News & Views 05/24/07

Photo: A boy who was wounded in a suicide bomb attack receives treatment in a hospital in Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, May 24, 2007. At least 27 people were killed and dozens wounded on Thursday when a suicide bomber in a car packed with explosives drove into a crowd of mourners at a funeral in Falluja, police said. REUTERS/Mohanned Faisal (IRAQ)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

Curfew Begins to Choke Samarra

At least 10 residents have died as the result of a curfew imposed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, local doctors say. Residents in this city of 300,000 located 125km north of Baghdad have been struggling to find food, water and medical supplies. Vehicles have been banned from entering or leaving the city since May 6. The Iraqi government and the U.S. military imposed a strict curfew on the city that day after a suicide car bomb killed a dozen police officers, including police chief Abd al-Jalil al-Dulaimi. Samarra has been a hotspot of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq since close to the beginning of the occupation in March 2003. After the attack, U.S. and Iraqi forces encircled the city and sealed off all entrances with concrete blocks and sand bags. Local people told IPS that the main bridge in the city has been closed, ambulances have not been allowed to reach people, and residents are facing an increasingly dire situation. "We are being butchered here by these Americans," Majid Hamid, a schoolteacher in Samarra told IPS. "People are dying because we lack all of the necessities, and our government seems to be so happy about it."

Where Nobody Is Accountable

Killings, crime, lack of medical care, collapse of educationàthe list goes on. But with the occupation by U.S.-led forces now into a fifth year, and a supposedly democratic government in place, no one knows who to hold accountable for all that is going wrong. It is the occupation forces, particularly the United States and Britain, that must be held accountable, many Iraqis say. "It is good of these people to discuss accountability for theft, but the most important thing to account for is Iraqi blood," Numan Ahmed, a human rights activist from the Adhamiya neighbourhood in Baghdad told IPS. The British medical journal Lancet has reported that by July 2006, 655,000 people had died as "a consequence of the war." It has reported that the risk of death among civilians is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. "By now a million Iraqis have been killed for no reason, and many millions disabled or badly injured just because of some thieves in Baghdad and Washington," Ahmed said. "We are prepared to reveal the documents to condemn them even if takes us a lifetime." But Iraqis have no means to take action against occupiers. The United States has not accepted jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which has the power to investigate complaints of genocide. The United States took the view that the court could conduct "politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of U.S. military and political officials and personnel." U.S. opposition to the ICC is in stark contrast to the strong support for the Court by most of its closest allies. But Iraqis have found no way to proceed against these either. With no doors of justice open to them, many Iraqis are now taking to unlawful ways to hit back at occupation forces and government targets. "The only way to do it is at gunpoint," 32-year-old Ali Aziz from Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad, told IPS. "They invaded us at gunpoint and we find it ridiculous to talk about any other way of getting back what belongs to us." Aziz said he had lost several friends in attacks by U.S. soldiers. "The whole world is dealing with this in a hypocritical way, and there is only us to claim our rights the way we find proper." The human rights group al-Raya filed a case in a local court in Fallujah against U.S. forces in 2004, following a massive military crackdown. About three-quarters of all buildings in the city were destroyed or heavily damaged during the U.S. assault in November 2004. But U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces have hit out at the human rights group. "The secretary-general for the organisation has now been arrested by Fallujah police for reasons that we are not aware of, and the organisation is not functioning any more," a member of the board, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS in Baghdad. "It is not the right time to talk about accountability when daily killings by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are still ongoing. God knows if it will ever be possible."

Mob Cheers As British Soldier Dies

A cheering mob made victory hand signals yesterday after a British serviceman was killed in an ambush on the streets of Basra. The Ministry of Defence said the soldier was removed from Al Tuwaysa, central Basra, but died of his wounds later in hospital. A civilian driver in the convoy was killed at the scene of the ambush. The mob danced as his body was dragged from a burning fuel lorry. Pictures from the scene showed militants holding AK47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers as thick smoke from burning vehicles filled the air around them. The attackers were said to be members of the Mahdi army, the militia of Shia Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which is fighting to wrest control of Basra from the British-backed local government. In other clashes, witnesses said they had heard gunfire and grenade blasts only a few hundred yards from the governor's office in the centre of the city. The fighting comes as British troops are scaling down forces in Basra to hand over increased responsibility to police and army units. One leading private security firm has warned its clients that the Mahdi army uprising indicates that the movement has concluded that the central government will not survive in the long-term.

JOURNALISTS FACE REPRESSION ON ALL SIDES

The working environment for Iraq's journalists is becoming increasingly dangerous and difficult, with 31 killed just since the start of this year, according to the International Federation of Journalists. The dire situation has prompted both international and local media groups to design a new "safety strategy" involving the creation of special offices charged with protecting journalists in the face of "kidnappings, targeted killings and other threats to media". These offices will be set up in Baghdad and Arbil, and government and well as media outlets will have representatives there. Since the U.S. invasion in March 2003, at least 204 journalists have been killed in the country, a figure that surpasses the media death toll in any other war zone in history, IFJ reports. "It is wrong to be complacent about the media situation (in Iraq)," Aiden White, the secretary general of IFJ, told IPS on the sidelines of a May 10-11 safety strategy conference in Arbil that was organized by IFJ and two affiliated Iraqi and Kurdistan journalists' syndicates. "The first concern is, of course, the physical safety of journalists," he said. "But the discussion that follows is creating the right environment for journalists in terms of eliminating legal and political pressures." The IFJ, which represents some 500,000 members in more than 100 countries, has complained to U.S. authorities in Iraq about their failure to provide protection for journalists, with few results.

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

No water or electricty and Iraq to spend 1.5 billion dollars on weapons

Iraq's defence ministry will buy new weapons worth more than 1.5 billion dollars (1.11 billion euros), including helicopters and US rifles, the minister announced on Monday. The purchases will be made possible by a 26 percent increase in the country's defence budget, to 4.1 billion dollars (three billion euros) for the current fiscal year. "The Iraqi government has signed a contract with the American government to set up a foreign weapons sales office to buy weapons that Iraq needs," Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassim Mohammed said at a Baghdad press conference. "This programme will help Iraq to buy modern weapons and to ensure arrival of these weapons when the ministry asks for them," he added. Iraq has started importing American-made M-16 and M-4 rifles, which are slowly replacing the ubiquitous Soviet-designed AK-47 Kalashnikov among the Iraqi forces struggling to bring order to the country. Mohammed is also looking to beef up the country's air force and navy with the purchase of 29 Soviet-designed M-17 helicopters, six reconnaissance planes, 10 patrol boats from Italy and 26 from the United States.

Sunni Resistance Receptive to Sadr Alliance

Nationalist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's bid to unite Sunnis and Shiites on the basis of a common demand for withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces, reported last weekend by the Washington Post's Sudarsan Raghavan, seems likely to get a positive response from Sunni armed resistance. An account given Pentagon officials by a military officer recently returned from Iraq suggests that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province, who have generally reflected the views of the Sunni armed resistance there, are open to working with Sadr. According to Raghavan's report on May 20, talks between Sadr's representatives and Sunni leaders, including leaders of Sunni armed resistance factions, first began in April. A commander of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Abu Aja Naemi, confirmed to Raghavan that his organisation had been in discussions with Sadr's representatives. Sadr's aides say he was encouraged to launch the new cross-sectarian initiative by the increasingly violent opposition from nationalist Sunni insurgents to the jihadists aligned with al Qaeda. One of his top aides, Ahmed Shaibani, recalled that the George W. Bush administration was arguing that a timetable was unacceptable because of the danger of al Qaeda taking advantage of a withdrawal. Shaibani told Raghavan that sectarian peace could be advanced if both Sadr's Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups could unite to weaken al Qaeda. Raghavan reports that the cross-sectarian united front strategy was facilitated by the fact that Shaibani had befriended members of Sunni nationalist insurgent groups while he was held in U.S. detention centres from 2004 through 2006. Now Shaibani, who heads a "reconciliation committee" for Sadr, is well positioned to gain the trust of those Sunni organisations.

Baghdad District Is A Model, But Only For Shiites

Ice cream shops in the Shiite stronghold of Kadhimiya are flush with sweet-toothed customers. Hospitals have new supplies. Rents have tripled as displaced Shiites flock to the historic district's spacious homes, while pilgrims stream to the golden-domed shrine at its heart. Here on the volatile Sunni-dominated west bank of the Tigris River, religious Shiite leaders and their militias have unquestionably consolidated control, transforming Kadhimiya into what could be a model for much of Baghdad if the Shiites have their way. "This experience in Kadhimiya, you might find it in the future in every neighborhood throughout Iraq," said Sheik Muhammad Bakr Khamis al-Suhail, the white-robed leader of the neighborhood council. But the future that Kadhimiya points to may not be democratic, inclusive or just, at least by Western standards. Residents and American commanders describe the area as a nerve center for benign and malignant elements of Shiite power, the raw embodiment of the Shiite revival that has swept Iraq in the last four years. It is a place, they say, where militia leaders, Iraqi politicians, criminals and clerics intersect and compete; a place where the Iraqi soldier protecting residents on Monday may be collecting bribes for a militia on Tuesday, praying at the mosque on Friday and firing at American troops over the weekend.

Iraqi’s Peace Plans

Last week, a majority of Iraqi lawmakers demanded a timetable for U.S. and other foreign troops to leave their country. The very next day, the Al Fadhila party, a Shi'ite party considered moderate by the (often arbitrary) standards of the commercial media, held a press conference, in which it offered a 23-point plan for stabilizing Iraq. The plan addressed not only the current situation in Iraq -- acknowledging the legitimacy of Iraqi resistance, setting a timetable for a complete withdrawal of occupation troops and rebuilding the Iraqi government and security forces in a nonsectarian fashion -- but also the challenging mission of post-occupation peace building and national reconciliation. It included provisions for disbanding militias, protecting Iraq's unity, managing Iraq's natural resources, building relationships with other countries based on mutual interest and the principle of non-intervention in domestic issues, and healing the wounds of more than 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions and foreign occupation.

An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media. That's par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis -- remember them? -- have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country's ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders. Al Fadhila's peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition. More significant even than proposals made by Iraqi political parties are those put forth by the country's armed resistance groups --- the very groups that have the ability to bring a halt to the cycle of violence. Comprehensive plans have been offered by the Baath party, which ruled Iraq for three generations, the Islamic Army in Iraq and other major armed resistance groups and coalitions. The plans vary on a number of points, but all of them shared a few items in common: the occupation forces must recognize them as legitimate resistance groups and negotiate with them, and the United States must agree to set a timetable for a complete withdrawal from Iraq. That's the key issue, but Iraq's nationalists see it only as the first step in the long path to achieving national reconstruction and reconciliation.

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

U.S. quietly, dramatically increasing Iraq troop levels

The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday. This "second surge" of troops in Iraq, which is being executed by extending tours for brigades already there and by deploying more units, could boost the number of combat troops to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year. When support troops are included, the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000 - the most ever - by the end of the year. The efforts to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq are being carried out without the fanfare that accompanied President Bush's initial troop surge in January. Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, the U.S. commander who led NATO troops into Bosnia in late 1995, when asked to comment on the analysis of deployment orders, said: "It doesn't surprise me that they're not talking about it. I think they would be very happy not to have any more attention paid to this." The first surge was prominently proclaimed by Bush in a nationally televised address Jan. 10, when he ordered five additional combat brigades to join 15 brigades already in Iraq.

Secret US plot to kill Al-Sadr

The US Army tried to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the widely revered Shia cleric, after luring him to peace negotiations at a house in the holy city of Najaf, which it then attacked, according to a senior Iraqi government official. The revelation of this extraordinary plot, which would probably have provoked an uprising by outraged Shia if it had succeeded, has left a legacy of bitter distrust in the mind of Mr Sadr for which the US and its allies in Iraq may still be paying. "I believe that particular incident made Muqtada lose any confidence or trust in the [US-led] coalition and made him really wild," the Iraqi National Security Adviser Dr Mowaffaq Rubai'e told The Independent in an interview. It is not known who gave the orders for the attempt on Mr Sadr but it is one of a series of ill-considered and politically explosive US actions in Iraq since the invasion. In January this year a US helicopter assault team - tried to kidnap two senior Iranian security officials on an official visit to the Iraqi President. Earlier examples of highly provocative actions carried out by the US with little thought for the consequences include the dissolution of the Iraqi army - and the Baath party.

RESISTANCE

U.S. Latino Soldiers Who Refused Iraq Speak Out

A U.S. Army medic who refused to load his gun in Iraq and then escaped through a base window in Germany rather than be deployed a second time returned home to Los Angeles this week after serving six months in a U.S. military prison. By the time Aguayo arrived in Tikrit, he had already appealed to be discharged from the Army as a conscientious objector. He said he realised that he couldn't kill anyone and went out on patrol and guard duty without loading his gun. …….."It seemed like the whole point of these convoys was just to start a firefight," he said. "It's like a vicious circle that continues. We're there because there's conflict and there's conflict because we're there. It's a never-ending cycle." He told IPS that what he saw in Iraq strengthened his opposition to killing and war. "One time we were driving around the city setting up checkpoints and we heard an explosion so we went to see what was happening, and a vehicle of Iraqi police had been hit and my unit stayed back and I could see wounded people in the distance," he said. "We just stayed back and that seemed weird to me. I couldn't understand why we just stood there. I couldn't understand why we couldn't randomly help people. We could only help people when we hurt them." …….. "Initially it was that shocking moment," he said. "I had never gotten in trouble in any kind of way. Just two speeding tickets back when I started driving in 1990. But on the other hand it was also a moment of peace where I could reflect, and I'm really at peace because I finally have what I wanted for so long. I wanted to be separated from the military because this is wrong, because morally I couldn't continue down this path."

Kucinich Will Expose Iraqi "Hydrocarbon Act" Privatization In House Speech

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) will invoke a rarely used House procedure today to discuss the privatization of Iraqi oil on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Kucinich plans to invoke a point of personal privilege under House Rule IX to respond to published remarks regarding efforts he has made to inform the House Democratic Caucus of the details of the Iraqi Hydrocarbon Act. Kucinich will have one hour of time on the House floor in which he plans to explain why Congress' insistence on benchmarks in the supplemental, which includes passage of the Iraqi hydrocarbon act, demands that Iraqis privatize their oil.

Petition of Solidarity

Amidst rising bloodshed, President Bush has told the Iraqi Parliament they have till the 31st of May to pass a flawed oil law that could give multinational companies unprecedented control of Iraq's oil fields. But some Iraqi leaders are daring to resist - and they need our help. Two weeks from now, members of the Iraqi Parliament -- including Sunni, Kurdish and Shia leaders -- are planning to read Avaaz's petition of solidarity from the floor of Parliament. They say this statement of global support for Iraqi sovereignty will strengthen the resolve of their colleagues to face down Bush and big oil companies by opposing this law. So sign the petition today--let's make 100,000 voices heard in Iraq's Parliament before they vote. Our simple message: we support Iraq's sovereign right to its own oil. Revenue from oil should be distributed fairly to the Iraqi people. And the Iraqi national parliament should decide this without foreign influence.

Fixing What’s Wrong With Iraq

Many of my colleagues, faced with the reality that the war in Iraq is not going well, line up to place all the blame on the president. The president “mismanaged” the war, they say. “It’s all the president’s fault,” they claim. In reality, much of the blame should rest with Congress, which shirked its constitutional duty to declare war and instead told the president to decide for himself whether or not to go to war. More than four years into that war, Congress continues to avoid its constitutional responsibility to exercise policy oversight, particularly considering the fact that the original authorization no longer reflects the reality on the ground in Iraq. According to the original authorization (Public Law 107-243) passed in late 2002, the president was authorized to use military force against Iraq to achieve the following two specific objectives only: (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq ; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. I was highly critical of the resolution at the time, because I don’t think the United States should ever go to war to enforce United Nations resolutions. I was also skeptical of the claim that Iraq posed a “continuing threat” to the United States. As it turned out, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no al-Qaeda activity, and no ability to attack the United States . Regardless of this, however, when we look at the original authorization for the use of force it is clearly obvious that our military has met both objectives. Our military very quickly removed the regime of Saddam Hussein, against whom the United Nations resolutions were targeted. A government approved by the United States has been elected in post-Saddam Iraq , fulfilling the first objective of the authorization. With both objectives of the original authorization completely satisfied, what is the legal ground for our continued involvement in Iraq? Why has Congress not stepped up to the plate and revisited the original authorization?

Mad at Congress? Take the Iraq Vote Pledge

Are you mad at Congress for surrendering to George Bush over the Iraq Supplemental? So are we - and we're determined to do something about it. Together, we have spent the past six months doing everything in our power to persuade the new Democratic Congress to end the disastrous Iraq War. But even though a majority of Democrats (including Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid) want to set a timetable for withdrawal, Republicans are marching in lockstep behind Bush along with a crucial minority of "Bush Democrats." So what can we do? Let's put them on notice that we will defeat all pro-war Republicans next November, and replace "Bush Democrats" with progressive Democrats in next year's primaries. Take the Iraq Vote Pledge:

"I pledge to vote against every Senator and Representative who approves funding to continue the disastrous Iraq War. We have already given far too much of our blood and treasure - and killed far too many Iraqis - for a war based on lies. We are now occupying a hostile nation divided by civil war for the benefit of military contractors and Big Oil.”

The only way to support our troops is to bring them home NOW, and no funds should be used for any other purpose. If Congress fails to bring our troops home, I will do everything I can - and urge everyone I know - to defeat pro-war Senators and Representatives, both in my party's primary elections and in the November general election."