More Light!

We’ve now gone through the period of the shortest day, here in the northern hemisphere. From now on, we will have more light.
We Quakers frequently use the term “Light” to refer to the divine, or to the sense of general spiritual enlightment on which we wait, expectantly, whenever we worship together.
Please G-d, let the there be a lot more of it in the world.
Ethiopia sending its army and air force against Somalia? Where are the powers in the world that will stop this madness?
George Bush planning to increase the size of the US occupation force in Iraq? Where is the powerful citizens’ movement here in the US to say “No way! Get them out now!”
Yes, we all need more Light.
… As we stood at our street-corner peace demonstration here in Charlottesville on Thursday, I had a sense for the first winter solstice-time since we’ve been maintaining this peace presence every week that now, finally, the tide in our country has begun to turn deeply in our direction.
(Though we still have a long, long way to go, in order to (1) Get all of our troops out of Iraq, and (2) find a new, more egalitarian balance in our country’s relations with the rest of the world.)
Personally, though, I’m feeling a sense of being deeply blessed. My three kids, aged 21 through 28, are all back with us for Christmas, along with two of their three significant others. We have a warm home full of fun and laughter. We have plenty– far too much!– to eat. It was pretty easy for all the kids to get back here.
Over this past year I’ve visited with families and communities in northern Uganda and Palestine who most certainly don’t have these blessings. In both places, the perpetuation of a decades-long state of war, and the associated restrictions and movement controls imposed by governmental authorities, have reduced entire communities to deep poverty. In both places a large proportion of the people don’t have the basic physical things required for human flourishing. In both places, too, the imposition of draconian movement controls separates cultivators from their lands and people from their birthplaces; these movement controls also impose huge social wounds by splitting families and wrecking livelihoods.
So yes, let there be a lot more Light in the weeks and months ahead. For the peoples of northern Uganda, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, Somalis, and Ethiopians– and all the others of our brothers and sisters bent low under the burden of bitter conflict… And for US Americans and the other peoples who both suffer from conflict and also bear a disproportionate responsibility for its perpetuation and sometimes its extreme exacerbation. (Being violent is also a sickness of the soul.)
Perhaps if the United States can now start to creep back down off its self-erected pedestal of global unilateralism and toengage more respectfully and more thoughtfully with the other nations of the world that action itself might have a much broader demonstration effect, or ripple effect, as well?
After all, if pursuit of a policy of militarism, unilateralism, and arrogance has not succeeded for the world’s most heavily armed power, then surely everyone, everywhere can see the extreme limits on the usefulness of such a policy?
Oh wait. Most of the world’s other peoples and governments understood that a long time ago. Now, we US Americans just need to catch up…

152 thoughts on “More Light!”

  1. Helena,
    Where is the powerful citizens’ movement here in the US to say “No way! Get them out now!”
    We hear their noises but not their loud voice that’s why…

  2. Dawoud has been selling trees at the same corner in the Karrada district every Christmas season for 10 years. At 77, he is not ready to abandon his spot.
    Dawoud is a Muslim, but he has lived among Christians in the mixed Karrada district for years. “We are brothers,” he said, expressing a tolerance that is increasingly rare in Baghdad.

  3. A few hopeful lights at the micro level in this season. I am sure what I and most Americans see as light and hope is not exactly what the Umma apologists on this board like.
    1) Iranian revolutionary guards caught red handed at SCIRI Al Hakim’s headquarters.
    2) Britons raze a police station from where torture and death squads were ran. Iraqi politicians complain. Britons acted to save 127 prisoners about to be executed.
    3) The UN security council, including highly ambivalent parties like Russia and China, finally impose sanctions on Iran. Now they are the oficial pariahs they should always have been.
    4) Ethiopia gets in the acts against the Islamic/Al Qaeda Somalis. Three cheers for my Ethiopian friends.
    5) Ceasefires between Hamas and Fatah last hours on the average. Judging by the factional carnage in Iraq, and the history of PLO ceasefires with King Hussein, we are in for years of infighting.
    6) President Bush realizes, in spite of Saudi lobbyist Baker’s stance, that there is to much at stake to retreat. And we the people know that from our daily experience, that is we except some weak knees and of course the Umma among us.

  4. Just over two weeks ago President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa flew to Washington for a short meeting with GW Bush. The brief statements that the two made at the “photo-opportunity” following the meeting were published by the White House transcription service. I have not observed any other statement from any South African politician or public official lately concerning Somalia. Nor were any Somalis or Ethipians or UN officials present at the meeting. The relevant part of the transcript (otherwise notable for Bush’s inability on that occasion to distinguish “Darfur” from “Doha”) is as follows:
    (Mbeki…)”The President also mentioned, I discussed with the President the impact of the situation in Darfur on the neighboring countries, particularly Chad and the Central African Republic. But also the difficult situation in Somalia—
    “PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, sir.
    “PRESIDENT MBEKI: — and the President, together, we are very keen that, indeed, something must move there. This was a failed state. It’s necessary to support the transitional government, to restoring a government and to reunify the country, and so on. It’s an important thing because the problem, one of the big problems is that as it is, it provides a base for terrorists, find safe haven there and then can spread out to the rest of the continent. It’s something that is of shared concern.”
    Now aircraft are bombing in Somalia. Helena, what can be done to forestall the Dorises of this world (“three cheers”, et cetera) from running away with this thing? Can you shed any light on where this new war is coming from, that we in South Africa could find ourselves embroiled in, or partly responsible for, thanks to the reckless personal intervention of Mr Mbeki?
    I found the White House transcript at:
    http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061208/dcf039.html?.v=56

  6. Gosh! All this triumphant excitement about finding some Iranians visiting Iraqi government officials! And all this time I thought that legitimate democratically elected governments of independent sovereign states were allowed to invite anyone they wanted into their country. Bush HAS insisted, has he not, that Iraq is a sovereign country with a legitimate, democratically elected government?
    Oh no! Don’t tell me Bush was lying again!

  7. All
    Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
    I commend the Lady Faiza’s Christmas message to the world.
    http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/
    What a remarkable family, and what a remarkable story. What I really love is her discovery of the West from the library. Her description of reading and constructive criticism of TE Lawrence, Charlie Marx, Gertrude Bell is what really impresses me.
    For those who look to military solutions in Baghdad the British used a Battle Group of 1000 men to capture a police station in Basra as Doris commends. Try calculating how many men you need to clear Baghdad.
    So to all umma, ulemma, rich, poor, and whether they agree with Helena or not, a bit of peace and light might be good thing to wish for in 2007 CE.

  8. Oh dear me! It looks as if those Iranians were actually invited by Jalal Talibani, the democratically elected Kurdish President of Iraq. Now, either the democratically elected President of Iraq has the right to invite whomever he pleases or else Iraq is not independent and sovereign, right? So, which is it, Doris? Is Iraq independent and sovereign, giving the democratically elected President the right to invite whomever he pleases into the country, or is Iraq NOT independent and sovereign, in which case the Americans have a right to arrest the guests of the democratically elected President, if they happen not to approve of those guests?

  9. After 4 years NOW US find some Iranians in Iraq!! What a jock….
    What is Abdul Aziz al-Hakim origin is it a Tabtabaee? Iranian
    What is The Bader Militia? Iranians
    What is Asistani? Iranians
    ……………….More …………..and more…
    Enough guys of this rubbish from US and all those Puppets and Iranians they are “ALL IN ONE” and Iraqi dieing every day and OIL looting continue specially from SOUTH OIL FIELD

  11. Oh by the way, Dick & W have now officially killed more Americans than the 9/11 terrorists…
    Right. And I guess that by that logic Henry Wallace and FDR killed more Americans than the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

  12. JES: Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
    Where and when did Iraq attack the US?
    Bush and bin Laden have this in common: they killed thousands of Americans for no justifiable reason whatsoever.

  14. John C., Doris is not only pro-war, she is VERY well-informed. After all, she used esoteric terms like “Umman apologists”. And THEN she used the very, VERY esoteric term “Umma among us” – why, THAT term is so esoteric she is the only one on earth who has a clue what it means!
    Gosh! With expertise like that who needs Tom Friedman?!

  15. Where and when did Iraq attack the US?
    Iraq was a threat to Israel, so US “GWB” justified the war as defending the “Only Democracy in ME” and our friend in ME ISREAIL!!

  16. Iraq was NOT a threat to Israel, and I don’t think any of the lying war mongers believed it was. The invasion of Iraq was about much bigger things than just Israel.

  17. I agree Shirin, that’s what they telling their nations and their media propaganda for normal people who some “if not most of them” they don’t know what’s Iraq and where Iraq on the map, sadly these lies easy to believed.

  18. “Right. And I guess that by that logic Henry Wallace and FDR killed more Americans than the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.”
    Let’s see JES, weren’t you telling us how Hassan Nasrallah was responsible for a lot of dead Lebanese? And by the way, I don’t completely disagree with that.

  20. s this some of the peace and light we were hoping for?
    Israel to Build New Settlement in Occupied West Bank
    This is on going for years, what International community did for them?
    How many UN resolutions ignored by Israeli?
    Did any western nation stand in face of Israelis actions all those years?
    Did and Western nation suggested sanctions on Israeli as a punishments for her actions?
    Peace and Light comes when we all believe in one law and in one standard sadly that’s not the case in ME all the time…

  21. Israel to Build New Settlement in Occupied West Bank
    Can they learn some thing from this?

    We have been living in this struggle for more than 100 years. We, the citizens of this conflict, have been born into war and raised in it, and in a certain sense indoctrinated by it. Maybe this is why we sometimes think that this madness in which we live for over 100 years is the only real thing, the only life for us, and that we do not have the option or even the right to aspire for a different life.

    David Grossman’s speech at the Rabin memorial

  23. JES, Can you tell us on this map where the new Settlement will be Please?
    Looks you are against any withdraw from the occupied land after 67? So are you considering yourself peace seeker then?
    Hope you come back with answers!

  24. outside of the West Bank separation fence,…the Jordan Valley is a question mark,

    actions deemed illegal by virtually all other states. The Oslo Accords (1993) and the Road Map (2003) have failed to reach a land agreement between the parties or to bring Israeli withdrawal.

    Since 2002, the Israeli government has been building a “security fence” that winds deep into Palestinian territory, claiming the barrier would keep Palestinian suicide bombers from striking Israeli citizens. But this separation wall is a major de facto annexation of Palestinian territories, as is Israel’s continued settlement-building. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s West Bank barrier violates international law, but the unequal struggle over the land of Palestine continues.

  25. I think that with all due respects to fairness and accuracy, we should at least credit the Japanese with waiting until dawn before attacking our military bases and fleet at Pearl Harbor; this in contrast to Sheriff Dick and Deputy Dubya unleashing “shock and awe” on undefended, civilian Baghdad by appropriately-named “stealth” bombers operating like neocon ninjas in the dead of night. Talk about “unprovoked and dastardly attacks!”
    I predict that in the not-too-far-distant future, humiliated and disgraced America will have high school history textbooks much like those the Japanese have invented: perfect specimens of voluntary amnesia whitewashing unpleasant aspects of the nation’s history too painful to contemplate. Thus, in regards to America’s unlawful, immoral, and totally unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq, future hagiographers will note that “America during the period in question somehow became unpopular. Then some very bad things happened. But the future looks so much more promising now.” Something like that.

  27. Jes,
    I looked at several maps, including the one from FMEP posted by Salah, and Maskiot seems to be approximately 10 kilometers south of “the barrier” (It is further south than Al’Aqaba and Al-Farisiyah, both well beyond the green line). Also this line from your Ha’aretz link:
    “In May, GOC Central Command Yair Naveh, who is the overall West Bank commander, approved the expansion of the territory of four settlements, Beitar Illit, Givat Zeev, Ornit, and Maskiot. Maskiot is the only one of the four located outside of the separation fence.”
    would mean that it is considered part of the occupied WB. Hence, this would be yet another breach of Oslo – unless we take the Jordan Valley as annexed and done with, as many would like to!

  28. Michael Murry,
    Do you really think today’s history textbooks, even in colleges, are any better? How many honest references have you seen to the native American genocide, the colonial war with Mexico, the massacre of the “savages” in the Phillipines, the real story of the USS Maine and the Cuban colonial adventure, the massacres of union workers in the age of the robber barons, …. may I stop?

  29. David and Salah,
    I don’t really know where the proposed site of Maskiot is. According to the report in Haaretz, it is outside the security fence. However, the map posted by Salah clearly shows an existing “Maskiyot” within the fence. I would say that this leaves the question as unclear, and that either the NYT or Haaretz report must be in error.

  30. JES, given that the “fence” (I prefer the term barrier as more accurately descriptive of both the nature and intent of the structure) does not by any means follow the Green Line, but in many places cuts very deeply into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, being “outside the fence” does not necessarily mean being outside he occupied West Bank. Also, when did the Jordan Valley get inside the Green Line?
    And by the way, when did they start referring to housing developments in Israel proper as “settlements”, and when did the Yesha council start involving itself in housing developments inside Israel proper?

  31. John,
    If you don’t see the two as related, then why do you put them in the same context?
    Bernard,
    If you’ll recall, Hawaii was a territory, and I imagine that the Japanese felt perfectly correct in attacking what they saw as part of their rightful empire in the Pacific. Where and when did the Japanese attack the Continental United States (apart from a single artillery shell that may or may not have been fired from a Japanese submarine at Santa Barbara)? For that matter, where and when did Germany attack the US?
    The issue here is not who started the war or even whether or not it is a “just” war. Rather, it is the cheap shot of accusing the President and Vice President of the US having killed US soldiers and marines.

  32. Looks you are against any withdraw from the occupied land after 67? So are you considering yourself peace seeker then?
    BTW Salah, nowhere did I say that I support the establishment of another settlement within the Occupied Territories, nor did I say that I am against withdrawal from the territories. Your assumption is simply wrong and misplaced.

  33. Chaps
    Some peace and light at last in the dying days of 2006.
    Tim Garden used to command a nuclear bomber squadron. He inspires me with a lot of confidence that a lot of people in government do actually know what they are doing.
    Ignore the convenional courtesies in the opening paragraph. They stem from the days when people came to parliament armed. the UK lower chamber has two lines two swords length apart which separate different points of view.
    ===============================================LorLord Garden: My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, on giving us the opportunity to debate this Bill. I trust that, given the almost unanimous support for the Bill in this debate, it will go into Committee and be taken seriously. We have heard speeches from noble Lords with a wide range of experience. I single out the military experience of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, and the diplomatic experience of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, as providing an important dimension to the debate.
    I have taken a close interest for a number of years in the question of the appropriateness of weapons that depend on cluster munitions for their effect. As noble Lords have shown as they have thrown the various statistics around, we have, sadly, been gaining much more data about their effect, particularly in many of the conflicts over the past 15 years. As the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, said, Kosovo in 1999 was effectively an air campaign with the widespread use of cluster bombs. In Afghanistan in 2001, in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and in Lebanon in 2006, a large number of unexploded submunitions have caused injury and death to civilians long after the battle has finished.
    I take very seriously the words of the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. He is, after all, among your Lordships today the person with the most recent experience of the battlefield. He said, rightly, that there is no such thing as a nice weapon. By their nature, weapons are not nice. However, I assume that, just like other members of the British military, of which I was once a member, he accepts that there are certain classes of weapons that are appropriately prohibited from warfare, whatever their military utility. The right reverend Prelates the Bishops of Salisbury and of Coventry reminded us of that moral dimension and the need to align what is legal with what is right. We have accepted that in the international community. As the noble Lord, Lord Archer of Sandwell, said, we have done that for 140 years, since the St Petersburg international military convention of 1868 laid down that,
    • “the necessities of war ought to yield to the requirements of humanity”.
    Since then, we have banned many types of weapons, despite the fact that they are probably very useful to have. We do not use them because their effects are both inhumane and disproportionate. Thus, there are bans on biological and chemical weapons, which we all accept. Perhaps we forget the much older ban on exploding bullets in 1868, the ban on expanding dum-dum bullets just before the turn of the century, the prohibition on weapons that contain shrapnel that is undetectable by X-rays, the prohibition of laser blinding weapons and, in 1997, the prohibition of anti-personnel landmines. The question for me, therefore, is whether cluster munitions, or a subset of them, fall into a similar category of weapon that merits banning. If they do, then the military utility argument no longer holds, although I will address that issue.
    We also need to keep in mind that we are making the argument to ban cluster bombs for two different reasons, which we need to put together. There is the question of the direct effect of the weapon: is it disproportionate in the way that it acts and does it cause too much collateral damage? There are also the longer-term consequences of the weapon, which is a separate problem. One can combine those issues in considering whether these are inappropriate weapons.
    The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, reminded us that many of the weapons that we are talking about were conceived in the days of the Cold War, when he and I used to look at weapons in a different way from perhaps how they are looked at in the post-Cold War era. Then, we were thinking of an anti-armour weapon, such as the BL755 against mile after mile of Red Army tanks that may have progressed forward. That weapon was, effectively, a 1,000 pound bomb with 147 fragmentation armour-piercing bomblets. Once deployed, the bomblets would disperse and, because the bomb would be going forward, the bomblets would go forwards and land in an elliptical pattern. The size and the shape of that pattern were difficult to predict, because they depended on the speed and the angle of the aircraft dropping the canister, the height at which the canister opened and the effects of wind. There were lots of uncertainties. The higher you were when you launched the weapon, the bigger the pattern. It is normally at least several hundred metres long, however—a big area in which 147 fragmentation armour-piercing bomblets are randomly dispersed. Whatever else they may be, cluster bombs are area weapons.
    We have heard from many noble Lords that not all the bomblets will detonate on landing. That is understandable: sometimes they are too low to arm before they hit the ground; some of the parachutes get caught in trees; some strike the soft ground, as we have heard; and some just fail because, on occasion, military equipment does just fail.
    From a military perspective, there is also the problem that, because you have lots of little bombs in a big canister like an ordinary bomb, none of them can be that powerful. They are smaller than if you were dropping a 1,000 pound bomb. You have a random spread, which means that you must have your targets close together to have much hope of achieving a good military effect. Most of the bomblets tend to miss the target, which is another reason why they are scattered around. There is also the problem of the unexploded ones. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, cited the Kosovo assessment of the 530 UK cluster bombs dropped producing 78,000 little bomblets. These assessments are generally made with the most optimistic of assumptions. The weapons might have disabled up to 30 pieces of military equipment—not tanks or armour, but what are called “pieces of military equipment”. That is a pretty low rate of return for a military weapon.
    These weapons are much more use against soft-skinned vehicles or troop concentrations—that is one argument that is made. We have also heard from many noble Lords that they should not be used in urban areas, yet most of the operations in which we now find ourselves have an urban dimension. As the world becomes more urbanised, that problem gets worse. Because this is an area weapon, if it is used in urban areas, where there are lots of civilians, it is bound to cause disproportionate direct civilian casualties. If you were to make a case merely on the direct effect, you would have to be absolutely confident that you were able to control targeting policies so that the weapons were used only against military targets and not places with possible concentrations of civilians. As we have seen, this is impossible to police.
    On direct effects, the military utility is not terribly high and there is the difficulty of controlling these weapons so as to not cause disproportionate damage to civilians. I have no problem with saying that one could make a case just on the basis of direct military effect that it is time for these weapons to go. As most noble Lords have said, however, the real problem is the consequential long-term effects of unexploded munitions, which potentially lie around for years. That case for a ban is much stronger.
    In the past, the Government have made the case—I think that they have now stopped—that although they are sowing what amount to anti-personnel mines, that was not the intention when the bomb was dropped and is therefore different from setting deliberate anti-personnel mines. That case cannot be sustained. We know that there will be a percentage of unexploded munitions and we must accept responsibility for them. We know that the victims are likely to be civilians and we know that children are particularly vulnerable, as many noble Lords have said. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, reminded us, however, one of the big problems is not just for the civilians, but for our own troops. As they go through what are effectively unplotted minefields or are de-mining—it is difficult to clear these sorts of submunitions—they get damaged. We lose our own troops as well as civilians and children.
    Unexploded ordnance is not a new problem. We must remember that there are failure rates, whatever weapon we are talking about. We still find live bombs left over from World War II, but we are now talking about a different scale of problem. The odd bomb that did not explode was one bomb for every bomb dropped; in this case, we are talking about hundreds of bomblets for every bomb dropped.
    The question is whether we should treat weapons with submunitions differently. It is a question of scale and risk. Noble Lords have been throwing around a lot of statistics on the percentage rate of failure and unexploded ordnance. For what we now call “dumb” cluster munitions, Governments and manufacturers tend to claim a failure rate of 5 per cent. The sales brochure figure appears over-optimistic compared to the data in reality. That is understandable; the sales brochure figures are compiled under carefully controlled test circumstances. When you are dropping a bomb or firing artillery in real operational circumstances, you tend to get a higher failure rate.
    Lord Elton: My Lords, could the noble Lord help us on a technical point? I understood that the 5 per cent figure related to the Lebanon, where the munitions used were M85s. I understood that that was intended to be a smart weapon. Am I wrong about that?
    Lord Garden: My Lords, I shall come to the smart weapon in a moment. The general rate quoted by manufacturers for the dumb weapons is 5 per cent; for smart weapons, some manufacturers claim a rate of 1 per cent. Data from the first Gulf War, where the 5 per cent figure was claimed by manufacturers, have given us an actual figure of about 23 per cent. That is not an unusual difference between the two. As the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, reminded us, large numbers of bombs—in Laos, for example—have an extraordinary long-term effect, like minefields. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped 6 to 7 million cluster bombs. By the end of 1996, 10,000 people had become casualties to the bomblets left behind, of which nearly 2,500 were amputees. One-third of those casualties were children.
    After the Iraq intervention of 2003, the UN reported that 1,000 children were injured by unexploded ordnance—predominantly bomblets—in the three months after the original intervention. The Government position, which your Lordships have spoken about a lot, on whether we should phase out the so-called dumb munitions—those without target discrimination capability and without self-destruct, self-neutralisation or self-deactivation capability—is now at least that these weapons do not need to be kept for ever. The dates—2010 for BL755 and 2015 for the M26 MLRS—are, probably coincidentally, the dates at which these weapons were expected to go out of service anyway. That is not a respectable or responsible position to take.
    We have not talked at all today about the JP233, of which the Air Force was very proud back in the Cold War days. It was an anti-airfield weapon that not only put holes in runways, but sowed a minefield to prevent the holes from being repaired. It was taken out of service seven years before its due date, once the landmine treaty came in. We have an example of how the Government can withdraw a weapons system from service early because it realises that it is no longer appropriate. That is what we must do in this case.
    Whether non-dumb weapons—those with some self-destruct system, which obviously appeal greatly to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee—get us over that problem is easy to answer. The manufacturers’ aspirations—to bring the failure rate down to 1 per cent from 5 per cent—are to make it five times better. That sounds good. The 1,000 children injured in Iraq in three months in 2003 would only be 200 children maimed or killed by these new smart weapons. That does not seem to be an appealing prospect.
    I am not convinced by the arguments in favour of some division. We all know that that would create a fuzzy definition, which would allow cluster munitions to continue and proliferate. That feeling is much reinforced by the recent experience in Lebanon, which my noble friend Lady Northover and other noble Lords talked about.
    In July 2003, after the report on the children injured in Iraq, the then General Sir David Ramsbotham and I, who were not yet Members of your Lordships’ House, wrote a joint letter to the Times. We wrote:
    • “The use of weapons, which by their nature kill and maim civilians long after a conflict is over, have no place in a civilised country’s arsenal. We should now prohibit cluster munitions, whether dropped from the air or fired from the ground. The UK could set an example to the world by removing them from our inventory, just as we have done for landmines”.
    Subsequent events, particularly in Lebanon, have reinforced me in that view. I strongly endorse the attempts of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, to get this Bill through. He will have the support of these Benches.

  35. JES,
    Oh yah JES, I did not said “you said” that’s what your link/post telling which try to defend this act.
    I asked our friend here if I am wrong in reading your post/link.

  36. Salah,
    I suggest you try reading carefully what I wrote rather than trying to read things into what I wrote. I in no way tried to, nor am interested in defending “this act”, as you call it. You asked me a question, and I answered it. So, to answer you again: yes, you were absolutely wrong in your “reading” of my brief post and the link.

  38. Letter dated 9 September 1987 from the Permanent Representative of Jordan
    to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General

    I am transmitting to you the most recent information on Israeli settlement activity in the occupied Arab territories during the month of July 1987. This activity includes the confiscation of Arab land and acts of aggression against Arab citizens and their property, with a view to the implementation of Israeli settlement schemes aimed at expelling the Arab inhabitants from their land and taking it over, in contravention of the principles of international law relating to military occupation and, in particular, the Hague Convention of 1907 and the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. The continuation of such a policy constitutes a danger for international peace and security and for peace efforts and prospects in the region.

    I should be grateful if you would have this letter and its annex circulated as an official document of the General Assembly, under item 76 of the provisional agenda, entitled “Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the population of the occupied Territories”, and of the Security Council.

    (Signed) Abdullah SALAH
    Ambassador
    Permanent Representative

    I. Confiscation of land and establishment of settlements
    4. Maskiot, in the northern Jordan Valley, established by the United Kibbutz Movement.

  40. “The issue here is not who started the war or even whether or not it is a “just” war. Rather, it is the cheap shot of accusing the President and Vice President of the US having killed US soldiers and marines.”
    JES, I totally disagree with this statement. The issue absolutely IS who started the war, and whether it is a just war. Since I conclude that Bush and Cheney started the war, and it is not a just war, I hold them responsible for the deaths of our soldiers. I don’t know what you meant by your other comment.

  41. I understand John. The question is, what is the relationship between the number of deaths of American service people and the number of deaths on 9/11?
    Now, you might have compared the former with, say, the number of Iraqi military personnel killed as a result of Saddam Hussein’s adventures in Iran and Kuwait. Or, you might have compared it with the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of Ba’ath rule in Iraq during some four decades. But you didn’t, and it is obvious from your original statement that you see some connection between the decision to go to war in Iraq and the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
    As far as the cheap shot goes, such a comparison – especially when it comes from someone who otherwise claims that there is no connection between 9/11 and Iraq – is exactly that. (Just as was all the fanfare when the number of US military deaths reached 2,000 last year.) Let’s not forget that the vast majority of those US military people were killed by hostile forces – many of them apparently non-Iraqis who were affiliated with al-Qaeda. With all due respect, to then assert that Bush and Cheney killed them is akin to a member of the German American Bund accusing FDR and Henry Wallace of killing tens thousands of American soldiers, because, after all the war was “unjust” as Germany never attacked the United States, and if the president had only not sent those troops over to Europe and put them in harms way in the first place, they would still be alive.

  42. JES writes:
    >> Germany never attacked the United States
    Germany declared war on the US four days after Pearl Harbor.
    If blaming Bush/Cheney for the deaths of 3,000 Americans bothers you, then let me help you. Bush/Cheney caused the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis! Feel better?

  43. 2) Britons raze a police station from where torture and death squads were ran. Iraqi politicians complain. Britons acted to save 127 prisoners about to be executed. – Doris
    You see that as a hopeful light???? The Brits were the ones who trained all those police, and less than four years later, we got what????
    One of the released prisoners claimed he was arrested as part of a tribal feud. He also said that one of his cousins was working with the British police when he was rescued. I am very glad they were rescued from their torture and death squads, however, it looks like the Shi’a on Shi’a tribal feud may have A LOT TO DO with who is helping out the occupation army.

  44. Let’s not forget that the vast majority of those US military people were killed by hostile forces – many of them apparently non-Iraqis who were affiliated with al-Qaeda.- JES
    Not true. Most of the hostile forces to the US/UK presence in Iraq are Iraqis. Very small numbers of al Qaeda.

  45. “The question is, what is the relationship between the number of deaths of American service people and the number of deaths on 9/11?
    “…such a comparison – especially when it comes from someone who otherwise claims that there is no connection between 9/11 and Iraq – is exactly [a cheap shot].    ”
    Of course there is a connection between 9/11 and Iraq, as anyone who is aware of reality knows very well. The connection is, of course, is that 9/11 was used as a false pretext for attacking Iraq – the neocons’ “second Pearl Harbor”, if you will. Many of us knew what the connection was when, within hours of the attacks on the WTC, members of the Bush administration were trying – absurdly – to publicly implicate Saddam. Information that has come out since then has confirmed that some members of the administration, including some at the very top, pushed for an attack on Iraq instead of Afghanistan. And of course, even after attacking Afghanistan, the Bush administration continued to try to associate Iraq with 9/11 in the minds of the public by implication.
    So yes, there IS a connection between Iraq and 9/11 even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the commission of that atrocity, and had only unfriendly relations with Al Qa`eda and bin Laden.

  46. Time and time again, Bush said that the invasion and occupation of Iraq are part of the ‘war on terror’.
    It makes no logical sense at all to have 200 times or 300 times the number of people killed in the ‘war on terror’ (who had nothing to do with the original terrorist action) than were killed in the original incident that started the ‘war on terror’.
    never mind the IMMENSE EVIL of such behavior!!

  47. Q: “what is the relationship between the number of deaths of American service people and the number of deaths on 9/11?”
    A: former > latter

  48. Bush/Cheney caused the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis!
    Another spurious piece of propaganda. I think that the authors of “Iraq Bodycount” had the best critique of this blatant Lancet-Johns Hopkins fabrication.

  49. Q: What is the relationship between the number of deaths American service people and the number of terror-related deaths in the US since September 11, 2001?
    A: former > latter

  50. Yes Bernard, I am quite aware that Germany declared war against the US, but then I’m sure that FDR could have tried to talk to them first!
    Not true. Most of the hostile forces to the US/UK presence in Iraq are Iraqis. Very small numbers of al Qaeda.
    And this assertion, Susan, is based exactly on what evidence?
    Many of us knew what the connection was when, within hours of the attacks on the WTC, members of the Bush administration were trying – absurdly – to publicly implicate Saddam.
    Exactly who were these “members of the Bush administration”, Shirin? (No fair citing TV docudramas as evidence!) As I recall, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were pretty much fingered within hours of the attacks, and the Prague meeting between Muhammed Atta and a member of Iraqi secret services came out only months later. Apart from that charge ( which BTW has not been convincingly refuted, in my opinion), I don’t recall anyone trying to pin 9/11 on Saddam Hussein.

  51. While we are on the topic of light and darkness here, isn’t it just wonderful how they all fall over each other when it comes to some good old fashioned patriotic fervor! (Tribalism at its best.) Everyone is getting carried away praising “the accidental president” Ford. The NYT and WaPo in their obituaries have carefully sanitized all the not so good memories. No one likes to talk about his role, along with his inherited secretary of state HK, in Suharto’s brutal invasion of East Timor that lead to the genocidal massacre of 200,000 of the 700,000 population. The night before the invasion he was in Jakarta, and toasted Suharto as a champion of democracy and “the destined sovereignty of the people”! As he was leaving on the morning of the invasion, as the US-trained paratroopers and US tanks were being dropped into Timorese villages, he was receiving regular CIA briefings on the progress of the invasion. In his recently declassified memo to Suharto, he says “[w]e will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem and the intentions you have.” His and Kissinger’s only concern was that they clean up after themselves quickly, so there would not be too many mass graves with M-16 bullet-riddled bodies to be found by the time foreign observers get there (“It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly [because] the use of US-made arms could create problems.”)
    And then there were those pesky coups in Latin America that he staged with the help of the man he appointed to run the CIA, one George H. W. Bush (“roll back the red threat in our own continent”). His term set the pace for the murderous activities of the School of the Americas starting with the brutal coup in Argentina (the infamous “National Reorganization Process”, which left more than 45,000 dead, and was the flagship of CIA’s notorious Latin American “Dirty Wars” in the years to come). This was followed by the CIA’s role in several other Juntas taking power during the next few years. And his role in the consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship. And his role, along with Bushes, in the assassination attempts on South American dissidents abroad.
    And domestically, he was the architect of the reversal of the push against the “imperial presidency” that had plagued the system in the last years of the Nixon White House (starting with the pardon itself). And let’s not forget that his administration was the hatching incubator of such darlings as Cheney, Rummy, and Wolfie. And we all know what monsters they turned out to be. Peace be with his soul now, but he was no innocent angel as he is being made to be.

  52. First, when I wrote of future American history textbooks “turning Japanese,” so to speak, I did not mean to foreclose the possibility that in many respects — say the American War on Vietnam, for example — they already had. The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome,” especially, might seem to fall into this category of wilful amnesia, but I think the many fine historical works available on the subject (Frances Fitzgerald’s “Fire in the Lake” and Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly,” etc.) somewhat compensate for the usual nationalistic tendency to obliterate unpleasant truths about America’s fascist tendencies: past, present, and future.
    Anyway, I’ve always found the use of the word “syndrome,” particularly annoying in that my generation’s hard-won lesson of Vietnam — “Don’t do it again!” — became associated in the public mind with “dirty f*cking hippies” and “a symptom of a disease,” so that a nation which considered wisdom a sickness spread by long-haired, bearded folk singers (not to mention Vietnam Veterans like myself) went ahead and enthusiasticaly did “it” all over again in Iraq just to prove itself “clean” and “healthy.”

  53. SIGH!
    JES, you and George Bush and all the other innumerates-with-an-agenda can label the “Lancet-Johns Hopkins” study any way you like, but that will not change the facts. That study used THE standard, universally recognized and accepted methodology for estimating “excess deaths” in a situation of armed conflict. The only reason it is being labeled a “fabrication” by people like you is that you do not like the results. Those who understand the methodology and know its history of accuracy, and who do not have a stake in minimizing the deadly impact of the Bush Iraq adventure do not find it out of line. The study passed peer review, meaning that people who know what they are looking at found it sound.
    The methodology used in the Johns Hopkins/Mustansariya University study is the exact same methodology that has been used in to estimate excess mortality in other conflicts, and not only has it been proven valid in past conflicts where death rates could be determined post-conflict, it has in the past been accepted without question by the very same people who are now declaring it “fundamentally flawed” and worse. In fact, the U.S. government is teaching representatives from other countries organizations how to use this very methodology.
    As for Iraq Bodycount, as I understand it, they are concerned civilians, not public health professionals or professional statisticians with experience in studying mortality in armed conflicts, so are hardly qualified to criticize the work of professional scientists in the field. It looks to me as if they are engaging in a turf war more than anything else. The passive method they use has been demonstrated again and again to result in a serious undercount of mortality. I could go into the various reasons why this is so, but somehow I think I would be wasting my time even more than I ahve already. By the way, extrapolating their figures based on past experience with passive methods of counting mortality, one comes – not surprisingly – to numbers very close to those produced by the Johns-Hopkins/Mustansariya study.

  54. David,
    It’s not patriotism or tribalism. It’s called common curtesy and respect for the dead. They’ll be plenty of time to criticize Gerald Ford after he’s buried. (But at least now I know what attracts you to Matthew Stevens and that inane piece of his that says absolutely nothing about the ISG report.)
    Well, now that I think about which ex-president is most likely on-deck after Gerry Ford, perhaps I speak too soon….

  55. all the other innumerates-with-an-agenda
    Sigh! Shirin my dear, unlike the people at the Iraq Body Count you have absolutely NO formal statistical or epidemiological training yourself (or indeed any experience as far as I can tell with inferential statistics) & your “innumerate” ad hominem reduces to a shaky paraphrase of “Mr. Numerate” himself Tim Lambert (a narcissistic dilettante computer scientist with no more stats background than John Sloboda and an “agenda” the size of the Titanic.) Lambert’s been taken down a peg on his own page, many times. I doubt you’re up to the task of defending his position here on scientific grounds. The most interesting defensible finding of both the Lancet and the IBC is that most of the violent deaths in Iraq have NOT been caused by the US military. As you know, the Geneva convention doesn’t hold the occupying power responsible for all civilian deaths, only those in territory where the power is capable of exercising its authority. I think we’d agree that in the case of the USA , this excludes much of Iraq.
    So I’m not sure how that’s an argument for any particular policy even if accepted as gospel truth. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support an argument for a US withdrawal (which I personally favor without qualification.)

  56. I don’t recall anyone trying to pin 9/11 on Saddam Hussein.
    Aaahhhaaaa
    Just to refresh JES MEMORY, and his cheap shots
    “Bush added: “Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He was a threat because he was a sworn enemy of the United States of America, just like al-Qaida. He was a threat because he had terrorist connections.”
    http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39025
    “Vice President Dick Cheney also said there were clearly ties between Hussein and the al-Qaida terrorists going back to the early 1990s, and he called the New York Times coverage of the story “outrageous.”
    He also noted the link provided by Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals used in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He fled to Iraq “and we found since when we got into Baghdad, documents showing that he was put on the payroll and given housing by Saddam Hussein after the ’93 attack; in other words, provided safe harbor and sanctuary. There’s clearly been a relationship,” said Cheney.
    http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1051121852966
    “The notion that there is no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida just simply is not true,” Cheney asserted.
    “On Jan. 27 of last year, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said terrorist detainees from Afghanistan had implicated Iraq in providing training and support to al-Qaida.
    http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29079
    “there IS some evidence of a link between Iraq and the 9/11 hijackers, enough to prove in a US district court that Saddam’s government trained the 9/11 hijackers at Salman Pak — just 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. As the second anniversary of that terrible day approaches, I’d like to know why anyone was against attacking one of the leaders responsible for thousands of American deaths.’”
    http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2003/5/9/72820
    “He reviewed the testimony of [former CIA Director James] Woolsey and terrorism expert Dr. Laurie Mylroie on alleged links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida, including whether lead hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a high-ranking member of Iraqi intelligence in Prague before Sept. 11, and whether Saddam Hussein ran a hijacking training camp in Salman Pak, just outside of Baghdad.
    “In particular, Mylroie testified about Iraq’s covert involvement in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and about the proximity of the dates of bin Laden’s attack on the U.S. embassies and Hussein’s ouster of weapons inspectors.”
    http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1051121852966
    “With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.” – meaning Saddam Hussein – “at same time. Not only UBL” – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.”
    http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtml

  57. Jes,
    It is tribalism at its best. Would you be as tormented by the lack of courtesy if the NYT was listing the horrors of someone you consider a terrorist on the day of his death? Don’t get all sentimental on me please. People who enter the public domain, especially at that level, forfeit their right to many rights that private citizens may have; one is such sentimental courtesies.
    If you would come to my house and break bread with me, there would be a bond between us that would require certain courtesies, despite the very fundamental disagreements that we may have. If Sharon came to my house, that would not be the case. Hundreds of thousands marched in Santiago to curse Pinochet on the day he died. It is easy for you to sit in your armchair and say they were not courteous. But they had their loved ones disappeared, tortured, raped … It is easy for us to act “civilized”. All the thousands in Timor, South America, and elsewhere who were affected by Ford and the Fords of the world do not forget their pain. And for every Ford, there are hundreds and thousands of them. How about respecting their dead with a mention of the terrible injustices that they endured? Isn’t this what “Never Again” is all about?

  58. Right Shirin. I suppose that you are correct about one thing. If the results had been more to my “liking”, I wouldn’t question the study, or the article, or the timing of its publication – kind of like your attitude to it.
    I’m glad that it’s THE standard. However, like all statistical studies, THE standard approach can be manipulated, particularly when people have a political axe to grind. And, of course, who am I to “understand the methodology”, as you say? But then, you haven’t told us who you are to understand it any better than I!
    Regarding “peer review”, are you absolutely certain that this study passed peer review? I know that the previous article passed peer review, because I read both the article and the discussion of the referees. I don’t find any indication of that in regard to this article, but I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me if so.
    As for “Iraq Bodycount”, I can see why you would find their response embarassing. (Have you read it, BTW? If not, you can look here: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php?PHPSESSID=e015a895d345156f9de6670b64a7dd52) At any rate, I’m not really certain who they are or what are their backgrounds, but their response, although not THE standard, does raise quite a few questions about the Lancet study. As, for example, the following from their summary:
    On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;
    Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;
    Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;
    Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;
    The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive “Shock and Awe” invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.
    These seem to be important questions to me, but then, I’m just a concerned civilian, not a public health professional or professional statistician (while I assume that you, Shirin, are all three?) Another question that I saw raised was that, if we are to take this study seriously, then we must believe that more Iraqi civilians have been killed since 2003 than were German civilians by all the allied bombing of Germany during all of World War II. I find that assumption a pretty hard one to swallow, having had a couple of uncles who served on B-17s and B-24s.
    But then, Shirin, who am I to confront you. SIGH!

  59. Of course, David, you’re absolutely correct, as I fully intend to make every effort possible to piss on Jimmy Carter’s grave when his time comes.
    Goodbye and God bless.

  60. Oh, I see Salah. There were absolutely no links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Ayman Az-Zawahiri never spent any time in Iraq, and there was absolutely no routine exchange of information.
    I’m really relieved that I have that clear.
    Now could you tell me the one about Goldie Locks and the Three Bears?

  61. JES: >> I think that the authors of “Iraq Bodycount” had the best critique.
    Then I rest my case. IBC offers no scientific critique. They simply point out that the consequences of the Lancet numbers are so outlandish they should make one wonder. So what? They’re plenty of “outlandish” things out there that are true.
    For example, 4 million Congolese dying! Pretty outlandish, no? Well, that figure was arrived at using the same methodology and I didn’t hear your friends complain about it. In fact, Congress passed a relief bill for the Congo based on that figure!
    PS I wonder if people who trash the Lancet study without offering scientific criticism realize how close they come to aping the behavior of Holocaust revisionists.

  62. SIGH, Bernard.
    Perhaps you can provide some scientific support of the study, apart from repeating that they used a scientific methodology?
    There was a lot of scientific evidence provided in response to the first study, particularly built-in skewing based on their use of Falluja and small sample and, more importantly, the excessively wide margin required to arrive at an acceptable level of confidence. As I pointed out above, I don’t see that the peer review – if there was any – was published by Lancet for the second study.
    Bringing up the Holocaust, eh? Next thing you know, you’ll accuse me of being an anti-semite!

  63. BTW, Bernard, who exactly are “my friends” who didn’t complain about the four million dying in the Congo? I’d be interested to know.

  64. Jes,
    Regarding your assertions about IBC vs. the Lancet study.
    1- Yes, all “primary research”articles in Lancet are peer reviewed. This is the standard (you can have fun with THE standard if you like ! 🙂 ) in all major medical journals. There are certain exceptions, such as letters, editorials, reviews, etc. This was not one of those.
    2- This happens to be my field. The IBC refutal has some correct points. Yet the bottom line is that they admit that their study may have undercounted and a better study that they defend the most is the ILCS. In a certain period, the ILCS measures would count 28,165 deaths, with the 95% CI up to 34,750. The Lancet estimate for the same period would be 38,400 [page 19-21]. That is about a 10% excess. Plausible. Even 20 or 30 % would be completely plausible. And this considering that the ILCS or IBC studies do not count by excess deaths due to disease, malnourishment, crime, etc. This can easily fill the gap. And lets say it doesn’t fill the gap: would the a 20-30% lower number please you? Lets’ say 450,000 dead Iraqis instead; is that okay with you? The problem with your attitude is that you neglect the revulsion and abhorence of that act, and fiddle with the numbers.
    3- Other than the formal peer review process prior to publication, many schools of epidemiology and public health across the world (including the US) have redone the study’s numbers, using their database and methods, and written approval letters. Do a quick NLM search over the past few months, and you will find quite a few. Then they may all have axes to grind.
    4- One thing that Shirin is right about is that there is a great deal of “turf” injury with the IBC people. They are good people who were doing this to condemn the war-mongers, and are now being hit by the wrong side and it hurts. I can see where they come from.
    5- Your uncles’ experiences on their bombers, although it would make for great stories to tell when frying marshmallows, is called anecdotal evidence. This does not enter the realm of science and research, though you may not like that. The Vietnam War left an approximate 3.5 million dead (some estimates up to 5.5, – 3.5 is one of the more conservative). And in a country with a much smaller population than WWII Germany. The two wars were very different. Many factors, including the US use of WMD (i.e. agent orange) with its long lasting and terrible effects. The Iraq war is also very different. Such comparisons make for odious conclusions.
    6- Some of your other minor remarks, like the discrepancy between the death certificates shown to the surveyors with no central record stem from your lack of experience with the field. The third world countries do not do perfect record keeping. Especially in conditions like today’s Iraq. I have seen quite a few people who were alive and well and had no recorded birth in the books. That is precisely why IBC’s methods are incomplete.

  65. Jes,
    Now regarding some of your other assertions:
    “Q: What is the relationship between the number of deaths American service people and the number of terror-related deaths in the US since September 11, 2001? A: former > latter”
    If you are just saying this because you enjoy saying the last word, well fine. But if you really believe that the Iraq war has made the US less prone to terrorism, you have more than one surprise coming. Several CIA and NIE reports during the past 2 years have stated the opposite.
    “Most of the hostile forces to the US/UK presence in Iraq are Iraqis. Very small numbers of al Qaeda. And this assertion, Susan, is based exactly on what evidence?”
    Again if you are saying this just because you enjoy it, it’s okay. Otherwise many of the recent books about Iraq, including “Fiasco”, “The One Percent Doctrine”, “The End of Iraq”, “The Looming Tower”, “Hubris”, “State of Denial”, “In the Belly of the Green Bird” … have very detailed accounts of conversations with senior commanders in Iraq, and the predominant consensus is that the majority of the insurgency are Iraqis, mostly Salafi-Sunni revivalists, or Baathists and neo-Baathists.
    “within hours of the attacks on the WTC, members of the Bush administration were trying – absurdly – to publicly implicate Saddam. Exactly who were these “members of the Bush administration”, Shirin?”
    Well you really did get carried away didn’t you. A few of the books listed above, especially Woodward’s and also Clarke’s “Against All Enemies” give detailed accounts of how with 48 hours after 9/11, Rummy, Cheney and Wolfie were drawing plans for Iraq, using false pretexts, and against the will of intelligence people like Clarke himself.

  66. Jes,
    Now regarding your very courteous remark about Carter: if you read my post about Ford, I did not saying anything rude or personal, simple a list of his “achievements”. I am not a huge fan of Carter actually; he has his own fair share of wrongs during his term in office, yet probably much less than his peers. But I know what your grudge with him is. And this coming from Mr. Courtesy himself?!
    May God bless you too, and us all.

  67. JES,
    1) As a matter of habit and preference, I do not watch docudramas if I can avoid it, and on the rare occasions I find myself sitting through one, I consider it far more drama than docu. I can honestly say that when it comes to 9/11, and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq I have successfully avoided watching even one minute of even a single docudrama. I take each of these events far to seriously to indulge in that kind of frivolous activity.
    2) The attempt to implicate Saddam Hussein in 9/11 began within hours. It may have been somewhat indirect, but it was clear as day what was going on. At the time September 11 happened I had a colleague who was an Iraqi Assyrian. She was, if anything, less a fan of Saddam than I was, though I don’t think she had lost anyone at the hands of his thugs as I had. We both came to work on that awful day, and that afternoon she came into my office, closed the door, and we said almost simultaneously “oh, my god, they are trying to implicate Saddam in this thing.” We understood that it meant that sooner or later they would use this ridiculous claim as an excuse to bomb the hell out of Iraq again.
    No doubt the baseless rantings of the lunatic Laurie Mylvoie were cited as evidence that Saddam was determined to destroy the WTC, but I don’t recall anymore the specifics of what we heard. In the ensuing days every Iraqi I knew of every possible religious, ethnic, and political persuasion had picked up the same message my colleague and I had, we all knew what utter rubbish it was, and we all knew what it meant – or at least we thought we knew – we did not realize at that time what the scope of it would be and what a catastrophe it would lead to.
    In addition some of the more hysterical and less thoughtful of our American colleagues also got the message, and were all for nuking Iraq right then. I also recall seeing these kinds of suggestions on the web. Other, more thoughtful Americans also heard the message and asked us whether it made sense. We told them it did not, and explained why.
    The point is that the name of Saddam Hussein came up almost immediately in the statements of various official and non-official sources, talking heads, and media reports, and it continued for weeks to come up in connection with 9/11, giving the impression that he was somehow involved. Since then we have seen very consistent documentary (not docudrama) and testimonial evidence from a variety of sources that shows that, for example, Rumsfeld began almost immediately to dream of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq.

  68. “unlike the people at the Iraq Body Count you have absolutely NO formal statistical or epidemiological training yourself”
    Wrong, as usual, Vadim. I do in fact have formal statistical training.

  69. 1- Fine David, I’ll accept that all primary research articles are peer reviewed, and that an exception wasn’t made in this case. Could you kindly provide a list of the referees in this specific case?
    2- Looks to me like you’re the one who’s fiddling with numbers here. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the ILCS report is more accurate, because “Iraq Bodycount” says so, and that because the ILCS report numbers are close to those of the Lancet study for a certain period in 2004, that the Lancet numbers must be correct. And could you kindly refrain from lecturing me on what you find deficient with my attitude!
    3- I’ll take your word for it. But could it be that either the database itself or the methodology, or both could be in error? (Here, again, the peer reviews could be of inerest. I recall that in the first study, one of the referees pointed out that they actually erred in their calculation of the lower end of their phenomenal range by a few thousand.)
    4- Sorry, I don’t buy the “turf wars” argument here, and I’m not certain what you mean that they’re “being hit by the wrong side”. The Lancet report wasn’t meant to attack Iraq Bodycount. I would imagine that the “Iraq Bodycount” people are probably a hell of a lot more pissed off by the fact that all sorts of lousy neocon, Zionist, Israel-firster lobbying right-wing, Likudnik, fascist, National Review readers are using their refutation to question the Lancet study findings.
    5- Thank you, David, I know what anecdotal evidence is. The fact that my uncles served on heavy bombers in WWII was not meant as evidence. It was purely anecdotal.
    The Vietnam War lasted for about 15 years, and I believe that there were single days in which more tonnage of ordnance was dropped on Vietnam than in both theaters in all of WWII. Neither of these is anywhere near the case in Iraq today.
    Calling Agent Orange a WMD is stretching it a bit, don’t you think? I mean, I agree that this was terrible stuff with horrible, long-lasting effects, but it is, and was used as a herbicide (not urbicide, please), and I have seen no evidence presented to the contrary.
    6- The other “minor remarks” weren’t mine; they were from “Iraq Bodycount”, but while you may have a case, I think that what they were saying is that it seems highly unlikely that the discrepanies are so huge, especially in a country with a comparatively high literacy rate and fairly well developed bureaucracy.

  71. I believe that the picture below tells us all we need to know about the lasting impact the presidency of Gerald R. Ford has had on the United States of America, the nation he so proudly led for a couple of years after pardoning the man who was at that time the biggest criminal ever to occupy the Oval Office:
    http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=975&Itemid=135
    as I fully intend to make every effort possible to piss on Jimmy Carter’s grave when his time comes.
    Wonder how many like to do so for those in picture and the criminal HK

  73. David, David, David,
    Why don’t you read what I write?
    Let’s not forget that the vast majority of those US military people were killed by hostile forces – many of them apparently non-Iraqis who were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
    I mean, just because I’m a Zionist doesn’t mean I’m stupid!
    And is the US less prone to terrorism? I don’t know, but there certainly hasn’t been another September 11. But that wasn’t the point I was trying to make anyway. I was trying to point out that I can use the same rediculous statement that John used to make exactly the opposite assertion.
    And, if you don’t want to read what I write, then at least do Shirin the honor of reading what she has to write:
    “within hours of the attacks on the WTC, members of the Bush administration were trying – absurdly – to publicly implicate Saddam….”
    “Rummy, Cheney and Wolfie” may have been drawing up plans, Davey, but these are called contingency plans, and they wouldn’t have been doing their jobs if they hadn’t accounted for all the contingencies at a time when the country had just been attacked. (I very much like your “against the will of the intelligence people”. They aren’t there to have a “will”. They are there to provide information.) But more important, they were not trying to “publicly implicate” Saddam. In fact, they were apparently so secretive about it that both Clarke and Woodward were able to leverage such information to make a lot of money off their books.

  74. and I have seen no evidence presented to the contrary.

    Fewer than 100 survivors of the Vietnam War are expected to qualify for one-off compensation for life-threatening illnesses which have claimed hundreds of their comrades in the past 35 years.

  75. eish lonik, Shirin?
    That’s a nice story. (David, you want to tell Shirin what anecdotal evidence is?)
    Funny, now that I think about it, it seems to me that, within days of 9/11, much of the Arab and Muslim world was very publicly trying to implicate Israel.
    As to your formal statistical training. What a coincidence, I have formal statistical training too. Why, I think I still have a thrity yearold copy of Herbert Blalock! So do most people who have done some graduate work in the social and behaviorial sciences, which is a lot of people.

  76. “Let’s not forget that the vast majority of those US military people were killed by hostile forces – many of them apparently non-Iraqis who were affiliated with al-Qaeda.”
    Simply -finally- false.
    “Rummy, Cheney and Wolfie” may have been drawing up plans, Davey, but these are called contingency plans,”
    Again, look at the record. Your claim at this point, is silly.
    “I mean, just because I’m a Zionist doesn’t mean I’m stupid”
    No, but being a Zionist of your stripe means using any argument however stupid, self-contradictory, illogical, or based on twisting the historical record, to justify “your” side. As Cynthia Ozick has said, she defends justice for Jews before justice for anyone else. And Faurisson said after Chomsky defended his right to speak, he didn’t care: he wasn’t interested in rights, only in victory.
    You Ozick and and Faurisson have a lot in common. An obvious point, but it needs to be made to you at least.

  78. Yes Seth. Well why don’t you try showing me what is “Simply -finally-false.” in the statment I made?
    And again, why don’t you look at the record here and the statements to which I was responding regarding Bush administration people trying publicly to implicate Saddam immediately after 9/11. This is simply a false assertion that cannot be backed up with evidence.
    And as to your final tirade, Seth, exactly of “what stripe” am I?

  79. “There was a lot of scientific evidence provided in response to the first study, particularly built-in skewing based on their use of Falluja…”
    Try actually reading the Lancet article on the study, JES. It might be enlightening. They did NOT use the data from Falluja in their calculations for the exact reason that it was an outlier that might skew the results upward. They DID on the other hand, include data from Kurdistan, despite the fact that they could have left that out as an outlier that might skew the results downward.
    “…and small sample…”
    Again, had you actually read the article, you would know that the authors themselves acknowledged that the sample was small (though it was not really too small to draw some reasonable inferences), and that a larger study was needed. Well, true to their word, they did that larger study this year, and published the results, which you and Bush and others who want to minimize the catastrophe like even less than you like the results of the first study. Go figure!
    “the excessively wide margin required to arrive at an acceptable level of confidence.”
    YAWN! OK, then. The lower end of the range is as likely as the upper end. No one is asking you to accept the upper end, and you don’t want to accept the number that would be the most likely no matter what the spread. Perhaps you would be willing to accept the lower end as possibly valid?

  80. Actually, Shirin, I did read both the 2004 article and the referee commentaries, and I may have been mistaken about inclusion of the Fallujah data. (You see Seth, I even admit when I may be wrong.)
    The range – again, as I recall from nearly a year and a half ago – was presented by the authors, I believe, as between 8,000 and 195,000. This was in order to arrive at a 95% degree of certainty, about the minimum they needed for an meaningful result. One of the the referees pointed out that the lower limit should be, as I recall, 5,000. Now, Shirin, you claim that “lower end of the range is as likely as the upper end.” That is correct. And it is precisely the point. There is nothing that I recall from statistics that stipulates that the “most likely no matter what the spread” is in the middle (…”tell you what, let’s just split the difference.”) The whole idea is to get a high degree of certainty with a minimal range of possibilities so that you don’t have to pick a number between 5,000 and 195,000!
    So, it isn’t a matter of what I will accept. I would suppose that something around the “Iraq Bodycount” figure is probably the best we can do until such time as the situation in Iraq will allow for a broad-based and comprehensive survey. (This, by the way, is more or less what happened after WWII, Bernard, and the reason that criticism of the Lancet study is a whole lot different than Holocaust denial.)

  81. This is simply a false assertion that cannot be backed up with evidence.
    Of course they did not say broadly and publicly but their attention is their and obvious
    Just give you example this was reported by NYT, first year of the war polls shows 11% of Americans believed there is no link between Saddam and AlQaeda, after two years and due to GWB and most of the administration around him insisted there were links the poll shows growing number to 46% so it does not matter are there evidences (which in this case approved not) or not makes the publics believe what the government sale to them.
    Compares to Maskiot settlement it is similar case as your statements:
    “I don’t really know where the proposed site of Maskiot is…..… it is outside the security fence.”
    Any admission or straight word put here did you said or them saying it’s on Occupied Palestinians Land? NO of course not you and them simply denying thing firstly by saying ” proposed” in fact the project of Maskiot began months ago this by Israeli citizen who live there and interested in politics /blog discussion saying I don’t really know where the proposed site of Maskiot is looks you are poor in geography I forgive you because your text books did not showing borders of your state till the new minister of education recently asked to put Green Line on the map in the Israeli text book

  82. “That’s a nice story. (David, you want to tell Shirin what anecdotal evidence is?)”
    In your attempt to discredit me you are making yourself look foolish. This is not anecdotal evidence in the sense you are trying to make it sound like – not, for example, in the sense of the completely unprovable “well, my uncle flew a bomber in WWII and he never killed a single civilian”, or “Well, I know three Iraqis and not a single one of them has lost a family member”, or whatever. I was recounting a personal experience, JES, not trying to present numerical proof of something. Furthermore, what I have told you is supported by readily available documentary and testimonial evidence. There are written documents from, for example, Rumsfeld, there are written and videotape records of public and private statements by Bush administration officials, various talking heads, and news reporters. I heard and read these things with my own eyes and ears, so did numerous others, including ordinary Americans, and we all got the same message from them, which was, based on subsequent events, the message we were intended to get.
    “Funny, now that I think about it, it seems to me that, within days of 9/11, much of the Arab and Muslim world was very publicly trying to implicate Israel.”
    Yes, but unlike the early attempts by the Bush administration, neocon talking heads, and the media to associate Saddam with 9/11, there is, as far as I know, no real evidence to substantiate any Israeli involvement. Furthermore, some of the claims – like the one that all the Jews working in the WTC stayed home that day – were ludicrous on their face.
    “As to your formal statistical training. What a coincidence, I have formal statistical training too. Why, I think I still have a thrity yearold copy of Herbert Blalock! So do most people who have done some graduate work in the social and behaviorial sciences, which is a lot of people.”
    Then you acknowledge that Vadim was wrong when he stated with such certainty that I have had no formal statistical training.

  83. Jes,
    Some things you have said, I am not sure if they are really answerable, and a few were already answered before I could get to them. But the few that I can answer:
    1- I am sure if you twisted Lancet’s chief editor’s arm in Gitmo, you could get the names of the reviewers (I have no knowledge about other fields, but in medicine they are not called referees). But technically, it is a secret. I have had quite a few papers rejected (sad honesty !) and would very much like to know who they were, to exclude them from future reviews if there is a pattern. But I have no way of finding out. One may ask certain people to be excluded (if you happen to believe they don’t like you, or your work, or are your competitors); other than that, you send the shot in the dark and hope that it lands in someone’s lap that doesn’t tear it apart. Presently, major journals have approximately 30-40% pre-peer review rejection, and approximately 60+% peer review rejection (of the ones that go to review of course). Again, all of this is medicine, and the basic sciences. Engineering, humanities, law, I have no clue.
    2- I am not saying the ILCS is correct or not. I don’t know that study well enough. All I said was, the IBC people whose refutation you are quoting seem to accept that study as more valid than their own. And the ILCS numbers are not at most, more than 20-30% different from Lancet’s.
    3- I did not comment on your attitudes in life, etc. It was in regard to the subject at hand, i.e. trying to minimize the numbers, while the real attention should go to the terrifying crime. I apologize for the example, and I know you will hate me for this, but it’s totally an Ahmadinejad tactic; as if proving they were 4 million Jews murdered instead of 6 changes the nature of the horrid act.
    4- ‘I’m not certain what you mean that they’re “being hit by the wrong side”’ I mean, the IBC people are all anti-war activists, and they didn’t expect to become the sticks with which the warmongers attacked their own side. This caused them to be the object of attack of their fellow anti-war friends. By the way, 1 of the 3 has public health training as far as I know (which is more than enough, IMHO).
    5- Yes the Vietnam War did last longer and much more tonnage was used but (a) the lack of precision guided weaponry caused a lot of that ordnance to be wasted and (b) there was no civil war between factions, killing up to 10,000 is some bad months (US military estimate, later retracted) and (c) it was a far less developed peasant society, hence the “excess loss of life” due to loss of sanitation, electricity, healthcare, etc. was much less marked.
    6- Agent Orange is now formally considered chemical warfare. And there are loads of evidence for its effects. The major ones are birth defects, a variety of malignancies, and neurodegenerative disorders. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the studies were done on US GIs with minimal exposure. The poor Viet peasants were hardly studied. Do a lit-search on NLM.
    7- The discrepancies have nothing to do with literacy. Government numbers and logs can be very unreliable in the developing world. I was in another country and needed to cross a border. I was told that crossing it with a Western passport would be risky. In a few hours, they got me a birth certificate, and a few days later, a native passport with that birth certificate. And all for such a bargain price, I was left wondering if I should have got a 10-pack!
    8- “There is nothing that I recall from statistics that stipulates that the “most likely no matter what the spread” is in the middle” Well there is. It is called the principle of SEM (standard error of the mean). It infers that in a sampling analysis, if you repeat the test lets say 100 times, and plot the means, the highest possibility is that real mean of the population is at the mean of means (in a normal distribution) or the median of the means (in a non-normal distribution) i.e. in the middle. It does not need mention that this does not apply to bimodal and other erratic distributions. That is the reason why you should always plot the data before analyzing it. The proof is a bit more complicated than this, but if you are interested you can check out the Visual Statistics website. Or see “Press, W. H.; Flannery, B. P.; Teukolsky, S. A.; and Vetterling, W. T. Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN: The Art of Scientific Computing, 2nd ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992.” By the way, the ILCS was statistically (and only statistically, IMHO) more robust, because it had a tighter SEM.

  85. “eish lonik, Shirin?”
    Nice failed attempt at Iraqi dialect, JES. That would be eish lonich in the central/southern dialect, or eish lonki in the Muslawi, or northern dialect. Your attempt is not Iraqi, I am afraid, but a hybrid of some sort.

  86. JES: Your “friends” are those people who denigrate the Lancet study with no scientific basis. The few scientists who objected to it, physicists and economists, were exposed as being completely ignorant about current sampling technology. The authors of the study have refuted all these bogus charges.
    Yes, in statistical analyses there’s always a probability of error, and if you think the authors were very unlucky with the randomization and produced a wrong answer that’s your choice.
    But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re calling their work a
    “blatant Lancet-Johns Hopkins fabrication.”
    You’re accusing of fraud scientists who publish a paper in one of the world’s leading journals, with the full support of their peers in the epidemiological community!
    That’s revisionism, my friend. That’s charlatanism in the style of David Irving.
    To accuse scientists of fraud without the slightest piece of evidence is disgraceful.

  88. Let’s save some time.
    One question that will tell us far more than any of these others –
    JES, do you really MIND that the war the CIA intentionally created in Vietnam (by talking the Catholic-fascist Diem out of his retirement in California and helping him and his brutal landlord buddies steal half a country after Ho had beaten France straight up) killed millions of people?
    If you don’t, then it really doesn’t matter to you how many have really died in Iraq, or whether their deaths were a foreseeable (in legal terms) result of Bush’s aggression. The message is either:
    1. Anyone gets to do whatever they want to anyone else to take whatever they want (because I’m the strongest). Including lie about what they’ve done.
    or
    2. We white Christian capitalists, embodied in purest form in America, have a special exclusive pass from God, like the one he used to order the Hebrews to butcher and enslave anyone who got in their way 3000 years ago, to take what we must have to eventually subjugate the world under His rules. Including lie about what we’ve done.
    There are problems with both these positions, I think. But if you do mind that so many people were killed by our tax dollars (still paying the debt, you know), then you must admit that it is fairly predictable that this sort of thing seems to happen, and maybe we the taxpayers should demand that our elected government come up with clear limitations on the use of American power and actually stick to that. Starting now.
    Yours,
    Redskin lover

  89. “Actually, Shirin, I did read both the 2004 article and the referee commentaries, and I may have been mistaken about inclusion of the Fallujah data.”
    You were not only mistaken, you were 180 degrees from the facts. They did NOT include the Falluja data, they mde that very clear in the paper that was published in the Lancet, and in all the interviews I heard, and they also explained how Falluja was one of the randomly selected locations, and why they did not include it in the final data.
    “There is nothing that I recall from statistics that stipulates that the “most likely no matter what the spread” is in the middle (…”tell you what, let’s just split the difference.”)”
    Well, JES, since you made it very clear that you have had formal training in statistics, I am rather shocked that you do not recall this most basic of statistical concepts. This is statistics 101 – in fact, it is taught in the introductory units on statistics in high school and even in some middle schools. It is the heart and soul – the meat and potatoes, if you will, of the kind of statistics used in all kinds of population studies, including – no, especially – in the behavioral and social sciences, quality assurance, and on and on and on. It is called the Standard Error of the Mean, and it is, indeed the value in the range with the highest probability of being the true value. It has been a very long time since I have worked with or taught statistics, but as I recall, put simply, it is the mean of the means of a sampling distribution. David, did I get that more or less right?
    “The whole idea is to get a high degree of certainty with a minimal range of possibilities so that you don’t have to pick a number between 5,000 and 195,000!”
    No, the whole idea is to find the value in the range that has the highest probability of reflecting the true population value.

  91. Salah – are you sure he knows bamya? Whether he knows kubba or not I am not sure, but you can be sure he does not know kubbat Mosul! (Oh dear, now I am getting hungry!)

  93. STAGE DIRECTION: Tupharsin shimmers in, unsheathes his Henckels International Classic Stainless Steel Meat Fork, inserts it into JES, extracts it, runs a meditative finger over the tines, looks feelingly at the stalls seats and lisps…
    TUPHARSIN: He’s done.
    CHORUS: But he’ll back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And thank goodness for it.
    STAGE DIRECTION: Slow fade to darkness, spot comes up, illuminating a sign, which reads:
    HERE ENDETH THIS DAY’S LESSON

  94. Shirin,
    Salah – are you sure he knows bamya?
    Shirin: He did in one post long time ago.
    Cubba he did make a jock on LAITH KUBBA, then he apologised about his cold jock.
    I agree Shirin Kubba Mislaweyia sooo tasty but look should be made from Iraqi ingredients believe me nothing tasty like what we eat in Iraq no way at all.
    I wish one day all the friends her meet all in place let say “Jerusalem”!! Each one bring one cooked item from his home recipes

  96. BTW, there is one guy from US he is KKK gang member he had a very racist history with Black Africans and recently also start about Islam he invited to that service.
    I read there is Palestinians Lawyer he study the Crimes of Holocaust, Iran declined his request and they did not issue visa for him, his name I think Khalid Mohammad
    I don’t know what Ahamadinajdy to do with this silly conference he gave a free gift to Israelis and an opportunity for their political gain in fact is Islam/Muslim have no business in all this story, the denial will not bring any benefits Islam/Muslim or Islam/Muslims loosing nothing whatsoever of the acknowledgment of Holocaust Crimes which is documented by different sources and people. Ahamadinajd just another nuts.

  97. Ah – Laith Kubba! Now I understand the joke.
    I like your idea of meeting one day for an international shared meal. Unfortunately, despite being from a very Muslawi family, I never learned to make kubbat Mosul decently – it is certainly the most difficult kubba in the world to make. In fact, I almost never make any kind of Iraqi kubba for anyone but myself because, although it tastes ok, my kubba is messy and ugly to look at. I can make rice kubba that is almost acceptable, and I also can make pretty good Lebanese Kibbe – you know, the kind you bake in a large flat pan – but kubba is not my best dish. I AM however rather famous for my Iraqi dolma. Not the cold meatless yolanchi dolma, but the real Iraqi dolma that has meat and is served hot – the one that uses onions, eggplants, squash, tomatoes and siliq or grape leaves…you know it, I am sure.
    So, I will bring Iraqi dolma. What will you bring?

  98. Shirin, Looks the Light here shifted to the Food and its effect to humans, definitely will be interesting that Arabian/Muslim hospitality make any one in the world appreciated it will build the paths for better understating and friendship and peace. Hope crosses fingers…
    I like the Dolma with Grape Leafs which more acid I don know but this my test.
    What I am bring, you tell me….some thing interesting of course
    Did you hear about “Barda Calow”? I think its Turkish name but Iraqis knew its and some familles doing it, its a dough put in a “Gidder” and full with Rice and paces of lamb meat with some “Leyah” and some fried eggplants strips in between, then the dough close from the top and put on fire till be ready, when services its comes like a drum and you cut it and start beat it you will never stop….
    you know, the kind you bake in a large flat pan if you mean burghul and minced meats and all the spices and things, I eat one from our neighbour in Hila they are Christians they did it for us in one occasion I still have that test in my mind from that time its so tasty

  99. Well David, I stand correct, then, on the issue of the statistics, and I apologize. It would be ineresting if you could explain briefly how the SEM applies to the Lancet study (just for informational purposes).
    Moving on, you all know nothing of dolma. My wife is from Baku, and she knows how to make dolma!

  102. Chaps
    the power of the bloggers strikes again
    Juan Cole has a piece by William Polk today
    Today, there are signs that we have hovered on the brink of war with Iran for at least the last six months. As you may know, I have written on this danger on my website (www.williampolk .com). I think we are edging closer. Among the signs – and there are many — that point in this direction is one that I do not find reported in the American press: the Selective Service System announced three days ago that it is preparing its first test since 1998 of the draft.
    I listened to Mr Polk telling us how he brought Ben Bella to Algeria in a State Dept convoy at the end of the French war, a couple of years ago, and I bought and read his informative and readable book on Iraq.
    The great thing about listening to people in person is that you pick up on the non verbal communication and form an opinion on their reliability as a guide
    Somehow I suspect he knows which way the wind is blowing.

  103. “I like the Dolma with Grape Leafs which more acid…”
    You need to taste my dolma before you make a decision! I prefer it more acid as well, and I use a “secret ingredient” to create a flavour that gives it more than just an acid taste, but an added richness too – at least that is what people say, and that is my experience also.
    “What I am bring, you tell me….some thing interesting of course”
    Hmmmmm – msaq`a? I don’t think I have made it once since I left Iraq. Or perhaps purda pilaui? Let me think some more about it. I don’t make Iraqi food that often anymore because it is so much work, and I do not know how to make a small amount at a time – you know how it is!
    “Did you hear about “Barda Calow”? I think its Turkish name but Iraqis knew its and some familles doing it, its a dough put in a “Gidder” and full with Rice and paces of lamb meat with some “Leyah” and some fried eggplants strips in between, then the dough close from the top and put on fire till be ready, when services its comes like a drum and you cut it and start beat it you will never stop….”
    Yes, it is Turkish, I think.
    And I am remembering now that every morning for breakfast I used to eat a sammoon with qeymar and orange marmalade. If I ate that now I would be big as an elephant in one month, but I was younger then. (For those who do not know, qeymar – or gaymar in central/southern dialect – is the very very very cream of the cream of the milk of a water buffalo, and it is white and thick like butter, but it does not melt like butter – or maybe like cream cheese, but not as sticky. Well, it is unique.
    “ if you mean burghul and minced meats and all the spices and things, I eat one from our neighbour in Hila they are Christians they did it for us in one occasion I still have that test in my mind from that time its so tasty”
    Yes, but instead of forming it into small shapes filled with meat, it is baked in layers in a pan. We have some Lebanese who married into the family, and one of the women makes it the best – it is fantastic. She freezes it, too, and every time she comes to visit she brings a supply.
    And you know, bamiya is still one of my very favourites. I used to make it with lamb or chicken. I make it here now and then, but only with chicken.
    And do you know lebaniya? Soup made from yoghurt with lamb, and mint and garlic and a few other things? It is so nice in cold weather especially, and lovely for iftar as the first taste to hit your mouth after a day of fasting.
    Oh, I just remembered something from a couple of years ago. One of the young people in the family asked me to please prepare a traditional Iraqi meal for the Thanksgiving dinner at her home. So, I bought all the ingredients, and took them to her home with all the needed implements, and everyone – all the guests, and the men and the women, and the children who were old enough gathered in the kitchen, and I gave them all different tasks, and we all prepared the meal together. There was hardly enough room in the kitchen for all the people – just like it used to be in `Eid and at other times back in Iraq.
    Well, now I am getting hungry again – and for more than just the food, too! For everything that goes with the food.

  104. OK, JES, when we have the get-together that Salah is proposing, then I will challenge your wife to a dolma-off – how is that?
    What sort of dolma does she make, by the way? The cold, meatless kind wrapped only in grape leaves? Not that I do not enjoy that kind very much when it is well prepared. It is just that my best dish is the Iraqi dolma that contains meat with several different types of wrappings, and is served hot. Nevermind, though, we will make the contest work even if it is two different kinds of dolma.

  105. No, no. My wife only makes hot dolma with meat filling (and a tiny bit of rice). She serves it with youghurt or sour cream, which mixes with the cooking broth.
    I sometimes make the kibbe saniyya that you describe – layers of bughul with minced lamb in between.
    BTW, is your “secret ingerdient” by any chance either sumac or kizil?
    I think that there is great merit to the idea of us all eating together rather than fighting!

  106. This Ethiopian government has repeatedly massacred citizens protesting electoral abuses, but this does not stop the US from getting behind their attack on Somalia all the way.

  107. Ho hum
    Life will get interesting when Sudanese forces cross the Ethiopian frontier.
    Curious to find the US Ally Ethiopia lining up with the guys who brought down the Blackhawk in Mogadishu.
    On 7 May 2006, fighting broke out between Islamist militias and an alliance of Somali warlords over control of Mogadishu. The three rival groups in Somalia are the transitional government, the Islamic Court Union (ICU), and the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). According to the UN report, the interim government received arms and up to 8,000 troops from Ethiopia, Yemen and Uganda and the ICU receives weapons from Eritrea, Djibouti, Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Hezbollah.[2] However accuracy of this report is disputed.[3] The United States has in past admitted financing of the ARPCT.

  108. They did NOT use the data from Falluja in their calculations for the exact reason that it was an outlier that might skew the results upward.
    BZZZT! As you should remember Shirin, Tim Lambert and company covered this ground some time ago.
    Garfield: “Majority of deaths from the air’ was mistated as being based on non-falluja experience. It is methodologically interesting and important to try to figure out what is going on with a representative but very small sample. On this point, I combined data from non-falluja area and the total mortality experience, including falluja. My mistake.”
    more here:
    http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002967.html

  109. “secret ingerdient” by any chance either sumac or kizil?
    I think Shirin using “Tamor Hindy” تـمـر هـنـد ?

  110. Vadim, this is a very silly and utterly transparent game you play with red herrings like this. It has also become predictable and boring.
    You know very well that I was referring not to any ancillary material in the report, but to the data used to calculate the probable number of excess deaths. The Falluja data were, as you (and the miriad others who try the same lame argument) know very well, excluded from those calculations on the basis that Falluja was an outlier, and those data could skew the result upward unrealistically. On the other hand, data from Kurdistan were included, although they could have been excluded on the basis that they could skew the result downward unrealistically.

  111. JES, your wife’s dolma sounds good. Traditional Iraqi dolma includes a higher proportion of rice, I think. Yoghurt would work very well for that kind of dolma. So, I hope your wife will bring her dolma, I will bring my dolma, and we can enjoy two different styles of the same dish. And you will bring your kubba?
    And no, that is not the “secret ingredient” :o}

  112. It does not need mention that this does not apply to bimodal and other erratic distributions.
    I think it does need mention! (see Shirin’s remarks above)
    Vadim, this is a very silly and utterly transparent game you play with red herrings like this.
    The study is a red herring, and it is silly and boring to drag it into any conversation addressing present or future US policy on Iraq. Since according to all mentioned studies the US isn’t doing most of the killing, I can’t see how it argues for a US withdrawal (not that dozens of other reasons can’t be found.)

  113. Can we say some light coming from Iraq?

    • “oil production is likely to total more than $41 billion this year, which reflects both an increase in price and in production. Every month this year has shown an increase in production over the same month in 2005 for a projected average increase of 14.3%. If production continues to increase, it’s likely that the Iraqi oil fields will be up to full production by the end of 2007. This leaves the government with an awful lot of money and they’re scrabbling around to find ways to spend it effectively.

    ”

    “• Business registrations are booming. More than 20,000 new businesses have been registered between April of 2003 and the end of 2005 and thousands more have been registered since then, including 286 in November. This is about three times the number registered between 1946 and 2003.”

  114. Jes,
    Yes I have had dolma, a few times only alas, with my Turkish and also Iranian Azeri friends, and it can be a great treat. Lucky people get it at home.
    Ask your wife why that beautiful Ottoman palace on the Bosphorus is called “Dolma Baceh”. I wonder if it’s because it is small and cute, kind of like calling it a dumpling.

  115. David, you must come to our collective international feast and sample both styles of dolma. What will be your contribution?

  116. Shirin,
    I would be very glad, but if I remember correctly you live in Masqat; am I wrong? That would literally be across the globe. Tant pis.

  118. The streak of good news continues and we hope their momentum carries into 2007. It must be in honor of the birthday of our guiding Jesus.
    1) Loyalist troops entered Mogadishu. Islamic forces were disbanded. US shows understandinmg for Ethiopia’s positive role in backing the transition government.
    2) Top ranking Taleban killed was confirmed. Denied four at least four days, now admitted. A Taleban a day keeps the doctor away. Kudos for the US tracking and execution. Tax dollars at work.
    3) Egypt sending automatic weapons to Fatah plus million of bullets. For us all who know how Arab politics work that is meant to strengthen Abu Mazen’s political position. May God divide them and confuse them just like he has divided Iraqis.
    4) Umma apologist celebrate that US had more casualties in Iraq than 9/11. Their hatred blinds them. They do not see that in 9/11 we lost 3.000 people in 2 hours. Iraq was about 4 years of war. We cannot absorb a 9/11 attack a week, we can fight in Iraq forever. AND in 9/11 the enemy lost 19 people/400.000 dollars. Want to count the Umma losses in Iraq? Shirin has the numbers. Good ratio.
    5) Saddam is about to hang. The Umma justice system may not be just but it is fast. A 30 day appeal and Saddam joins the glorious martyrs he praised and funded for so long. Muftis and Immams are still divided on whether a hanged martyr gets the virgins or not. For 30 bucks you can find a cyber mufti to decree whatever insanity you believe, so who cares?

  119. I was starting to regret reading this thread, but then it got to dolma so it was all worthwhile.
    If that get-together ever happens, my Middle Eastern specialty is mansaf, which I learned from a Jordanian restaurateur when I lived in Yonkers half a lifetime ago. And for the Ashkenazi side of my heritage, I’m a master at baking challah – also an acquired recipe, but one I picked up during the year I worked for the Satmarim. Maybe the whole thing could be done under the slogan “too full to fight…”

  120. Salah,
    A Lebanese Shi’i man once read me a somewhat comical quote from Imam Ali to make a point. It went something like this: “Never fight back a rabid dog, a broken wall, or a bad woman [prostitute]; the dog will bite you, the wall will crash on you, and the woman will stain your honor, and you can do none of those back” (I apologize for my poor translation; I am sure some of the people on the thread can do it much more eloquently). Don’t you think this ‘rivayah’ applies to our friend here?

  121. Jonathan,
    Thanks for your coverage of the Somali situation. I wonder what you think will be the medium-term effects of the Ethiopian incursion.

  122. Wow! The genius Doris, who uses terms the meaning of which only she knows, has come to share her perspicacity with us again. She is very happy that the “Umma court system” – whatever that is – has decided to make Saddam a martyr, thus allowing him to go out in a burst of glory and feeding his narcissistic delusions.

  123. David,
    My wife would certainly not know the answer to that question. She is Jewish (part Ashkenazi, part Mountain Jew), not Azeri, and has no ties to Turkey.
    My late uncle was a Turkish Muslim from a well-known Istanbul family, and he would have known for sure.

  124. Jonathan, you will be most welcome, but I, for one, cannot decide between mansaf and challah. I’ll tell you what. If you will supply both, I will throw in a batch of my – rather famous, if I do say so myself – Iraqi-style Tabbouleh. I make it on the moist side, more burghul than most Lebanese tabbouleh, but not too much, VERY lemony, and heavy on the onion and mint.

  125. David, alas I am not in Musqat now, much to my chagrin. I plan to return next year – not sure exactly when or for how long, but hopefully will return for good, if not next year, then soon after.

  126. Guys
    Can I come too please.
    I am reading your posts with a wave of nostalgia for Mansaf and Tabouleh.
    I am only beginning to learn Middle Eastern cooking and need to spend far more time in Persian and Afghan and Lebanese restaurants.

  127. Guys
    Can I come too please.
    I am reading your posts with a wave of nostalgia for Mansaf and Tabouleh.
    I am only beginning to learn Middle Eastern cooking and need to spend far more time in Persian and Afghan and Lebanese restaurants.

  128. Jonathan I like mansaf.
    Hay what you think about مطبك سمك its rice with Almond and dry grapes and some spices and other things with pieces of Fish “Iraqi Fish Shaboot, Ketaan” and the all thing served on Seniyah stainless steel big plate with side salads and all those things?
    BTW, I am very good in making Kebab Iraqi over the Manklah “Charcoal Kebab” Iraqi
    David, Sorry I don’t heard about that one, I know Imam Ali (كرم الله وجهه (his talks full of wisdom and guides for our lives in this life

  130. Thanks Doris
    Welcome to the discussion. Most of us might disagree with you but we have to defend your right to express your point of view. I think you are probably about 14 years of age and your commendable interest in World Affairs sets you apart from your peers who might have difficulty finding Iraq on the map. Those of us who have been around a bit longer know that God is generally on the side of the big battallions.
    I am not particularly well briefed on East Africa so my knowledge is slanted by a EuroMed perspective.
    However I can confidently predict that events in Somalia will have the following effects:
    1 Infant mortality will rise from its present appalling levels to even worse levels.
    2 The heroin smuggling routes that were interrupted by the Islamic Courts will come back into service.
    3 Invasion of a muslim country by a christian army will upset very many people.
    After that it is down to a throw of the dice.
    It will all probably revert to gang wars among the clans.
    What worries me most is that we may be seeing the start of The Water Wars. I dont know what the price of Ethiopian intervention is but they can now do much as they please as the US proxy in the region.
    Ethiopia Sudan and Egypt as well as Uganda and Kenya are riparian states on the Nile.
    The legal regime covering the Nile is the Nile Waters Treaty which is 80 years old (like Iraq)
    http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/projects/casestudies/nile_agreement.html
    Ethiopia’s population now equals Egypts which is one of the four most important economies in the Middle East and is a candidate for closer integration with the EU. Egypt’s economy is based on the existence of the Nile. Government of Egypt have stated that contravention of the Nile Waters Treaty will be grounds for war. My friends in the poor quarters of Cairo might starve if the water flow is reduced.
    Sudan has a treaty right to a percentage of the waters of the Nile and is building a dam with Chinese and Arab Finance and Contractors. The Merowe High Dam, also known as Merowe Multi-Purpose Hydro Project or Hamdab Dam, is a large construction project in northern Sudan, about 350 km north of the capital Khartoum. It is situated on the river Nile, close to the 4th Cataract where the river divides into multiple smaller branches with large islands in between. Merowe is a city about 40 km downstream from the construction site at Hamdab. The main purpose of the dam will be the generation of electricity. Its dimensions make it the largest contemporary hydropower project in Africa.
    The other countries have rights to neglible percentages of the Nile waters. Kenya has announced that it is considering renouncing its participation in the Nile Waters Treaty.
    Ethiopia is looking at diverting Nile waters for irrigation purposes to feed its population.
    So Ethiopian Military crossing international frontiers worries me. Sudan has only recently stopped its long running civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian south. Provoking a Sudanese intervention against Ethiopia by restarting the civil war would not be good news.
    A homeless band of muslim warriors in Somalia without air cover trapped up against the Kenyan frontier would not be good news. Somebody might arm them with SA-18 and even the odds.
    So for our New Years reading it is probably time to dust off your copies of Barbara Tuchman “The Proud Tower” and “Guns of August”. Stratfor’s piece on Central Asia is available free on his website.
    Maybe then Doris you will understand why seven years ago US aircraft were bombing Christian Serbs to protect Muslim Kosovans and why the main street in Pristina is called Bill Clinton Boulevard.

  133. Frank, of course you are invited! And you need not bring Arabic food. What about some Irish food? After all, this is an international group.

  134. Salah, thanks! Your friends sound like just the kinds of people I want to meet in Musqat. I would be grateful if you would put us in touch. I think you have my e-mail address, right?

  135. Frank, you nailed down my background, age, and reasoning perfectly, so I must consider your Somali analysis seriously as you seem very perceptive. Thanks for that.
    My perspective was less informed and certainly more superficial than yours, but I share it with you because superficial doesn’t always mean wrong. He are my premises:
    1) You can’t fix Somalia anymore than you can fix Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other failed state. Specially aganst the will of prevalent and conflicting internal forces.
    2) If you can’t fix it, you are better of containing the malignant impact of these areas. Either by making sure there is some equilibrium that prevents a clear winner or even worse by your global enemy taking over. Read Al Qaeda, a local variant of Taleban, or anything Wahabi style for that matter.
    The Ethiopian intervention is welcome as it contributes to the above model.

  136. Shirin
    The problem with Irish food is that most of it involves pork and alcohol.
    There are a lot of recipes involving potato, but they dont have the delicacy of flavour.
    What I would love to bring is a North German and Baltic specialty Black Bread and Pickled Herring. I can’t make up my mind if I pefer the Hamburg variant, the Luebeck version, the Polish version, or the Swedish version. They are variously known as Matjes or Rollmops.
    The flavours are in the berries and spices they are pickled with.

  137. That sounds great, Frank, and you are right, in this gathering alcohol is not a great idea, and pork is a double no-no!

  139. PS Frank, just to clarify, the alcohol and pork is a poor idea because the Umma among us would get all upset over the mere sight of it.

  140. Shirin,
    I am starting to get used to the Umma game. We should do more of that; agree?
    Salah, intentionally or not, did not respond to my hint from the Imam Ali quote. I was not rtying to make a religious or wisdom statement. It was more in reference to our Ummologist. Hmm ..I like that too. I think we should open Ummology seats in major academic insitutions.
    BTW, I don’t know what you had said made me have the impression that you are in Masqat, or somewhere else in Oman. I am sorry; must have been the dementia. I don’t know where you are then.

  142. I’m an Umma, he’s an Umma, she’s an Umma, they’re all Ummas, wouldn’t you like to be an Umma toooooooooo?

  143. You can’t fix Somalia anymore than you can fix Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other failed state.
    Hmmm. Liberia. Sierra Leone. Cambodia. The Democratic Republic of Congo. Bosnia. Southern Sudan.
    Yeah, you’re right. It’s impossible to fix a failed state. Totally impossible. Which is why all the above countries are still in a state of quasi-genocidal civil war, and why international peacekeeping and mediation haven’t done a thing to change them.
    For that matter, it should be obvious that Somalia in particular is impossible to rebuild, because Puntland and Somaliland didn’t construct functioning states through organic processes. What you see in Garowe and Hargeisa is all an optical illusion, which is probably part of the malignancy that has to be contained.
    [/sarcasm, in case anyone doubted]

  145. Shirin,
    As a bona fide member of the Umma, will you please be kind enough to consider Pink Floyd honorary members of the Umma? You know, UmmaGumma !!

  146. “In other words, pork would be an Umman-rights violation?”
    Good one, Jonathan!
    By the way, I was searching for an equivalent way to say why pork would be a double whammy in this group, but I couldn’t find any acceptable equivalents for the other non-porkers in our group. Perhaps you are more conversant with those kinds of things than I am.

  147. David, maybe you got the impression that I am in Musqat because I just WAS in Musqat. Unfortunately, I am not there now – wish I were. The weather should be perfect there right about now.

  148. I was searching for an equivalent way to say why pork would be a double whammy in this group
    The Hebrew word you’re looking for isn’t all that different: am is a people (in the ethnic sense) and amcha is “our people.” So I guess you could say I’m a non-porker because I Am what I Am.
    (Actually, I’m not really a non-porker. I’m a member of the Jewish people but a religious atheist, and I eat non-kosher foods with gusto. But you get my drift.)

  149. Ummology – yes, I like that. Doris could lead the effort.
    I know declare that Pink Floyd are honorary Ummas.
    (By the way, David, you need to go back to Ummology 101. One is not a member of the Umma, one either is or is not AN Umma.)

  150. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni

    Israel cannot remain an uninvolved observer. It must promote a better future, instead of just talking about it. If the Palestinian voter thinks that nothing will come of supporting Abbas, he will vote accordingly. If instead of continuing to say that Abbas is weak and that, in the end, Hamas will inevitably win, we say that everything depends on the Palestinian voter, and that only he can bring about an end to the Israeli occupation, then perhaps Abbas and his supporters, with the active support of the Arab world, will succeed in tipping the balance.

  151. Awww, look what happens! I go away for a few days to do Christmas stuff with my family and you commenters all take over the comments board here and (1) have fun, (2) talk about food, and (3) seem to get along with each other.
    Maybe I should go away more often.
    But when feast-time comes you absolutely can’t leave me out! I see we’re a bit short on desserts… I could make a really good torta rustica with fall fruits or order up a batch of baklava from Shatila in Dearborn. (I guess that would be cheating?)
    Kudos to all males who’re willing to cook! And females, too, of course.
    Meanwhile, I can really see the value of us all keeping a good sense of Ummor here…

  152. Helena
    Back to reality, i’m afraid.
    So Ethiopian Military crossing international frontiers worries me. Sudan has only recently stopped its long running civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian south. Provoking a Sudanese intervention against Ethiopia by restarting the civil war would not be good news.
    A homeless band of muslim warriors in Somalia without air cover trapped up against the Kenyan frontier would not be good news. Somebody might arm them with SA-18 and even the odds.
    http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/C3B6C066-0AD2-4E66-BF20-AA0700714CE9.htm

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