News of the Day for Sunday, May 9, 2010

Turkish soldiers patrol on a road near the Turkey-Iraq border in the mainly Kurdish southeastern province of Sirnak, 2008. The Turkish air force has struck Kurdish rebel hideouts in neighbouring northern Iraq after an attack inside Turkey left two soldiers dead, the military said. (AFP/File/Mustafa Ozer) This situation is little talked about in the U.S. but continues to fester and adds to the dangerous mix of tensions in the area. -- C



Reported Security Incidents

Baghdad

Bomb in Mansoor injures 6, damages nearby shops.

Falluja

Power line knocked out by bomb.

Mosul

Gunmen kill a man and escape. No motive is suggested.

al-Jazira area, Salah al-Din Province

Police find 4 decomposed bodies, shot some time ago.

Southeast Turkey, near the border with Iraqi Kurdistan

Two Turkish soldiers killed in separate IED attacks, blamed on the Kurdish militant group PKK. This continues a spate of clashes in the border region that began on Friday.

Other News of the Day

Electoral Commission sends vote results from 17 provinces to the Supreme Court for ratification, but the recount continues in Baghdad. Although this would otherwise settle results for 245 of the 325 seats in Parliament, 9 candidates are awaiting final ruling on their eligibility having been presumptively disqualified for alleged links to the Baathist party.

Jalal Talabani is in Cairo for meetings with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and representatives of the Arab League.

KBR gets $568 million in a no-bid contract to provide military support services in Iraq, even as the Justice Department announces a lawsuit against the company for taking kickbacks from subcontractors. Congress has been insisting that the Pentagon put these contracts out to bid but Gen. Odierno felt it would be "too disruptive."

U.S. funded program to preserve ruins of Babylon is mired in a dispute among Iraqis over priorities. Excerpt:

Local officials want swift work done to restore the crumbling ruins and start building restaurants and gift shops to draw in tourists, while antiquities officials in Baghdad favor a more painstaking approach to avoid the gaudy restoration mistakes of the past.

The ruins of the millennia-old city, famed for its Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel, have suffered heavily over the past decades. Deep in Iraq's verdant south, the cluster of excavated temples and palaces were mostly rebuilt by former ruler Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, using modern yellow brick to erect towering structures that marred the fragile remains of the original mud brick ruins. After Saddam's fall in 2003, a U.S. military base on the site did further damage.

The site is filled with overgrown hillocks hiding the estimated 95 percent of the city that remains unexcavated -- which archaeologists hope could eventually be uncovered.

But for that to happen, they argue, the slow and meticulous work needs to be done to train Iraqis in conservation and draw up a preservation plan that can be used to drum up international funds and get the site UNESCO World Heritage status.

Afghanistan Update

DPA rounds up several security incidents. Taliban militants planning to attack a U.S. base in Herat province encounter a local "community protection force," behead four of them. (This is essentially an effort to replicate the Sahwa concept from Iraq, paying locals to side with the government.) Afghan and U.S. forces in the area later kill 10 Taliban, some wearing suicide vests, according to an Afghan army commander. Separately, 3 Afghan soldiers killed Saturday in Helmand, and in separately operations in Paktia and Paktika, coalition forces kill 6 alleged Taliban.

U.S. drone strike destroys a house in Inzarkas, North Waziristan. Ten bodies are pulled from the rubble, additional people are injured, according to an unnamed "intelligence official." A second anonymous official says 4 of the dead were non-combatants.

Taliban threaten a renewed offensive timed to coincide with Karzai's trip to Washington.

Meanwhile, Karzai can expect a cool reception, as his relationship with his U.S. benefactors is under severe strain. (I must say he is playing an interesting game since he is dependent on the U.S. military for every breath he takes, and they just might decide it's time for him to stop emitting C02. -- C)

Nevertheless president Obama has asked his aides to refrain from excessive public criticism of Karzai.

Afghanistan bars 2 private security firms from operating on the highway south of Kabul, after two incidents in which civilians were killed.

Widespread flooding in recent weeks has killed more than 80 Afghans and destroyed thousands of homes.

Quote of the Day

Two days after 9/11, when the president addressed Congress and asked rhetorically, “Why do they hate us?” my response was: “The people immediately around you are the ones who could tell you with precision why. That is, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage”—these are the people who ran the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“They could explain to you, in detail, why.” Once the Soviet Union had been expelled in 1989 from Afghanistan and we simply walked away from it, the people we had recruited, trained, and equipped with things like Stinger missiles—the first time the Stinger was ever used against a Soviet gunship was in Afghanistan. Once we had achieved our purposes, we just walked away, and these highly armed young men felt, “We’ve been used. We were cannon fodder in a little exercise in the Cold War, in a bipolar competition between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Then we compounded that with further mistakes like placing infidel troops (our troops) in Saudi Arabia after 1991, which was insulting to any number of Saudi Arabians, who believe that they are responsible for the most sacred sites in Islam: Mecca and Medina. Osama bin Laden is so typical of the kinds of figures in our history, like Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein, who were close allies of ours at one time. We know Saddam at one time had weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts!

Chalmers Johnson