US Invasion of Iraq-Updates

[no1important]

It never ends

 

[Scape]

Does the saying, 'Tet offensive' mean anything?

 

[PoisonPete2]

This is quickly becoming a 'tit for tat' war. 6 Americans got car bombed in western Iraq so they bomb out the closest city, killing hundreds of civilians (read women and children). So now the Sunnis retaliate in a Shiite section of Bagdad. Unfortunately its getting harder to kill the Occupiers so the revenge is against fellow Nationals.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Would someone be kind enough to remind us just why this US invasion of Iraq was so gosh darned urgent and critically important????


What the US has done in Iraq and the lies they told to do it......is enough cause for ANGER at the US bumpkins for a long time to come. Just because Amerikans have short term memory problems.........the rest of the world does not...


each death / injury / torture/ beheading /suicide bombing in Iraq since the invasion is the RESPONSIBILITY of the USregime (and insanity of bush gang)

 

[Ocean Breeze]

bushlet taken to task at the UN over Iraq

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/09/16/chavez.un.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest


( now, why does that just make my day?? :wink:

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Azzaman, September 15, 2005


Hundreds of people are fleeing restive cities in the center and western parts of Iraq following the massive U.S.-led attack on Tal Affar which has led to the displacement of tens of thousands.

Many people in Samarra, 120 kilometers north of Baghdad, are reported to be leaving, fearing an imminent U.S.-led assault.

Long queues of cars are forming at military checkpoints waiting for permission to leave the city.

Senior Iraqi officials, including Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi, have warned that the attack on Tal Affar is one of a series of forays to subdue anti-U.S. and anti-government groups in other cities.

The attack on Tal Affar, described as the most ferocious after last year’s assault on Falluja, has resulted in massive relocation and displacement of nearly 200,000 people.

It is the second U.S. attack on Tal Affar in less than a year.

U.S. troops had moved on Samarra last year but the city is currently under the control of anti-U.S. groups.

The attack on Tal Affar has worsened security conditions in the country. There has been an upsurge in car bomb explosions and attacks in Baghdad which have killed and wounded hundreds of people.

The attack has exacerbated conditions in the nearby Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, where anti-U.S. forces have increased attacks and operations in the past few days.

Officials in the province of Salahuddin, of which Samarra is a major district, have voiced concern over government’s plans to use military force to subdue the city.

Salahuddin’s deputy Abdulla Jabbara, said the provincial authorities and “the people of Salahuddin categorically reject carrying out an attack on Samarra.”

He doubted whether military force, no matter how massive, would ever bring peace to the area.

“Previous attacks by U.S. and Iraqi forces on the city have not led to the imposition of security. On the contrary conditions have worsened.”

Residents say Samarra is in “deplorable conditions” with no functioning public services and absence of law and order.

Jabbara said the withdrawal of U.S. and Iraqi forces is the only solution to the plight of Samarra’s 200,000 people.

“Security should be left to the people of the city with the formation of a new police force and administrative council,” he said.

displacing people in Iraq, Displaced People in S.US. Hmmm.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Market bombing in Iraq kills many

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4256484.stm


( seems that the collective we might start to show our "gratitude" to the bush goons for ALL they have done for the Iraqis. (sarcasm) Particularly since the dead can't do it. :evil: :twisted: :x

 

[Ocean Breeze]

What has happened to Iraq's missing $1bn?
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent



19 September 2005


One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq's defence ministry in one of the largest thefts in history, The Independent can reveal, leaving the country's army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons.

The money, intended to train and equip an Iraqi army capable of bringing security to a country shattered by the US-led invasion and prolonged rebellion, was instead siphoned abroad in cash and has disappeared.

"It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history," Ali Allawi, Iraq's Finance Minister, told The Independent.

"Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal."

The carefully planned theft has so weakened the army that it cannot hold Baghdad against insurgent attack without American military support, Iraqi officials say, making it difficult for the US to withdraw its 135,000- strong army from Iraq, as Washington says it wishes to do.

Most of the money was supposedly spent buying arms from Poland and Pakistan. The contracts were peculiar in four ways. According to Mr Allawi, they were awarded without bidding, and were signed with a Baghdad-based company, and not directly with the foreign supplier. The money was paid up front, and, surprisingly for Iraq, it was paid at great speed out of the ministry's account with the Central Bank. Military equipment purchased in Poland included 28-year-old Soviet-made helicopters. The manufacturers said they should have been scrapped after 25 years of service. Armoured cars purchased by Iraq turned out to be so poorly made that even a bullet from an elderly AK-47 machine-gun could penetrate their armour. A shipment of the latest MP5 American machine-guns, at a cost of $3,500 (£1,900) each, consisted in reality of Egyptian copies worth only $200 a gun. Other armoured cars leaked so much oil that they had to be abandoned. A deal was struck to buy 7.62mm machine-gun bullets for 16 cents each, although they should have cost between 4 and 6 cents.

Many Iraqi soldiers and police have died because they were not properly equipped. In Baghdad they often ride in civilian pick-up trucks vulnerable to gunfire, rocket- propelled grenades or roadside bombs. For months even men defusing bombs had no protection against blast because they worked without bullet-proof vests. These were often promised but never turned up.

The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit says in a report to the Iraqi government that US-appointed Iraqi officials in the defence ministry allegedly presided over these dubious transactions.

Senior Iraqi officials now say they cannot understand how, if this is so, the disappearance of almost all the military procurement budget could have passed unnoticed by the US military in Baghdad and civilian advisers working in the defence ministry.

Government officials in Baghdad even suggest that the skill with which the robbery was organised suggests that the Iraqis involved were only front men, and "rogue elements" within the US military or intelligence services may have played a decisive role behind the scenes.

Given that building up an Iraqi army to replace American and British troops is a priority for Washington and London, the failure to notice that so much money was being siphoned off at the very least argues a high degree of negligence on the part of US officials and officers in Baghdad.

The report of the Board of Supreme Audit on the defence ministry contracts was presented to the office of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Prime Minister, in May. But the extent of the losses has become apparent only gradually. The sum missing was first reported as $300m and then $500m, but in fact it is at least twice as large. "If you compare the amount that was allegedly stolen of about $1bn compared with the budget of the ministry of defence, it is nearly 100 per cent of the ministry's [procurement] budget that has gone Awol," said Mr Allawi.

The money missing from all ministries under the interim Iraqi government appointed by the US in June 2004 may turn out to be close to $2bn. Of a military procurement budget of $1.3bn, some $200m may have been spent on usable equipment, though this is a charitable view, say officials. As a result the Iraqi army has had to rely on cast-offs from the US military, and even these have been slow in coming.

Mr Allawi says a further $500m to $600m has allegedly disappeared from the electricity, transport, interior and other ministries. This helps to explain why the supply of electricity in Baghdad has been so poor since the fall of Saddam Hussein 29 months ago despite claims by the US and subsequent Iraqi governments that they are doing everything to improve power generation.

The sum missing over an eight-month period in 2004 and 2005 is the equivalent of the $1.8bn that Saddam allegedly received in kick- backs under the UN's oil-for-food programme between 1997 and 2003. The UN was pilloried for not stopping this corruption. The US military is likely to be criticised over the latest scandal because it was far better placed than the UN to monitor corruption.

The fraud took place between 28 June 2004 and 28 February this year under the government of Iyad Allawi, who was interim prime minister. His ministers were appointed by the US envoy Robert Blackwell and his UN counterpart, Lakhdar Brahimi.

Among those whom the US promoted was a man who was previously a small businessman in London before the war, called Hazem Shaalan, who became Defence Minister.

Mr Shalaan says that Paul Bremer, then US viceroy in Iraq, signed off the appointment of Ziyad Cattan as the defence ministry's procurement chief. Mr Cattan, of joint Polish-Iraqi nationality, spent 27 years in Europe, returning to Iraq two days before the war in 2003. He was hired by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority and became a district councillor before moving to the defence ministry.

For eight months the ministry spent money without restraint. Contracts worth more than $5m should have been reviewed by a cabinet committee, but Mr Shalaan asked for and received from the cabinet an exemption for the defence ministry. Missions abroad to acquire arms were generally led by Mr Cattan. Contracts for large sums were short scribbles on a single piece of paper. Auditors have had difficulty working out with whom Iraq has a contract in Pakistan.

Authorities in Baghdad have issued an arrest warrant for Mr Cattan. Neither he nor Mr Shalaan, both believed to be in Jordan, could be reached for further comment. Mr Bremer says he has never heard of Mr Cattan.

A week of violence in Iraq

* SUNDAY 11 SEPTEMBER

Gunmen killed a senior Iraqi judge, his brother and a Major General in the Iraq army. A British and a US soldier were killed in bomb attacks.

* MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER

Gunmen killed nine civilians and two policemen in Baghdad and a roadside bomb killed six Iraqi soldiers in Fallujah.

* TUESDAY 13 SEPTEMBER

A car bomb killed five people and gunmen killed another four in the Mansour district of Baghdad Two civilians were killed by a suicide bomber on a bus in Hilla.

* WEDNESDAY 14 SEPTEMBER

At least 167 people were killed and 570 wounded in 14 bombings in Baghdad.

* THURSDAY 15 SEPTEMBER

Three suicide car bombers killed 28 policemen and eight civilians and gunmen killed four more people Baghdad.

* FRIDAY 16 SEPTEMBER

Two suicide car bombers killed 13 people, and gunmen shot dead eight more in Baghdad, including a local mayor in Iskanariya district and an imam in Sadr City.

* SATURDAY 17 SEPTEMBER

At least 52 people were killed or found dead throughout the country.

* SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER

At least three Iraqi soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb and an Iraqi MP and four others were shot dead by gunmen. Two dozen bodies of murder victims were found in the Tigris.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

The Cakewalk War
by Paul Craig Roberts
by Paul Craig Roberts



The "cakewalk war" is now two and one-half years old. US casualties (dead and wounded) number 20,000. As 20,000 is the number of Iraqi insurgents according to US military commanders, each insurgent is responsible for one US casualty.

US troops in Iraq number about 150,000. Obviously, US troops have not inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi insurgents. US troops have perhaps inflicted 150,000 casualties on the Iraqi civilian population, primarily women and children who are the "collateral damage" of the "righteous" and "virtuous" US invasion that is spreading civilian deaths all over Mesopotamia in the name of democracy.

What could the US have possibly done to give America a worse name than to invade Iraq and murder its citizens?

According to the September 1 Manufacturing & Technology News, the Government Accounting Office has reported that over the course of the cakewalk war, the US military’s use of small caliber ammunition has risen to 1.8 billion rounds. Think about that number. If there are 20,000 insurgents, it means US troops have fired 90,000 rounds at each insurgent.

Very few have been hit. We don’t know how many. To avoid the analogy with Vietnam, until last week the US military studiously avoided body counts. If 2,000 insurgents have been killed, each death required 900,000 rounds of ammunition.

The combination of US government owned ammo plants and those of US commercial producers together cannot make bullets as fast as US troops are firing them. The Bush administration has had to turn to foreign producers such as Israel Military Industries. Think about that. Hollowed out US industry cannot produce enough ammunition to defeat a 20,000 man insurgency.

US military analysts are beginning to wonder if the US has been defeated by the insurgency. Increasingly, Bush administration spokesmen sound like "Baghdad Bob." On September 19 the Washington Post reported that US military spinmeister Major General Rich Lynch declared "great success" against the insurgency that had just inflicted the worst casualties of the war, including a three-day mortar attack on the "safe" Green Zone.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, says: "We can’t secure the airport road, can’t stop the incoming (mortar rounds) into the Green Zone, can’t stop the killings and kidnappings." The insurgency controls most of Baghdad and the Sunni provinces.

With its judgement lost to frustration, the US military has 40,000 Iraqis in detention – twice the number of estimated insurgents. Who are these detainees? According to the Washington Post, "Many of the men detained in Tall Afar last week were rounded up on the advice of local teenagers who had stepped forward as informants, at times for what American soldiers said they suspected amounted to no more than settling local scores."

Obviously, the US, not knowing who or where the insurgents are, is just striking blindly, creating a larger insurgency.

The Iraq government, despite being backed by the US military, is unable to control movements across the Iraqi – Syrian border. So the Bush administration has passed the buck to Syria. Puny Syria is declared guilty of not doing what the US military cannot do.

Adam Ereli, the demented US State Department spokesperson, denounced the Syrian government for "permitting" insurgents to cross the border. The US government cannot prevent a steady stream of one million Mexicans from illegally crossing its border each year, but Syria is supposed to be able to stop a couple hundred foreign fighters from sneaking across its border.

Ereli misrepresents Syria’s inability to be "an unwillingness" which indicates that Syria is consorting with terrorists, not only in Iraq, but also in Lebanon and Palestine. Does this sound like Syria being set up for invasion?

According to news reports, at Ted Forstmann’s annual meeting of movers and shakers last weekend, US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, predicted that US troops will soon enter into Syria. Simultaneously, the Bush administration is desperately trying to orchestrate a case that it can use to attack Iran.

Stalemated in Iraq, the White House moron intends to attack two more countries.

At the Human Rights Conference on September 9, the former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, described Americans as "people with blood-soaked hands."

"Who are the terrorists," asked Mahathir, the Iraqis or the Americans?

The entire world is asking this question.

September 20, 2005

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the

ah yes, the "cakewalk " war. Or two. Over confident in their arrogance???

"Who are the terrorists," asked Mahathir, the Iraqis or the Americans?

The entire world is asking this question.

let's see now.... (a puzzlement??? Nope. ) Definately NOT the Iraqis........so that leaves.......drum roll please: The Amerikans.------and terrorize they continue to do.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0922-08.htm


Echos of the past......(not so distant past???)

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Iraqi resistance earns world’s respect
John Catalinotto,


Sep 22, 2005

In the more than two years since they began an armed struggle against the illegal U.S. occupation of their country, the Iraqi resistance has earned the respect of the world’s people.

Not only throughout Arab and Muslim lands, but at gatherings like the World Social Forum in India and Brazil, references to the Iraqi resistance were cheered. Spokespeople for the anti-globalization movement like Arundhati Roy as well as Marxists openly call for solidarity with the Iraqi resistance.

It is easy to understand why the Iraqi fighters have earned this solidarity. And it is time to extend the same solidarity from the anti-war movement here.

In April and May of 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s strategy of “shock and awe” appeared to have worked. Overwhelming U.S. military technology, with its modern “blitzkrieg,” was supposed to destroy the Iraq state and force the people to submit. Washington would then rule a docile Iraq and intimidate the world into following U.S. dictates.

Any defiant nations, which Bush called the “axis of evil,” could expect the same “shock and awe.” Iran and Syria were nearby targets. North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela were on the list. Zimbabwe came under pressure, too. Even China was threatened with being surrounded by U.S. military bases.

It was a grandiose plan. Once underway, it would mean the death of millions of people, including tens of thousands of GIs.

Fortunately for the world, the Iraqis refused to be a subject people and never let the plan get underway. The collective sacrifice of the Iraqi people has changed the balance of power in the world. It has weakened U.S. imperialism, especially its most aggressive elements, and encouraged defiance to U.S. dictates on every continent.

Now the Pentagon has problems recruiting enough soldiers to occupy Iraq, let alone conquer the world. U.S. threats to bomb Iran or Korea must still be taken seriously, as should threats to assassinate popular leaders like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. But where will the Pentagon find willing troops for new invasions?

The same enemy

It is appropriate, too, that the U.S. anti-war movement, especially the serious opponents of imperialism, think of the Iraqi resistance as an important ally. Recent events, including the Camp Casey struggles and Hurricane Katrina, have shown that some anti-war forces have already moved toward this position.

A dynamic sector of the anti-war movement now consists of “gold star” parents. It is a remarkable gain in political consciousness that the mother of a fallen GI from Baltimore, in the midst of grieving over her loss, can speak publicly of her understanding of why the Iraqis would fight to drive out the occupier.

Then there was Hurricane Katrina. The Bush regime was caught. It had stolen funds from levee repair to pay for the war. It criminally neglected to rescue those caught in the disaster. Millions now see that the government in Washington neither represents nor cares for the poorest sections of the U.S. working class, which are predominately African American and other people of color. It is a racist regime that sends its troops to kill people, not to save them.

The blows the Iraqi resistance strikes against the occupation are not blows against the U.S. population. On the contrary, weakening the regime in Washington strengthens the movement here for equality, for workers’ rights and to end the war. The population here and the Iraqis there have the same enemy: the regime in Washington.

Washington has no right to run Iraq

Washington lied to justify the war. It committed war crimes while smashing the Iraqi state and replacing it with an occupation regime and a puppet regime. International law recognizes the right of an occupied nation to fight for self-determination. Those who defend self-determination and the right to fight for it know the choice of methods and means must be left to the people carrying out that fight.

The Iraqi resistance is made up of many different organizations, with different political programs and goals and ideologies. There is armed struggle, union organizing, community organizing and other forms of struggle. As of yet there is no national front. The many Iraqi forces that want to end the U.S. occupation differ over tactics.

For example, the Iraqi National Foundation Congress on Sept. 15 issued a statement critical of the targeting of civilians a few days earlier in Baghdad, when 150 people were killed by a car bomb, but put the onus for the killing on the aggressive U.S. tactics in the north of Iraq.

Some people have argued that should U.S. troops leave, a civil war would occur, or that the Iraqis would choose a religion-based regime, or put Saddam Hussein back in power. Whatever the new Iraq looks like, this is a decision that only the Iraqis can make, and they can only make it when the Pentagon leaves.

If Washington can’t help the people of New Orleans, it certainly can’t help those of Baghdad.

The duty of the movement here is to join the struggle to make the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq impossible and to do this in solidarity with the Iraqi sisters and brothers who have stopped the empire in its tracks.

If Washington can’t help the people of New Orleans, it certainly can’t help those of Baghdad.

OOOOH.(ouch)..... that must hurt those pver inflated egos in washington.---IF they are paying heed...

 

[Ocean Breeze]

US soldiers kill deputy mayor, two police officers in northern Iraq

By Xinhuanet

TIKRIT, Iraq, Sept. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A deputy mayor of the Iraqi town of Dhuluiyah, some 100 km north of Baghdad, and two police officers were killed by US forces there on Friday, local policeand witnesses said.

"A group of US soldiers stormed the house of Brigadier Jabar Atiyah Saud, the deputy mayor of Dhuluiyah and dragged him out of his house before they shot him several bullets in his head," asource from the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, the US soldiers also killed two local police officers, Captain Amir Yousif and the 1st Lt. Jasim Khalaf, the source added.

The US troops have sealed off the town of Dhuluiyah since Tuesday, imposing curfew and preventing people from leaving their homes as US snipers deployed on roofs of high buildings, local residents told Xinhua by telephone.

"The US soldiers shot the drinking water containers above houses and many families are suffering from shortage in watersupplies," a local resident, Ammar al-Jubouri said. The wounded people or even deaths were not allowed to shift to the medical center outside the town, Jubouri said. On Wednesday, the US troops had detained the police chief of the town and hundreds of people, including dozens of policemen, after insurgents in Dhuluiyah attacked a convoy of trucks carrying military supplies for the US troops.

The attack damaged three trucks in the convoy guarded by the US troops and killed their three drivers, probably Turkish nationals, According to the source. Enditem

something about cold heartless KILLERS /assassins comes to mind. :evil:

 

[Ocean Breeze]

The logic of colonial rule

By Tariq Ali

09/23/05 "The Guardian" -- -- There is now near-universal agreement that the western occupation of Iraq has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster; first for the people of Iraq, second for the soldiers sent by scoundrel politicians to die in a foreign land. The grammar of deceit utilised by Bush, Blair and sundry neocon/neolib apologists to justify the war has lost all credibility. Despite the embedded journalists and non-stop propaganda, the bloody images refuse to go away: the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops is the only meaningful solution. Real history moves deep within the memory of a people, but is always an obstacle to imperial fantasists: the sight of John Reid and the Iraqi prime minister brought back memories of Anthony Eden and Nuri Said in Downing Street just before the 1958 revolution that removed the British from Iraq.

The argument that withdrawal will lead to civil war is slightly absurd, since the occupation has already accelerated and exacerbated ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq. Divide and rule is the deadly logic of colonial rule - and signs that the US is planning an exit strategy coupled with a long-term presence is evident in the new Iraqi constitution, pushed through by US proconsul Zalmay Khalilzad. This document is a defacto division of Iraq into Kurdistan (a US-Israeli protectorate), Southern Iraq (dominated by Iran) and the Sunni badlands (policed by semi-reliable ex-Baathists under state department and Foreign Office tutelage). What is this if not an invitation to civil war? The occupation has also created a geopolitical mess. Recent events in Basra are linked to a western fear of Iranian domination. Having encouraged Moqtada al-Sadr's militias to resist the slavishly pro-Iranian faction, why are the British surprised when they demand real independence?

The Iranian mullahs, meanwhile, are chuckling - literally. Some months ago, when the Iranian vice-president visited the United Arab Emirates for a regional summit, he was asked by the sheikhs whether he feared a US intervention in Iran. The Iranian leader roared with laughter: "Without us, the US could never have occupied Afghanistan or Iraq. They know that and we know that invading Iran would mean they would be driven out of those two countries."

Meanwhile, there is the war at home. A war against civil liberties masked as a defence against terror. In the face of terror attacks one particular mantra, shrouded in untruth, is repeated: "We shall not permit these attacks to change our way of life." But they do. "Oh, may no more a foreign master's rage/ With wrongs yet legal, curse a future age!" wrote Alexander Pope. Three centuries later, we have Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and Britain's own state security prison, Belmarsh, in which some of those held indefinitely without trial have been driven mad and transferred to Broadmoor. Nor should one forget the public execution of Jean Charles de Menezes and the attempted cover-up that followed.

There will be no progress towards peace so long as Tony Blair remains prime minister. He was re-elected with only 35 % of the popular vote and barely a fifth of the overall electorate - the lowest percentage secured by any governing party in recent European history. Britain is undergoing a crisis of representation: a majority of the population opposed the war in Iraq; a majority favours withdrawing British troops; 66% believe that the attacks on London were a direct result of Blair's decision to send troops to Iraq. All good reasons why we march and demand an end to war, occupation and terror on Saturday.

 

[gopher]

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article314745.ece


23 September 2005 21:38 Home > Comment > Commentators
Hart Viges: 'You can't wash your hands when they're covered in blood'
Published: 24 September 2005
My name is Hart Viges. September 11 happened. Next day I was in the recruiting office. I thought that was the way I could make a difference in the world for the better.

So I went to infantry school and jump school and I arrived with my unit of the 82nd Airborne Division. I was deployed to Kuwait in February 2003. We drove into Iraq because Third Infantry Division was ahead of schedule, and so I didn't need to jump into Baghdad airport.

As we drove into Samawa to secure their supplies my mortar platoon dropped numerous rounds on this town. I watched Kiowa attack helicopters fire Hellfire missile after Hellfire missile. I saw a C130 Spectre gunship ... it will level a town. It had belt-fed artillery rounds pounding with these super-Gatling guns.

I don't know how many innocents I killed with my mortar rounds. I have my imagination to pick at for that one. But I clearly remember the call-out over the radio saying "Green light on all taxi-cabs. The enemy is using them for transportation".

One of our snipers called back on the radio saying "Excuse me but did I hear that order correctly? Green light on all taxi cabs?" "Roger that soldier. You'd better start buckling up." All of a sudden the city just blew up. Didn't matter if there was an innocent in the taxi-cab - we laid a mortar round on it, snipers opened up.

Next was Fallujah. We went in without a shot. But Charlie Company decided they were going to take over a school for the area of operations. Protesters would come saying "Please get out of our school. Our children need this school. We need education".

They turned them down. They came back, about 40 to 50 people. Some have the bright idea of shooting AK-47s up in the air. Well a couple of rounds fell into the school ... They laid waste to that group of people.

Then we went to Baghdad. And I had days that I don't want to remember. I try to forget. Days where we'd take contractors out to a water treatment plant outside of Baghdad.

We'd catched word that this is a kind of a scary place but when I arrive there's grass and palm trees, a river. It's the first beautiful place that seemed untouched by the war in Iraq. As we leave, RPGs come flying at us. Two men with RPGs ran up in front of us from across the road.

"Drop your weapons". "Irmie salahak." They're grabbing on to women and kids so [we] don't fire. I can't take any more and swing my [gun] over. My sight's on his chest, my finger's on the trigger. And I'm trained to kill but this is no bogey man, this is no enemy. This is a human being. With the same fears and doubts and worries. The same messed-up situation.

I don't pull the trigger this time ... it throws me off. It's like they didn't tell me about this emotional attachment to killing. They tried to numb me, they tried to strip my humanity. They tried to tell me that's not a human being - that's a soft target.

So now, my imagination is running ... What if he pulled his trigger? How many American soldiers or Iraqi police, how many families destroyed because I didn't pull my trigger. After we leave this little village we get attack helicopters, Apaches, two Bradley fighting vehicles, and we go back. And we start asking questions. Where are they? Eventually they lead us to this hut where this family is living, and myself and [another soldier] started searching for AK-47s, for explosives, for RPGs, you know ... evidence. And all I can find is a tiny little pistol, probably to scare off thieves

Well because of that pistol we took their two young men ... Their mother is at my feet trying to kiss my feet like I deserve my feet to be kissed. Screaming, pleading. I don't need to speak Arabic to know love and concern and fear. I had my attack helicopter behind me, my Bradley fighting vehicle, my armour, my M4 [semi-automatic] with laser sight. I'm an 82nd Airborne killer. But I was powerless ... to ease this woman's pain.

After I came home I applied for conscientious objector [status]. I'm a Christian, what was I doing holding a gun to another human being? Love thy neighbour. Pray for those who persecute you, don't shoot them.

I get my conscientious objector packet approved. I'm free. It's all gone now, right? No! I still swerve at trash bags ... fireworks ... I can't express anything. All my relationships are falling apart because they can't fucking understand me. How do they know the pain I've gone through or the sights I've seen? The innocence gone, stripped, dead? I couldn't stand the pain. People were leaving me.

I couldn't cut my wrists. So I called the police. They come stomping through my door. I have my knife in my hand. "Shoot me." All of a sudden I was the man with the RPG, with all the guns pointed at him, thinking "Yes, we can solve the world's problems by killing each other". How insane is that? Lucky I lived through that episode. See, you can't wash your hands when they're covered in blood. The wounds carry on. This is what war does to your soul, to your humanity, to your family.

My name is Hart Viges. September 11 happened. Next day I was in the recruiting office. I thought that was the way I could make a difference in the world for the better.

So I went to infantry school and jump school and I arrived with my unit of the 82nd Airborne Division. I was deployed to Kuwait in February 2003. We drove into Iraq because Third Infantry Division was ahead of schedule, and so I didn't need to jump into Baghdad airport.

As we drove into Samawa to secure their supplies my mortar platoon dropped numerous rounds on this town. I watched Kiowa attack helicopters fire Hellfire missile after Hellfire missile. I saw a C130 Spectre gunship ... it will level a town. It had belt-fed artillery rounds pounding with these super-Gatling guns.

I don't know how many innocents I killed with my mortar rounds. I have my imagination to pick at for that one. But I clearly remember the call-out over the radio saying "Green light on all taxi-cabs. The enemy is using them for transportation".

One of our snipers called back on the radio saying "Excuse me but did I hear that order correctly? Green light on all taxi cabs?" "Roger that soldier. You'd better start buckling up." All of a sudden the city just blew up. Didn't matter if there was an innocent in the taxi-cab - we laid a mortar round on it, snipers opened up.

Next was Fallujah. We went in without a shot. But Charlie Company decided they were going to take over a school for the area of operations. Protesters would come saying "Please get out of our school. Our children need this school. We need education".

They turned them down. They came back, about 40 to 50 people. Some have the bright idea of shooting AK-47s up in the air. Well a couple of rounds fell into the school ... They laid waste to that group of people.

Then we went to Baghdad. And I had days that I don't want to remember. I try to forget. Days where we'd take contractors out to a water treatment plant outside of Baghdad.

We'd catched word that this is a kind of a scary place but when I arrive there's grass and palm trees, a river. It's the first beautiful place that seemed untouched by the war in Iraq. As we leave, RPGs come flying at us. Two men with RPGs ran up in front of us from across the road.

"Drop your weapons". "Irmie salahak." They're grabbing on to women and kids so [we] don't fire. I can't take any more and swing my [gun] over. My sight's on his chest, my finger's on the trigger. And I'm trained to kill but this is no bogey man, this is no enemy. This is a human being. With the same fears and doubts and worries. The same messed-up situation.
I don't pull the trigger this time ... it throws me off. It's like they didn't tell me about this emotional attachment to killing. They tried to numb me, they tried to strip my humanity. They tried to tell me that's not a human being - that's a soft target.

So now, my imagination is running ... What if he pulled his trigger? How many American soldiers or Iraqi police, how many families destroyed because I didn't pull my trigger. After we leave this little village we get attack helicopters, Apaches, two Bradley fighting vehicles, and we go back. And we start asking questions. Where are they? Eventually they lead us to this hut where this family is living, and myself and [another soldier] started searching for AK-47s, for explosives, for RPGs, you know ... evidence. And all I can find is a tiny little pistol, probably to scare off thieves

Well because of that pistol we took their two young men ... Their mother is at my feet trying to kiss my feet like I deserve my feet to be kissed. Screaming, pleading. I don't need to speak Arabic to know love and concern and fear. I had my attack helicopter behind me, my Bradley fighting vehicle, my armour, my M4 [semi-automatic] with laser sight. I'm an 82nd Airborne killer. But I was powerless ... to ease this woman's pain.

After I came home I applied for conscientious objector [status]. I'm a Christian, what was I doing holding a gun to another human being? Love thy neighbour. Pray for those who persecute you, don't shoot them.

I get my conscientious objector packet approved. I'm free. It's all gone now, right? No! I still swerve at trash bags ... fireworks ... I can't express anything. All my relationships are falling apart because they can't fucking understand me. How do they know the pain I've gone through or the sights I've seen? The innocence gone, stripped, dead? I couldn't stand the pain. People were leaving me.

I couldn't cut my wrists. So I called the police. They come stomping through my door. I have my knife in my hand. "Shoot me." All of a sudden I was the man with the RPG, with all the guns pointed at him, thinking "Yes, we can solve the world's problems by killing each other". How insane is that? Lucky I lived through that episode. See, you can't wash your hands when they're covered in blood. The wounds carry on. This is what war does to your soul, to your humanity, to your family.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

gopher: ......the ANGST that man must be living with now. and will indefinately. INSANE-(irrational) is the word for it. But then this whole situation was executed by a less than "sane" -rational person. In the modern era of psychological awareness, multitude of self help programs, and more sophisticated awareness... wonder how bush will fare in the historical perspective. seems his coping skills will be measured /evaluated along with his "leadership " skills/ techniques. So far he is short on true skills and long on manipulation and deceit.

what is amazing is that Amerikans (so many ) seem so unaware... or indifferent.

 

[Ocean Breeze]

September 23, 2005

While I was going over the local newspapers this morning, I read a shocking headline: "A 23-floor, 5-star hotel to be built inside the Green Zone". I read the whole article and I wished I did not. The article says "The Minister of reconstruction announced the approval of the Prime minister to build a 5-star hotel inside the Green Zone." Also, the article said the government is committed to rebuild the country to stop the deprivation that was done under the former regime.

Isn't that ridiculous? What does it mean to spend millions of dollars in a place where no Iraqis can go? If someone gets married and wants to spend few nights at this 5- star hotel, he should get the permission first from the Americans and maybe they would give him a special badge just like others who work inside the fortified Zone. Why did Jafari approve spending millions of dollars on something that would not be used by Iraqi citizens? Didn't he think of the destruction that happened and still happening to Baghdad and Iraqi cities in general? Didn't he think that there are several 5-star hotels in Baghdad that need to be rehabilitated and make the people enjoy going to them? Didn’t he think of the jobless people who are supposed to build their country outside the Green Zone instead of building a fancy hotel for westerners only inside it? Didn't he think that this will hurt the feeling of the Iraqi people when they see they will be deprived from something built by their own money? I just want to understand, why doesn't he think of all of that?

A friend of mine, who works at the ministry of immigrants and displaced, told me that the Council of Ministers rejected donating the ministry which is supposed to provide the refugees of Tal Afar with food and tents. Consequently, the team sent to Tal Afar will be back soon without providing all of the refugees with their needs.

Now I want to ask him, is it worthy to build a five-star hotel for westerners and prevent people of this country from their RIGHT?!

Now you, Iraqi people, the government whom you voted for forgot about you and started taking care of their allies rather than you. You are left with a dirty city, no place to have fun in, no clubs, no open roads, no services, no electricity, no fuel, no water, no safety, and no CONTROL at all. This government is hiding behind the Jersey Walls surrounding the Green Zone where the 5-star hotel will be built. This government which says it "cares about you and about your safety" is building a new 5-star hotel. What a tragedy?! "Long live the Tyrant." As Twenty Four Steps to Liberty

for the pleasure and comfort of all the oil moguls?? & other V.I. P.s Someone has their priorities in order. NOT.

 

[gopher]

Looks like the British holiday in Basra is over =

Shia militia fires up anti-British hatred after SAS rescue

By Adrian Blomfield in Baghdad

(Filed: 23/09/2005)
Daily Telegraph
The Shia militia accused of taking two SAS soldiers hostage in Basra this week sought to stoke growing anti-British sentiment in southern Iraq yesterday by accusing London of masterminding terrorist attacks in the country.

The smear campaign is another blow to the British Army's hopes of restoring its affection among locals and its previously good relationship with Basra's administration - two factors that have distinguished the British-controlled south from Iraq's chaotic Sunni Arab provinces.


A crowd at anti-British demonstrations in Basra Relations with Iraqi authorities in the country's second city sank to their lowest level after Basra's governing council announced it was ending all co-operation with British forces in response to Monday's rescue of the two soldiers.

Basra's governor, Mohammed al-Wa'eli, accused Britain of "imperial arrogance".

He told Reuters news agency: "The governing council has decided to stop all co-operation with the British until they meet three demands. To apologise for what happened, to guarantee that it does not happen again, and third, to provide some compensation for all the damage they did during the operation."

British diplomats expressed hope that a compromise could be found, saying the conditions were "not insurmountable".

A British embassy spokesman in Basra said: "We've had two and a half years of fantastic relations. The conditions they have laid out shouldn't be a problem.

''We regret the disturbances to the people of Basra but the situation demanded the response. British lives were in danger, civil authority had broken down and there was a serious danger they had been handed over to Shia militia."



British Warrior armoured vehicles punched holes in the wall of a police station where the two men were initially held and then destroyed a building belonging to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army where they were later transferred. Senior aides of Sadr, who twice led bloody uprisings against American forces in the south last year, sought to capitalise on a rumour that has gained widespread acceptance in Basra that the two men were Israeli spies caught trying to plant bombs.

Abdel Hadi al-Daraji, the cleric's top official in his main bastion, the sprawling Sadr City slums of Baghdad, told The Daily Telegraph that Britain was plotting to start an ethnic war by carrying out mass-casualty bombings targeting Shia civilians and then blaming the attacks on Sunni Arab groups.

"Everyone knows the occupiers' agenda," insisted Mr Daraji, who is currently the only Mahdi army official authorised to speak directly on Sadr's behalf.

"They are in bed with Mossad [the Israeli intelligence service] and their intention is to keep Iraq an unstable battlefield so they can exploit their interests in Iraq." But Mr Daraji insisted that Sadr was not going to call for a Shia uprising in Basra, where he enjoys only a limited, if growing, following in the city's slums.

"We have to take the moral high ground and resist this provocation by the British," he said. "This is a very dangerous, very sensitive time in Iraq but we must calm our supporters or we will fall into the British trap."

Sadr has been keen to cultivate a degree of legitimacy since he agreed to join the political process last year. But he has recently come out in opposition to a new constitution and some western diplomats say he is again trying to stir up his followers.

"He is basically trying to keep them just under boiling point so that, if he chooses the road of violence, they will jump when he gives the command," a diplomat in Baghdad said.

Sadr yesterday sent an envoy, Mudhafar al-Moussawi, to the south, ostensibly with orders to calm his supporters. But the envoy's message, delivered on radio broadcasts, was far from calming. He described this week's incidents in Basra as "a second Abu Ghraib". He also called on the British people to rise up and "overthrow the terrorist government of Tony Blair''. In many ways, Sadr does not need to start an uprising in Basra. He already enjoys a disproportionate degree of influence on both the police force and the city's administration.

The Jameat police station where the two soldiers were originally held is under the control of the internal affairs and serious crimes unit, the most influential department in Basra's police force - and the most heavily penetrated by the Mahdi army.

Sadr will also be convinced that the withdrawal of co-operation from the Basra administration will effectively corral British troops in barracks, solidifying the Mahdi army's control of the city.

Although British soldiers have maintained a much lower profile in Basra since Monday, joint patrols with the police have not been entirely suspended.

 

[jjw1965]

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a premeditated murderous act of aggression

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Why Immediate Withdrawal Makes Sense
Commentary: The US is part of the problem in Iraq, not part of the solution.

By Michael Schwartz

September 22, 2005



Conflict Studies
From filibustering Frist to taking a stand on Darfur: Our annual roundup of college campus activism.

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That we are in a military quagmire in Iraq has become a fact of life among Americans of all political persuasions. Though Administration officials still sometimes speak of troop reductions in early 2006, and some top military men clearly no longer endorse "staying the course," the muted voices of reason within the military and the State Department still talk in terms of a three-to-five year drawdown of forces followed by the "sustained presence of a large American contingent, perhaps 50,000 soldiers," to be housed in the huge permanent bases the U.S. is continuing to construct and upgrade in Iraq. In addition, Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force Chief of Staff, recently told New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt that U.S. air power would be flying combat missions inside Iraq "more of less indefinitely."

Many in the anti-war movement, despite the high-intensity moments generated by Camp Casey and Cindy Sheehan's demand that President Bush at least meet with her "before another mother's son dies in Iraq," also seem increasingly resigned to a long-term military engagement with Iraq. While most continue to advocate the "immediate withdrawal" of American troops, such calls are uttered with little sense of hope. In fact, there appears to be a growing feeling that any form of "immediate" withdrawal will prove a thoroughly unsatisfactory option, destined only to intensify the present chaos in Iraq, trigger a civil war, and/or unleash a round of ethnic violence that could escalate to levels of near-genocidal mass murder. Instead, ever more critics of Bush's Iraqi adventure are proposing "phased" withdrawal scenarios that could keep American troops at the ready for years to prevent the Iraqi pressure cooker from blowing its top.

Many of these cautious withdrawal scenarios are advocated by staunch opponents of the war. I am thinking, in particular, of Juan Cole, the most widely respected antiwar voice, and Robert Dreyfuss, a thoughtful critic of the war who publishes regularly at the independent website Tompaine.com as well as in the Nation and Mother Jones. Both have offered forceful warnings against a hasty American withdrawal, advocating instead that U.S. forces be pulled out in stages and only as the threat of civil war recedes. Dreyfuss expresses the thinking of many antiwar activists thusly:


"They worry that if the United States withdraws from Iraq, the result will be an all-out civil war among three major ethnic and religious blocs. (It's facile to argue that Iraq is already wracked by civil war; yes, there is widespread terrorism, a guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation forces, and periodic clashes between Sunnis and Shiites. But it hasn't reached anything like civil war proportions yet, and it might: Things could get far, far worse.) Maybe it's too late for the United States to be able to do anything to prevent the outbreak of such a catastrophic civil conflict. But because there is so much at stake, it's worth a try."

Cole captures the same logic in a phrase: "All it would take would be for Sunni Arab guerrillas to assassinate Grand Ayatollah Sistani. And, boom"

And they are right. Black Wednesday, September 14, with its 12 Baghdad car bombs, killing at least 160 Iraqis, and wounding upward of 600, offered a flash of civil-war-level violence. Ordinarily, Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence accounts, on average, for fewer than 100 civilian deaths a week. This was true even during the car-bomb offensive just after the January elections. If a Black Wednesday occurred every week, the death toll from such violence might reach 15,000 per year, and we could start talking about a real civil war. So things could indeed get much worse.

But where Dreyfuss and Cole are mistaken is in concluding that U.S. forces can be part of an effort "to prevent the outbreak of such a catastrophic civil conflict." Despite the plausible logic of this argument, the U.S. presence doesn't deter, but contributes to, a thickening civil-war-like atmosphere in Iraq. It is always a dicey matter to project the present into the future, though that never stopped anybody from doing so. The future, by definition, is unknown and so open to the unexpected. Nonetheless, it is far more reasonable, based on what we now know, to assume that if the U.S. were to leave Iraq quickly, the level of violence would be reduced, possibly drastically, not heightened. Here are the four key reasons:

1. The U.S. military is already killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die in any threatened civil war;

2. The U.S. presence is actually aggravating terrorist (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it;

3. Much of the current terrorist violence would be likely to subside if the U.S. left;

4. The longer the U.S. stays, the more likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil war will prove accurate.

American Violence in Iraq

In listing the problems faced by Iraqis ("widespread terrorism, a guerrilla war against the U.S. occupation forces, and periodic clashes between Sunnis and Shiites."), Dreyfuss is succumbing to the reportage of the mainstream press, which rarely mentions the immense toll that American forces are taking every day inside Iraq.

In fact, the best estimate is that the occupation has been killing about 40,000 Iraqi civilians each year. These figures were first published a year ago in a path-breaking, yet largely neglected, study published in the British medical journal the Lancet by a mixed team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Iraqi universities; but careful vetting of war reports indicates that something close to these rates seems to have been maintained ever since. That helps explain why even the distinctly limited numbers collected by U.S. and Iraqi official sources (when released at all) almost always report that American (or other) occupation forces account for at least two-thirds of all civilian deaths in military actions, with an unknown proportion of the remainder due to the actions of the Iraqi government, not the resistance.

There are four main ways American forces in Iraq accomplish such mayhem.

First, there are the hundreds of checkpoints around Baghdad and in other contested cities, sites of numerous violent incidents. Because of the danger created by the threat of suicide bombers, those guarding the checkpoints are ordered to fire at suspicious activity. The following account of the death of Reuters reporter Waleed Khaled, offered by Major-General Rick Lynch based on an official U.S. Army investigation, makes clear why even the most savvy Iraqi is risking his or her life approaching a checkpoint:


"Lynch said soldiers reacted when they saw the car traveling ?forward at a high rate of speed. That particular car looked like cars that we have seen in the past used as suicide bombs. It wasn't a new car, it was an older model car... And there were two local nationals inside the car. Our soldiers took appropriate measures. We mourn the loss of life of all humans... But our soldiers are trained to respond in those situations. Put yourself in the place of the soldiers, knowing that the insurgents, who have been known to use suicide bombs, suicide car bombs, suicide vests, to attack innocent civilians, will always have an attack and then respond to that attack when the first responders come forward. So our soldiers took appropriate action on that particular case.'"

With some 600 checkpoints in Baghdad alone, and as many as 100 cars approaching each checkpoint during a non-curfew daylight hour, there are upwards of 250,000 chances each day for an Iraqi driver to fail to slow down soon enough, or, distracted, fail to see the checkpoint in time, or do something to make jumpy soldiers jump. If only one out of 40,000 drivers makes this mistake that still would produce perhaps 6 lethal incidents a day -- in which case about 2,000 Iraqis would meet Waleed Khaled's fate each year, although without the benefit of news coverage and a U.S. Army investigation, however perfunctory. (Note that, at this point, we have just about no way of knowing in any of the death situations discussed here and below how many Iraqis are dying, so these are the crudest of figures.)

Second, American troops are constantly patrolling contested areas in Iraqi cities under instructions to use "overwhelming force" in firefights with actual or suspected resistance fighters. If they encounter sustained resistance, the rules of engagement call for demolishing buildings occupied by snipers, and treating all inhabitants of such buildings as the enemy. Among the several hundred patrols or more each day around Iraq, it appears that about one in ten result in lethal firefights. Even if fewer than half of these firefights produce a single collateral civilian death, this tiny percentage would yield perhaps 15 deaths on an average day or close to 5,000 civilian deaths a year.

A third staple of the occupation is entering houses in search of suspected insurgents, either because they have been identified by informants, or as part of house-to-house searches after IED or other guerrilla attacks. U.S. statistics indicate that no fewer than 75% of all entered houses do not contain an insurgent, but the army rules of engagement require that soldiers enter without knocking and by crashing through doors in order to retain the element of surprise, and thus prevent either an ambush or an escape by suspects. Lethal force is used at the first sign of resistance or attempted escape --to preempt attacks with weapons that suspected insurgents might have hidden nearby. (The army argues that, while more humane treatment might create less anger among the tens of thousands of non-resistant families whose homes are invaded, such restraint would also expose the soldiers to many more casualties from the occasional resistance fighter. Military philosophy in this and other settings is to protect the lives of American soldiers "even if those methods do not always win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi populace.")

With several hundred such missions undertaken each day, and such patrols entering as many as a dozen houses on a patrol, American troops enter something like 2,000 Iraqi homes on an ordinary day. If only one of every one hundred entries results in violence, and far less than half end in a dead civilian, these home invasions can still account for 10 or so deaths per day, or another 3,500 per year.

Fourth and finally, we come to American air power. When American patrols, large or small, encounter violent resistance, their rules of engagement call for the use of overwhelming fire power to eliminate the enemy. Where their immediate response fails to destroy the enemy, an air assault is often ordered, with either gunships or bombers. Air assaults are also ordered against suspected insurgent "safe houses."

Although they are rarely reported, such air assaults are the most terrifying and ferocious forms of American violence. Virtually all of these strikes occur in highly populated areas, sometimes destroying whole houses, or even whole groups of houses, and (where the inhabitants haven't fled) they sometimes kill whole families in the process. The New York Times recently reported such an attack in the border city of Husaybah, which "destroyed three houses in an area that has experienced intense fighting." Unlike most such news items, this one also contained an Iraqi Interior Ministry report of casualties. Based on local hospital reports, the Ministry claimed that the air strikes "had killed more than 40 civilians, mostly members of an extended family who had sought shelter from the bombings." (American officials, as is their general practice, said they "knew of no civilian casualties.")

American officials do concede that they average about "50 close air support and armed reconnaissance missions every day." These occur at all of the familiar urban hotspots: Baghdad, Falluja, Mosul, Tal Afar, Ramadi, Samarra, as well as numerous smaller towns. If only one in five of these missions produces civilian casualties, and if the average death toll is only four instead of 40, then 15,000 Iraqi civilians die every year from U.S. air attacks.

The depressing total of these very rough calculations is over 25,000 civilian deaths each year, more than five times the number caused by car bombs and other Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. (And remember, we're not even figuring in major American military campaigns against the insurgency.) To add to the levels of mayhem, keep in mind that, at any given moment, the U.S. military keeps perhaps another 12,000-15,000 Iraqis locked in its prisons, holding areas and interrogation centers. Numbers like this, or even lower versions of the same, explain why in a country with a population of only 25 million, so many Iraqis see the Americans as the main source of the daily violence they endure, and why 60% regularly tell even American-sponsored pollsters that they want an American withdrawal immediately, if not sooner. This also explains why the primary condition for a cease fire set by the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS, the political arm of the Sunni resistance) was an American "troop pullout from most urban areas and an end to military checkpoints and raids." AMS leader Isam al-Rawi explained:


"The Americans and British must leave all residential areas?This is very sensitive for our feelings. When they retreat to military bases outside the major cities, the Iraqis will no longer be meeting military tanks and trucks in the streets and highways, and they will no longer be afraid their homes will be invaded at night."

Iraqi-on-Iraqi Violence

The prospect of a civil war is, of course, horrendous, but the ongoing American violence is massive enough that it would take several Bloody Wednesdays every week to match it. This, of course, is a possibility, but a more reasonable guess would be that, in a trade-off between the end of U.S. violence and an escalation in the civil war, the result would actually be a decline in civilian casualties in Iraq.

But a quick U.S. withdrawal would be less likely to produce a civil war than leaving American troops in place as a barrier against such a development. The killing and imprisonment policies of the occupation itself are the main generating and sustaining force for the rising levels of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. The sooner the occupation ends, the sooner Iraqi civil violence is likely to begin to subside.

To grasp this point, it is necessary to understand that there are -- broadly speaking -- two tendencies within the Sunni resistance against the U.S. occupation. While they share the goal of expelling the Americans, their strategies and tactics are fundamentally different. One tendency, which many Iraqis designate the "nationalist resistance," seeks in the short run to expel the Americans from their local communities by attacking American patrols and checkpoints with roadside explosives and hit-and-run attacks. An operation is a success when it ties down American troops and therefore prevents them from manning checkpoints, marching through neighborhoods, or conducting house-to-house searches. While their attacks often kill innocent bystanders, they do not usually purposely target civilians, and often condemn those who do, calling them terrorists and outlaws.

The other tendency, designated the "jihadists" by many Iraqis, fights to weaken the resolve of the Americans and of Iraqis who, by their definition, help the occupation. For the jihadists, an operation is a success when it inflicts either a huge toll in casualties or scores a propaganda victory against the occupation or its supporters. Their tactics are designed to intimidate and demoralize their opposition. They therefore try to mount spectacular attacks on U.S. forces, the Iraqi military and police, Iraqi government officials, and also Iraqi civilians they feel are aiding the Americans, attempting to intimidate them away from voting in elections, participating in local government, or joining the police force or the new Iraqi military.

Beyond this immediate terrorist purpose, the leadership of the jihadists, most notably Abu Musab al Zarqawi, seeks sooner or later to create a mega-state among all Sunni Arabs in the Middle East. Zarqawi and others of his persuasion believe that Shiite Muslims are the main barrier to such a state and that, in the long run, they must be defeated. They therefore focus their terrorist attacks on the Shia, who, they believe, support the American-installed Iraqi government (rather than on the Kurds, who support that government far more avidly than any Shia group). In this way, the jihadist leadership hopes simultaneously to undermine Shia support for the American-sponsored government and to weaken the Shia in what they consider to be a larger, longer term confrontation.

Numerically, the jihadists represent a tiny minority of resistance fighters in Iraq (certainly no more than 10%). The vast majority (probably well over 90%) of the 70 or so attacks each day are conducted by the nationalist resistance. But the jihadists are responsible for the high-profile car bombings and the spectacular attacks against Shia mosques and other "soft targets." These account for the vast majority of all the civilian casualties inflicted by the resistance.

Given this situation, how might a speedy American withdrawal affect the levels of Iraqi-generated violence? Most obviously, it would eliminate the presently predominant form of Iraqi violence -- the 65 or so guerrilla attacks against American forces every day, (though many guerrilla units might redirect their attention to the Iraqi army, insofar as it chose to conduct American-type patrols in disputed neighborhoods). And it would also obviously eliminate the jihadist attacks against American troops and bases.

But those fearful of civil war worry that the American absence would remove the main deterrent to terrorist attacks and simply free-up jihadist resources from anti-American operations to unleash further mayhem. The full jihadist effort could then be concentrated on attacking the Shia.

Violence after an American Departure

What this assumption ignores, however, is a simple (though not obvious) fact: The terrorist offensive against the Shia is largely a consequence of American brutality in Iraq. Despite Abu Musab al Zarqawi's oft repeated desire to launch a holy war against the Shia, his success in doing so is directly linked to a continuing U.S. presence. His primary appeal in Iraq, after all, rests on the claim that the occupation is "being aided by their allies from Shia." Moreover, because, he claims, "the Shia sect has always spearheaded any war against Islam and Muslims throughout history," he insists that they can never be brought into a movement to oppose the occupation and therefore have to be treated like the enemy. It is this appeal that, in Sunni areas, has allowed him to recruit supporters for his anti-Shia campaign.

University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win, the definitive book on suicide terrorism, spoke for virtually all terrorism experts, when he made this very point to the American Conservative magazine, asserting that every suicide bombing campaign "is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The [American ] operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life."

Thus, while Zarqawi is seeking a holy war against the Shia, the real question -- as Pape puts it -- is whether "anybody listens to him." In other words, his success depends on his ability to recruit new martyrs (inside and outside Iraq) to undertake suicide missions. This recruitment, in turn, depends upon two factors: the level of mayhem the occupation creates, which generates the anger that creates his volunteers; and the credibility of his claims that the Shia are allies of the Americans.

On both accounts, the military occupation of the country, by its very presence and its actions, continually pours more gasoline on an already burning fire, and cannot help but continue to do so as long as it attempts to pacify the resistance. After all, the daily mayhem in Baghdad and other cities, and the spectacular American assaults on cities like Falluja and Tal Afar, are broadcast across Iraq and the entire Muslim world (even if they are often largely ignored in the American media). These increase support for both the nationalist guerrillas and the jihadist terrorists.

In addition, under the strain of an exhausted army and a fractured budget, the Bush administration is seeking to "Iraqify" the occupation by replacing American troops with Iraqis. In 2004, after Sunni police and military units melted under fire or defected to the guerrillas, the U.S. began relying more heavily on Shia recruits (as well as Kurdish militiamen, or Pesh Merga) in their battles with the Sunni resistance. The brutality of the American military plan for pacifying the country, now being enacted by ever more Shia and Kurdish soldiers, has convinced increasing numbers of Sunnis that Zarqawi's claims about the Shia are all too correct, and so has allowed him to recruit increasing numbers of willing martyrs, both in Iraq and in neighboring countries.

Just before Bloody Wednesday, at Tal Afar, Shia (as well as Pesh Merga) soldiers were given frontline responsibility for lethal house-to-house searches, spearheading the wholesale destruction of individual homes, many with residents still inside, and whole neighborhoods. It was no surprise, therefore, when, a few days later, Zarqawi declared that Bloody Wednesday was the beginning of the "battle to avenge the Sunni people of Tal Afar," and also the beginning of a "full scale war on Shiites around Iraq, without mercy." Here again, American action exacerbated rather than suppressed internal Iraqi friction.

This constant and escalating provocation only swells the reservoir of willing martyrs and increases the plausibility of Zarqawi's claim that the sole route to "liberation" involves direct attacks on Shia citizens.

On the other hand, history indicates that once the provocation of foreign troops is removed, the reservoir tends to quickly drain. Terrorism expert Robert Pape reports that, in recent history, it is almost unknown for suicide bombings to continue after the withdrawal of the occupying power:


"Many people worry that once a large number of suicide terrorists have acted that it is impossible to wind it down. The history of the last 20 years, however, shows the opposite. Once the occupying forces withdraw from the homeland territory of the terrorists, they often stop--and often on a dime."

American withdrawal is therefore the cornerstone of any strategy that wants to maximize the hope of avoiding civil war. It would, at one and the same moment, remove the major source of Iraqi civilian deaths -- and remove the primary flash point that leads to the car bombings. It would certainly mean as well the withdrawal of Shia and Kurdish troops from Sunni cities -- the key to Zarqawi's ability to convince (some) Sunnis that the Shia are willing pawns of the occupation and so their eternal enemies.

The clock is ticking however. With each new American attack, more Sunnis are convinced that their hope for liberation lies with Zarqawi's strategy. And with each new terrorist attack, Shia anger -- already at a high level, given the degrading nature of the American occupation and two years of American-style "reconstruction" -- is likely to become ever more focused on the Sunni community that appears to be harboring the terrorists. Recently there have been growing signs of violent Shia retaliation. If the terrorist attacks continue unabated, then increasing numbers of Shia may adopt an attitude complementary to Zarqawi's -- blaming the entire Sunni community for the terrorist attacks. If this occurs, Zarqawi will have succeeded in his personal goal of "dragging them into the arena of sectarian war," and a raging civil war may truly develop.

Zarqawi's plan will be in danger of collapsing, however, if the U.S. withdraws.

American withdrawal would undoubtedly leave a riven, impoverished Iraq, awash in a sea of weaponry, with problems galore, and numerous possibilities for future violence. The either/or of this situation may not be pretty, but on a grim landscape, a single reality stands out clearly: Not only is the American presence the main source of civilian casualties, it is also the primary contributor to the threat of civil war in Iraq. The longer we wait to withdraw, the worse the situation is likely to get -- for the U.S. and for the Iraqis.

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics

Note: the US is the problem ,NOT the solution. ( a no brainer) (and was from the onset)

 

[Ocean Breeze]

Blood and Oil

It has long been an article of faith among America's senior policymakers -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil -- a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today. Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region.

American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish -- rather than enhance -- America's access to foreign oil.

An Occupation Floating on a Sea of Oil

Oil was certainly not the only concern that prompted the American invasion of Iraq, but it weighed in heavily with many senior administration officials. This was especially true of Vice President Dick Cheney who, in an August 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, highlighted the need to retain control over Persian Gulf oil supplies when listing various reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any doubt that Cheney's former colleagues in the oil industry viewed Iraq's oilfields with covetous eyes. "For any oil company," one oil executive told the New York Times in February 2003, "being in Iraq is like being a kid in F.A.O. Schwarz." Likewise oil was a factor in the pre-war thinking of many key neoconservatives who argued that Iraqi oilfields -- once under U.S. control -- would cripple OPEC and thereby weaken the Arab states facing Israel.

Still, for some U.S. policymakers, other factors were preeminent, especially the urge to demonstrate the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine, the precept that preventive war is a practical and legitimate response to possible weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions on the part of potential adversaries. Whatever the primacy of their ultimate objectives, these leaders shared one basic assumption: that, when occupied by American forces, Iraq would pump ever increasing amounts of petroleum from its vast and prolific reserves.

This sense of optimism about Iraq's future oil output was palpable in Washington in the months leading up to the invasion. In its periodic reports on Iraqi petroleum, the Department of Energy (DoE), for example, confidently reported in late 2002 that, with sufficient outside investment, Iraq could quickly double its production from the then-daily level of 2.5 million barrels to 5 million barrels or more. At the State Department, the Future of Iraq Project set up a Working Group on Oil and Energy to plan the privatization of Iraqi oil assets and the rapid introduction of Western capital and expertise into the local industry. Meanwhile, Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi -- then the Pentagon's favored candidate to replace Saddam Hussein as suzerain of Iraq (and now Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister in charge of energy infrastructure) -- met with top executives of the major U.S. oil companies and promised them a significant role in developing Iraq's vast petroleum reserves. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he insisted in September 2002.

Aside from the purely pecuniary benefits of seizing Iraqi oil, administration officials of all persuasions saw another key attraction: once Iraqi fields were pumping oil again, the resulting revenues would essentially pay for the war and the costs of occupation. "We can afford it," White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey said of the planned U.S. invasion, because rising Iraqi oil output would invigorate the U.S. economy. "When there is regime change in Iraq, you could add three to five million barrels [per day] of production to world supply," he told the Wall Street Journal in September 2002. Hence, "successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy." In one of the most striking comments of this sort, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional panel, "The oil revenue of [Iraq] could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Clearly, gaining control of what Wolfowitz once described as a country that "floats on a sea of oil" was one of the Pentagon's highest priorities in the early days of the invasion. As part of its planning for the assault, the Department of Defense established detailed plans to seize Iraqi oil fields and installations during the first days of the war. "It's fair to say that our land component commander and his planning staff have crafted strategies that will allow us to secure and protect these fields as rapidly as possible," a top Pentagon official told news reporters on January 24, 2003. Once U.S. troops entered Iraq, special combat teams spread out into the oil fields and occupied key installations. In fact, the very first operation of the war was a commando raid on an offshore loading platform in the Persian Gulf. "Swooping silently out of the Persian Gulf night," an over-stimulated reporter for the New York Times wrote on March 23, "Navy Seals seized two Iraqi oil terminals in bold raids that ended early this morning, overwhelming lightly armed Iraqi guards and claiming a bloodless victory in the battle for Iraq's vast oil empire."

This early "victory" was followed by others, as U.S. forces occupied key refineries and, most conspicuously, the Oil Ministry building in downtown Baghdad. So far, so good. But almost instantaneously things began to go seriously wrong. Lacking sufficient troops to protect the oil facilities and all the other infrastructure in Baghdad and other key cities, the military chose to protect the oil alone -- allowing desperate and rapacious Iraqis to go a rampage of looting that fatally undermined the authority of the military occupation and the U.S.-backed interim government. To make matters worse, the very visible American emphasis on protecting oil facilities while ignoring other infrastructure gave the distinct -- and not completely inaccurate --impression that the United States had invaded Iraq less to liberate it from a tyrannical regime than to steal, or at least control, its oil. And from this perception came part of the anger and resentment that constituted the essential raw materials for the outbreak of an armed insurgency against the American occupation and everything associated with it. The Bush administration never recovered from this disastrous chain of events.

An Occupation Engulfed in a Sea of Fire

The Iraqi insurgency is not monolithic, and it is not always possible to determine the intentions of its various components. Nevertheless, it is clear that oil -- that is, the association between Iraqi oil and the American occupation -- plays a central role in the insurgents' hazy ideology. "The insurgents used this," Iraqi-born oil consultant Falah Alijbury said of American plans to privatize the Iraqi oil industry. As he put it, the insurgents are telling fellow Iraqis, "Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable." From Alijbury's perspective, this is one of the insurgency's most powerful appeals.

The disparate Iraqi insurgent groups were also aware of Washington's intent to finance its war and occupation through sales of Iraqi petroleum, and so have made sabotage of Iraq's pipelines, pumping stations, and loading terminals one of their most important strategic objectives. According to one source, insurgents conducted 230 major attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure between January 2004 and September 7, 2005, causing billions of dollars in losses. Here, for instance, is a listing of some of the most recent attacks, as compiled by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security:

* August 20: Attack on a major pipeline between Bayji and Baghdad stopped electricity to the capital.

* August 26: Insurgents sabotaged an exporting oil well north of Kirkuk.

* August 27: Bomb beneath an oil pipeline supplying the Daura oil refinery in Baghdad, causing an hour-long fire.

* August 29: Rebels fired a mortar at Iraq's oil ministry building in Baghdad.

* August 30: Lt. Colonel Mohammed Rashad, commander of a unit protecting Iraq's oil pipeline network, was assassinated in front of his home in Kirkuk as he was leaving for work.

* Sept 3: An explosion on oil pipeline 2.5 miles from Fatha, between Kirkuk and Bayji, stopping oil flow from Kirkuk to Ceyhan after insurgents ignited an oil leak.

* Sept. 5: Oil pipeline connecting Bayji and Baghdad was set on fine west of Samarra.

As a result of such attacks, which continue to occur on a near-daily basis, Iraqi oil output has actually declined since the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. According to the DoE, total production stood at 1.9 million barrels per day in May 2005, compared to 2.6 million barrels in January 2003, just before the American invasion. Quite the opposite of paying for the American occupation, as promised by administration officials, Iraqi production is costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars per year. Underwriting the costs of using American soldiers and U.S.-paid private guards to protect Iraq's highly vulnerable pipelines and refineries has proved expensive indeed.

At present, American forces are protecting two main components of Iraq's oil infrastructure: the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan export pipeline in the north, near Iraq's border with Turkey; and offshore loading terminals in the south, on the edge of the Persian Gulf. Protection of the northern pipeline is the responsibility of Task Force Shield, a mobile combat unit made up of Army forces drawn from Fort Wainright, Alaska and Fort Lewis in Washington State. In the Gulf, protection of the loading platforms is the responsibility of the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.

These oil-protection operations have proved extremely hazardous. In April 2004, for example, suicide bombers in a small boat approached the Khor al-Amaya offshore loading terminal and detonated their explosives when approached by a U.S. patrol ship, killing two Navy sailors and one Coast Guard sailor -- the latter being the first Coast Guardsman to be killed in combat since the Vietnam War. Adding further symbolism to this event, the platform involved was one of those occupied by Navy Seals in March 2003 in that "bloodless victory in the battle for Iraq's vast oil empire."

Despite the deployment of American troops at key oil facilities and the ever-rising amounts of money invested in pipeline security, the Department of Defense has made zero progress in its drive to boost Iraqi oil output. "In the north, Iraq's main export pipeline looks all but impossible to protect from sabotage," the British Financial Times reported in June. "Meanwhile in the south, local tribal disputes, which often go unreported, hamper efforts to restore oilfields, while security costs and other reconstruction bills all reduce the amount of money available for [the rehabilitation of] the oil industry."

Efforts to boost Iraqi oil production have also been hampered by two other problems: pervasive corruption in the Oil Ministry and severe differences between the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shiites over the future allocation of oil revenues.

Just how much Iraqi oil has been lost to corruption or black-market transactions is impossible to determine, but experts believe the amounts are substantial. "Administrative corruption takes on so many forms," Muhammad al-Abudi, the Oil Ministry's director-general of drilling, observed in March 2005. "The robberies and thefts that are taking place on a daily basis and on all levels... are committed by low-level government employees and also by high officials in leadership positions in the Iraqi state," he noted. Typically, these losses are blamed on insurgent activity, thereby diverting attention from the government figures actually responsible. "It seems there that there is an implicit alliance between the smuggling and sabotage forces aimed at increasing the rates of exhaustion of the state resources," Diya al-Bakka, another senior Oil Ministry official told Oil & Gas Journal in May.

The corruption and mismanagement has had another serious consequence for Iraq's long-term oil potential: in order to maximize output now, and thereby keep the dollars rolling in, Iraqi oil executives are employing faulty pumping methods, thus risking permanent damage to underground reservoirs. For example, managers are continuing to pump oil from Iraq's main Rumailia oilfield, one of the world's largest, even though water injection systems (used to maintain underground pressure) have failed; in so doing, they are thought by experts to be causing irreversible damage to the field. "The problem is that [underground] pressure problems could lead to a permanent decline in production," observed one European buyer of Iraqi oil quoted in the Financial Times last June. Even if U.S. companies later were to gain access to Iraqi fields, therefore, they might find yields to be disappointing.

Just as significant is the warring between Iraq's three main ethnic and religious communities over the distribution of future oil royalties. Most of Iraq's large oilfields are concentrated in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south. The Kurds and Shiites want most of the royalties to be distributed to Iraq's provinces on a per capita basis which would benefit them, but leave funds relatively scarce for the Sunni region and for any future central government in Baghdad. A failure to reach agreement on this issue was one of the main obstacles to final adoption of the new Iraqi constitution, and helped prompt the Sunni delegates to reject the final text. The Sunnis are also worried by provisions of the proposed constitution that allow groups of provinces (presumably in the Kurdish and Shiite areas) to form self-governing regional entities which could lead to the breakup of Iraq into three semi-independent statelets, with the Sunnis occupying the smallest and poorest region in the center. Not only would such a breakup enhance the Sunnis' sense of alienation from the Iraqi nation-building project -- thereby further invigorating an already vigorous insurgency -- but it would also disrupt Iraqi oil operations and make investment in Iraq's petroleum industry even less attractive to foreign oil companies. The net result, in all likelihood, will be a further decline in Iraqi petroleum output.

The Oil Evaporates

From all that can be seen, oil production in Iraq is likely to remain depressed for years, no matter how much more blood is shed in its pursuit. It is already evident that American military action will not lead to democracy in Iraq, merely to the division of the country into separate ethnic enclaves, one possibly ruled by Iranian-like ayatollahs; it can now also be said that we will not gain any additional petroleum supplies as a result of all this sacrifice and tragedy. Not only has the use of force to procure Iraqi oil failed to achieve its intended results, it has actually made the situation worse.

This is an important conclusion to draw from Iraq as the United States becomes ever more dependent on imported petroleum. Even before Katrina struck a blow to our domestic oil industry, the Department of Energy was already projecting our reliance on imports to grow from about 53% of total consumption in 2002 to 66% by 2025. As a result of the hurricane, that percentage will in all likelihood be pushed much higher, because most of the growth in domestic petroleum output was expected to occur in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico -- the area most heavily affected by Katrina and its 2004 predecessor Ivan. A number of the drilling platforms in these waters were sunk by the storms which also played havoc with the pipelines connecting them to shore. True, many of the platforms that survived will be repaired and put back into operation, but insurance rates have skyrocketed; and investors may prove hesitant, even with oil prices soaring, to put up billions of dollars to install new platforms that will only be washed away in the next major hurricane. As a result, domestic U.S. output may fall well below DoE projections, and so more of our supply will have to be imported.

And there is no question where this additional oil will have to be procured: in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, the Andes, and other areas beset by chronic instability and conflict. These are the only areas capable of increasing oil output sufficiently to satisfy rising U.S. demand, and so these are the areas that will attract the greatest American attention and potential Pentagon involvement. If past experience is any indication, U.S. policymakers will respond to the dilemma of our growing dependence on unstable foreign providers by sending more and more American military forces to these areas in a desperate attempt to ensure uninterrupted access to oil. This is, in fact, the underlying reason for the Pentagon's search for new military bases in Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Africa.

Despite the debacle of Iraq, most senior policymakers appear to retain their blind faith in the efficacy of military force as a tool for securing access to foreign sources of petroleum. This, as Iraq makes painfully clear, is delusional. Yet they persist in risking the lives of young Americans and others in their continued adherence to a failed and immoral strategy. Any attempt to reconstruct American foreign policy on a more rational and ethical basis must, therefore, begin with the repudiation of the use of force in procuring foreign oil and the adoption of a forward-looking energy strategy based on increased conservation and the rapid development of alternative fuels.

Michael T. Klare is the Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum