Informed Comment

Don’t miss part II of Frontline’s (PBS) special on the Iraq War tonight.

Part I, aired last night, is or will be available in streaming video, as will the whole thing.

Posted in Iraq | Comments Off

On Tuesday morning, major clashes broke out between government security forces and local Basra militias (including the Mahdi Army) that sent black smoke billowing in the air above the oil port. A strict curfew was imposed and schools were closed. Reuters reports:

‘ “Basra is half empty. There are no vehicles and no one is going to work. People are afraid to go out,” said a military official in the city, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A hospital source said “tens of wounded” were arriving at hospitals and that some were too busy to accept more casualties. ‘

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement announced a “civil disobedience” campaign on Monday in every region of Iraq. The Sadr Movement follows Shiite cleric Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr. The movement is complaining that the government continues to target is supporters.

McClatchy reports of Baghdad:

‘ On Monday, the Sadrists all but shut down the neighborhoods they control on the west bank of Baghdad. Gunmen went to stores and ordered them to close as militiamen stood in the streets. Mosques used their loudspeakers to urge people to come forward and join the protest.

Fliers were distributed with the Sadrists’ three demands of the Iraqi government: to release detainees, stop targeting Sadrist members and apologize to the families and the tribal sheiks of the men. ‘

On Monday Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Basra at the head of a big security force, at the beginning of the major security sweep of that city that produced Tuesday’s fighting.

It is being rumored, al-Hayat says, that the prime minister is planning to remove the military commander in the city, Gen. Mohan Hafiz al-Furayji, as well as the police chief, Major-Gen. Abdul Jalil Khalaf. UPI says that he will attempt to institute a tighter command and control structure in the city. Although the US had been putting pressure on Britain to send some of its troops from the airport back into Basra city, Gordon Brown appears to have resisted Washington’s blandishments in this regard. The US military is concerned that if security collapses in Basra, it could cause the center-north to unravel, as well (this calculation is correct).

Michael Schwartz shows how Bush crippled Baghdad.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Some readers have complained that occasionally postings are partially obscured when viewed with the Firefox browser. I haven’t seen this effect in Firefox myself, so I assume it is a setting problem. Or CSS formatting conflict?

It can also occur in in I.E., apparently, and it positively does not in Safari 3.0. A reader has written in that the problem does not occur in Firefox 3.0 beta.

[The most expert opinion appears to favor upgrading your browser to the latest version, as well as emptying your cache and setting text size to normal; people say when they have done these things, the problem goes away. Apparently Apple's new Safari browser also has the virtue of not having this problem.]

Another reader said the site does not validate well. However, I’m just using Doug Bowman’s Minima template for blogger.com, and I never have bothered to learn css, and the useful comment would be to direct me to a similar but better-validated blogger.com template.

Do any of my technically ept readers have any suggestions to fix the grey block problem in Firefox? It seems to be a user setting, since it does not occur very often. One kind reader sent a screen shot, below.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

All hell broke loose again in Iraq on Sunday, with political violence killing nearly 60 persons according to official statistics.

A roadside bomb killed 4 US troops, bringing the total dead in Iraq on the American side to 4,000. The thing I most mind about the deaths of those brave warriors is that our government has not been honest about why they died. We don’t know the answer to that question. We’ve been lied to.

The Bush administration still has not told us why they died. It was not to protect the US from “weapons of mass destruction” (see below; that was a fabricated cover story). It was not to spread democracy. It may have been to nail down a major petroleum-producing country for US geostrategic goals (ensuring its resources were available to the US and could be denied if necessary to growing rivals such as China). If so, one has to ask whether the objectives (which were hidden from the American people) were the top priority for the US, or only for the petroleum industry; whether those objectives have been achieved; and whether there was another way to attain them. No such debate has ever been held. Was it in part to ensure Israeli security, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue (and Craig Unger implicitly argues, below)? If so, that should be stated, it should be debated. Even the former head of Shin Bet did not agree that it increased Israel’s security. It is not right to ask men and women under arms to die for their country without telling them exactly how they are benefiting their country. For all we know, they have died so that Bush and Cheney could throw goodies to their “base,” so that Halliburton could escape bankruptcy and Hunt Oil could get new development contracts.

The Green Zone was subjected to repeated mortar and rocket attacks on Sunday, which wounded 1 American and 4 others inside, and killed at least a dozen on its edges (because those firing them were bad shots). The Green Zone is where the US Embassy and major Iraqi government buildings are. It had been a little safer recently, or at least the Pentagon was peddling that line to CNN during last week’s commemoration of the 5th anniversary of the war (see the CNN piece below). It is a measure of how the war objectives keep being defined down, that for the Green Zone to be relatively safe was trumpeted as an accomplishment. The “green zone” was always supposed to be safe, since it was heavily guarded and surrounded by blast walls. I take it that the US ceasefire with the Mahdi Army has actually broken down, in part because the US army and its Iraqi allies keep arresting commanders of the Mahdi Army. The Bush administration attitude has been, that’s not a truce, that’s an opportunity to make a bust.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement is demanding that recently arrested members of the Mahdi Army be released by the al-Maliki government. If their demands are not met, they say, they will launch a general strike. I suspect that the shelling of the Green Zone on Sunday was proffered as evidence that they really would be willing to take extreme actions if that would free the arrested Sadrists.

CNN transcript of Kyra Phillips’ interview. The clip below seems laggy but you get the idea.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

‘ Baghdad

- Around 6 a.m. four mortars hit the Green Zone, Iraqi police said.

- Around 8 a.m. A roadside bomb targeted Iraqi police patrol near the Shaab stadium, injuring three policemen.

- Around 11 a.m. Iraqi police said 6 rockets targeted the Green Zone, two of them hit the Green Zone and four others hit different areas of Baghdad. One hit a residential building in Kamaliyah killing five civilians and injuring 8, one hit cars parking yard near the Qadiri shrine in central Baghdad injuring 5 civilians. The other two hit different areas in Karrada causing no casualties.

- Around noon gunmen in three civilian cars opened their machineguns fire towards civilians near a cooking gas factory in Zafaraniyah, killing 7 civilians and injuring 16 others.

- Around 3 p.m. a suicide bomber driving a car bomb targeted civilians near a gas station in Shoala neighborhood, killing 5 civilians and injuring 7.

- Around noon a roadside bomb targeted civilians on Uqba bin Nafia square, injuring two civilians.

- Around 5 p.m. two rockets or mortar shells hit the Green Zone, a third missed its target and hit in Sadoun street, injuring one civilian, Iraqi police said.

- Around 8 p.m. a mortar shell hit residential buildings (called the Palestinians’ buildings) injuring four civilians.

- At 8:26 p.m. several mortar shells or rockets targeted the Green Zone fell short and hit different areas 3 in Karrada and 1 in Arasat killing 2 and injuring 7 civilians. Another hit a house in Sadoun Street, killing 5 civilians from one family.

- Police found 6 dead bodies throughout Baghdad . . .

Nineveh

- Around 7 a.m. a suicide bomber drove his truck bomb into an Iraqi army headquarter in the industrial area west Mosul, killing 13 soldiers and injuring 30 soldiers and 12 civilians.

- A suicide bomber driving a car bomb targeted an Iraqi army convoy in Al Nour neighborhood in Mosul, killing one officer and injuring 3 soldiers and 7 civilians.

- A roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army vehicle in Al Hadbaa neighborhood in Mosul, injuring 7 civilians.

- Iraqi police found one dead body in Mosul.

Diyala

- Iraqi police said U.S. troops killed 14 men and injured five people including a woman then used aerial fire to hit four homes in Al Dahalga village (about 28 miles east of Baquba). The U.S. military said they killed 12 men that were a part of a suicide bombing network. . .

- Gunmen killed citizen Ali Hassan in front of his house in central Baquba, Hassan was returning home yesterday after he was displaced.

- Gunmen killed Brigadier General Akram Awad Radhi and his driver as he was heading back to Baquba from Abu Saida area (about 12 miles east of Baquba).

- Gunmen attacked policemen in central Baquba killing a police lieutenant and injuring two other policemen.

- A mortar shell slammed into Al Gatoun area west Baquba, killing two civilians and injuring one.

- A mortar shell slammed into Kanaan town (about 9 miles east of Baquba) injured an infant girl and a woman.

Kirkuk

- Gunmen using two cars attacked an Iraqi army fixed check point to monitor a main road south of Kirkuk (about 16 miles) killing four Iraqi army soldiers and burning their Humvee.

Salahuddin

- A suicide bomber driving a car bomb targeted the house of Al Muatasim town (about 12 miles south of Samarra) mayor yesterday, killing 3 policemen and injuring two civilians. ‘

Posted in Iraq | Comments Off

Craig Unger’s email, part of an interchange on a private discussion group, is reprinted here with permission:

[A critic, let us call him X, objected] to Jim Lobe’s suggestion that Iraqi WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda had nothing to do with starting the Iraq War. But Lobe is right. X is off base when he says nothing “suggests anything other than they believed Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs.”

As my recent book, The Fall of the House of Bush–which owes a debt to Lobe’s fine reporting on the neocons) shows in great detail, Cheney and the neocons effectively created an alternative national security apparatus to circumvent, sabotage and subvert the $40 billion a year that the nation spends on intelligence and to disseminate false intelligence about Saddam that would create a basis for war.

To be specific, let’s take the Niger documents that falsely asserted that Saddam had agreed to buy 500 tons of yellowcake from the Republic of Niger. Many unanswered questions remain about the origin of the documents. But no one contests that they were forgeries that were based on documents stolen from the Niger Embassy in Rome over New Year’s Eve in 2000.

I traveled to Rome to investigate the fabrication and dissemination of the documents, and, as I report in my book, I found that both the documents themselves and the information in them were distributed by right wing elements of Italian intelligence and the neocons in a deliberate manner to make it appear as if there were multiple independent sources corroborating one another, when in fact the only source were the original phony documents.

When the White House wanted to use the documents to build the case for war in an October 2002 speech Bush gave in Cincinnati, the CIA intervened twice to say the information was not reliable.

As I also show in my book, these documents and/or the information in them were discredited by Western authorities(including the CIA and the State Department) on at least fourteen such occasions before Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address

But none of that stopped Bush from citing this information–or, rather, disinformation– as a casus belli in his famous sixteen words in his 2003 SOTU Address. [ Col. Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, told me, if he took something out of Colin Powell's UN speech 47 times, the neocons would put in 48.]

X seems to suggest that all this could have been the result of mere ineptitude. However, I cite, on the record, no fewer than nine former officials in the military and intelligence worlds who characterize the Niger document episode as black propaganda or part of a disinformation campaign that was intentionally done to mislead the American people into supporting a war.

Likewise, one has only to talk to Tyler Drumheller, the former head of European operations for the CIA, who has recounted at great length how he vetted “Curveball,” the prized Iraqi exile who spun phony yarns about mobile weapons vans, and told his superiors again and again and again that Curveball could not be trusted. Yet George Tenet, under pressure from the White House and the neocons, ignored him. As a result, Colin Powell told the world about the phony mobile weapons vans.

One could go on at great length with many other examples(as I do in my book). But the point is, the neocons had deliberately gamed the system. As their policy papers show, they knew they wanted to start the war long before the administration took office and in order to do so they knew they had to control intelligence. That’s why Wolfowitz, Perle, and Eliot Abrams began making semi-secret trips to Austin as early as 1998 to convince Bush that an invasion was necessary. That’s why, in December 2000, they tried to put Wolfowitz in as head of the CIA. And that’s why, when that didn’t work, they moved him to the Pentagon where he oversaw the creation of the Office of Special Plans which was in charge of putting out phony intelligence.

Likewise, Cheney put John Bolton in at State to keep an eye on Colin Powell and to make sure that State Department analysts at INR( who had repeatedly discovered the errors in the phony neocon intelligence) were kept out of all the key meetings. As a result, Colin Powell made his presentation to the UN based on intel that came from the neocons in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon–not the professionals at Langley and at [the State Department's intelligence analysis branch,] INR.

In other words, we went to war not because of intelligence failures, as X seems to think, but because of intelligence successes–successful black propaganda operations, successful disinformation operations–that were deliberately designed to mislead the American people.

As to why, again, I believe that Jim Lobe is on the right track. One has only to read the various neocon policy papers dating back to the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance papers(aka the Wolfowitz Doctrine), A Clean Break in 1996, David Wurmser’s Tyranny’s Ally in 1997, the PNAC papers of 1998, and scores of other articles to see that the neocons had been hoping to start the war for roughly a decade before it actually began. According to these papers, the chief reasons for this grand new strategy of overhauling the Middle East were regional security(ie, Israel) and to protect America’s strategic resources(ie, oil.)

Craig Unger

Vanity Fair Magazine

Go here for information about The Fall of the House of Bush and to buy the book.

Posted in Iraq | Comments Off

This Easter is an especially sad one for Iraq’s Chaldean Christians. Their archbishop was kidnapped and held for ransom, then killed by guerrillas. His captors had demanded that the Christians support demands that the US withdraw from Iraq and pay $3 mn. [Since Chaldeans are patriotic Iraqis, there was no reason to think they did not already support withdrawal of US troops.]

Nor was that the last of their problems, according to this article by Peter Lamprecht:

‘ Days after the body of a kidnapped archbishop was found buried in northern Iraq, fresh kidnappings and murders continue to haunt the country’s Christians this Passion Week.

“We have people threatened, people kidnapped, people killed – this is Holy Week,” Kirkuk’s Chaldean Archbishop Luis Sako said.

Danger in Mosul may be great enough to effectively cancel Easter in the city this year, one clergyman said.

“We could close our churches in Mosul to protect ourselves and say to everyone that we don’t accept the situation,” Dominican Father Najeeb Mikhail said. “Or we can hold all the celebrations, and maybe we will receive some bombs or attacks.”

Fr. Mikhail affirmed that Mosul’s Christian denominations planned to remain in the city despite the attacks.

His comments came yesterday, only hours before meeting with Mosul’s Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholic bishops to decide how to help the city’s now leaderless Chaldean flock. Chaldean Archbishop Paulus Faraj Rahho, kidnapped last month while leaving a Mosul church, was found dead last Thursday (March 13), buried in a shallow grave. ‘

Pope Benedict XVI celebrated a memorial mass for Archbishop Rahho last week. He said then, “”Let his example support all Iraqis of good will — Christians and Muslims — to work for a peaceful coexistence, founded on human brotherhood and reciprocal respect . . .”

Surely that is the way Archbishop Rahho would have wanted his death to be commemorated, by increased Christian-Muslim understanding.

AFP notes that Pope Benedict seemed profoundly upset by the archbishop’s killing, and in his Palm Sunday sermon last Sunday at St. Peter’s Square said:

“Enough with the slaughter. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!”

Someone should put it to music and sing it at peace rallies.

The press says there was applause. There is certainly applause from me. The Catholic Church was among the few major institutions in the world to come forthrightly out against the Iraq War on principle.

There were about 800,000 Christians in Iraq in 2002, and it is widely thought that about half have been forced to flee the country, mainly to Syria and Lebanon.

The deaths of 4 US troops were announced on Saturday. One was killed on Friday, and three more were struck by a roadside bomb on Saturday.

You contrast the concerns of the Iraqi Christians, with just staying alive this Easter or finding enough food to eat or avoiding being kidnapped, with those of Americans in southern California. Many are struggling to avoid losing their homes; for some it is too late, and they just have to be grateful for their new small apartments. Then this brought me up short:

‘ Former Marine Cpl. Gustavo Aguilar Jr., a two-tour veteran of the Iraq war who was profiled in the Daily News last week, also has something to be thankful for in tough times.

Aguilar had been laid off from a bakery-delivery job and feared losing his home. But after his story appeared in the Daily News, Aguilar immediately received several job offers.

He now likely will be able to avoid either foreclosure or having to sell his Sylmar town home.

“Despite all the hard times we’ve gone through, we never lost faith,” Aguilar said. “If it can carry us through, it can do the same for the country.” ‘

So if the Iraqis are being devastated by the war, and if the Americans who fought the war are losing their lives, or if alive are losing their jobs and barely avoiding being made homeless, who exactly is benefiting from the war?

Enough with the slaughter. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq.

Sing it.

Posted in Iraq | Comments Off

The USG Open Source Center translates an Arab nationalist call to the southern Shiite province of Maysan, which is ruled by the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, to block Iranian influence. In fact, Maysan, which borders Iran, is negotiating with Iran to receive electricity and other aid.

Movement Calls For Efforts To Prevent Iran From ‘Interfering’ in Iraqi Affairs
Jihadist Websites — OSC Summary
Saturday, March 22, 2008

Terrorism : Movement Calls For Efforts To Prevent Iran From ‘Interfering’ in Iraqi Affairs

On 14 March, a jihadist website posted a statement issued by the Iraqi Movement for Defending Iraq’s Arabism, in which the group calls on the chief of police of Maysan Governorate to support the national movement in the governorate and take action to prevent Iran from interfering in Iraqi affairs. The statement is attributed to the Iraqi Movement for Defending Iraq’s Arabism and is dated 14 March 2008.

A summary of the statement follows:

The statement starts by addressing the people of Maysan Governorate, saying that “the occupation came to kill your love for your nation and to divide you into sects so that it would be able to control your resources completely.”

The statement goes on to say that this [American] “occupation coincides with Iranian infiltration into Iraq under the banner of Shiism and the love of Prophet Muhammad’s household,” and calls on Maysan’s chief of police to “side with the forces and movements that raise the banner of Arabism and Islam, reject the occupation, and seek to prevent Iran from interfering in our affairs.” The statement also calls on the governorate’s officials “to join the Iraqi Movement for Defending Iraq’s Arabism in order to take part in saving the nation from the new tragedy that awaits it.”

The statement concludes by urging the people not to give up their city and homeland and calls on them to prevent “foreign interference” in their affairs.

Posted in Iraq | Comments Off