News & Views 07/25/07

.Photo: Iraqis cheer as they follow the Asian Football Cup 2007 semifinal match between Iraq and South Korea at a cafe in central Baghdad. Bombers murdered at least 26 Iraqi football fans Wednesday as they cheered their team's victory in the Asia Cup semi-finals but failed to stop thousands more from sharing a rare moment of national joy.(AFP/Ahmad al-Rubaye)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

Video: Iraqis Celebrate Soccer Win

VERY WELL DONE MEN

YES YES YES YES. CONGRATULATION TO ALL MY IRAQI BROTHERS. YES WE DID IT TO THE FINAL MATCH OF ASIA CHAMPIONSHIP. THE MATCH WITH THE KOREAN TIGER. WE DEFEATED THEM AND WE ARE NOW ONE SIDE OF THE FINAL MATCH. WE WILL WAIT FOR THE OTHER MATCH OF SAUDI ARABIA AND JAPAN. BY GOD WELL, WE WILL WIN THE NEXT MATCH AND WE WILL BE THE CHAMPION OF ASIA. MY COUNTRY DESERVE ONE MORE SMILE.

Bombings Strike Soccer Fans in Baghdad

Two suicide car bombings struck soccer fans in Baghdad as they were celebrating Iraq's victory in the Asian Cup semifinal on Wednesday, killing at least 50 people and wounding more than 100, officials said. The victims were among the thousands of revelers who took to the streets of the capital after the country's national soccer team beat South Korea to reach the tournament's final against Saudi Arabia on Sunday in Jakarta, Indonesia. The first attack took place about 6:30 p.m. when a bomber exploded in a crowd of people cheering near a well-known ice cream parlor in Baghdad's western neighborhood of Mansour, according to police and hospital officials. At least 30 people were killed and 75 were wounded, an Interior Ministry official said. Another suicide car bomber detonated his payload about 45 minutes later in the midst of dozens of vehicles filled with revelers near an Iraqi army checkpoint in the eastern district of Ghadeer, killing at least 20 people, including two soldiers, and wounding 61, according to the ministry official.

Lovely ….. Lovely

I could see that she was remembering the time when this was normal practice, at the club or in a fancy restaurant… and she was vivacious as I'd not seen her in a long time; laughing and joking. But my son couldn't remember those times clearly. He found the experience innerving. Out, in a restaurant AFTER NINE!! He was not comfortable; neither could he eat his supper with ease, and asked if he could have it to go. He was the son of these times as neither his sister nor I were.. Both were sitting across the table from me, two different pictures of two different times. I took pity on him and we left as soon as we had finished our meal. As we entered the hotel, his spirits revived and he took his immaculate supper to the diner where most of the guys watch TV in the evening. He felt safe. For me – for my daughter, it was a flashback into our former "normal" lives; for my son, it was a strange experience….. We really are slipping back into ages long gone…. aren’t we? Our clock is moving backwards.

Basra doctors on strike, demand protection

Nearly 150 doctors in Basra, Iraq's second largest city about 600km south of Baghdad, began a three-day strike on 23 July, demanding the government protect them and their families. “We will not attend our clinics and will not do operations for three days to draw to the government's attention our plight as doctors living in harsh conditions,” said Dr Muaid Jumaa, head of the Basra Doctors’ Association. Jumaa said 12 doctors had been killed in Basra by unidentified gunmen since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and dozens of others had fled the city. “We are protesting against the assassinations, kidnappings, threats and blackmail facing doctors in Basra and calling on the government to shoulder its responsibilities in protecting this important sector of our society,” Jumaa said. “The government has to improve the security situation in the province and this is not hard,” he continued.

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

VIDEO: Iraq’s “Success” Story’s Ugly Side

Bloc Suspends Iraqi Gov't Membership

Iraq's largest Sunni Arab bloc said Wednesday it has suspended its membership in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government, dealing a new setback to the Shiite leader's efforts to achieve national reconciliation. The Iraqi Accordance Front, which has six Cabinet members as well as 44 of parliament's 275 seats, said it was giving al-Maliki a week to meet their demands or it would quit his 14-month-old Cabinet altogether. ``The Accordance Front announces the suspension of its membership in the government,'' Sheik Khalaf al-Elyan said at a news conference attended by the two other leaders of the three-party Accordance Front - Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi of the Iraqi Islamic Party and Adnan al-Dulaimi of the Congress of the People of Iraq. Al-Elyan leads the National Dialogue Council.

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

House passes Lee's bill barring permanent Iraq bases

The House voted 399-24 today to pass Rep. Barbara Lee's bill to prevent creation of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq and to bar U.S. control of Iraqi oil. Lee's HR 2929 was considered under suspension of the rules, which bars amendments, limits debate and requires a two-thirds vote for passage -- a sign that House Democratic leaders saw it not only as good policy, but as another tool putting Republicans on the spot to oppose a long-term presence in Iraq. "Putting Congress on record with this clear statement helps take the targets off our troops' backs and it supports our goals of handing over responsibility for security and public safety to Iraqi forces," Lee, D-Oakland, said on the House floor. "We must soundly reject the vision of an open-ended occupation as bad policy that undermines the safety of our troops and recognize it for what it is: another recruiting poster for terrorists," she said. [How fast can bush say “veto” or “signing statement”? Or maybe he will pretend that those bases were never “permanent” meaning lasting more than 100 years. – dancewater]

New US Embassy Rises in Iraq

Huge, expensive and dogged by controversy, the new U.S. Embassy compound nearing completion here epitomizes to many Iraqis the worst of the U.S. tenure in Iraq. "It's all for them, all of Iraq's resources, water, electricity, security," said Raid Kadhim Kareem, who has watched the buildings go up at a floodlighted site bristling with construction cranes from his post guarding an abandoned home on the other side of the Tigris River. "It's as if it's their country, and we are guests staying here." Despite its brash scale and nearly $600-million cost, the compound designed to accommodate more than 1,000 people is not big enough, and may not be safe enough if a major military pullout leaves the country engulfed in a heightened civil war, U.S. planners now say. Militants have fired shells into the compound in the fortified Green Zone, where more than 85 rocket and mortar strikes have killed at least 16 people since February, according to a United Nations report last month. Five more people died in fierce barrages this month. "Having the 'heavily fortified Green Zone' doesn't matter one iota" when it comes to rocket and mortar attacks, said one senior military officer.

Like much U.S. planning in Iraq, the embassy was conceived nearly three years ago on rosy assumptions that stability was around the corner, and that the military effort would gradually draw down, leaving behind a vast array of civilian experts who would remain intimately engaged in Iraqi state-building. The result is what some analysts are describing as a $592-million anachronism. "It really is sort of betwixt and between," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations who advises the Defense Department. "It's bigger than it should be if you really expect Iraq to stabilize. It's not as big as it needs to be to be the nerve center of an ongoing war effort."

Serving in Iraq

The young soldier joined the military for college tuition. At the behest of his father, a Vietnam veteran, he talked to a recruiter. The day he was to enlist in the National Guard his father threatened the recruiter. The metal hip, the bad knee, hand and shoulder where he had been shot, were reminders of what this man's father had been through in Vietnam. Something the man rarely spoke of to his son. His father taught him about the "evil American military/politcal machine." He thought things had changed. "My theory was that we had learned our lesssons from Vietnam and that Americans would never let that happen again. Wrong!" he wrote. The father and son struck a deal. The teen-ager would enlist in the ROTC and become an officer. When he donned his uniform tears rolled down his father's cheeks. "I had never seen my father cry," he wrote. Today he serves his second deployment in Iraq and this is his description of his military service: "Our job is to go around the world killing people at the American citizens' expense." Somewhere in Iraq this soldier is hurting.

Iran's growing presence in Iraq

At the second round of talks between Iranian and US diplomats here Tuesday, one message American Ambassador Ryan Crocker delivered was that the US wants Tehran to play a positive role in Iraq. But ask many Iraqi Shiites, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and they say their neighbors are doing just that. In fact, economic ties between Iran and Iraq are growing in the face of US criticism of Tehran's meddling, which includes arming militias. Such Iran-Iraq links are not only bolstered by common beliefs binding Shiite leaders but also, some experts say, by a US strategy to arm and support former Sunni insurgents – many of whom consider Shiites bitter foes – in the fight against Al Qaeda. All of this puts Iran in a much stronger position in any future talks with the Americans, analysts say. "The Iranians are running the ship in Iraq, not the Americans. They also have [many] more chips on the table in Iraq than the US," says Riad Kahwaji, who heads the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. "The situation in Iraq is strategically more in favor of the Iranians than the Americans."

COMMENTARY

Misperceptions of the 'War' in Iraq

As pilgrims marched by our Baghdad bureau on their way to Karbala, I could hear them chant: "Kul yom Ashura! Kul ard Karbala!" or "Every day is Ashura! All land is Karbala!" Simply put, they were saying, everyday and everywhere in Iraq, Shi'ites are reliving Hussein's battles in Karbala. There was no talk of democracy or the Ba'ath Party, Saddam Hussein or the U.S. troop "surge," or other subjects that dominate the Iraq debate in the United States. Instead, it is apparent that many of Iraq's Shi'ites believe they are fighting a different war from the one many in the United States see their troops engaged in here, and for different reasons. Many Sunni groups in Iraq are also fighting a war that seems to have little in common with the official U.S. and Iraqi characterization of the conflict. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and its allies recently formed an umbrella group they call Dowlit al-Islam, or the Islamic State in Iraq. After the group claimed responsibility for bombing the Iraqi parliament building in Baghdad's Green Zone in April, the group issued an Internet statement explaining its motivation. The group said the suicide bomber who attacked parliament's cafeteria and killed one lawmaker was motivated to kill "the traitors and collaborators" who had sold out to a "Zionist-Persian" conspiracy to control Iraq. From what they wrote, they seem to believe they are fighting Israel, Iran and their agents, not the U.S. mission to bring democracy to Iraq. These visions of war are just two of the competing power struggles that U.S. troops in Iraq are trying to quell; the reality is there are many wars within the war.

OUR PRICELESS, PRICELESS MEDIA IN THE USA

NY Times Responds Again on Fallujah

NY Times Responds Again on Fallujah - Public editor's second response contains factual errors

To paraphrase Clark Hoyt, if you're going to defend the performance of a news organization, you at a minimum need to get your facts right. In his second response to FAIR regarding the New York Times' review of the play Fallujah, Hoyt wrote: “In restating its case, it introduced a new error-–calling white phosphorus (WP), the incendiary weapon that was used in Fallujah, a "chemical agent," which it is not. Chemical agents, like nerve gas, are something entirely different. While calling WP a chemical agent may add emotional punch to FAIR’s argument, it indicates to me a carelessness with terms that undercuts FAIR’s credibility.”

In fact, white phosphorus has been described as a "chemical weapon" by both the Pentagon (Think Progress, 11/21/05) and by the New York Times (3/22/95)--when discussing its use by Saddam Hussein. (The Times actually called it one of "the worst chemical weapons.") An official of the U.N. body that enforces the ban against chemical weapons told the BBC (BBC News Online, 11/16/05) that “if...the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because the way the [Chemical Weapons] Convention is structured or the way it is in fact applied, any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons.” U.S. forces have admitted to using incendiaries--both white phosphorus and the modern version of napalm--as an anti-personnel weapon (Field Artillery, 3-4/05; London Independent, 8/10/03). See "Now It's a Chemical Weapon, Now It's Not" (Extra!, 3-4/06).

Hoyt was also critical of FAIR's citation of Rahul Mahajan's first-hand accounts of civilian deaths in Fallujah (CounterPunch, 11/6/04), asserting that he was right to rely instead on the Times reporter, Dexter Filkins, who was embedded with the U.S. Marines: "Mahajan said he was in the city months earlier, in April, when U.S. forces first assaulted Fallujah.... The allegations of napalm-–and the actual use of WP-–involved the November battle that Filkins covered." That's just wrong; the first use of white phosphorus by the U.S. in Fallujah was in the April 2004 assault, as the newspaper North County Times (4/10/04) reported: “[Cpl. Nicholas] Bogert is a mortar team leader who directed his men to fire round after round of high explosives and white phosphorus charges into the city Friday and Saturday, never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused.”

ALSO THIS ONE:

Editor & Publisher: Bob Woodward vs. David Brooks on Iraq Pullout (7/22/07)

A Meet the Press appearance offers insight into the source of misinformation so frequent in New York Times columnist Brooks' writing. His citation of Times reporter John Burns when asserting that postponing withdrawal would "prevent 10,000 Iraqi deaths a month" prompts questioning from fellow guest Woodward, if not from their "bulldog" host:

Woodward: "10,000 dying"... where does that come from? Brooks: Well, A, it comes from John Burns. Second, it comes from the national intelligence... Woodward: Well, no, he doesn’t say 10,000. Brooks: Well, no, no, but it talks about genocide. Woodward: Yeah. Brooks: So I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.

Meanwhile, epidemiologists who have applied the standard tools of their profession to Iraq and concluded that the death toll under U.S. occupation is approximately 15,000 a month do not have David Brooks' access to the mainstream media discussion. [Amazing that they cannot tell us how many people are dying per month right now, even with a quarter of a million Americans running around the country…..but they think they can predict how many will die in the future, if all Americans were gone from the country! These war-mongerers will stoop to ANYTHING. – dancewater]

Quote of the day: This is, or should be, obvious. If we want to "withdraw" from Iraq (or Afghanistan) via the Gates Plan, we should at least be clear about what that is likely to mean - the slaughter of large numbers of civilians "including women and children". And it will not be due to a series of mistakes or incidents; it will not be errant or inadvertent. It will be policy itself. It will be the Washington - and in the end the US - consensus. Tom Engelhardt