Category: Iraq-2006-Q2

Tragic Riverbend post, telling us about life in her corner of “liberated” Iraq.. (Thanks to Frank for the tip.)

In case we needed a reminder of why the Geneva Conventions (which are part of the “laws of war”) are important, the most recent (of many now emerging) revelations about the misdeeds of US soldiers in Iraq can provide one.
On June 16, two US servicemen were captured during what looked like a fairly well-planned ambush of their patrol. Three days later, their mutilated bodies were found.
The Bushites pointed to the treatment of those two as revealing the inhumane nature of the insurgents in Iraq…
Now, AP’s Ryan Lenz has revealed that the two captured GIs belonged to the very same army platoon as five other soldiers who are now accused of having deliberately plotted and then committed the rape of an Iraqi woman and the subsequent murder of her along with three members of her family, back in March.
This is a grisly, tragic sequence of events all round. In no way do I argue that the gruesome earlier behavior of their platoon-mates in any way “justified” the way the two captured GIs were treated. All these abuses of the laws of war are quite unjustifiable.
I do, however, hold that it is quite likely that if members of this platoon had behaved all along towards the Iraqis whom they encountered in a way consistent with the Geneva Conventions, then those two murdered and mutilated GIs might now still be alive… That’s the thing about the Geneva Conventions: they provide a single unified code of conduct for how everyone should behave in a war zone.
Yes, of course if the soldiers in the US occupation forces all kept impeccably to the standards of the Gevena Conventions, it is quite possible that the insurgents would still commit some atrocities– though in far, far smaller numbers than the ones they’ve committed to date.
But the many messages the Bush administration’s high officials have put out about the idea that the Geneva Conventions are somehow “outdated” and don’t apply to Americans have certainly trickled down to the troops and affected the judgment of many of them regarding what they think is acceptable and what unacceptable in a war zone.
The piece by Lenz, by the way, is interesting in a number of ways. It seems he has been able to “break” the story about the March rape and murders in the US MSM in good part because, as the tagline at the end of the story informs us, he was previously embedded with the 502nd Infantry Regiment, the same regiment of which the accused delinquents were part. So I assume he must have had some fairly good sources at the regimental level there who helped give him some of the background to the story.
He writes:

Up to five soldiers are being investigated in the March killings, the fifth pending case involving alleged slayings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.
The Americans entered the Sunni Arab’s family home, separated three males from the woman, raped her and burned her body using a flammable liquid in a cover-up attempt, a military official close to the investigation said. The three males were also slain.
The soldiers had studied their victims for about a week and the attack was “totally premeditated,” the [US military] official said on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
… The official said the rape and killings appeared to have been a “crime of opportunity,” noting that the soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.
One of the family members they allegedly killed was a child, said a senior Army official who also requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

But here is another interesting aspect of the case: Lenz writes that “Mahmoudiya police Capt. Ihsan Abdul-Rahman said Iraqi officials received a report on March 13 alleging that American soldiers had killed the family in the Khasir Abyad area, about 6 miles north of Mahmoudiya.” He doesn’t say whether Abdul-Rahman informed the US military of this allegation at the time. He does write that, “U.S. officials said they knew of the deaths but thought the victims were killed in sectarian violence.”
Oh, what a handy explanation, eh?
But the way the details of the crime started to emerge up at the officer level wasapparently through the participation of soldiers from the platoon in question in what are described as “counseling sessions” that were– according to an earlier filing from Lenz– organized among platoon members after the deaths of their two comrades, in an attempt to help them deal with their feelings, etc etc.
From what Lenz writes, the rape-and-murder action undertaken by the five had been known of prior to that by a number of their comrades. He writes, “A second soldier, who also was not involved, said he overhead soldiers conspiring to commit the crimes and then later saw bloodstains on their clothes, the official said.”
But it wasn’t till the “counseling sessions” that any of these other, non-involved platoon members shared their suspicions or concerns with their superiors. Omerta ruled…
Anyway, all branches of the US military that have members on active duty inside Iraq are now becoming stained by the revelation of earlier acts of atrocity and mistreatment of Iraqi civilians. Military discipline seems to be coming under exactly the same kinds of pressure there that it came under in Vietnam.
Yes, to a large degree I do hold these individual sodliers responsible for their misdeeds. Burt I hold their commanders even more responsible for their training and discipline… and the higher up the chain of command you go, the more responsible these commanders should be held.
So let’s see, that goes up through the level of their regimental commanders up to the all-Iraq command to Centcom to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to– Donald Rumsfeld, to President Bush. We US citizens should demand that the nation’s higherst commanders of all be held directly responsible for upholding the rule of law– whether in the midst of combat (the circumstance that is addressed directly by the internationally agreed “laws of war”) or in any other circumstance. They also need also to take robust action to ensure compliance with the laws of war by soldiers and officers at all levels.
If they don’t do that, then as citizens of a nation built upon the rule of law we need to do the “holding responsible” for them– at the ballot box!
Meanwhile, until the US reverts to being a nation that abides by and upholds laws, the risks to individual US soldiers (and civilians) will continue to mount.
Note, too, that a call that the US military start complying with the laws of war in no way contradicts my equally strong call that the US military be withdrawn from Iraq at the earliest possible time, and the US military as a whole be radically downsized. Of course, if there were no US occupation of Iraq back in March, then that poor Iraqi woman and her family would never have met the grisly fate that was inflicted on them. (And nor would the two slain soldiers or the other 500 or so US soldiers killed this year in Iraq have been sent home in body bags, either.)
But whether the troops are in Iraq or not, they need to uphold the laws of war. It’s as simple as that.

I  know I’m late in commenting on the US Supreme Court’s decision,
announced June 19, that ruled
illegal the Bushites’ project of establishing special “military
commissions” to ptorcess the cases of the 500-some men still held at
the Guantanamo Naval Base.

The decision is important at a number of levels.  Firstly,
regarding the fate of the Gitmo detainees, the Supremes told the
administration it has to either try them according to the existing
rules and procedures used by courts martial (which operate under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice)– or, it should go to Congress and
ask Congress to legislate new rules for dealing with these detainees.

(I’m assuming this also applies to detainees held by the US military or
“other government agencies” at Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan, or
elsewhere, as well?  I’m not sure, though.)

Secondly, the June 29 decision informs the President quite clearly that
even though 9/11 might have changed many things for Americans– a
proposition worthy of considerable further discussion– still, it did
nothing to alter the concept of the US as a political system that
operates under duly legislated laws rather than through
imperial fiat or the undisclosed and unregulated workings of secret
government agencies.  This will have huge effects, I hope, on the
Bushites’ ability to continue with other illegal projects like the
widespread use of warrantless wiretapping of everyone’s communications
and illegal scrutinization of people’s financial dealings…

Good for the Supremes!  (Or at least, for the five of them who
voted for this ruling, as opposed to the three who opposed it.)

Regarding the fate of the Gitmo detainees– many of whom have now
languished under the sometimes brutal and always demeaning control of
their captors for more than four years now– the administration (and
Congress) will find themselves dealing with some rather tough dilemmas:

Continue reading “Bush’s Gitmo woes”

Is the “Khalilzad Cable“, the full text of which was published by the WaPo today, the present war’s equivalent of the Vietnam War’s “Pentagon Papers“?
Back in 1971, when Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg leaked huge portions of the 47-volume report on US-Vietnam relations commissioned by SecDef Robert McNamara to the NYT and the WaPo, their publication by the two papers sparked a storm of controversy in the US and helped to swing elite opinion massively against the war.
The “Khalilzad cable”, which was sent from Viceroy Khalilzad to Secretary of State Condi Rice just “hours” before the surprise trip that Bush made to Baghdad on June 12, reveals how stunningly unsuccessful all the US’s efforts to stabilize Iraq and build effective, pro-US new security forces there have been. Equally significantly, it also reveals the degree to which Zal Khalilzad, the US Viceroy in Baghdad, is aware of this situation– despite all of Bush’s earnest public avowals that things are going ahead very well in Iraq.
That’s why it deserves to have the same impact within the US policy elite that the Pentagon Papers had in their day.
The text of the cable– marked “Sensitive”, but also “Unclassified”– was given by a person or persons unnamed to brilliant WaPo columnist Al Kamen. The title that Khalilzad put in the “subject” line was this: Snapshots from the Office: Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord.
Okay, the content of what was in the cable was pretty interesting– though not much in it comes as any huge surprise to anyone who’s been following the good Iraqi blogs and good journalism from Iraq over the past few months. But what intrigued me just as much was the context within which Khalilzad was writing it… It seems to be a detailed study of the behavior and attitudes of just nine employees in (I assume from the title) the Public Affairs Office at the “embassy”.
Why did the ambassador spend so much time and effort producing this particular piece of work, I wonder?
I have two suppositions: (1) It’s possible that the “Social Discord” within the PAO had grown to the degree that the office’s work had become noticeably fault-ridden… in which case Condi might well have asked her man there: “Zal, so what the heck is going on in the PAO, anyway?” Or, (2), Zal, last weekend, for whatever reason, might have thought it would be instructive to try to provide Condi with the most firsthand description he could of “How Iraqis Live”… Well, he’s not going to get that from talking to the Iraqi political leaders… and he’s not about to exit from the Green Zone in a disguise like some latter-day Haroun al-Rashid and go out ‘n’ about in downtown Baghdad to see how his subjects are really living there… so the “subjects” of the planned enquiry who are closest to hand seem to be the three Iraqi women and six Iraqi men who work in his own PAO.
(Or, of course, both motivating factors might have been at work.)
Para 4 of the cable is interesting. He writes that the women from the PAO, “also tell us that some ministries, notably the Sadrist controlled Ministry of Transportation, have been forcing females to wear the hijab at work.” This is recounted with the air of being ‘news’– and it indicates that Khalilzad’s best way of learning what’s going on in Iraqi government ministries is to listen to hearsay from the handful of women who work in his PAO?
Similarly, in para 6, Khalilzad once again shows us how reliant he is on indirect hearsay to learn things about life in Iraq that are common knowledge to bloggers, good journos, and human-rights workers within the country:

An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province… ”

Para 11 gives a little snapshot of how terrifying life has become for the Iraqi employees in the US Embassy. It deals with the strong suspicions these employees have about the hostile attitudes of the Iraqi forces personnel controlling the access checkpoints around the Green Zone:

They seemed to be more militia-like and in some cases seemingly taunting. One employee [told us that] guards had held her embassy badge up and proclaimed loudly to nearby passers-by “Embassy” as she entered. Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people.

Paras 12-15 seem particularly revealing:

12… [O]f nine employees in March, only four had family members who knew they worked at the embassy. That makes it difficult for them, and for us…
13. We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their “cover”…
14. Some of our staff do not take home their American cellphones, as this makes them a target. Planning for their own possible abduction, they use code names for friends and colleaguyes and contacts entered into Iraqi cellphones. For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members at on-camera press events.
15. More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions we would make for them if we evacuate.

Then, there are some paras where Zal tells Condi what he has learned about general security conditins in the area around Baghdad from these PAO staff people:

20. Since Samarra [i.e. the late-February bombing of the mosque in Samarra]… [o]ur staff– and our contacts– have become adept in modifying behavior to avoid “Alasas,” informants who keep an eye out for “outsiders” in neighborhoods. The Alasa mentality is becoming entrenched as Iraqi security forces fail to gain public confidence.
21. Our staff report that security and services are being rerouted through “local providers” whose affiliations are vague. [Or perhaps your staff know but don’t want to tell you, Zal? Had you thought of that?]… Personal safety depends on good relations with the “neighborhood” governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by the militias. People no longer trust most neighbors.

And finally, in para 23, Zal does reveal that he’s not quite sure how much he can trust even these staff people: “Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exaggerate developments or steer us towards news that comports with their own worldview. Objectivity, civility, and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don’t abate.”
So okay, at the next press briefing at the White House or the State Department, let’s hear some of those reporters asking the Prez, or Condi, or their flaks: “So really, how are things going in Baghdad? And do you judge that Ambassador Khalilzad is an experienced and well-informed judge of the situation there?”
My judgment from all the above– assuming the cable as leaked and published is genuine (and I assume the WaPo would have done much to authenticate it before they published it)– is that things are even more precarious for the US position in Iraq than I had previously thought… It seems to me that Khalilzad and his staff there are hanging on by a hair. And what’s more, he seems to understand this– and to be eager to warn Condi about just how bad things are… And this, apparently even after he’d gotten the good news about the killing of Zarqawi and Maliki’s completion of forming his government…
(We have also, earlier, seen Khalilzad or his staff people telling the NYT’s John Burns that of course it was the US Viceroys in Baghdad before him who made all the big mistakes… not him, at all.)

Our esteemed colleague Reidar Visser has two good new entries on his website: this on the federalism issue in Iraq, and this on the latest cabinet appointments there.
I don’t, alas, have time for any prolonged comment on these really interesting essays here, and I note that both of them contain a wealth of well-organized information and analysis that’s just about impossible to come by anywhere else (or at least, anywhere else in the English-speaking world.)
I hate to make a critical point. But I note that in the “federalism” piiece he writes:

A second group of federations are those that have been deliberately “designed”, often after a period of political upheaval and regime breakdown. Examples of this include post-war Germany, South Africa after apartheid and Ethiopia in the democratic era…

But today’s South Africa is really not a federal state in any sense in which I understand the term. It is a determinedly unitary state. The nine provinces in South Africa were deliberately– and as the result of a lengthy political process– deisgned to be purely administrative units, and not units that in any way embodied any ethnic or cultural particularity… And similarly, the ethnic and linguistic particularities in the state have no defined geographic basis (such as they have in, for example, Belgium.) That, though many Afrikaners and some, though by no means all, of the people who had previously been “citizens” of the Bantustans might at some point have been open to the idea of having ethnically based subunits within a broader South African federation.
For me, South Africa is a fascinating example of a state that, though unitary, is still intentionally dedicated to the goals of multi-culturalism and mutli-lingualism. It could therefore stand as a great example to either an Israeli-Palestinian unitary state in the future, or more immediately to the Iraqi state today. (Or indeed, to the US… )
Well, that’s just a small criticism. Clearly, I need to go and read both of Visser’s essays much more closely when I have the time.
I also note, regarding the relevance of the “Spanish example” that he cites for a possibly multilingual state, that that did not become possible for Spain until the internal linguistic-cultural issues had a chance of becoming “diluted” within the broader impulse of Spain’s assimilation within the broad, peaceable, democratic polity of the EU. But this is far from being the case in Iraq regarding, for example, the Kurdish question…
Lots of food for thought, though.

Two “gains” for the Bush folks’ project in Iraq today, that I am sure will get heavily hyped by the administration and all its flaks: The reported killing of Abu Mus’ab Zarqawi in Ba’quba, and the naming and rapid swearing-in of ministers to the crucial three security portfolios there.
That latter AP report tells us:

The new defense minister is Iraqi Army Gen. Abdul-Qader Mohammed Jassim al-Mifarji [with] Shiites Jawad al-Bolani for interior and Sherwan al-Waili for national security.

(Note the now apparently routinized identification of people by sect. I find that scary.)
These two political “gains” for the Bush project in Iraq come on a day when two of my articles announcing the failure of this project are being published. However, my underlying analysis still certainly stands– and primarily, my conclusion that it’s no use having even the “full deck” of government ministers named and sworn in if the administrative machinery of governance is so broken that it hardly works at all.
Can a Minister for National Security deliver security? Can all of these three ministers together do the same?
Can a Minister for Water deliver water? A Minister for Agriculture deliver the services that will allow the repair of the country’s many technical, financing, and marketing systems in that field? No.
(I had actually written something to that effect in my first draft of the CSM column, since I thought the three security ministers might get named between me writing it and it coming out… But that got cut out in the editing.)
Anyway, let us now see. I would be extremely happy if the naming of these latest ministers was associated with finding a significant resolution of the deepseated political issues that have come to divide the country. If that is the case– if a spirit of “Iraqi national unity” can now spread throughout Iraq– that would be truly be a blessing.
Given the political balance within the country, however, I don’t see that any such entente, if found, would result in the emergence of a pro-US political order in the country. Therefore, whether the Maliki government “succeeds” politically– which, I maintain, it can do only on Iraqi-nationalist terms– or whether it fails, then the Bush project of installing a pro-US order in Iraq will have failed. Let us see exactly what kind of a “cakewalk” this turns out to be…
(And as for Zarqawi? From everything I understand about Iraq, his killing will make only a dent, at most, in the trajectory of the anti-US insurgency in Anbar and other provinces. I agree with Juan Cole when he wrote today, “Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don’t expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.”)
So anyway, today will no doubt be a day for the Bush administration’s leaders, flaks, and allies to have a day of public jubilation. Tomorrow, when they get back to figuring what to do with the many very difficult problems they face around the world, things won’t look so different from they did yesterday. Long-term outlook for them: still gloomy.

Here is my column in Thursday’s CSM calling for a rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (I also warn there that various catastrophic scenarios in Iraq are very possible.)
Here’s how it starts:

When President George W. Bush and his advisers launched the invasion of Iraq, they promised that this project was intended not only to find and destroy the “weapons of mass destruction” that they claimed were there, but also to remove Saddam Hussein and bring good governance to Iraq’s 26 million people.
Now, some three-plus years later, it is clear that this latter project has failed. (And there were no WMDs to be found.)
Indeed, Mr. Bush’s good-governance project in Iraq has failed so miserably that it cannot now be revived…

Here’s how it ends:

In March 2003, Bush launched a big roll of the geopolitical dice when he invaded Iraq. The stakes were very high. But now it is crystal clear that he “lost” that bet. Far better to cut the nation’s losses now and shift to rebuilding a decent relationship with the rest of the world, than to sit idly by in Iraq waiting for what can only be a further deterioration of the situation.

In the Salon.com piece, which should be up on their site on Thursday, I expand on some of the further geostrategic implications of what I wrote about in the CSM piece.
How capable are the Bushites– and the US citizenry as a whole– of coming to terms with the new geopolitical realities, I wonder?

Immortal quote from Riverbend yesterday:

I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.

I can’t tell you how much this reminds me of Lebanon, 1976.
I covered the aftermaths of a number of car-bombs there. They were used especially by the “Christian”-exclusivist forces agains civilians living on the Muslim-and-leftist side.
Body parts scattered about. A hand on the dashboard of a car across the street… Random pieces of human flesh thrown onto a tree…
I covered the aftermaths of a lot of incidences of ethnic/sectarian cleansing, too. The “clearing out” of some 250,000 Shiite Muslims from the neighborhoods of East Beirut– and of course, the “clearing out” of the Palestinian refugee camps from there, too.
The International Organization for Migration reported June 2 from Iraq that,

More than one million people are displaced in[side] Iraq as a result of decades of conflict with at least 203,000 of them particularly vulnerable and in need of humanitarian assistance. Most urgent however, are the needs of those displaced since late February.

The report also says,

Nearly 100,000 people have been displaced in Iraq’s central and southern governorates since the bombing of the shrine at Samara on 22 February and numbers are continually rising,

Until recently, the UN Country Team (UNCT) that coordinates the humanitarian aid supplied by the various UN bodies in Iraq (UNHCR, World Food Program, WHO, Unicef, etc) has steadfastly tried to avoid supporting the establishment of any large-scale IDP camps, as this report from May 30 spelled out.
(This position was most likely adopted in line with the thinking of former UNHCR chief Mrs. Sadako Ogata, whom I heard agonizing back in 1995 over the effects inside Bosnis of the international community’s establishment of–nearly always– mono-ethnic IDP camps there. Her clear assessment was that the establishment of those camps had facilitated the many waves of ethnic cleansing that raged acorss that land and the concurrent emergence of mono-ethnic and often separatist polities there… This is an incredibly tough kind of decision for humanitarian-aid managers to have to make.)
However, in Iraq, the national government has already started to support the establishment of IDP camps. The UN report linked to there says this:

The UNCT has consistently taken the position that the establishment of IDP camps should be avoided; and that IDPs ought to be supported through host family arrangements until alternative accommodation and durable solutions can be found. Nevertheless, given the fact that the government has already begun setting up IDP camps and isrequesting assistance from the humanitarian community, the UNCT’s IDP Working Group is preparing a guidance note on how the UNCT could support these camps as an option of last resort.

As in any instance of atrocity-laden inter-group conflict, large numbers of Iraqi citizens have also fled outside their country. I am not sure how many there are in Jordan or Iran right now. (Any info on such figures, friends?) But this report by the UN’s IRIN service from Damascus says:

Local NGOs put the number of Iraqis in Syria at about 800,000, the majority of whom live in the suburbs of Damascus in deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Before the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003, their numbers were estimated at only 100,000.
The report further noted that prostitution among young Iraqi women, some as young as 12 years old, “may become more widespread, since the economic situation of Iraqi families is deteriorating.” “Organised networks dealing in the sex trade were reported,” it noted, citing evidence that “girls and women were trafficked by organised networks or family members”.
Rising child labour was also cited as a worrying trend…
“We can’t leave Syria alone on this issue,” said Dietrun Günther, senior protection officer at the UNHCR in Damascus. “If the West really wants to help Syria in this matter, it must negotiate new terms for its support of refugees.”

Anyway, let’s all just work for the speediest possible end to the violence and destruction in Iraq, and the speediest possible return of all these internally and internationally displaced Iraqi citizens to their homes.
And we could light a special candle for Riverbend: The clarity, humanity, and eloquence of her writing about the effects of the maelstrom of violence in Iraq make her testimony every bit as powerful as Anne Frank’s testimony of living as a hunted fugitive in Nazi-occupied Holland.

This little piece of reporting by Capitol Hill Blue’s Doug Thompson looks very significant. (Hat-tip to Juan Cole for flagging it.)
Thompson writes:

Military commanders in the field in Iraq admit in private reports to the Pentagon the war “is lost” and that the U.S. military is unable to stem the mounting violence killing 1,000 Iraqi civilians a month.
Even worse, they report the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha is “just the tip of the iceberg” with overstressed, out-of-control Americans soldiers pushed beyond the breaking point both physically and mentally.
“We are in trouble in Iraq,” says retired army general Barry McCaffrey. “Our forces can’t sustain this pace, and I’m afraid the American people are walking away from this war.”
Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has clamped a tight security lid on the increasingly pessimistic reports coming out of field commanders in Iraq, threatening swift action against any military personnel who leak details to the press or public.

McCaffrey has been in Iraq fairly recently and was one of the Iraq experts called in to a small-group meeting with Pres. Bush last week. I just hope that Bush (1) allowed McCaffrey enough time to give an honest report on what he had seen, and (2) listened to him carefully and understood what he was hearing.
I’ve been pretty busy over the past few days writing two pieces that I consider important on the theme that the failure of the Bushite project in Iraq is now clear. One is my column for Thursday’s CSM. The other is a longer think-piece that should appear on Salon.com tomorrow.
It has become increasingly clear to me over recent weeks that:

(1) The US military has no ability and no plan for resolving Iraq’s interlocking crises of public security collapse, infrastructural breakdown, and prolonged political impasse. These problems are unevenly distributed through the country. But the fact that the insecurity is greatest of all within the huge metropolis of Baghdad, the hub of the country, is fatal to the Bushite project.
(2) The political process being shepherded forward by Viceroy Khalilzad has been going nowhere. Here we are, now nearly 6 months after that much-hyped national election of december 15, and the country still doesn’t have a full government!
(3) Also, Juan Cole’s daily events-in-Iraq blog, which used to contain many tidbits of internal Iraqi political news, has become almost totally a lengthy daily catalogue of grisly deaths and mayhem. (And of course it’s not just Juan… That is, unfortunately, most of the news that’s happening inside Iraq these days.)

Invading Iraq was– as I note in both the pieces I’ve been writing– a huge roll of the geopolitical dice by the Bushites. That they have lost the “game” they played there there will have huge repurcussions– both in Iraq, and far beyond.
Here, just as a benchmark, is the lead to the column I had in the CSM on January 9, 2003:

Any use of massive violence such as that Washington is now threatening against Iraq is a terrible thing.
Everything we know about violence gives two clear lessons. First, the use of force always has unintended – often quite unpredictable – consequences. And second, war in the modern era always disproportionately harms civilians.

And here’s how I finished it:

Mr. President, there is still time to stop this war. True, the build-up toward it has already been very expensive. But you should not conclude that the fact of those already sunk costs locks you into a path of war against Iraq from which there is no escape. If you launch this war, then the cost – in dollars, in human suffering, and in unfolding strategic chaos around the Middle East and the world – will be unimaginably greater than anything you’ve spent to date.
Turn back. You have many friends in the US and around the world who will eagerly help you find a way to do so.

He didn’t listen to me, or to any others of the hundreds of experts in Middle Eastern and world affairs who warned him this would turn out badly… I am crying for the people of Iraq this week. I just hope they can find a way to hold their country together and bind up the wounds they are all currently suffering.

On the 7^th of June 1981, during the
Iraq-Iran war, the Israeli Air Force bombed the Iraqi nuclear site. Many
tried to justify this act. (For example, one commentator wrote, “America
and the coalition forces might have faced a nuclear-armed Iraq during the

Persian Gulf War
in 1991, and again during the U.S. invasion
of
Iraq
in 2003, had Israel not destroyed Iraq’s nuclear
reactor in 1981.”) But the majority of Iraqis judged that it was a crime
and a terrorist act sponsored by state of Israel.

The attack raised a number of questions of interpretation
regarding international legal concepts. Was it an act of legitimate self-defense
justifiable under international law under
Article 51
of the charter of the United Nations (UN)?
I wonder what the reactions would be if Israel’s neighbours used the same
argument, claiming that Israeli nuclear power represented a threat to them
also!

Let’s start with the Iraqi defence and military
arrangements for The Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre in 1981.

The site was protected by 50 meter
high earth ramparts all around it. This was this to force any planes to fly higher
before approaching the site so that the Iraqi air-defense radar stations
would detect them.

The Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Centre had its own air
defense station, combined of anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles.
On the top of earth ramparts there were many AA guns set to open fire in
event of any warning so they would make a ring of fire around the site. Also
there was a radar station to detect planes if it approached the site.

All around the site there were also balloons
filled with gas connected with cords to the ground so they kept over the
site at an altitude higher than the earth ramparts.

The city of Baghdad was protected by
Russian type SAM-2 and SAM-3 Air Defence missile networks with two different
killing zones (technology of the late 1950s).

Also around Baghdad on top of most high building
there were AAA guns: all had orders to open fire to protect the sky over
Baghdad city in any event of warning.

On the borders there was early warning radar
stations. Ttheir mission was to give early warning if any plane pass the
border or approached it. But at the time
the Iran war was going on on the Eastern
borders, so most of the attention was toward the East Borders.

During that time all SAM sites were working from
dawn till sunset. During the night-time the crews were on alert.

The Iraqi Air force also kept a daily patrol
flying over Baghdad, on the edge of the city from dawn till sunset. All
fighters would land by sunset time, but the crews remained on alert at all
the times.

On Jun 7 shortly after the time when all the
batteries of SAM2&3 had just been turned off, and the Iraqi fighter air
patrol had just landed at the end of the day-long mission, there came the
sound of explosions and shortly after that the sky was filled with the
flashes of exploding rounds from all the guns set up around…

Continue reading “Tuwaitha, June 7, 1981: a short memoir”