable oil will have to be lowered. That is bad news for Oman, which claims reserves of 5.4bn barrels and is heavily dependent on oil and gas exports but it is also bad news for the world as a whole.
As the world's natural resources shrink and global warming changes the environment, competition for unimpeded access to them has intensified and will continue to do so. About four-fifths of the world's known oil reserves lie in politically unstable or contested regions.
Surely such minor matters as these wouldn't generate warfare for the next 20 years?
A while ago I stumbled on a large booklet describing the funding and operational organization of Al Qaeda and its Southeast Asia affiliate Jamaat Islamiya. (spellings vary :) The book featured a good deal of interesting evidence about how Al Qaeda operates through charities, front companies, the hawala money networks and so forth. But it also had charts laying out the structures of contemporary JI and Al Qaeda, as well as the more theoretical designs of how terror networks are laid out.
Later that day I found a couple stories about Hamas and its workings, which are quite a bit more complex than the suicide bomb factories and occasional welfare handouts that the media caricatures lead us to believe. I oppose Hamas' goals and methods as ghastly and counterproductive to the Palestinian people, but I am intrigued by how the organization has numerous branches and an all-pervasive social structure in Palestinian society that replaces the fading and highly dysfunctional Palestinian Authority. I'm also alarmed by the burgeoning operation of Hamas-related schools for the youngsters, because by teaching intolerance you get into more feedback loops of violence.
This feature about the late Sheik Yassin on the Palestine Chronicle delineates the development of Hamas over several decades. Sources like this certainly have their biases, and this particular article has a rather passive view of suicide bombings, but nonetheless sheds light on a very shadowy organization:
The Brotherhood's strategy was to create a decentralized yet hierarchical system of operations. Hamas is composed of administrative, charitable, political, and military elements, which have subdivisions. The administrative wing coordinates the movement's actions. Charity work is conducted in cooperation with other centers sympathetic to Hamas. The political activity that takes place within the territories is confined to Hamas sympathizers participating in union and university elections. Externally, Hamas has information and political offices in a number of neighboring states. The "military" wing, known as the Izzedin Qassam Brigades, is responsible for combating the occupation.I would say that it is accurate that Israel in fact encouraged increased militancy in Hamas by going after the more moderate factional leaders. Israel has done this all the time, and then claims no moral difference between killing any and all leaders of whatever stripe. It works to the Likud's favor to eliminate the more moderate leaders. When they are gone, the movement is further radicalized (and deemed to have had its true nature finally revealed) and the peace process gets nowhere. Were the 'pragmatic elements' ever potentially helpful? We will never know, since we were only left with the remnants.Since the founders were Brethren, Hamas' structure borrows from the movement. For example, each region is comprised of "families" and branches, answerable to an administrative center. Hamas members, however, are not singular in capacity. There are four general categories in which they fall—intelligentsia, sheikhs (religious leaders), professionals, and activists. Contrary to media reports claiming that zealots from poverty-stricken areas lead the movement, "among [its leaders] are intellectuals, bourgeoisie and educated people far from the bottom rungs of the social ladder".
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Yassin was among the first leading moderates in Hamas jailed by Israel; but not the last. Israel’s arm also reached across the Atlantic, encouraging America’s incarceration of Musa Abu Marzuq, former chief of Hamas’ political wing and a key component of the movement’s pragmatic elements.Although Israel may have assumed such moves would hamper, or possibly end, Hamas activities, the opposite occurred. Israel altered the political rather than military direction Hamas was moving in; and inadvertently helped hard-liners. In recent years, it has been increasingly difficult to convince, or be convinced, that restraint is the right strategy. And leaders who had previously held convincing arguments against mass violence, are have become less able to dissuade Hamas’ unregimented military arm, the Izzedin Qassam Brigades, to temper their activities.
The Qassam Brigades are divided into independent cells of five to ten combatants. The total number of hard core fighters is estimated at around 100, although many more sympathizers claim to be part of these cells. Following repeated Israeli crackdowns, these cells have distanced themselves from the political leadership. They give Hamas their allegiance and are bound to its general long-term goals; yet do not report their plans or activities to the political hierarchy, thus avoiding detection by Israeli and Palestinian Authority security services.
Also it is very important to note how the cells absorb a certain array of operating principles but then operate independently. To an extent this also seems to be the Al Qaeda-linked pattern of activity. As people say, Osama bin Laden was really trying to franchise the operation, and 3/11 perhaps proved the success of the business model.
In any case, if and when the Israelis withdraw from Gaza, the Palestinians are considering holding elections, where Hamas supporters could quite possibly take a plurality of the vote. Wouldn't that be funny?
Willie Safire, among others, has been complaining for a while now about what he calls 'Kofigate.' Allegations are developing that the former UN oil-for-food program run under sanctions was swamped with corruption and kickbacks at all levels, diverting legitimate money intended for Iraqis and also possibly channeling extra oil through 'oil vouchers.'
A high-ranking UN official has been implicated in the scheme, and as many are saying it couldn't come at a worse time because the UN is supposed to be helping Iraq transition to a new government now.
The UN has launched a major investigation.
This also goes along with more recent allegations of corruption in the CPA and Iraqi Governing Council that I mentioned before, in particular because the IGC was allowed to hand over ministerial positions to their cousins and such, causing the growth of patronage and factionalization.
Juan Cole has posted his testimony to Congress about the mess in Iraq. He was also on a panel next to the maddening Richard Perle (thank you to Cole for noting the settler connection!):
It is deeply shameful that Perle is still pushing Chalabi, and may well succeed in installing him. Chalabi is wanted for embezzling $300 million from a Jordanian bank. He cannot account for millions of US government money given him from 1992 to 1996. He was flown into Iraq by the Pentagon (Perle was on the Defense Advisory Board, a civilian oversight committee for the Pentagon) with a thousand of his militiamen. The US military handed over to Chalabi, a private citizen, the Baath intelligence files that showed who had been taking money from Saddam, giving Chalabi the ability to blackmail large numbers of Iraqi and regional actors. It was Chalabi who insisted that the Iraqi army be disbanded, and Perle almost certainly was an intermediary for that stupid decision. It was Chalabi who insisted on blacklisting virtually all Baath Party members, even if they had been guilty of no crimes, effectively marginalizing all the Sunni Iraqi technocrats who could compete with him for power. It was Chalabi who finagled his way onto the Interim Governing Council even though he has no grassroots support (only 0.2 percent of Iraqis say they trust him).Does Iraq just corrupt everyone and everything it touches??!Now Chalabi's nephew Salem has been put in charge of the trial of Saddam Hussein. Salem is a partner in Zell and Feith, a Jerusalem-based law firm headed by a West Bank settler, in which Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for Planning, is also a senior partner when not in the US government. You can be assured that the trial will be conducted on behalf of the Bush administration and the Neocons, and on behalf of the Chalabis. Since the Chalabis have been trying to overthrow Saddam for decades, it is hard to see how this can have even the appearance of an impartial tribunal.
Anyway, Perle was just a one-note Johnny, with his whole message being "We must give away Iraq to Ahmad Chalabi yesterday! That will solve all the problems."
If the Bush administration listens to Perle and puts Chalabi in as a soft dictator, it will be the final nail in the coffin of the Iraq enterprise. The whole thing is already going very badly wrong. Chalabi will play iceberg to the Iraq/Bush Titanic.
It would be really interesting to know the list of secret promises Chalabi has given Perle (and presumably the Israelis through Perle) that would explain this Neocon fervor for the man.
In other news a woman was fired for taking a picture of flag-draped coffins coming back from Iraq, and she has also complained about sexist treatment of Halliburton employees in the past, it seems. (I had a feeling they would get her)
Speculations of a wider war unfolding, and "Apocalypse Phase," a cool piece from Monbiot about Christian fundamentalism propelling our policy in the Mideast.
The UN envoy Brahimi is criticizing how tilted towards Israel Bush is behaving, making it more difficult to form a new Iraqi government. Yes this is very important--a central tension in the hegemon.
According to Josh Marshall the CPA's website is actually a ripoff of the Brookings Institution's, a sublime irony that I verified by looking at the CPA site's code, which is full of tags with the same names as the Brookings' menu. Also the background pattern is the same. This shoddy website plagarism says more about our work in Iraq than anything else I could imagine....
I have a lot of work to do today, meeting with two groups and as always my 3-hour night class, so I don't think I can put in an update later. But for now I can simply say that Billmon has really zeroed in on things in Both Ends Against the Middle and Both Ends Against the Middle. Cheers to that.
Bad news out of Saudi Arabia and Basra today: is it connected? Why assume it isn't? Is the king of Jordan hella threatened? Of course he is.......
Bush's spokesman had reservations about the list of settlements that Sharon announced in Israel as safe from evacuation and hinted that in a final peace agreement that included a territorial exchange with the Palestinians, not all would remain under Israeli control. The settlement blocs will compete - Ariel against Kiryat Arba, Gush Etzion against Ma'aleh Adumim against the Binyamin district - and some will be evacuated and others will go through to the Final Four.Haaretz' Amir Oren reporting on the machinations unleashed inside Israeli politics by Bush's declaration.Bush also shackled Sharon to a timetable for evacuating the outposts, under the supervision of Ambassador Dan Kurtzer, whose job will be to do to Sharon what Sam Lewis did to Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir in the 1970s and 1980s, while Sharon mocked them for it. Sharon is the D-9 bulldozer driver, a "Dubi" in IDF slang, who can with the same machine and effort either lay the groundwork for a new settlement or demolish one; and Kurtzer will be the foreman for the demolitions.
Netanyahu's announcement of support for the evacuation is very bad news for Sharon. The message to Mazuz and Bush is simple: An indictment against the prime minister will not obstruct the political process because the next in line is committed to it. The horse can be changed, because the fresh one, waiting for the change, will continue the work of the predecessor. To implement Sharon's plan, there's no need for Sharon.
Yes, folks, the light rail is now on its way back to us. I got ahold of a nice folding model of a light rail car. It is surprising how big the cars actually are. I visualized more bus-sized vehicles, but these are bigger. The bottom of the car has little printed factoids. Each car has a capacity of up to 190 passengers, with 66 seats. That's sweet!
For more info consult the DOT or MetroTransit Hiawatha website. (even WikiPedia?!)
Hurray that the strike is over--these things are going to be sweet! (I think more folding models might be available at the MetroTransit stores, and yes, the catenary arm is a little bent out of position on my pic)
Stay tuned for more light rail goodies.....
It sounds like one of the high-ranking neoconservatives is very angry with how badly the occupation was planned. He wrote a report to the CPA that was published anonymously today. According to the DKos, rumor has it that it's Micahel Rubin, an Office of Special Plans and American Enterprise Institute schemer.
The report ominously warns of civil war and points out that the setup which allowed the Governing Council to appoint ministers has led to a lot of nepotism, patronage and self-dealing, exacerbating the problem of how to manage the estimated 30 militias roaming the country. This report is very sobering since it comes from deep within the machine...
Via the Agonist some nice news bits about the terrifying road to Basra. Also a good roundup from Winds of Change about Central Asia. My favorite was this hilarious piece from Something Awful making fun of the batty dictator of Turkmenistan. Speaking of the Agonist, its main editor Sean Paul Kelley is something of an expert on Central Asia and the Caucasus region and he had an interesting report on the continuing confrontation between the US and Russia inside Georgia. Also the WindsOfChange writeup cites a report from Sgt Hook blogging in Afghanistan, where his tent city has been replaced with a hut city, much to the pleasure of our increasingly obscured soldiers there.
Bob Woodward is writing WaPo pieces extracted from his new book.
Robert Dreyfuss is a Washington journalist who's done a lot of good work exposing neo-con machinations and all that, and he now writes on TomPaine.com regularly so I would suggest you check it out.
This should help everyone. i am reducing the size of this lengthy front page and my much beloved Danview banner image. I am also going to throw in some nifty info boxes... it will be nice. Maybe.
Also there will finally be a page for images. Hurrah!
From now on I will make entries branch off into the "continue reading" fork at a much shorter length. That helps keep things much neater in front, and will be helped by the new additions. That will also encourage the typical visitors to look at a wider breadth of things...
I have also made some good strides cleaning up my bedroom. Alison has worked very hard to make the house immaculate for the final slide into finals. Even though my room is still challenging and hostile at least its kind of coming together......... Really it is.
Walking to the Library this morning, the 63K line whizzed past me on Grand Avenue for the first time in well over a month.
I was so surprised that I hollered to the bus because finally they're back on the road!!!!
And now, finally, the Light Rail project can start moving closer to opening day. Thank God!!!!
The first serious thunderstorm of the season came over and WCCO switched to covering it during all these climactic moments in Bob Woodward's segment.
"And Cheney says to the Saudi Ambassador... Paul Douglas here--hailstorms and high winds in Sleepy Eye!!.... then the CIA director ran out of the room!"
Mike Wallace: "You don't say!"
It was disappointing. However most of the gritty details leaked out during the day and have been rounded up on the Internet.
We always knew the Saudis were venal Bush family supporters, but they actually promised to manipulate oil prices leading up to the election?! Damn!
Fun stuff will go down tomorrow, then.
I got up early this morning to watch the Sunday talk shows, starting with Kerry on Meet the Press and Rice on several shows. Turned out to just be a lot of talk. McLaughlin Group was all right, they played a little clip of Prof. Khalidi. However, as usual hours of network TV teach us little or nothing. Wolf Blitzer somehow forgot to ask Ehud Olmert about the settlements.
60 Minutes featuring Bob Woodward's critical new book on the drive for war is going to be published this week, and already the stuff in there about Powell is quite stunning.
This weekend I saw the new phase of the Israeli-American hegemon begin to coalesce in all its oily glory. Rita Cosby on FoxNews says that "we" took out Hamas' operational leader Rantissi, and MSNBC's Abrams' Report editorialized about how unfair it is when people say that U.S. troops--and Israeli troops--are intentionally harming civilians when they are merely going after The Terrorists.
They are trying to merge the Terror Threat into one unitary force, with us and the settlers as one spunky crew of do-gooders. It seems that Richard Perle still has some persuasive influence.
All these God damned retired military officers appearing constantly on TV scare the hell out of me... the body count is all they care about. It's appalling.
I have to run now, but please enjoy this roundup on the no-strategy strategy on Iraq, Woodward's new book and the continuing fallout from Washington's merger with Jerusalem. Also some shocking quotes on Iraq... from Timothy McVeigh?
If the invasion was an integral part of the war that began Sept. 11, then Bush will generate public support for it. The problem that Bush has -- and it showed itself vividly in his press conference -- is that he and the rest of his administration are simply unable to embed Iraq in the general strategy of the broader war. Bush asserts that it is part of that war, but then uses the specific justification of bringing democracy to Iraq as his rationale. Unless you want to argue that democratizing Iraq -- assuming that is possible -- has strategic implications more significant than democratizing other countries, the explanation doesn't work. The explanation that does work -- that the invasion of Iraq was a stepping-stone toward changes in behavior in other countries of the region -- is never given.--Stratfor (this URL will cease to work soon)We therefore wind up with an explanation that is only superficially plausible, and a price that appears to be excessive, given the stated goal. The president and his administration do not seem willing to provide a coherent explanation of the strategy behind the Iraq campaign. What was the United States hoping to achieve when it invaded Iraq, and what is it defending now? There are good answers to these questions, but Bush stays with platitudes.
This is not only odd, but also it has substantial political implications for Bush and the United States. First, by providing no coherent answer, he leaves himself open to critics who are ascribing motives to his policy -- everything from controlling the world's oil supply, to the familial passion to destroy Saddam Hussein, to a Jewish world conspiracy. The Bush administration, having created an intellectual vacuum, can't complain when others, trying to understand what the administration is doing, gin up these theories. The administration has asked for it.
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The problem that Bush has created is that there is no conceptual framework in which to understand these maneuvers. Building democracy in Iraq is not really compatible with the deals that are going to have to be cut. It is not that cutting deals is a bad idea. It is not that the current crisis cannot be overcome with a combination of political and military action. The problem is that no one will know how the United States is doing, because it has not defined a conceptual framework for what it is trying to accomplish in Iraq -- or how Iraq fits into the war on the jihadists.
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Obviously, the administration has a strategy in Iraq and the Islamic world. It is a strategy that is discussed inside the administration and is clearly visible outside. Obviously, there will be military and political reversals. The strategy and the reversals are far more understandable than the decisions the Bush administration has made in presenting them. It has adopted a two-tier policy: a complex and nearly hidden strategic plan and a superficial public presentation.
A report on the Agonist about how the new American stance on Israel and the occupation will harm efforts to stabilize Iraq: "Optional Pain: Into the abyss." According to this piece, the ceasefire in Najaf will not hold, and this week finally generated for Arabs the "linkage" between the U.S. and Israel.
Prof Juan Cole has a new piece on Salon.com, "Turning into Israel?" which everyone should read. Just sit through the Salon ad like a good child.
Neoconservatives, many of them ardent defenders of Israel with strong ties to the Likud, were among the chief intellectual architects of the war on Iraq. The American neoconservative linkage between Iraq and the Likud was first revealed in a position paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and other neoconservatives for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. They advocated an Iraq war, the destruction of the Oslo peace process, the refusal ever to return territories occupied by Israel in 1967, and using a conquered Iraq as a means of pacifying the Lebanese Hezbollah.Thank you, sir.At the time, such positions were regarded as wildly radical: Today they have become U.S. policy. ....
The siege of Fallujah made the American military look to many Iraqis and Arabs as though it were imitating the tactics of the Israeli military, which had long launched punitive raids into Gaza (and before that Beirut) and targeted places like civilian apartment buildings and crowded streets with bombs and missiles from jets and helicopter gunships..... The upshot: In many minds, there are now two major occupations of Arab land by outside powers, the West Bank and Iraq. This perception is a very dangerous development for Americans seeking legitimacy in Iraq and the Muslim world.The massive U.S. assault on Fallujah created a situation in which political forces not on very good terms with one another put aside their differences to unite against the U.S. Palestinians and Iraqis tend to differ about whether the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein from power was a good thing. Almost all Iraqis agree that it was. But both concur that Israeli occupation and punitive measures toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are wrong.
Likewise, radical Sunnis and radical Shiites do not for the most part like each other very much. But they were capable of joining together to send tens of relief trucks in a convoy to aid Fallujah. This forging of new bonds among forces that reject both the now-formalized process of annexation by Israel of Palestinian territory and the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq signals that the U.S. is losing the battle for hearts and minds. Once such attitudes harden, they are extremely difficult to overturn. Fallujah may be one of those historical turning points, where the stronger power wins militarily but loses all legitimacy in the eyes of those for whom it is supposedly fighting.
It's rough in Husaybah, the last Iraqi city on the Euphrates before the Syrian border. Apparently several marines were just killed this weekend there.
Rumor has it that a Kurdish splinter group is going off to fight the Turks. Watch out for KONGRA-GEL... acronym of doom.
Spain is getting the hell out now that Aznar is gone. Bad things going to happen with the Brits in Basra? An Army think tank condemns 'war on the cheap.' Nice to know that the institutional gears are grinding.
Here is a real weird shocker: there's a new book out about Timothy McVeigh, including a number of statements from our most well-known domestic terrorist. It seems that during his service in the first Gulf War, he was deeply troubled by having killed an Iraqi from 19 football fields away:
McVeigh received a medal for his deed, but "the would-be Rambo was emotionally torn about what he had done ... as he reflected on his actions, McVeigh found that his first taste of killing left him angry and uncomfortable. The carnage and sadness he saw in the hundred-hour war left him with a feeling of sorrow for the Iraqis." It was too easy: McVeigh, who according to the authors always hated bullies, felt like one himself. In an extraordinary quote, he says, "'What made me feel bad was, number one, I didn't kill them in self-defense. When I took a human life, it taught me these were human beings, even though they speak a different language and have different customs. The truth is, we all have the same dreams, the same desires, the same care for our children and our family. These people were humans, like me, at the core.'"This is a textbook example of FOXNewspeak, "Palestinian Homicide Attack Wounds Four" at "an industrial zone between Israel and Gaza," whatever limbo space that might be. (Erez is in fact located inside Gaza; my point is that their terminology is warped)It's not easy to know what to make of this quote, which sounds like it could have been uttered by "All Quiet on the Western Front" author Erich Maria Remarque. How could the man who claims to feel no remorse after killing 168 people, including many children, suffer such conscience pangs over the killing of two enemy soldiers? But his feelings become more comprehensible when we consider that McVeigh had grave doubts about the war in the first place, because Iraq was not directly threatening the U.S. and because he was serving as part of a U.N. force "that, he feared, was eventually planning to take over the world." In any case, if we assume his statement is sincere, it becomes more difficult to picture him as an unfeeling sociopath.
EJ Dionne in the WaPo attacks the administration for multiplying radical theories atop each other in the invasion of Iraq, citing a new book Rick Atkinson's "In the Company of Soldiers" on the 101st Airborne:
...Our troops and Iraq confronted looting and chaos. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson's fine new book about the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, "In the Company of Soldiers," picks up the story. Atkinson contrasts Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus surveying "a great river of loot" with Rumsfeld's denial of the reality on the ground. The television images, Rumsfeld said, were of "the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase."Bob Woodward is releasing a new book wherein he basically acts as an anguished Colin Powell's mouthpiece, adding further to the tumult in Washington. Woodward says that "Top administration officials barely speak to each other" now that the acrimony has reached this level, further evidence that Washington is a house divided against itself, bucking and swaying wildly... The WaPo broke some nice quotes from it yesterday although it was this exclusive AP story that broke it open.Atkinson writes: "The Pentagon press corps laughed, but Rumsfeld's remark was inane. . . . Too little thought had been given, by the Army or anyone else in the Defense Department, to securing Iraq, except for oil fields and the WMD depots, which would prove nonexistent. . . . The military had barely enough troops to wage war, much less to simultaneously put a country bigger than Montana into protective custody."
So Bush pursued one radical theory about planting democracy in Iraq and doubled our nation's bet by pursuing another radical theory that underestimated the number of troops we needed to create the order essential for democracy.
Maureen Dowd remarks on what Powell actually told Bush about taking over Iraq, 'the house of broken toys.'David Brooks finally admits that he was wrong, but he'll be proven right in 20 years. Ok then...
Marines abandon cultural sensitivity training in Fallujah. I thought the bit about "Sniper Bob" at the end was interesting.
The full text of Brahimi's plan for Iraq, and Prof Cole's view on it.
The shockwaves of Bush's declaration for the settlements continues to radiate. Egypt's president claims to be "shocked," as if he didn't see this one coming. Not surprisingly, a writer in Lebanon's Daily Star sees it as election-year pandering to fundamentalists.
"This statement secures for Bush the support of both Jewish electors and of hard core evangelical Christians," he said. But the real winner in the matter, according to him, is Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon because he will be able to make use of that position in his own favor by both appealing to the Likud Party and continuing in the construction of the controversial separation fence.Australians grumbling about the whole damn thing, as is Marwan Bishara, who if memory serves used to be in the Israeli Knesset."This position is the first American position of its kind in decades and its first beneficiary is Sharon," he said. He added that international observers were linking the developments in Palestine to those in Iraq, in that both were seen as an example of US-Israeli hegemony over the region.
Josh Marshall says in for a dime, in for a dollar with the Likud:
I think it's clear that Israel will never allow a right of return for the descendents of anyone who lived within Israel's current border before 1948, having the US rule it out altogether simply makes us the enforcer of the policies not just of Israel but of this particular Israeli government.And that brings us one step closer to the complete identity of viewpoints, interests and policies between the United States and Israel, which is really not a good thing for either Israel or the United States -- particularly not when this Israeli government is in power.
I'm not doing that, but some of my favorite web writers seem to be: Billmon and Salam Pax, both of them needing some time to collect themselves after things have gotten so shaken up this week. Billmon closes this episode by saying:
A friend of mine likes to call the Israeli-Palestinian issue the "Death Valley" of American progressives -- a hellish, blasted wasteland that sucks the life out of anyone who tries to cross it. Better not to go there, and instead work the land that can be watered and tilled: health care, the environment, econoimc policy, etc. And for a long time I thought that was good advice.I also strongly recommend Billmon's second-to-last writing 'End of the road:'But since 9/11, I've come to think that the desert has to be crossed, otherwise the gradual descent into an endless war in the Middle East is going to doom whatever slim hopes there may be for a revival of progressive domestic policies in this country -- much as the coming of the Cold War did after World War II
.....
It doesn't look like this crash can stopped, either. I guess that's one of the essential elements of tragedy -- the disaster can be seen but not avoided. Maybe it's the same feeling that John O'Neill had as he ran back into the South Tower that day, knowing what he had feared most had come to pass. I don't know. When the next major attack hits America, and the pressure to retaliate with genocidal force becomes impossible for our rotten political system to resist, maybe then I'll know.I'm left at a bit of a loss here. What is to be done? The Popular Front isn't looking like a very viable proposition at the moment. Maybe it's just time to sit back and see whether the metaphorical truck breaks through the Middle Eastern telephone poll -- or wraps itself around it, turning the passengers into jelly. "Oh well."
I'm feeling pretty beat right now -- in several senses of the word. So I'm going to shut down the bar for awhile and think things over. I mean, if the leader of the free world can take a week off in the middle of an intifada, I figure I'm entitled to kick back for a few days, too.
Bush's statement marks the effective end of any realistic chance that the United States will play a constructive role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Washington truly is Likud-occupied territory now, and resistance is almost certainly futile. For all intents and purposes, the world's only superpower has been bound and gagged.I looked at Ayatollah Sistani's website today, including the Fiqh--questions and answers from the religious authoritay. They are entertaining, especially the oral sex questions. He also knows what's what with the lottery.
"While Bush vacationed, warnings went unheard." It seems that George Tenet is ducking responsibility for informing the president about terror threats at the ranch in August 2001, but then whose responsibility was it?? Aw snap–they must have forgotten to bring some brains to the Crawford picnic.
Sidney Blumenthal, Clintonista Extraordinamente, talks about how the military is increasingly pissed with Bush, and of course how ignorant he was in that press conference. This Slate digestion of the press conference is about as brave an interpretation as any sane person could tolerare.
Bin Laden offered a truce to Europe. How bizarre, I thought as it came over on the CNN breaking news early this morning.
They are trying to discredit the 9/11 commission, surprise surprise.
Updates from riverbend in Iraq as well as Iraq at a Glance.
Muslim WakeUp is a nifty very pro-modernization of Islam sort of site.
TurningTables is printing interesting things that he couldn't publish when he was still in the military. A proud army parent speaks out about how bad the leaders are.
I hope everyone voted in the MCSG elections today. That's the nice thing about Macalester: you get to vote to oppose forms of domination like capitalism and heteronormativity.* I would like to see St. Thomas and St. Kate's dare to offer such a resolution...
I have made some serious changes in the inner workings of the site, as some may have noticed. Now, when you go to an archive entry like the classic "Battle for Mesopotamia," there are 'breadcrumbs' that lead you back up the hierarchy of days / months / years, although I haven't developed a year index yet.
Also, the URLs for archive entries are now different, such that each entry is down inside nested year, month and day folders, while the actual entry has its title in the URL, such as http://www.hongpong.com/hp-archives/2003/03/26/the_battle_for_mesop.html . I have a nice little yellow box that tells which topics have been deemed relevant to the post.
I have made index pages for each category work a little better, and there are now month archives, but there is a strange glitch in there that I haven't fixed (with the blue "posted XY date" bit appearing intermittently).
I have also improved the master archive listings, but they are not quite as good as I would like.
For now, I am leaving all the old log entries' HTML files in place, so that search engines and people who (anyone?) might have linked here will still be able to access it. However these pages can no longer be reached from the site normally.
So in other words, it is still progressing, even though what I changed this week was really the nut of what seemed incomplete to me. Also the About Me page is nice but relatively uninformative and pointless. I would really appreciate any suggestions, so email or instant message me with your ideas.
I am also hoping to get some kind of aesthetically pleasing photo / image gallery system that actually integrates with the site working, but I haven't found good stuff to do it with yet.
I am also planning to put together a little floating box at the top of the front page with my key links for following the news, and highlighting various special features on the site that have vanished into the archives.
Here is a nice site with really excellent layout and a lot of tips: Bryan Bell. He has a link today to a huge batch of great OS X icons representing all different types of Mac hardware. Time to get a 512K hard drive icon.
*Yes, the computer's spell checker does not understand what 'heteronormativity' is.
Wednesday was a very strange one. I am not sure what to make of all that's happened.
What does it mean to have a man at the helm who knows he's made mistakes, but can't recall what they are?
Where do we go from here? How will the world react to Bush and Sharon's joint declaration?
If it's now US policy to support these things, are the settlers and the White House coordinating? How is Washington-- the Pentagon and the White House, I suppose-- gauging the 'realities on the ground?' Who gets free reign to manipulate the realities?
"Bush rips up the road map" reports the Guardian today. On Tuesday, "Sharon vows to keep control of major West Bank settlements" they reported.
The rumors are getting around now that the horrible John Negroponte will be appointed to succeed Paul Bremer in the Sovereign Iraq. That man's hands are bloody from Central America, the horror of this man ruling American policy in Iraq with all these mercenaries around is too much...
Haaretz analysis on Bush's statements.
I respect Rabbi Michael Lerner writing in the Nation (and online) about the terrible synchronicities of both occupations. Lerner is among the Jewish peace movement struggling to challenge the occupation of Palestinian land. This piece is a little more radical dissention from Zionism, also the Nation.
"Saravejo on the Euphrates." Another Nation article about the wreckage of Fallujah.
I think everyone should read what Billmon wrote on the Bush-Sharon agreement today. It is a dead on expression on what we've thrown away, and what terrible risks are being gained by the moment.
Cheney's paycheck from Halliburton in 2003 was only $20,000 less than his White House paycheck.
Rep. Waxman watching the reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Good info here...
Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek: "Our Last Real Chance" featuring "The Politics of Rage: Why do They Hate Us?"
More about the devious Ahmed Chalabi from the Agonist.
What weakness, what confusion...
'Corpses lying in streets of Fallujah'
THE OTHER WAR by SEYMOUR M. HERSH: Why Bush’s Afghanistan problem won’t go away.
U.S. Workers, Lured by Money and Idealism, Face Iraqi Reality
Mr. Bush's Press Conference: The New York Times Op Ed page:
The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change.
It has come.
Bush May Accept West Bank Plan
Sharon to ask Bush to reject any right of return
Obligatory (via Billmon)
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946
Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky / tongue tied and twisted / an earthbound misfit
--Pink Floyd "Learning to Fly" on "A Momentary Lapse of Reason"
Drawing later on a line he often slips into his campaign speeches, he reminded a global audience that "freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."
New York Times -- April 14, 2003
He said to them, "Not yours is it to know times or eras which the Father placed in His own jurisdiction.
But you shall be obtaining power at the coming of the holy spirit on you, and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem and in entire Judea and Samaria, as far as the limits of the earth."
--So Spake The Jesus, Acts 1:7-8 (Concordant Bible).
Bush is set to meet with Ariel Sharon at the White House tomorrow during a very climactic moment. It is encouraging, I suppose, that he's offering to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, much to the fury of the settlers and Israeli right-wing parties within the government. It's nice to actually see settlers forced to protest. (The Guardian adds the context so ominously lacking in American media)
We can't underestimate the importance of the effect of Sharon's Gaza gambit on the West Bank's future. Sharon seeks nothing less than leveraging America's power to permanently secure the vast majority of the settlements, along with the seized and fenced land around them, representing somewhere between 40 to 60% of the West Bank.
On this topic, President Bush's motives have always seemed very shadowy. In his time, Poppa Bush strongly believed in checking Israel's land grab, leading to quite a bit of friction between him and the Israelis. No doubt this stemmed from his realpolitik outlook, as well as an oil-man's firm goal of maintaining decent relations with the Arab world.
So is Bush just another Christian fundamentalist, blithely unconcerned, or even pleased, that Jewish settlers are displacing Arabs and slicing up the land? I tend not to think so. In his addled life, Bush has been treated to a spectacular spiritual education from Billy Graham and the other southern Christians, but I think that Graham does not teach the sons of rulers the same sort of pap his media empire propagates. To control fundamentalists and secure their loyalty, you can't think along the same lines they do. All along Graham whispers to Bush the key slogans needed to bring them into line while the outward operation levels their minds.
I saw Graham's creepy daughter Anne Graham Lotz pimping her new fundie book, "Why?" on Hannity & Colmes and other Fox outlets for the Easter season. Besides her disturbing wrenched-facelift appearance, I was struck by her final statement that the Sept. 11 hijacking plot was essentially birthed in hell, and furthermore that those causing all the trouble in the streets of Iraq that day didn't worship the same God "as us." Both of these statements strike me as heretical and dangerous to the Christian faith, because they elevate Sept. 11 from the mundane to the spiritual or eschatological plane of existence. They reinforce Bush's false and anti-Christian notions of ultimate good, accessible at the Pentagon, pitted against ultimate evil lurking in the Arab shadows. These ideas are designed to compel Christians to throw everything away and march mindlessly to the end of the world and the All-Consuming Battle of Good and Evil.
Ultimately Lotz's declarations are heretical for the very reason that Jesus laid out: Not yours is it to know times or eras which the Father placed in His own jurisdiction. Planes flying into buildings are not the ultimate harbingers of spiritual collapse, unless we permit them to be.
If Bush has been huddled this whole Easter vacation praying at the ranch as Iraq goes up in flames, that would concern me more. And I suspect he probably has.
What kind of God resides in the infinite space between his two temples? What loosed fears and imagined demons nip at his eye sockets when he stumbles through another unnerving press conference?
The wild theories about how Leo Strauss encouraged his followers to strike a pose of prophetic piety while cynically claiming divine inspiration come to mind when consider the attitude taken by the Moralizing Mega Leaders around him. The idea that the nihilistic real leaders would lead along the naïve religious "gentlemen" of society fits over today's situation too well. But it's paranoid. Is Bush the top gentleman or the nihilist leading the other gentlemen?
Why have Israel and the West Bank become so crucial? Why does Bush go through all these hoops to protect, extend and underwrite Israel's policies? It still doesn't add up, and it probably won't until the dust settles. And the dust won't settle until the "final status agreement," so in the meantime young and confused people like me speculate endlessly.
I will add the obvious facts: support for the Israeli settlement project is close to a political freebie for right-wingers scooping up fundamentalist Christians. It's also highly profitable for the military-industrial engine, once the unchallengable priority of continuous annexation is locked into place. These are some of the prime movers, but it fails to explain why Bush thinks as he does.
In what seems like a thousand years ago, I reached the conclusion that the morality of Palestinian violence could only be judged alongside the fact that Israel's multi-party government incorporates several parties that openly advocate the ethnic cleansing of Arabs. I felt that those parties' Jewish supporters in the West Bank enjoyed a political shield and even encouragement of their aggressive activities. The Likud, as the umbrella right-wing party, is hardly innocent of prodding Israeli Jews to invest in seizing more land.
I first ran across the little Scripture quote above in some fundie literature that was of course devoted to helping the Jews settle Judea and Samaria, to ultimately bring about the end of the world and the collapse of the Jewish people, a suppressed logik bomb in the Likud-fundamentalist alliance. I've heard other fundies talk about how we should witness Judea and Samaria, and pay attention to what the (white) Christians who've been there report.
But unfortunately, I am all too aware that it in great part it is the Palestinian Christian population that bears the crushing pressure of this horrible, profitable war. Especially in Bethlehem, they are the ones squeezed between Fatah and Hamas on one side, and the expanding "suburbs" of Jerusalem upon their farmland. Hence, with what means they still have, many have chosen to leave the Holy Land for Jordan and points elsewhere.
So, in my cheeky atheist way, I took that verse of the Bible to signify that Jesus would want good people to witness all transpiring in the ancient land. Seeing past the unpredictable violence of Islamic militants, Jesus would be more than a little upset that those ancient communities are getting rolled aside for another bypass highway, another self-defeating expanse of red-roofed homes. Jesus would want us to understand that a sturdy peace, not annexing a bloc of settlements on Holy land, is the only goal that a good Christian would work towards.
If in fact the U.S. acts to secure these settlements, who can predict what the reaction will be across the Arab world? Who knows what the Iraqis will do, now that they've determined how to kill and injure the U.S. military at an unprecedented rate?
Hear Ye! The time is nigh to visit Armageddon Books. :)
The ongoing news and some opinions: As always, some of the most clear and incisive views come from within Israel. "Caving in to terror, back to 242" by Amir Oren:
It took a mere eight companies - paratroopers, Golani and Border Police. They secured the open, fragile borders of Israel in Gaza and Sinai, in the Arava and along the length of the West Bank, in the Galilee and in the Amakim region, right up to the May 1967 alert and the subsequent Six-Day War. That was the entire ground force the Israel Defense Forces was asked to commit to maintaining security along the confrontation lines with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. There was no fenced, electronic obstacle line covered by air power.
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Ninety-two is more than eleven times eight - and 92 companies is the force the army needed after the Six-Day War to guard the new lines and patrol the territories. That was before the number of commands was inflated, and the numbers increased even further with the intifada of the 1980s and then again with the fighting under way since September 2000.
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In a new study of the IDF from 1967-1973, recently completed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Haim Nadel, Sharon is quoted at telling a general staff meeting around the time Eshkol and Johnson were meeting: "We generals have all the full right not only to express ourselves, but to influence matters. A lot will be dictated to Israel by the IDF's position. These borders are not only borders for peace, they are borders to prevent war, borders to prevent the danger of eradication ... We are now in an ideal situation; there won't be normalcy for decades to come ... the borders to keep are the current ones, without any retreats, without any arrangement that doesn't guarantee absolutely our military control over the territory. And that means maintaining the current situation."
It would be interesting to know how Tourism Minister Binyamin Elon felt this morning. I mean, there hasn't been a Pesach like this one in years: More than a million people thronged to the countryside, hiking, picking cultivated buttercups, visiting the parks, touring archaeological sites and filling every possible hotel and guest house. Even the Negev knew joy.Here is an article from Salon about Tourism Minister Elon and his connections with American fundamentalists.
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But from the perspective of the tourism minister, who wakes up in the morning in [West Bank settlement] Beit El, the rush to nature is somewhat one-sided. The vast majority of the hiking and traveling takes place inside the Green Line. There are a few specific sites in Yesha (the Hebrew acronym of Judea and Samaria) that are blessed with physical beauty and historical significance (national significance, too, in the eyes of many)...
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In the Negev, Galilee and center of the country, in the parks and forests, everyone holidayed - religious and secular, hawks and doves. With their feet and tires, they marked out the Green Line.That was the strongest proof of the Israeli aspiration for normalcy. If the settlers' claim that the terrorism wiped out the Green Line were correct, and that there is no difference between Afula and Ofra, why did most families prefer to spread their blankets out in Horshat Tal, barbecue on the banks of the Yarkon River, pick cotton on a kibbutz, suntan along the shores of Lake Kinneret and put up tents in Eilat? Maybe because it's that small, old, crowded Israel, blossoming in a cornucopia of colors and the fragrances of flowers is in the hearts, and the land of messianic salvation is the one that failed?
The Palestinian Prime Minister Qureia is infuriated that this plan will help clear the way for annexation, and naturally it's Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leading the charge to demand that the Likud Party annex:
Sharon expects guarantees from Bush in support for the disengagement plan, assurances that no other plan will replace the road map, backing in the fight against terror emanating from territories from which Israel has withdrawn, and a declaration that Israel will not be required to return to the 1967 borders.On the other hand Yoel Marcus is more optimistic that the Gaza move will finally bring about an end to the occupation. Keep in mind that Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the efforts to build as much fence around settlements as possible:Meanwhile, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said Tuesday that Sharon's plan to retain and expand five large West Bank settlement blocs destroys any chance for peace. Qureia said the plan "may destroy the whole peace process."
"These tactics destroy any hope for peace," he said. "We will not accept any settlement blocs. And we will not accept any decisions unless the Palestinian Authority is a part of the decision-making process."
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Hours before leaving the country at around 2 A.M. Tuesday, Sharon said the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim would be included in the "Jerusalem envelope" section of the West Bank separation fence. The prime minister also specified five other West Bank settlement areas that would remain under Israeli rule.
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Sharon wants the American letter to contain declarations regarding the future permanent status, which can be taken as support for the annexation of large blocs of settlement in the West Bank and the elimination of the Palestinian refugees' right of return to Israel. Sources said a final agreement may not be reached until Wednesday's meeting with Bush.Sources in Jerusalem also said the exchange of letters will not be public, but that the Americans will not be averse to Israel's publication of the letters.
PM names settlements to remain under Israeli rule: Speaking at the start of the traditional Moroccan post-Passover Mimouna festivities in Ma'aleh Adumim, Sharon said the settlement - which is adjacent to Jerusalem - was one of six areas in the West Bank that would remain under Israeli control.
"Ma'aleh Adumim will remain part of the state of Israel forever and ever," Sharon said about the largest settlement in the West Bank. "It will be included in the envelope fence around Jerusalem in order to avoid terror atacks on it and in its environs."
The prime minister also said the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, Givat Ze'ev, Ariel, Kiryat Arba, and enclaves in the West Bank city of Hebron would all remain under Israeli sovereignty. This was the first time Sharon has detailed the settlements Israel wants to keep.
"Ariel, the Etzion Bloc, Giv'at Zeev will remain in Israeli hands and will continue to develop," Sharon said. "Hebron and Kiryat Arba will be strong. Only an Israeli initiative will keep us from being dragged into dangerous initiatives like the Geneva and Saudi initiatives."
Netanyahu has no intention of supporting the disengagement plan until Sharon builds a fence around the Ariel, Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim and other enclaves.... “At the moment”, Netanyahu told his followers, “not a meter of that security barrier is being built in the direction of those enclaves. Sharon is building the fence on the Green Line, or next to it, without anybody noticing. I suggest he start taking me seriously. Only when the barrier is built, and I mean by that the route approved by the government, only after that will I get behind him. I will force him to fulfill that condition. And I’m not just saying that, not threatening. This is for real”.Tonight comes the long-belated press conference. I wonder what demons will peer out from his eye sockets this time.
I watched a little bit of the Fox News Sunday roundup, featuring Bill O'Reilly and two retired military officers rambling on about cracking the brownshirt thugs etc. etc.. I wonder if people are starting to realize that retired military officers are not the fount of all mideast wisdom in this world. Of course the former assistant chief of the air force would understand the intricacies of civil management in the Arab world. "We'll need some more SEAL guys, more tanks and some of your boys' F-22s too!" says the other one. Brilliant! With advisors like this we are sure to prevail. As Bill says, crush them now, hearts and minds come later! Your wisdom, Bill, is something to behold. No spin both now and before the war, as long as we never crosscheck anything you say.
The ghastly hypocrisy among all these shrill folks is pretty alarming. They are sort of spinning off into an exciting new plane of existence where Iraqi neighborhoods must be leveled to hypothetically save the life of a single marine, though by what strategy isn't specified. It's a rhetorical device to make murder sound inevitable, for the coming of the (fourth?) gulf war is upon us.
I think this is almost more disturbing than the dissolving situation in Iraq:
Senior Israeli officials met with top Bush administration officials on Sunday in a bid to complete details of Israel's unilateral withdrawal of settlements in the Gaza Strip, a diplomatic official said.What will Sharon tell the fine zealots of Ma'aleh Adumim? "The plan's rock solid," no doubt. Also, Stephen Hadley and Elliott "PNAC" Abrams are two completely corrupt neo-con bozos, Abrams of Iran-Contra fame.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, and other Israeli officials met at the White House with deputy U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Elliot Abrams, a top National Security Council aide.
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Shortly before Sharon leaves the country, he will visit the largest West Bank settlement - Ma'aleh Adumim, on the outskirts of Jerusalem - in an effort to win support for the withdrawal plan, the prime minister's bureau said.
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Israel will not be asked in the future to withdraw to the 1949 cease-fire lines (the Green Line) on the West Bank, according to a letter Bush is to present to Sharon during his U.S. visit.According to the letter, the determination of borders in a final status accord will take into consideration "demographic realities" on the ground.
Sharon's letter to Bush will state that the prime minister intends to bring the separation plan to his cabinet and to the Knesset for approval. The letter says the plan includes the withdrawal of all Jewish settlements and Israel Defense Forces from the entire Gaza Strip, apart from the Philadelphi Road on the Egyptian border, and that it also calls for the evacuation of four Jewish settlements in the northern Samaria section of the West Bank.
Bush's letter to Sharon will also contain the following:
* Reiteration of America's commitment to Israel's security and to the preservation of its strategic qualitative edge.
* A statement of commitment to the road map, and to the prevention of other diplomatic initiatives.
* Recognition of Israel's right to self defense and its right, as need arises, to carry out anti-terror operations in areas from which its forces are to be withdrawn.
* A declaration that Palestinian refugees can be absorbed in the future in the Palestinian state, just as Jewish refugees from Arab states were absorbed in Israel.
Israeli officials believe the section of this letter from Bush referring to final status borders is highly significant. They believe it constitutes U.S. recognition of Israel's future annexation of West Bank settlement blocs and the negation of a right of Palestinian refugee return to Israel.
Israel has been pushing for a clearer wording to the letter, but the Americans have made it clear that it is difficult for them to include an outward statement against the right of return due to their relations with Europe and the Arab states.
Israel also expects that the Bush administration will support the planned route of the separation fence. In exchange for such support, Israel has promised that no "enclaves" will be created that trap hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and that the West Bank town of Ariel will not be connected to the main separation fence.
I am more than a little angry that this seems like it will come to pass like every other folly, and what will unfold is what the lunatics wanted all along... I don't believe for a minute that the fence won't create "enclaves" because the whole idea is to create "enclaves." Hurray for Ariel not being within the fence, but instead everything else will be? Ahhh, thank you great 21st century Christian warriors..
Just as a reminder, here's how Bush may view the religious overtones of the War On Terra. (this is from an arch-conservative site)
Wow, a heavily indebted dairy farmer in Mississippi went to work for driving fuel trucks for Kellog Brown & Root in Iraq, and got kidnapped on a fuel convoy between Fallujah and Baghdad. Others have said that the easy-pickins target of the convoy was hardly guarded at all. Now he has been taken hostage by Iraqi insurgents threatening to kill and mutilate him. He's the guy on the video clips in front of the Iraqi flag. That's about as horrible as it gets.
Describing conditions in Fallujah, EmpireNotes relates the political allegiances of (Fallujans?):
Among the more laughable assertions of the Bush administration is that the mujaheddin are a small group of isolated "extremists" repudiated by the majority of Fallujah's population. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the mujaheddin don't include women or very young children (we saw an 11-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov), old men, and are not necessarily even a majority of fighting-age men. But they are of the community and fully supported by it. Many of the wounded were brought in by the muj and they stood around openly conversing with doctors and others. One of the muj was wearing an Iraqi police flak jacket; on questioning others who knew him, we learned that he was in fact a member of the Iraqi police.An Iraqi dentist at Healing Iraq takes stock of a year of occupation. It's one of the most fatalistic things I've seen, but that is simply the road he sees it going down, and what has America done to keep it from the path of civil war?One of our translators, Rana al-Aiouby told me, "these are simple people." It is true that they are agricultural tribesmen with very strong religious beliefs. They are not so far different from the Pashtun of Afghanistan -- good friends and terrible enemies. They are insular and don't easily trust strangers. We were safe because of the friends we had with us and because we came to help them.
The muj are of the people in the same way that the stone-throwing shabab in the Palestinian intifada were. A young man who is not one today may the next day wind his aqal around his face and pick up a Kalashnikov. I spoke to a young man, Ali, who was among the wounded we transported to Baghdad. He said he was not a muj but, when asked his opinion of them, he smiled and stuck his thumb up.
A whole year has passed now and I can't help but feel that we are back at the starting point again. The sense of an impending disaster, the ominous silence, the breakdown of most governmental facilities, the absence of any police or security forces, contradicting news reports, rumours everywhere, and a complete disruption in the flow of everyday life chores.There is a problem with Abu Ghraib, a notoriously chaotic prison west of Baghdad, full of common criminals, foreign elements and the local revolutionaries, a steaming, barbaric mess of a place. The whole place is surrounded with Saddam's mass graves. But better still, the families and acquaintances of those prisoners are floating around the surrounding city, which generates a great deal of violence, and the prison is itself attacked from time to time. If there was a jailbreak, who knows what kind of militancy would come out?
All signs indicate that it's all spiralling out of control, and any statements by CPA and US officials suggesting otherwise are blatantly absurd.The chaos and unrest have rapidly spread to several other cities in Iraq such as Mosul, Ba'quba, and Kirkuk. The situation in Fallujah looks terrible and bleak enough from what Al-Jazeera is showing every hour. Ahmad Mansour reported that they keep changing their location for fear of being targetted by Americans. The town stadium has turned into one large graveyard, and the death toll is 500 Iraqis until now with over a thousand injured, a huge price to pay for 'pacification'. The insurgents in Fallujah who are using mosques and house roofs to wage their war against the Marines are equally to blame for the blood of the civilians who have been caught in the crossfire. A ceasefire has been announced by the Americans and is supposed to be in effect but Al-Jazeera reports that fighting continues. What kills me is the absence of any serious effort by Iraqi parties, organisations, tribal leaders, or clerics to intermediate or try to put an end to the cycle of violence. All we hear is denunciation and fiery speeches as if those were going to achieve anything on the ground.
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It is becoming increasingly evident from all the violence we have witnessed over the last year, that a proxy war is being waged against the US on Iraqi soil by several countries and powers with Iraqis as the fuel and the fire, just like Lebanon was during the late seventies and eighties. The majority of Arab regimes have a huge interest in this situation continuing, not to mention Iran, and Al-Qaeda. I am not trying, of course, to lift the blame from Iraqis, because if Iraqis were not so divided the way they are, these powers would have never succeeded. I never thought that Iraqis would be so self-destructive, I thought that they had enough of that. But with each new day I am more and more convinced that we need our own civil war to sort it all out. It might take another 5, 10, or even 20 years, and hundreds of thousands more dead Iraqis but I believe it would be inevitable. Yugoslavia, South Africa, Lebanon, Algiers, and Sudan did not achieve the relative peace and stability they now enjoy if it weren't for their long years of civil war. If the 'resistance' succeeded and 'liberated' Iraq, the country would immediately be torn into 3, 4, 5 or more parts with each faction, militia, or army struggling to control Baghdad, Kirkuk, Najaf, Karbala, and the oil fields. It will not be a sectarian war as many would imagine, it would be a war between militias. We already have up to 5 official militias, not to mention the various religious groups and armies.
Reports from Iraq now show that it has become a chaotic detention center and under investigation by Amnesty International. Salon.com called it Gitmo on Steroids. Near the international airport, it has become the City of Fear where the local residents are possibly suffering from Uranium poisoning. the black hole where midnight arrests go. Conditions have improved, from concentration camp-like quality, to mere Spartan prison level, but this is small comfort to those inside and outside.At least someone has proposed a useful plan to bring peace to Iraq.That the rebels are operating outside of a notorious prison should be of note, and that they have control of the highway there, and apparently can at least strike at US helicopters, is of note. Tensions have been building there for weeks as Iraqi's have complained about the treatment there.
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The fighters have been attacking the prison with mortar fire. And still have control of the main highway to Fallujah.This area then is a focal point for anti-US sentiment, because it is now the site of a makeshift town filled with people who have one thing in common - relatives in US custody. There are, according to reports, hundreds of "third party" nationals in custody here. One would presume that these are the suspected cadres or terrorists who have come to Iraq.
That the rebels are operating with impunity here means that the native intifada has joined up with the elements of the resistance trained or backed by the outside - that Abu Ghraib has become an antiversity of terror and resistance.
Ok, I'm about to go have Easter dinner with the fam, but here are a couple updates.
Empire Notes reports the damage in Fallujah.
I am extremely alarmed about this report in Haaretz that states Bush is going to make a declaration in favor of annexing West Bank settlements this week. This is what you might call a harbinger of a new sort of holy war, or just another day at the ranch.
Anti-U.S. Outrage Unites a Growing Iraqi Resistance (NY Times, April 11) BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 10 — Moneer Munthir is ready to kill Americans.Fighting barefoot strikes me as the ultimate signature of life and death in the Global South. This is everything we could ever fear, replicated across the country.For months, he has been struggling to control an explosion of miserable feelings: humiliation, fear, anger, depression.
"But in the last two weeks, these feelings blow up inside me," said Mr. Munthir, a 35-year-old laborer. "The Americans are attacking Shiite and Sunni at the same time. They have crossed a line. I had to get a gun."
Ahmed, a 29-year-old man with elegant fingers and honey-colored eyes, has been planting bombs inside dead dogs and leaving them on the highway. He and a team of helpers have been especially busy recently.
"We start work after 11 p.m.," Ahmed said. "Our group is small, just friends, and we don't even have a name."
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The other day, when trouble broke out in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Khadamiya, he dashed home from work, grabbed a clip for his Kalashnikov and took it out front."If the Americans come this way, we will fight them," Mr. Muhammad said. "I'm going to defend my house, my street, my land, my religion."
He stood on the sidewalk in sweat pants, without shoes.
"I like to fight barefoot," he said.
Mr. Muhammad said he recently joined the Mahdi Army. And while some of his neighbors watched him admiringly as he strapped on an ammunition belt and gulped down a glass of water before a battle started, others scowled.
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A few days after the contractors were killed, United States marines invaded Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, in a major offensive to wipe out the insurgents behind the attack. So far, more than 300 people have been killed.Before the fall of Saddam Hussein a year ago, young men in this city were told they were the vanguard, the elite, top prospects for top jobs because of their tribal connections and Sunni alliances. Now, they are adrift, subject to the most aggressive American tactics and the full brunt of occupation.
Like the angry youth of the West Bank and Gaza, Iraqi children are increasingly surrounded by music, images, leaflets and praise for fighters. "The men of Falluja are men for hard tasks," sings Sabah al-Jenabi, a popular Iraqi performer, in a song that made the rounds even before the killing of the contractors. "They paralyzed America with rocket-propelled grenades. The men of Islam will fight the Americans like leaderless soldiers. We'll drag Bush's corpse through the dirt."
Abdul Razak al-Muaimy, a 32-year-old laborer, said: "I train my son to kill Americans. That is one reason I am grateful to Saddam Hussein. All Iraqis know how to use weapons."
It goes without saying that such groups are literally impossible for the U.S. to infiltrate, so the only strategy available is collective punishment, which merely reflects the West Bank. Our leaders believe that this "Mahdi" thing is a concrete object with membership lists and annual tea parties. Is it so hard to believe that they're just plain pissed?
Already, "We think we have taken away a significant capability," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director for operations of the military's task force in Iraq, said in a telephone interview. "It no longer is an offensive threat; but it still remains a threat." General Kimmitt said the order had gone out "to destroy the Sadr militia — deliberately, precisely and powerfully."Enter Evil Galactic Emperor Palpatine:But now the militiamen who took control, to varying degrees, in Kut, Kufa, Najaf and a section of Baghdad called Sadr City have broken into small groups, with some already seeming ready to melt away to fight another day. "We believe that many who were wearing the Mahdi Army uniform last Saturday have tucked it under the bed and put their AK's back in the closet," one senior military officer said.
That means detailed intelligence will be required to identify the militia's leadership and important fighters, a factor noted by Mr. Bush in his radio address, which carried a warning of the "struggle and testing" that lay ahead. In Falluja, he said, the Americans "are taking control of the city, block by block." In the south, he said, "they have taken the initiative from al-Sadr's militia."
"Prisoners are being taken, and intelligence is being gathered," Mr. Bush said. "Our decisive actions will continue until these enemies of democracy are dealt with."
The Iraqi army refuses to fight other Iraqis, and of course they have been dissolving all over the place.
British officers in their sector of southern Iraq believe that U.S. troops are just plain brutal. This is further disturbing evidence of the impact that the hi-ranking Pentagon planners have had on America's policy towards Iraqis.
Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.I can't believe they just use the computers to fire back into the general area of mortars--that's appalling and may be a war crime. "Expect Snipers on All Minarets.""The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."
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The officer explained that, under British military rules of war, British troops would never be given clearance to carry out attacks similar to those being conducted by the US military, in which helicopter gunships have been used to fire on targets in urban areas.British rules of engagement only allow troops to open fire when attacked, using the minimum force necessary and only at identified targets. The American approach was markedly different: "When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.
"They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. They are very concerned about taking casualties and have even trained their guns on British troops, which has led to some confrontations between soldiers.
Exiles are coming back to fight. This story is reported by Hannah Allam, who as a young female American Muslim, has put herself at great personal risk to report from Iraq, including a daring story I remember from months ago where she went deep into the Sunni Triangle to interview insurgents. This particular story was reported from the dusty back alleys of Amman, Jordan.
These via TPM: Even CIA arch-enemy Novak is taking shots at Bush?! "the generals are silent -- in public. Many confide that they will not cast their normal Republican votes on Nov. 2." Wowza... This Aug. 6 memo zap comes from a disenchanted former Republican bigshot. Disorder up and down their ranks!!!
Judge the Pundits! (via Agonist) Support Erodes. Anger throughout the mideast, as always.
Billmon makes the case that Iraq is now FUBAR to end all Rs. In that thread magurakurin said that
These people in Fallujah are fighting for their homes, they have nowhere to go. It all reminds of a scence in Casablanca When Colonel Strausser asks Rick how he will feel when the Germans march into New York and Bogart replies with something to the effect of "Well, there are some parts of New York that I would advise you not to invade."The troop shortage is a great deal of the problem now. The U.S. literally can't allocate many more marines to crush Fallujah, it's just too big. The whole country is too big.
How is Iraq any different? Do you think three battalions of any Marines would be able to control Jersey City? How about the Bronx? South Central LA? It's over, we lost.
Patrick Cockburn reports on Apocalypse now? Part 1 in The Independent.
the disasters of the past week, the worst in political terms since President Bush decided to invade Iraq, are in large measure self-inflicted. The US suddenly found itself fighting a two-front war because it over-reacted to pressure, political and military, from important minority groups in the Sunni and Shia communities.The Sharonizing of America: you have to read this, because only an Israeli can understand the synchronicity:In Vietnam a US commander once said of a village: "We had to destroy it in order to save it." In Iraq the same might apply to Fallujah. It is true that since the war Fallujah has been the most militant and anti-American city in Iraq, but it is not entirely typical. Sunni by religion and highly tribal, it has a well-earned reputation among Iraqis as being a bastion for bandits. Iraqis in Baghdad, even those sympathetic to the resistance, spoke of people in Fallujah pursuing their own private feud with the US.
Yet the US responded to the killing of the four US contractors in Fallujah by sending in 1,200 Marines to launch a medieval siege, one in which they initially refused to allow ambulances in or out. If the Americans really believed they were being attacked by a tiny minority, Iraqis asked, why were they attacking a city of 300,000 people? The result has been to turn Fallujah into a nationalist and religious symbol for all Iraqis.
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[Sadr]'s black-clad militiamen, known as the Army of the Mahdi, number perhaps 5,000 men. But as soon as they went on the offensive, they exposed the fragility of US support among the Iraqi police and US-trained paramilitary units, such as the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps, which were expected to assume an increasing share of security duties.About 200,000 Iraqis belong to these forces. However, confronted by the Army of the Mahdi the police faded away, often handing over their weapons to Mr Sadr's men. As soon as the Army of the Mahdi moved on the city of Kut, on the Tigris south of Baghdad, the police disappeared and the Ukrainian soldiers in the city withdrew.
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By dissolving the Iraqi state and dealing only with Iraqis long in exile, the US began to alienate Iraqis as a whole. Mr Bremer and the CPA confined themselves to Saddam's old palaces, and when they visited other cities they were cocooned from the reality of Iraqi life around them, most notably the growing anger at the lack of economic opportunities.Even now there are only limited signs that Washington and the CPA understand the extent of the political defeat that they have suffered. If they are not prepared to hold Iraq with a large military garrison, they need Iraqi Arab allies - and of these today they have almost none.
the Americans have supplanted us in the headlines. Their air force carried out targeted assassinations, letting the chips of civilian casualties fly where they may as they lop off the arm of terror. In a confusion of historic images, the Iraqi quagmire was dipped into the Lebanese quicksand with a touch of Vietnam jungle.Daily sites to check (yes, Gerber, this is my belated note to you) would mainly include the Agonist, Juan Cole, Billmon, WarInContext, Dkos, BackToIraq and Josh Marshall's TPM, with a side of TomPaine, Alternet, ZNet, Counterpunch and CommonDreams.
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The jubilee of Dien Bien Phu: The struggle between the occupation forces and powerful national currents hasn't changed - not in Nablus and not in Baghdad.
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However, the peak of the coordination between the two countries is the current situation, in which for the last few years we have been witnessing a kind of Israelization - or Sharonization - of America: in its attitude toward the threats of terrorism, America is talking and behaving in Iraq like the last of the hawks on the Israeli General Staff. Instead of giving Jerusalem an example of political daring, Washington has become a huge version of the Israeli army's "we'll show them" approach. Sharon's visit there next week will look almost like the hosting of the aged mentor by his slightly maladroit disciple.
Jesus' General featuring Republican Jesus, is just damn great. RealClearPolitics got a good mention as a well-done conservative blog on Dkos yesterday. Steve Gillard is on point yet again about their "CEO accountability avoidance." Blogging of the President is a nice liberal blog by Jay Rosen (including something about Kurds). INTEL DUMP isn't bad, but fairly aggressive/conservative (to engage in pigeonholing). Mark Kleiman also is a top notch blogger. Tapped is another nice weblog from The American Prospect Online. Counterspin mm mm good. OpenSourcePolitics is kewl.
Empire Notes is posting straight from Baghdad. This is excellent: Turning Tables, a soldier who blogged when he was in Iraq, and has just started up again after returning to civilian life, but of course things have taken their turn:
i'm so torn now...it's hard for me to make an unbiased decision...how do i feel...Not to be confused with e-rocky-confidential and Iraq Now, other soldiers writing in Iraq.
revolution is coming...i hope it's averted...but i know it won't be...how do you quench the fire of fanaticism...there is no central command capable of surrender...a million militants/freedom fighters/insurgents...a million roque groups who don't agree with each other...A million places to hide in and fight from...one giant can of shit worms...
In the Military-Industrial Feedbag department, consider whereisthemoney.org, charting how many trillions of Pentagon dollars fly out of the Treasury somewhere into CorporateSpace. Compare with CostOfWar.com or its scholarship page.
Some paranoid things I'm throwing in, as long as we are talking about those who were Determined to Strike Inside U.S.: Emperor's Clothes Articles on 9-11. Something paranoid about Kerry and the DLC.
My God, David Brooks is still the most wretched thing to see. Strained cognitive dissonance and silly sources (Lieberman AND a Yale lecturer?! Huzzah!) of the worst sort:
Most important, leadership in the U.S. is for once cool and resolved. This week I spoke with leading Democrats and Republicans and found a virtual consensus. We're going to keep the June 30 handover deadline. We're going to raise troop levels if necessary. We're going to wait for the holy period to end and crush Sadr. As Joe Lieberman put it, a military offensive will alienate Iraqis, but "the greater risk is [Sadr] will grow into something malevolent." As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed, "I've been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve."Under the mercenary file we should add this NY Times story about how Blackwater was lured into the now-legendary Fallujah ambush. Also consider that the MilCorps are grouping together now: "Each private firm amounts to an individual battalion," said one U.S. government official familiar with the developments. "Now they are all coming together to build the largest security organization in the world." Sounds like SkyNet. A further comment on the condotierri. Of course without sufficient troops they saved the day in Najf before. Hired Guns by Tucker Carlson. Is it Crossfire Tucky Tuck? I can't imagine he'd muss his bowtie.Nonetheless, yesterday's defections from the Iraqi Governing Council show that populist pressure on the good guys is getting intense. Maybe it is time to pause, to let passions cool, to let the democrats marshal their forces. If people like Sistani are forced to declare war on the U.S., the gates of hell will open up.
Over the long run, though, the task is unavoidable. Sadr is an enemy of civilization. The terrorists are enemies of civilization. They must be defeated.
Texans pray for oil in Israel. Why the hell not?
For the moment, Juan Cole is suggesting that the Neocons pounced on al-Sadr when he announced his support for Hamas, and if the leader of the Shiite Marsh Arabs, who has suspended his role in the Governing Council, turns against the U.S., it could be a whole new ballgame. Neocon schemeries? Never!:
Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, legendary leader of the Iraqi Hizbullah, which organized the Shiite Marsh Arabs to fight Saddam, has suspended his membership in the Interim Governing Council (IGC) in order to protest American actions in attacking the Sadrist movement. Al-Muhammadawi met Friday with Muqtada al-Sadr, whom the Americans say they will arrest (according to AP). Were Muhammadawi and the Marsh Arabs to turn against the Americans, they would be formidable foes.later he suggests that the killing of Yassin and this turn in the situation are deeply connected, and I tend to agree:Although Neoconservative circles in the US continued to attempt to blame Iran for the Shiite insurgency, it is obvious that it is homegrown and that it was deliberately provoked by the Americans, perhaps by the Neocons themselves. With their typical arrogance, they vastly underestimated the support for Muqtada in the country, and underestimated the degree to which even Iraqis who do not like him would violently resist the US moving against him. The Neoconservatives, egged on by Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, want to widen the war to Iran so as to overthrow the government in Tehran, and apparently don't give a rat's ass about the American lives that would be lost attempting to occupy Iran, a country 3 times larger than Iraq.
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American troops, which had faced heavy fighting and harassment in the Shiite slums of East Baghdad or Sadr City, gave up and withdrew from the civilian areas on Friday, according to wire service reports and the Arabic press. The US does retain control of the police stations in East Baghdad, but these are apparently isolated garrisons and the writ of US rule runs no farther than the fences around them.
This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast. The "handover of sovereignty" scheduled for June 30 was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush's election campaign, but it now seems likely to be even more empty. Since its main rationale was to provide more legitimacy to the US enterprise in Iraq, and since any legitimacy the US had is fading fast, and since a government appointed by Bremer will be hated by virtue of that very appointment, the Bush administration may as well just not bother.
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Part of what caused this incipient collapse of the US-appointed Iraqi government is that the US military decided to besiege the entire city of Fallujah to get at insurgents who killed 4 US Blackwater mercenaries last week, even though reports indicated that the guerrillas left the city after the killings. Those guerrillas, supported by civilian demonstrations and desecration of the mercenaries' bodies, announced that they were taking revenge for the Israeli murder of Hamas clerical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Just as the Israelis and their American amen corner helped drag the US into the Iraq war, so they also have inflamed Iraqi sentiment against the US by spectacular uses of state terror against Palestinians. Both the Sunni and the Shiite uprisings in Iraq in the past week in a very real sense were set off by Sharon's whacking of Yassin, a paraplegic who could easily have been arrested. (Only once Muqtada al-Sadr announced his support for Hamas was he targeted by the Neocon-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority for arrest, convincing him that he had nothing to lose and had better launch an insurgency).
Incredibly, Minnesota lost three soldiers in this week alone, the bloodiest week that our state has yet suffered from the war.
Cpl. Levi Angell of Cloquet, 20 years old, same age as me, was killed when his Humvee was hit by an RPG. Pfc. Moises Langhorst, 19, of Moose Lake was killed earlier somewhere in Al Anbar province on April 5. Cpl. Tyler R. Fey, 22, of Eden Prairie was killed in Al Anbar the day before.
Mark Shields made an excellent point on Lehrer News Hour about the Coalition veterans who should be getting rotated out of Iraq now but have been trapped by the new unrest and Pentagon orders: they are effectively the first round of draftees, conscripted to fight the battle.
While snooping at Steve Gillard's blog (Steve is one of the original DKos people) I found a number of stories, including one about two soldiers who drove to Canada to avoid shipping to Iraq.
Army private Brandon Hughey got in his silver Mustang around midnight on March 2, rolled past the gates at Fort Hood in Texas, and headed northeast. All he had to guide him was a deepening dread and principled objection to the war in Iraq and a promise of help from a complete stranger he'd found on the Internet. His unit was deploying to the Middle East the next morning and, as Hughey, 18, wrote in a February 29 e-mail to the stranger, an anti-war activist, "I do not want to be a pawn in the government's war for oil, and have told my superiors that I want out of the military. They are not willing to chapter me out and tell me that I have no choice but to pack my bags and get ready to go to Iraq. This has led me to feel hopeless and I have thought about suicide several times."The first soldier to request Canadian asylum, Jeremy Hinzman, has started a website to deliver news and updates on his situation. The second soldier, Brandon Hughley has also started a website to detail his story: "Do not allow Canada to Send an 18-year-old to prison for refusing to kill or to be killed in an illegal, unjust war."In contrast to Hughey, Hinzman engaged a lengthy process of pleading from within his unit for non-combat duty as a conscientious objector (C.O.). After his request was denied, Hinzman faced orders for Iraq. He and his wife crammed what they could into their Chevy Prizm and headed north, with their son, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Hinzman, 25, understood what he was risking: if he wins his case, never being able to visit the U.S. again; if he loses, being deported, going directly to jail with a harsh sentence. Desertion during wartime is a capital offense; though the last execution for a runaway soldier was in 1945, Hinzman worries that the penalty could be revived. "The Bush administration has done so many unprecedented things," he notes.
Steve also wrote a really excellent response to the horrible Fox show The Swan, where entrants get plastic surgery and enter a beauty contest. I find the concept very disturbing, and reflective of where Fox's real values lie. A good summary from Gillard of how the White House is treating the events there:
There is this arrogant idea that all the US has to do is kill enough people and the resistance will end. Dan Barlett, the White House spokesman making the rounds of the morning shows, said "we're fighting evil".When I heard that, my mouth fell open. Hasn't anyone in the White House noticed most Iraqis are on the fence, and many more have decided to oppose the occupation. They are not supporting us. They are not taking our side, except when we pay them. There isn't one pro-american group native to Iraq. No one cares about Chalabi's henchmen.
I heard a Lt. Col say "we're winning every firefight." So? Why are you in firefights? Why are people killing your Marines? Doesn't that speak of a massive policy failure. Now, I know he has to win a battle, but the idea that we're fighting in Iraq is insane. We were supposed to liberate these people, not have them turn on us.
Sistani is trying to split the difference and stop the killing. Well, that isn't going to work. Sadr is not the only Shia in arms. Iraqis are telling western reporters that they are sick of the incompetence and mishandling of Iraq. Iraqis have the most educated populace of the middle east, 130K engineers and architects, but the country is being rebuilt by Halliburton. Unemployment is 60-70 percent and not going down, the streets are unsafe.
It has been more than two years since Charlie Co. of the 2nd Battalion, 20th Special Forces Group received mobilization orders for active duty in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It has been 16 months since the National Guard unit returned to the United States from assignment in Kosovo and demobilized.Another piece, The US Military is in Real Trouble:But for 72 Army Guardsmen from that unit, their active-duty stint turned into a financial nightmare that continues to this day. Most of the soldiers were forced to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for on-base meals even though DoD regulations state that they are entitled either to per diem allowances or access to base dining facilities at no cost. Their efforts to obtain reimbursement from the Army have produced “frustration and disgust,” as one soldier described it – but no justice.
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The GAO report identified a number of major structural flaws in the system, including nonintegrated databases in hundreds of Guard and active Army units, insufficient resources Armywide to manage the influx of nearly 100,000 mobilized reservists and Guardsmen, and poorly trained payroll personnel. It said nothing short of a total re-engineering of the Army’s payroll system could halt the widespread problems.But the men of Charlie Co. already knew that.
For seven months between the day they arrived at Fort Carson, Colo., for mobilization training in early January 2002 until their departure for Europe that August, the soldiers were forced to pay for their own meals at the dining facility used by the active-duty 10th Special Forces Group. Never mind the fact that under Operation Noble Eagle/Enduring Freedom – the post-9/11 operations to secure the continental United States and eject the Taliban from Afghanistan – mobilized Guardsmen and reservists were entitled to per diem for meals and lodging; the dysfunctional and haphazard Army personnel system was not going to budge.
Our 30-year old all-volunteer Army is crucially close to being broken.Also they are following the depleted uranium issue, and its effect on US soldiers. I looked at the site after Gillard noted the story of intel agent David DeBatto, a veteran of our failing Iraq policies, whom the Pentagon is trying to discredit:Never in the history of the post-Vietnam volunteer Army has such a beaten up and over-tasked force had to sustain itself in the face of ever-expanding requirements and constantly accelerating deployment tempos that we see today.
The quality of our force is suffering. Anybody who denies that fact is either blind or ignorant. If the military is not bolstered, very soon, with an infusion of smart, well-trained, and highly-motivated volunteers, the force will suffer even more.
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The cumulative effect of this deterioration on troopers’ morale cannot be underestimated.Following a recent survey of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by the military newspaper Stars & Stripes, some analysts have concluded that the Bush administration’s approach to Iraq risks doing to the All-Volunteer Force what Vietnam did to the draft.
The survey, which polled thousands of troops, found that 40 percent of recipients said their missions in Iraq had little or nothing to do with what they had trained for. Perhaps even more foreboding, half the soldiers who were surveyed indicated that they will not reenlist when their tours end or when the Pentagon lifts the stop-loss order currently in effect that has prevented over 24,000 active duty soldiers and over 16,000 reservists from leaving the service.
This week I spoke over twenty Army NCOs, all recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan duty. Ranging in rank from corporal to sergeant 1st class, all but two said they intend to leave active service once they get the opportunity to do so. The majority added that they wish to completely sever their military ties and will not join reserve units to continue their service.
Two general officers, who have asked that they remain nameless, have both told me that it is their firm belief; that if it were not for the stop-loss policy then the total force would already be in critically severe jeopardy and it clearly could not complete its missions. Meanwhile, U.S. Army Reserve officials are pondering why they have missed their reenlistment goals for 2003.
The Army has launched what I can only describe as a smear campaign against me by trying to destroy my credibility. They are claiming, among other things, that I am trying to present my self as an official Army or Pentagon spokesman (God forbid!) and that I have been trying to set national policy (I never realized I had that much authority). They are, of course, trying to minimize my experience and expertise by saying, in effect; I don’t know what I am talking about. Pretty standard stuff for a large agency trying to muzzle someone who is speaking the truth about them.Mind you, these accusations are being made primarily by men (I use the term loosely here) that either never served a day in Iraq or Afghanistan or spent their time in-theater in a nice, air-conditioned office with Internet and e-mail connections 24/7, showers, latrines, good food and never went over the wire except to re-deploy. This was done when soldiers like myself were going out, over the wire, on 3-4 mission a day, seven days a week and getting about 3-4 hours of sleep a day, if we were lucky.
We took incoming from RPG’s, AK-47’s, and 60 and 80 mm mortars every day and night. We were also exposed to the very real danger of attack from the enormous crowds that circled us every time we would stop and dismount in a town or village. As for my team, a THT (Tactical HUMINT Team) for which I was the team leader, we were responsible for some of the biggest and most significant intelligence collection efforts in the central Sunni Triangle area in which we operated. I am very proud of my team and what they accomplished, usually under very difficult conditions; conditions made all the more difficult because of poor leadership at the 0-4 and 0-5 levels, some of the very same people now leveling baseless allegations against me.
The moral fault lies not with those who fight or flee, but with those who designed this war, and have by their malicious incompetence utterly failed to pacify and stabilize the country.
A website did a poll of which Republican should hold the title of Honorariest Homosexual, and the winner was National Review dork John Derbyshire, but our illustrious Senator Coleman came in second with 25 or 22% of the votes. Way to go, Norm!
This via the entertaining wonkette.com.
I have a nasty cold this holiday weekend. Spent all day sitting around feeling immobile but we watched 26 Grams on DVD from Blockbuster. Viacom sure loads those DVDs with tons of ads that you can't fast forward over because they are a giant EvilCorp out to usurp your God-given right to skip over garbage!
The late news on the Jerusalem Post is that there were specific warnings of Palestinians rioting after Friday prayers at the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa Mosque in the Old City.
Police: Riots may break out after Friday prayersMassive police forces were stationed Friday morning in east Jerusalem and especially in the Old City, after police received specific warning that young Palestinians intend to riot following the Muslim prayers on Temple Mount, which are to resume at 1 p.m.
Last Friday, Palestinian youth rioted on the holy site in what was considered the most serious security incident on Temple Mount since the riots of October 2000, which sparked the second Intifada, known also as the al-Aqsa Intifada.
Police said that entrance to the mosques was restricted to men above the age of 45 carrying Israeli IDs. Muslim women of all ages are allowed to enter the compound.
Meanwhile, the high terror alert continues across the country. Security forces are stationed in city centers, shopping malls and synagogues.
Meanwhile the Post's editorial board says "unless the US wipes out Mahdi's army and the Sunni resisters quickly and decisively, it will have a real intifada on its hands:"
Now it's a fair question whether the US will have to face down a popular uprising – a real Iraqi intifada – or be defeated by it.Our sense is that what America faces now is similar to what Israel faced in the early days of the present conflict. Fallujah, as American military commanders have pointed out, is a city apart, a place that uniquely benefited from Saddam's largesse and now finds itself a loser in the new dispensation. Sheikh Sadr is a young upstart, supported mainly by Iran and opposed by the mainstream Shiite Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. As for "Mahdi's Army," Sadr's ragtag militia, it does not represent a serious military threat to the Coalition.
Yet what starts small can end large. A population that wishes to remain aloof from a conflict can gradually be drawn into it as orchestrated provocations engulf everyone in violence. Sadr's calculation is that as violence spreads – and as the Coalition resorts to increasingly aggressive measures, with all the "collateral damage" that entails – Iraqis will cast their lot with him, not the occupiers or their designated successors.
As of this writing, the Coalition has obliged the sheikh. The US has promised a "deliberate and precise" reaction; in Fallujah, Marines fired rockets at a mosque, killing more than two dozen Iraqis.
That does not mean that any military action taken against Sadr is counterproductive and will only strengthen him. What it does mean is that the Coalition cannot afford half-measures. The great mistake made by Israel in the early days of the intifada – and that, frankly, is what it has become, even if it didn't start out that way – was to ratchet up the violence slowly. Too much Israeli precision served too embolden the Palestinians rather than deter them. Too much American precision will accomplish the same.
We do not mean to suggest that the US employ indiscriminate force. But unless the US wipes out Mahdi's army and the Sunni resisters quickly and decisively, it will have a real intifada on its hands, and the temptation to retreat will ultimately prove overpowering. Just look at Israel.
Who would have ever thought they might want that to happen?
I am extremely concerned that there will be another incident around the Mount/Al Aqsa area, perhaps rounded out with something else in Karbala and Najf, a synchronicity between Arabs, Israel and the United States, having stumbled up to this point, having finally exhausted all plans...
Also, word is that all Sunnis in Baghdad are supposed to go to the central mosque. Raed in the Middle:
The next couple of days are going to be really red.
The Red Weekend…
Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the “fall” of Baghdad.Tomorrow is Friday, the Muslims sabbath, and the mosques of Baghdad will NOT be available for the noon prayer. The mosques announced that the Friday prayer of tomorrow is going to be in the central mosque, for all Sunnis. Um AlMaarek mosque, thousands and thousands are going to be there.
Thousands of Iraqis from all Iraq joined the Falluja blood donation campaign, Falluja is still under siege, more than 300 people killed there and more than 500 injured in the because of the collective punishment Bremer has ordered.
Iraqi police officers joined AlMahdi Army in Najaf and Kufa, where the coalition forces lost control over the city. The same thing in AlKut city too.
The GC is falling apart, some members resigned, others are on their way.
People are making jokes about the “hand over of authorities”, who is going to hand over what?This Saturday is a sacred religious anniversary for Shia, the (Arbaeen) of AlHusien. This anniversary witnessed millions of Iraqi Shia marching to Karbala from all the Iraqi cities, and if this thing happens this year… ohhh…
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This bloody cycle of violence is not going to stop in the next couple of days, but next week I think a political solution will be acceptable.I feel sad and frustrated.
The sound of aggression and violence is louder than my voice.
I can't believe that Bush is yet again hanging out at the GOD DAMNED RANCH. Because God knows he did such a good job managing threats from there last time.
I have found a huge array of information today, so let me summarize:
Mesopotamia Aflame: DEBKA is not my idea of a serious source, but their Iraqi battle map is what you have to look at. Don't necessarily believe their report about Sadr, (nor Hamas) but it's interesting.
There is emerging information that a U.S. translator says that the government had all kinds of 9/11 evidence in its possession. And lo and behold the U.S. media won't pick it up.
There are Sunnis and Shiites marching from baghdad to Fallujah with humanitarian supplies, and they have been overrunning American checkpoints. Could go badly.
In the Irony Department Richard Perle says there wasn't enough planning. WHAT THE HELL MAN?!
Justin Raimondo on Sadr, "The New Saddam." Because the U.S. always needs someone to hate? Hmm...
More of Asia Times: One year on, from liberation to jihad by Pepe Escobar. Meanwhile it's time to reconstruct Islam!!! The Shiite voice that will be heard. Baathists on the bandwagon! But wait, its not a second war?!?!? Ahh hell...
The very paranoid site WHATREALLYHAPPENED.COM is having a field day! (a paranoid report on whether or not a plane actually hit the Pentagon). I don't really need any more conspiracy theories, so regard these as questionable but entertaining. Pepe Escobar at Asia Times online is going off about 9/11. A mellow theological scholar publishes a book asserting that the 9/11 story was faked.
Command Post has continuing updates. More hawkish places are asserting that Iran is propelling matters. This piece does have a lot of nice background, though.
These are extremely graphic pictures of dead Iraqis in Fallujah from Al Jazeera. Asia Times on the uprising: When fear turns to anger.
Iraq Anarchy by Robert Fisk, a man whose early pessimism about the war turned out all too correct
Anarchy has been a condition of our occupation from the very first days when we let the looters and arsonists destroy Iraq's infrastructure and history. But that lawlessness is now coming back to haunt us. Anarchy is what we are now being plunged into in Iraq, among a people with whom we share no common language, no common religion and no common culture.Here is something of significance: In the former capital of the Islamic Caliphate, Samarra, the uprising has arrived, according to AFP. I have said before that Samarra is a sort of 'magic' place in the logic of Al Qaeda, in the sense that they are trying to rebuild the caliphate, which would hold a special logic within this ancient city.
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Dan Senor, the occupying power's spokesman, wouldn't tell anyone exactly what the evidence against Sadr was - even though it has supposedly existed since an Iraqi judge issued the warrant some months ago.The US military response to the atrocities committed against four American mercenaries in Fallujah last week has been to surround the entire city and to announce the cutting off of the neighbouring international highway link between Baghdad, Amman and Damascus - thus bringing to a halt almost all economic trade between Iraq and its two western neighbours.
What good this will do "new" Iraq is anyone's guess. Vast concrete walls have been lowered across the road and military vehicles have been used to chase away civilians trying to by-pass them. A prolonged series of Israeli-style house raids are now apparently planned for the people of Fallujah to seek out the gunmen who first attacked the four Americans - whose corpses were later stripped, mutilated and hanged.
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And all this, remember, began because Mr Bremer decided to ban Sadr's trashy 10,000-circulation weekly newspaper for "inciting violence."
"I believe, first of all, that we underestimate that this war on terrorism is really a war against radical Islam. Terrorism is a tactic. It's not a war itself. Secondly, let me say that I don't think we understand how the Muslim world views us, and I'm terribly worried that the military tactics in Iraq are going to do a number of things, and they're all bad. ... I think we're going to end up with civil war if we continue down the military operation strategies that we have in place. I say that sincerely as someone that supported the war in the first place."More on this from salon.com."Let me say, secondly, that I don't know how it could be otherwise, given the way that we're able to see these military operations, even the restrictions that are imposed upon the press, that this doesn't provide an opportunity for Al Qaida to have increasing success at recruiting people to attack the United States. It worries me. And I wanted to make that declaration. You needn't comment on it, but as I said, I'm not going to have an opportunity to talk to you this closely. And I wanted to tell you that I think the military operations are dangerously off track. And it's largely a U.S. Army -- 125,000 out of 145,000 -- largely a Christian army in a Muslim nation. So I take that on board for what it's worth."
The rightwing Tacitus says something insightful, but also portentious of doom, as those hawks are wont to do:
Consider that if you are American, there is no open road to Baghdad from any of Iraq's neighboring countries. For the moment, CPA resupply is a triumph of airlift. Something to chew on. It's not the result of any one tragically wrong decision or miscalculation; rather, it's the end result of a year of accumulating bad calls and wishful thinking: disbanding the army plus not confronting Sadr plus giving the Shi'a a veto plus the premature policy of withdrawal from urban centers plus the undermanning of the occupation force (and the concurrent kneecapping of Shinseki) plus the setting of a ludicrously early "sovereignty" date plus the early tolerance of lawlessness and looting plus illusory reconstruction accomplishments plus etc., etc., etc. In short, the failure of the occupation to be an occupation in any sense that history and Arab peoples would recognize. Bad calls of such consistency are the product of a fundamentally bad system.
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As you read this in the cold, comforting, wan glow of your screen, United States Marines are adding Fallujah to the roll call of honor that stretches from our young nation's first defeat of jihad in North African sands, to the beaches of Tarawa and Saipan, to Hue, and beyond. And soon, the men and women of the United States Army will emerge from their embattled base camps to conquer the ancient valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates for the second time in a year. What they are doing is right and just; the enemy they fight is manifestly base and tyrannical. There is no question on this count, and there is no doubt of their battlefield victory. What is in doubt is whether their victory will last, and whether the price paid for it will be worthwhile. These magnificent instruments of our national will, soldier and Marine alike, are unstoppable by any insurgent, any jihadist, any fanatic, or any guerrilla.
Juan Cole on point as always. Also he illustrates the truth about the role the U.S. has played in influencing the growth of post-Saddam Iraqi militias:
Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor, who has often attempted to peddle frankly false stories, was at it again on Wednesday. He said Muqtada al-Sadr was targeted because he maintained a militia. Let's see: In April of 2003, the US Department of Defense flew Ahmad Chalabi into Iraq with over a thousand of his militiamen, actually transporting them in US troop carriers. They brought a militia to Iraq.
Just published, Robert Reich asks us to visualize what a second Bush administration might feel like.
A book review about The Rise of the Vulcans, a book I got but haven't read much of yet about the personal histories of Bush officials. It is not very polemical; the section about Wolfowitz's path from math to Wohlstetter's political science is quite good.
I already posted this before, but once again a book review from the Times about Bush's psychopathology:
the Schweizers quote one unnamed relative as saying that George W. Bush sees the war on terrorism "as a religious war": "He doesn't have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know."
Someone advised me today to keep an eye on CounterPunch. Not a bad idea.
Riverbend in Iraq is still going. Another Iraqi blog, Iraq-Iraqis.
...A united militia with the same uniform should be created grouping all the guards and armed people from the parties’ members and the followers of the GC members to enforce order in streets. It’s their duty and our duty would be to defend our democracy and freedom against terrorists and trouble makers and kayos lovers.
Lawrence of Cyberia, another nice blog. Reading A1 is another blog that criticizes the New York Times.
I just mentioned it below, but again Billmon's Death of a Dream is worth reading for its insight on neo-cons, Israel and anti-Semitism in the Middle East. This is the Arabic blog which the original mujahideen conversation apparently comes from.
Compare this press release with what actually transpired in that poor nation.
The casualties are piling up rapidly. This site is authoritative.
NY Times reporter John Burns was briefly captured by a Shiite militia.
Michael Lind wrote this last year about "The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War," and I might be more skeptical of it if Lind wasn't a former neocon, and editor of the National Interest, himself. (Good info about PNAC in here) I ran into some old paranoid pieces about the war running beyond control. Another old piece by a Palestinian professor about how the war is supposedly ultimately to Israel's benefit. Ah, for those heady and speculative days.
Via Atrios a stunning little letter from a contractor working in Iraq:
Discipline is slipping in the forces and it reminds one of the Viet-Nam pictures of old. Instead of a professional military outfit here we have a bunch of cowboys and vigilantes running wild in the streets. The ugly American has never been so evident. Someone in charge needs to drop the hammer on this lack of discipline, especially that which is being hown by the Special Forces, security contractors, and "other government agencies". We won the war but that doesn't mean we can treat the people of this couotry with contempt and disregard with no thought to the consequences. Those contractors, just like the last ones who were killed, were out running free with no military escort. Armed or not, that is a breach of protocol and a severe security risk. While I grieve for the families of those persons I would like to see the person who decided that it was alright for them to convoy out there without the military brought up on charges, unless of course that person was in the convoy, in which case at least he won't be getting anyone else killed.I'm angry about how we're treating peope here. I know it's not the entire military, in fact it is a very small, select group that believes they are somehow above the law of not ony this land but also the law of the military and those laws we hold dear in ouor own country. If someone were to try to treat our fellow Americans the way some of these people are treating the Iraquis the courts would certainly lock them away. I would phrase that last line harsher, but in light of recent events that would be cruel. Discipline is needed here, and I'm not certain that our current administration is prepared to take the steps necessary to crack down on all of this. In order for discipline to be restored I do believe Donald Rumsfield would have to admit that perhaps Powell's rules of war were in fact valid.
Inside the personal bubbles that the long-suffering Israeli populace inhabits:
Suicide bombings create small, self-enclosed worlds consisting of family, a few friends, and a tiny geography. You go to this supermarket which is not in a busy mall, this cafe which has an armed guard, drive your kids to school along this side road which isn't a bus route - and to hell with anyone you don't know or trust. This is your own personal bu'ah, your bubble, and no one who is not in it is above suspicion. What is happening in Gaza or Nablus - the curfews, the checkpoints, the terrifying incursions of troops, the targeted assassinations, the collapse of the social infrastructure, the malnutrition, the cages in which Palestinians are fenced off like zoo animals - could be happening in Bosnia instead of a 25-minute drive away, because no one goes there except your son the soldier or your husband the reservist, and he doesn't talk about what he's seen because he can't. He doesn't have the emotional language to express it, who among us does? He comes home and gratefully re-enters his bu'ah. If I were an Israeli businessman, I'd invest in escapism, the bu'ah's wallpaper...If you ever wanted to understand what anesthitized language about cracking down on Palestinians looks like, read this from an Israeli terror institute.
Joe Conason observed in February that the president was oblivious.
Rummy admits it's serious! "Iraq's stability crumbling at a rapid rate."
This news report from Knight-Ridder looks grim:
Marine engineers patrolling near Ramadi on Wednesday reported coming across a mass grave containing up to 350 bodies of Iraqis who appeared to have been killed in the fighting. It wasn't clear whether the bodies belonged to combatants, civilians or both.
.....
Rumors, unconfirmed and unconfirmable, heightened the tension: Those involved in the insurgency said Sunnis, Shiites and even Palestinians would gather in a war summit in Sadr City on Thursday."The Sunni people, the Shiite people, we share the same God, the same suffering under the Americans and the same goal, to end the occupation of Iraq," said Said Ammer al Husainie, the Mahdi Army leader in Sadr City. "We have been working together, and will continue to work together, to see that our aims are met.
.....
-The BBC reported that Shiite fighters had entered a Sunni mosque Monday, recruiting volunteers to donate blood for the resistance. Once recruited, the volunteers "together agreed on a wide-range attack in the neighborhood on the Americans," the BBC reported.-In Ramadi, a traditional Sunni stronghold, witnesses said Marines were fighting soldiers who were dressed like members of Mahdi Army.
-In southern and central Baghdad, traditional Sunni neighborhoods, pro-Sadr posters and literature were widely circulated.
Too funny to leave out: the dictator of Turkmenistan's dogmatic guide to better living: The Rukhnama. Radio Free Europe is a new news source. EurasiaNet has a lot of good news collecting going on. Don't forget the Argus.
If this whole post doesn't make any sense to you, it doesn't make sense to me, either.
Mac Weekly interview, October 10, 2003:
Dan Feidt: There have been a lot of violent incidents of in Sadr City recently, because the Americans have detained some clerics that follow Sadr. Is that a sign that the peace between the Shia religious groups and the United States is fraying?
Prof. Rashid Khalidi: It is not clear whether in fact what the United States is doing with Muqtada al-Sadr—in this place called Sadr City which is named for a relative of his who was killed by the Baathists—is going to lead to alienation of the Shia from the United States. Sadr doesn’t represent all the Shia. He is one factional leader. He is charismatic, he is popular but there are a lot of other people there.
The big question is A: how alienated are people in Iraq going to be, Shia, by American actions and policies, and B: to what extent will the United States try to repair its relations with the Shia by making up to Iran. There is an important faction in our government which is trying to do that, just as there’s an important faction in the government trying to sabotage any such possibility. So stay tuned for where the arm wrestling in Washington will end up. That in turn will determine a lot of these things. If The United States totally alienates Iran then one of the few possible means of positively affecting the attitudes of Shia in Iraq will disappear.
I have been playing Johnny Cash's cover of U2's One over and over the last few days. The burning away of any cohesion, any plan, any progression in Iraq has forced me to step back and do some soul searching. What was the point, anyway? I really tried to find out, in my own half-assed roundabout kind of way.
I talked for a while with a Macalester geography professor before lunch. Everyone was expecting Sadr to make a move at some point, he said, but it seems the U.S. never had a plan to handle him, and no one thought that it would go this far.
Before the war he tried hard to find out from his connections in Washington if there was, in fact, a postwar plan. There was none, of course, and no one ever told him who was ultimately in charge of making that plan.
So was it a sin of omission? Was the plan to bring it all crashing down? Why would people that had agitated against Saddam for years finally wipe him out without a playbook?
Since this stretch of HongPong.com started in March 2003, I can't say exactly what my point was; I just wanted to highlight what I saw was wrong in the war that was just getting underway.
On the fifth post, I pointed out that they weren't planning, and it alarmed professional policymakers. I tried to highlight the importance of these weird and disturbing documents like the Clean Break.
Now it's all coming down; can I say that I was surprised? Did I do enough to prevent this? Could I have influenced a damn thing?
If I feel upset that it might be flying to bits, I can only imagine how the many knowledgeable and concerned people I've met over the past few years feel about the grand failure to prevent what awaits us tomorrow. I was just one damn student.
I tried to conduct some journalism, but even after this interview, I didn't have a damnfool idea of what action I ought to take. At least I asked a question about Sadr.
As Radiohead says, "We tried but there was nothing we could do."
I found the following in a thread on Billmon.org, attached to a very insightful piece illustrating that anger towards Israel is not something we can surgically rip out of the Middle East.
This was posted by the German magazin der Spiegel and was taken from an the islamic weblog qoqaz.com they translated from the arabic and I have translated from the German. It regards the resistance in falludja.Al-Anbari: God is Great!
Al-Ramadi: Peace!
Al-Anbari: Peace upon you!
Al-Ramadi: Peace and the Mercy of God upon You!
Al-Ramadi: Are you still alive? (...) Send us news!
Al-Anbari: Wie have smashed the Americans, battles are raging in all the streets.
Al-Ramadi: By God!
Al-Anbari: By God! And we have taken their weapons and equipment.
Al-Ramadi: Were some of them killed as well?
Al-Anbari: Yes the whole troop that was on street 20, was completely destroyed and one of the cars, that was close to mariams house, was burned.
Al-Ramadi: Which Mariam?
Al-Anbari: Remember Mahmud al-Mariam, that lives close to the house of Ibrahim al-Khaschiban? The house behind his.
Al-Ramadi: Ah. Have they gotten in the houses or arrested anyone?
Al-Anbari: No they have not succeeded in getting to this place yet. Perhaps they will come in the night. At the moment they are collecting themselves in the street on which the playground is located close to the house of Safi al-Battah.
Al-Ramadi: Was kind of weapons are the resistance fighters using?
Al-Anbari: Light weapons and grenades.
Al-Ramadi: I have heard that their base in Ramadi was hit hard with mortar fire yesterday..
Al-Anbari: yes, their night was black. (...) The eintire region has risen against them without exception! Interesting is also that most of the Mudschahidin are made up of police and the new army.
Al-Ramadi: God is great! (...)
Al-Anbari: Truly, when you see their weapons you feel that the angels are fighting on our side!
Al-Ramadi: There is no victory except on Gods side!
Al-Anbari: They called me from the school and told me not to come, for the situation didn't allow it. They killed 6 Americans. I felt something pull me there, and I found the battle in the vicinity of our house. And the heroes ran after the Americans (...). When I saw them again, they were carrying the Americans weapons and equipment stained with their blood, they were screaming God is Great!
Al-Ramadi: By God, Arabs and Muslims here are truly very eager, to hear more such news, that cools the breast. I will copy this dialog and show all!
Al-Anbari: God is Great!
Al-Ramadi: And what now? (...)
Al-Anbari: We are at greatest readiness. (...) I will give you the details if I stay alive.
Kamal: I plead God for your safety and victory.
Al-Anbari: The American Armee, that the world fears, has turned out to be a horde of sheep(...).
Kamal: How are Mohammed and the other Mudschahidin?
Al-Anbari: They are well. thank God we had no dead and only two wounded, and their wounds are slight.
Kamal: Who are these two?
Al-Anbari: To be honest, I don't know them, for people in the entire region mobilized, men and women. I didnt think people from this region had so much heroism and courage in them. Mothers even pushed their children to fight.
Kamal: As God wills it! Blessed be the Allmighty!
Al-Anbari: Imagine: I encountered a boy, he was not even 15, and he carried a weapon,but without ammunition (...). When I saw him in his heroism, I ripped out my magazin and gave it to him.
Kamal: Oh God!!! God is Great!!!
Al-Anbari: I also saw a young man, that heroically stood his ground against the Americans and threw after them, and they didnt react to it, even though they were many.
Kamal: Such news calms and strengthens the pride. (...) I would like to ask you a favor.
Al-Anbari: Sure.
Kamal: I wish to make as many copies of this story, as I can and distribute them to all Mudschahidin , that wish to have it, as a small effort on my part, to help strenghen their moral.
Al-Anbari: As God wills!"This conversation with a messenger out of Ramadi appeared today, on wednesday afternoon. As god is my witness, I know this brother, who finds himself at the gulf, for I have worked with him. He with whom he speaks, is his brother in Ramadi. In this conversation is contained news of the Mudschahidin on the battlefield"
I have not checked the web traffic level here in quite some time. I have known this site to have high traffic at times, especially after I put up my protest pictures back in the day, and got links from several places.
However, I haven't run an analysis on the numbers since this version of the site started in January. My logfiles may have a chunk missing around March 12, although there were technical problems when I went to London that knocked HongPong.com off for a while. It wouldn't be a surprise that traffic fell when I went on break, in any case.
date #pages #reqs Mbytes Mar/29/04 91 180 4.77 Mar/30/04 258 317 6.15 Mar/31/04 66 155 4.04 Apr/ 1/04 196 524 15.08 Apr/ 2/04 248 428 15.43
I have published the web traffic analysis produced by the fine free tool Analog. I used to use third-party counters but then I got tired of their whole method. Although there is nothing particularly wrong with them, I prefer to do it myself.
The report shows that there have been at least a few hits from all over the place, including Turkey, Israel, Japan, Hong Kong and Mexico. Also the most popular day was March 30, followed by April 2nd. (I have filtered out log entries from accessing at my own computer as well as the one I use at work)
I did not have referrer logging turned on, which is key to determining which sites the traffic comes from. I have turned it on now. I suspect most of those hits came from DailyKos postings I made, considering that the biggest waves in years past have usually come from a link in other forum comments.
It is a promising graph right now, but as you can see it has tapered off for a few days. Time to engineer some hits. w00p w00p!
Also you might care to note that both military and government computers have been here. That's interesting.
#pages %pages #reqs %reqs Mbytes %bytes domain
1318 44.77% 2272 35.76% 47.02 32.61% .com (Commercial)
594 20.18% 1299 20.44% 36.28 25.16% [unresolved numerical addresses]
327 11.11% 1082 17.03% 27.24 18.89% .net (Networks)
159 5.40% 826 13.00% 13.60 9.43% .edu (US Higher Education)
338 11.48% 347 5.46% 4.29 2.97% .org (Non Profit Making Organizations)
11 0.37% 53 0.83% 3.10 2.15% .nl (Netherlands)
68 2.31% 75 1.18% 1.87 1.30% .jp (Japan)
2 0.07% 24 0.38% 1.50 1.04% .fr (France)
32 1.09% 33 0.52% 1.41 0.98% .pl (Poland)
11 0.37% 45 0.71% 1.34 0.93% .ca (Canada)
7 0.24% 38 0.60% 1.27 0.88% .au (Australia)
15 0.51% 49 0.77% 1.04 0.72% .uk (United Kingdom)
2 0.07% 15 0.24% 0.64 0.44% .de (Germany)
13 0.44% 48 0.76% 0.60 0.41% .nz (New Zealand)
6 0.20% 27 0.42% 0.59 0.41% .mil (US Military)
3 0.10% 8 0.13% 0.39 0.27% .pt (Portugal)
4 0.14% 16 0.25% 0.28 0.20% .se (Sweden)
3 0.10% 16 0.25% 0.28 0.20% .ch (Switzerland)
5 0.17% 13 0.20% 0.25 0.18% .hu (Hungary)
2 0.07% 2 0.03% 0.17 0.12% .mx (Mexico)
2 0.07% 5 0.08% 0.15 0.11% .tr (Turkey)
3 0.10% 14 0.22% 0.15 0.10% .gov (US Government)
3 0.10% 9 0.14% 0.15 0.10% .sg (Singapore)
3 0.10% 13 0.20% 0.15 0.10% .us (United States)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.13 0.09% .it (Italy)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.09 0.07% .lk (Sri Lanka)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.05 0.04% .cz (Czech Republic)
3 0.10% 9 0.14% 0.05 0.03% .be (Belgium)
1 0.03% 4 0.06% 0.03 0.02% .il (Israel)
1 0.03% 4 0.06% 0.02 0.01% .lt (Lithuania)
1 0.03% 1 0.02% 0.02 0.01% .hk (Hong Kong)
3 0.10% 3 0.05% 0.01 0.01% .sc (Seychelles)
A special thanks to the friends who've been coming since 2000, and to everyone else who finds my strange little project interesting.
I am going into the time of massive final projects now, so very soon I will not have much time at all to improve the functions of the site. If anyone has suggestions please let me know via comments below or email! Thanks again!!
HongPong.com traffic report (full)
In the nick of time TioDan, i.e. the kosher slingin' guerilla Dan Schwartz, has started a El Blog de Tio at Blogspot, http://tiodan.blogspot.com . It is nice to see more friends undertaking such projects. He is also most interested in those dang mercenaries!
What is the key to successful blogging? That is a good question that I don't think about too much... The standard policy seems to be 'winging it.'
On Iraq: this just rolled into my mailbox, a piece on TomPaine telling us that Chaos is the Reason All Along. Yop.
This report from Reason is pretty sharp. Also the Pandora Project is monitoring the disturbing health effects, including mutations, of depleted uranium. "Wildfire" has some further links, including a diary from an earlier trip.
Naomi Klein is apparently on the ground in Iraq now, reporting on the uprising situation.
The mentally dubious Joseph Farah explains that since al-Sadr is a Shiite with Iranian support, the US must be at war with Iran. Of course! (Never trust WorldNetDaily)
All I can tell you is we are now fighting a regional war. Our local opposition in Iraq is being trained, armed and directed with foreign support – by neighboring Iran.idiot at the New York Post, what else is new?The uprising yesterday was treated in many initial news accounts as a spontaneous uprising directed by Najaf cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
What the other news accounts left out was one significant, but well-established fact: Al-Sadr works for Iran. He is an Iranian agent. His authority comes from Iran.
Make no mistake: Just because we view restraint as a virtue does not mean our enemies share that view. The refusal to use our power in the face of defiance only makes defiance more attractive.What the hell does that mean, anyway? Evil Blonde Woman of Wrath saysWhen U.S. forces arrive in a troubled country, they create an initial window of fear. It's essential to act decisively while the local population is still disoriented. Each day of delay makes our power seem more hollow. You have to do the dirty work at the start. The price for postponing it comes due with compound interest.
.......
We broke a basic rule: Never show fear. No matter how we may rationalize our inaction, that is what we did.Instead of demonstrating our strength and resolve, we have encouraged more attacks and further brutality - while global journalists revel in Mogadishu-lite.
Of course, we're not going to flee Iraq as President Bill Clinton ran from Somalia. But our hesitation to respond to atrocities against Americans has renewed our enemies' hope that, if only they kill enough of us, as graphically as possible, they still can triumph over a "godless" superpower.
To possess the strength to do what is necessary, but to refuse to do it, is appeasement. Since Baghdad fell, our occupation has sought to appease our enemies - while slighting our Kurdish allies. Our attempts to find a compromise with a single man - the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - have empowered him immensely, while encouraging intransigence in others.
Weakness, not strength, emboldens opponents - and creates added terrorist recruits.
We came to Iraq faced with the problems Saddam created. Increasingly, we face problems we ourselves created or compounded.
If the administration lacks the guts to do what must be done, free Iraq will face a dismal future. As vicious as they are, our enemies have the courage of their convictions.
Do we?
I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle.But so goes the unanimous vote around my household - and I'm betting millions of others - in the aftermath of what forevermore will be remembered simply as "Fallujah."
Wouldn't it be lovely were justice so available and so simple? If we were but creatures like those zoo animals we witnessed gleefully jumping up and down after stomping, dragging, dismembering and hanging the charred remains of American civilians whose only crime was to try to help them.
Another blogger is attacked by rightwingers from LittleGreenFootballs.
It appears that more mercenaries from Blackwater Security Consulting have saved the day and protected the CPA's office in Najf from being overrun like the rest of the city, after a Blackwater helicopter dropped them ammo and took away a wounded Marine. Interesting... And they say we can't tell civilians and militants apart. (links via Agonist)
Juan Cole suggests that the whole storm is really due to a fractured White House. I would tend to agree, after seeing Biden complaining about the situation to Jim Lehrer:
As I read him Biden is passing on what he has heard, that the reason for this gridlock is an internal power struggle within the Bush administration, which has paralyzed decision-making.If so, it may be that certain forces within the administration took advantage of the lack of a clear reporting line to launch the assault on Muqtada al-Sadr, hoping to effect a fait accompli and forestalling any later State Department attempt to treat with him. If this interpretation is correct, the retreating Department of Defense may sow a lot of land mines for hapless State before June 30.
Biden and Lugar also made it clear that they are not being consulted by the White House on Iraq, and, indeed, it has been a year since they could even get an appointment to see Bush about it. Imagine how locked out the American public is!
The late breaking news is that 12 Marines have been killed in Ramadi. Al Qaeda is claiming responsibility for some attacks, though not from the last few days.
Hans Blix says that the war is worse than Saddam. Oh, what a naughty inspector.
The BBC reports on the nature of this spectacular and decidedly well-armed Mehdi Army. Evening Standard characterizes rising anarchy.
Wow, a lot to follow. Attacks coming all over now: can the U.S. keep it together this week? My imagination struggles with what's going on....
I've been looking around for some more perspectives about what this week is bringing us. In particular some interesting new sites have popped up.
This one is by a Libyan woman, apparently the first Libyan blog.
Where is Raed by Salaam Pax, still the standard-bearer of Iraqi blogging, feels that the days of speaking freely may have ended.
Remember the days when every time you hear an Iraqi talk on TV you had to remember that they are talking with a Mukhabarat minder looking at them noting every word? We are back to that place.You have to be careful about what you say about al-Sadir. Their hands reach every where and you don't want to be on their shit list. Every body, even the GC is very careful how they formulate their sentences and how they describe Sadir's Militias. They are thugs, thugs thugs. There you have it.
I was listening to a representative of al-sadir on TV saying that the officers at police stations come to offer their help and swear allegiance. Habibi, if they don't they will get killed and their police station "liberated". Have we forgotten the threat al-Sadir issued that Iraqi security forces should not attack their revolutionary brothers, or they will have to suffer the consequences.
Dear US administration,
Welcome to the next level. Please don't act surprised and what sort of timing is that it: planning to go on a huge attack on the west of Iraq and provoking a group you know very well (I pray to god you knew) that they are trouble makers.
In particular this is a drive through Fallujah and Ramadi.
On March 22 she arrived in Baghdad after the long drive from Jordan. There's a lot of pictures, including a funny pose with the AK:
Sallah tells us that Fallujah is the only place in Iraq where (even during Saddam’s regime) there was never a ruling Governor. It’s a real rebel town. Based on the traditional tribal system (which still exists). They are very proud and dignified people who WILL NOT accept within their multi – tribal society, working out their own co – existence, that there should be a person promoted to such a position that does not respect this equality and the diversity. The first Governor lasted a day before he was shot dead, the second, two. Rebel town.On the way into Baghdad, he told us that both Fallujah and Ramadi were the most dangerous places for Westerners, as the US forces had come down hard on them, showing no respect for their traditions, beliefs, culture, dignity, intelligence… or the fact that they were actually, really, human beings.
And finally….. BAGHDAD!The site is operated by Fiona's brother, a well-designed operation.Chaos. Imagine blindfolding every single taxi driver in London, and then surgically connecting their left hands to their horns. This does not begin to describe the insanity on the roads as we went past burnt out Mosques and Palaces.
Eventually we ended up in Sallah’s personal Oasis in the centre of Baghdad. Palm trees, Lemons, Figs, the air rich with the scent of Orange blossom.
And then do you know what Fiona Katie did next???
Fired an AK47!
Yes, the very first thing I did in Baghdad, just moments after I got out of the vehicle, I borrowed an AK47 from an Iraqi and fired it (into the air).
Healing Iraq is a pretty good blog with a decidedly anti-Sistani, anti-clerical feel, but he furious with Sadr's little project.
I have to admit that until now I have never longed for the days of Saddam, but now I'm not so sure. If we need a person like Saddam to keep those rabid dogs at bay then be it. Put Saddam back in power and after he fills a couple hundred more mass graves with those criminals they can start wailing and crying again for liberation. What a laugh we will have then. Then they can shove their filthy Hawza and marji'iya up somewhere else. I am so dissapointed in Iraqis and I hate myself for thinking this way. We are not worth your trouble, take back your billions of dollars and give us Saddam again. We truly 'deserve' leaders like Saddam.He also has guest blogs for irregular contributions.
Iraq at a glance is written by an anonymous dentist. He has a decidedly negative view of the recent anti-war protesters:
It’s very cozy and comfortable to drink the tea in the morning, getting out of your first-class houses, driving your fancy cars, speaking loudly against your governments, criticizing your prime ministers and presidents, saying “ I want this thing”, “ I don’t agree on this decision”, “ I hate Blair and Bush”…..etc.Altogether he makes a compelling point, though of course I disagree that the war was ever the right thing to do. Also he posts photos from a trip to visit a poor family in Baghdad living among the ruins.
Look you coddled pampered people… why don’t you want us to do what you’re doing now ? why don’t you want us to live like you ? Are you idiots? Selfish? Or what ?
You ‘protestors’ I’m sure you didn’t use your mind when you got out of your houses.. just let me tell you something: when you want to refuse something or say that’s wrong, first of all you should study the whole case and discuss it thoroughly before saying it’s wrong, and when you say it’s wrong, GIVE A PROPOSAL to solve the case, now when you said “ No war….” What is the right thing to do to get rid of Saddam and build democratic countries in the region?
Tell me …Otherwise, when you don’t know ANYTHING about Iraq and Iraqis do you know what to do? JUST SHUT UP and stay at home
Now let’s speak about Iraqis, when you ask an ordinary Iraqi : “ Did you want the war to get rid of Saddam and get your freedom?”
If he was honest man I’m sure he’d reply “ yes”..
But, now many Iraqis are getting disturbed due to the explosions and bombs which make them angry, in spite of the fact that they are always angry! , so they don’t know where is their interest or benefit, and they don’t know whether they prefer the Americans to stay or leave or what? I’m sure they don’t know what they want…OK.. Iraqis want a government, but the US said that Iraq will turn over sovereignty at the end of June, so what makes some of them angry?
As I said they are disturbed and confused…
Back to you ‘ protestors’, last year my salary was 1.5$, last year my parents were about to go mad cause we were almost broke, last year I had to obey the mean and disgusting orders of Saddam’s officers cause I had to join the conscription, last year I couldn’t watch what’s happening now on the TV cause I used to watch SH laughing at us, last year I couldn’t write what I’m writing now, last year thousands were being executed, last year hundreds of doctors, engineers and educated people were being arrested and tortured cause they dared to try to travel ! last year……
Now, what do you think? Just give me a way to get all the above without a war ….
i also found a site called "Almuajaha: The Iraqi Witness," but it hasn't been updated in a while, except for its public submission newswire.
Baghdad Burning, which I've mentioned before and is on my list at right, is a really excellent site by a young Baghdad woman. This post about Sadr and a year since the invasion:
Let me make it very clear right now that I am *not* a supporter of Al-Sadr. I do not like clerics who want to turn Iraq into the next Iran or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait… but it makes me really, really angry to see these demonstrations greeted with bullets and tanks by the troops. Why allow demonstrations if you're going to shoot at the people?
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These last couple of weeks have been somewhat depressing for most people. You know how sometimes you look back at the past year and think to yourself, “What was I doing last year, on this same day?” Well we’ve been playing that game constantly lately. What was I doing last year, this very moment? I was listening for the sirens, listening for the planes and listening to the bombs fall. Now we just listen for the explosions- it’s not the same thing.I haven’t been sleeping very well either. I’ve been having disturbing dreams lately... Dreams of being stuck under rubble or feeling the earth shudder beneath me as the windows rattle ominously. I know it has to do with the fact that every day we relive a little bit of the war- on television, on the radio, on the internet. I’m seeing some of the images for the very first time because we didn’t have electricity last year during the war and it really is painful. It’s hard to believe that we lived through so much...
There's been a lot of things on the news today. Why did the CPA suddenly choose to shut down Sadr's newspaper? Perhaps it had something to do with this AP report that Sadr was declaring allegiance with Hamas and Hezbollah last Friday. Did this provide an opportunity for the Middle Eastern altruists in the Pentagon to, say, merge the threats between Israel and the U.S.? That's wild speculation!! Can't be true!
Prof. Juan Cole continues to describe things with the most clarity. He actually sounds almost as paranoid as I do sometimes:
The civilians in the Department of Defense only know how to blow things up. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith staffed the CPA with Neoconservatives, most of whom had no administrative experience, no Arabic, and no respect for Muslim culture (or knowledge about it). They actively excluded State Department Iraq hands like Tom Warrick. (Only recently have a few experienced State Department Arabists been allowed in to try to begin mopping up the mess.) The Neocons in the CPA have all sorts of ulterior motives and social experiments they want to impose on the Iraqi people, including Polish-style economic shock therapy, some sort of sweetheart deal for Israel, and maybe even breaking the country up into three parts.He informed me of people called "Palestinian-Salvadorans," quite a shock. Polls:
An opinion poll taken in late February showed that 10 % of Iraq's Shiites say attacks on US troops are "acceptable." But 30% of Sunni Arabs say such attacks are acceptable, and fully 70% of Anbar province approves of attacking Americans. (Anbar is where Ramadi, Fallujah, Hadithah and Habbaniyah are, with a population of 1.25 million or 5% of Iraq--those who approve of attacks are 875,000).But simple statistics don't tell the story. If there are 25 million Iraqis and Shiites comprise 65%, that is about 16 million persons. Ten percent of them is 1.6 million, which is a lot of people who hate Americans enough to approve of attacks on them. If Sunni Arabs comprise about 16% of the population, there are 4 million of them. If 30% approve of attacks, that is 1.2 million. That is, the poll actually shows that in absolute numbers, there are more Shiites who approve of attacks on Americans than there are Sunni Arabs. The numbers bring into question the official line that there are no problems in the South, only in the Sunni Arab heartland.
Sadr's volatile movement has seized control of the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shiism's holiest sites. (All we need now is a(nother) Temple Mount incident)
Will the US attack the Kurds? What? This latent Kurdish nationalism seems to be emerging. It is, as they say, troublesome.
As well as an interesting report about crime and disorder thriving in Baghdad, Al Jazeera has some late breaking news, in their own unique style, from Falluja. (this city has somewhere called the "Golan District?!" Hell) Also there is a lack of food.
"We also visited the Golan district where clashes took place earlier today between fighters from Falluja and US forces," Ali said. "We saw signs of fierce confrontation. US forces have bombed the district. We saw several destroyed houses."Golan inhabitants say US forces used cluster bombs and missiles against them," he said. "Citizens of the city are completely enraged - but not afraid - waiting for the coming events," the correspondent said.
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The leaflets outlaw demonstrations and the possession of firearms and impose a 7pm to 6am daily curfew. Residents are advised that in the event of a raid by US forces, all family members should gather in a single room in the house. "This indicates that door-to-door operations will be launched by US forces," the correspondent said.Aljazeera has also received a statement issued by a group in al-Anbar province calling itself the Jihad Brigades, urging followers of the Shia leader al-Sadr to continue resisting.
"Even Falluja's main hospital is inaccessible because it is located out of the city across the Euphrates river, and the bridge is closed. Today I saw an ambulance driver negotiating with US soldiers to let him cross the bridge. They let him through after a long and tiresome argument.""Shops are closed and life in the town is paralysed. I am standing among dozens of angry Falluja people. They say they are not afraid of the US forces, they are ready to fight. The crowd was chanting 'There is no God but Allah'."
THE PREZ: No, the intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same. I believe we can transfer authority by June 30th. We're working toward that day. We're, obviously, constantly in touch with Jerry Bremer on the transfer of sovereignty. The United Nations is over there now. The United Nations representative is there now to work on the -- on a -- on to whom we transfer sovereignty. I mean, in other words, it's one thing to decide to transfer. We're now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty. But, no, the date remains firm.
Gloom...has been building over Iraq. Increasingly, the Wise Heads are forecasting disaster. Wise Heads say they see no realistic plan, hear no serious concept to get ahead of the situation. Money, training, jobs...all lagging, all reinforce downward spiral highlighted by sickening violence. There seems to be no real "if", just when, and how badly it will hurt U.S. interests. Define "disaster"? Consensus prediction: if Bush insists on June 30/July 1 turnover, a rapid descent into civil war. May happen anyway, if the young al-Sadr faction really breaks off from its parents. CSIS Anthony Cordesman's latest blast at Administration ineptitude says in public what Senior Observers say in private...the situation may still be salvaged, but then you have to factor in Sharon's increasing desperation, and the regional impact.
WaPo says it "Marks a New Front in War." Also "Spread of Bin Laden Ideology Cited." Al Qaeda == "The Base," don't we get it yet?
I liked the NY Times story about the life of the mercenary. Google News searches for mercenaries are fruitful right now.
Here's a fun article about how religious people are turning away from the Enlightenment from the Secular Humanists.
Guardian writer grumbles about America's emerging cultural war. Is it really that polarized? I don't know if I buy it.
More paranoid things about the energy markets. I'm certainly not buying all of this one.
A few bits about Israel: Increasing anti-Semitism really concerns me, as it will likely cause the social fabric in a lot of already marginal places to fray, as well as scare the hell out of many people. Haaretz investigates something well worth reflecting on. Sharon says his hands are clean of bribes, yet no matter how much he washes, the spots, damn spots, won't come out, he says. " Less than a man of his word, Sharon's Passover Legends." Not surprisingly the Palestinian peace movement is having trouble getting traction right now. Why aren't settlers protesting more?
Christian Science Monitor says that Iraqis and Palestinians see their sufferings as a form of globalization (via Prof. Cole):
The focus on Jews and Israel reflects a wider belief among Arab Iraqis, Sunni and Shiite alike, that the US and Israeli occupations are twin Golems of a globalization that they can not resist or control, one that is causing the disintegration of the very fabric of their cultures and economies even as it offers prosperity and freedom to a fortunate few.It may be hard for Americans to understand the occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend. Here, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity - oil. And corporations allied with the occupying power literally scrounge the country for profits, privatizing everything from health care to prisons, while Iraqi engineers, contractors, doctors, and educators are shunted aside.
Like economic globalization in so many other countries of the developing world, this model in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. My visits to hospitals, schools, think tanks, political party headquarters, art galleries, and refugee camps reveal conditions clearly as bad, and often worse, than on the eve of the US invasion.
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Iraq is sliding toward chaos; a state that many Iraqis increasingly believe is exactly where the US wants them to be. A prominent Iraqi psychiatrist who has worked with the CPA and the US military explained to me that "there is no way the United States can be this incompetent. The chaos here has to be at least partly deliberate." The main question on most people's minds is not if his assertion is true, but why?For example, many here see last week's carnage of Americans in Fallujah as suspicious. To send foreign contractors into Fallujah in late-model SUVs with armed escorts - down a traffic-clogged street on which they'd be literal sitting ducks - can be interpreted as a deliberate US instigation of violence to be used as a pretext for "punishment" by the US military.
I like last December's special Washington Monthly report on the glorious synchronicity between powerful Republican families in the U.S. and those who are somehow plucked to serve in Iraq.
When the history of the occupation of Iraq is written, there will be many factors to point to when explaining the post-conquest descent into chaos and disorder, from the melting away of Saddam's army to the Pentagon's failure to make adequate plans for the occupation. But historians will also consider the lack of experience and abundant political connections of the hundreds of American bureaucrats sent to Baghdad to run Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Wandering around I found a piece by Manuel Valenzuela on a rather far-left site, featuring things by the "Worker's World" and others... (they are reprinting the as-yet-unconfirmed Zelikow-Israel thing, again via Cole) More than a little bloated with cliches but interesting nonetheless: "The War of Error:"
It is in the MIC’s interest to prolong this most ambiguous and marketable war for as long as possible. When the citizenry has been successfully turned to submissive sheep, ignorant as to its role as a massive pawn, primordial emotions dictating logic and common sense, the MIC is assured of ever-increasing power, control and wealth. From cradle to the grave, we are but slaves to the military-industrial complex, nothing more than puppets whose strings are attached to the massive claws of the omnipotent masters tearing us to shreds as they amuse themselves with the games of disquieting existence and rapacious divisiveness they thrust upon our oblivious selves.Greed-mongers, fear-mongers, warmongers and profiteers, the Bush administration, the Corporate Leviathan and the MIC together are annihilating our future. When greed intermingles with the almighty dollar, profit is placed above people, we become statistics in cost-benefit analysis, we are shamelessly exploited and we all become open wounds waiting to become collateral damage.
Let me just ask how Bush felt about Israel and Palestine back in those days.
Please, someone, tell me that the last three years weren't all about generating Israeli-American hegemony over the Middle East, that this whole cataclysm wasn't designed to torch the whole of Mesopotamia and issue waves of wreckage and fear among the Arab people, to the benefit of Israel's Samsonite leadership.
People find it very hard to believe that the Pentagon neo-cons really thought Israel's security policies--i.e. the West Bank occupation/settlement project-- had much to do with the need to invade Iraq. It is a radical idea.
(I posted this quick one on a DKos thread)
How many people know that Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith's former law partner Marc Zell IS IN FACT a settler, and a leader of that movement?? Is this fact somehow devoid of any significance whatsoever?
Perhaps, just perhaps, it has to do with Kissinger's theory of the Revolutionary Power that seeks to flip over the whole poker table in order to get what it wants. Can the glittering prize be something as pathetic as the tiny wedge of hilly desert between Jerusalem and Jordan? Is the goal to shake the Mideast to the point that all those nations are reduced to fighting and killing among themselves?
Can their imagined key to the prize be the radicalization of relations between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds? Was the opportunity to toy with Iraq's complex inter-group plumbing the REAL PLAN? And encouraging the destruction of Iraqi ministries and illuminating government records THE METHOD?
How do you explain this in enormous gap of time between when they convinced Bush to do it--late Sept 2001--and the invasion itself, they somehow forgot to plan what would have to be done in Iraq after the invasion? That somehow they forgot to equip the army with nonlethal peacekeeping gear and, hell, any kind of civil defense plan at all??
Maybe after all this time I am still stubborn and extraordinarily paranoid. Yes, I am both of these. But WHY doesn't Bush understand that Israeli settlement construction and Arab and Palestinian democratic process are a ZERO SUM GAME? Does he not understand that his support of Sharon makes the Arabs paranoid as hell?
Furthermore, I believe that Ahmed Chalabi and his paramilitaries, who have been permitted by Feith and the gang to seize control of all of Saddam's dirty secret police files, have been running around the country killing Sunni leaders and blackmailing everyone. This has exacerbated sectarian tensions. (Was partitioning Iraq, also known as the theory of "re-Ottomanization," related to this?) Where does Chalabi stand in relation to today's magnitudinal jump in chaos? I have not a damn clue.
I wish I was not driven to make such radical statements as these above. I wish that Iraq + Israel + Palestine had some kind of easy, honorable logic that would work itself out. Yet I have searched for a long time, and I have not yet found it. So I am forced to postulate the more paranoid theories. *I WANT them to be disproved. I DO.* Yet I cannot see the way out of this dumb tunnel.
What was I supposed to think after reading The Clean Break and Crumbling States documents by the current Pentagon/Special Plans staff?
What do we do now? I am cursed to be an atheist. If I weren't, I would pray.
I have been sitting around all day reading an excellent tome about Afghanistan for my Geography class, but as I made a quick trip over to Minneapolis I heard a disturbing report that five American soldiers had been killed in a confrontation with Shiite protesters in Baghdad. There have been a lot of reports of increasing protests after the U.S. shut down militant Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's newspaper, Hawza. Now his segment of Shiites have apparently tried to take over all the police stations in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, named for his father.
The U.S. lost seven soldiers and around 20 were wounded. There were also massive protests in the Shiite spiritual center of Najaf, where some of the international forces lost some soldiers and apparently killed around 20 protesters.
I was under the general impression that Sadr's horrid wrathfulness had been co-opted into the more mellow Sistani movement as the date of a national Shiite leadership draws nearer, while Sunnis were more likely to commit violence. Seems I overestimated how stable the Shiites really were. (is that really a surprise?)
Some well-rounded commentary, as always, can be found with Professor Cole.
Perhaps a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to the radical, Khomeini-like ideology of Sadrism, and some analysts with long experience in Iraq put it at 50%. Earlier Muqtada Al-Sadr, the movement leader, had called on his forces to avoid violence against Coalition forces. As of Sunday, he has decided that the Coalition means permanently to exclude his group from power, and has decided to launch an uprising. This uprising involves taking over police stations in Kufa, Najaf, Baghdad and possibly elsehwere. The Sadrist militia now controls Kufa, according to the New York Times, and probably controls much of Sadr City or the slums of East Baghdad, as well,
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...the violent clashes in Najaf, Baghdad, Amara and Nasiriyah may signal the beginning of a second phase, in which the US faces a two-front war, against both Sunni radicals in the center-north and Shiite militias in the South. The clashes come at a pivotal moment, since on Friday April 9, the Shiite festival of Araba'in will take place, coinciding this year with the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.
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The outbreak of Shiite/Coalition violence is a dramatic challenge to US military control of Iraq. The US is cycling out its forces in the country, bringing in a lot of reserve and national guards units, but will go from 130,000 to only 110,000 troops. It is too small a number to really provide security in Iraq, but the country has not fallen into chaos in part because the main attacks have come in the Sunni heartland and because the Coalition has depended on Shiite militias to police many southern cities. If the Shiites actively turn against the US, the whole military and security situation could become untenable.
UPI reports that "Protestor deaths leave Iraq in chaos."
A demonstration in the southern city of Najaf turned deadly as Salvadoran soldiers -- under Spanish command -- exchanged fire with supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the city of Najaf. Reports from the scene indicate that at least 19 protesters and 4 coalition troops were killed.The violent clash has left much of the Shiite sections of Iraq in near chaos. This represents the most serious clashes between coalition forces and the Shiite population....
After the estimated 5,000 demonstrators traded gunfire with the troops in Najaf, crowds turned out in Baghdad, Kerbala, and Sadr's home village of Kufa to "declare war on the American occupation," said one supporter.
The vast Shiite slum of Sadr City -- named for Moqtada's cleric father who was killed by the Baath regime in 1999 -- went into near chaos Sunday afternoon after the news of the fighting in Najaf.
After a demonstration by hundred of people protesting Yacoubi's arrest demonstrated in a Baghdad square -- where sporadic gunfire was heard but casualties witnessed by UPI -- the members of Sadr's banned militia, the Mehdi Army, were seen arming themselves and preparing for combat outside Sadr's offices in Sadr City.
Trucks and minibuses with license tags from all over the predominantly Shiite south of Iraq were seen streaming in to Sadr City and unloading waves of young men in the black t-shirts of the Mehdi Army, which has previously never openly displayed weapons banned by the occupation forces.
In front of Sadr's headquarters, they were seen arming themselves with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers and organizing in military formations before deploying throughout the neighborhood in cars and pickup trucks.
The men were also seen forming roadblocks to prevent entry into the neighborhood, which has upwards of 3 million people living in one of the most densely populated urban settings east of the Gaza Strip.
As night fell, U.S. military vehicles, tanks and troops could be seen setting up roadblocks around the neighborhood themselves and reports of widespread fighting in the area have been reported by sources in the neighborhood.
One resident told UPI by phone that Sadr's militia had seized all five of Sadr City's police stations are were declaring their own form of martial law. There are also reports that U.S. infantry backed by helicopters and tanks have entered the neighborhood to reclaim the police facilities from the militia.
New York Times reports "Violent Disturbances Rack Iraq From Baghdad to Southern Cities."
Iraq was racked today by its most violent civil disturbances since the occupation started, with a coordinated Shiite uprising spreading across the country, from the slums of Baghdad to several cities in the south. An American soldier and a Salvadoran soldier were killed in the unrest, news agencies reported.By day's end, witnesses said Shiite militiamen controlled the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, with armed men loyal to a radical cleric occupying the town's police stations and checkpoints.
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At nightfall today, the Sadr City neighborhood shook with explosions and tank and machine gun fire. Black smoke choked the sky. The streets were lined with armed militiamen, dressed in all black. American tanks surrounded the area. Attack helicopters thundered overhead."The occupation is over!" people on the streets yelled. "We are now controlled by Sadr. The Americans should stay out."
Witnesses said Mr. Sadr's militiamen had tried to take over three police stations in Sadr City, a poor, mostly Shiite neighborhood of northern Baghdad named after Mr. Sadr's father.
Franco Pagetti, an Italian photographer, said he was caught in the crossfire and witnessed several American tanks firing into the ground.
"The tanks were shooting into the pavement, not at the height of the people," Mr. Pagetti said. "It looked like they were trying to clear the streets." Mr. Pagetti also said he had watched a group of militiamen launch three rocket propelled grenades at American Humvees but the militiamen had missed each time. "The situation is getting worse," Mr. Pagetti said. "I saw injured people getting put in cars. The people said they had been wounded by American helicopters."
As the fighting raged, Mr. Sadr called on his followers to "terrorize" the enemy as demonstrations were no longer any use. Last week, his weekly newspaper, Hawza, was shut down by American authorities after it had been accused of inciting violence. The closure began a week of protests that grew bigger and more unruly at each turn.
"There is no use for demonstrations, as your enemy loves to terrify and suppress opinions, and despises peoples," Mr. Sadr said in a statement distributed by his office in Kufa today.
"I ask you not to resort to demonstrations because they have become a losing card and we should seek other ways," he told his followers. "Terrorize your enemy, as we cannot remain silent over its violations."
British troops today clashed with demonstrators in the Iraqi town of al-Amara during on a day of violent protests across the country. The Ministry of Defence said that the soldiers returned fire after coming under attack from a “criminal element” in the crowd armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).No British troops were injured in the incident although a MoD spokeswoman said that there were a number of Iraqi casualties. It was not immediately known if any of the Iraqis were killed.
The news from Iraq today of scattered clashes between US/Coalition forces and armed crowds and Shia paramilitaries is the worst news to come out of Iraq for months.
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The reality is that the US doesn't have anywhere enough soldiers in the country to control the place if there's this sort of widespread violence on an on-going basis. That could quickly lead to a vicious cycle which will put a virtual end to reconstruction and prevent the coming into being of any entity for us to hand the place off to. In Jefferson's ugly phrase, we may end up holding the wolf by the ears.
In the euphemistic headline department, WaPo says "Pakistan Struggles to Put Army on Moderate Course."
Isn't it interesting that many of the people in the CPA's press office have ties to the Republican Party? It's almost as if... they are there for partisan sugarcoating. What? Never!
So now I must return to my Afghanistan book, which is going to take all evening to finish. As I read, in my imagination I'll see that today's situation, meanwhile, is sliding ever closer to the precipice.
This evening calls for a lot of Radiohead. Two and two always makes five.
I ran into this weird info via Cosmic Iguana and had to dig into it further. A professional metals trader named Jim Sinclair now sees strange actions in the U.S. dollar, which he can't pin down on anything normal. He thinks there may be a pattern marking it as similar to the mysterious stock market manipulations just prior to 9/11.
This guy clearly seems pretty eccentric, but if my job was to track the most notoriously silly market in the world, the gold market, I would probably be batty too.
Sinclair believes this pattern immediately emerged after the assassination of HAMAS spiritual leader Sheik Yassin. Gold community heads up, March 26:
In conversation with Kenny this morning, we both noted that gold is in what I call "the technician’s nightmare" which is not that infrequent once a long trend is underway.All internals are now full-bore positive, well overbought and therefore screaming for a correction. A failure to see a relatively short-lived, but possibly sharp correction is what concerns me as I look at new market trading relationships and fish for the cause.
Al Qaeda is both a financial and military organization. My question is simple: Are we looking at the al Qaeda footprint in the market?
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You know that there was significant, unexplained -either fundamentally or technically- buying of Puts and selling calls in the airlines' stocks just before 9/11. This has never been defined or investigated.Here is what bothers me. I see a footprint in the US dollar that is not the Exchange Stabilization Fund. It is not the German Blitz-Market. It is not the Swiss Stair Ladder. It is not Pinky Green and his pal. It is the footprint I showed you last night and one that I have never seen before.
If I were Interpol, the CIA or the NSA, I would reacquisition the chart of the options on airline trading for 90 days before 9/11 and see if the footprint now in the dollar, which is unique, matched the footprint on the buy of the airline Puts and the sell of the airline Calls just before those exact airlines hit the WTC.
There is a scary combination taking place which is a skewing of relationships caused by a huge interest in the market muscling new market trading relationships between items by their execution. Please consider the following:
1. Asian currencies are strong on balance.
2. The US dollar has been accumulated over the past 7 days in a unique footprint.
3. The euro is weak on balance
4. Gold is strong, period.
5. The stock market, although it should be near a technical bounce, lost its bull appearance and has gone to neutral.
6. Commodities are quite strong, most certainly traditional war commodities.
7. We have a price crisis but not a supply crisis in energy.What fundamentally would make the relationship above come into the markets? If my little friend in Kenya, the Seer, Mahendra Sharma, gets it right, what would be the reason? Well, it is an unthinkable event in the Middle East that causes concern that Euroland is the next target because its security is lax compared to the USA which has become a thinly veiled police state. Would that not do the following?:
1. Launch gold into the stratosphere?
2. Strengthen the US dollar by default because the short side is simply ENORMOUS.
3. Cause mixed events in equity markets.
4. Put the price of oil to at least $60 if not higher.
5. If it was serious enough in light of this scenario, could it possibly postpone the November US elections?The evidence that such an event is possible is in the marketplace. This need not happen but should be thought about. If it occurs, the motivating factor that could go down in history as the modern version of the killing of Arch Duke Ferdinand is the recent elimination of the Hamas martial cleric.
Interest rates will rise this year and my wager is that the rise will occur before the election, most likely in late spring or early summer. That event will injur gold slightly for a very short time after which the price will appreciate into the election.I will refine the timing as we approach that event so broadly discussed but so meaningless. Just remember this: Once inflation bites, which it’s doing now as evidenced by the commodity price rise, inflation, the shark-like predator that it is, locks its jaws. Remember this well!
Assuming that gas prices climb to the $3 per gallon level, the American public will go BALLISTIC. After that happens, any claims by the Federal Reserve that inflation does not exist will fall on deaf ears AND PERMANENTLY DISCREDIT THE FED INTERNATIONALLY. I suspect that a significant amount of the participants at our recent Florida G7conferrence stopped by Salim Gillani’s Chevron station prior to the meeting.
Turkey knows the significance of this incident even if most Westerners don’t fully appreciate the danger. Turkey is maneuvering to get out of harm’s way. This is serious and when a government moves in such a significant way it has to tell you that the elimination of the leader of Hamas has widespread implications. The following is from my intelligence service Stratfor.com.
Turkish-Israeli Relations: An Axial Shift?
Summary
Turkey has condemned Israel's assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an act of "terrorism." This is the first time a Turkish government has criticized Israel for a position since the two states enhanced their military relationship in the mid-1990s. The mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara could not afford to remain neutral on this issue, especially because many Turkish citizens have been arrested on suspicion of ties to al Qaeda. The development could signal an initial AKP bid to realign with the Arab and Muslim world; Turkey and Israel have had diplomatic relations since 1949.Analysis
Turkey has condemned Israel's targeted assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an act of terrorism. In an interview with Turkish daily Hurriyet on March 25, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed that the international community must examine this kind of act, adding that there can be no peace in the Middle East unless Israel gives up its strong-arm tactics. Erdogan said Israel's actions have seriously derailed any role Turkey could have played in mediations between Israelis and Palestinians, and he hinted that he might cancel a visit to Israel in April if the current atmosphere does not change.
This is an unprecedented criticism of Israel from Ankara. The mildly Islamist Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party), or AKP, is taking advantage of international outrage over the killing of Yassin to try to undo Turkey's image as a pro-Israeli state. Ankara hopes this will stave off criticism from certain parts of the populace and the Muslim world. We should note that Hamas and the AKP trace their roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood organization of Egypt.
It’s a dangerous world out there that is getting even worse. That’s good for gold but for unfortunate reasons. The US simply doesn’t have any more properly trained troops to engage in Afghanistan in the manner required to meet the challenge. With this happening and the war for the minds and hearts of Iraqi citizens a disaster, where is plan B?
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Increasingly, Alan Greenspan's reign as Chairman of the Federal Reserve is being reviewed more critically in the media. With over-the-counter derivatives out of control, householders being encouraged to borrow on their homes to finance consumer purchases, gas prices at record highs, and no indications of inflation anywhere, what can I say other than pass the Malox please.
The water of hatred is boiling all over the world but press reports are muted and seek reasons always to maintain social order.This is the most dangerous time we have faced in our lifetime. I have lived a good part of my 63 years in areas with high Islamic populations and frankly you have no idea of the hatred that is building out there every day. Nor do you appreciate the dedication that is associated with that hatred.
You do not appreciate that many more people than you can imagine are willing to die and pass along to their families the mission that this hated engenders. We do not appreciate or respect the beliefs of other cultures and that will be what history points to as the underlining cause of World War III which started long before 9/11.
Finally on April Fool's Day he posts "Rumor Control" and a bunch of Al-Qaeda news clippings when he feels that things are still afoot.
There is a high probability that what we are experiencing this morning is a very temporary blowout in the gold price from its march to the upside.Shorts are gunning for $423 on the close. Any close under $428 will encourage the short sellers. The long funds - or about 45,000 new long contracts purchased at an apparent average of $413.50 - have likely not participated in this morning's selling and will in all probability have mental stops at $423.
All this adds up to one hell of a bear trap being set up next week. The only thing I believe can prevent a temporary and healthy decline here is a significant geopolitical event. No sane person would wish for that.
There are still strange footprints in the dollar that have yet to be defined. However, the hunt is on and they will be identified. The supply of gold between $430 and $435 will be overcome but that might take some consolidation first. Markets get stretched out when they have one way runs.Gold is up over $40 since we called the bottom. That is a stretch that can only continue if the driver is a geopolitical event in the making. The crisis in energy prices continues as the falsification of economic indicators reaches a point of total absurdity.
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Should gold persist under $428 into tomorrow’s opening, that would call for a push to $423. At $423, the bulls will make their stand so be prepared for another shoot out at the Comex corral tomorrow.The rub is that every day the world is moving towards some sort of military/terrorist catharsis and the solutions being applied do not seems to be easing that progression.
I am supposed to write a proposal for my final paper in International Security class tonight. But given what's been happening the last few weeks, what can I address that isn't tearing apart like wet toilet paper? Where can I stand when the sands are shifting so? Is it possible to research and write on security in this snake pit? I'm hoping you guys might have suggestions!
This deserves to go first: a report from Haaretz that America plans to make 'implied' recognition of the illegal Israeli settlements. Holy land, gotta gotta get it!
U.S. assures Israel no retreat to 1967 lineBelow is my round-up on the Iraq and the Fallujah-mercenary issue, Pakistan, military-industrial corruption, the Uzbekistan aftermath, Clarkestorm 2004 and further Israel-Palestine tidbits. (crossposted on DKOS diary)
The U.S. will assure Israel that it will not have to withdraw to the Green Line in a future permanent settlement with the Palestinians.The promise appears in a letter of guarantees drafted by the American administration in exchange for Sharon's disengagement plan.
The U.S. rejected Israel's request to recognize the future annexation of the large settlement blocs in Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel and Etzion. Instead of referring explicitly to the settlements, the Americans propose a vaguely worded letter, which Israel would be able to present as implied recognition of the settlement blocs.
My special thanks go to those following the best of mainstream and alternative media every day at WarInContext. The Agonist is a news blitz all day long--they are making a full-time go at it. New frontiers of journalism or just obsessed people?
That's Robert Fisk reporting "Things are getting much worse in Iraq" today, a brutally honest British reporter who has given a totally different slant to the war, but then again he said it would be a quagmire from the very beginning. Juan Cole is an expert who just plain gets it:
Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did General Kimmitt take us through the little uptick [in violence].
A marine vehicle blown off the road near Fallujah, a marine killed, a second attack with small-arms fire on the same troops, an attack on an Iraqi paramilitary recruiting station on the 14th July Road, a soldier killed near Ramadi, two Britons hurt in Basra violence, a suicide bombing against the home of the Hillah police chief, an Iraqi shot at a checkpoint, US soldiers wounded in Mosul ... All this was just 17 hours before Fallujah civilians dragged the cremated remains of a Westerner through the streets of their city.
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But there was an interesting twist - horribly ironic in the face of yesterday's butchery - in General Kimmitt's narrative. Why, I asked him, did he refer sometimes to "terrorists" and at other times to "insurgents"? Surely if you could leap from being a terrorist to being an insurgent, then with the next little hop, skip and jump, you become a "freedom-fighter". Mr Senor gave the general one of his fearful looks. He needn't have bothered. General Kimmitt is a much smoother operator than his civilian counterpart. There were, the general explained, the Fallujah version who were insurgents, and then the al-Qa'ida version who attack mosques, hotels, religious festivals and who were terrorists.
So, it seems, there are now in Iraq good terrorists and bad terrorists, there are common-or-garden insurgents and supremely awful terrorists, the kind against which President George Bush took us to war in Iraq when there weren't any terrorists actually here, though there are now. And therein lies the problem. From inside the Green Zone on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything. How far can the occupying powers take war-spin before the world stops believing anything they say?
What would drive the crowd to this barbaric behavior? It is not that they are pro-Saddam any more, or that they hate "freedom." They are using a theater of the macabre to protest their occupation and humiliation by foreign armies. They were engaging in a role reversal, with the American cadavers in the position of the "helpless" and the "humiliated," and with themselves playing the role of the powerful monster that inscribes its will on these bodies.I was disturbed by the 'frenzy of violence' in Iraq, as the Star Tribune headline put it, although perhaps I see the frenzy occurring over a longer timeframe. The images they printed had a distinct Mogadishu overtone, it's hard to deny.This degree of hatred for the new order among ordinary people is very bad news. It helps explain why so few of the Sunni Arab guerrillas have been caught, since the locals hide and help them. It also seems a little unlikely that further US military action can do anything practical to put down this insurgency; most actions it could take would simply inflame the public against them all the more.
As recounted by Clarke in his book, and confirmed by documents provided to NEWSWEEK, Emerson and his former associate Rita Katz regularly provided the White House with a stream of information about possible Al Qaeda activity inside the United States that appears to have been largely unknown to the FBI prior to the September 11 terror attacks.In confidential memos and briefings that were sometimes conducted on a near weekly basis, Emerson and Katz furnished Clarke and his staff with the names of Islamic radical Web sites, the identities of possible terrorist front groups and the phone numbers and addresses of possible terror suspects—data they were unable to get from elsewhere in the government.
Experts say the bloodshed could signal the resurgence of the regional Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which has revitalized itself in the lawless Pakistan-Afghan border area, under the leadership of Tohir Yuldashev. Or it could point to a violent offshoot of the local, moderate Hizb-ut-Tahrir, fed up with years of brutal crackdowns by Uzbek President Islam Karimov on Islamic believers of all types.This Yuldashev character is being called the new "Al Qaeda leader" of the moment. Is he really internationally evil??
Well, that's about the most comprehensive war mosaic I can put together today.
So what the hell do I do about my final paper?
I will have some information about the Falluja incident in the next post. In the meantime, a couple stories about pre-destination in foreign policy.
Yes, the no-fly zones captured Georgie's imagination right away. Thanks, CNN:
BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Frustrated that Iraqi gunners were shooting at American planes, within weeks of coming into office, President Bush approved war plans for a massive retaliatory attack on Iraq if a U.S. pilot had been shot down.CNN has learned that the secret plan Operation Desert Badger called for escalating air strikes within four to eight hours of a shootdown. Pentagon sources say a long list of targets across the country would be hit, crippling Iraqi air defenses and command and control. The plan went far beyond the Clinton administration's 1998 Operation Desert Fox, which hit 100 targets in four days.
President Bush revealed Desert Badger's existence in January, responding to criticism he planned to invade Iraq from the beginning.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Like the previous administration, we were for regime change. And in the initial stages of the administration, you might remember, we were dealing with Desert Badger or flyovers, and fly-betweens and looks.
And so we were fashioning policy along those lines.
This says that the guy chairing the 9/11 commission, Zelikow, said that Israel's security was a prime motive in the decision to invade Iraq. Come again!?!?War Launched to Protect Israel - Bush Adviser::
Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.WASHINGTON, Mar 29 (IPS) - IPS uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 -- the 9/11 commission -- in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch U.S. ally in the Middle East.
Zelikow's casting of the attack on Iraq as one launched to protect Israel appears at odds with the public position of President George W. Bush and his administration, which has never overtly drawn the link between its war on the regime of former president Hussein and its concern for Israel's security.
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Zelikow made his statements about ”the unstated threat” during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president.He served on the board between 2001 and 2003.
”Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation.
”And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell,” said Zelikow.
The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state.
The administration, which is surrounded by staunch pro-Israel, neo-conservative hawks, is currently fighting an extensive campaign to ward off accusations that it derailed the ”war on terrorism” it launched after 9/11 by taking a detour to Iraq, which appears to have posed no direct threat to the United States.
