Informed Comment

9 Marines among 31 Killed in Iraq

The news from Iraq on the last Saturday before the US elections was truly horrible, with an orgy of death and explosions. More US troops were killed in one day than at any time since last May. The Iraqi national guards behaved in a way that demonstrates they are nowhere near ready to take over security themselves.

The shakiness of the US coalition in Iraq was underlined when tens of thousands of Italians demonstrated in downtown Rome against the Iraq war and the support Italy has given to it. Although the rightwing government of Silvio Berlusconi can easily ignore even such a large demonstration, it seems clear that Berlusconi’s government ever fell, the Italians would be out in a flash.

Associated Press reports 31 deaths in Iraq from major violence, including the killing of 9 US Marines.

Near Fallujah, guerrillas used a car bomb to kill 8 Marines. A further Marine combat death was later reported. The car bomb had also wounded 8 Marines.

Guerrillas in Baghdad targeted the Arabic satellite channel, al-Arabiyah, with a car bomb, killing 7 persons and injuring 19.

Near Latifiyah south of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a US convoy. Iraqi national guards then showed up, furious, and began firing wildly and throwing hand grenades. They hit several civilian vehicles, killing at least 14 persons. It seemed clear that there was a lot of what the US Pentagon calls “collateral damage.” The national guards in that region have faced a lot of attacks.

Guerrillas at Fallujah subjected Marine positions outside the city to the strongest artillery barrage seen in recent weeks. The US military responded by bombing Fallujah, attempting to hit a guerrilla mortar emplacement.

Ramadi saw further fighting on Saturday, with clashes between US troops and the guerrillas there. The fighting left two policement dead and 4 Iraqis injured. Al-Jazeerah is reporting early Sunday morning Baghdad time that 3 US Marines have been wounded.

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Towers of Beirut

Readers have asked me to what Bin Laden was referring when he said he first conceived the idea of attacking US skyscrapers when the Israelis destroyed the “towers” of Beirut.

Beirut had been among the more advanced cities in the Arab world. I saw it in 1968 and 1974 before the civil war when it was called the Geneva of the Middle East. Although there was fighting in Beirut 1975-1981 by local militias, in fact by the early 1980s the situation had calmed down substantially and the economy was roaring back.

Then Ariel Sharon took it into his head to invade Lebanon in 1982. Sharon always has plots within plots. He wanted to install a far-rightwing government of his liking in Beirut and reshape the Eastern Mediterranean. And he wanted to murder the Palestinian leadership in Beirut, just bomb them all or otherwise rub them out. Although the Palestine Liberation Organization was an annoyance to Israel, it had been substantially defeated by the Syrians in the late 1970s and was extremely weak in 1982. In a way, Sharon’s attack was made possible by the Camp David Accords, in which Egypt made a separate peace. Sharon took advantage of the neutralization of Egypt to launch an aggressive war on Lebanon. Egyptians were boiling mad as a result.

The horrible Israeli siege of Beirut in summer of 1982, which lasted for weeks, involved the brutal and indiscriminate bombing of the city. Many of the “towers” that were destroyed contained hundreds of innocent Beirutis. Sharon’s proposed puppet ruler, Bashir Gemayyel, used to keep posters of Hitler in his locker at college. He was promptly assassinated and the whole scheme fell apart.

The invasion killed some 18,000 persons, half of them innocent civilians. During this period Sharon turned the task of guarding the disarmed and helpless Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps over to his allies, the fascist Phalangist paramilitary. The latter promptly murdered hundreds of defenseless Palestinians.

One of the 9/11 hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, was a Lebanese Sunni who was 8 when the Israelis invaded his country and wrought so much destruction. He obviously was deeply traumatized by the experience.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was a wanton act of aggression and destruction that ended up radicalizing the Lebanese Shiites and leading them to develop the technique of suicide bombing. A majority of Israelis was disgusted with the war, and in the aftermath Sharon was politically marginalized for two decades. Somehow he has managed to rehabilitate himself and now pursues his agenda of killing without any let or hindrance.

Beirut’s “towers”

Beirut under Israeli bombardment.

The US has since the late 1970s coddled the Likud Party about its aggression, whether in the Occupied Territories or in Lebanon (part of which it occupied for 20 years!), which has helped to generate anger among Arabs at the United States. A whole generation of Arab politicians and intellectuals was marked by humiliation and helplessness in the face of Sharon’s Lebanon war.

None of this justifies the monstrous attack on the US of September 11. As Gandhi pointed out, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

But it is in the interests of all Americans for our government to find a way for Israelis and Arabs to live in peace and justice with one another. In a world where small numbers of terrorists have enormous power because of new technologies, it is dangerous to let such situations fester.

When Dwight Eisenhower perceived the 1956 war launched against Egypt by France, the UK and Israel to be a threat to US security, he knocked some heads together and made it stop. He ordered the Israelis summarily out of Sinai, and cursed out Anthony Eden “like an old soldier.” He also threatened the French with an end to US loans if they didn’t settle the Algerian crisis because he was afraid the Algerians would go Communist if it festered along. We need someone in the White House who will do more than ignore Arafat and kiss Ariel Sharon’s enormous backside. We need an Eisenhower to reshape the political realities in the region in a positive way. Right now we don’t have an Eisenhower in the White House.

(By the way, it is highly unlikely that Bin Laden started thinking about hitting the US in 1982. But once the idea was proposed by Khalid Shaikh Muhammad in 1996, he may well have flashed back to those scenes of Sharon’s siege of Beirut.)

The full transcript of Usamah’s diatribe is at al-Jazeera.

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Elections and Religious Tensions in Iraq

Al-Hayat reports that Shaikh Sadr al-Din Qubanji, a Friday mosque preacher for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, criticized “religious figures who doubt” everything and “threaten” to boycott the elections, which will “make manifest the rights of the Shiites.” He asked the doubters if they wanted “the Shiites to be killed and cut off yet again?” He said, “it is necessary to give the Shiites and the Sunnis their respective rights, in accordance with what they deserve. A If the Shiites rule in accordance with the elections, that is their right. For they are the majority and they have rights that will be made manifest via this election.”

The SCIRI leader was probably referring to Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadrists, who had earlier threatened to boycott the election. When the Shiites in Bahrain boycotted the last election, it threw parliament into the hands of Sunni fundamentalists, and al-Qubanji knows this very well.

At the same time, Shaikh Mahdi al-Sumaid’i of the Association of Muslim Scholars preached before hundreds of worshippers at the Ibn Taimiyah Mosque in Baghdad. He said, “The Assocation of Muslim Scholars and the Consultative Council of the Sunni Community have issued a general call to the members of the group, to specify their position on the elections. With regard to the US attack on Fallujah, he said that a meeting would be called to address the “marginalization of the Sunnis” and the crushing of their personality. He said that during the Najaf crisis they had stood as a single man. He wants the Sunnis to show equal solidarity today.

Dennis Gray of the Associated Press reports that voter registration via food ration cards will begin Monday in Iraq.

Six weeks will be spent registering voters and political parties.

Authorities have used a Saddam-era database for food rationing to create an initial voter roll. Heads of households collect their 2005 ration cards from 548 distribution centers around the country starting Monday, and voter registration clerks will be waiting with fact sheets on each family. If there are mistakes, the voter roll will be corrected.

Combining voter registration with the popular food rationing system is expected to lessen the chances of attacks by insurgents, and it also provides a cover for Iraqis who wish to sign up to vote but might fear being targeted by those seeking to disrupt the election.

U.S. military units like the 3rd Brigade are responsible for protecting the election process, but they also must keep enough distance to counter charges that Iraqi organizers and participants are merely puppets on America’s strings.

In Baqubah they are finding that a third of the population is illiterate and 70 percent know nothing about the election. It is likely that the US military will have to preside over the elections, despite the officers’ desire to stay in the background.

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The Other Shoe Drops: Bin Laden Weighs in

It is interesting that Usamah Bin Laden explicitly said that it doesn’t matter to al-Qaeda whether Bush or Kerry is president. Only the degree to which the US gives “liberty” to the Muslim world matters to al-Qaeda, he says. [I'll have things to say about this diction below, but it is bizarre that a mass murderer who helped run the Taliban state is talking about "liberty."]

Does the appearance of the video help or hurt Bush? It is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a painful reminder that Bush dropped the ball, left the fight against al-Qaeda half-finished, and ran off to the Iraq quagmire, so that Bin Laden is still at large 3 years after he killed 3000 Americans and hit the Pentagon itself. That can’t be good for Bush. On the other hand, because so many Americans confuse Bush’s swagger and aggressive instincts with being “strong on terrorism,” any big reminder that al-Qaeda is out there could actually help W. It shouldn’t, but it may well.

He begins by addressing the US public directly [this passage is translated by J. Cole]:

On the reason for the war, addressing the US public, Bin Laden says, “I say to you that security is an important pillar of human life, and that free persons do not neglect their own security, contrary to the allegations of Bush that we despise liberty. He should let us know why we did not strike at Sweden, for instance [if that were true]. It is well know that those who despise liberty do not possess lofty-minded souls like the 19, God bless them. We only waged battle with you because we are free persons, and we cannot sleep knowing that injustice is being done. We want to regain freedom for our nation. As you damage our security, we will damage yours.”

Some of the rest of the statement is given by The Associated Press:

He said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital.

“While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women,” he said.

“God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind,” he said.

Bin Laden suggested Bush was slow to react to the Sept. 11 attacks, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. At the time of the attacks, the president was listening to schoolchildren in Florida reading a book.

“It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone,” he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center.

“It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl’s talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God,” he said.

In planning the attacks, bin Laden said he told Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, that the strikes had to be carried out “within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed.”

Bin Laden has repeatedly said that one of the reasons he hit the US was over the Israeli attacks on the Palestinians. Bin Laden has cared deeply about Palestine since his youth. His partner in Peshawar at the Office of Services for 6 years when he was funding the Mujahidin was Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist. When he came back to Jiddah from Pakistan after the Soviets withdrew, Bin Laden gave a guest sermon at the local mosque in which he bitterly criticized Israeli actions during the first Intifadah. He declared war on the Zionists and the Crusaders, and has constantly complained about the Occupation of the Three Holy Cities, which are Mecca, Medinah and Jerusalem. Because he did not use traditional Palestianian nationalist language, it has been possible for some to miss his commitment to the Palestine issue. The 9/11 report notes that he wanted to move the attack up from September to April of 2001 to punish the Israelis for actions against Palestinians. He thought of himself as attacking the US for backing Israel and Israeli aggression and seems to be annoyed at the success of the Bush administration in painting him as a nihilist.

The talk about being “free persons” (ahrar) and fighting for “liberty” (hurriyyah) for the Muslim “nation” (ummah) seems to me a departure. The word “hurriyyah” or freedom has no classical Arabic or Koranic resonances and I don’t think it has played a big role in his previous statements.

I wonder if Bin Laden has heard from the field that his association with the authoritarian Taliban has damaged recruitment in the Arab world and Iraq, where most people want an end to dictatorship and do not want to replace their secular despots with a religious one. The elections in Pakistan (fall 2002) and Afghanistan went better than he would have wanted, and may have put pressure on him. He may now be reconfiguring the rhetoric of al-Qaeda, at least, to represent it as on the side of political liberty. I am not saying this is sincere or might succeed; both seem to me highly unlikely. I am saying that it is interesting that Bin Laden now seems to feel the need to appeal to this language. In a way, it may be one of the few victories American neo-Wilsonianism has won, to push Bin Laden to use this kind of language. I doubt it amounts to much.

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Pentagon Briefing on Missing Explosives

I just watched the Larry DiRita host a Pentagon briefing on the issue of the missing explosives at al-Qaqaa.

I was disgusted by the political spin DiRita was putting out. The Pentagon should be serving the military needs of the whole United States, not of the Bush administration.

DiRita kept talking about RDX plastic explosives, when the real issue is what happened to the HMX, which is the stuff that can be used to detonate an atomic bomb. At one point DiRita insisted that the Pentagon refers to it all as RDX and doesn’t distinguish HMX (!) He brought a poor US army major, Austin Pearson, out to talk about how his unit had destroyed over 200 tons Iraqi munitions, including tons of stuff from al-Qaqaa.

But if DiRita thought that this officer would clear the whole thing up, he was clearly disappointed. The major said explicitly that he had not seen any seals of the International Atomic Energy Commission, which means that he cannot testify that his unit destroyed the HMX. Then he was asked if insurgents could have carried off 150 tons of that stuff in a short period of time as a practical matter. He replied that it seems like a lot, but in fact it could be done really quickly.

Then he let it slip that his unit was at al-Qaqaa on April 13, before the KSTP video was shot of US soldiers examining HMX there. So Pearson’s unit could not have removed all the HMX at that time. Since he didn’t see IAEA seals, it seems likely that his unit didn’t remove any HMX.

No one doubts that the US military has blown up enormous amounts of Iraqi ordnance. The point is that they have also not blown up enormous amounts of Iraqi ordnance, and that the country’s 80 major arms depots have gone on being looted throughout the US occupation because the military was not given enough troops by Bush to guard the depots.

Conclusion: The DiRita performance today was embarrassing to Bush. His Pentagon spokesman doesn’t know the difference between RDX and HMX and he hasn’t debriefed his chief witness, Maj. Pearson, so as to avoid being blindsided when the major says he never saw IAEA seals, that looters could have carted off tons of HMX quickly and easily, and that his unit was at al-Qaqaa before the date of the damning KSTP video!

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US Has Killed 100,000 in Iraq: The Lancet

The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, reports that the US and coalition forces (but mainly the US Air Force) has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the fall of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Previous estimates for civilian deaths since the beginning of the war ranged up to 16,000, with the number of Iraqi troops killed during the war itself put at about 6,000.

The troubling thing about these results is that they suggest that the US may soon catch up with Saddam Hussein in the number of civilians killed. How many deaths to blame on Saddam is controverial. He did after all start both the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. But he also started suing for peace in the Iran-Iraq war after only a couple of years, and it was Khomeini who dragged the war out until 1988. But if we exclude deaths of soldiers, it is often alleged that Saddam killed 300,000 civilians. This allegation seems increasingly suspect. So far only 5000 or so persons have been found in mass graves. But if Roberts and Burnham are right, the US has already killed a third as many Iraqi civilians in 18 months as Saddam killed in 24 years.

The report is based on extensive household survey research in Iraq in September of 2004. Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham found that the vast majority of the deaths were the result of US aerial bombardment of Iraqi cities, which they found especially hard on “women and children.” After excluding the Fallujah data (because Fallujah has seen such violence that it might skew the nationwide averages), they found that Iraqis were about 1.5 times more likely to die of violence during the past 18 months than they were in the year and a half before the war. Before the war, the death rate was 5 per thousand per year, and afterwards it was 7.9 per thousand per year (excluding Fallujah). My own figuring is that, given a population of 25 million, that yields 72,500 excess deaths per year, or at least 100,000 for the whole period since April 9, 2003.

The methodology of this study is very tight, but it does involve extrapolating from a small number and so could easily be substantially incorrect. But the methodology also is standard in such situations and was used in Bosnia and Kosovo.

I think the results are probably an exaggeration. But they can’t be so radically far off that the 16,000 deaths previously estimated can still be viewed as valid. I’d say we have to now revise the number up to at least many tens of thousand–which anyway makes sense. The 16,000 estimate comes from counting all deaths reported in the Western press, which everyone always knew was only a fraction of the true total. (I see deaths reported in al-Zaman every day that don’t show up in the Western wire services).

The most important finding from my point of view is not the magnitude of civilian deaths, but the method of them. Roberts and Burnham find that US aerial bombardments are killing far more Iraqi civilians than had previously been suspected. This finding is also not a surprise to me. I can remember how, on a single day (August 12), US warplanes bombed the southern Shiite city of Kut, killing 84 persons, mainly civilians, in an attempt to get at Mahdi Army militiamen. These deaths were not widely reported in the US press, especially television. Kut is a small place and has been relatively quiet except when the US has been attacking Muqtada al-Sadr, who is popular among some segments of the population there. The toll in Sadr City or the Shiite slums of East Baghdad, or Najaf, or in al-Anbar province, must be enormous.

I personally believe that these aerial bombardments of civilian city quarters by a military occupier that has already conquered the country are a gross violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, governing the treatment of populations of occupied territories.

Spencer Ackerman at TNR’s online blog on Iraq has a long interview with Burnham about the study, in which Burnham is quite humble about it not being definitive.

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Missing HMX: It Really is Missing

The evidence accumulates hourly that deadly HMX explosives were at the al-Qaqaa facility on April 18 of 2003 and subsequently disappeared.

The allegation that the material was moved by the Saddam regime between March 16 and April 9 does not seem to me to get Bush off the hook. First, it is probably groundless. Josh Marshall points out that the photos released by the Pentagon of trucks at al-Qaqaaa are of a different part of the huge facility than where the HMX was stored.

Second, it wouldn’t account for all the material that disappeared, since a substantial amount was certainly looted after the US conquest, as television video from embedded reporters demonstrating that the material was there on April 18, suggests. Third, the US had complete control of the skies over Iraq and had al-Qaqaa under surveillance. If they did not want Saddam moving HMX around, all they had to do was take out some trucks that came up to al-Qaqaa, as a warning.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ran away from a lower-level bureaucrat’s crackpot conspiracy theory, of Russians moving the stuff to Syria, so fast that he could have been auditioning for a Nike commercial. The Russians rather exasperatedly denied the story. (The Russians haven’t been militarily involved in Iraq since the 1980s when they were part of the Soviet Union).

A new low was reached in the Republican Party, out of panic at this story, by Rudi Giuliani, who blamed our troops for the al-Qaqaa catastrophe, saying, ”No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?” So let’s get this straight. Bush sends only 100,000 US troops to Iraq, when 500,000 are needed to secure the country. Then when the troops don’t have te personpower to do their jobs properly, you blame them? The refreshing thing about Giuliani’s remark is its honesty. Surely a lot of fatcat Republicans who are always draping themselves in the flag and exploiting the heroism of US troops actually view them as little more than kitchen help, who can be blamed if the banquet doesn’t come off as brilliantly as hoped. Remember the images of Bush in white tie toasting his “base” among the super-wealthy, in Fahrenheit 9/11? It is not the corporals in the US army whom he was toasting.

The Star Ledger reports:

ABC said experts who have studied the images say the barrels seen in the video contain the high explosive HMX, and U.N. markings on the sealed containers were clear.

“I talked to a former inspector who’s a colleague of mine. He confirms that, indeed, these pictures look just like what he remembers seeing inside those bunkers,” David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq told the network.

ABC said the barrels seen in the video were found inside locked bunkers that had been sealed by inspectors from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war began.

“The seal’s critical. The fact that there’s a photo of what looks like an IAEA seal means that what’s behind those doors is HMX,” Albright said.

The soldiers were not ordered to secure the facility, ABC reported.

The Pentagon yesterday released an aerial photograph taken two days before the Iraq war of two trucks at the site where nearly 400 tons of high explosives went missing, but it was unable to say they had anything to do with the disappearance.

The image of a small portion of the sprawling al Qaqaa arms storage site, taken on March 17, 2003, showed a large tractor-trailer loaded with white containers with a smaller truck parked behind it, the Pentagon said.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita acknowledged that he could not say that the trucks were hauling away the explosives, or had anything to so with the disappearance of the material.

Earlier yesterday, the U.N. nuclear agency said U.S. officials had been warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at al Qaqaa after another facility — the country’s main nuclear complex — was looted in April 2003.

The IAEA cautioned American officials directly about what was kept at al Qaqaa, the main storage facility in Iraq for so-called high explosives, spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in Vienna.

And here is what weapons inspector David Kay had to say about the ABC News video from al-Qaqaa in April, 2003:

BROWN: I don’t know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I’ll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.

KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that’s an IAEA seal. I’ve never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You’ll see it somewhat differently.

KAY: Well, it’s interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.

And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that’s either HMX or RDX. I don’t know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.

BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn’t know what they had.

KAY: I think quite likely they didn’t know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives.

And to put this in context, I think it’s important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

BROWN: Could you — I’m trying to stay out of the realm of politics.

KAY: So am I. BROWN: I’m not sure you can necessarily. I know. It’s a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?

KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented.

Iraq had, and it’s a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

Laura Rozen has more.

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