Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

Every Thursday, almost without fail, I join my friends from the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice in holding a one-hour “peace presence” on one of the busy corners in our town. (Right outside the local office building maintained by the federal government, actually.)
A few weeks ago I was making a few new signs to replace the ones that had become so tattered over the past three years. One I made says at the bottom “U.S. deaths in Iraq”. Above that there are spaces for four large single-digit numbers, and little velcro squares to which I attach the relevant digits each week. (This is all done with environment-hostile foamcore. Sorry ’bout that.)
Today the number was 1,591. I get the number out of the WaPo every Thursday. I realize it doesn’t mention the much great number of Iraqi deaths. One of our other signs says “We mourn all the victims.”
Preparing the digits each week is a horrible thing. Somehow it’s a very physical way of seeing how quickly that number rises.
In ‘Nam, the proportion of Vietnamese deaths to US military deaths was roughly 50 to 1. I believe something like the same proportion (or something even higher, given the US mil-tech “advances” since then) must apply today. But how, actually, do you count? What do you count? All the infants and sick people who died because of the war-caused degradation of what was once a fairly efficient modern safe-water system? All the sick people who died because of the war-caused chaos in the medical system in general, or because they couldn’t get to the hospital because of the rampant public insecurity?
… Anyway, my favorite sign to hold is still the one that says on one side, “Honk 4 peace” and on the other, “Rebuild our communities.” It’s a good intersection to stand at, since the lights are timed to allow only one of the four approaching streams of traffic to go through it at a time. So drivers in the other three approach roads all have to wait a while.
This means that all of us with the signs can focus on turning toward the approaching stream of traffic and trying to interact with those drivers. We wave and make peace signs to them.
You wouldn’t believe the number of honks we get.
In the past six weeks the number of honks has definitely been increasing– and also the intensity with which people do it. Several times today it felt like a veritable cacophony of different honkings, all competing with each other. Sometimes one or two of the drivers waiting at the light really feel they want to express themselves, and then that can set almost everyone else going as well.
The way I see it, it’s become not just an interactive thing– between us demonstrators and the drivers– but almost a community thing among the drivers themselves, as well.
Anyone who hates this war and who, sitting waiting in her or his car at the light, hears another driver “honking 4 peace” will know that she is not alone. That’s why, sometimes, the honking just seems to spiral almost out of control there.
To me, that’s incredibly valuable, to be able to “connect” all those people in a single symphony of honking, even if only just for a couple of minutes, in today’s unbelievably fractured US culture. (However, if you’re down on the pavement right in front of some of those big old honking pick-up trucks, it can really hurt your ears.)
About how to count all those war-related deaths of Iraqis, though…

Continue reading “Approaching 1,600”

Matt, over at Today in Iraq, put up the most amazing post yesterday, to mark the second anniversary of the “Mission Accomplished” peroration by Our Great Leader.
If you can’t read anything else this year, read that.
Let’s hope to God the US forces aren’t still over there, killing Iraqis and getting killed by them, this time next year.

Read Riverbend’s Monday post from her family’s neighborhood in Baghdad.
I lived through six years of just such horror during the civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s. Including the fiendish kinds of car-bombs (set by “Christian” militias) in which one goes off, people gather to help the wounded, and then ten minutes later another goes off…
They have those in Iraq, too, these days.
I could still describe to you the arrangement of body parts I saw in the street by the time I arrived, reporter’s notebook in hand.
I can still feel the same knot I’d get in my gut if a bomb went off and I thought it was somewhere near where my kids were.
Read Faiza’s latest post in English, too. Faiza is still in Jordan, but it seems to me she has a very clear eye for what’s going on in her homeland, Iraq:

Continue reading “Life, war, bombs, despair”

This article by Peter Maass in today’s NYT magazine is really worth reading. It’s about some extremely thuggish ex-Baathists in Iraq whom Allawi’s Interior Minister, Falah Naqib, put in charge of something called the Special Police Commandos.
They have US “advisors” working with them. Naturally. Maass, who knows his way around the world of US Special Thug Forces around the world says many of these guys had extensive experience in the US-backed and very violent rightist movements in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America.
(Negroponte’s fingerprints, most likely.)
In Salvador, as Maass reminds us, more than 70,000 people from the 6 million population were killed during that rightist-fueled terror in the twelve-year period 1980-92.
Anyway, this little extract gives some of the flavor of Maass’s latest piece. It’s about an SPC squad who were working unde the “advice” of Capt. Jeff Bennett of the 3rd Infantry Division:

The officer in charge of the raid — a Major Falah — now made it clear that he believed the detainee had led them on a wild-goose chase. The detainee was sitting at the side of a commando truck; I was 10 feet away, beside Bennett and four G.I.’s. One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence. The blows continued for a minute or so.
Bennett had seen the likes of this before, and he had worked out his own guidelines for dealing with such situations. ”If I think they’re going to shoot somebody or cut his finger off or do any sort of permanent damage, I will immediately stop them,” he explained. ”As Americans, we will not let that happen. In terms of kicking a guy, they do that all the time, punches and stuff like that.”

Or how about this:

Continue reading “The caudillo of Samarra”

I have decided to take down– for now!– the “Democracy Denied in Iraq” counter that has been a feature of the JWN sidebar for more than seven weeks now.
On this day, 88 days after the partially legitimate January 30 election in Iraq, UIA list head Ibrahim Jaafari has won approval from the elected National Assembly for his list for a transitional government.
I realize that the path to sovereign and democratic self-government in Iraq still looks extremely bumpy. (An under-statement, that.)
As that AP report states,

the 37-member Cabinet [presented to the NA by Jaafari] still has two vacancies, five acting ministers and fails to incorporate in a meaningful way the Sunni Arab minority due to a dispute over the suitability of Baathists who served in Saddam Hussein’s regime…
The historic decision also was made with a third of legislators in the 275-member National Assembly absent.
Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari told reporters that decisions over the vacant and acting Cabinet positions will be made in three to four days.

Still, inasmuch as having the counter up on the sidebar expressed a forceful reproach to the US occupation authorities, I think it’s appropriate right now to take it down and “give Jaafari (and everyone else involved) a chance.”
I still have the HTML/script for the counter, however, and shall put it up at a moment’s notice whenever I think it should go back up.
“Empires will tremble!” (as a good friend of mine once said with I think just a touch of irony when I told him the Quakers were about to bring out a report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
A couple more significant details from the AP report:

Continue reading “Democracy possibly proceeding in Iraq?”

Yesterday, I noted here that Iraq’s transitional President, Jalal Talabani, has a “security counsellor” called Wafiq al-Samarai.
Commenter “Badr” noted that the position should probably be translated as “national security advisor”, and that “Wafiq al-Samarai was chief of military intelligence under Saddam and a leading opposition figure to the regime later.”
Interesting.
Both that Talabani has his own “national security advisor”, in a system that I had previously understood to be one in which the responsible-to-parliament PM would exercize executive power and the President would perform Queen Elizabeth 2-like ceremonial tasks.
I guess I got that wrong, huh? (But actually, did I?)
If Talabani is really building his own entire parallel ruling apparatus I think the word for that is “divide and rule”?
Also interesting, that Talabani would pick this Samarai person. Can Badr or anyone else give more details to reveal the distance Samarai might actually have traveled from his high-level Baathist past? Also, knowing something about his commitment to democratic principles and the rule of law would, I think, be very informative…
In a related vein, Juan Cole writes today that:

Jalal Talabani told al-Hayat that he feared that the concerns among the Shiite religious parties about Sunni Arab cabinet ministers being completely free of any Baath association would cause the baby to be thrown out with the bath water. It is this issue of vetting the Sunni Arab ministers that appears to have delayed the finalization of the cabinet, along with continued Sunni Arab demands for some important ministries. Talabani warned against any purge of ex-Baathists, pointing out that there there are a million and a half Baathists in Iraq. He said it was important to distinguish between ordinary party members and the Baath military. The latter had to be kept away from the levers of power, he said, lest it make another coup similar to the one in 1968.
Talabani also warned that for foreign troops to be withdrawn at this point risked provoking civil war. He insisted that Iraq is not occupied[!!!]

Oh, how convenient for Mr. Talabani as, with huge help from his friends in Washington, he gathers powers to himself and is able blithely to contradict the actual standing of his country under international law.

Yesterday, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting put out the first edition of its once-daily ‘Iraqi Press Monitor’ since February 2nd.
I’m glad they’ve cranked it up again. It’s not perfect but it does provide some interesting tidbits. Like one in yesterday’s edition, from the Chalabist Al-Mutamar newspaper that referred to someone called “Wafiq al-Samarai, security counsellor to the Iraqi president.” Samarai had reportedly issued his “first press release”, in which he

promised an end to terrorist violence. In particular, he said, foreign insurgent groups would driven out through a combination of national reconciliation, dialogue and employment.

Well, never mind so much what the guy said. But who knew that the Iraqi President would have his own “security counsellor”?
I thought the system of government was supposed to be one in the which the Prime Minister headed the executive power?
In today’s edition of IPM, they had this report from the SCIRI daily, Al-Adalah:

Jawad al-Maliki, who deputises for Jaafari in the Islamic Dawa Party, said the government should have been announced on January 25 [oops, maybe make that ‘April 25’?] but the decision was postponed for a day as some issues remained unresolved. Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zibari described Jaafari

It’s twelve weeks today since January’s significant (if certainly not perfect) multi-party election in Iraq. And still, the party list that won the majority of seats has been prevented– both by the strictures of the US-dictated Transitional Administrative Law and by the manueverings of key US allies in the country– from being able to form a government accountable to the elected National Assembly.
The Bush administration, it seems to me, has just about completely “blown” the extremely valuable second chance it was handed, virtually on a plate, by the Iraqi voters back on January 30th.
The “first chance” Washington had to effect constructive social and political reform in Iraq was right after the US military victory back in April 2003. As longtime JWN readers will recall, I always opposed the decision to go to war. But once it had been fought, and apparently militarily “won”, I did not pursue a vengeful attitude toward its authors but instead advocated strongly for a reconciliatory and rehabilitative approach.
They didn’t take my advice. (Nothing new there, but I persist in giving it.) Instead, they pursued many of the most anti-humanitarian tactics of classic colonialist “pacifications”, particularly through their mass-detentions policy and their launching of extremely nasty “punitive expeditions” in Najaf, Fallujah, and elsewhere. All of which expeditions were chosen in preference to the option of negotiations that was very present in all or nearly all of those situations.
At least, though, the Bushies showed some commitment to the goal of democratic elections. On this blog and elsewhere, I spoke out and lauded that goal, despite the many evident shortcomings with the idea of trying to hold decent elections in a situation of continued military occupation and rampant public insecurity.
The majority of the Iraqi people showed great courage, and turned out to vote. And miraculously, through that act they offered the US occupation authorities in Iraq an extremely valuable “second chance”. Indeed, this second chance had even more legitimacy than the first one, since it was won through the US forces’ support for a fairly genuine exercise in Iraqi popular consultation.
Moreover, unlike the Bushies’ “first chance” back in April 2003, the second chance was something that democrats and reformers throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds could empathize with, and openly hope to emulate. It therefore had an extremely broad “resonance effect” throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. (A failure of the ‘democratic experiment’ in Iraq will, as a result, have a much broader domino effect than anything the US suffered as a result of the failure in Vietnam… )
Much-needed political and social reform could, it was hoped, come through the act of voting! How much more palatable is that as an strategy, for everyone, than the idea of reform coming through military aggression?
But the Bushies are, I think, very close indeed to having blown this second chance…
Is it too early to make a definitive judgment on this? (I have been keeping the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter up on the sidebar here for more than seven weeks now, and have always hoping to be able to take it down “soon”….)
The latest word on the AP wire tonight is that,

Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari [has] decided, some members of his political bloc said, to shun further attempts to include members of the party headed by [Iyad] Allawi, the secular Shiite politician who had served as prime minister as the country prepared for elections Jan. 30.
… Al-Jaafari’s list could be put to parliament as early as Monday, some of his bloc said. Others indicated the Cabinet announcement would be made Tuesday.

But as the writer of that piece, Thomas Wagner, notes: “Many such forecasts have proven wrong so far.”
But even if Jaafari is able to win parliamentary support for his list on Monday or Tuesday, how much real ability will his government have to govern?
This is an extremely serious issue. And much of the answer lies in the hands of the country’s US occupation administration. (I hope JWN readers haven’t for a moment been taken in by the Bushites’ protestations that they are “not an occupation force” in Iraq any more. Of course they are– both in fact, and under international law.)
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course in pursuing questions of internal politics. Certainly, it would not have to listen to fatwas such as that issued by Donald Rumsfeld when, during his recent visit, he explicitly “told” the Iraqis what they could and couldn’t do with regard to former Baathists.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would have full control over national resources and national revenues.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government would chart its own course with regard to national security. That course would most likely involve reaching agreements with the country’s neighbors, as well as with those portions of the occupying forces still remaining (or not) inside the country.
An empowered, elected Iraqi government could make its own appeals to whatever portions of the international community it should choose to, for help in attaining any of its national tasks. It would certainly not feel beholden to any diktats coming out of Washington.
… Meanwhile, we should note that much of the “story” that has been told by the mainstream US media about recent events in Iraq has claimed that the situation in the country got notably better for a whole period after the elections, and is only now threatening to get worse.
But that is actually a completely wrong view to present…

Continue reading “Bushies close to losing Iraqi ‘second chance’?”

WaPo article by Josh White today:

An Army inspector general’s report has cleared senior Army officers of wrongdoing in the abuse of military prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere, government officials familiar with the findings said yesterday.

Why am I not surprised?
White’s piece notes that Brig. Gen Janis Karpinski is the only flag officer so far to have been recommended for punishment.
The article also provides a brief and generally clear summary of all the many previous (and deeply overlapping) ” investigations” the military has carried out over the past year into the abuse/torture of detainees.
Clausewitz, of course, was the person who famously coined the phrase “fog of war”. I sometimes think that what the Penatgon’s high-ups have achieved by organizing these numerous overlapping investigations has been to create “the fog of investigation”.
But maybe I’m too cynical.
What I do know is that there has been nothing like the clear, unequivocal leadership that has been needed from every civilian and military portion of the US national command structure that states flat-out that no act of torture or abuse will be tolerated!; that any suspected instances of abuse or torture will be investigated immediately, and any guilty party punished!; and that the Geneva Conventions and other essential humanitarian-law protections for detainees remain our sole standard!
Those kinds of clear leadership actions are what I was calling for in May and June of last year when I was writing a lot about the need for a clear posture of zero tolerance for torture. Here, or here, or here.
The Bushies, though, chose not go that route. Now, I know full well that as I write this, US government employees and contractors somewhere around the world are abusing and torturing detainees– on my tax dollar. It makes me sick to my stomach. It also makes me think more seriously than before about trying to become a war tax resister.

I’m in a real rush today. There was an interesting article in toway’s WaPo by Ann Scott Tyson (embedded). It gave a clear picture of how the US forces have almost zero control of the terrain, just 25 miles out of downotwn Baghdad. (Okay, so there are huge areas of Baghdad itself where they have no control, either.)
I found this portion, where a US Army captain commanding a small position at the south of the “Triangle of Death” is describing his situation to a visiting colonel, particularly interesting:

Capt. Ryan Seagreaves, of Allentown, Pa., told McMaster that he needed engineers to reinforce and expand his austere base so that there would be room for more Iraqi forces. He said he also needed dirt to fill protective barriers. Iraqi contractors are so terrified to work in the area that a convoy of 10 earth-filled dump trucks recently refused to travel south to McMaster’s base. One driver fainted when told the destination, he said.

Traditionally, when officers in modern armies needed more “dirt” to fortify their position, they would either dig it up themselves or be supplied by their logistics people with military earth-moving equipment to get the job done… Now, they are reliant on outside “contractors” to do even this basic job?
When the British Army suffered terrible losses and strategic setbacks in Iraq back in 1916-17, it was precisely because of completely insufficient logistic support for their forward positions. And yet, in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld blithely thought he could ignore the lessons of history (and all the good advice the uniformed military had tried to give him), and decided to go ahead and conquer Iraq with an ultra-“lean” attacking force, anyway.
The US forces– but also, to a much greater extent, the Iraqi people— have been suffering the chaotic, disastrous consequences of that decision ever since.
I’ve been thinking of trying to write a broad strategic survey of what’s been happening with the war, but I absolutely need to continue concentrating on my Africa book.
So while I do that, I’ll leave the comments thread here for y’all to put in additional news about Iraq.