Iraq First Lady Narrowly Escapes death;
Baghdad Equivocates on Role of Iran
A roadside bomb almost killed Iraq's first lady on Sunday in Baghdad, striking her car and wounding three of her bodyguards.
Bush is asking for another $70 bn. for next year, most of it for the Iraq War. Will the next president have the courage to put the war in the regular budget and not disguise the costs as a "supplemental"? (Even a lot of smart people get fooled by this, talking about how the budget deficit shrank, even as they neglected to include the war expenses.)
CSM reports on the way the Iraqi government is in between the US and Iran and says it lacks hard proof of Iranian interference. It is forming a commission to look into the matter. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said at his first Sunday news conference that there is no hard evidence that the Iranian government is sending in arms to destabilize Iraq.
The headline writer of the Washington Post took the low road. Dabbagh met a second time on Sunday with reporters to clarify the issue of Iranian arms in Iraq. He said that there were certainly Iranian weapons in Iraq, but the question was where they came from. The Post headline tries to make it look as though Dabbagh was accusing the Iranian government; he was simply leaving open the possibility. Check into who wrote the headline. It will be revealing.
After all, Iran has a well developed criminal black market in arms (Ronald Reagan once got involved in it). So the presence of Iran-made weapons proves nothing about Iranian government intentions. The ayatollahs in Tehran have been openly siding with the al-Maliki government against the Mahdi Army militia.
Tom Engelhardt on the Iraq War as endless war.
Yahoo and Microsoft are forbidding Iranians to sign up for email services as Iranians. They have erased that country from their list of possible nationalities.
John Mearsheimer corrects the NYT review of Benny Morris's 1948. The review repeats a lot of old discredited chestnuts about the 1948 war. The Arab governments did not call on the Palestinians to leave, guys. There is no transcript of any such transmission in any archive. Nor would it make sense to deprive their armies of sympathetic locals who could offer food and information. Etc., etc. But Zionist propaganda, like other nationalist propaganda, has immense staying power in the face of contrary evidence.
McClatchy reports political violence on Sunday in Iraq:
' Baghdad
- Around 8 p.m. two roadside bombs targeted the Iraqi traffic police headquarters in Yarmouk neighborhood, killing one traffic policeman and injuring four others.
- Around 10 p.m. Mrs. Hiro Talabani, Iraq's first lady, survived a roadside bomb explosion that targeted her convoy near the Iraqi national theater in central Baghdad, injuring 4 bodyguards.
- Around 2:45 p.m. a magnetic bomb attached to a car exploded near the Green Zone injuring one civilian.
- Imam Ali Hospital in Sadr city received 5 dead bodies, including three children, and 17 injured, including children within the last 24 hours.
- Three mortar shells hit the Green Zone.
- Gunmen killed Dr. Ayaad Jafar, the assistant of head of Baghdad University, and injured two of his sons in Al Adel neighborhood.
- Two mortar shells slammed near Al Hurriyah square in Karrada injuring two civilians.
- A rocket hit a residential area in Karrada and didn't explode.
- A roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army vehicle in central Baghdad injuring two soldiers.
- A roadside bomb targeted civilians in Zayuna injured two children and one man.
- Iraqi police found three dead bodies throughout Baghdad, one in Zayuna, one in Mansour, one in Shurta Rabia.
Diyala
- A member of Al Sahwa (Awakening), a U.S. sponsored militia, was killed and another member was injured while trying to defuse a roadside bomb near one of Al Sahwa headquarters near Al Wajihiya area, 12 miles east of Baquba.
Salahuddin
- Gunmen bombed a policeman's house near Balad city, killing two women.
Nineveh
- Gunmen killed Sarwa Abdul Wahab, a journalist, a lawyer and a member of the Mosul branch of the Independent Electoral Commission in Iraq. She was leaving her house with her mother in Al Bakr neighborhood in Mosul.
- Gunmen killed two civilians in two different incidents in Mosul.
- A roadside bomb targeted a civilian car in Mosul killing one civilian.
Basra
- Iraqi police said an Iranian coast guard boat killed an Iraqi fisherman near Al Fau. A local fishermen association said three fishermen were killed in the attack. '
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/05/2008 01:07:00 AM
Click to join Infoco
5 Comments:
Iranian manufactured armaments and ordnance are freely available on the world's arms market (see LH menu at each site for specific items).
The mere discovery of Iranian manufactured weaponry in Iraq does not prove the material was shipped directly from Iran. There are a hundred, maybe more, active international arms dealers from Argentina to Zimbabwe. It's perfectly plausible that Iranian arms could be purchased by a middleman anywhere in the world and shipped to distributors in Iraq. The IRGC and other officials inside Iran may very well be involved in that. But simply discovering Iranian manufactured arms inside Iraq does not conclusively prove Iran is arming Iraqi militias directly.
Regarding the Washington Post propaganda, the New York Time's Michael Gordon is still at his old tricks. From today's edition:
May 5, 2008
Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD — Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.
An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.
The United States has long charged that the Iranians were training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran, which Iran has consistently denied, and there have been previous reports about Hezbollah operatives in Iraq.
But the Americans say the reports of Hezbollah’s role at the Iranian camp offer important details about Iranian assistance to the militias, including efforts Iran appears to be making to train the fighters in unobtrusive ways.
Material from the interrogations was given to the Iraqi government, along with other data about captured Iranian arms, before it sent a delegation to Tehran last week to discuss allegations of Iranian aid to militia groups.
It is not known if the delegation confronted its Iranian hosts with the information, or how the Iranians responded.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government announced Sunday that it would conduct its own inquiry into accusations of Iranian intervention in Iraq and document any interference.
“We have experienced in the past that Iran interfered and has special groups in Iraq, but Iran also had evidence that they were participating in positive ways in security,” Ali al-Dabbagh, a senior Iraqi government spokesman, said in an interview.
“We would like the Iranians to keep their commitment, the commitments they made in meetings with the prime minister and with other groups that have visited them,” he said. “They had made the promise that Iran would be playing a supportive role.”
There has been debate among experts about the extent to which Iran is responsible for instability in Iraq. But President Bush and other American officials, in public castigations of Iran, have said that Iran has been consistently meddlesome in Iraq and that the Iranians have long sought to arm and train Iraqi militias, which the American military has called “special groups.”
In a possible effort to be less obtrusive, it appears that Iran is now bringing small groups of Iraqi Shiite militants to camps in Iran, where they are taught how to do their own training, American officials say.
The militants then return to Iraq to teach comrades how to fire rockets and mortars, fight as snipers or assemble explosively formed penetrators, a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made of Iranian components, according to American officials. The officials describe this approach as “training the trainers.”
The training, the Americans say, is carried out at several camps near Tehran that are overseen by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Command, and the instruction is carried out by militants from Hezbollah, which has long been supported by the Quds Force. American officials say the Hezbollah militants perform several important roles for the Iranians.
First, they say, the Iranians believe it is useful to have Arabs train fellow Arabs. Second, Hezbollah has considerable experience in planning operations and using weapons and explosives in Lebanon.
According to American officials, the four Shiite militants who provided the information on Hezbollah’s role were captured between last September and December after they had returned from training in Iran. They were questioned individually and provided similar accounts, the American officials said.
The captured men described themselves in the accounts as part of a class of 16 militants who crossed into Iran from southern Iraq and were taken to a camp near Tehran, where they studied in a classroom and in the field. Some had been in Iran several times as part of a program that American officials said was aimed at turning them into “master trainers” and which could last several years.
According to their interrogation reports, the militiamen believed that militants from other countries were also being trained at the camp, an impression based on hearing snippets of conversations in other dialects and languages. But the group was kept separate and was not allowed to mingle with others.
American officials say that they believe that similar classes have been arranged for other groups of Iraqi militants, but that the effort appears to be compartmentalized to ensure security.
An American official said that an Iraqi who facilitated the militiamen’s travel to Iraq was also captured and confessed that he had been paid by an Iranian. The official summed up the information from the interrogation reports but did not make them available. He declined to be identified because the information had not been released publicly.
Other evidence of Iranian involvement that American officials have provided to Iraqi officials involves details of captured Iranian arms, like 81-millimeter mortars and 107-millimeter rockets that American officials say bear markings indicating that they were made this year. The weapons have a particular type of fuse and are painted in a way that American experts say is unique to Iran.
The Iraqi military also seized Iranian-made weapons with 2008 markings during their offensive last month in the southern port of Basra, according to American officials.
The reports of Iran’s training program and the discovered weapons caches are politically very significant. When Mr. Maliki visited Iran in August, the Iranians sought to reassure the Iraqis that they were not intervening in Iraq’s internal affairs.
The Bush administration, which has sought to draw attention to Iran’s support for militias, has cited the interrogation reports and evidence of recently made Iranian arms as an indication that the Iranian officials were not keeping their word.
“We don’t want to be at war with Iran, and we will not allow anyone to settle their scores with Iran on Iraqi soil,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Mr. Maliki, said Saturday in an interview. “But at the same time, we don’t want Iran to settle their scores with the United States on Iraqi soil.”
Discussing the delegation’s recent visit to Iran, Mr. Dabbagh, the government spokesman, and close associates of Mr. Maliki familiar with details of the trip said the group did not meet with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but met with leading officials from the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the intelligence agency.
Jalaluddin al-Sagheer, a prominent member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite political party, asserted that the Iraqi Shiite politicians would be loath to take any position that would alienate Iran.
“Iran is not an easy country for us,” he said. “We have a long border with them; we have a long history of relations with them; we have strong commercial ties with them and we cannot hurt that because of copies of documents.”
There have been earlier indications of Hezbollah involvement. Ali Mussa Daqduq, a senior Lebanese Hezbollah commander, was captured in Iraq in March 2007. At first he refused to talk, presumably to avoid giving away his Lebanese accent. As a consequence, he was initially dubbed Hamid the Mute by American officials.
According to American officials, Mr. Daqduq eventually acknowledged under questioning that he had come to Iraq to evaluate the performance of Shiite militias that the organization had played a role in training. He was making his fourth trip to Iraq when he was captured. After his detention, Hezbollah militants appear to be less visible in Iraq, American officials say.
Alissa J. Rubin and Qais Mizher contributed reporting.
ref : “Tom Engelhardt : Endless War”
Mr. Engelhardt here reviews almost all the rationales of cause célèbre ‘IRAQ’ : ie., from all the faux casus belli reasons (WMD; Saddam the Dictator; al-Qaeda 'link'; etc.) to invade IRAQ ~ to all the faux raisons d'être (OIL national interests; ‘Democracy’; Sunni:Shi'ite Civil War; IRAN!; etc.) to occupy IRAQ...
...to today, where ‘The Mission’ apparent appears to be (not unlike Viet Nam, imho, devolved to) SURVIVAL: the only U.S. media-reported metric of success being = our rate of KIA + WIA attrition; And we now find ourselves entirely bereft of Old Glory: having recently walled off to ghetto-ize and lay seige to Sadr City; hauling out M1 Abrams tanks with heavy cannons, and AH-64 Appache attack helicopters to hover over this Shi'ite slum and reign shellfire upon and rubble-ize it, and by our doing so collectively punish this urban population of 2+ million peoples living within metropolitan Baghdad. fwiw, The residents therein do oppose all occupation forces, and "foreign" influence over their lives ~ including, not only our own military presence but also that shadow of IRAN = BADR Corps militia that is the de facto ‘IRAQ’ government establishment and ‘Iraqi Army’.
After his recounting of recent history, told to us as this timeline series of Bush Administration ‘talking points’ -vs- reality Over There, Mr. Engelhardt then talks to us about this "Endless War" dynamic apparent, by referring to a statment made by The U.S. Secretary of Defense :
“Gates describes our war-fighting future in this way: "What has been called the 'Long War' (i.e. Bush's War on Terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."”
“"There are no exit strategies." That's a line to roll around on your tongue for a while...”
“...Put in a nutshell: If ‘the mission’ is heading into madness, then double the mission... This is brilliantly prosaic thinking, based on the assumption that the "global commons" should be ours and that the "next war" will be ours, and the one after that, and so on.”
But there he, Mr. Engelhardt leaves us. iow, after such an effort to establish his (timeline of historical facts) premise, the writer fails to extrapolate his topical thesis: “Why are we fighting ‘Endless War’, apparent?”, which ~ as i have suggested before, fwiw: the writer is more likely to find his purpose in the madness of perpetuating War Powers realpolitik, Over Here ~ rather than the madness of Endless War-making sans raisons raisonnables, Over There.
Joe Biden was a big supporter of this new armored vehicle. It took the Iraqi militias (or more ominous for the USA, Iranian or other foreign technicians) about fifteen minutes to figure out the vulnerabilities of the MRAP and exploit them.
2 more U.S. soldiers' deaths in Iraq raise doubts about MRAP vehicle
By Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers
05 May 2008
WASHINGTON — The deaths of two U.S. soldiers in western Baghdad last week have sparked concerns that Iraqi insurgents have developed a new weapon capable of striking what the U.S. military considers its most explosive-resistant vehicle.
The soldiers were riding in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protective vehicle, known as an MRAP, when an explosion sent a blast of super-heated metal through the MRAP's armor and into the vehicle, killing them both.
Their deaths brought to eight the number of American troops killed while riding in an MRAP, which was developed and deployed to Iraq last year after years of acrimony over light armor on the Army's workhorse vehicle, the Humvee.
The military has praised the vehicles for saving hundreds of lives, saying they could withstand the IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, which have been the biggest killers of Americans in Iraq. The Pentagon has set aside $5.4 billion to acquire 4,000 MRAPs at more than $1 million each, making the MRAP the Defense Department's third largest acquisition program, behind missile defense and the Joint Strike Fighter.
Full story Here.
.
Juan hit on a very key issue that none of the media report on, which is the differences in opinion on governance issues between the Ayatollah's in Iran and al-Sistani. Al-Sadr's block seems to favor a form of governance similar to what Iran has, with clerics governing according to sharia law (Islamic governance and courts). However "no sectarian violence" is a key al-Sistani supported doctrine and he clearly believes in an inclusive government with a minimal formal role for clerics, but a very large informal role. That is Iraq is likely never going to have a purely secular democracy like many in the US seem to assume - it will be unique, a sort of hybrid.
Al-Hakim seems to be somewhat of a moderating influence back and forth, proposing a separate region in southern Iraq which would be governed presumably along the same principles as Iran has. However when Iraq's government becomes more popular among Shiite's in particular, it clearly threatens popular support for Iran's more theological form of governance and Iran may feel obligated to interfere in Iraq in response. Therefore my view is Iran and Iraq may have a deeply troubled security relationship for years to come and there isn't much the US can do about it. However pushing simplistic notions of Iraq = "good" and Iran = "evil", as pro-Israel propagandists like the New York Times tend to do, is clearly destructive to both Iraqi and US long-term interests.
Post a Comment
<< Home