War as City-State: We Force-feed it, We Pay

This great post from Tomdispatch offers some mind-boggling numbers for materiel involved in the War in Iraq whose "drawdown" is described thusly:

the American drawdown will be the "equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York."

Now there's a thought. It's as if the whole war were a city-state in itself, complete with food, shelter, weapons, infrastructure - and of course, a nice big population.

Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, or 3 million, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million, whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which will still be operating in 2011 with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them), or more than 350 forward operating facilities, or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.

The conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is unprecented, and yet Americans are mostly oblivious, unaware that we are creating little islands in about the least compatible environments imaginable. What does this mean to the Iraqis and Afghans, to see not only war, but an entire set of city-states forcibly planted in their own beautiful and unrelated culture, shocking them without their participation in it.

In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a “boardwalk” that typically included a “Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet.”

And of course, there's the staggering cost. The cost in lives, American, but far more Iraqis and Afghanis, is something we'll have to live down. And our children will have to live down. And our future generations, if we have any, will have to live down.

This is the second bubble, courtesy of Republican war strategy. "Down with Government, Up with War". As if war was waged by individuals, not a government. As if war led to freedom. As if war liberated people, instead of enslaving them to its consequences. The aftermath, the bloody, destructive aftermath of war is always littered with lies, claims of victory, claims of power, claims of valor.

But as the second bubble, the bubble of war, is already bursting, its inevitable failure becoming clearer even to a propaganda-numbed, not-very-free-minded (Texas schoolbooks, anyone?) American public, as this becomes then another collapse like the economic collapse, the collapse of the war machine will likewise have worldwide implications. That's because it's ultimately another economic collapse.

It's one thing to wage war. Bad enough. But to conduct war by imposing little city-states within sovereign nations is like forcing a rejected transplant without medication. It's unsustainable. Let's hope this drawdown is for real, and that we seriously draw down on ALL fronts, without leaving our unsustainable "islands" behind.

And by the way, thanks to a load of idiots on both the right and left, there's not much chance of that. Look for Collapse II. Doubt it'll be pretty.

Iraqis Good Riddance to Bush

Unsurprisingly, Iraqis say good riddance to Bush with much bitterness.

"I hope Obama will correct the negative results Bush made. Iraq should be a country as wealthy as Gulf countries because we have oil, agriculture and splendid civilization," said Abass Majeed, a 38-year-old taxi driver from Sadr City in Baghdad.

But Iman Khalil, a 52-year-old widow, does not agree with him. "We will see no basic change between Bush and Obama. All U.S. presidents are the same: To protect Israel and plunder Iraq's oil reserves," she said emotionally.

Bush gets the boot from Iraq, where he falsely claimed he wanted to bring democracy. Right. By force. As if freedom comes by force. What did he expect? Love isn't by force either.

The Shoes Heard & Seen 'Round the World

Virtually everyone has seen this "send-off" for Bush's "Victory Tour". Now the shoe-thrower's become a folk hero to much of the Middle East, and no doubt elsewhere, although he faces possible criminal prosecution. He's got the best defense in the country, apparently, though - lawyers were lining up to get the job. And the likely charge would be defaming a public figure, the punishment of which could set him back what's described as a "small fine". Small price for such a big impression...

Does US Congress Have Less Clout Than Iraqi Parliament?

Believe it or not, this seems to be the case. Incredibly, while the Iraqi parliament comes to blows over the agreement that would allow the US to stay in their country for another 3 years, the lil' ol' US Congress can't even read that Agreement, let alone discuss it.

The administration has asserted that the agreement between the U.S. and Iraq is merely a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and therefore does not require congressional approval. Yet the agreement goes far beyond the traditional limits of a SOFA, which typically set the terms for bringing materials and equipment into a nation and outline the legal procedures that will apply to members of the military who are accused of crimes.

Believe it or not, the current agreement contains terms that will actually give Iraq a measure of control over U.S. forces. No foreign nation or international entity has ever been given the authority to direct U.S. forces without prior congressional approval - either through a majority vote of both chambers or a two-thirds vote in the Senate in the case of treaties.

If this agreement goes into effect without congressional approval, it will establish a precedent under which future presidents can exercise broad unilateral control over the U.S. military - and even give foreign nations control over our troops.

If this sticks in your craw, you can send a message to that effect to Congress, and hope someone listens...
And they're getting ready to adjourn, the best you could hope for is Nancy Pelosi pops this question - highly unlikely - and the end (of the time to approve the agreement) is near...

Iraq's Guantanamo: Worse Than the Other Gitmo, and Over 20K Strong

It's one thing to say "end the war in Iraq." It's another thing to deal with the 21,000-plus (the number fluctuates) detainees it is holding there without charge and with fewer rights than Guantanamo detainees. What's going on, and what will happen?

This question is addressed in David Enders' great report on Camp Bucca in Iraq and the situation with detainees from the Iraq war.

Close to the Kuwaiti border, Bucca is the U.S. military's largest detention center in Iraq. About 80% of the detainees there are Sunni, not Shi'a, Muslim.

One of the biggest complaints is that the vast majority of detainees have not been charged with any crime. "Why don't the U.S. forces charge him if he has done something? Then at least we would know how long he will be here," said Hadia Khalaf, whose son Qusay was arrested in September 2007. "He was our provider," she said, reflecting the plight of many families who rely on extended family and charity to survive.

Since 2003, approximately 96,000 Iraqis have been officially detained by the U.S. military, with 100,000 more having been temporarily detained but never sent to a theater-level internment facility like Bucca. The other theater-level facility currently open is Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, which serves as the system's in- and out-processing center and holds about 3,000 detainees, including roughly 300 juveniles.

Yes, that's right. We're detaining juveniles in Iraq. Without charge. And God knows what else is happening to them. And the "300" figure was only about Camp Cropper. How many are at Bucca, a much larger facility. And what happens to the families whose provider in Iraq's tough economy is now in US detention without access to due process, without even being charged with anything.

The legal basis for detentions stems from a single line of a 2004 UN Security Council resolution, which has been renewed every year since by agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. This resolution, which gives the legal justification for continued U.S. military occupation, allows "internment where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security."

As you might imagine, the Iraqis are now happy about renewing this "right" and are working on negotiating another "contract" which would end the US's policy of detaining Iraqis without charge.

The Iraqi government has demanded that the U.S. military no longer be allowed to detain Iraqis without its approval. The State Department and White House have been largely mum about the discussions, while Maliki's office has regularly leaked parts of the agreement and says that the final sticking points are whether U.S. troops will continue to be immune from prosecution under Iraqi law and the extent to which the U.S. military will have to coordinate with and receive approval from the Iraqi government before launching operations.

Of course, whatever "imperative reasons of security" means is up to an unknown selection of folks on the ground. Not having to charge them with anything means we can essentially pick guys up and keep them at Bucca and elsewhere for as long as we like. This creates more humanitarian tragedy and resentment from the Iraqi people we claim to be "helping", not to mention being not the way it's supposed to be done. We're acting as if we are occupying in every way, shape and form.

Joseph Logan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa section, thinks an amnesty might be the answer. "If you don't have the evidence to transfer someone to the Iraqi system, it's probably the case that their outright release should be considered," Logan said.

"The U.S. is on the one hand claiming broad powers of detention, and at the same time is claiming the conflict is not a war or occupation," he said. "You can't have it both ways. If you want these completely unchecked powers of detention, you have to occupy the country again" -- that is, revert to the legal status the United States held before the 2004 UN resolution.

Detainees receive an initial review of their case before being sent to Cropper, but they are not allowed to attend it. The reviews are conducted by a panel of three U.S. military officers. Detainees are allowed to attend later reviews, but at no point are they given access to a lawyer.

Not only that, but there's no time limit. I mean, even the most heinous criminals get time limits (unless it's "life" or "death", but at least they know what it is). But these are people who may have just done something someone considered "suspicious." It's truly horrific.

Detention operations have been a rocky road. Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 received the most coverage, but thousands of prisoners living in leaky tents outside the prison's "hard site" complained of lack of medical care, indifferent and at times hostile treatment from guards, inedible food and extreme weather, including flooding. American troops even admitted at the time that they believed more than 80 percent of those detained were innocent of wrongdoing. Recently released Iraqis, as well as Iraqi officials, say this statistic is probably still true.

Yes, our American troops didn't feel that these detainees were an "imperative" threat to security. But they can't do anything about it, and neither can anybody except ... Condoleeza Rice? Or Dick Cheney?

And what about torture?

Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 received the most coverage, but thousands of prisoners living in leaky tents outside the prison's "hard site" complained of lack of medical care, indifferent and at times hostile treatment from guards, inedible food and extreme weather, including flooding.

And then

Torture also certainly continued past 2004. On a visit to Abu Ghraib in March 2005 (it has since been closed), I saw a detainee who had been strapped to a chair and left in the pouring rain. Only after reading former interrogator Tony Lagouranis' book Fear Up Harsh did I learn this was a tactic used to induce hypothermia. At the time, the guards told me the prisoner had been restrained because he refused to stop throwing feces at his captors.

It's getting harder to find out about this issue, though.

None complained of abuse during detentions or interrogations once in Cropper or Bucca, though some said they had been beaten and roughly interrogated before being put into the theater-level system.

"The first three days they didn't give me any food," said Samir Mohamed, who was arrested in 2007 while driving between Damascus and Baghdad. He said he was blindfolded for three days while he was interrogated and beaten. "They put cigarettes out on me," he said. One U.S. soldier I spoke to who requested anonymity said the CIA maintained an off-the-books "black site" at Camp Anaconda near Balad as recently as mid-2007. I have not been able to confirm this independently.

And could all this actually be a side effect of the "Surge"???

But if the treatment once incarcerated is generally better than in the past, the intelligence that puts Iraqis there does not seem to be. "I was working as a guard at a gas station," said Jassim, who was arrested in August 2007, during the surge in Baghdad. "There were eight of us working as guards, and they lined us up and said, 'We'll take the first four.'" The U.S. military has admitted that the surge led to a surge in detainees as well, as a result of increased raids, which strained an already overcrowded system and elicited fresh reports of arbitrary detentions.

Plus, the military has admitted that some of the insurgents in detention have actually run their own courts inside the prison camps. This supposedly doesn't happen anymore, but the camps are run in a rather, shall we say, counterproductive way.

The first time Abu Wissam, 58, was arrested by U.S. troops was in a roundup in December 2003. He was arrested again in September 2007. He has spent most of the latest detention in Bucca's Camp 26, which is known as a takfiri camp, since takfiris -- Sunni Muslim extremists who consider Shiites to be heretics and non-Muslims -- have been allowed to run it. "Sometimes they wanted to punish a prisoner," Abu Wissam said. "They would put someone in the camp and tell the takfiris, 'This guy worked with the police.' The takfiris hate anyone who works with the Iraqi government or the Sahwa or the police."

In other words, the Sunni extremists are allowed to run one of the camps in Bucca. And, of course, they take revenge of anyone suspected of working with - you guessed it! - the Shi'a-dominated Bush-backed government. Genius at work! Whatever is going on here, I think there's some problems with the direction...

"The Sahwa people were scared to sleep inside," Abu Wissam said, referring to the movement of former Sunni resistance fighters who have made a marriage of convenience with the U.S. military since late 2006 to battle al Qaeda. He and other prisoners I interviewed said interrogations mostly focused on general questions. For Abu Wissam they were questions such as "did you fight against Israel" during the 1973 war -- apparently considered a mark of suspicion by U.S. interrogators but something that a member of the Iraqi army would have been shot for refusing to do. Abu Wissam said he was given a paper to sign, admitting guilt to a list of charges that included murder, attacking U.S. troops, kidnapping and sectarian cleansing. In July the U.S. military admitted that Islamic extremists had been running courts inside Bucca for years and had even carried out killings inside the prisons.

The whole thing is so incredibly confused and, of course, unjust. Is this part of the "democratization" of Iraq? Well, who cares, says the GOP, as long as we can tap into Iraqi oil? And did the detainees have a choice in signing the list of crimes they were guilty of? Did they have any idea what it was all about, or what the consequences would be?

Abu Wissam said he complained about the treatment, especially the fact that all prisoners suffered because of the actions of some. "I asked the American officer, 'Why do you treat all of us like takfiris?' and he said, 'You killed our friends. You are all takfiris.'"

Oh, Great! Collective punishment. Well, it seems to be the U.S. foreign policy of late, from sanctions on the people as punishment for acts of a government that will neither suffer significantly nor step down as a result from their power-seat, nor, of course, change their policies towards the U.S., which was the supposed whole point.

If that exchange suggests collective punishment of prisoners, the review process shouts it. Detainee review hearings at Camp Cropper are held in a sparsely furnished trailer. An Iraqi flag hangs on the wall, no doubt an unintended irony. Prisoners swear on a Quran before three U.S. officers, who read a list of accusations.

In one hearing I observed in early August, the defendant had been rounded up with relatives after a weapons cache was found nearby. The military strongly believed the young man's father was an insurgent, but the officers thought it was more than likely the accused had been picked up simply because he happened to be there. Regardless, it had been enough to hold him for at least four months.

"I just want to go back to school," the young man told the officers when given a chance to speak. "I have missed a year because of this."

"You're still young," one of the officers replied. "You'll have time to catch up."

Whereas in Guantanamo, detainees are held in Xtreme Security with hoods on, etc., in Camp Bucca, it seems to be more of a world within itself, where just simply being in it is the horrible thing, as there's no way out except what seems to be arbitrary, blind luck.

"I don't think that there is a law that covers what we're trying to do -- that is, to detain people indefinitely. There have been terrorist acts throughout history, so this war is never going to end," said retired Adm. John Hutson, a military law expert. "The 250 guys at Guantanamo can have habeas corpus, but the thousands of detainees elsewhere don't have any rights. I think we have focused like lasers on Guantanamo because it's iconic and it's 90 miles off our shore. But you can't make legal, diplomatic or moral distinctions based on the locale of the detainee. We've worried about Guantanamo, but there are more detainees elsewhere. Whatever rules we come up with have to apply across the board."

"This war is never going to end"! And these detainees will be detained "indefinitely"? Sounds like the message of John McCain and his 100 years plus occupation/war. The same officer, retired Col. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge, more or less, of Abu Ghraib, was more recently in charge of Bucca - until someone worse came in.

Bucca was originally slated to be shut down in late 2003, Karpinski said, before Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and his staff, who were responsible for setting up Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo, took over from Karpinski. Karpinski said Miller told her he would "Gitmo-ize" the system, after which Abu Ghraib and then Cropper became the main center for interrogations.

"Bucca is holding this massive population of Iraqis who were hauled in and are security detainees that have no intelligence value. When you determine that they have no further intel value, you transfer them to Bucca," Karpinski said.

So what's the point?
Well, ominously, when Karpinsky asked Miller's attorney, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a simple question about "procedures", this is what she got:

"I asked her specifically about release procedures for the prisoners at Gitmo," Karpinski said, "thinking, naively, we might be able to learn something from their procedures. Beaver looked at me like I was crazy and arrogantly said, 'Release, ma'am? There is no release plan for our prisoners. Most, if not all of them, will spend every last day of their lives at Gitmo.'"

Folks, this is a POLICY, not a tactic or even a strategy. What does it say about justice in general or the U.S. in particular when it has a policy of permanently imprisoning people who are not its citizens, not citizens of countries at war with the United States, and who are not even accused of any crime, and have no recourse to justice, for the rest of their natural lives???

Outside Bucca, as the sun comes up, Ali, 12, reads a letter he has written to his father. "Dear Daddy, How are you? I hope you are doing well. I miss you so very much and I miss you taking me in your arms. Dear Daddy, we are all doing well, thank God! I pray that God gives me and Mommy and my sister Nour the patience to survive while you are absent. I asked God to help you and all the detainees with you to be released. Dear Daddy, you can rely on God, then on me, to take care of the house and the family. I cry every day, every day thinking of you. I pray for you because you are oppressed. I ask God to release you from your misery, Inshallah!"

Around him, other families, almost all women, wave pictures of the incarcerated. One woman has five sons inside; another has a brother who has been in U.S. prisons since 2004. Another says this is her twelfth visit to Bucca. All say that the trip is a financial strain. One says that without her husband to support her, she has been reduced to begging. Others complain that their children are depressed and failing in school.

It's the lack of rights, the total lack of justice, redress, or even hope for a legitimately-obtained freedom that smacks of ... anything, really, anything at all, but .... what used to be ... America. Who, or what, will bring these families back together? Does "family values" have to be just a slogan with closed doors on the rest of the world? It certainly means nothing whatsoever on the ground in Iraq. Rights, compassion, humanity, all that is so much "security risk".

Change these tactics or... say to America, the former bastion of freedom, justice and democracy...

R.I.P.

US Dumps Friends, Again: Assassination Plot for Maliki?

Well, if you thought the Bush Administration couldn't do more damage, think again. Now, in the continuing, time-honored tradition of dumping allies - remember our "friend" Saddam Hussein? - a story has now surfaced that the US is planning to dump Iraq's President Maliki - say what??? - yes, Maliki is now a possible target of US assassination plans... for what? First, of course, for his lack of enthusiasm for being under US military occupation and control for the forseeable indefinite future. And, backing that up, for his "leanings" towards that Satan, or possibly anti-Satan, Iran.

Baghdad: Americans, increasingly resenting recent moves by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, could seek to topple or even assassinate him, says a secret report by a Kurdish political party, which is part of the national government.

The report, which Gulf News has seen, says Al Maliki does not want to see any US soldier in Iraq after 2011 and he preferred strong political, economic and military relations with the Americans but not the presence and influence of the US military in his country.

The latest US resentment stem from Al Maliki's strong stance in the current talks to reach a strategic security agreement between the two countries, the report said.

So he's not a US lackey! He's destroying the whole purpose of the invasion, a 3 trillion dollar investment!

"Al Maliki has started to undermine the influence of those in the Iraqi military and security commanders who are classified as proteges of the Americans. This has raised concerns in the US military command in Baghdad. The freezing of the powers of the Iraqi Army's chief of staff, Babakir Zebari, is the first indication of this trend," the report said.

According to the report, the US suspects Al Maliki of getting closer to Iran in order to launch a broad military operation in Basra, Al Sadr City in Baghdad and Maysan province, in preparation for a complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

The report said the statement of Shiite leader Moqtada Al Sadr about converting most of the Mahdi Army into a social and cultural organisation, named Al Mumahidun, is part of the Iranian game.

Oooh, the Iranians have a game plan, an evil plan to convert a military organization into a "social and cultural organization". Now how evil can you get?

According to the report, the US is weighing three options.

The first is to topple Al Maliki in parliament and bring vice-president and leader of the Islamic Supreme Council, Adel Abdul Mahdi, into power. Mahdi, according to the US, is more pragmatic than Al Maliki. He enjoys the support of Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Al Hakim. But this option may not hold as Al Hakim and Mahdi are both considered close to Iran as well.

The second option is to pressure Al Maliki to resign. But this is difficult as he heads an elected government.

The third option is an assassination attempt against Al Maliki with the help of terrorist groups, and to put in place a puppet administration favourable to the Americans.

Oh, so we're going to out-evil 'em! How evil is assassination "with the help of terrorist groups"???? I thought it was a war on terror! But actually it's a war on ... on.... on anybody who disagrees with us, especially who doesn't like to be pushed around, to the tune of Big Guns, by the US.

"Brutal Ethnic Cleansing", Not Surge, Brought So-Called "Success" In Iraq

One of John McCain's strategies to win the election has been to play up the so-called "success" of the Surge, and Obama's opposition to it. In doing so, he has had to confirm that one of his many "gaffes" on Iraq was no mistake:

In a conference call Wednesday, McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann told reporters that the Arizona senator had not misspoken — that he had intended to tell Katie Couric that the troop surge, which began in 2007, had enabled the success of the “Anbar awakening” of major Sunni sheikhs against Al Qaeda, which began in 2006.

Juan Cole's powerful article reveals that the Myth of the Successful Surge is only that, a myth, subscribed to, logic and reason be damned, by John McCain in his bid to seal the neocon-numbed protoplasm imagined to be the "Republican electorate" and that all important fantasy "swing vote" (the "naaa, I dunno" crowd?). First off, is it really "success"?

"Most American commentators are so focused on the relative fall in casualties that they do not stop to consider how high the rates of violence remain."

Secondly, what is the real reason for the decrease in violence? Brutal ethnic cleansing, a Sunni-Shi'a civil war.

Although the "Sunni Awakening" has been rightly credited by Obama and others for helping reduce the "surge" in violence before the actual troop surge occurred, McCain's advisors and supporters, among others, are claiming that the surge provided on-the-ground support for that "Awakening" as well as implied "moral support", knowing that the U.S. would "be there" for them... But Juan Cole has another crucial point on this voodoo logic:

Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in February 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the "surge" by politicians such as McCain. But attempts to pay off the Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra U.S. troops were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation that began in the winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation, and was.

And we have another issue:

For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were U.S. troops doing differently from September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought U.S. force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra U.S. troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.

What the "Surge" really did was give the civil war away to the Shi'a. I'm sure Iran is shedding no tears over that, although I doubt anyone but the most callous would condone the way it went down.

As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65 percent Shiite to at least 75 percent Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the United States inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.

CNN's Michael Ware seems to side with this view.

The sectarian cleansing of Baghdad has been — albeit tragic — one of the key elements to the drop in sectarian violence in the capital. […] It’s a very simple concept: Baghdad has been divided; segregated into Sunni and Shia enclaves. The days of mixed neighborhoods are gone. […] If anyone is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in violence, then they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are lying to you.

Does this contribute to Iraq's stability, one measure of real success?

The Shiitization of Baghdad was thus a significant cause of falling casualty rates. But it is another war waiting to happen, when the Sunnis come back to find Shiite militiamen in their living rooms.

As usual, non-military means could have been more effective had they been used earlier, more evidence that the "Surge" is and was not the path to success:

In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join U.S.-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006; indeed, it could have been deployed from 2003 and might have forestalled large numbers of deaths.

Other factors also contributed to the reduction in violence:

The Mahdi Army militia of Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr concluded a cease-fire with U.S. and Iraqi troops in September 2007. Since the United States had inadvertently enabled the transformation of Baghdad into a largely Shiite city, a prime aim of the Mahdi Army, they could afford to stand down.

This was a huge element in the "success" story. Not to mention economic factors unrelated to the surge.

The vast increase in Iraqi oil revenues in recent years, and the cancellation of much foreign debt, has made the central government more powerful vis-a-vis the society. Al-Maliki can afford to pay, train and equip many more police and soldiers. An Iraq with an unencumbered $75 billion in oil income begins to look more like Kuwait, and to be able to afford to buy off various constituencies. It is a different game than an Iraq with $33 billion in revenues, much of it precommitted to debt servicing.

And by what measure does McCain or anyone else claim that violence is now at "acceptable" levels, enough to be called "success"?

I'd suggest some comparisons. The Sri Lankan civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils has killed an average of 233 persons a month since 1983 and is considered one of the world's major ongoing trouble spots. That is half the average monthly casualties in Iraq recently. In 2007, the conflict in Afghanistan killed an average of 550 persons a month. That is about the rate recently, according to official statistics, for Iraq. The death rate in 2006-2007 in Somalia was probably about 300 a month, or about half this year's average monthly rate in Iraq. Does anybody think Afghanistan or Somalia is calm?

The talk about the Surge is more propaganda exploiting the civil war that the U.S. helped inspire and prosecute, wittingly or unwittingly, than it is anything else, much less a "Success Story". The story of Iraq is a tragedy, and McCain doesn't even get it.

23 Billion Dollars LOST in Iraq: BBC Uncovers it, US Gags It

Click the link above for must-read news. The disasters keep on coming: when it rains, it pours.
This war, the Bush-Cheney War, is turning out to be the absolute worst debacle in every respect ever perpetrated by anyone on the US - they beat out al-Qaeda by a long shot.

While Presdient George W Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely
the gagging orders will be lifted.
To date, no major US contractor faces
trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.
The president's Democratic
opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq.
Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee on oversight and government reform, said:
"The money that's gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just
so outrageous, it's egregious.
"It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history."
In the run-up to the invasion, one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth $7bn that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president.

Read it and weep...

Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control

MUST READ THIS - use link above (click title)

A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American
military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US
presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details
of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive
political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US
troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis
and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the
Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country.

Sobering News: Iraq War Vets Recount Atrocities from US Occupation

Dahr Jamail's latest report "Enough Is Enough, It's Time to Get Out" recounts the daily horror stories shared by Iraq War veterans in Seattle in what was "a continuation of the "Winter Soldier" hearings held in Silver Spring, Maryland in March."

If this isn't enough incentive to pull out of that occupation, what is?

"We were told we'd be deploying to Iraq and that we needed to get ready to have
little kids and women shoot at us," Sergio Kochergin, a former Marine who served
two deployments in Iraq, told the audience. "It was an attempt to portray Iraqis
as animals. We were supposed to do humanitarian work, but all we did was harass
people, drive like crazy on the streets, pretending it was our city and we could
do whatever we wanted to do."

">Dahr Jamail's latest report "Enough Is Enough, It's Time to Get Out" recounts the daily horror stories shared by Iraq War veterans in Seattle in what was "a continuation of the "Winter Soldier" hearings held in Silver Spring, Maryland in March."
If this isn't enough incentive to pull out of that occupation, what is?

"We were told we'd be deploying to Iraq and that we needed to get ready to have little kids and women shoot at us," Sergio Kochergin, a former Marine who served two deployments in Iraq, told the audience. "It was an attempt to portray Iraqis as animals. We were supposed to do humanitarian work, but all we did was harass people, drive like crazy on the streets, pretending it was our city and we could do whatever we wanted to do."

Kochergin continued, "We were constantly told everybody there wants to kill
you, everybody wants to get you. In the military, we had racism within every
rank and it was ridiculous. It seemed like a joke, but that joke turned into
destroying peoples' lives in Iraq."

"I was in Husaiba with a sniper platoon right on the Syrian border and
we would basically go out on the town and search for people to shoot," Kochergin
said. "The rules of engagement (ROE) got more lenient the longer we were there.
So if anyone had a bag and a shovel, we were to shoot them. We were allowed to
take our shots at anything that looked suspicious. And at that point in time,
everything looked suspicious."

Kochergin added, "Later on, we had no ROE at all. If you see something
that doesn't seem right, take them out." He concluded by saying, "Enough is
enough, it's time to get out of there."

The huge disconnect between rhetoric fed to the American public/protoplasm at home and the reality on the ground in US-occupied Iraq boggles the still-working mind. No wonder the Republican agenda is based on dumbing-down and distraction - to coverup for their blatant crimes, lies, and cruel policies.

We claim to oppose racism and promote democracy and higher values. Like this, perhaps?

Doug Connor was a first lieutenant in the army and worked as a surgical nurse in
Iraq. While there he worked as part of a combat support unit, and said most of
the patients he treated were Iraqi civilians. "There were so many people that
needed treatment we couldn't take all of them," he said. "When a bombing
happened and 45 patients were brought to us, it was always Americans treated
first, then Kurds, then the Arabs."

Or how about these "family values"?

Connor added quietly, "It got to the point where we started calling the Iraqi
patients 'range balls' because, just like on the driving range (in golf), you
don't care about losing them."

So that's how they laid down the "groundwork for peace" as W claimed? Maybe he was thinking of the peace one finds in cemeteries? But there's more than just the "peace" of death.

"I watched Iraqi Police bring in someone to interrogate," Seth Manzel, a vehicle
commander and machine gunner in the U.S. Army, told the audience. "There were
four men on the prisoner...one was pummeling his kidneys with his fists, another
was inserting a bottle up his rectum. It looked like a frat house gang-rape."

Of course, they will say "those were Iraqis"... But who set the example for them? Abu Ghraib, no doubt - which was no exception.
This has to be Job One: Get out of Iraq asap. Occupation can never be victory. It was a mistake, a lie, a humanitarian disaster, a shame, a gigantic drain on the economy, and now a burgeoning tragedy.

IRAQ: Praying, Not Playing: How War Kills Sports

Dahr Jamail does a piece about what happened to that winning Iraqi soccer team - thanks to the US invasion. When it's war vs. peace, guess what wins out?

DN!: US Targeted Baghdad Hotel Before 2 Journalists Killed

Just in from Democracy Now!: "Fmr. Military Intelligence Officer Reveals US Listed Palestine Hotel in Baghdad as Target Prior to Killing of Two Journalists in 2003"

Last month marked the fifth anniversary of the US military shelling of the
Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. The attack killed two journalists: Reuters cameraman
Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network
Telecinco. The Pentagon has called the killings accidental, but in this
broadcast exclusive Army Sgt. Adrienne Kinne (Ret.) reveals she saw secret US
military documents that listed the hotel as a possible target. Kinne also
discloses that she was personally ordered to eavesdrop on Americans working for
news organizations and NGOs in Iraq.

Here's the link to the video. One quote:

One of the instances was the fact that we were listening to journalists who
were staying in the Palestine Hotel. And I remember that, specifically because
during the buildup to Shock and Awe, which people in my unit were really
disturbingly excited about, we were given a list of potential targets in
Baghdad, and the Palestine Hotel was listed as a potential target. And I
remember this specifically, because, putting one and one together, that there
were journalists staying at the Palestine Hotel and this hotel was listed as a
potential target, I went to my officer in charge, and I told him that there are
journalists staying at this hotel who think they’re safe, and yet we have this
hotel listed as a potential target, and somehow the dots are not being connected
here, and shouldn’t we make an effort to make sure that the right people know
the situation?
And unfortunately, my officer in charge, similarly to any
time I raised concerns about things that we were collecting or intelligence that
we were reporting, basically told me that it was not my job to analyze. It was
my job to collect and pass on information and that someone somewhere higher up
the chain knew what they were doing.

Now the question is: why?

US Plans to Occupy Iraq, Grab Its Resources

In Maya Schenwar's article, "Managing Iraq's Econoccupation", she discusses how negotiations between the Bush administration and the US-backed Maliki government have forged ahead relentlessly to basically "occupy" Iraq economically, especially to maintain that all-important stranglehold on Iraq's impressive oil supply.

On the one hand, Iraq is being torn apart by violence, largely inspired by the US invasion and occupation of that country. On the other hand, the real "message" of that invasion and occupation, the oil-grab and strategic base-grab is being strongarmed into place by aggressive "diplomatic" talks. Talks, of course, that are made forceful by that megaladon US military presence. According to Ms. Schenwar's article in truthout:

In a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last month, State Department
Iraq Coordinator David Satterfield revealed the Declaration of Principles
proposals have now been divided into a binding Status of Forces Agreement (on
military involvement) and a nonbinding Strategic Framework Agreement (on
economic and diplomatic relations). Neither would be submitted for the consent
of Congress.

Some of the details being worked out in the Strategic Framework Agreement are detailed here:

Thanks to Bremer's alterations of Iraqi law during the first year of the US
occupation, American companies are now allowed to buy out 100 percent of Iraqi businesses, instead of partnering with them. Bremer's orders also eliminated Iraq's high taxes on corporations, exchanging them for a 15 percent "flat tax." They abolished the practice of giving preference to Iraqi companies - in contracting out reconstruction work, for example - and erased a requirement to hire Iraqi workers.
Previously, Iraqi banks were closed to foreign ownership. Now, not only can foreign banks operate in Iraq, they can take over private Iraqi banks as well.
Bremer reworked Iraq's trademark and copyright laws, eliminated trade barriers and afforded foreign businesses the option of circumventing Iraq's legal system and taking any disputes to international tribunals.

This is your blueprint for occupation. Iraq will cease to have any effective sovereignty, the U.S. having essentially "taken over" the country and its resources. So much for the blatant lies and propaganda fed to US protoplasm, calling it a "liberation". What a callous, calculated con job! In a very telling example of the propaganda lie vs. the on-the-ground truth:

The November version of the Bush-Maliki agreement suggested a commitment to
"facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq,
especially American investments, to contribute to the reconstruction and
rebuilding of Iraq."
According to James A. Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, the "flow of foreign investments to Iraq" wouldn't manifest as generously as it sounds: The deal would primarily translate into "US/UK oil company control."
Last week's assault on Basra was "part of an effort to defeat the 'nationalists' in Iraq and consolidate a pro-US political regime that will go ahead with the oil deals," Paul told Truthout.

Just before fighting erupted in Basra, the Iraqi presidential council approved the "provincial law," which clears the way for elections - potentially allowing nationalist leaders who oppose US oil interests to come to power. Maliki's Basra attack, says Paul, represents a failed attempt to quash that possibility..

Wow... this means that our soldiers are fighting to keep Iraq as a US "possession", not a sovereign nation. Our enemies are no longer called "terrorists". Now that the deed is done, or almost done, we can call them what they really are: "nationalists". We are fighting to keep control of Iraq, especially its oil. And according to the article, this is not the idea of Big Oil corporations, but Bush/Cheney's idea. Of course, Big Oil stands to profit, but Bush's idea was to keep America richer, on oil, maintain the status quo.

The Iraqis, however, have quite a different agenda, and with what little rudiments of democracy they have now in place, they are fighting the US oil-grab with all they've got.

According to James A. Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum,

"The Parliament has remained steadfastly opposed and, in spite of periodic
predictions that parliamentary agreement is 'near,' they have not acted," he
said. "There have even been rumors that the companies have offered $5 million to
each parliamentarian who votes 'yes,' a rumor that seems to me to be probably
based in reality, yet even with such blandishments the Parliament has not
acted."

And a recent poll shows 63 percent of the Iraqi people want Iraqi companies to keep control of their country's oil.

Antonia Juhasz, a fellow at Oil Change International, isn't convinced that US policy will change with the November elections either.

"I hope things would change under a Democratic administration. But the
fact that neither Clinton nor Obama has put forward an immediate withdrawal plan
is worrisome. It doesn't give me confidence that they would abandon the oil
policies the Bush administration has pursued."

Obama's going to have to address the hard stuff: either we're for democracy, and have to listen to the will of the Iraqi people, or we're for aggression and empire, and have to listen to the warmongers, oil interests, and neocons.

War on Terror Fuels Itself; Economy, Democratic Values Pay

Tom Engelhardt's intro to Mark Danner's great article on "Taking Stock of the War on Terror" brings this eloquent take on the war on terror:

The announcement (not declaration) of "war" was, in fact, a necessity for this administration, the only lever available with which to pry a commander-in-chief presidency out of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Without the President's self-proclaimed War on Terror, there would have been no "war" at all, and so no "wartime" atmosphere or "wartime" presidency to be invoked to cow Congress into backing Bush's future war of choice in Iraq. Without "war" and "wartime," it would have been impossible to bring the American people along so readily and difficult to apply "war rules" from the Guantanamo prison complex in Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Otherwise, as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris recently pointed out in the New Yorker, how could American officials and commanders have designated those prisoners seized by the U.S. military in Iraq as "'security detainees,' a label that had gained currency in the war on terror, to describe 'unlawful combatants' and other prisoners who had been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and secrecy, without judicial recourse."

In the meantime, consider with Mark Danner, author most recently of The Secret Way to War, the fate of that global Pax Americana which the War on Terror was intended to bring about, as he gave this clear, painfully true picture of the War on Terror:

How indeed to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it
is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part
man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look
closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side,"
as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory
stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of
Gibraltar;
And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part,
Virtual War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political
utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia,
and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always
expanding.

Read more of this brilliant expose, of which this is another excerpt defining the GWOT:

... declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."

That's it! It's the war against "evil", against "terrorism", against something that is neither a nation nor a people, but rather an amorphous idea. Why not declare war instead on, say, the number 13?

And the impressive result? According to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2006, the Iraq War, what was to be the "clincher" against terrorism, has become its biggest promoter.

In fact, that NIE cites the "Iraq jihad" as the second of four factors "fueling
the jihadist movement," along with "entrenched grievances, such as corruption,
injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a
sense of powerlessness"; "the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social,
and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations"; and "pervasive anti-US
sentiment among most Muslims." ...
Which means that telling the story of the War on Terror, a half dozen years on -- and "taking stock" of that War -- merges inevitably with the sad tale of how that so-called war, strange and multiform beast that it is, became subsumed in a bold and utterly incompetent attempt to occupy and remake a major Arab country.

Basically, the War on Terror is "an ideological crusade", and considering that bin Laden deliberately provoked the U.S. into attacking the Islamic world in order, as he envisioned it, to weaken America's military and economic power in a hopeless quagmire, it seems that Bush jumped right in. Into Iraq, that is, worse in so many ways than Afghanistan. And look at our military and economy now, going downhill fast.

The original idea was to shape up the Middle East and create a "Democracy domino effect. But as Mr. Danner points out:

The problem the administration faced, or rather didn't want to face, was
that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order
that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the
United States.

Instead of dealing with the dictatorships that create instability and public resentment, we chose to invade an autonomous nation, causing already-existing potential rifts to morph into deadly civil war, further exacerbated by al-Qaeda who deliberately foment such violence.

... the Sunni-Shia divide running through Iraq in effect runs through
the entire Middle East. The United States, in choosing this place to stage its
Democratic Revolution, could hardly have done al-Qaeda a better favor.

Now we are hardly in a position to walk away. The moral victory is a distant fantasy. The terrorists have decentralized. They've become "viral al-Qaeda":

"viral al-Qaeda" -- "spontaneous groups of friends," in the words of former
CIA analyst and psychiatrist Marc Sageman, "as in [the] Madrid and Casablanca
[bombings], who have few links to any central leadership, [who] are generating
sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent
errors and poor training."

And as Mr. Danner sums it up, we have passed into the "era of the amateurs",

...self-organized, Internet reliant, and decentralized, dependent not on
armies, training, or even technology but on desire and political will.

We keep feeding that desire and starving our own moral vision by refusing creative nonviolent options. It's time to use our minds in something other than creating enemies and hitting them with clubs. It's time to reassess our purpose on this earth. When you insist on fear, emotions get in the way of reason. A war on terror is self-destruction, and humankind deserves better.

Thanks to US Invasion, Iraqi Women Lose Rights, Gain Abuse

One of the unintended consequences of the US Invasion of Iraq is the entrenchment of powerful Islamist forces that have permeated Iraqi society and turned it inside out, gutting advances in women's rights that were achieved during Saddam Hussein's secular regime. As usual, bumbling US interventionist, blind, and ultimately anti-democratic international policies have struck again. And as usual, women and children, and of course, civilians, bear the brunt of the resulting debacle.

According to this report by Dahr Jamail, the results are devastating. Whereas under Saddam, women had a higher level of education than in most of the Arab world, and could obtain well-compensated and respected jobs in medicine, law, government, and universities, and of course, there was no dress code, now women are turning up in garbage dumps, after having been raped, tortured and murdered ... accused of having been "bad" for not adhering to strict so-called "Islamic" dress codes and other restrictions.

The militias dominated by the Shia Badr Organisation and the Mehdi Army are leading imposition of strict Islamist rules. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government
is seen as providing tacit and sometimes direct support to them.

Women are being harrassed, threatened, kidnapped, tortured and killed for "offenses" ranging from lack of hijab (in this case, stricter head-to-toe covering) and wearing makeup to having respectable jobs outside the home or even attending a university or school. This situation extends to all major cities in Iraq, from Basra to Baghdad to Baquba and beyond. It is beyond unimaginable, beyond horrifying. Women are being reduced, along with the whole of Iraq generally, to rubble. They are often out of fear forced to live confined like prisoners in their own homes.

And Iraq itself suffers from the lack of their valuable input as doctors, government employees, lawyers and teachers/professors. Not to mention the fact that many of them are widows with children, thanks to the war, and therefore, under this horrific siege of so-called "Islamic" - what I consider the absolute antithesis of "Islamic" - militias enforcing their own weird, right-wing agenda that totally undermines the very thing they profess to be defending: the family, the social structure, even religion. How can these women feed their own children if they cannot work outside the so-called "home", which consists of God only knows what bombed-out shelter or lack thereof?

If these so-called "Muslims" are so allegedly religous, why do they forcibly prevent their own children's mothers to struggle to survive, even though this affects their children's survival? Who are they to label these wives, mothers, and daughters "bad" when they spend much of their own time marauding, raping, killing and threatening others?

It's gotten so bad that all the achievements in women's education are basically bombed out.

In early 2007 Iraq's Ministry of Education found that more than 70 percent of girls and young women no longer attend school or college.

It's not lack of desire for knowledge. It's only the pervasive atmosphere of fear, caused by the abductions and killings that have become prevalent. In Basra where red graffiti warns women to cover from head to toe, at least 40 women have been abducted in the last five months alone, according to the police chief. And in Baghdad,

Several women victims have been accused of being "bad" before they were
abducted, residents have told IPS in Baghdad. Most women who are abducted are
later found dead.
The bodies of several have been found in garbage dumps, showing signs of rape and torture. Many bodies had a note attached saying the woman was "bad", according to residents who did not give their names to IPS.
Similar problems exist for women in Baquba, the capital city of Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.
"My neighbour was killed because she was accused of working in the directorate-general of police of Diyala," resident Um Haider told IPS in January. "This woman worked as a receptionist in the governor's office, and not in the police. She was in charge of checking women who work in the governor's office."
Killings like this have led countless women to quit jobs, or to change them.

Thus the Iraqi women must spend their time virtually imprisoned at home, never daring to venture out unless escorted, into streets which by themselves are extremely dangerous war zones.

"Women bear great pain and risks when militants control the streets," Um Basim, a mother of three, told IPS in Baquba recently. "No man can move here or there. When a man is killed, the body is taken to the morgue. The body has to be received by the family, so women often go alone to the morgue to escort the body home. Some are targeted by militants when they do this."

As if this is not bad enough, women are also being detained in US and Iraqi prisons, and their situation is unknown.

According to Nadira Habib, deputy head of the parliamentary committee, there are around 200 women detained in the Iraqi run al-Adala prison in Baghdad. Habibi says there are presumably women in U.S.-run prisons too. "But no one knows how
many female detainees are now in prisons run by U.S. forces as they always
refuse requests from our committee to visit them."

On top of this are the so-called "honor killings", especially common in the Kurdish north, where women are slaughtered on suspicion of having affairs or even contact with someone, often false allegations. So where is the US and where are the so-called Western democracies? Busy "fighting terrorists" - read "planting them" - all over the world.

If instead of taking a militaristic approach, the US and West had taken the approach of dialogue and "detente" - oooh, radical! - maybe democracy would have had a chance. But when you go the military route, taking what the rest of the world views as an extreme interventionist position, what do you expect of the others, your supposed "enemies"? They will be militant, extremist, right-wing jerks. Islam is far away and unlike all that these so-called "Islamists" are doing, just as other hijacked religions are in their essence unlike what extremist zealots act out, from extremist Jews to extremist fundamentalist Christians to extremist (think USSR & Maoist China) atheists, all imposing their narrow views on societies by force. The invasion of Iraq is in essence an invasion, forcing a whole society to kowtow to our own needs, ideas, etc, by force of arms. It is a path doomed to failure and will drag down all that get caught in it.

Guernica II: Remote-Control Massacre

Dahr Jamail again comes through with this insightful, if devastating, report on what the U.S. bombing strategy really brought about in Iraq - and what kind of future our continued military effort there would bring. On January 10, U.S. bombers and F-16's attacked an area south of Baghdad.

The use of B1 bombers shows the terrible failure of the U.S. campaign in
Iraq," Iraqi Major General Muhammad al-Azzawy, a military researcher in Baghdad, told IPS. "U.S. military and political tactics failed in this area, and that is
why this massacre. This kind of bombing is usually used for much bigger targets
than small villages full of civilians. This was savagery."

The attack on Juboor and neighbouring villages just south of Baghdad
had begun a week earlier with heavy artillery and tank bombardment. The attack
followed strong resistance from members of the mainly Sunni Muslim al-Juboor
tribe against groups that residents described as sectarian death squads.

"On Jan. 10, huge aircraft started bombing the villages," Ahmad Alwan
from a village near Juboor told IPS. "We took our families and fled. We have
never seen such bombardment since the 2003 American invasion. They were bombing everything and everybody."

Residents said two B1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets dropped at
least 40,000 pounds of explosives on the villages and plantations within a span
of 10 minutes.

"The al-Qaeda name is used once more to destroy another Sunni area,"
Akram Naji, a lawyer in Baghdad who has relatives in Juboor told IPS. "Americans
are still supporting Iranian influence in Iraq by cleansing Baghdad and
surroundings of Sunnis."

But do Americans who pay for this war hear any of this news? Not if they listen to mainstream news. Note that Sunnis feel Americans are "supporting Iranian influence" while mainstream U.S. news reports the diametrical opposite. Note that the U.S. frequently shows hostility in word and deed towards Iran's Shi'a President Ahmedinejad, while maintaining a friendly attitude towards Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Yet Sunnis in Iraq are interpreting this bombing as an attack on them personally, using al-Qaeda as a ruse.

Now note how the bombing is played out in the media. Tom Englehardt analyzes various American news sources, showing how they buried the true story in lion's skin of terror-fighting.

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members
of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. ...Twenty-six
paragraphs later, the story ended this way:
"The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.
"In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds
of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into
Baghdad."
And here's paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:
"The threat from buried bombs was well known before the
[Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped
nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.'s."

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab
Jabour from an IED that blew up "an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant
Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to
reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq."

Note that both pieces started with bombing news -- in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days -- those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad -- simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration's invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.

How many civilian casualties were there? Who were the civilians? What strategic interests were the U.S. supposedly "protecting" by this attack? What intelligence, if any, led to this area as a strategic target? Who did they think they were killing vs. who did they actually kill? What was gained by this, if anything?

Since Americans pay for this war, as I said, they should know what the hell is going on. But that's not going to happen, apparently. Someone has an agenda, and it's either a very blood experiment in Chaos Theory, a horrific way to nab oil rights in an era when we're supposed to be going green, or just empire-lust run amok. But it's not, no not at all, to "defend freedom", "fight terrorism", or promote democracy. This can't by any stretch of any Republican fantasy, be for that purpose.

Mr. Englehardt then makes a correlation between the bombing of Guernica, Spain, of Picasso's famous painting fame, in which up to 10,000 civilians were killed by - and this is the connection - 100,000 lbs. of explosives. The same as the U.S. bombing on Abu Jaboor in Iraq - 100,000 lbs. of explosives. But back then in 1937,

The self-evident barbarism of the event -- the first massively publicized
bombing of a civilian population -- caused international horror. It was news
across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last
century, Picasso's Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems, and other works of art.

Fast-forward to Iraq 2008, and 100,000 lbs. of explosives dropped by American bombs on small farming villages south of Baghdad is barely worth a couple of yawns. More war stats. Can't cut it against Britney Spears celebrinsania.

As far as we know, there were no reporters, Iraqi or Western, in Arab
Jabour when the bombs fell and, Iraq being Iraq, no American reporters rushed
there -- in person or by satellite phone -- to check out the damage. In Iraq and
Afghanistan, when it comes to the mainstream media, bombing is generally only
significant if it's of the roadside or suicide variety; if, that is, the "bombs"
can be produced at approximately "the cost of a pizza" (as IEDs sometimes are), or if the vehicles delivering them are cars or simply fiendishly well-rigged human bodies. From the air, even 100,000 pounds of bombs just doesn't have the ring of something that matters.

Some of this, of course, comes from the Pentagon's success in creating a
dismissive, sanitizing language in which to frame war from the air. "Collateral
damage" stands in for the civilian dead -- even though in much of modern war,
the collateral damage could be considered the dead soldiers, not the ever rising percentage of civilian casualties. And death is, of course, delivered "precisely" by "precision-guided" weaponry. All this makes air war seem sterile, even virginal. Army Col. Terry Ferrell, for instance, described the air assaults in Arab Jabour in this disembodied way at a Baghdad news conference:

"The purpose of these particular strikes was to shape the battlefield and take out known threats before our ground troops move in. Our aim was to neutralize any advantage the enemy could claim with the use of IEDs and other weapons."

You've got non-military verbs strategically placed with battlefield nouns. It creates that all-important bloodless "look". It's almost like selling insurance: "policy", "claim", "planning", etc. The purpose is to keep you, the taxpayer, slightly bored, yet reassured that this war was doing something good, serving some purpose, like "keeping America free."

As that phrase "take out known threats before our ground troops move in" made clear, this was an attempt to minimize casualties among American (and allied Iraqi) troops by bringing massive amounts of firepower to bear in a situation in which local information was guaranteed to be sketchy at best. Given such a scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this, increasingly, is likely to be the American way of war in Iraq.

As Mr. Englehardt sums the math up succinctly:

Anyway, here's the simple calculus that goes with all this: Militarily,
overstretched American forces simply cannot sustain the ground part of the surge
for much longer. Most, if not all, of those 30,000 troops who surged into Iraq
in the first half of 2007 will soon be coming home. But air power won't be. Air
Force personnel are already on short, rotating tours of duty in the region. In
Vietnam back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as ground troops were withdrawn,
air power ramped up. This seems once again to be the pattern. There is every
reason to believe that it represents the American future in Iraq.

And air war means civilian deaths far outnumber the death of actual soldiers - or "militants", as they are now called. For there's not even parity in terms anymore. Our military are "heroes" or "soldiers"; theirs are "insurgents", "militants" or "terrorists". In fact, the name al-Qaeda has come to be used loosely to refer to any Sunni fighters/insurgents. Hence their perception that the U.S. wants to eliminate Sunnis per se.

So if anyone can articulate what we are fighting for, whom we are fighting, and why, in any logical or meaningful way, please let me know. All the reasons presented so far are about as relevant as a random page out of tax law. So bloodless. So mundane. So ordinary. So easy to forget. Almost like a video game. At least, that's what taxpayers are supposed to think. And never, ever even mention or think, don't dare to say, that it's a filthy, bloody, messy, sickening, mind-numbing, sanity-busting, nearly-pointless, remote-control massacre.

Surge Success: "There is no one left for them to kill"

The news is full of it: Casualties in Iraq are down, the Surge is a success. Bush/Cheney and Al-Maliki claim that they have "won" a "victory" over the "militants" - whatever that means. They cite recent lower casualty numbers, claiming the "surge" worked, and things are getting better. But people on the ground have a different explanation for the relative calm, which is atypical of the rest of 2007.
"There is no one left for them to kill," 55-year-old retired teacher Nathum Taha told IPS in Baghdad. "The Americans continue to use Arab Shia Iraqi militias to kill Sunnis, but most people have left by now."
Now the city of Baghdad, and much of the nation that was Iraq before we invaded it, is divided along sectarian lines. Where once Shi'a and Sunni families coexisted peacefully, there are ethnic cleansings that have driven many into "safe" neighborhoods, and others are refugees in strange cities, if they can't leave Iraq altogether. And it's not because they're naturally violent or divisive as the Republicans would have you believe...

This assessment from an Iraqi who voiced what people who have to live in the war zone are saying:

"Americans and Iranians have succeeded in realising their old dream of dividing the Iraqi people into sects. That is the only success they can talk about."

"If the situation is good, why are five million Iraqis living in exile," says 55- year-old Abu Mohammadwho was evicted from Shula in West Baghdad to become a refugee in Amiriya, a few miles from his lost home.

"Sectarian killings are less because all the Sunnis have been evicted from mixed areas in Baghdad," Salman Hameed, a teacher who was evicted from the al-Hurriya area west of Baghdad eight months ago told IPS. "All my relatives and Sunni neighbours who survived the killing campaign led by the militias under the eyes of American and Iraqi forces have fled either to Syria or to other Sunni cities."

Over 30 tons of cluster bombs, which are known for their heavy "collateral damage" on civilian populations, were dropped in the first 6 months of 2007. And that's not counting the
"Attacks against U.S. forces are not much less than they were last month, but media coverage has almost disappeared," Muhammad Younis from Mosul, in Baghdad on a business trip, told IPS. "The resistance is moving fast and changing locations in order to avoid intelligence provided by collaborators. Most Iraqis hate the Americans more than ever after the death and destruction caused by their occupation."

"American air raids are increasing in a way that shows a total failure on the ground," a retired general of the dissolved Iraqi army told IPS. "A whole family was killed near Madayin, southeast Baghdad on Saturday (Nov. 3) just after the tragic bombing of houses south of Tikrit (about 100 km north of Baghdad) where more than 10 civilians were killed."

On Nov. 4, Iraqi army personnel backed by U.S. soldiers detained 12 people during a raid on the Sunni Abu Hanifa mosque in the Adhamiyah district of northern Baghad.

"Those American and government forces could not face the resistance fighters, so they arrest innocent people," Aziz Thafir, a lawyer who witnessed the arrests, told IPS. "They started their raid with nasty sectarian words against Sunnis, and then arrested every one who was around in the mosque."
"They are more vicious than they were before," 44-year-old Abu Ahmed told IPS in the capital. "This is a religious war against Sunnis, who would not accept the occupation and division of the country."

Many Iraqis believe the sectarian violence is being perpetrated or orchestrated by the U.S., not prevented or stopped by them, as presented in American public propaganda, aka media blitzes. And they see that reporting is not accurate either - attacks by U.S. and Iraqi forces, as well as Iraqi police, against Iraqi civilians, are not being covered. They see the U.S. as working on a "divide and conquer" policy, and the lessening of violence as merely the result of so many people having either been killed or fled as refugees - plus the dividing of their cities into ethnically cleansed "havens".

"I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased and
that everything is fine," retired general Waleed al-Ubaidy told IPS
in Baghdad. "But the truth is far more bitter. All that has happened is a
dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq."
And as with Baquba and
other violence-hit areas of Iraq, he says a part of the story in Baghdad is that
there is nobody left to tell it. "Most of the honest journalists have
left."
"Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and
neighbourhoods," Ahmad Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdad's municipalities
told IPS. "There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni Baghdad to start with.
Then, each is divided into little town-like pieces of the hundreds of thousands
who had to leave their homes."

The U.S. has to answer questions about possible complicity.

"The Americans ask (Prime Minister Nouri al) Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations when they know very well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing," Mahmood Farhan from the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group, told IPS.

At least they could have read

"A UN report released September 2005 held interior ministry forces responsible for an organised campaign of detentions, torture and killings. It said special police commando units accused of carrying out the killings were recruited from the Shia Badr and Mehdi militias.
Retired Col. James Steele, who served as advisor to Iraqi security forces under former U.S. ambassador John Negroponte, supervised the training of these forces.

Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisors group in El Salvador in 1984-86; Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighbouring Honduras 1981-85. Negroponte was accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights in 1994. The Commission reported the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers.
The violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the CIA, according to a CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras.
The CIA records document that "special intelligence units", better known as "death squads", comprised CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.
Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004. "

Makes you wonder what those in Iraq were really trained to do. Why then don't the Democrats put up a stronger fight to stop this disastrous war?

Iraq Slaughter Surpasses Rwanda Massacres

This just popped up on the radar. Let's pray it wormholes into the public consciousness and conscience. Another reason to work hard for withdrawal. Complete, total withdrawal. And a complete and total reversal of the anti-democracy efforts of the Bush Administration, which include, among other crimes, insanely wild warmongering.

New Poll Reveals:
September 2007 - More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered
In the week in which General Patraeus reports back to US Congress on the impact the recent ‘surge’ is having in Iraq, a new poll reveals that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003.

Previous estimates, most noticeably the one published in the Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number (654,965 deaths).

These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:

- Q - How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.

None 78% One 16% Two 5% Three 1% Four or more 0.002%

Given that from the 2005 census there are a total of 4,050,597 households this data suggests a total of 1,220,580 deaths since the invasion in 2003.

Detailed analysis (which is available on our website) indicates that almost one in two households in Baghdad have lost a family member, significantly higher than in any other area of the country. The governorates of Diyala (42%) and Ninewa (35%) were next.

The poll also questioned the surviving relatives on the method in which their loved ones were killed. It reveals that 48% died from a gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another blast/ordnance.

This is significant because more often that not it is car bombs and aerial bombardments that make the news – with gunshots rarely in the headlines.

As well as a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from 1994 (800,000 murdered), not only have more than one million been injured but our poll calculates that of the millions of Iraqis that have fled their neighbourhoods, 52% have moved within Iraq but 48% have crossed its borders, with Syria taking the brunt of refugees.

And for those left in Iraq, although 81% may describe the availability of basic groceries such as bread and fresh vegetables as “very/fairly good”, more than one in two (54%) consider them to be “expensive”.

Note: The opinion poll was conducted by O.R.B. and the survey details are as follows: •Results are based face-to-face interviews amongst a nationally representative sample of 1720 adults aged 18+ throughout Iraq.
•The standard margin of error on the sample size is +2.4%
•The methodology uses multi-stage random probability sampling and covers fifteen of the eighteen governorates within Iraq. For security reasons Karbala and Al Anbar were not included. Irbil was excluded as the authorities refused our field team a permit.
•Interviews conducted August 12th – 19th 2007.
•Full results and data tabulations are available at www.opinion.co.uk/newsroom.aspx
•O.R.B. are full members of the British Polling Council and abide by its rules

Bush-Petraeus Spin Job Undercuts Admiral Fallon's Command

Not to mention the consensus of many other officers and military people on the ground in Iraq, and overseeing the whole War Operation, the global empire military enterprise dubbed "Global War on Terror", which is turning into "Global Terror Farming Operation".

If you're gonna have a war, at least let it be run by warriors, or military people. That's one more thing the Bush administration did NOT do, which has led to the total Disaster called the Iraq War. The latest in a long line of fiascos is Gen. Patraeus and the Surge Spinsters. No, they're not spin doctors, which would imply a certain level of expertise, not to mention human concern. Spinsters. They're on their own, they can't have children, and nobody wants to hook up with them. Welcome to Club Surge.

Here in this Club you have to say "My War, Right or Wrong". Now that's a new spin on patriotism. Now we have Admiral Fallon, the top dog on the ground in Iraq, in other words, Commander of CENTCOM, the superior, I repeat, superior officer over Gen Patraeus, saying the surge is a failure, it was wrong to begin with, and Patraeus is... well, let's hear it from the man in charge himself:

In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

That extraordinarily contentious start of Fallon's mission to Baghdad led to more meetings marked by acute tension between the two commanders. Fallon went on develop his own alternative to Petraeus's recommendation for continued high levels of U.S. troops in Iraq during the summer.

The enmity between the two commanders became public knowledge when the Washington Post reported Sep. 9 on intense conflict within the administration over Iraq. The story quoted a senior official as saying that referring to "bad relations" between them is "the understatement of the century".

Fallon's derision toward Petraeus reflected both the CENTCOM commander's personal distaste for Petraeus's style of operating and their fundamental policy differences over Iraq, according to the sources. The policy context of Fallon's extraordinarily abrasive treatment of his subordinate was Petraeus's agreement in February to serve as front man for the George W. Bush administration's effort to sell its policy of increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq to Congress.

If you have the two top leaders in a war at complete odds with one another, and the one whose decision is taken is the underling, then you've got trouble. Real, bad trouble. Again, this means the Commander in Chief is basically using an officer lower in the command chain to circumvent his superior in order to spin out his own pet policy. It's not what Petraeus thinks is right. It's what Petraeus thinks is expedient to his own enhancement. It's called "ass-kissing." That is, Patraeus' spin job. But what Bush did is called "subordination", I believe.

Military guys, give me a clue. What do you call this messing with the chain of command? Is it the job of the Commander in Chief to not only set goals, but to set how those goals are to be achieved even though the consensus on the ground says otherwise? That's what military dictators do with their armies.

I used to think we were different.
"A Republic, if you can keep it." (Ben Franklin.)
Not with Bush and his like-minded "ass-kissers" in power.

Cruelty to Children, thanks to U.S. foreign policy

Bridgethought of the Day: Democracy is not cruel, inhuman, or invasive. If actions speak louder than words, and they do, what does it say about us to the rest of the world? Our "democracy" is just another codeword for "hypocrisy." Or so it looks to everyone outside Island America. You can't bring democracy by force.

Case in point: the War in Iraq, and its devastating effect on children there.

Don't get self-righteous so fast, dems. In this eye-opening article on Dahr Jamail's website, you can listen to the Clinton Administration's own Madeline Albright in one of her many compassion-free moments:

By now Iraq has seen a generation of children pass with just survival a
major issue. During the period of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in the
1990s, more than half a million children died, according to the United
Nations.

In 1996, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright was asked by
Lesley Stahl on the CBS ླྀ Minutes' show if she thought the price of half a
million dead children was worth it. She replied, "I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."

Worth it? And so, apparently, is the Iraq War and its untold millions of refugees, dead, hungry, thirsty, homeless, and virtually everything BUT democratized. Gee, didn't know democracy could be so cruel. But for a good cause! Democracy! Half a million dead children? Worth it!

And so Bush-Cheney just continues to fight the good fight, continue the dream. The casualties? Children...

Ahmed Ali's scathing article about how U.S. operations in Baquba have robbed children there of their childhood, describes how in Iraq:

According to an Oxfam report on Iraq released Jul. 30, "92 percent of
children had learning impediments that are largely attributable to the current
climate of fear. Schools are regularly closed as teachers and pupils are too
fearful to attend. Over 800,000 children may now be out of school, according to
a recent estimate by Save the Children UK -- up from 600,000 in 2004."
The
Oxfam report also said that child malnutrition rates in Iraq have risen from 19
percent before the invasion in 2003, to 28 percent. "More than 11 percent of
newborn babies were born underweight in 2006, compared with 4 percent in
2003."

Not to mention the lack of toys, free time, safety or security ... so what can children in Iraq do in their "spare time" using energy gained from sparse rations? What else do people do in Iraq now that the U.S. invaded?

According to an L.A. Times Article, "More children are doing the bombings and killings in Iraq."

Boys, some as young as 11, now outnumber foreign fighters at U.S.
detention camps in Iraq. Since March, their numbers have risen from 100 to 800,
said Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, the commander of detainee operations.

And with perhaps 2 million + refugees coming out of Iraq, what does the future exactly hold for Iraqi children?

Democracy? Yeah, right.