9 okt 2008
Iraqi minorities are not for sale
By Fatih Abdulsalam, Azzaman, October 5, 2008
Iraqi legislators have revoked a paragraph in the constitution that gave a set of seats for Iraqi minorities in provincial councils.
The reason they cited was that there was no “authentic count” on the number of these minorities in the country.
But this is a baseless excuse and pretext to violate the rights of Iraqi Christians, Shebeks, Sabeans and Yazidis for whom land of today’s Iraq has been a habitat from time immemorial.
There must have been other reasons which prompted the parliament to take a decision that has alienated an important and crucial component of the Iraqi society.
Iraqi minorities thought they would be treated much better than under former leader Saddam Hussein whose regime the U.S. toppled in 2003.
But they now find themselves in far worse conditions. At least Saddam Hussein respected their religious rights and their way of worship. His regime is credited with the building of scores of churches and places of worship for all Iraqi minorities.
Today, these minorities have been worst hit by U.S. occupation and the surge in violence it caused.
To say the government lacks credible counts of Iraqi minorities is a big lie. Such counts could have easily been obtained from their religious leaders.
Moreover, conducting such a count is not that difficult given the fact that the remaining numbers of these minorities now predominantly live in northern Iraq.
For the U.S. and its puppet government everything in Iraq now either falls under the category of minority or majority.
And who is a minority or majority depends on which sect, religion or ethnic group you belong to.
If your are a Shiite you see Shiite majority across the country. If you are a Kurd you see Kurdish majority even in traditional Arab heartland and so on and so forth.
There are no credible counts in Iraq for almost everything. No one knows for sure who the majority is and who the minority is.
This applies to Arabs and Kurds. It applies to Shiites and Sunnis.
But only the weakest and powerless in the society had to pay for the lack of authentic counts. Iraqi minorities, who thought they would be better off under a U.S.-protected government, suddenly find themselves without protection.
.
The End of Iraq's "Awakening"?
An interview with the commander of the Sunni-led Awakening movement reveals the possibility of a new anti-U.S. resistance.
In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the commander of the Sunni-led Awakening movement in Baghdad says that attacks by the Iraqi government and government-allied militiamen against Awakening leaders and rank-and-file members are likely to spark a new Sunni resistance movement. That resistance force will conduct attacks against American troops and Iraqi army and police forces, he says. "Look around," he says. "It has already come back. It is getting stronger. Look at what is happening in Baghdad." The commander, Abu Azzam, spoke to The Nation by telephone from Amman, Jordan, last week, before returning to Baghdad.
He laid out a scenario for a new explosion in Iraq, one that would shatter the complacent American notion that the 2007-08 "surge" of American troops in Iraq has stabilized that war-torn country. Although the greater U.S. force succeeded in putting down some of the most violent sectarian clashes, it was the emergence of the Awakening movement in 2006 that crushed Al Qaeda in Iraq and brought order to Anbar and Baghdad.
On October 1 the Iraqi government was slated to take over responsibility for the Awakening movement, which includes about 100,000 mostly Sunni fighters in the provinces of Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala and in the mostly Sunni western suburbs of Baghdad. Made up of many former Baathists, ex-military officers from the Saddam Hussein era and other assorted secular nationalists, the Awakening -- in Arabic, sahwa, also referred to by the U.S. military as the Sons of Iraq -- involves thousands of former guerrillas from the 2003-07 Iraqi resistance.
The sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki views the Awakening movement with extreme suspicion, and the feeling is mutual. According to several Iraqi sources interviewed for this article, there is a grave possibility that the relative calm that has prevailed in Iraq over the past year will be shattered if the Shiite-led government and its allied militia, the Badr Brigade of the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), engage in an armed power struggle with the Awakening forces for control of western Baghdad.
So far, the United States is trying to cajole Maliki into supporting the Awakening, offering $300 to $500 per month for each member of the Sunni militia. At the same time, U.S. military officers in Iraq have promised to guarantee the payments to the Sunni forces and to shield the Awakening from attacks or reprisals by the regime. But among Sunnis, including those interviewed for this story, there is widespread concern that they are on their own and that the United States will not abandon the government in Baghdad despite its sectarian, pro-Iran leanings.
In that case, said a former top Iraqi official, many Sunnis may turn to an unlikely source for support: Russia. "The Russians are very active," he said. "They are talking with many Iraqis, including resistance leaders and Awakening members, in Damascus, Syria. They are in discussions with big Baathists." According to this official, former Baathists, army officers and Awakening members in Damascus, Amman and inside Iraq are looking to Russia for support, especially since Russia seems intent on reasserting itself in the Middle East. "The Russians intend to come out strongly to play with the Sunnis," he said. "I heard this from sahwa members in Damascus and Amman. 'If the Americans abandon us, we will go to the Russians.'"
Abu Azzam, who helped found the Awakening in the Baghdad area, is based in the Abu Ghraib suburb of the capital, and he is the commander for the region. Over the past several months, he said, "hundreds" of his fighters have been assassinated by the Badr militia or killed in battles with Iraqi police forces controlled by ISCI's Badr Brigade. Last month, the police issued a warrant for Abu Azzam's arrest, but Maliki quashed it after a brief period of confusion. "The Ministry of Justice and the police in Iraq are controlled by the religious parties," Abu Azzam said. "It wasn't a real arrest warrant." Still, it was unsettling to the movement, and it was widely taken as a sign of things to come.
According to the New York Times, Maliki's government has ordered the arrest of 650 Awakening leaders in the Baghdad area and hundreds more north of the capital, in Diyala province. The Times quoted Jalaladeen al-Saghir, a top official of ISCI's Badr Brigade, saying, "The state cannot accept the Awakening. Their days are numbered."
The Iraqi government has pledged to enroll 20 percent of the Awakening force in the army and police. But that pledge is seen by most Sunnis as an action by Maliki to keep the Americans happy -- even though Maliki has no intention of keeping his promise.
"Maliki tells the Americans what he thinks they want to hear," an Awakening leader tells The Nation. "I tell the Americans all the time that it is a trick, but they don't understand. The Americans are so naïve. They assume good will on the part of Maliki. We don't understand. The Americans know that Maliki is working closely with the Iranians, so why do they believe him? Why do they listen to him?"
According to Abu Azzam, the fact that 80 percent of the Awakening forces will be kept out of the security services means that they won't have work, and they will be angry. "The government's plan is to take the 20 percent, bring them into the security forces, but move them out of the neighborhoods where they are based," he says. That's foolish, he adds, because those militia forces know the neighborhoods, and they know a lot about pro-Al Qaeda and pro-Sunni Islamist radicals, house by house. "If you move them, you lose all that knowledge," he says. "And then they replace them with Iraqi army units that are mostly made up of sectarian Shiite forces." It is a formula for disaster, and a new civil war.
Last week, the Iraqi Parliament passed a flawed but workable law to govern provincial elections, which are expected to be held early in 2009. Abu Azzam is forming his own political party, the Iraqi Dignity Front, to compete mostly in the Baghdad suburbs. In other provinces, there are other parties emerging out of the Awakening, including the Anbar-based National Front for the Salvation of Iraq. Most of the Awakening-linked parties are expected to sweep the Sunni vote in Anbar, Salahuddin, Diyala and the western suburbs of Baghdad, delivering a knockout blow to the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Sunni religious bloc that at times has been part of Maliki's coalition. The Iraqi Islamic Party was elected with only 2 percent of the Sunni vote, when nearly all Sunnis boycotted the rigged 2005 elections. Sheikh Ali Hatim, leader of the National Front for the Salvation of Iraq, told an Arabic-language newspaper:
We are waging a battle of destiny against the Islamic Party. Al Qaeda does not pose any danger to Iraq anymore, and it is finished. The real danger are those that fight us in the name of legitimacy and religion -- I mean the Islamic Party. Had it not been for the intervention of the government and the US forces, this party would not have lasted for two days in Al-Anbar.
But the pro-Awakening parties are far more concerned about the threat from Maliki and the ISCI-Badr forces than they are with the Iraqi Islamic Party, which does not have a militia of any consequence. And there is no guarantee that they will be satisfied with participation in a political process that restricts them to elections in Anbar and a few other Sunni strongholds yet keeps them out of power in Baghdad and in the central government -- especially if the campaign of violence and assassination continues against their fighters.
According to Iraqi sources, the assassinations of key Sunni leaders are being carried out by death squads associated with the Badr Brigade, often supported directly by units from Iran's intelligence service, which works closely with Badr forces. Since 2003 the Badr Brigade and Iran's intelligence service have assassinated thousands of former Baathists, army and air force officers; Sunni intellectuals and professionals; and others opposed to Iran's influence in Iraq.
Many Iraq experts in Washington discount the possibility that the Russians would lend their support to a new resistance force in Iraq, but they do not entirely rule it out.
Earlier this month, a former top Baathist official openly called on Moscow for help. Salah Mukhtar, who was an aide to Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi foreign minister under Saddam, and who was Iraq's ambassador to India and Vietnam, said that Russia's "pre-emptive step in Georgia is a formidable act from the strategic point of view in its timing, aims and tactics," and he called on Russia to direct its attention to Iraq:
The United States' Achilles' heel is Iraq. … The U.S. colonialist project to have absolute control over our planet can be buried in Iraq.
Only through backing the patriotic Iraqi resistance and strengthening its military capabilities can we accelerate the end of U.S. colonialism all over the world. … The key to defeat the United States in the world and to corner it into isolation is Russia providing support to the Iraqi resistance directly or indirectly.
The key to freeing the world by muzzling the United States requires Russian involvement in the Iraq battle.
Despite the bravado in that statement, it's not impossible that Russia might be toying with the idea of engaging the United States in the Middle East more directly. In all likelihood, it would depend on a significant further deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations over Georgia, Iran and other points of contention. In the meantime, though, it is likely that Russian intelligence agents are quietly connecting with Iraqis.
The bottom line is that despite the deceptive calm in Iraq, the country remains poised to explode. Not only it is possible that the Sunni-Shiite war could reignite but another flashpoint is developing in the north and northeast of Iraq, involving Kurds' aspirations to aggrandize their territory. Both Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq would oppose any further Kurdish expansionism, especially the Kurds' desire to take control of oil-rich Kirkuk and Tamim province. Plus, there is still the possibility that the forces of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr might reassert themselves, with Iranian backing, if Maliki were to cave in to U.S. demands for a status-of-forces agreement and a U.S.-Iraq treaty that cedes too much of Iraq's sovereignty to the American occupation forces.
New Evidence Shows Bush Had No Plan to Catch bin Laden After 9/11
New evidence from former U.S. officials reveals that the George W. Bush administration failed to adopt any plan to block the retreat of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the first weeks after 9/11.
That failure was directly related to the fact that top administration officials gave priority to planning for war with Iraq over military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
As a result, the United States had far too few troops and strategic airlift capacity in the area to cover the large number of possible exit routes through the border area when bin Laden escaped in late 2001.
Because it had not been directed to plan for that contingency, the U.S. military had to turn down an offer by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in late November 2001 to send 60,000 troops to the border passes to intercept him, according to accounts provided by former U.S. officials involved in the issue.
On Nov. 12, 2001, as Northern Alliance troops were marching on Kabul with little resistance, the CIA had intelligence that bin Laden was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains close to the Pakistani border.
The war had ended much more quickly than expected only days earlier. CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, who was responsible for the war in Afghanistan, had no forces in position to block bin Laden's exit.
Franks asked Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, commander of Army Central Command (ARCENT), whether his command could provide a blocking force between al Qaeda and the Pakistani border, according to David W. Lamm, who was then commander of ARCENT Kuwait.
Lamm, a retired Army colonel, recalled in an interview that there was no way to fulfill the CENTCOM commander's request, because ARCENT had neither the troops nor the strategic lift in Kuwait required to put such a force in place. "You looked at that request, and you just shook your head," recalled Lamm, now chief of staff of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.
Franks apparently already realized that he would need Pakistani help in blocking the al Qaeda exit from Tora Bora. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting that Franks "wants the (Pakistanis) to close the transit points between Afghanistan and Pakistan to seal what's going in and out," according to the National Security Council meeting transcript in Bob Woodward's book Bush at War.
Bush responded that they would need to "press Musharraf to do that."
A few days later, Franks made an unannounced trip to Islamabad to ask Musharraf to deploy troops along the Pakistan-Afghan border near Tora Bora.
A deputy to Franks, Lt. Gen. Mike DeLong, later claimed that Musharraf had refused Franks' request for regular Pakistani troops to be repositioned from the north to the border near the Tora Bora area. DeLong wrote in his 2004 book Inside Centcom that Musharraf had said he "couldn't do that" because it would spark a "civil war" with a hostile tribal population.
But U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, who accompanied Franks to the meeting with Musharraf, provided an account of the meeting to this writer that contradicts DeLong's claim.
Chamberlin, now president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, recalled that the Pakistani president told Franks that CENTCOM had vastly underestimated what was required to block bin Laden's exit from Afghanistan. Musharraf said, "Look, you are missing the point: There are 150 valleys through which al Qaeda are going to stream into Pakistan," according to Chamberlin.
Although Musharraf admitted that the Pakistani government had never exercised control over the border area, the former diplomat recalled, he said this was "a good time to begin." The Pakistani president offered to redeploy 60,000 troops to the area from the border with India but said his army would need airlift assistance from the United States to carry out the redeployment.
But the Pakistani redeployment never happened, according to Lamm, because it wasn't logistically feasible. Lamm recalled that it would have required an entire aviation brigade, including hundreds of helicopters, and hundreds of support troops to deliver that many combat troops to the border region -- far more than were available.
Lamm said the ARCENT had so few strategic lift resources that it had to use commercial aircraft at one point to move U.S. supplies in and out of Afghanistan.
Even if the helicopters had been available, however, they could not have operated with high effectiveness in the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border region near the Tora Bora caves, according to Lamm, because of the combination of high altitude and extreme weather.
Franks did manage to insert 1,200 Marines into Kandahar on Nov. 26 to establish control of the air base there. They were carried to the base by helicopters from an aircraft carrier that had steamed into the Gulf from the Pacific, according to Lamm.
The Marines patrolled roads in the Kandahar area hoping to intercept al Qaeda officials heading toward Pakistan. But DeLong, now retired from the Army, said in an interview that the Marines would not have been able to undertake the blocking mission at the border. "It wouldn't have worked -- even if we could have gotten them up there," he said. "There weren't enough to police 1,500 kilometers of border."
U.S. troops probably would also have faced armed resistance from the local tribal population in the border region, according to DeLong. The tribesmen in local villages near the border "liked bin Laden," he said, "because he had given them millions of dollars."
Had the Bush administration's priority been to capture or kill the al Qaeda leadership, it would have deployed the necessary ground troops and airlift resources in the area over a period of months before the offensive in Afghanistan began.
"You could have moved American troops along the Pakistani border before you went into Afghanistan," said Lamm. But that would have meant waiting until spring 2002 to take the offensive against the Taliban, according to Lamm.
The views of Bush's key advisers, however, ruled out any such plan from the start. During the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld had refused to develop contingency plans for military action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan despite a National Security Presidential Directive adopted at the Deputies' Committee level in July and by the Principles on Sept. 4 that called for such planning, according to the 9/11 Commission report.
Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz resisted such planning for Afghanistan because they were hoping that the White House would move quickly on military intervention in Iraq. According to the 9/11 Commission, at four deputies' meetings on Iraq between May 31 and July 26, 2001, Wolfowitz pushed his idea to have U.S. troops seize all the oil fields in southern Iraq.
Even after Sept. 11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to resist any military engagement in Afghanistan, because they were hoping for war against Iraq instead.
Bush's top-secret order of Sept. 17 for war with Afghanistan also directed the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq, according to journalist James Bamford's book A Pretext for War.
Cheney and Rumsfeld pushed for a quick victory in Afghanistan in National Security Council meetings in October, as recounted by both Woodward and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Lost in the eagerness to wrap up the Taliban and get on with the Iraq War was any possibility of preventing bin Laden's escape to Pakistan.
.
Is Obama Correct on the Keating Five?
KEATING ECONOMICS: John McCain & The Making of a Financial Crisis
.
Does McCain Still Agree with Reagan that Government is the Problem?
By Arianna Huffington
Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, famously declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Twenty-seven years later, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and seven-plus years into the reign of Bush and Cheney, Reagan's anti-government battle cry should be on trial. But, stunningly, it is not.
This needs to change. The presidential candidates' view of the role of government should be one of the central questions of the last 36 days of the campaign. And it should definitely be a question they are asked at their next debate:
"Sen. McCain, given the part deregulation played in the current economic crisis and your support of a massive government bailout of the financial industry, are you now ready to break with Ronald Reagan's assessment?"
And, to be even handed: "Sen. Obama, in 1996, Bill Clinton cheerfully announced that 'the era of big government is over.' As the Dow plummets and Wall Street and Main Street turn to Washington for big government bailouts, are you now ready to break with President Clinton's assessment?"
The shift in my own thinking on the role of government was what led to my disillusionment with the Republican Party, and the transformation in my political views. I've always been progressive on social issues: pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay rights -- even when I was a Republican. The big difference is that I once believed the private sector would address America's social problems. But the hope that people would roll up their sleeves and solve this country's social ills without the help of government was never fully realized. There were never enough volunteers or donations -- and the problems were just too massive and intractable to tackle without the raw power of appropriations that only government can provide.
Our economy is not the only thing that is crumbling. So is the philosophical foundation of the modern Republican Party -- also known as the Leave Us Alone Coalition, led by its spiritual guru, Grover Norquist. His dream of making government so small "we can drown it in a bathtub" has been embraced by the GOP mainstream.
Indeed, during his 2003 inauguration, Jeb Bush stood in front of Florida's capitol building and said: "there would be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill."
I sadly suspect that Jeb and Grover and their Republican compatriots have not yet updated their views of government -- they have not yet made the connection between demonizing government and looking to it to save the day.
The financial meltdown has put the Grand Old Party's schizophrenia on full display. But why are so many in the media, the Democratic Party, and the Obama campaign averting their eyes from the spectacle of a party that wants to drown government until they need it to bail out Wall Street or AIG -- that wants to vanquish government workers, unless they are listening in on our phone conversations or working hard rolling back government regulations?
It's like the story, probably apocryphal, of the agitated -- and obviously confused -- senior citizen imploring a GOP politician not to "let the government get its hands on Medicare."
With the madness of this contradictory mindset exposed, voters will have a chance to decide if they agree with Norquist and Jeb and W and Cheney and the Republican Messiah himself, Ronald Reagan and, yes, with John McCain. And even Cindy McCain who, in her otherwise bland convention speech, called for "the Federal government" to "get itself under control and out of our way."
A staggering 83 percent of Americans believe that we are heading in the wrong direction. And, I'm sorry, Sen. McCain, I don't think it's because of too many earmarks or because $3 million was spent in 2003 to study bear DNA in Montana.
Size matters in some things, but when it comes to government, it's not the size of the government, it's the way it is utilized.
"Big government" didn't get us into Iraq. It didn't spy on Americans or open black op rendition facilities all over the world. "Big government" didn't create Guantanamo or okay the use of torture. "Big government" didn't leave the residents of New Orleans to suffer in the wake of Katrina. "Big government" didn't cause the financial industry to run off the rails. Indeed, the free market is what created all the new, risky ways for banks to game the system and, eventually, implode -- then come calling on "big government" to ride to the rescue.
So let's hear what McCain and Obama think the fundamental role of government should be. I can think of no better way to underline the massive gulf between the two candidates -- and the two parties they represent -- at the very moment when McCain is so desperately trying to blur the differences (see his recent shopping spree at the second-hand populism store: "Big discounts on 'fat cats' and 'Wall Street greed'!")
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig says that if Americans recognize that the financial crisis -- and the need for a government bailout -- is due to "policies McCain still promotes... this could well be the event that effected a generational shift in governmental attitudes. Think Hoover vs. (the eventual) FDR."
But if we want to make sure that Americans make that connection, we need to put the question of the role of government front and center in the campaign. Economic policy and foreign policy and domestic policy are all important areas of debate. But before we continue looking at the (falling) trees, let's take a step back and consider the forest.
Abonneren op:
Posts (Atom)
