This Israeli government action is an unvarnished war crime. It is known as collective punishment. There was already hunger and malnutrition among Palestinian children, which will now be worsened.
The Olmert government is not interested in negotiating, apparently, even though nothing the Likud and the Kadima “Likud Light” has done since 2001 has diminished the salience of the Gaza Muslim fundamentalist party, including a concerted campaign of murder, kidnapping, assault and collective punishment. Despite the violent groups on its margins, Hamas itself has at various points indicated a willingness to play ordinary politics, but Olmert will be satisfied with nothing less than destroying it. So far it isn’t going well for him.
Cutting off fuel to the Gazans and provoking a cut-off of UN food aid is not only criminal but also stupid. It is difficult to imagine such mean-spirited sanctions against civilians having any policy effect whatsoever, so they are just making Israel look bad.
Gillerman called Hizbullah, an Arab party, “animals” in summer of 2006. Would he like to expand the reference to include other races? How many of us exactly are Untermenschen in his view? For Likudniks to call Jimmy Carter a “bigot” is sort of like the Ku Klux Klan denouncing Nelson Mandela for racial insensitivity. —
PS A reader wrote in that if it is all right to criticize Zionists without being anti-Semitic it should be all right to criticize Hizbullah without being anti-Arab. But I’m not talking about criticizing Hizbullah, which I have done. I’m talking about dehumanizing them and calling them animals. I think that remark demonstrated a racist mindset on Gillerman’s part, of which he should be ashamed. And I don’t see why the US should let him into the country to smear our brave, humanitarian ex-presidents as “bigots.” Jimmy Carter has built homes for the poor, helped nearly wipe out a deadly parasite in Africa, helped negotiate social peace around the world impartially. Not to mention all the good he did Israel in neutralizing Egypt, its most powerful military rival (and Gillerman and his like repaid him with adventurism in Lebanon and thumbing their nose at American entreaties to make peace with the Palestinians). What good has Gillerman ever done anyone? He isn’t good enough to shine Jimmy Carter’s shoes.
Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sharpened his rhetoric against Iran on Friday. Mullen appeared earlier to want to put the brakes on the Cheney war machine. Is he weakening?
Muqtada is offering an olive branch to his former ally turned deadly foe, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki seems in no mood to accept it.
First the Pentagon said that the Iraqi Army needed to be 390,000 strong. Now it says Iraq needs 646,000 troops. A new audit suggests that the Pentagon has substantially over-estimated how many trained Iraqi troops the al-Maliki government has.
Iraqis speak to the US Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
The US military was criticized by Iraqis for killing innocent persons in a bombing raid on Sadr City.
‘ * BAGHDAD – The U.S. military said on Friday it had killed 10 fighters in helicopter missile strikes and ground battles in eastern Baghdad overnight.
* BAGHDAD – The U.S. army said on Friday that a U.S. soldier was killed by a road side bomb south of Baghdad on Thursday.
* HILLA – Gunmen shot dead a man near his house overnight in Iskandariya town, 40km (25 miles) south of Baghdad and police said they arrested six people in connection with the attack.
* MOSUL – Gunmen shot dead a fisherman and wounded another while they were fishing overnight on the Tigris river where it runs through northwestern Mosul, 390km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, the Iraqi army said.
* MOSUL – A roadside bomb wounded a civilian in Tal Afar, 420 km ( 260 miles) north of Baghdad, the Iraqi army said.
* BASRA – Gunmen shot dead a news broadcaster working for al-Nakheel TV and Radio station run by a Shi’ite faction in the Qurna area, 80km northern Basra, the station’s director Adnan al-Yasiri said.
* HILLA – US and Iraqi forces conducted a joint operation and arrested six people on Thursday in the Mahwaeel area, 75km (45 miles) south of Baghdad, arresting two suspects after gunmen shot and wounded an Iraqi policeman, police said.
* FALLUJA – A bomb implanted beneath a Friday prayers preacher’s seat exploded in al-Raqeeb mosque in al-Julan area, northwestern Falluja, 50km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, wounding 4 people including two policemen, police said.
* ISKANDARIYA – Gunmen killed two people in al-Qariya al- Asriya in Iskandariya town, 40km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
* YUSUFIYA – A roadside bomb killed a civilian and wounded another in Yusufiya town, 15km (9 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – The U.S. military said on Friday it killed two gunmen and detained 18 suspects during operations targeting al-Qaeda in central Iraq on Wednesday.
BAGHDAD – A roadside bomb exploded in Adhamiya neighbourhood, northern Baghdad, on Thursday night, wounding three people, police said.
BAGHDAD – Iraqi police found three bodies on Thursday overnight in different areas of Baghdad, police said.
MOSUL – Iraqi police found two bodies in Mosul, one of them was beheaded, on Thursday, police said.
MOSUL – Gunmen shot dead a policeman in western Mosul, police said. ‘
- Thursday night, The American planes bombed the Husseiniya neighborhood (north Baghdad) .Two people were killed and 8 others were injured.
- The American army bombed Sadr city around 11 pm and 1 am .Iraqi army said 11 people were killed and 32 others were injured.
- Around 4pm, five gunmen riding a Kia mini bus opened fire on an Iraqi check point when they tried to stop them. Three Iraqi soldiers were injured .Then, the Iraqi army killed those gunmen when the soldiers in the check point opened fire on them .The gunmen’s car exploded at once as it was carrying roadside bombs and rockets .
- Police found two dead bodies in west Baghdad (Karkh bank): 1 in Saidiyah and 1 in Bayaa.
Diyala
- Around 9:30 pm, gunmen attacked an Iraqi army patrol at Al-Wajihiyah (20 km east of Baquba).One officer was killed and three soldiers were injured in that incident.
Kirkuk
- Thursday night, Iraqi army soldiers wounded a gunman who was planting a roadside bomb at Safra village of Riadh (west of Kirkuk).Then, the Iraq squad defused the bomb and the gunman ran away .
- Thursday , a roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army patrol at Al-Utheim (south Kirkuk).One officer was killed in that incident .Another roadside bomb targeted another patrol in the same area with no casualties recorded.
- Thursday, a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol at Hajaj neighborhood in Kirkuk city. One policeman was injured with a civilian who was at the site of the incident.
Salahuddin
- Around noon, an officer was killed by a bomb planted in his car while he was about to start the car’s engine inside the police Academy in Tikrit.
- In the afternoon, American planes bombed a site at Jalam (25 km north east of Samarra ) killing four gunmen of Qaeda members including a Saudi Arabian leader in that location, police said .
Anbar
- Around 11:30 am, a bomb planted under a chair in Al-Raqeeb mosque at Al-Jewlan neighborhood in downtown Falluja .The target was the orator Khalid Himoud who replaced the former orator who was killed 9 months ago. The orator survived ,but one person was killed with four others injured. ‘
‘ They said US intelligence had “high confidence” that the structure bombed by the Israelis was a nuclear reactor, “medium confidence” that the North Koreans were involved in building it, and “low confidence” that plutonium from it was for nuclear weapons.
Because other elements of a weapons program, such as a plutonium reprocessing plant, had not been detected, US intelligence was less certain that the plutonium was for nuclear weapons, they said.’
We would have to know exactly what kind of reactor it was to know if it was suitable to help in a weapons program. As the Bush administration admits, there isn’t any evidence of that.
Moreover, I’m not really very impressed that they only have medium confidence that North Korea was involved.
Even the high confidence that the building was a reactor cannot be just accepted without question. They had high confidence that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program in the early zeros, which was not true. We should be skeptical about these sorts of stories until we see the proof.
I have been disappointed that more nuclear engineers in the US do not express themselves publicly on what is likely and unlikely. This story seems to me fishy. Syria is a poor state. Where would it have gotten the money for a reactor? Why exactly are there doubts that North Korea was involved? How much of the intelligence is from US sources and how much from Israeli? The latter are highly politicized. The head of Mossad in 2002 expressed confidence that Saddam was close to getting nukes.
Moreover, while I am against proliferation of nuclear weapons, the idea that the Israelis can just bomb anyone’s innocent research or civilian power reactor any time they like for no good reason is scary. The Israelis rejected the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and broke with international consensus to acquire by hook and crook British, French and US nuclear secrets and built dozens, perhaps hundreds of nuclear bombs, provoking the nuclear weapons race in the region.
The real question is the timing of the announcement, since the bombing happened a long time ago. It is suspicious to me that the announcement was made just after a spy for Israel was arrested in the US who had stolen US nuclear secrets. Is it diversionary?
Syria expert Josh Landis discusses a different theory of diversion, having to do with revelations that Syria and Israel are closer to an agreement on the future of the Golan Heights.
I’d add that former president Jimmy Carter’s recent trip to meet with Hamas leaders has put pressure on Israel to come back in a serious way to the negotiating table. Also Hamas’s own apparent change in stance on diplomacy, as Helena Cobban discusses.
So the timing of the Syria reactor announcement does seem suspicious in Middle East terms. If the US doesn’t in fact think there is any evidence that the reactor had weapons implications, then it is really a non story, and releasing it can only be for hoopla reasons.
Here is Aljazeera’s report on the issue, which contains yet another diversionary theory, that the revelations are aimed at pressuring North Korea:
Turkey bombed northern Iraq again on Wednesday, claiming to hit at guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) “attempting to infiltrate Turkey from the Khakurk region of northern Iraq.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Manuchehr Mottaki, strongly backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s attack on the Mahdi Army militia on Wednesday. He said, “Weapons should be only in the hands of the Iraqi army.” The Iraqi army appears increasingly to be dominated by cadres of the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and it and ISCI are key Iranian clients in Iraq. What Mottaki said therefore makes complete sense. What doesn’t make sense is the Bush administration’s long-term effort to misrepresent the nativist Sadr Movement and its Mahdi Army, based in Iraq’s festering slums, as Iran-backed.
It is precisely the closeness of the al-Maliki government and its primary current pillar, ISCI, to Iran that has made Sunni Arab countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia skittish about allowing it into the Arab League system as a full diplomatic partner. The Sunni Arab states largely do not have embassies in Baghdad, and Iraqi Shiites accuse them or their populations of surreptitiously helping Iraqi Sunni Arab guerrillas.
Russian t.v. argues that Petraeus has proved his mettle as a diplomat, a key criterion for his new job, and predicts he may be the next Secretary of Defense.
- Tuesday night, clashes took place in Husseiniya neighborhood (north Baghdad) between the Mahdi army and the American forces. Four people were killed and eight others were injured.
- Around 8am, a roadside bomb targeted an American patrol at Al-Butil at Zafaraniyah neighborhood (east Baghdad).Two civilians were injured with no information on the American’s side.
- Around 2 pm, a roadside bomb targeted an American patrol on the high way of Mikanik in Dora (south Baghdad). No casualties reported.
- Around noon, a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol at Nafaq Al-Shurta neighborhood (west Baghdad) .Six people were injured including two policemen.
- Around 2 pm, a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol at Qahtan intersection near Yarmouk neighborhood (west Baghdad).Three civilians were injured in that incident.
- Around 7 pm, a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol in Karrada neighborhood .Five people were injured in that incident.
- Police found 4 dead bodies in Baghdad neighborhoods today: 2 were found in Saidiyah in west south Baghdad (Karkh bank).While 2 were found in east Baghdad(Risafa bank); 1 in Ur and 1 in Ubaidi .
Salahuddin
- Tuesday night, American troops raided Baaja , Jamila and Huriya villages on the western side of Shurqat (300 km north of Baghdad) .The troops killed ( Rabia Abood Mohammad ) and arrested 25 persons with 6300 American dollars and 500 000 Iraqi dinars confiscated from Abdul Razaq Khalaf Hassan’s house.
- In the morning, An American squad raided Albu Marouf village at Al-Jazira area (25 km south west Tikrit) .One person was killed and seven others were arrested by the American squad who are from one family .Also six cars were damaged in that incident. We have no confirmation of that incident from the MNF-I at the time of this report.
- In the morning, gunmen injured the teacher Jalal Khorsheed in Hawija Bahriyah in Dhulwiya (south of Tikrit and 80 km north of Baghdad).
Mosul
- Be fore noon, a suicide bomber detonated himself inside an exchange shop .Minutes late, a car bomb exploded at Dawasa neighborhood (downtown Mosul).Two were killed and nine others were injured (including two policemen).
- Around noon, a car bomb targeted a police patrol in Mosul city .Seven people were injured in that incident including four policemen.
- Around noon, noon, a roadside bomb exploded at Al-Rashidiyah downtown Mosul city . Four people were injured in that incident.
- In the afternoon, mortars shell hit Nahrwan neighborhood (west Mosul ). Four people were injured in that incident.
Diyala
- Police and Sahwa members found four remains of dead bodies at Sansal in Muqdadiyah (north east Baquba).
Kirkuk
- Around 3pm, a roadside bomb targeted a police patrol at Al-Wasiti neighborhood in Kirkuk city. Two policemen were injured including an officer.
- The social committee in Kirkuk council buried 38 unidentified dead bodies found in different areas in Kirkuk during the last four months ago. ‘
Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania just was not big enough to allow her to hope to win the elected delegate count. She is increasingly using dark and exaggerated rhetoric and 2/3s of Democrats complain that she has gone too negative (less than half say that about Obama). Her exaggerations yesterday extended into the realm of international politics in a most unfortunate way. It seems clear to me that she cannot win the nomination via elected delegates and that she is hoping to win by scaring the super delegates about Obama. This strategy is counterproductive for the Democratic Party and for the country. Clinton needed to win by well into the double digits in Pennsylvania (which is how she began in the polling there months ago) in order to remain credible. 10 points doesn’t do it. (One reader pointed out that it seems actually to be 9.2%, not double digits at all). Obama actually won Texas, which will be a headline in June when all the counting is done there (don’t ask). It is over. She should stop before more damage is done.
The damage that Israeli spying has done to US security is immense, not only because of such leaks but also because of Israeli reverse engineering of US technology and the pirating of it. Further, the nuclearization of the Middle East that the Israelis initiated has the potential to drag us all into Armageddon.
The Israeli Right is always going on about threats to Israel’s existence, even though it is the most powerful country in the Middle East. But no one ever brings up its strangulation of the Palestinian nation, its siege of Gaza, its dispossession of the West Bankers. The right makes an imagined future threat the basis for actual victimization of others in the present. America’s security is deeply threatened by the ongoing Israeli colonization projects in the Middle East, as should have been clear for some time.
‘ In an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, Clinton was asked what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.
She replied: “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. That’s a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that, because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic.” ‘
Clinton has unfortunately fallen into a typical Washington fear-mongering fantasy. Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. As of last fall, US intelligence determined that it was not trying to get a nuclear weapon. There is no realistic likelihood of Iran having a bomb ‘in the next ten years.’ Israel on the other hand has hundreds of bombs and has threatened to use them.
So the statement seemed incommensurate with the known facts. It was counter-productive because Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei has denounced nuclear weapons. Khamenei says that nuking civilians is contrary to the Islamic law of war, which only allows warriors to kill other warriors:
‘ “Their other issue is [their assertion] that Iran seeks [a] nuclear bomb. It is an irrelevant and wrong statement, it is a sheer lie. We do not need a nuclear bomb. We do not have any objectives or aspirations for which we will need to use a nuclear bomb. We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules. We have announced this openly. We think imposing the costs of building and maintaining nuclear weapons on our nation is unnecessary. Building such weapons and their maintenance are costly. By no means we deem it right to impose these costs on the people. We do not need those weapons. Unlike the Americans who want to rule the world with force, we do not claim to control the world and therefore do not need a nuclear bomb. Our nuclear bomb and our explosive powers are our faith, our youth and our people who have been present on the most difficult scenes with utmost power and faith and will continue to do so.’
Khamenei’s quaint chivalry in this age of total war stands in contrast to Clinton’s chilling contemplation of genocide against 70 million Iranians in retaliation for something they would and could have had no part in deciding. Mutual Assured Destruction is a security underpinning of the contemporary nuclearized world, but it is a diplomatic weapon that works best by allusion.
If you were an Iranian and you heard Clinton talking like this, would it make you more or less interested in acquiring your own nuclear weapon? That is, Clinton’s rather bloodthirsty pandering to what she thinks the Israel lobbies want to hear is likely actually to produce the opposite of the desired reaction in Iran itself and is most unwise.
Clinton also does not mention that Israel is already protected by MAD because it has several hundred nuclear warheads (see the beginning of this essay). Senator Clinton is by now just flailing around fantasizing about incinerating children in playgrounds in Isfahan.
Mark 8:36 is relevant here, and I commend it to the good senator: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Zogby is reporting as follows, that there is a late surge for Clinton in Pennsylvania and that her margin is being given to her by white, ethnic, Catholic men. It also seems clear that as undecided voters (which fell recently from 8% to 6%) and those who wanted “someone else” (fell from 4% to 3%) have made up their minds, they have tended to go for Clinton. Otherwise Obama’s percentages have been pretty stable though perhaps falling slightly. Clinton’s increases are beyond the margin of error.
‘Released: April 22, 2008
Newsmax/Zogby Poll: Clinton Up 10 Points; Beats Margin of Error
UTICA, New York – New York’s Hillary Clinton continued to pull away from rival Barack Obama of Illinois as the campaigning in Pennsylvania ended and voters prepared to cast ballots today, the latest Newsmax/Zogby daily telephone tracking poll shows.
She now leads Obama, 51% to 41%, having gained three points over the past 24 hours as Obama lost one point, pushing her beyond the poll’s margin of error to create a statistically significant lead for the first time in the Pennsylvania daily tracking poll.
Meanwhile, 6% remained undecided and another 3% said they preferred someone else in the two-day tracking poll. It was conducted April 20-21, 2008, using live operators working out of Zogby’s on-site call center in Upstate New York, included 675 likely Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania. It carries a margin of error of +/- 3.8 percentage points.
Pennsylvania
Clinton 4-20/21: 51% . . . 4-19/20: 48% . . .
Obama 4 20/21: 41% . . . 4 19/20: 42% . . .
Pollster John Zogby: “Sounds like a radio station’s call letters, but remember WECM – white, ethnic, Catholic, men. That is what put Clinton into her double digit lead here in Pennsylvania…” ‘
In addition, LAT reports that fighting continued on Monday in Sadr City between its Mahdi Army militiamen and Iraqi government forces backed by US troops. Nine are said dead in the clashes. The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is attempting to reduce the power of the Sadrist political movement, backed by the Mahdi Army, in favor of his new ally, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Al-Hakim’s movement is more middle and upper class and more tied to Iran, while the Sadrists are working class or poor slum dwellers and Iraqi nationalists. In Baquba, a Sunni female suicide bomber targeted US backed Sunni militiamen of the local Awakening council, killing 3.
Kudos to James Glanz and Alissa Rubin of the NYT for getting the story! They point out that the US and Iran are on the same side in southern Iraq, both fearful of the nativist Sadr movement. This correct narrative is completely the opposite of what Americans have been spoon fed on television and by Bush / Pentagon spokesmen. I had pointed out this Bush- Iran convergence last week and also pointed out that US intelligence analysis admits it. The article is the first one I have seen to say that Iran supports al-Hakim’s ISCI in its bid to create a Shiite superprovince in Iraq’s south. I’ve never been able to discover what the Iranians feel about this and had wondered if they weren’t at least a little bit worried about a soft partition of Iraq because of its implications for Iranian Kurdistan, which might become restive and seek to join Iraqi Kurdistan. But it is plausible that Tehran might risk this scenario in order to gain a permanent regional ally in the form of the Shiite Regional Government in southern Iraq.
The Badr Corps paramilitary says that it is now the Badr Organization and is no longer a militia. The Badr is modeled on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is a sort of National Guard in Iran, so I suppose Badr is saying that its troops now play a similar role in Iraq, functioning as a slightly less formal state security force. But the Badr reporting line goes to MP Hadi al-Amiri and thence to cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, not to the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. Likewise, the Peshmerga paramilitary of the Kurds has been redefined as a National Guard and accepted as such in the Iraqi Constitution. But the question remains of what these militias would do if their own leadership did come into conflict with the prime minister. They are after all militias. As for Badr’s insistence that they haven’t run death squads, secret courts, or torture cells, actually they have. They just tend to do these things under the cover of the Ministry of the Interior. As the NYT report said, the US doesn’t see Badr as a militia “because they aren’t trying to kill us.”
What Condi’s diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors looks like from Moscow:
Professors and students in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, are requesting protection after a rash of kidnappings targeting them, al-Hayat writes in Arabic. They also want past such kidnappers now in state custody to sentence them quickly, fearful that local tribal sheikhs will intervene to get the miscreants released, resulting in reprisals against the victims.
- Around 8 am, three IEDs planted in three cars targeted employees of the Cabinet office. The first one was in Dora and the employee was driving his own car the BMW when it exploded and he was injured in that incident .The second one targeted another employee who was injured as he was driving his Hyundai car with another passenger who was sitting by him. The third one targeted a female employee’s car at Alawi neighborhood. She was injured in that incident.
- Around 10 am, two roadside bombs targeted two cars near the red crescent in Mansour neighborhood .No casualties reported.
- Around 11 am, random clashes took place at Rubayee street of Zayuna (east Baghdad). Six people were killed including a woman in that incident.
- Around 3:20 pm, mortars hit the green zone (IZ) in central Baghdad.No casualties reported.
- Around 4 pm, a roadside bomb targeted a KIA mini bus near the oil marketing headquarter at Zayuna neighborhood (east Baghdad). One person was killed and five others were injured in that incident.
- Around 4 pm, a mortar shell hit Mashtal neighborhood (east Baghdad). Two people were injured in that incident.
- Around 4 pm, clashes took place at Mashtal neighborhood (east Baghdad) between the Iraqi army and the Mahdi army . Five people were injured in that clashes.
- Around 6 and 6:30 pm, two Katyusha missiles hit the Supreme council headquarters .No casualties reported.
- Around 6:10 pm, a Katyusha missile hit the Salhiyah compound (central Baghdad).No casualties recorded ,but some cars were damaged in that incident.
- Police found 4 dead bodies in Baghdad today: (3) were found in east Baghdad (Risafa bank); 1 was in Zayuna , 1 was in Husseiniyah and 1 was in Mashtal. While(1) was found in Dora.
Diyala
- Around 1.15 pm, a female suicide bomber detonated herself near one of the popular committees headquarter at Mafraq in Baquba .Three members were killed and 4 others were injured.
Basra
- In the afternoon, a roadside bomb targeted an American patrol at Al-Ghuzaza bridge (north Basra), witnesses in Basra said . While the MNF in Iraq gave us this reply “We can confirm there was an IED attack on US troops today in Basra with casualties. No further information is releasable at this time.” ‘
Welcome to Informed Comment, where I do my best to provide an independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics.
Informed Comment is made possible by your support. If you value the information and essays, I make available and write here, please take a moment to contribute what you can.
