Increasingly, it looks like Washington's maligned critics were remarkably on the mark about the disastrous post-war picture in Iraq. On the Horizon
Washington seems to be strangely of two minds when it comes to questions of nuclear proliferation: One standard for the us, another for the rest of the world.
Iraq in Year Zero
Iraq is well over a month into the Year Zero and, as American attention wanders elsewhere, there is finally a staggering report in a major newspaper, The New York Times, on the catastrophe that is our "occupation." All that heavy thinking about Japan and Germany after World War II, all the serially leaked plans for the "liberation" of the country before and during the war, all the memo writing and frantic scrambling for policy traction in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House, all those ideas about creating a model reconstructed land that would by its very example (and ours) change the Middle East.... I won't even bother to complete that sentence. But here's another of my collage/reports on the state of occupied Iraq. As a start, don't miss the Times' long, detailed, well reported, and utterly grim piece by Edmund L. Andrews and Susan Sachs. It was once said that the Soviet armies on entering Germany in 1945 stripped the country bare, sending even its doorknobs back to their devastated land. By now, the looting of Iraq, still ongoing, seems to be threatening to reach a similar level.
Andrews and Sachs write in part:
"In the space of a few weeks, awe at American power in war has been transformed into anger at American impotence in peace. A crime wave, increasingly the work of organized gangs far better armed than the skeleton Iraqi police forces, has kept citizens in a peculiar state of limbo, free yet fearful. Delays in restoring electricity and telecommunications have kept businesses closed. Banks, looted of at least $500 million in deposits, have yet to reopen. Traders, attacked daily by armed bands on the highway linking Iraq to Jordan, are reluctant to send much needed imports.
Iraq's government, the country's biggest employer, is essentially shut down, aggravating unemployment."
Here's the irony: The antiwar movement and critics of the war of every stripe (including those within or recently retired from the military) have been mocked and dismissed for their wartime speculations -- and, not surprisingly with any speculation, mistakes were made and bad guesses taken (though most critics had predicted a short war against a desperately weakened enemy). Increasingly, however, it looks like -- compared to the Bush administration at least -- the critics were remarkably on the mark about the bigger picture. The administration, it seems, will have been proved wrong straight down the line -- from the existence of a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the possible uses of Iraqi oil in the supposedly financially painless reconstruction of the country. Oh yes, all those oil dreams. Let's start there. In the British Observer Peter Beaumont reports:
"Meanwhile there is a crisis over funding for reconstruction following claims that oil revenue will fall far short of the $41 billion (£26bn) required over the next two years to get the shattered nation on its feet. Before the war senior US administration officials, including President George W. Bush, suggested that the sale of Iraqi oil... would largely pay for the reconstruction. But new figures produced by Spain's Ministry of Economic Affairs... have led the Spanish government to conclude that oil revenues are likely to fall far short of the contribution originally envisaged. According to the Spanish figures, the $41bn total is likely almost to double over 10 years...
The scale of the expected shortfall in funding has been underlined by the US commitment to reconstruction, a slim $2.5bn approved by Congress. US Treasury Secretary John Snow insisted last week that countries like France and Germany, who opposed the war, would have to make substantial contributions."
And then, of course, there's the trustworthy Phillip J. Carroll, the retired oil exec appointed by the Pentagon to be senior advisor to the Iraqi Oil Ministry (which as yet has only a skeleton staff in place). Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times now indicates that Carroll may have a minor conflict of interest. It seems that, after a 32-year career at Shell where he was chief executive, he retired and took over as chief exec of Fluor for another four years. Fineman reports:
"Documents on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that Carroll continues to receive more than $1 million a year from Fluor in retirement benefits and bonuses pegged to the company's performance. He also owns about 1 million shares of the company's stock, according to its latest proxy statement. Fluor has said it plans to bid on a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contract to rebuild Iraq's oil industry."
On the other hand, maybe this is the occupation's reality principle at work. Perhaps our administrators felt it was important that in the year zero we begin by teaching the Iraqis a lesson in "free market" crony capitalism, something to help heal the wounds after decades of Saddam Hussein's crony Baathism.
Among the more depressing reports to come in today, Ed Vulliamy of the Observer reports that, with exactly the sort of sensitivity we might expect from the Pentagon, the military has chosen to build a major permanent airfield-military base complex at the site where civilization began, the ancient city of Ur. (For any of you who live in New York City, by the way, the Metropolitan Museum's "First Cities" exhibit is a stunning introduction to the 6,000 years that led us from the first ziggurat to the Pentagon. Don't miss it.) Now, it seems that Ur's ziggurat, or pyramid, the best preserved in the region, is to have an American base "right alongside the site, so that the view from the peak of the ziggurat -- more or less unchanged for 6,000 years -- will be radically altered." To add to the looting stories, Vulliamy reports:
"One of the greatest wonders of civilisation, and probably the world's most ancient structure -- the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Iraq -- has been vandalised by American soldiers and airmen, according to aid workers in the area. They claim that US forces have spray-painted the remains with graffiti and stolen kiln-baked bricks made millennia ago. As a result, the US military has put the archaeological treasure, which dates back 6,000 years, off-limits to its own troops. Any violations will be punishable in military courts."
Unfortunately, reports of this sort -- of every sort, in fact -- seem to be pouring out of Iraq. By picking and choosing, let me just recommend two other recent ones, again in mainstream publications. The Christian Science Monitor has done its own investigation of leftover depleted uranium (DU) from the minimalist battle for Baghdad. DU is used to harden tank armor and tank shells as well as various kinds of missiles, and the bullets sprayed in vast numbers by the A-10 Warthog aircraft. The U.S. military insists that DU presents essentially no danger to anyone, but also warns American troops (though not Iraqis) to steer clear of the stuff or handle it only with care and protective gear. Monitor journalist Scott Peterson visited a number of sites including the Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad, only 300 yards from the American occupation headquarters and sprayed by Warthog bullets. He found some places where the Monitor's Geiger counter registered radioactivity at 1900 times background levels. His long, sobering account of Iraq as a radioactive waste site begins:
"At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks. But Ms. Hamid's stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by -- and contaminated with -- controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road.
No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout."
And finally, of course, the children of Iraq continue to suffer as they have suffered these last twelve years. Anna Badkhen has written a report on the dangerous postwar lives of those children for the San Francisco Chronicle. After discussing the street violence in urban Iraq that daily wounds and kills children, she comments:
"Street violence is not the only threat to the lives of Iraqi children. UNICEF said looters have stripped many of the country's already dilapidated water treatment plants of purification equipment and chemicals. Hundreds of thousands of tons of raw sewage are pumped into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers daily, polluting the major source of drinking water for Iraqis. As a result, thousands of children here are suffering from gastroenteritis and diarrhea. Those conditions lead to dehydration and acute malnutrition, which have doubled in the past year, UNICEF said."
The details, fair warning, are difficult to read.
As a small token of hope, here at least, I will cite a piece from the Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion page worth arguing about by former Republican consultant Kevin Phillips on the sorts of problems that an Iraq in chaos and a Middle East convulsed by terrorism might present to our president in the coming years. I noted today that, for almost the first time in recent memory, leading Democrats began immediately in the wake of the terror attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco to take out after the president.
On the Horizon
What a global moment. The Iraq war is over and you can sense the major media turning elsewhere; you can also sense the public exhaustion with the subject. The problem is -- not everyone is exhausted. In Washington, in the White House, in the Pentagon, in the various right-wing, inside-the-beltway think tanks that have fed the Busheviks their agenda thus far, nobody's exhausted. The strategists are strategizing; the planners are planning, the military is re-organizing itself globally.
Yes, even to Bush planners, Iraq may look like a potential quagmire. The interesting conservative James Pinkerton asks in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, "Is President Bush's victory in Iraq coming undone like a cheap cowboy boot?"
"After a series of attacks on GIs, the American 'peacekeepers' adopted the same modus operandi they used in Bosnia: Forces have been under orders to travel as little as possible. It's especially critical to avoid casualties now, as body bags might upstage the administration's declare-victory-and-let's-cut-taxes blitz. Of course, the problem is that not much policing -- let alone nation-building -- gets done. Meanwhile, as the U.S. shuffles the bureaucratic players into their various boxes at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the Shiites are mobilizing. The multiple factions of Shiite Islam don't agree on much, except that the United States should leave. In the past, colonialists kept the Shiites under control through a divide-and-conquer strategy. But for the U.S. to be so Machiavellian, it will need Americans who speak Arabic, and those are in short supply in Baghdad..."
Today, as well, the LA Times carried the first piece I've seen since Robert Fisk wrote about the subject in the British Independent in the immediate postwar moments, suggesting that some of the looting and sabotage is part of Bath Party resistance to an occupation.The details in the piece are chilling and so is this comment, "'It's like an insurgency,' said Col. David Perkins, who commands the U.S. Army brigade that took Baghdad more than a month ago and has been trying to hunt down the regime's remnants."
If Iraq is an impending quagmire, Afghanistan may already have quagged out -- see, for instance, Paul Knox's "How Not to Run a Country" in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Remember our war to liberate Afghan women? Well, as Knox reports:
"Mr. Karzai holds sway over very little territory outside Kabul, the capital. Even there, he has been forced to make concessions. He welcomed Sima Samar, the courageous physician who became a symbol of women's resistance under the Taliban, into his government as women's affairs minister. They traveled to Washington in January of 2002, for George W. Bush's post-9/11 State of the Union address. But six months later, Mr. Karzai booted Dr. Samar out of the government at the insistence of Muslim leaders, after a false press report said she had rejected Islamic law. When The Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York visited Afghanistan last August, he found Dr. Samar under siege in her Kabul home, guarded by soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition.... [He concludes:] It seems the product of shallow strategic vision, spotty follow-through and an almost non-existent grasp of history. If this is Mr. Bush's idea of how to run an empire, he has a bunch to learn."
I'll tell you, by the way, what I haven't seen -- a single significant article in recent times on the return of Afghanistan as the drug-producing capital of the universe. (Drug war anyone?)
In the meanwhile, there's another group of strategists out there thinking globally -- Al Qaeda and its confederates. (Sometimes it seems like they might almost be exchanging thoughts with the strategists in Washington.) It turns out, for instance, that Al Qaeda (or associated groups) didn't just bomb any compounds in Riyadh, or simply any compounds with westerners, they targeted the particular compound which held the offices of the Vinnell Corporation, one of these Pentagon backed rent-a-cop, rent-a-mercenary outfits, as Marian Wilkinsin of the Melbourne Age writes:
"Al-Qaeda has a particular hatred for the US Vinnell Corporation because it trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard, the country's internal security force and an integral part of the Saudi military forces. Vinnell, under contract to the US Army, employs about 800 people in Saudi Arabia including 300 Americans. Vinnell recently came under the financial control of giant US defence contractor Northrop. Vinnell's relationship with Saudi Arabia over nearly three decades has been intriguing and controversial. For five years until 1997 it was owned by the Carlyle group, a defence and investment house close to the Bush family. Several former Republican cabinet ministers sat on Carlyle's board.
...
Indeed Vinnell...'paved the way for co-operation between the United States and Saudi Arabia during the (first) Gulf War.' It was this co-operation that infuriated Osama bin Laden."
But, sticky feet and Al Qaeda attacks seem only to spur the Bush strategists onward. After all, unlike some of their liberal supporters, they really never conceived of the war in Iraq as an end in itself, but as the beginning of a push for domination at home and abroad on quite an awesome scale. In the decade-plus between the first and second Gulf Wars, the United States managed to nail down an arc of bases that now stretch from the former Yugoslavia quite literally to the western borders of China.
These garrisons are meant to lock in the oil lands of this earth -- with, obviously, the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Palestinians still to be brought into line. But beyond that, beyond even the North Korean situation where, as Jim Lobe mentions below in a piece in the Asia Times, Washington hawks are still planning to "decapitate" the North Korean regime (and South Korea be damned), the Bush hawks (where did the phrase "chicken hawks" disappear to?) are scanning the horizon for future global competitors -- and at the top of most of their lists is China, as it was well before September 11th.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute. {publish-page-break}
The New Al Qaeda
Al Qaeda has re-appeared, hydra-like. What do the most recent bombings really mean? Doing It for Themselves
With the US occupation in disarray, some Iraqis are taking matters into their own hands.
The New Al Qaeda
"The war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide."
--President George W. Bush, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. On May 1, the president assured the U.S. that the tide had turned in the war on terrorism. But now Al Qaeda seems to have risen up, hydra-like, with a number of smaller heads sprouting where the largest was cut off. Almost simultaneous bombings in Riyadh, Yemen and Casablanca killed dozens of people, both Americans and citizens of a host of other countries. New travel alerts have been posted for Southeast Asia and Kenya. Bush has been forced to admit that Al Qaeda are still "plotting to kill," and Democrats are having a field day.
The first and most obvious interpretation of Al Qaeda's latest spate of bombings is that crusading Bush has failed to kill the beast. Some Arab papers are charging that Bush's "lies" have already destabilized the Middle East, and that the bombings are the result.
It's not entirely clear what effect the war in Iraq has had on its neighbors, just yet, but it's certainly fair to start speculating about its effect on Al Qaedea's recruitment strategies. Stephen F. Cohen, writing for the The Nation, cites the recent bombings in his argument that Bush's war probably has not made our nation safer:
[W[ill the war, and the long US occupation that seems likely to ensue, reduce the recruitment of young Arabs by terrorist movements or will it inspire many new recruits? The subsequent suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco suggest that the latter result will be the case.
É
With or without more recruits, will the war decrease or increase the number of terrorist plots against the United States, whether at home or abroad? Here too the targeting of a US firm in Saudi Arabia and continuing "terrorist" attacks on American troops even in Iraq itself are not good sign
Another argument is also being made, that Al Qaeda's resurgence on foreign shores and against civilian targets is evidence of just how weak the organization has become. The war in Afghanistan did, without a doubt, rob Al Qaeda of some of its leadership and its center of operations. As a BBC commentator observes, the group's losses in Afghanistan and the international campaign against it have forced the organization to change: Despite the loss of senior planners, new military commanders seem to have emerged. Local affiliates, which always had a certain degree of autonomy, may now be working on their own initiative.
Above all, al-Qaeda seems to have adapted to the fact that, for the moment at least, it is no longer able to hit high-profile Western targets.
These new "soft targets" have less strategic importance for the West, and pose certain risks for Al Qaeda: Muslims have already died in the latest round of attacks, threatening the fundamentalist group's purist credibility. But Al Qaeda's new, dispersed and "soft target" approach may also have downsides for the U.S. As the London Daily News's reports: Experts say the apparent broader range of targets are easier to strike and often serve double duty, fitting aims of both al-Qaida's global approach and the local militants it works through - from Africa to Asia to America. Such attacks, they said, are proving difficult to gain intelligence on and avert. German intelligence officials believe al-Qaida has regrouped under a new generation of leaders who can continue to draw on young terror recruits in several Arab countries, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
A recent threat assessment drawn up by Germany's foreign intelligence service said al-Qaida has put new people in key positions and has the finances to once again carry out co-ordinated terror attacks, Welt am Sonntag said.
Al Qaeda, in any case, continues to exist and continues to plan attacks. The London Times reported on Sunday that the attacks may even have been announced by Osama Bin Laden three months ago. So much is still unknown, down to Bin Laden's whereabouts, that it may take years of analysis to document exactly how Bush's war in Iraq affected efforts to stamp out such a complex and multiform enemy. But for the moment, are the recent attacks a sign of strength or weakness? A security analyst Dan Keohane and Jonathan Stevenson told Radio Free Europe to look at it in another way: "It's more a demonstration of [continuing] activity. I think that's the more important point for these groups at the moment, a lot of the intelligence organizations and governments generally in Europe and America have been quite keen to show how active they've been at countering terrorism and there have been quite some successes and certainly huge numbers of arrests," Keohane told RFE/RL. Analyst Stevenson agreed with that assessment. "We are seeing a demonstration of Al-Qaeda's continued ability to improvise and adapt to a much more alert security environment; they can't hit the United States and Europe easily, so they expand the geographical range of their operations and hit targets in which the security forces are either weak or politically compromised," he said.
Discuss this article.
Doing It for Themselves
It has been more than a month since American troops chased Saddam Hussein from his palaces on the Tigris and, by many accounts, Iraq is in worse shape than before the US invasion. Bowing to the obvious, perhaps, early administration promises of a quick US exit have been revised downward to cope with the train wreck that the occupation of Baghdad has become. One of the first casualties of the postwar period, according to the Washington Post's Scott Wilson, is Washington's pledge to let Iraqis run Iraq as soon as possible. Instead, L. Paul Bremer, the new US viceroy of Iraq, declared that the US would hold onto the major ministries -- Interior, Finance, and the security services, for example -- for at least the first year, while holding out the possibility of some Iraqi control over smaller posts. As might be expected, few Iraqis are happy with this line of thinking.
"Delaying the creation of an Iraqi administration is a retreat by U.S. officials here, who 12 days ago predicted that the 'nucleus' of an interim government would be in place by the end of May. The timeline has been pushed into June, and the result envisioned by U.S. officials will be far more modest than opposition leaders had expected. ...
'There seems to be a difference between the Iraqi opposition vision and the coalition vision about the government of this country,' said an opposition party official, normally supportive of Washington's point of view, who attended the meeting. 'Right now it's basically like we are dancing over this issue. But there is a matter of our sovereignty at stake.'"
In the absence of American leadership, then, some Iraqis have taken matters into their own hands. As the New York Times' Nazila Fathi reports, the city of Amara, southeast of Baghdad, has set up a functioning democracy entirely without US help. A militia seized control of this city of 300,000 during the early days of the war, and maintained security and municipal services while turning power over to popular civic leaders -- exactly what US troops have failed to do thus far. By the time British forces arrived to secure the city, there was little left for them to do.
"'The authority comes from the city council,' said Capt. Robert Nicholas, the British liaison to the council. 'They just consult us to tick the box. We tried to allow decision-making to be made by Iraqis because they know best how things are.'"
Probably more worrying for US administrators is the news that Kurdish groups in the north have begun cutting their own, unsanctioned deals with multinational oil companies. As the London Independent's Andrew Buncombe reports, the deals might be an effort to present the Baghdad government with a fait accompli. In any case, the Kurds are offering access to their oil fields at fire-sale prices.
"Samples of the proposed 'production-sharing agreements' seen by The Independent on Sunday reveal that the PUK authorities are offering investors an attractive deal. The initial share of profits would be split 60:40 in favour of the oil company, dropping to around 50:50 once a specified level of production is reached. 'They are extremely favourable terms,' said Gordon Barrows, of the Barrows Company, a US-based publisher of international oil laws and contracts and the company that obtained the contract."
Shiite leaders, long oppressed by the Ba'athist regime, are stepping into the power vaccuum, too. While some have grudgingly begun talking to American forces about postwar power sharing, others have not. And as Middle East Online reports, some of what they're saying -- this from Mohammed al-Fartussi, a Sadr City imam -- should give Iraq's new American rulers pause.
"'The cinemas in Al-Saadun Street show indecent films. I warn them: if in a week they do not change, we will act differently with them,' he said in a sermon at Muslim weekly prayers at Al-Mohsen mosque in Baghdad's Shiite suburb of Sadr City. 'We warn women and the pimps who take them to the Americans: If in a week from now they do not change their attitude, the murder of these women is sanctioned (by Islam),' Fartussi added.
'This warning also goes out to sellers of alcohol, radios and televisions,' the imam, or prayer leader, told a crowd of several thousand faithful." Discuss this article.
{publish-page-break}
Leading by Example
America's war in Iraq may be encouraging other nations, namely in Southeast Asia, to follow suit. Re-Cleansing Iraq
The US seems dangerously incapable of stemming the latest wave of ethnic cleansing in Northern Iraq.
Leading by Example
When it comes to peace and terror, President Bush seems to want world leaders to do as he says, not as he does. Preemptive strikes, the use of overwhelming force against a weak and/or scattered enemy, nuclear weapons and some level of disregard for the Geneva Conventions -- these may all be acceptable options for the world's only superpower. But Bush would like lesser powers to fall in line with stricter standards. Lesser powers, unfortunately, don't always agree. And in Southeast Asia our leadership by example may already be having violent consequences. For a while, it looked like India and Pakistan would be the most likely to follow our lead, and not our leader's words. After India's foreign minister commented that Pakistan was more deserving of a preemptive strike than Iraq, it seemed the two nuclear powers might be tempted to try America's foreign policy approach on for size.
But so far, it's Bush's new best friend, the president of the Phillipines, and the Indonesian government who have taken the U.S.'s actions as a cue to become increasingly militant.
In Indonesia, talks between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government broke down on Sunday. The United States, along with Japan, Australia and members of the European Union have all pressured Jakarta to give the talks, intended to bring some form of autonomy to the Aceh region, more time. As U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told the International Herald Times, "it's our judgment that the possible avenues to a peaceful resolution were not fully explored at the Tokyo conference. We call for the two parties to return to the negotiating process as soon as possible."
But paratroops landed in Aceh on Tuesday.
In the Phillipines, President Macapagal Arroyo declined to label one rebel group in her country as terrorists, but only because she says the label doesn't matter. She was engaged in intermittent talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) before leaving Manila, but broke them off just before her state visit to Washington.
Her absolute support for Bush's war in Iraq has brought Arroyo's popularity down in her own country. Stateside, however, her visit was one of the high-profile diplomatic "thank yous" that Bush has been doling out to world leaders who joined the "coalition of the willing." At the White House, Arroyo was promised increased military and economic support. Having turned away from negotiations and apparently towards a military solution, she is now expecting American help, in some form, when she cracks down on groups like the MILF or the terrorist group known as Abu Sayyaf.
(Of course, Arroyo still has the little matter of domestic disaffection to deal with. One opposition politician, Rep. Liza Maza of Bayan Muna, warned Arroyo against committing "crucial foreign policy errors of unpatriotism" when she meets with Bush. How might a meeting in Washington be seen as "unpatriotic" in the Phillipines? As Maza sees it, "we have virtually been under the US command in their antiterror/pro-hegemony wars.")
Writing for The Christian Science Monitor, Dan Murphy reports that the Phillipines and Indonesia are taking the U.S.'s actions as a cue to try shock and awe tactics:
"In the past week, two separate peace initiatives have collapsed in Southeast Asia: The Philippines' effort to end its war with Muslim rebels and the internationally brokered peace talks between Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). Though peace was a long shot in both cases, analysts point to an unexpected trigger for the latest round of hostilities: America's quick victory in Iraq.
'This is the right time to go back to war,' says Dr. Andrew Tan, an expert on regional insurgencies at Singapore's Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies. 'In the context of the war against terrorism, there are few, if any, diplomatic costs to seeking a military solution.'
...
Meanwhile, US complaints about human rights abuses have been blunted by the Bush administration, determined to improve its military relationships in a region seen as crucial to the war on terror. But Dr. Tan and other analysts warn that the Philippines and Indonesia are making a mistake if they imagine a quick military solution is possible to the long-festering conflicts within their borders."
Discuss this article.
Re-Cleansing Iraq
American forces in northern Iraq find themselves in the middle of a growing ethnic conflict, as Washington's Kurdish allies seek redress for decades of repression by Saddam Hussein's regime -- chiefly the "Arabization" campaigns which forcibly relocated thousands of Kurds. Distressingly, the US troops and their commanders seem hard-pressed to keep the civil bloodshed from escalating.
As Charles Radin of the Boston Globe reports, the "wave of village burnings, forcible evictions, and armed clashes between Kurdish forces and Arab fighters" threatens to scuttle the fragile cease-fire imposed by the coalition. And, while US commanders insist they are trying to "freeze the situation in place," Kurdish leaders increasingly see their erstwhile allies as unwelcome interlopers.
"Hoshyar Zebari, director of international relations for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dominant political force in the conflict area, said American intervention is 'a point of tension between us and the coalition forces.' 'Unfortunately, they do not comprehend the sensitivity of this process of Arabization' that was pushed with steadily increasing force during nearly 40 years of Ba'ath Party rule in Iraq, he said. 'It was ethnic cleansing, really.'"
Now, it seems that northern Iraq is to be cleansed again. On Sunday, a day after Arabs and Kurds clashed in Kirkuk, Kurdish politicians in Erbil passed a new law to "cancel the history of Arabization" by forcing non-Kurds who moved into three northern cities as part of the Hussein government's campaign to leave, clearing the way for Kurds to return to their former homes. Ominously, as Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times writes, the law does not specify how the north's Arabs are to be forced out.
Kareem Fahim, writing in the Village Voice, interviews one of the Kurdish returnees, Ibrahim Ismail, who blithely tells Fahim that he simply found his former village, Baba Mahmoud, deserted.
"Members of the Iraqi Arab family that lived in the house he has taken over returned only once, to collect their furniture. 'They came with a truck and took their things,' he says. 'I didn't ask their names.' Ismail says this land has belonged to the Kurds since Ottoman times. 'The Arabs cut down the trees our families had planted, and they used them to cover their houses,' he says, pointing to the timber roof of one hut. 'They told me that they always knew we'd come back.' It is Kurdish land, he repeats, surrounded by his children and a brother, who also claimed one of the houses. 'The Arabs knew this, and so they left.'"
Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}
Reporting on Private Lynch
Forget Jayson Blair. Why are British media outlets breaking big stories about Pentagon shenanigans? Big Brother, Re-Branded
How do you quell controversy over an unpopular survelliance initiative? Give it a new name.
Reporting on Private Lynch
The New York Times has been busy with the Jayson Blair scandal, lately, but maybe they should be paying attention to larger issues. One of Blair's fabrications related to Private Jessica Lynch -- Blair made up interviews and described tobacco fields around a house he had never seen. But that was a minor detail in the Lynch saga. Scores of other reporters, editors and producers helped generate the storm of hype around Lynch's dramatic rescue. Now, according to reports by the Toronto Sunday Star, the Guardian and the BBC, it seems that Lynch's rescue may have been staged especially for those high-tech night cameras the special forces were carrying during the mission. Jayson Blair is cause for concern at The New York Times, but the BBC's report should have the rest of the American media doing some soul searching about the coverage of this war.
Lynch's story provided the Pentagon with heroes and happy news, just when the war was proving more difficult than the Bush administration had originally hoped. The grainy green night footage showed Army Rangers and Navy Seals busting into a hospital with guns drawn and whisking a stunned-looking Lynch away in a helicopter. A brave Iraqi laywer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, supposedly tipped off the Americans to Lynch's location. "Daring!" "Heroic!" the headlines blared. The first reports claimed that Lynch had fought for her life, that she had bullet wounds, that she had been mistreated and possibly tortured at the Iraqi hospital.
But now, in a scathing indictment of both the Pentagon's willingess to stage manage facts and the American media's willingness to applaud the show, a BBC documentary has called most of the details of the original story into question. Reporter John Kampfner calls the entire rescue "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.":
Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital. "We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.
"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."
There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance.
But as the ambulance, with Private Lynch inside, approached a checkpoint American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch.
(The BBC also notes that Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of Top Gun fame, has been advising the Pentagon since the war in Afghanistan ...)
No reporters seem to have questioned the Pentagon's official narrative, nor asked, as the BBC did, for the unedited version of the videotape that the Pentagon was handing out. The original New York Times report on April 5 read:
"Muhammad ultimately contacted American marines in Iraq, pointing out the exact room where Private Lynch was being held, and around midnight on Tuesday April 1, marines launched an attack on the nearby Baath Party headquarters while Army Rangers secured the hospital grounds and Navy SEALS raced into rescue Private Lynch. There were firefights to get into the building, and firefights to get out, according to Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the spokesman for the United States Central Command headquarters, in Doha, Qatar. Members of the strike force who stayed behind found ammunition, maps and a terrain model in the basement of the hospital. General Brooks said that was proof the Iraqis are using civilian facilities to disguise and protect military installations. By Wednesday morning, marines seized the hospital under light sniper fire. Civilian patients and medical staff members emerged with hands raised."
Jayson Blair provided "additional reporting" for that story. His contribution proved entirely fictitious. Presumably, all of the other reporters at least travelled to their reported locations. But given how much of this story may have been debunked, were any of them asking the Pentagon the tough questions? Were any of them skeptical enough of the made-for-Meg Ryan narrative being handed to them? Most of America probably still believes that Jessica Lynch fought for her life, was terribly wounded, possibly even tortured and then saved by a heroic Iraqi lawyer and brave Navy Seals. In truth, the British report indicates that Jessica Lynch's unit took a wrong turn, she was terribly injured in a car wreck, and taken to a hospital where Iraqi doctors treated her and then actually tried to get her back to American troops.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer is declining comment. The Iraqi lawyer Mohammed, a primary source for the version of the story where Lynch was mistreated and saved, has a cushy job with a Republican lobbying organization and a $300,000 book contract, so he has to stick to his guns. At the Pentagon, it's bluster as usual. Spokesman Bryan Whitman called any accusations of stage management "void of all facts and absolutely ridiculous," but included this healthy dose of backpedaling:
"'We don't want to take unnecessary risk. We do make sure that when we exercise military force we use the right resources, sufficient to get the job done. It is a decision made by the commander on the ground,' Mr Whitman told CNN. He also said that the US military never claimed that the troops came under fire when they burst into the hospital, but that troops supporting the mission exchanged fire nearby.
Speculative reports in the media were responsible for some of the misinformation, not Pentagon statements, he added.
'The Pentagon never released an account of what happened to Lynch because it didn't have an account. She never told us,' Mr Whitman added."
We may never know all of the details of what happened to Private Jessica Lynch. But the fact remains that it was British and Canadian outlets that broke this story. And Kampfner at the BBC doesn't think that's a coincidence. CNN asked Kampfner whether British officials themselves were worried about the Pentagon's presentation of information, and Kampfner said: "Well, I mean, it must be said the British are no more angels than the Americans when it comes to putting out certain messages in the war. The British were worried about the Lynch episode, but they saw this more in general terms. They were worried about the entire U.S. media operation.
Forget Blair, and forget his race. What are the rest of America's reporters doing? Discuss this article.
Big Brother, Re-Branded
What do you do when the public spurns your product? Well, for many a marketing executive, the answer is simple: Slap a new name on the unsuccessful item and begin selling it again.
Apparently, somebody at the Pentagon has been taking marketing classes.
Earlier this year, responding to broad skepticism and concern, Congress ordered the Pentagon to explain exactly what it intended to accomplish with its wildly controversial Total Information Awareness data surveillance initiative. This week, the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency delivered that report. Its centerpiece: A name change. The controversial outlines of the project remain unchanged -- the Pentagon still intends to mine commercial databases, tracking the buying and behavioral habits of millions of Americans. But now, the initiative will be known as the Terrorism Information Awareness program. The re-branding, military officials claim, is simply an effort to reassure the country that the program is intended for tracking and finding foreign terrorist threats -- not building dossiers on US citizens.
Noting that the methodology, technology, and legal restraints associated with the effort remain unchanged, civil libertarians are far from mollified.
Caron Carlson of eWeek reports that some privacy rights advocates "applauded the report as a good first step." But even those advocates are still calling for ongoing oversight of such data mining projects.
"Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, said he was encouraged that the report recognized that the effectiveness of a project like TIA should be evaluated before it is deployed. 'They acknowledge that a threshold question is effectiveness," Dempsey told eWEEK. 'They acknowledge that the law has imposed very few limits on what [data] they can get and how they can get it.'"
Other privacy activists are less reassured by the Pentagon's explanatory effort, though. Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells Wired that the report "is disappointing -- after more than a hundred pages, you don't know anything more about whether TIA will work or whether your civil liberties will be safe against it." Tien asserts that DARPA has done little to assuage real concerns. "Their mantra is, 'We always operate within current law.'"
That blanket reassurance -- like the name-change -- has been of little value to those critics who remain skeptical not just of the TIA program, but of the increasingly pliant laws governing surveillance. Cynthia Webb of The Washington Post reports that one such Congressional skeptic remains convinced that the problems with the program go far deeper than just the name.
Finally, editorial writers at many mainstream newspapers, including those at the Denver Post, are hoping that the Pentagon's report -- and the re-branding effort -- reflect an acknowledgement by the military and Congress that all data mining efforts are worrisome and must be watched closely.
"It seems that each day, as technology advances, government has even more prying eyes -- and they are more and more fixated on the daily acts of people. To protect ourselves from ourselves, Congress already has banned the use of the TIA system against Americans without further congressional approval.
That's important. Yet we can't cry 'big brother' with every new advance in information-gathering. Every year can't be '1984.'
However, Americans can and should help our government strike the proper balance between our privacy and the security of the homeland. Ask questions. Raise concerns."
Discuss this article.
{publish-page-break}
America's Most Wanted?
Big corporations can do business with our enemies. The rest of us had better shut up. Big Brother, Re-Branded
How do you quell controversy over an unpopular survelliance initiative? Give it a new name.
America's Most Wanted?
If you're a major corporation with ties to the Bush administration, you can do business with countries that support terror and other 'evil' states, lining your pockets and theirs, but your patriotism won't be questioned. If you're an all-girl country pop act, a minor Hollywood star, or just a young American whose views differ from the president's, exercise your right to free speech and you can expect to be treated like Public Enemy Number One. The Dixie Chicks are still being boycotted and were booed at the Country Music Awards. Where are the Clear Channel-supported boycotts of Halliburton?
As Bob Herbert at The New York Times points out, Halliburton has a wretched track record, which includes a fine for doing business with Libya (a country on the State Department's terrorist list), and a $2 million settlement in a case that charged the company with price gouging. But it's the Dixie Chicks who get flak for being unpatriotic: "The Chicks learned how dangerous it can be to criticize the chief of a grand imperial power. Halliburton, on the other hand, can do no wrong. Yes, it has a history of ripping off the government. And, yes, it's made zillions doing business in countries that sponsor terrorism, including members of the "axis of evil" that is so despised by the president.
But the wrath of the White House has not come thundering down on Halliburton for consorting with the enemy. And there's been very little public criticism. This is not some hapless singing group we're talking about. Halliburton is a court favorite. So instead of being punished for its misdeeds, it's been handed a huge share of the riches to be reaped from the reconstruction of Iraq and U.S. control of Iraqi oil."
Despite a sexy US Magazine cover story explaining their position, the Dixie Chicks are still getting hassled. They had to pipe in their appearance via telecast at the American Country Music Awards on Wednesday.
Before the war, the Screen Actors Guild issued a prescient press release warning studio executives not to deny entertainers work based on their political views, emphasizing that "Even a hint of blacklist must never again be tolerated in this nation."
But it's not necessarily the studios that are exerting the pressure. It's everyone from the Baseball Hall of Fame to MCI. The Hall of Fame cancelled an appearance by Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon because of their anti-war views. Tim Robbins gave a rousing speech at the National Press Club in response, where he detailed what he and his family have been through since September 11.
The phone company MCI was targetted with a boycott when longtime political activist Danny Glover expressed "unpatriotic" views. The conservative talk show host who started the boycott now claims that MCI sent him an email promising that Glover would be dropped.
Glover told the Associated Press that the whole idea is to crush any kind of dissent: "Something is happening now that is very dark and very sinister in this country, and for us to not admit it is happening is, in some ways, for us to be blind."
Of course, the right wing talk show hosts and country music fans have every right to their views. It's the overall stifling climate, where anyone who questions the powers-that-be is silenced, that's frightening. What's most frightening, given that climate, are recent hints that government-backed authorities might be taking that climate as carte blanche to conflate dissent with terrorism. Being booed in Las Vegas, or even losing a spokesperson gig, is one thing. Being arrested is another.
The Washington Post reports that the government is already using the Patriot Act against people who have nothing to do with terrorism, in cases involving credit card cons and hackers, to name a few.
In Oakland, California, the state's anti-terror intelligence center encouraged police to look at protesters as if they were terrorists: "Days before firing wooden slugs at anti-war protesters, Oakland police were warned of potential violence at the Port of Oakland by California's anti-terrorism intelligence center, which admits blurring the line between terrorism and political dissent. The April 2 bulletin from the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) arguably offered more innuendo than actual evidence of protesters' intent to 'shut down' the port and possibly act violently.
CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle said such evidence wasn't needed to issue warnings on war protesters.
'You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest),' said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department. 'You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.'"
And in Portland, Oregon, the local TV station has posted mug shots of anti-war protesters on its Web site. Their crime? Protesting without ID. They look about 17. Are these really America's Most Wanted?
Discuss this article.
Big Brother, Re-Branded
What do you do when the public spurns your product? Well, for many a marketing executive, the answer is simple: Slap a new name on the unsuccessful item and begin selling it again.
Apparently, somebody at the Pentagon has been taking marketing classes.
Earlier this year, responding to broad skepticism and concern, Congress ordered the Pentagon to explain exactly what it intended to accomplish with its wildly controversial Total Information Awareness data surveillance initiative. This week, the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency delivered that report. Its centerpiece: A name change. The controversial outlines of the project remain unchanged -- the Pentagon still intends to mine commercial databases, tracking the buying and behavioral habits of millions of Americans. But now, the initiative will be known as the Terrorism Information Awareness program. The re-branding, military officials claim, is simply an effort to reassure the country that the program is intended for tracking and finding foreign terrorist threats -- not building dossiers on US citizens.
Noting that the methodology, technology, and legal restraints associated with the effort remain unchanged, civil libertarians are far from mollified.
Caron Carlson of eWeek reports that some privacy rights advocates "applauded the report as a good first step." But even those advocates are still calling for ongoing oversight of such data mining projects.
"Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, said he was encouraged that the report recognized that the effectiveness of a project like TIA should be evaluated before it is deployed. 'They acknowledge that a threshold question is effectiveness," Dempsey told eWEEK. 'They acknowledge that the law has imposed very few limits on what [data] they can get and how they can get it.'"
Other privacy activists are less reassured by the Pentagon's explanatory effort, though. Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells Wired that the report "is disappointing -- after more than a hundred pages, you don't know anything more about whether TIA will work or whether your civil liberties will be safe against it." Tien asserts that DARPA has done little to assuage real concerns. "Their mantra is, 'We always operate within current law.'"
That blanket reassurance -- like the name-change -- has been of little value to those critics who remain skeptical not just of the TIA program, but of the increasingly pliant laws governing surveillance. Cynthia Webb of The Washington Post reports that one such Congressional skeptic remains convinced that the problems with the program go far deeper than just the name.
Finally, editorial writers at many mainstream newspapers, including those at the Denver Post, are hoping that the Pentagon's report -- and the re-branding effort -- reflect an acknowledgement by the military and Congress that all data mining efforts are worrisome and must be watched closely.
"It seems that each day, as technology advances, government has even more prying eyes -- and they are more and more fixated on the daily acts of people. To protect ourselves from ourselves, Congress already has banned the use of the TIA system against Americans without further congressional approval.
That's important. Yet we can't cry 'big brother' with every new advance in information-gathering. Every year can't be '1984.'
However, Americans can and should help our government strike the proper balance between our privacy and the security of the homeland. Ask questions. Raise concerns."
Discuss this article.
Aid Watch: 
Coalition Watch: 
Occupation Watch: Why Iraq, Not the US, Should Prosecute Hussein's Pals (The Chicago Tribune);Baghdad's Death Toll Assessed (The Los Angeles Times);Pfc. Jessica Lynch's Rescue Was Staged (BBC);US, British Troops Accused of Torture (Associated Press)
Policy Watch: Lebanon's Lessons for Iraqi Power Sharing (The Minneapolis Star Tribune);Wolfowitz: Turkish Army Should Have Overruled Government, Allowed US Access During War (The Hill)
Saddam Watch: 'Comical Ali's Last Hours as Information Minister (The Toronto Star)
Weapons Watch: Head of UN Nuclear Agency Warns of Iraq Nuclear Disaster (Reuters);No Political Fallout for Bush on Lack of Weapons (The Independent);Remains of Toxic Bullets Litter Iraq (Christian Science Monitor)
Oil Watch: War for Oil a Pentagon Policy Since 1999 (Sydney Morning Herald)