70 Killed in Iraq
Diplomacy of Iran May be Legacy of British Sailor Hostage Crisis
The killings of 18 Iraqi, British and American soldiers by Iraqi guerrillas and militiamen were announced on Thursday.
AFP estimates that 52 persons were killed or found dead on Thursday, with 20 bodies brought to the morgue at Baquba northeast of Baghdad.
Other violence, including roadside bombings and mortar attacks in Baghdad on Friday, are reported by Reuters.
Militiamen in the southern Shiite port city of Basra deployed a roadside bomb to kill four British soldiers and their interpreter when it penetrated their armored fighting vehicle. The incident occurred near the Hayaniya district, a slum where the Mahdi Army of the Sadr Movement is strong. (In general, in Basra, the Mahdi Army is a minority affair.) Tony Blair's implication that Iran was involved in this attack somehow is likely incorrect. Iran and the Mahdi Army mostly don't get along very well. Besides, an allegation like that should be accompanied by some proof.
In Mosul, 40 Sunni Arab guerrillas attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint. They set vehicles aflame and confiscated the soldiers' weapons, having found them asleep.
On Thursday, Sunni Arab guerrillas deployed roadside bombs in Baghdad to kill 4 US GIs.
Near Latifiya, guerrillas directed heavy fire at a US helicopter, apparently forcing it to make a hard landing in which 4 of the 9 service personnel aboard were injured.
Sunni Iraqi clerics meeting in Amman have agreed to form a new organization, the Council of Islamic Clerics. They issued a communique that said:
' The conference stresses the need for working with all means, including the legitimate resistance, to expel the invasion forces and ensure laying down a timetable for their pullout.'
Bernard Gwertzman's interview of me on the release of Iran's hostages and the Iranian role in Iraq is available at the Council on Foreign Relations web site.
Jim Lobe interviews Gary Sick, Trita Parsi and me on the Iranian capture and release of the British sailors, and what might be the aftermath.
Noam Chomsky on 'What if Iran had invaded Mexico?'
Shorter Washington Post: Feith and Cheney were just making it all up as they went, and lied us into a quagmire of a horrible war.
Cheney repeated on Thursday on Rush Limbaugh his ridiculous assertion that Saddam Hussein was running Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as an al-Qaeda agent in Baghdad.
Someone should please tell Cheney that his own government captured documents in Iraq that show that Saddam's security forces were a) afraid of al-Qaeda and Zarqawi and b) were trying to capture him once they heard he was in Iraq. The pdf link in my posting on this shows the APB Iraq put out for Zarqawi and the wanted poster.
I don't know why this information hasn't percolated up to Cheney or why the US press doesn't call him on his ridiculous assertions that are contradicted by clear documentary evidence in USG hands.
Zeinaub Chami on the propaganda effort by the Zionist Organization of America to bring so-called "ex-terrorist" Muslim speakers to the Detroit Metro area, and who say questionable things about the Muslim tradition.
Yes, whenever I want to know about Islam, I go to the Zionist Organization of America and to the retired terrorist dentists that they recommend.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/06/2007 06:29:00 AM
9 Comments:
Blair quite specifically said he *wasn't* making any allegation over this attack in Basra.
It has been covered elsewhere many times now why tha argument that Iraqi nationalists wouldn't accept help from Iran no longer holds as true as it did.
In any case, the attack in this instance may not have actually used one of these sophisticated devices - if the reports of a massive explosion are true, that suggests something closer to large buried munitions, which have been used elsewhere to attack the more vulnerable underside armour of vehicles.
Cheney is not actually saying that Saddam and al-Qaeda were allies. He is correctly saying that Zarqawi was operating in Iraq, and letting peole jump to conclusions.
Zarqawi was in fact in US/Israel controlled Kurdistan before the invasion, leading a group calling itslef Ansar al-Islam. Under the no-fly zone rules, the Iraqis were not permitted to get near them.
It is not clear why Zarqawi was allowed to operate from there. Ansar al-Islam had camps in known places, and even had western journalists interveing them.
Cheney, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, thinks that he is a master spin doctor. Clinton was, but there was only a narrow window for elaborate scientific spin techniques to be developed before the Internet came and messed it all up. The smoke screen and mirrors can not operate in full public view,i.e. Internet.
Tony Blair has clearly, and depressingly, learned nothing from his humiliation at the hands of Tehran this past week.
One lesson he should certainly have learned concerns the vulnerability of British troops should a US-Iran war break out. Blair should be thinking very hard about making unsubstantiated allegations that could contribute to a casus belli for Bush and Cheney. Any US attack on Iran, even if Britain’s support was only of the diplomatic and political variety as in the case of last summer's Lebanon war , would result in Iranian countermeasures-by-proxy that would see British troops dying or disappearing across Iraq in numbers not seen since 2003. Of course, this was no secret before the crisis, but the point has been well underlined.
Another lesson is that Britain cannot simply run crying to the international community about Iranian misbehaviour, brandishing intelligence-based "evidence", and expect the nations of the world to rally to the Anglo-Saxon cause. Britain grandly threatened a "new phase" over the hostage crisis, trotted off to New York and Brussels waving its GPS coordinates, came back with not a lot, and ended up having to revert to the old phase of soft diplomacy and even expressions of regret. Only at this point did Ali Larijani condescend to speak to the British officials that he had ignored for 10 days, though not before scolding them on UK tv news for internationalising what should always have been a bi-lateral matter.
The flipside is that Iran has also demonstrated an alternative and more productive path for its adversaries to take. Confrontation, internationalisation and accusation may be futile or highly risky, but direct bilateral engagement on the basis of mutual respect – of the kind offered by Iran in 2003 – can yield positive results. It seems reasonable to consider that Tehran may have been sending these messages quite deliberately. And if it was, it would seem that, somewhat audaciously, it is adopting a carrots-and-sticks approach to those it perceives as threatening it.
More on this here
David Wearing
The Democrat's Diary
"Tony Blair's implication that Iran was involved in this attack somehow is likely incorrect. Iran and the Mahdi Army mostly don't get along very well."
I have generally found your analysis of the relationship (or rather, lack of one) between Iran and the Sadrists convincing.
What do you make of the analysis in Asia Times Online this week suggesting a possible rapprochement between Sadr and Iran mediated by Sistani?
Shi'ite power bloc in Iraq takes shape
Babak Rahimi
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ID04Ak07.html
The IG's report is finally out from Sen. Levin that exposes the fiction spread by Cheney/Feith et al on Al Qaeda/Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/washington/06qaeda.html
How did an argument that essentially boiled down to "because we say so" ever work? I guess we're just too eager to listen to the war drums.
Anyone with a little familiarity with Hussein would've known that he would not permit AQ to form any substantial operations in his country (especially after 9-11). If Zarqawi was with Ansar Al-Islam and Hussein did not seek to capture him (Dr. Cole's link to the Iraqi documents would dispute such an assumption), it would simply be because Ansar was attacking the Kurdish regional gov't that Hussein couldn't touch. So Ansar was distracting the Kurds, which would've been of value to Hussein.
But it's really too much that anyone would have believed that stupid AQ/Hussein argument. If AQ (particularly Bin Laden) had gotten anywhere within Hussein's reach, he would've snatched them up, tied a bow on them, and delivered them to the US/UN/UK/France with a "get out of jail free card" endorsed by China and Russia. He never would've allied with AQ, which would have--as it did even as a lie--lead to his downfall. And Bin Laden never would've trusted Hussein when he knew that Hussein could buy all manner of good will ( including an end to "regime change" talk and sanctions) by delivering OBL and AQ to the West.
It is a sad testament to how uninformed we are and how given to jingoistic war drumming, that this palpably ridiculous AQ/Hussein argument could ever have supported going to war.
re.Iraqwatcher's comment at 1109 - Its true that "Blair quite specifically said he *wasn't* making any allegation over this attack in Basra", but he
then went on to say that “The general picture . . . is that there are elements at least of the Iranian regime that are backing, financing, arming, supporting terrorism in Iraq”
....which I believe is known as trying to have your cake and eat it - I'm not accusing Iran (because inconveniently I don't have any evidence) except I am, to all intents and purposes, accusing them anyway. In other words, classic Blair. The facts (or lack thereof) are cynically fitted around the policy, whilst a pious air of probity is affected.
We've heard much about how the Iranians "exploited" the 15 British troops in captivity. I would argue that Blair's exploitation of the 4 British service-people who died yesterday to serve his tawdry agenda on Iran is a far more cynical act.
Oh man it is so bad here in the UK. several right wing propoganda rags have outright blamed iran and Ahmadinejad himself directly for the bombing of 4 soldiers. Im sure thats a libel, or are sovereign nations not entitled to protection under the law?
Either way the timing of the basra bombing
is highly suspicious. Normally insurgent groups trip each other over trying to claim credit for high profile attacks, but as far as im aware not one group has claimed responsibility for this, maybe im wrong. Either way, it has distracted from Britain's impotence in the whole affair and came almost exactly as the 15 touched down on UK soil.
It seems that the interviewer tries to portray the whole issue as a hostage taking incident. What is your reaction to that? If it was a hostage taking incident, what were the hostage takers' demands?
The case of the exploding clay.
The problem in getting US forces out of Iraq is that the Bush administration deosn't want to leave until Iraq conforms to the neocon ideal of a supplicant state.
The invasion was to be the beginning of a process to mold Iraq into this form. But soon into the modeling process the clay exploded.
It seems that Bush and Cheney cannot let go of their original objective, and therefore cannot articulate a definition of victory that makes sense in today's Iraq.
Between now and 2008 the only option is to impeach Bush and Cheney and therefore make Pelosi president. And then hope for her to get us out, maybe with Dr. Cole's plan.
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