Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

Tuesday, that well-known “democrat” Jordan’s King Abdullah (not!) railed vociferously against Iranian influence in the upcoming Iraqi elections. Yesterday (or so), the Iraqi newspaper Ad-dustour reported that

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has decided to make the Jordanian capital Amman the place to sort out the absentee ballots of Iraqi expatriate voters. Hence, ballot boxes will be transported to Amman for this purpose.

I got this latter nugget of news from today’s email feed from IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor”. For some reason they haven’t posted today’s IPM content on their website yet. I guess it’ll happen soon.
My question is, “Why should anyone particularly trust this process of conveying all the Iraqi exiles’ votes to Amman and then counting them there?”
Btw, I’m finding it frustratingly difficult to find precise info on how, exactly, the promised provisions for including Iraqi exiles in the voting process will actually be implemented– apart from the above.
For example, in how many different places around the world can they cast their votes? (In South Africa’s landmark 1994 election, exiles could vote through their local SA consulates.) What are the rules for determining their eligibility? Roughly how many people might we be talking about?
Anyone who could point me to any answers there, please do so…

Continue reading “Jordan; Iraqi exile ballots; Orwell”

I’m a bit behind with my reading. I just want to bookmark this piece by Nir Rosen, written in October I think. He was embedded with an Armored Cavalry Regiment in western Iraq.
The piece is titled “The wrong Ayoub”. It uses the description of a unit forcefully breaking into a guy’s house, wounding him, and arresting him– only later to discover he was the “wrong” Ayoub– to illustrate the atrociously poor level of intelligence the unit was relying on.
This part, at the very beginning, is also very troubling:

According to a major from the Judge Advocate General’s office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process, at least 7,000 Iraqis are being detained by US forces. Many languish in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposes English-language procedures on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed.
Some are termed “security detainees” and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they are still a “security risk”. Most are innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant-colonel familiar with the process adds that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, that would entail a court martial, which would imply that the United States is occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or a liberation.

Terrible, searing testimonies now coming out from inside Fallujah. If you can only read one, I suggest this one from a Russian (or, Turko-Russian?) doctor who’d been working in one of the city’s hospitals. (Not clear which.)
Look especially at the references he makes to the results of the extreme water shortage inside the city:

Together with Americans the flies invaded the city. They are millions. The whole city seems to be under their power. The flies cover the corpses. The older is corpse, the more flies are upon it. First they cover a corpse as by some strange rash. Then they begin to swarm upon it, and then a gray moving shroud covers the corpse. Flies swarm upon some ruins as gray monstrous shadows. The stench is awful.
The flies are everywhere. In the hospital wards, operating rooms, canteen. You find them even where they cannot be. In the “humanitarian” plastic bottle with warm plastic-stinking water. The bottle is almost full, simply someone opened it for a second and made a gulp, but this black spot is already floating there…
It is a general crisis with water. There are simply no clean sources. The local residents fetch water from the river, muddy, gray and dead. You can buy anything for water now. The sewage system is broken, the water supply is broken, and electricity is absent in the city.
I am afraid to imagine what will happen in two weeks. Hepatitis will take toll of thousands. They say already that people at the outskirts are in fever with the symptoms of typhus. But one cannot verify it. They prohibited moving in the city…

Continue reading “Testimonies from Fallujah”

Retired 3-star Marine General Bernard Trainor is sort of an intellectual’s military leader. Well, they like to fawn all over him at Harvard University’s prestigious “Kenndy School of Government”, where he helps run a security-studies program. Here’s his take on whether the US military has in mind any “exit strategy” from Iraq:

I don’t think they have an exit strategy in mind at this particular point. I think the concept is to maintain our forces in there. Do we need more forces? Yes, we [do], but that’s a double-edged sword. If we start to put more American forces in, all that does is agitate the people who feel that this is an American occupation. But we do need the forces.

Are you feeling more secure yet? Are you reassured that the Prez sho’ looks as though he knows what he’s fixin’ to do in Iraq?
… Well, neither do I.
The above quote comes in the latest of the periodic little “interviews” conducted with Trainor by Bernie Gwertzman, a retired national-security correspondent for AP who now works at the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. He puts them out in a handy little column that the CFR produces and distributes jointly with the NYT.
(Have we mentioned enough “prestigious”– equals East Coast, old money– US institutions yet? I’m sure you get the drift.)
Trainor was generally laudatory about what the US fighting men had achieved in Fallujah. Speaking about the Fallujah operation in a notable past tense (!) he said:

They all did very well… I think the performance of the army and the Marines is probably indistinguishable. The First Marine Expeditionary Force is the lead in the operation. [The operation] was very, very well planned, and I think they caught the insurgents by surprise because they feinted as if they were going to come from the south and, in fact, came from the north. When the Marines went in there shooting with lots of support, the issue was never in doubt. I think it went very quickly, and I think it worked with surprisingly low casualties.

Also, this:

Continue reading “Trainor on Fallujah, etc.”

The Eid al-Fitr, which comes at the end of Ramadan, is a much-loved Muslim family feast. Families gather for long visits. The kids get new outfits. Everyone eats a lot and reminisces. Good family time. You know, like Christmas or Easter for Christians, Pesach for Jews. Every religious or national community has such festivals.
It wasn’t so much fun for Riverbend’s family in Baghdad this year. They had finaly been able to get together, and the television was playing Al-Jazeera when the infamous mosque-shooting tape came on. Here’s how River describes it:

We sat, horrified, stunned with the horror of the scene that unfolded in front of our eyes. It’s the third day of Eid and we were finally able to gather as a family- a cousin, his wife and their two daughters, two aunts, and an elderly uncle. E. and my cousin had been standing in line for two days to get fuel so we could go visit the elderly uncle on the final day of a very desolate Eid. The room was silent at the end of the scene, with only the voice of the news anchor and the sobs of my aunt. My little cousin flinched and dropped her spoon, face frozen with shock, eyes wide with disbelief, glued to the television screen, “Is he dead? Did they kill him?” I swallowed hard, trying to gulp away the lump lodged in my throat and watched as my cousin buried his face in his hands, ashamed to look at his daughter.
“What was I supposed to tell them?” He asked, an hour later, after we had sent his two daughters to help their grandmother in the kitchen. “What am I supposed to tell them- ‘Yes darling, they killed him- the Americans killed a wounded man; they are occupying our country, killing people and we are sitting here eating, drinking and watching tv’?” He shook his head, “How much more do they have to see? What is left for them to see?”

Continue reading “Riverbend’s family “celebrates” Eid”

Update, Thursday 1400 GMT: In addition to all the following, even the New York Times is reporting that “Senior Marine intelligence officers in Iraq are … emphasizing that expectations for improved conditions [in Fallujah] have not been met.” Sounds bad, huh? Read the whole piece there.

I’ve seen confirmation elsewhere of my earlier surmise that the US/Allawist assault on Fallujah was timed to be over by November 22, the day the “Reconstructing Iraq” conference is due to open in Sharm al-Shaikh, Egypt…
Well, the best-laid plans can go awry. The resisters/insurgents in Fallujah are still very active in several parts of the city, according to this report on Al-Jazeera.net this morning.
The report quotes Iraqi journalist Fadil al-Badrani, who is still in the city, as saying:

“Fierce resistance is still raging with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and machine guns against the US forces stationed on the outskirts of Falluja.”
… Badrani said American war planes and tanks had resorted to bombing the holdout sectors of the city and some areas were still not under their control.
“Clashes are still continuing the southern and eastern edges of the town. US forces have so far failed to storm the northern al-Julan neighbourhood,” he said.
He added that US-led forces had abandoned al-Julan and the northern parts of the city, resorting shelling and aerial bombing those areas.

The reports in the western media about aerial bombing raids over parts of the city offer confirmation of the view that: (1) fierce resistance is continuing, and (2) there are sizeable parts of the city over which the US forces notably do not exercize on-the-ground control. If they did, then (1) they wouldn’t need the aerial bombardments, and (2) the air attacks would actually be impossible, given the density of US forces present on the ground throughout the whole city.

Continue reading “Fallujah battle continues”

US military commanders in Iraq have identified a major new threat– Iraqi hospitals!
That seems the only conclusion to be drawn from this piece of spine-chilling reporting from the NYT’s Eric Schmitt:

Military commanders point to several accomplishments in Falluja. A bastion of resistance has been eliminated, with lower than expected American military and Iraqi civilian casualties. Senior military officials say up to 1,600 insurgents have been killed and hundreds more captured, altogether more than half the number they estimated were in the city when the campaign began.
The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.

This is an outrageous and criminal argument to make.
Not only (see previous post) has the US made a positive decision not to count Iraqi civilian casualties. But now, any independent institution that issues casualty reports is judged to be “a propaganda weapon for the militants” and on that basis is to be shut down.
Watch out, the people who run the excellent British medical journal, The Lancet! There might be a Tomahawk missile heading your way any day now!
There is a difference, of course, between The Lancet and Fallujah General Hospital. Fallujah hospital was actually, until it was shut down, providing urgently needed medical services to a beleaguered population. Shutting it down in a situation of anything less than immediate military necessity–if there had been snipers on its roof, for example–is therefore clearly a major violation of the laws of war.
No such argument of “military necessity” has yet been made. All we have is the claim that the hospital was a “propaganda weapon in the hands of the militants.”
This is so sick, so unbelievably tragic. How can US commanders make these outrageous arguments and believe that the people who hear them will simply nod sagely and say, “Oh yes, that makes good sense”??
Also, why should anyone take seriously their claim that the Iraqi civilian casualties in Fallujah were “lower than expected”, since they also clearly admit that they don’t “do” casualty counts.
I wonder, at the military briefing from which those quotes were taken, where the follow-up questions from the press were:
“Okay, so how many Iraqi civilian casualties have there been?” ” How many were you expecting?” ” Was it valid to go ahead and launch the offensive even if you were expecting that high a number of casualties?” ” Tell us what is actually being done to help the wounded among the Iraqi civilians?”
No, none of those questions appear to have been asked. The media people involved just went along for the ride. Virtually oblivious to the moral consequences of what they were writing about– not to mention, to the quite predictable fallout of the anti-humanitarian nature of US actions on the politics inside Iraq.
It’s as if they don’t even really see Iraqis as fully human, subject to normal human motivations and the natural human desire for personal dignity… But perhaps doing that would be a dangerous exercize.

Andrew Mack, former director of Kofi Annan’s strategic planning unit, has a very important and carefully argued piece in the Japan Times today. He focuses on the issue of the gross disproportionality between the numbers of deaths of US combatants in Iraq and those that the US military has inflicted upon Iraqi civilians.
A (dis-)proportion of 100:1, that is.
His conclusion:

essentially for political reasons, the U.S. has chosen to pursue a counterinsurgency policy that is almost guaranteed to generate a huge civilian death toll.
In the West there is justifiable outrage at the barbarous beheadings of foreigners in Iraq, but relatively little concern about the tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis whose deaths are the inevitable consequence of a U.S. strategy designed to reduce U.S. casualties.

I should note that–for people who believe in “just war theory” (a relatively late accretion into Christian doctrine, but one that many westerrners seem to believe in strongly)– the “proportionality” of military actions taken by one’s own side is very important.
So, actually, is the issue of the “probability of success”. I.e., just war theorists recognize that since war is itself massively harmful, you don’t want to have it drag on and be “unsuccessful”.
I guess the Bushies just didn’t read their St. Augustine before they launched this war?
Proportionality of military action, and in particular the need to take positive action to avoid the infliction of harm on civilians, is also an important principle in the international laws of war.
I went to the website of the ICRC, the body internationally charged with interpreting and guarding the integrity of the international laws of war, and I punched “proportionality” into their internal search. It came up with this lengthy list of materials.
One of them was this appeal, issued Nov 9, dealing explicitly with the situation in Iraq. It starts:

The ICRC reminds all those involved in the armed confrontations in Iraq that international humanitarian law prohibits the killing or harming of civilians who are not directly taking part in the hostilities.
It calls upon all fighters to take every feasible precaution to spare civilians and civilian property and to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality in all military operations.
[“Distinction” = the positive obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to take active steps to avoid damage to the latter. Where such a distinction cannot be clearly made, commanders are obliged to assume that the individuals concerned are civilians until the opposite has been proved.]

Okay. How dispropotional have the US operations in Iraq been?
Andrew Mack, in the article cited above, builds on the results of the recent Lancet survey. He notes that the authors of that survey already recognized that Fallujah was such an extreme “outlier” in terms of the casualty totals inflicted there, that they had excluded the Fallujah figures from their global estimate of the death toll. He writes,

If the death rate from Fallujah had been included in the calculation, the “excess death” total would be closer to 200,000.
… It is important to note that the huge death toll is not due simply to the war — most violent deaths have occurred since the United States declared victory in April 2003.
The survey also shows that 84 percent of the violent deaths were caused not by rebels, but by coalition forces. And most of these deaths weren’t caused by soldiers fighting on the ground, but by long-range air and artillery strikes. Women and children together made up more than half of the violent deaths, with 38 percent of the total being children.

He notes:

Continue reading “Disproportionate violence”

Here are two good pieces of reporting by Dahr Jamail:
This is the latest post (Nov 12) on his blog. In it he describes driving round Baghdad with his driver/friend/interpeter Abu Talat…

One of our stops is at the home of Dr. Wamid Omar Nathmi, a senior political scientist at Baghdad University. An older, articulate man who vehemently opposed the regime of Saddam Hussein, he is now critical of the US policy which is engulfing Iraq in violence, bloodshed and chaos.
He told me that during the buildup to the siege of Fallujah, he had sent John Negroponte, the current so-called ambassador of Iraq, a letter which, along with several other points, asked him,

As part of the Bush/Allawist campaign to subdue Iraq’s cities, the US military has been turning off the water to many of them. You can imagine what this means for civilian families, hospitals, etc.
It is also a clear breach of the 2nd Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which deals with precisely the issue of what is permitted and what not permitted during situations of siege and assault on cities.
Dan O’Huiginn and his colleagues from Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq* have pulled together a very useful briefing paper on this issue. It’s written from a UK perspective– drawing together the info on the denial-of-water issue for British MPs and urging them to act on it. I am sure that it could easily be edited to form an appeal to legislators and authorities in other countries.
Especially the US!
I note parenthetically that while many in the US political establishment argue strongly for respect of the provisions of international humanitarian law that apply to the treatment of prisoners-of-war, or wounded combatants, they generally seem less enthusiastic about arguing for the provisions that are designed to protect civilians living under foreign military occupation.
I’m wondering whether this is because, while there is an implied “reciprocity” in all the Geneva Conventions and annexes, it might be harder for Americans to imagine that their (our) homeland might ever come under foreign military occupation than it is to imagine that US soldiers might be taken prisoner in hostilities?
This failure of imagination notwithstanding, it seems evident to me that basic human ethics, as well as the provisions of international humanitarian law, should be a powerful argument for trying to separate civilians as much as possible from the horrors of war.
Also, as Dan and Co. argue in their briefing paper, it only makes good political sense in the Iraqi context for the US/Allawists to try to treat Iraqi civilians decently…
—
*Sorry I got the full name of CASI wrong in an earlier post.