News & Views 11/30/07

Photo: Iraqi displaced families attend a demonstration calling on Iraqi President Jalal Talibani to put a stop to evictions of Arab families from temporary government housing in central Baghdad. Some 80 displaced families living in governmental properties in Baghdad, which belonged to the regime of executed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, demonstrated. (AFP/Ali Yussef)

REPORTS – LIFE IN IRAQ

PHOTOS: Signs of Success in Iraq

PHOTOS: Much Work to Be Done

Palestinian refugee children die in Iraq

Two sick Palestinian refugee children waiting for resettlement from Iraq died in the last two weeks, one of them in Al Waleed refugee camp at the Iraq-Syria border and the other one in Baghdad. Another refugee, a 50-year-old man, also waiting to be resettled, died earlier this month in Al Waleed refugee camp. So far seven people have died there, including three young children, since Palestinian refugees started to arrive at the border in March 2006 fleeing violent attacks against them. A 3-year-old Palestinian boy died a few days ago in Ramadi hospital and was buried in Al Waleed, where the family had been living since fleeing Baghdad in September last year. He had been suffering from rickets, a bone disease caused by lack of vitamins and minerals. He also suffered from pneumonia. Another Palestinian child whose resettlement approval was pending, a 14-year-old suffering from Hodgkin's disease, died in Baghdad last week.

Iraqis' Quality of Life Etched by Slow Gains, Many Setbacks

This war-battered city, according to U.S. statistics, now receives an average of 11.9 hours of electricity a day, far more than earlier this year. But don't tell that to Ghaida al-Banna. For three straight days this week, the 50-year-old housewife's home in the once ritzy Mansour neighborhood received no power at all. Barely any water came out when she turned on the faucet. One thing Banna's area does have in abundance is uncollected garbage, piled into giant, malodorous heaps dotting the street. As violence continues to dip across Iraq, U.S. officials say they will increasingly shift their barometers of success from security to basic services -- electricity, gasoline, water and sanitation -- that reflect whether life for Iraqis is returning to normal. But according to interviews with more than two dozen people in neighborhoods throughout Baghdad, the effort to boost services has been uneven, marked by gradual successes and frequent setbacks. In some neighborhoods, residents have seen government workers spruce up their parks or provide a few more hours of electricity, while residents of other districts report conditions continually deteriorating. The quality of life for Iraqis is expected to be at the center of an assessment Congress will receive in March from U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, according to U.S. diplomats and military officers. Yet officials are still struggling to determine how best to measure the normalcy of Iraqi life, a notion harder to quantify than attacks or corpses.

Iraqi civilian killings drop sharply in November

The number of civilians killed in violence throughout Iraq fell this month to the lowest level in nearly two years, according to government statistics obtained by Reuters on Friday. The data showed 538 civilians were killed in November, down 29 percent from October. The statistics are compiled by the health, interior and defence ministries, and represent the best Iraqi count of the bloodshed. They confirm a sharp fall in violence in the 10 months since U.S. forces launched a "surge" of 30,000 additional troops and a new tactic of moving from large bases into small neighbourhood positions to reduce violence. The number of civilians killed in violence in October was 758. The November figure is nearly 75 percent down from the almost 2,000 deaths per month at the beginning of this year. The last time the government recorded fewer than 600 civilians killed in Iraq was in February 2006, the same month an attack on a Shi'ite shrine triggered huge sectarian violence.

Iraqis Find New Challenges Upon Return

One woman returned from Syria to find her neighborhood a maze of checkpoints and her house gutted by fire. Another woman's home was spared, but it's now in the shadow of 10-foot blast walls encircling the streets. Baghdad appears to be breaking free of the daily carnage and roving sectarian death squads that forced hundreds of thousands of families to flee the country. They are now trickling back to a city and a life they barely recognize. Thousands of Iraqis have returned to Baghdad in recent weeks after a sharp decline in violence. But many of the homecomings have been bewildering as the former refugees adjust to the realities of war's wake: destroyed and looted buildings, restricted movements and few places where Sunnis and Shiites still live together.

….. "The situation is still tense," said a Shiite woman on Friday who returned from Syria three weeks ago. The woman - who identified herself only as Umm Bassam - fled with her family six months ago after her husband escaped a kidnapping by Sunni insurgents. She decided to come back to Baghdad, but left her husband in Syria with their two children. She was dismayed to find their neighborhood, Sadiyah in southwestern Baghdad, has become filled with checkpoints. Their house was charred, apparently by Sunni insurgents as security forces approached.

McCarthyism Comes to Iraq: Dententions of Those Accused of "Iran Connection" on the Rise

Detentions have become commonplace in Iraq, but now more than ever before people are being detained after being accused of membership in "militias supported by Iran." Hundreds of our men were detained and accused of being militiamen supported by Iran," Mahmood Allawi, a 50-year-old lawyer from Diwaniyah, 160-kilomtres south of Baghdad, told IPS. "We are Arab Shiite and Iran is as much an enemy to us as America! It is Iran that we fear most after our leaders were killed by the so-called 'Iranian supported' militias," Allawi said. There has been a spike in abductions being carried out by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Diwaniyah, capital of Iraq's Al-Qadisiyah province and home to a population of roughly 400,000. On Nov. 13, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that 60,000 people are currently detained in Iraq. U.S. officials claim that the military has been actively fighting against members of the Mehdi Army militia of anti-occupation cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

People here told a different story to IPS. "If they mean the Mehdi Army then they know them well because they worked together for about two years now," Abdul Kazem Hussein, a former Iraqi officer who fled to Baghdad from Diwaniyah recently told IPS. Hussein claimed that the U.S. military had been using members of the Mehdi Army to carry out attacks on Sunnis in Baghdad, as well as areas south of Baghdad, like Diwaniyah. "But they are detaining hundreds of people who have always been afraid of being drilled to death by Mehdi Army murderers," Hussein explained, alluding to a practice used by Mehdi Army members of using electric drills to torture Sunni men they capture.

Aid shrinks as Iraq's internal refugee tally grows

And as the number of the internally displaced is growing, aid workers say the conditions they are living in is growing worse. They say it is becoming especially tough for children 12 and under, who make up 65 percent of the total number of internally displaced Iraqis. Aid agencies say the situation is getting harsher because of dwindling aid from international agencies and an overwhelmed central government in Baghdad. Hussein and his family have been living with 2,000 other people in the camp for more than a year now. "Up to this point, the central government has done nothing for these people, only [nongovernmental organizations] help them sometimes, and all that has been spent on the camp is from our budget," says Ahmed Duaibel, spokesman for the Najaf government. "Our pleas to Baghdad have fallen on deaf ears." And help from other quarters is also less forthcoming. As of last Friday, a United Nations fund for emergency relief for Iraqi children and refugees had only $33.8 million in it. The UN says it must have $98.9 million to meet the needs, including those of the internally displaced. Kasra Mofarah, who heads the Jordan-based NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI), an umbrella group of 280 nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq, says he is now seeing donor fatigue after years of contributors sinking billions of dollars into the country's reconstruction with little results. Plus, many fear lack of accountability, he says.

REPORTS – IRAQI MILITIAS, POLITICIANS, POWER BROKERS

Crackdown on Iraq Sunni leader after bombs found

Iraqi security forces arrested dozens of people, including the son of a leading Sunni Arab politician, in a pre-dawn raid on Friday after a car rigged with explosives was found near the lawmaker's office. The incident threatened to increase political tension across Iraq's sectarian divide at a time when violence has been falling dramatically in the country. The Shi'ite-led government said Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the Accordance Front, the main Sunni Arab bloc, could be stripped of the immunity from prosecution he holds as a member of parliament if he was found to have links to car bombs. "No one is above the law. Dr Adnan al-Dulaimi has immunity, but this does not exempt him from questioning and accountability," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said. "The case is very serious and the accusations against him are very serious. He has to prove his innocence. He will be called for questioning. If the charges against him are proven, his immunity will definitely be lifted." Seven people were arrested on Thursday at Dulaimi's office and 29, including Dulaimi's son Mekki, were seized in a raid early on Friday at Dulaimi's house, said Brigadier General Qassim Moussawi, security spokesman for Baghdad.

US Weighs Sunni Help With Shiite Fears

An Iraqi military chief delivered a sharp warning to an American commander: Beware of your new alliances with former Sunni insurgents. The U.S. officer, Lt. Col. Wilson A. Shoffner, had his own message to pass on. Iraq's Shiite-dominated leadership, he said, must learn to live with the outreach to Sunni tribes, whose help is considered crucial in recent blows against extremists such as al-Qaida in Iraq. The exchange this week at a joint U.S.-Iraqi base - witnessed by The Associated Press - highlights one of the deepest ruptures in strategic outlook between Washington and Baghdad. The Pentagon sees the Sunni tribal militias - known as Awakening Councils and other names - as vital partners to weaken the Sunni-led insurgency. On Tuesday, Sunni sheiks in north-central Iraq pledged 6,000 fresh fighters to join tens of thousands of others. But the Iraqi government, which is under heavy Shiite influence, is hesitant to incorporate the Sunni recruits into the regular security forces and worries they could easily slip back to the rebel side.

REPORTS – US/UK/OTHERS IN IRAQ

US to launch program to employ military-age men in Iraq

The United States is launching a program to promote stability in a restive Iraqi province by employing more men of military age, US officials said Friday in a video hook-up from Baghdad. The US Agency for International Development will next month launch the program in Salah ad Din province, which includes Tikrit, the home town of the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, USAID representative Dave Bailey said. Some 20 million dollars in funds have been made available for the so-called community stabilization program to improve vocational skills and promote business in key cities in the province, Bailey told reporters via satellite. Bailey said USAID was working with the US military to decide how best to spend the money in "order to employ military age individuals as well as provide them, again, immediate jobs as well as vocational skills training." [This sounded promising until I reached the “USAID” part. – dancewater]

State Department official Iraq update is really compilation of plagiarized major media articles

Kind of pathetic when the official report from the US State Department on what's "really" happening in Iraq is actually just a bunch of plagiarized paragraphs from the major media in the US.

Iraq's numbers don't add up, U.S. says

As U.S. forces begin to scale back in Iraq, the military is becoming increasingly reliant on Iraqi forces to report a wide array of crucial statistics, from the number of attacks on the local infrastructure to how many Iraqi civilians have been killed or wounded. And just as Iraqi forces have had a mixed record in fighting insurgents, they have been spotty at providing data from the regions where they have taken command. Iraqi officials have been reporting far higher civilian death totals than those reported by U.S. forces, and aides to American commanders now acknowledge that the U.S. military probably had been undercounting such casualties. Strategists for Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander here, said they were beginning to incorporate Iraqi tallies into their own, but underscored that though the totals might be different, the trends in both Iraqi and American numbers show dramatic decreases in civilian deaths since the summer. Also troubling to the United States is the frequent failure of Iraqi forces to report data on incidents occurring in the regions where they take the lead in providing security. In sectors handed over to Iraqi army and police forces, U.S. planners have seen a sharp decrease in overall data, severely hampering their ability to determine whether their military plan is succeeding.

U.S. wages covert war on Iraq-Iran border

While the PKK has been in the international spotlight in recent weeks, with Turkey mounting cross-border raids and threatening to launch an invasion of Iraq, not so much attention has been given to the Iranian offshoot, the PJAK. The group has been waging an insurgency against Tehran since 2004, which recently has escalated. A guerrilla leader told the New York Times last month that PJAK fighters had killed at least 150 Iranian soldiers and officials in Iran since August. Iran accuses Washington of backing the group, and while the US denies this, local and foreign intelligence sources say the accusation is most likely true. According to a former US Special Forces (SF) commando currently based in Iraq who spoke on condition of anonymity, Special Forces troops are currently operating inside Iran, working with insurgent forces like the PJAK. “That’s what the SF does,” he said. “They train and build up indigenous anti-government forces.”

“The primary function of the Special Forces is to stand up guerrilla forces or counter-guerrilla forces,” said another former SF soldier, retired Major Mark Smith. While he was not specifically aware of SF teams training the PJAK, he said it would not be surprising if they were. And “they would be training in an obscure border area or in a location denied to anyone not directly involved”, he said. He added that SF teams in Iran would be conducting strategic reconnaissance of possible nuclear and biological weapons sites, army headquarters, and significant individuals. “If they’re not doing these things in Iran, then they are remiss in their duties at the upper echelons of their command,” he said. [This is pure evil to go into other countries and inspire natives to violence against their own governments and their own people. I am sure many of them (both trainers and trainees) are just doing it for the money. – dancewater]

HISTORY

Iraq : Looking Back : 'Internationally Sponsored Genocide'

Editors have a mantra, do not look back, move on, write what is current. But sometimes looking back is vital. Those who ignore even the recent past are doomed to understand nothing, sink deeper into quagmires - and bleat again : 'Why do they hate us' ? Looking through material for the book that has been far too long in the making, I found a copy of a letter which I sent to a prominent (UK) Member of Parliament. It is dated November 1993 and clarifies for ever why the invaders were never going to be greeted with 'sweets and flowers'. Near exactly fourteen years ago - three years and three months in to the embargo - I wrote:

Meridian Hotel, Baghdad, 4th November 1993.

As you know, when I was here in April/May 1992, I thought things could get no worse. Yet in July this year, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations note in a Report: '..with deep regret', all the: 'pre-famine indicators being in place'. Further that an appreciable proportion of the population now had less calorific intake than the most famine stricken parts of Africa. That was July. This is apocalypse. This is an internationally sponsored genocide. Food prices have risen in real terms, one thousand percent. Some most basic of staples have risen eleven hundred times. This morning a breakfast for three, of three black coffees, two orange juices and an omelet cost, what would have been, in 1989, the equivalent of one thousand three hundred US dollars. With US dollars, one can buy stacks of black market Iraqi Dinars, an inches high wad for fifty dollars, chillingly redolent of Germany after the first world war. Most Iraqi people have no dollars.

'"In the foyer of the Rashid Hotel, is one of the most magnificent display of wondrous artifacts one could ever hope to see: jewelry, paintings, superb, rare antique boxes, chandeliers, crystal, exquisite family treasures, handed down over generations, many also collected from around the globe. They are the belongings of the middle class, for sale in the hope they will be sold for hard currency to the rare visitor. Living for a few more weeks. The poor have no antiques. "A friend, a multi-lingual, much traveled novelist and editor, whose great grandfather's statue graces an area of Baghdad, boils rose petals for a face cleaner, concocts a mixture of boracic and herbs for deodorant and uses an ancient clay for hair conditioner. She and her family, as many Iraqis, now clean their teeth with husks from a plant, a method from a bygone age. Tooth paste and tooth brushes are vetoed. Her last novel is trapped in her computer, for want of a minor, embargoed spare part. If she could release it, it would be anyway useless, there is no paper to print it on. Paper is also vetoed by the U.N., Sanctions Committee.

If you have not read this yet, read the whole thing: Baghdad Year Zero

Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn't have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies. The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.

COMMENTARY

Iraq: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Truth, also, is a casualty when governments and generals cherry-pick figures to support a partisan purpose. There is a deep irony that a US administration so loath to use statistics to gauge the success or failure of post-war Iraq is now "cooking the books" at will. Indeed, many are now arguing that Iraq has turned the corner. Iraqi officials claim 46,000 Iraqi refugees have recently returned as one of the statistics of success. Yet, the United Nations disputes both the numbers and the reasons for the return, claiming a survey found that "46% were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25% said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14% said they were returning because they had heard about improved security." Furthermore, as Michael Boyle pointed out in a more hopeful look at Iraq, the sectarian cleansing is such that refugees are returning to homogeneous neighborhoods. The UNHCR went further, warning Iraqis that they do "not believe that the time has come to promote, organize or encourage returns," given the volatile and unpredictable security situation in Iraq. Such a discrepancy and the politicizing of statistics should not come as a shock. With the legacy of Vietnam never far from the minds of decision-makers, it was decided from the off that the US "doesn't do body counts" and would, instead, prefer a combination of pure belligerence in the face of disaster, combined with Orwellian rhetoric from the steadily more erratic Donald Rumsfeld. Responding to the 2003 looting of Baghdad, Rumsfeld explained that "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." And when asked about whether the increasing violence was evidence of the war going badly, Rumsfeld reasoned in 2005 that "Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."

The Myths of Military Progress

Making occupation and calling it peace. Killing fewer and calling it progress. Rotating troops and calling it a withdrawal. Setting up new death squads and calling them allies. Lowering standards and calling it opening new opportunities. All of the above phenomena seem to be part of the current campaign by Washington in Iraq. There are fewer GI deaths in the country now because they don't leave the bases. Why? Because their latest allies-tribesmen paid in cold cash to kill for DC-are doing the killing and taking the hits. Indeed, some of the most fatal of those hits come from US air strikes that "mistakenly" bomb the men involved in killing the US bogeyman Al Queda in Mesopotamia, which may or may not be a phantom reality. Meanwhile, these tribesmen learn US military methods and locations while stockpiling US-supplied weaponry for some future war on their Shi'a opposites or perhaps even the same US forces they currently align themselves with.

The politicians here in the US, meanwhile, continue their cynical dealing in human life by refusing to insist on a genuine withdrawal timetable even as they steal billions from their country men and women to fight their wars and try to maintain the empire. False arguments erupt over withdrawal bills that aren't withdrawal bills because the White House insists that it has complete control over the war and its conduct while the opposition in Congress writes legislation that has more holes than a hooker's torn fishnets. Despite the impotence of the legislation, they fail to pass even that and end up giving the White house every penny it originally asked for. Wait until the election, says the opposition. Things will change then. If previous elections are any indication, the only thing that will change are the faces in the White House. Troops will remain in Iraq and the occupation/war will continue its haphazard road to control of the oilfields. Or, it will result in the defeat of Washington's plans for the region, no matter which politician sits in the Oval Office.

Terror is a Tactic

Nir Rosen: Shiite militias have been fighting the Americans on and off since 2004 but there's been a steady increase in the past couple of years. That's not just because the Americans saw the Mahdi army as one of the main obstacles to fulfilling their objectives in Iraq, but also because Iraq's Shiites---especially the Mahdi army---are very skeptical of US motives. They view the Americans as the main obstacle to achieving their goals in Iraq. Ever since Zalmay Khalilzad took over as ambassador; Iraq's Shiites have worried that the Americans would turn on them and throw their support behind the Sunnis. That's easy to understand given that Khalilzad's mandate was to get the Sunnis on board for the constitutional referendum. (Khalilzad is also a Sunni himself) But, yes, to answer your question; we could see a "Phase 2" if the Americans try to stay in Iraq longer or, of course, if the US attacks Iran. Then you'll see more Shiite attacks on the Americans.

A more plausible reading of US policy: Maliki "under control", leading Iraq to US-protectorate status

There are a number of left-over questions relating to the last year or so of Iraqi political history, among them: (1) Why exactly did Khalilzad and the US end up supporting Maliki for prime minister in spring 2006 in spite of Maliki's well-known Iranian connections; and (2) what was the meaning of all the subsequent newspaper leakage from Washington citing complaints about Maliki's "weakness" and "incompetence" and so on; not to mention (3) why did the US swing to the Sunnis take the form it did (arming Sunni tribes) rather than any effective Sunnification at the level of the Green Zone government. These are of course part of the Big Question: Whether the American policy has actually been to help dismember the country--including via the Maliki administration--or whether on the other hand there is still any sense in clinging to the idea that US policy "really" aimed at keeping the country together, but was plagued by mistakes and failures.

An important missing hypothesis in this question comes as part of a commentary by Haroun Mohammad in his regular op-ed in Al-Quds al-Arabi this morning (Friday November 30, it's on page 19 if you have to go to the archives for the pdf), his immediate topic being the agreement in principle signed by Maliki recently committing to long-term US military "support" for the Iraqi government, something this writer says will in effect turn Iraq into an "American protectorate" by the time Bush is ready to pack his bags for home. The agreement was the result of a 20-minute phone conversation between Bush and Maliki, no prior studies, no negotiations, no consultations, no nothing. Just like that. What this shows, says Haroun Mohammad, is something important about the personality of Maliki, which is not only devoid of any kind of Iraq-national component, but is really devoid of anything else either, except for doing what he is told to do, in this case by the Americans.

Quotes of the day: The hypothesis outlined here--namely that Maliki is and has always been "under control"--would require a different reading, putting more emphasis on the idea that in fact the dismemberment of the country, which Maliki has done so much to promote, is part of the American strategy, not an index of its failure. – from Missing Links blog