SECURITY INCIDENTS
Baghdad:
Unknown
gunmen in military uniforms kill two Iraqi workers in mobile phone
company of Iraqna in western Baghdad and kidnap two others.
Two car bombs explode in Baghdad.
One woman was killed and 15 people were wounded in a blast in an area
of eastern Baghdad. Thirteen people were injured in the other attack in
an area in the north of the city.
Explosion outside a building housing the Iraqna cell phone company in the Mansour district. It damaged the building and 14 nearby stores but no injuries were reported.
Civil engineer shot to death in front of a barber shop in west Baghdad.
Three civilians killed and five wounded when car bomb explodes at army checkpoint in eastern Baghdad.
Kirkuk:
Civilian killed and two others wounded when roadside bomb goes off near U.S. forces in Kirkuk.
Policeman killed by gunmen while heading to work in Hawija, southwest of Kirkuk.
Three civilians wounded when roadside bomb goes off near joint U.S.-Iraqi police patrol in Kirkuk.
Diwaniya:
Translator
with Polish troops killed and his nephew wounded by gunmen wearing
police commando uniforms in Diwaniya south of Baghdad.
Basra:
Two Iraqis killed in Basra.
Tikrit:
U.S. and Iraqi troops free three Iraqis who were kidnapped in Tikrit, and they killed one insurgent and captured nine in a raid in Youssifiyah, south of Baghdad, the U.S. command said.
IRAQ NEWS
Video
posted Internet claims to show Iraqi insurgents dragging burning body
of U.S. pilot on the ground after crash of Apache helicopter:
Parts of the video were blurry, and the face of the man being dragged
was not shown. His clothes were so tattered it was impossible to tell
if he was wearing an American military uniform, but he appeared to be
wearing military fatigues.
The
video was blurry but the helicopter could be seen clearly. It showed
the outlines of the craft's destroyed blades and blood on various
jagged pieces of wreckage spread over a field. However, it was not
possible to see if the helicopter had U.S. markings.
The
video also clearly showed the bloodied, burning body of a man being
dragged by several other men through a field. Before the body was
moved, the camera zoomed in on what appeared to be his waistline, which
showed a scrap of underwear with the brand name "Hanes" on it. The man
also appeared to be wearing some type of camouflage fatigues.
In
its statement, the U.S. military said it confirmed the two pilots had
died, and it had recovered "all available remains found on the scene,
given the catastrophic nature of the crash."
The
AH-64D Apache Longbow crashed about 5:30 p.m. Saturday due to possible
hostile fire west of Youssifiyah while conducting a combat air patrol,
the military said.
al-Jaafari refuses to abandon bid for a second term to break deadlock over new government,
and more than 1,000 of his supporters rallied in the holy city of
Karbala, urging an end to "U.S. interference" in Iraqi politics.
Al-Jaafari told The Guardian newspaper that he was rejecting calls to
give up the nomination of his Shiite bloc "to protect democracy in
Iraq."
"There
is a decision that was reached by a democratic mechanism and I stand
with it," he said. "We have to respect our Iraqi people."
Al-Jaafari added that the Iraqi people "will react if they see the
rules of democracy being disobeyed. Everyone should stick to democratic
mechanisms no matter whether they disagree with the person."
Condoleezza
Rice yesterday brushes aside suggestions that the United States wants
indefinite troop presence and permanent military bases in Iraq:
"The presence in Iraq is for a very clear purpose, and that's to enable
Iraqis to be able to govern themselves and to create security forces
that can help them do that," Rice told the House Appropriations
Committee's foreign operations panel. "I don't think that anybody
believes that we really want to be there longer than we have to," the
chief U.S. diplomat added.
However, Rice did not say when all U.S. forces would return home and
did not directly answer Rep. Steven Rothman, D-N.J., when he asked,
"Will the bases be permanent or not?"
"I would think that people would tell you, we're not seeking permanent
bases really pretty much anywhere in the world these days. We are, in
fact, in the process of removing base structure from a lot of places,"
Rice replied.
24 Wisconsin Communities Vote for Iraq Pullout:
Thousands of voters turned out in Wisconsin to offer a purely symbolic
but heartfelt message: Bring the troops home from Iraq. By margins
overwhelming in some places and narrow in others, voters in 24 of 32
communities approved referendums Tuesday calling for the immediate
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
In
addition to Madison, those communities supporting the measures included
the Milwaukee suburbs of Shorewood and Whitefish Bay, and the western
city of La Crosse. Those voting down the measure included the
northwestern city of Hayward and the south-central city of Watertown,
where 75 percent of voters disapproved.
REPORTS
Iraq Sunni leader says Iran stokes sectarian war:
One of Iraq’s leading Sunni Arab politicians accused Iran on Monday of
stoking sectarian tensions to foment a civil war that would break up
Iraq and allow Tehran to control its oil-rich Shi’ite Muslim heartlands
in the south.
Tarek
Al Hashemi, a contender for speaker when the new parliament opens on
Sunday, said Iran was fostering instability in Iraq, partly through
militias loyal to Shi’ite parties, in a bid to divert US pressure over
Tehran’s nuclear programme.
"The
main player in Iraq is Iran. It wants to create chaos for America in
Iraq as part of the conflict over the nuclear issue," Hashemi told
Reuters in an interview in Jordan. "Pushing the Americans into a
quagmire in Iraq at the present time serves Iran’s national interests."
All
Iraqis were paying the price for a proxy war between Iran and the
United States on Iraqi soil, Hashemi said. "The antagonists are Iran
and America and those paying the price are the Iraqi people in the near
term and, yes, in the long term, there are Iranian designs on Iraqi
territory."
COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS
Dahr Jamail: How Massacres Become the Norm:
U.S. soldiers killing innocent civilians in Iraq is not news. Just as
it was not news that U.S. soldiers slaughtered countless innocent
civilians in Vietnam. However, when some rare reportage of this
non-news from Iraq does seep through the cracks of the corporate media,
albeit briefly, the American public seems shocked. Private and public
statements of denial and dismissal immediately start to fill the air.
We hear, "American soldiers would never do such a thing," or "Who would
make such a ridiculous claim?"
It amazes me that so many people in the U.S. today somehow seriously
believe that American soldiers would never kill civilians. Despite the
fact that they are in a no-win guerrilla war in Iraq, which, like any
other guerrilla war, always generates more civilian casualties than
combatant casualties on either side.
Robert
J. Lifton is a prominent American psychiatrist who lobbied for the
inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders after his work with U.S.
veterans from Vietnam. His studies on the behavior of those who have
committed war crimes led him to believe it does not require an unusual
level of mental illness or of personal evil to carry out such crimes.
Rather, these crimes are nearly guaranteed to occur in what Lifton
refers to as "atrocity-producing situations."
Several of his books, such as The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, examine how abnormal conditions work on normal minds, enabling them to commit the most horrendous crimes imaginable.
Iraq today is most certainly an "atrocity-producing situation," as it has been from the very beginning of the occupation.
The
latest reported war crime, a U.S. military raid on the al-Mustafa Shia
mosque in Baghdad on March 26, which killed at least 16 people, is only
one instance of the phenomenon Lifton has spoken of.
An
AP video of the scene shows male bodies tangled together in a bloody
mass on the floor of the imams' living quarters – all of them with
shotgun wounds and other bullet holes. The tape also shows shell
casings of the caliber used by the U.S. military scattered about on the
floor. An official from the al-Sadr political bloc reported that
American forces had surrounded the hospital where the wounded were
taken for treatment after the massacre.
The
slaughter was followed by an instant and predictable disinformation
blitz by the U.S. military. The second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq,
Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, told reporters "someone went in and made the
scene look different from what it was."
(…)
Throughout
the three-year history of the U.S.-led catastrophe that is the
occupation of Iraq, we have had one instance after another of brutality
meted out to innocent Iraqis, by way of direct executions or bombings
from the air, or both.
During
an attack on a wedding party in May 2004, U.S. troops killed over 40
people, mostly women and children, in a desert village on the Syrian
border of Iraq.
APTN
footage showed fragments of musical instruments, blood stains, the
headless body of a child, other dead children, and clumps of women's
hair in a destroyed house that was bombed by U.S. warplanes. Other
photographs showed dead women and children, and an AP reporter
identified at least 10 of the bodies as those of children. Relatives
who gathered at a cemetery outside of Ramadi, where all the bodies were
buried, told reporters that each of the 28 fresh graves contained
between one and three bodies.
The
few survivors of the massacre later recounted how in the middle of the
night long after the wedding feast had ended, U.S. jets began raining
bombs on their tents and houses.
Mrs.
Shihab, a 30-year-old woman who survived the massacre, told the
Guardian, "We went out of the house, and the American soldiers started
to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one
by one." She added that she ran with her two little boys before they
were all shot, including herself in the leg. "I left them because they
were dead," she said of her two little boys, one of whom was
decapitated by a shell. "I fell into the mud and an American soldier
came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me."
Thereafter,
armored military vehicles entered the village, shooting at all the
other houses and the people who were starting to assemble in the open.
Following these, two Chinook helicopters offloaded several dozen
troops, some of who set explosives in one of the homes and a building
next to it. Both exploded into rubble as the helicopters lifted off.
Mr.
Nawaf, one of the survivors, said, "I saw something that nobody ever
saw in this world. There were children's bodies cut into pieces, women
cut into pieces, men cut into pieces. The Americans call these people
foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one piece of evidence of
what they are saying."
Hamdi
Noor al-Alusi, the manager of al-Qa'im general hospital, the nearest
medical facility to the scene of the slaughter, said that of the 42
killed, 14 were children and 11 women. "I want to know why the
Americans targeted this small village," he said, "These people are my
patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?"
As
usual, the U.S. military ran a disinformation campaign saying the
target was a "suspected safe-house" for foreign fighters and denied
that any children were killed. The ever pliant U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark
Kimmitt told reporters that the troops who reported back from the
operation "told us they did not shoot women and children."
Topping
his ridiculous claim was the statement of Maj. Gen. James Mattis,
commander of the 1st Marine Division. "How many people go to the middle
of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest
civilization?"
Perhaps
someone should have informed him that these farmers and nomads often
"go to the middle of the desert" because they happen to live there.
"These
were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naïve,"
Mattis stated before being asked by a reporter to comment on the
footage on Arabic television that showed a child's body being lowered
into a grave. His brilliant response was: "I have not seen the
pictures, but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologize for
the conduct of my men."
If
the U.S. were a member of the International Criminal Court, Maj. Gen.
Mattis may well have been in The Hague right now being tried for aiding
and abetting war crimes. How can someone holding an official position
like Mattis publicly sanction atrocities?
It is about unnatural responses such as these that Dr. Lifton has written extensively. In a piece he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine
in July 2004, Lifton addressed the issue of U.S. doctors being
complicit in torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. This article sheds much
light on the situation in Iraq. If we substitute "doctors" with
"soldiers," it is easy to understand why American soldiers are
regularly committing the excesses that we hear of.
Lifton
writes, "American doctors at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have undoubtedly
been aware of their medical responsibility to document injuries and
raise questions about their possible source in abuse. But those doctors
and other medical personnel were part of a command structure that
permitted, encouraged, and sometimes orchestrated torture to a degree
that it became the norm – with which they were expected to comply – in
the immediate prison environment."
He
continues, "The doctors thus brought a medical component to what I call
an 'atrocity-producing situation' – one so structured, psychologically
and militarily, that ordinary people can readily engage in atrocities.
Even without directly participating in the abuse, doctors may have
become socialized to an environment of torture and by virtue of their
medical authority helped sustain it. In studying various forms of
medical abuse, I have found that the participation of doctors can
confer an aura of legitimacy and can even create an illusion of therapy
and healing."
I
have personally experienced this. Standing with U.S. soldiers at
checkpoints and perimeters of operations in Iraq, I have seen them
curse and kick Iraqis, heard them threatening to kill even women and
children and then look at me as if they had merely said hello to them.
My status of journalist did not deter them because they saw no need for
checks.
Having
stood with soldiers anticipating that each moving car would turn into a
bomb and each passerby into a suicide bomber, I have tasted the stress
and fear these soldiers live with on a daily basis. When one of their
fellow soldiers is killed by a roadside bomb, the need for revenge may
be directed at anything. And repeated often enough, the process gets
socialized.
It's
about this attitude brought on by the normalization of the abnormal
under "atrocity-producing situations" that Dr. Lifton speaks. Unless,
of course, we consider Mattis and others like him to be rare sociopaths
who are able to participate in atrocities without suffering lasting
emotional harm.
And it is this attitude that is responsible for the incessant replication of wanton slaughter and madness in Iraq today.
Back
in November 2004, I wrote about 12-year-old Fatima Harouz. She lay
dazed in a crowded room in Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, feebly waving
her bruised arm at flies. Her shins had been shattered by bullets from
U.S. soldiers when they fired through the front door of her home in
Latifiya, a small city just south of Baghdad. Small plastic drainage
bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took
shrapnel from another bullet.
Her
mother, who was standing with us, said, "They attacked our home and
there weren't even any resistance fighters in our area." Her brother
had been shot and killed, and his wife was wounded as their home was
ransacked by soldiers. "Before they left, they killed all of our
chickens," she added, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock, and rage.
On
hearing the story, a doctor looked at me sternly and asked, "This is
the freedom… in their Disney Land are there kids just like this?"
Another
wounded young woman in a nearby hospital bed, Rana Obeidy, had been
walking home with her brother. She assumed the soldiers shot her and
her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda. This happened in
Baghdad. She had a chest wound where a bullet had grazed her, unlike
her little brother, whom the bullets had killed.
There exist many more such cases. Amnesty International has documented
scores of human rights violations committed by U.S. troops in Iraq
during the first six months of the occupation. To mention but a few:
U.S.
troops shot dead and injured scores of Iraqi demonstrators in several
incidents. For example, seven people were reportedly shot dead and
dozens injured in Mosul on April 15.
At least 15 people, including children, were shot dead and more than 70 injured in Fallujah on April 29.
Two demonstrators were shot dead outside the Republican Palace in Baghdad on June 18.
On
May 14, two U.S. armed vehicles broke through the perimeter wall of the
home of Sa'adi Suleiman Ibrahim al-Ubaydi in Ramadi. Soldiers beat him
with rifle butts and then shot him dead as he tried to flee.
U.S.
forces shot 12-year-old Mohammad al-Kubaisi as they carried out search
operations around his house in the Hay al-Jihad area in Baghdad on June
26. He was carrying the family bedding to the roof of his house when he
was shot. Neighbors tried to rush him to the nearby hospital by car,
but U.S. soldiers stopped them and ordered them to go back. By the time
they returned to his home, Mohammad al-Kubaisi was dead.
On
Sept. 17, a 14-year-old boy was killed and six people were injured when
U.S. troops opened fire at a wedding party in Fallujah.
On
Sept. 23, three farmers, Ali Khalaf, Sa'adi Faqri, and Salem Khalil,
were killed and three others injured when U.S. troops opened a barrage
of gunfire reportedly lasting for at least an hour in the village of
al-Jisr near Fallujah. A U.S. military official stated that this
happened when the troops came under attack, but this was vehemently
denied by relatives of the dead. Later that day, U.S. military
officials reportedly went to the farmhouse, took photographs, and
apologized to the family.
This
last incident ended in a way similar to the one I covered in Ramadi in
November 2003. On the 23rd of that month, during Ramadan, U.S. soldiers
raided a home where a family was just sitting down together to break
their fast.
Three
men of the family had their hands tied behind them with plastic ties
and were laid on the ground face down while the women and children were
made to stand inside a nearby storage closet.
Khalil
Ahmed, 30 years old, the brother of two of the victims and cousin to a
third, wept when he described to me how after executing the three men
the soldiers completely destroyed the home, using Humvees with machine
guns, small tanks, and gunfire from the many troops on foot and
helicopters.
"We
don't know the reason why the soldiers came here. They didn't tell us
the reason. We don't know why they killed our family members." Khalil
seemed to demand an answer from me. "There are no weapons in this
house, there are no resistance fighters. So why did these people have
to die? Why?"
Khalil
told me that the day after the executions took place, soldiers returned
to apologize. They handed him a cake saying they were sorry that they
had been given wrong information by someone that told them there were
resistance fighters in their house.
This
is only a very small sampling. The only way to prevent any of this from
being repeated ad infinitum is to remove U.S. soldiers from their
"atrocity-producing situation" in Iraq. For it is clearer than ever
that the longer the failed, illegal occupation persists, the larger
will be the numbers of Iraqis slaughtered by the occupation forces.
US anti-militia strategy another wrong Iraq move:
Last week's attack by US-led Iraqi paramilitary forces on a building
that Shi'ite leaders claim was a mosque may have marked the beginning
of a new stage of US policy in which Iraqi forces are used to carry out
military operations against Shi'ite militia forces - especially those
loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. However, such a strategy risks uniting the
Shi'ites against the US military occupation and leading to a showdown
that makes that presence politically untenable.
Just
before the operation against the mosque complex, which the US military
referred to as a "terrorist base", US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad
hinted broadly that the United States would soon target the Shi'ite
militias for the brunt of its operations.
"The
militias haven't been focused on decisively yet," he declared, adding
that militias were now killing more Iraqis than the insurgents.
Khalilzad further pinpointed the Mahdi Army and its ties to Iran as the
primary and most immediate US concern.
Most of those killed in the raid by US Special Forces and their Iraqi
counterparts apparently worked for Muqtada al-Sadr's political-military
organization, the Mahdi Army. After the raid, moreover, the State
Department spokesman said the incident underlined the need to free
Iraq's security forces from sectarian control.
Militiamen
loyal to Sadr have been implicated in many of the reprisal killings
against Sunnis since the bombing of a Shi'ite mosque in Samarra in
February. Sadr's forces may also be targeted, however, because he has
closer links to Iran than any other Shi'ite political figure.
On
a visit to Tehran in January, Sadr declared, "The forces of Mahdi Army
defend the interests of Iraq and Islamic countries. If neighboring
Islamic countries, including Iran, become the target of attacks, we
will support them."
In
a move evidently aimed at building popular support for a possible
confrontation with the United States, ministers representing all three
Shi'ite parties in the Iraqi government united in denouncing the raid
as a massacre. Even more significant, however, the "Shi'ite Islamist
Alliance" has demanded the restoration of control over security matters
to the Iraqi government.
According to Joost Hilterman of the Brussels-based International Crisis
Group, Shi'ite leaders are now talking about the "second betrayal" of
the Shi'ite cause by the United States. The first betrayal was the US
failure to intervene to support a Shi'ite uprising against the Saddam
Hussein regime at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, which resulted
in the killing of thousands of Shi'ite civilians.
In
a showdown between military forces of the two sides, the militant
Shi'ites would have a considerable advantage in numbers, but the US
would be able to deploy better-trained and -equipped Iraqi forces. US
combat forces would be ready to intervene on their side.
The
move against Shi'ite militia units appears to be the result of a new
fear in the White House of impending disaster in Iraq. Despite soothing
talk by US commanders last month that the threat of civil war had
passed, Brigadier-General Douglas Raaberg, deputy chief of operations
for the US Central Command, revealed the command's pessimistic view
when he told the Associated Press, "Whenever it happens, it's Iraq's
problem and Iraqis have to take care of it."
The
White House may also have begun to doubt that the political
negotiations on a new government will do much to reverse that trend.
The idea of a more aggressive policy toward the Shi'ite militias
appeals to the desire to do something dramatic to regain control of the
situation.
A
strategy of trying to wrap up the Mahdi Army, however, would represent
another major US miscalculation. The militant Shi'ites hold the high
cards in any showdown: the ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of
followers in the streets of Baghdad. The most likely result of such a
campaign would be a decisive - and final - political defeat for the
occupation.
Is it still worth it?:
Listening to an interview with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza
Rice, this morning on the Today programme, I felt physically sick,
especially when she said: "Thousands of mistakes were committed in
Iraq". I couldn't listen to the rest of her sentence; was she about to
echo Madeleine Albright's "but the price is worth it"?
In
May 1996, the 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Albright,
then US ambassador to the UN: "We have heard that half a million
children have died [as a result of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean,
that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the
price worth it?"
Albright responded: "I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
On September 30, 1998, the BBC reported that Denis Halliday,
coordinator of the programme, resigned in disgust (after 30 years as an
UN employee). The sanctions, he said, were killing 4,000-5,000 children
a month. Halliday said the sanctions were strengthening Saddam Hussein
by damaging "the innocent people of the country".
Two months later (November 26 1998) Unicef reported a 72% rise in
"chronically malnourished" Iraqi children, with 960,000 Iraqi children
fitting that description. Unicef official Philippe Heffinck noted: "It
is clear that children are bearing the brunt of the current economic
hardship."
Those were the kind of "mistakes" committed under the US-UK backed
sanctions. What about the "mistakes" under the Anglo-American
occupation?
To name but few:
The
lies over weapons of mass destruction originally used to justify the
war; the torture of prisoners, including women and children, in Abu
Ghraib and beyond Abu Ghraib; the obscenity of the Anglo-American
"liberation's" morality; the daily bloodshed and mayhem; the racism of
the occupiers; the humiliation of the occupied; the destruction of the
infrastructure; the killing of over 100,000 civilians; the siege and
bombardment of cities; the use of DU and white phosphorus; collective
punishment, destroying mosques, schools and houses; arbitrary arrests;
the more than 30,000 detainees in various US-UK controlled prisons and
camps; the women arrested as hostages.
Bearing
in mind the selective, short memory of the US administration and
British government, let us have a look at two "mistakes" during March
alone.
The first mistake took place in Abu Sifa, as reported in the Sunday Times on March 26:
The
villagers of Abu Sifa near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to
the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area
for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf
heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.
Khalaf,
a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US
helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the
Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf's brother Fayez, firing
as they went.
Khalaf
ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the
soldiers enter his brother's home and then heard the sound of women and
children screaming.
"Then
there was a lot of machine gun fire," he said last week. After that
there was the most frightening sound of all - silence, followed by
explosions as the soldiers left the house.
Once
the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic
search through the ruins of his brother's home. Abu Sifa was about to
join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered
from American atrocities.
According
to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house,
among them four women and five children aged between six months and
five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for
Knight Ridder newspapers said: "The American forces gathered the family
members in one room and executed 11 people.
The second mistake was related to academics:
Four
Iraqi academics were assassinated. One of them was Professor Kays Juma,
72. His death was reported by western media because he had an
Australian passport. Associated Press reported:
Australia
is trying to find out who will investigate the fatal shooting of an
Australian resident in Iraq by a private security guard.
Foreign
Minister Alexander Downer said the dead man was Kays Juma. Early
reports are that Mr Juma is 72 and a professor at the University of
Baghdad, where he taught PhD agriculture students.
"(We're)
obviously talking with the police and elements of the Coalition ... but
we'll have to wait and see and we're still encouraging coordination and
an appropriate investigation at this stage,'' he said.
He said Mr Juma was an Iraqi citizen married to an Australian. He lived in both countries.
"My
understanding is that he was in a vehicle, I'm not sure whether he was
in the vehicle alone or with other people, that endeavoured to go
through a checkpoint without stopping and the security officer opened
fire upon the vehicle and he was killed,'' Mr Downer said.
The guard is an employee of private security contractor Unity Resources Group.
Mr Downer said Australians should not travel to Iraq, and Australians already in Iraq should leave.
Paul
Jordan of AKE Asia Pacific, an Australian security consulting company
which has had contractors in Iraq since the war began, told ABC radio
he was not surprised by the incident.
"I can see how it can happen ... we're only recognising it now because
this person was an Australian, but this is something that happens every
day in Iraq,'' he said.
"The
American troops and other troops over there and security companies are
shooting innocent people that do get to close to convoys or who do the
wrong thing in traffic or just happen to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time and look suspicious,'' he said.
The Hyperpower Hype and Where It Took Us :
In that terrible moment when a choice might have been made between the
vision of apocalypse and the reality of al-Qaeda, between a malign
version of the smoke-and-mirrors Wizard of Oz and the pathetic little
man behind the curtain, the Bush administration opted for the vision in
a major way. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and other top officials
chose to pump up al-Qaeda into a global enemy worthy of a new Cold War,
a generational struggle that might comfortably be filled with smaller,
regime-change-oriented, "preventive" hot wars against hopelessly
outgunned enemies who -- unlike in those Cold War days -- would have no
other superpower to call on for aid.
That
radioactive decision, not the 9/11 attacks, determined the shape of our
world. Bush declared his "crusade" -- make no bones about it -- against
Islam (though al Qaeda was the fringiest of "Islamic" groups) and the
Middle East. It was, above all, to be a crusade to dominate the energy
heartlands of the planet.
In
its own way, al-Qaeda was ready to accept the Bush version of itself.
After all, our President had just elevated it into the major leagues of
enemyhood, right up there with the big boys of history. Via various
videos, including one just before the 2004 presidential elections,
al-Qaeda's leaders entered into a thoroughly bizarre "conversation"
with the Bush administration, which, in press conferences, answered in
kind. What a compliment! Who could reject a recruiting tool of that
sort, right out of someone's Hollywood fantasies. Why not be a group of
Islamic Dr. No's? (If only the Bush administration had reacted as James
Bond did: "World domination. The same old dream. Our asylums are full
of people who think they're Napoleon. Or God.")
On
their part, Bush and his cohorts were all-too-ready to dance with this
minor set of apocalypts, in part because they were themselves into
fantasies of world domination -- and considered themselves anything but
mad. With visions of a "New Rome" -- and a one-party democracy at home
-- dancing in their heads, they took that handy, terrifying image of
the apocalypse in downtown New York and translated it into every sort
of terror (including mushroom clouds threatening to go off over
American cities and unmanned aerial vehicles spraying poisons along the
East coast). In this way, they stampeded the American people and
Congress into their crusade of choice.
The
story of what followed you know well. Miraculously, al-Qaeda grew and
the United States shrank. For one thing, it turned out that top
American officials and the various neocons who worked for them or
simply cheered them on from Washington's think-tanks and editorial
pages, had been taken in by their own hype about American military
power. They deeply believed in their pumped-up version of our
hyper-strength, our ability to do anything we pleased in a world of
midgets; and with the Soviet Union gone, if you just checked out
military budgets and high-tech weapons programs, it might indeed look
that way. Economically, however, the U.S. was far less strong than they
imagined and its military power turned out to be far more impressive
when held in reserve as a threat than when put to use in Iraq, where
our Army would soon be stopped dead in its half-tracks.
In
retrospect, the Bush administration badly misread the U.S. position in
the world. Its officials, blinded by their own publicity releases on
the nature of American power, were little short of self-delusional. And
so, with unbearable self-confidence, the administration set out
flailingly and, in just a few short years, began to create something
like a landscape of ruins.
Today,
we stand in those ruins, whether we know it or not, though the Ground
Zero of the Bush assault was obviously not here, but in Iraq. Starting
with their "shock and awe," son-et-lumière air assault on downtown
Baghdad (which they promoted as if it were a hot, new TV show), they
turned out to want their apocalyptic-looking scenes of destruction up
on screen for the world to see no less than al-Qaeda did. It took next
to no time for them to turn huge swaths of Iraq into the international
equivalent of the World Trade Center. And it's a reasonable guess --
these people being painfully consistent in their predilections -- that
it's only going to get worse. (As Sidney Blumenthal recently put it in
another context, "Like all failed presidents, Bush is a captive in an
iron cage of his own making. The greater his frustration, the tighter
he grips the bars.")
BEYOND IRAQ
There is trouble ahead for Uncle Sam in his own backyard. Big trouble.
It is one of the most important and yet largely untold stories of our world in 2006. George W Bush has lost Latin America.
While the Bush administration has been fighting wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, relations between the United States and the countries of
Latin America have become a festering sore - the worst for years.
Virtually anyone paying attention to events in Venezuela and Nicaragua
in the north to Peru and Bolivia further south, plus in different ways
Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, comes to the same conclusion: there is a
wave of profound anti-American feeling stretching from the Texas border
to the Antarctic.
And almost everyone believes it will get worse.
Clipped wings and a triumph for realism:
Although still united in pushing for confrontation with Iran, the
coalition of hawks that propelled US troops toward Baghdad three years
ago appears to have finally run out of steam. Demoralized
by the quagmire in Iraq, as well as President George W Bush's still
falling approval and credibility ratings, the coalition of aggressive
nationalists, neo-conservatives and the Christian Right that promoted
the belligerent, neo-imperial trajectory in US foreign policy has lost
both its coherence and its power to dominate the political agenda in
Washington.
As
a result - and almost by default - realists under Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and in the uniformed military have steadily gained
control over the administration's policy. Within the increasingly
fractious Republican Party, more xenophobic forces appear to be on the
rise, as evidenced by recent and ongoing controversies surrounding
immigration and foreign control of US ports.
Evidence
of a decisive shift is not hard to find, beginning with the latest
edition of the "The National Security Strategy of the United States of
America", released last month.
A
kinder, gentler version of its fire-breathing 2002 predecessor that
laid out the doctrinal justification for the March 2003 invasion of
Iraq, the new version puts a greater emphasis on diplomacy and
development, tending alliances and other realist themes, even as it
continued the administration's defense of preemptive military action
with Iran squarely in mind.
Rice's constant travel - as well as that of her two underlings, Deputy
Secretary Robert Zoellick and Under Secretary for Policy Nicholas Burns
- not only demonstrates the priority the administration has placed on
cultivating allies and even states more skeptical of US benevolence. It
also suggests that the State Department - the bastion of foreign-policy
realism - is considerably more confident of its own power within the
administration.
Indeed, Rice's peripatetic pace stands in striking contrast to the
homebody habits of her predecessor, Colin Powell, who feared that even
a two- or three-day absence from headquarters would create policy
vacuums instantly filled by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld, co-leaders of the hawks' "cabal", as Powell's
former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, has called them.
Similarly,
senior military officers have appeared less reluctant to buck the party
line, making assertions about the lack of progress and looming
possibility of civil war in Iraq that are far less optimistic than the
two cabalists-in-chief.
The
return to realism has been helped immensely by the disappearance over
the past year of key players from the administration, among them
Wolfowitz and Feith, whose unpopularity with the military and among
even Republican lawmakers made them convenient scapegoats for the
growing fiasco in Iraq.
John
Bolton's move from a policymaking role in the State Department to the
United Nations also deprived the "cabal" of a key player in a strategic
post behind "enemy" lines.
The loss of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's formidable chief of staff
and national security adviser, after his indictment by a federal grand
jury for perjury and other charges in connection with the unauthorized
leading of classified information last October was an even more
decisive blow against the hawks. A national-security specialist who
acted with the full authority and confidence of the most powerful vice
president in US history, Libby was the hub of the hawks' network inside
the administration.
The network has also suffered serious losses in Congress, most
particularly the resignation after his indictment by a Texas grand jury
last year of the unusually powerful House majority leader, Tom DeLay,
who this week said he would not stand for re-election. An outspoken
champion of Israel's settler movement, "The Hammer", as he is known,
imposed iron discipline on Republicans in the lower chamber on behalf
of the 25-year alliance between the Christian Right and pro-Likud
neo-conservatives.
But aside from these losses, the coalition has been set back by internal divisions that seem only to grow deeper.
With
a few hardline exceptions, neo-conservatives such as Weekly Standard
editor William Kristol have been attacking Rumsfeld for failing to
deploy many more troops to Iraq and crush all resistance virtually
since US forces invaded.
Neo-conservatives have also suffered internal divisions that have
weakened their political potency. The most important has been their
reaction to Israel's disengagement from Gaza and the Kadima Party's
plans to dismantle settlements in the West Bank. Staunch Likudniks have
opposed disengagement and the administration's support for it; while
more moderate elements, including Kristol, have taken a more flexible
position.
The
coalition of hawks is also increasingly threatened by growing
disillusionment over the effects of the Bush administration's democracy
crusade across the Middle East.
Key
leaders in the Christian Right, in particular, were stunned by the
capital charges brought this year by a court in Afghanistan against a
Christian convert, who after US and Western protests was permitted to
go into exile in Italy last week.
"Some [in] our community decided early on that we would support the
president's policies because it might provide the shock therapy to
change these dictatorships" in the Islamic world, Reverend Richard
Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told
National Public Radio on Sunday.
"Now,
if in fact as a result of this effort ... we're not going to have that
kind of freedom for people to choose [their faith], then that's a real
torpedo in the belly of the president's policies."
American Conservative: Mission Improbable:
In Washington, there are a surprising number of analysts, even Bush
supporters, who consider an Iranian bomb inevitable at some point-off
the record that is. And for some it's not off the record: William Odom,
former head of the National Security Agency, asserts we should offer
the Iranians the bomb if they want it, noting that only under the Bush
administration has nonproliferation been used to foster regional
destabilization.
The Odom assertion underscores a salient point: an Iranian bomb or two
does not constitute a great danger to the United States. Even superhawk
John Bolton acknowledges that "for the United States the threat posed
by Iran is not direct" but that the Iranians could "strike at our
friends and allies in the region." State Department officials, with
characteristic precision, emphasize this: "A nuclear armed Iran would
represent a direct threat to U.S. forces and allies in the region,"
said Robert G. Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control and
international security. The threat is not to New York or Cleveland, but
to U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf or, given Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, to
Tel Aviv. And obviously any Iranian nuclear action against American
forces would bring forth a rapid and horrific retaliation.
It is natural that Israelis would feel more comfortable as the only
state in the Mideast with a nuclear arsenal, and Israeli spokesmen have
honed the melodramatic soundbite that an Iranian bomb would constitute
"an existential threat" to the Jewish state. Well, yes, it would.
Existential threats are, it is regrettable to say, what the nuclear age
is all about. For 40 years, the United States faced an existential
threat from the Soviet Union, and the Sovet regime in turn faced an
existential threat from the United States. Either side could end the
meaningful national life of the other-but only at the cost of losing
its own. In lamenting the possible emergence of an "existential threat"
from Iran, Israel is not complaining about anything that other
countries have not had to live with for the past two generations.
In January, Jane's Intelligence Review reported that some Israeli
strategists are wondering whether Israel's current strategic doctrine,
which mandates that Tel Aviv maintain absolute superiority over any
potential rival, is really worth the trouble it causes. According to
Jane's, some Israeli defense intellectuals are arguing that that the
requirement "can create enemies where previously they did not exist."
The alternative is for Israel to adopt a strategy of deterrence, the
same doctrine that saw the United States through the Cold War.
Go See V for Vendetta: You know something is up when a film like V for Vendetta
is a box office hit. Adapted from a series of graphic novelettes (i.e.,
comic books) written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, the
plot is set in a dystopian future Britain where "the Party" rules,
dissidents are rounded up, the Koran is banned, and the threat of
terrorism keeps the ruling elite firmly entrenched in power. From his
underground lair, "V" is a kind of futuristic Scarlet Pimpernel, who
strikes out at the regime – destroying the Old Bailey in a spectacular
pyrotechnic display – while reciting sonnets from Shakespeare and
wooing a beautiful girl whose fate has been delivered into his gloved
hands. He wears a mask – a sardonic visage reminiscent, at least in my
mind, of Cyrano de Bergerac – and as the plot unfolds so does the
origin of his vendetta against the Powers That Be: he was tortured and
disfigured by the regime's renditioners. As he kills those responsible
for his agony, one by one, the viewer is led toward the denouement: a
reenactment of the Guy Fawkes legend, in which the modern-day
incarnation of that early-17th-century English subversive succeeds in
blowing up Parliament and sparking a revolution.
The right wing hates this movie, and it isn't hard to see why: it
explodes all their pretensions about being the party of "freedom," and
it pretty clearly parallels the hypocritical cant of the War Party as
it pretends to battle "terrorism" while engaging in a campaign of state
terrorism that far surpasses anything a small band of amateurs could
possibly hope to dish out. They must find particularly galling a
subplot in which evidence emerges that a deadly series of biowarfare
attacks attributed to "religious fanatics" (and we don't mean George W.
Bush and Jerry Falwell) turn out to be the work of a sinister cabal
inside the government – the perfect excuse for a crackdown. All of this
– economic collapse, political turmoil, the dictatorship of "the Party"
– is clearly identified in the film as the product of a series of wars,
stretching from Iraq to Syria to Iran and beyond. I was particularly
intrigued by references to "the former United States of America," and
hints of a future history in which imperialism has drained the once
mighty U.S. until it is a pitiful husk of its former self, crippled by
economic dislocation and embroiled in civil war.
There was an attempt to demonize this film because it supposedly
"advocates terrorism," but that fell flat when it became a box office
hit – did the neocons and their fellow red-state fascists really mean
to be saying that the movie-going American public is pro-terrorist?
Clearly, the regime depicted in the movie deserves to be overthrown,
and that lesson is eventually learned by the female lead (Natalie
Portman), who spends a lot of time arguing with "V" over the morality
of righteous murder. As he hunts down and knocks off his torturers,
leaving a single red rose on the corpses as a sign of his authorship,
"V" has to listen to her whining and caviling until he subjects her to
a simulated imprisonment in the regime's torture chambers (which her
parents actually endured), and she – finally! – generates the requisite
amount of rage to understand the meaning of justice. The two of them
become a team of moral avengers, roles that evoke the origin of this
script in the comic book genre. The movie version renders these
characters in full, multidimensional reality while retaining the
larger-than-life symbolism redolent of the graphic novel form. And the
acting ain't bad, either…
Go see V for Vendetta,
and remember this: by supporting a work of art that embodies your
political and philosophical values, you are helping to fight the
cultural rot that the War Party feeds on. There is a scene in the movie
when Natalie Portman is going about her job at the BTN and passes a
security guard watching some ridiculous "reality" show. She asks, "How
can you watch that trash?" The contempt in her voice is clearly that of
the authors of this script, who are acutely aware of the political
consequences of entertainment as cultural "soma."
Alternately, a key moment as the anti-regime revolution gathers force
is the rebellion of a BTN celebrity, who turns his show into a satire
of the high chancellor (waspishly and brilliantly played by John Hurt).
The catalytic revolutionary moment occurs when the public stops
believing the lies of the regime – a moment V for Vendetta
brings closer to realization in our own world. The value of the media
as a political weapon is clearly understood by the makers of this
movie, and they utilize it to make their effort a resounding success.
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