An
Iraqi man carries a young Iraqi girl, killed during a Saturday night
clash between militias, Sunday April 23, 2006 in Baqouba, 60 km (35
miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq.
Note: as is often the
case, the only report of this incident is the photo caption. Numerous
other photos depicting otherwise unreported events in Iraq can be found
here.
Bring 'em on: Three U.S. soldiers killed by roadside bomb in Baghdad at 11:30 am Sunday. CentCom gives no further details. Note:
This brings the total of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq to
2,389. Average U.S. military deaths per day in April have been 2.74,
the most since November.
OTHER SECURITY INCIDENTS
Mortar attack on Iraq Defense Ministry kills 5, wounds 3, according to Reuters.
AP account of this incident gives death toll as 7. Also reports on 8 additional mortar rounds, apparently attacking the Interior Ministry, which did not result in casualties.
Police find the bodies of six young men in Adhamiya, bound and shot in the head.
Two Iraqi actors murdered by Islamic militants, troupe's building burned down.
Major oil and gas facility in Iraqi Kurdistan is ablaze. No information on whether accident or sabotage is responsible.
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS
WaPo summarizes Parliament action on top officials. Note:
Al-Maliki seems, on the record, to be an odd choice to lead a national
unity government, but evidently other factions are willing to give the
benefit of the doubt, at least publicly.
The
prime minister-designate, Jawad al-Maliki, an outspoken advocate for
the country's Shiite Muslim majority, will have the colossal task of
mending a nation nearly shattered by decades of war, dictatorship and
sectarian rivalry.
He is joined by a Kurdish president, Jalal
Talabani, and a Sunni Arab parliament speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani,
in a government that reflects a lengthy debate over how power would be
divided between the ethnic and sectarian groups that make up Iraq's
population.
"The great thing will be if I succeed in cementing
national unity and regaining security, stability and services,"
al-Maliki said at a news conference that followed the parliament's
meeting in Baghdad. "We have been able to accomplish several things
today, and with these accomplishments we shall complete the building of
the new Iraq on the basis of freedom, equality, plurality for all."
Al-Maliki,
55, also signaled that he was prepared to crack down on Sunni
insurgents and Shiite militias responsible for the rise in sectarian
violence that threatens to plunge the nation into civil war.
"Weapons
should be only in the hands of the government," al-Maliki said, noting
that laws require militias to be integrated into the nation's security
forces. Saturday's meeting of the 275-member parliament, just the
second since the election, provided rare and overdue images of
political accord against the backdrop of this beleaguered, war-weary
country.
In the fortified Green Zone's Baghdad Convention
Center, still undergoing slow reconstruction and lacking air
conditioning, parliamentarians sweated and fanned themselves. Their
rhetoric shared a tone of restrained optimism, reflecting the division,
violence and lawlessness that have taken the country to the brink of
civil war since the vote last year.
snip
In his new
role, al-Maliki must make overtures to the disaffected Sunni Arab
community, the backbone of the insurgency. Sunni Arab politicians
accepted al-Maliki despite his reputation as a hard-line champion of
Shiite rights.
Al-Maliki was deputy chairman of a committee
formed to purge Saddam allies from political life. Many Sunnis believed
the committee's goal was to deny them a role in Iraq.
He also
was a tough negotiator in deliberations over Iraq's new Constitution,
passed last year despite Sunni Arab objections. He resisted U.S.
efforts to put more Sunnis on the drafting committee as well as Sunni
efforts to dilute provisions giving Shiites and Kurds the power to form
semiautonomous ministates in the north and south.
Under a deal
worked out with Sunnis last year, parliament has four months to
consider constitutional amendments, a process likely to strain
relations among the ethnic and religious groups at a time when the
Americans are pushing for unity.
Sunnis and Kurds said al-Maliki
would start with a blank slate, unlike al-Jaafari, whom they considered
a weak leader during his year as the transitional prime minister.
"It's
a good step forward, and we will cooperate with him," said Mahmoud
Othman, a senior Kurdish politician. "I don't think he's a strong
sectarian. Now he's a prime minister, and he has to rule all Iraq, he
has to be balanced and objective." Juan Cole provides English-language synopsis of report in Al-Hayat on voting for Speaker.
Mahmoud
al-Mashadani, a Sunni Arab fundamentalist and a physician, received 159
votes out of 256 cast. Note that 159 votes is not all that great. He
needed 138 for a simple majority. There was obviously a lot of
opposition to him, even though he was apparently running as the only
candidate for the post among Sunni Arab delegates! In all the
celebratory reporting about the "end" of the "logjam" and the "glimmer"
of hope, it appears that no one is stopping to ask how stable the new
political process is. If 20 MPs had declined to support him, Mashadani
would have failed.
Al-Mashadani had been a member of the
constitution drafting committee and hated the final product, of which
he said, "We have reached a point where this constitution contains the
seeds of the division of Iraq." Last December, he told Knight Ridder of
Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, "Perhaps it will be difficult to
control them." He was among those who led the charge to unseat outgoing
prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Since the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance
and the Kurdistan Alliance are very committed to the constitution, he
is unlikely to get along with them.
After a government is formed
(if al-Maliki can succeed in putting one together), parliament will
have four months to revisit the permanent constitution passed by
referendum on October 15. Sunni Arab delegates are determined to
overturn the provisions that allow provinces to form confederacies and
to claim 100 percent of future oil and other natural resource finds,
denying those resources to the federal government. Since Sunni Arabs
have no such resources presently, they will be severely disadvantaged
by such a system. Since Mashadani is speaker of the house, he will
presumably have a certain ability to set the legislative agenda, and to
influence the negotiations over the constitution.
Al-Hayat
reports that in the voting for speaker, 97 blank ballots were cast.
Apparently among those who abstained in this way were the delegates of
Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National List (25 MPs) and Salih al-Mutlak's
National Dialogue Council (11 delegates). These two largely secular
parties, which include many ex-Baathist nationalists, were protesting
the "sectarian" character of the new government. It will be dominated
by Shiite fundamentalists, Sunni fundamentalists, and Kurdish
autonomists. Allawi and al-Mutlak and their secular MPs have apparently
been cut out of cabinet and other high posts, since their lists
garnered so few seats in parliament and the religious parties decline
to forgive them for their secularism and the Baathist pasts of many of
them. Allawi, for instance, has frequently publicly attacked Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani's influence on Iraqi politics, a stance that
inevitably makes him a pariah for most of the fundamentalist Shiites.
Yesterday's LA Times report, just prior to the Parliamentary vote, has some additional observations:
Maliki,
a longtime Shiite Islamist, spent the years of Hussein's rule exiled in
Iran and Syria. He has publicly accused Sunni politicians of being in
league with insurgents and forcefully condemned any suggestion that the
government negotiate with rebel Sunni Arab groups.He has relished his
role as a vocal proponent of de-Baathification. Mishaan Jaburi, a Sunni
legislator facing corruption charges who has endorsed reconciliation
with Baathists, once accused Maliki of threatening to dispatch a team
of assassins against him.
In terms of ideology and personal
history, Maliki and Jafari appear to be carbon copies. Both men are in
their 50s and hail from the Shiite shrine city of Karbala. Both were
idealistic and devout Shiite opponents of Iraq's Sunni Arab rulers and
the Baath Party. They became underground members of the Islamic Dawa
Party. Both fled into exile in Iran after Hussein came to power.
They
spent their years abroad as spokesmen for the Dawa Party, once
considered a radical group that claimed responsibility for bombings and
assassinations against Hussein's government. The two became prominent
figures in exile communities from London to Damascus, Syria, as they
plotted against Hussein. Both quickly rose to power in the initial
months after the U.S.-led invasion three years ago.
Jafari
became one of 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council handpicked by
Americans, and last year Iraqi legislators elected him prime minister
in the transitional government, while Maliki was his trusted and vocal
deputy.
He was among those who helped hammer out the details of
Iraqi sovereignty in 2004 with then-U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul
Bremer III. He was a fiery figure during negotiations over the
constitution, dismissing Sunni concerns about a charter that redefined
Iraq's relationship with the Arab world and its Sunni-dominated past.
Jafari,
a physician and theologian, agreed to step down only after he was
confronted with intense domestic and international pressure. Among
several preconditions, he demanded that his successor be a member of
the Dawa Party.
"Jafari's agreement wasn't without a price,"
said the aide to one high-level Shiite legislator. "Otherwise the floor
might have been opened and another candidate might have been chosen."
Maliki
holds a master's degree in Arabic language studies and worked in the
Iraqi Education Ministry. He became a member of the Dawa Party in his
youth and fled to Iran in 1980, moving to Syria in 1987, where he
remained until the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. He has three daughters and
two sons.
In person, he is soft-spoken and even-tempered,
working prayer beads as he contemplates questions, his eyes shaded by
tinted sunglasses. A frequent talking head on Iraqi and Arab
television, he has often been at the forefront of an increasing move
among the country's Shiite majority against the U.S. military presence.
After
a U.S.-backed raid last month on a Shiite house of worship allegedly
used to torture and hold kidnapping victims in northern Baghdad, Maliki
condemned the U.S. and called for an investigation. In an interview
with The Times in February, he accused those who opposed Jafari of
acting as dupes for Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador.
DEVELOPMENTS IN THE OCCUPYING POWER
Day late and a dollar short department: John Kerry blasts Iraq war, calls dissent patriotic. Note: Shorter John Kerry: "I was for the war before I was against it.
Before
a wildly enthusiastic crowd of hundreds at Faneuil Hall yesterday, US
Senator John F. Kerry exhorted Americans to speak out against the war
in Iraq, declaring that troops are dying because of what he called an
inept and deceitful policy orchestrated by the Bush administration.
It
was the 35th anniversary of the day Kerry, as a young Navy veteran
returning from the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, testified before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, famously asking, ''How do you ask a man to
be the last man to die for a mistake?" Kerry's case yesterday was much
the same: that Americans have a duty to speak out against a war that is
sacrificing lives on the ''altar of stubborn pride."
''Presidents
and politicians may worry about losing face or losing votes or losing
their legacy; it is time to think about young Americans and innocent
civilians who are losing their lives," Kerry said, to a thunderous
standing ovation. His speech, back on home turf, was billed by aides as
a major address on the importance of dissent during wartime.
Jabbing
his thumb in the air and sweeping his hands across the lectern, Kerry
could barely complete three sentences without being interrupted by
applause. Standing beneath oil portraits of Samuel Adams, George
Washington, and John Quincy Adams, Kerry invoked history, from
Congress's attempts in 1798 to silence Thomas Jefferson to Wisconsin
Senator Joseph McCarthy's crusade against communism in the 1950s.
''The
bedrock of America's greatest advances -- the foundation of what we
know today are defining values -- was formed not by cheering things on
as they were, but by taking them on and demanding change," Kerry said,
again to applause.
Meanwhile, in spite of the new Prime Minister designate, no commitment to reduce U.S. troop levels from the Decider.
So what else is new?
Former CIA Europe Chief says CIA told administration six months before
the invasion of credible intel that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass
Destruction™ or, for that matter, Weapons of Mass Destruction™ related
program activities.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The former
chief of the CIA's European operation is accusing the White House of
ignoring the spy agency's doubts that Iraq had a budding nuclear
program or weapons of mass destruction as the U.S. prepared for war.
"The
policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for
intelligence to fit into the policy," Tyler Drumheller told CBS' "60
Minutes" for an interview to be broadcast Sunday night. The network
released excerpts ahead of the airing. The White House has denied that
intelligence, while flawed, was exaggerated or manipulated in the
months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Drumheller,
who retired last year, said the White House ignored crucial information
from a high and credible source who claimed that there were no active
programs for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "60 Minutes"
identified the source as Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, with whom
U.S. spies had made a deal. CIA Director George Tenet delivered the
information to President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other
high-ranking officials in September 2002, according to Drumheller. A
few days later the administration said it was no longer interested.
Drumheller
said he was told about the exchange that followed: "And we said, 'Well,
what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel
anymore. This is about regime change.'" CIA spokesman Tom Crispell said
Saturday that Drumheller's remarks do not reflect the views of the
agency.
Think Progress summarizes pre-war statements by the architects of the Iraq war, and the rewards they have reaped for failure.
Max Cleland, while not exactly saying the war was wrong in the first place,
says "it is immoral to take advantage of volunteer soldiers by sending
them into combat "with no strategy to win and no strategy to end" the
war."
COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS
Note: As usual, the opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editors
Commentator Mike Whitney accuses occupying power of deliberately fostering sectarian violence in furtherance of breakup of Iraq
Paul Street discusses the U.S. political situation, analyzes the contrast between the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the comparatively limited public protest. Excerpt:
Part of the difference between the first and ongoing/second quagmires,
then, is precisely the legacy of the original one, which left
Americans' with an especially healthy dose of decent democratic and
humanitarian skepticism regarding the proclaimed noble claims and
objectives of U.S. foreign policymakers. The unfortunate thing,
however, is that public opinion seems considerably less relevant to the
making of policy in the early 21st century than it was in the 1960s and
1970s. Part of the difference has to do with the sheer 9/11-enabled and
encouraged messianic madness of the current hard-right White House,
whose super-authoritarian and militaristic authorities go beyond the at
least comparatively rational and politically sensitive Lyndon Baines
Johnson and perhaps even beyond the racist and paranoid Richard M.
Nixon administration in its determination to force policy down the
throats of the mere citizenry.
A bigger part has to do with the
savage authoritarian fraying and atrophy of communities and
institutions: the loss of basic organizational and political
connections linking ordinary people to policy and enabling public,
democratic, and collective resistance to concentrate power in ways that
policymakers cannot afford to ignore (for a useful primer on this
tragic inner-American collapse, see William Greider's haunting book,
Who Will Tell The People: the Betrayal of American Democracy [1992] See
also Noam Chomsky's chilling Failed States: the Abuse of Power and the
Assault on Democracy [April 2006], pp. 204-250). The Iraq war is being
conducted by the authoritarian "leaders" of a possibly post-democratic
U.S. (see also Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism [2005]) in a
time when the shocking disconnect between mere public opinion and
actual policy in world history's most powerful state endangers the best
aspects of the western and U.S political traditions and the very
survival of the human species. Mass despair and cynicism, both
partially self-fulfilling cause and horrible effect of that supremely
dangerous disconnect, are part of why antiwar protests are often so
slightly attended these days even as the citizenry has at least
privately opposed the second "quagmire" more quickly and widely than it
privately opposed Vietnam.
THE DANGEROUS NEIGHBORHOOD
Talabani is concerned about Turkish and Iranian troop concentrations on the Iraq border
Turkey
has moved thousands of troops to the border region in what its military
said was an offensive against Turkish Kurd guerrillas.
Iran has
also reportedly moved forces to the border, and last week shelled a
mountainous region inside Iraq used by Iranian Kurd fighters for
infiltration into Iran, according to Iraqi Kurd officials. There were
no reports of casualties from Friday's artillery and rocket barrage.
Talabani said that so far Iranian and Turkish forces have stayed on their sides of the border.
But
"I have expressed my concern over these concentrations ... Iraq is a
soveriegn independent nation that won't let other nations interfere in
its internal affairs," he said at a press conference with U.S.
ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in the northern city of Irbil.
Turkey
has called on the United States to crack down on rebel bases in
northern Iraq, but U.S. commanders, struggling to battle Iraqi
insurgents elsewhere, have been extremely reticent to fight the rebels,
who are based in the remote mountain areas in one of the few stable
parts of the country.
Turkey, however, is vowing to bring 'em on.
By SUZAN FRASER | Associated Press April 23, 2006
ANKARA,
Turkey (AP) - Turkey's army chief vowed stepped-up offensives against
autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels in comments broadcast Sunday as the
military sent thousands of soldiers backed by tanks to its
overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast and the Iraqi border.
"As long
as the PKK exists our operations will continue in ever-increasing
intensity," Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the land forces' commander, told
CNN-Turk television in an interview aired Sunday. He was referring to
the Kurdistan Workers' Party which has been battling for autonomy since
1984.
Buyukanit stressed however, that there was nothing unusual
in the troop deployment in the region. "There is nothing extraordinary,
there is always some movement in the area," he said. "It is not
different from previous years." Asked whether the military planned to
cross into northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK rebels there, Buyukanit
said: "I am not saying anything."
Quote of the day, "Let freedom reign" department:
His
Eminence, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the supreme religious
authority for Shi'ite Msulims in Iraq and worldwide, decrees that gays
and lesbians should be killed in the worst manner possible, according
to this news article from a London-based gay rights group.
A quick search through Sistani's official website turns up this page, translated as:
Q: What is the judgement on sodomy and lesbianism?
A: "Forbidden. Those involved in the act should be punished. In fact, sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible."
Thus says the Iranian cleric who was nominated by Iraqis for the 2005 Nobel Peace prize. Looking forward to the hate mail.
--Iraqi blogger Zeyad
Note: I posted fairly early today. I may update if major developments warrant.
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