Showing posts with label U.S.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.S.. Show all posts
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Saturday, February 17, 2007
US military planes criss-cross Europe using bogus call sign
February 19, 2006
Not only is the call sign bogus — according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) — so, it appears, are some of the aircraft details the Americans have filed with the air traffic control authorities.
In at least one case, a plane identified with the CIA practice of “extraordinary rendition” — transporting terrorist suspects — left a US air base just after the arrival of an aircraft using the bogus call sign.
The call sign Juliet Golf Oscar (JGO) followed by a flight number belongs, says the ICAO, to a now bankrupt Canadian low-cost airline called Jetsgo of Montreal.
But for several years and as recently as last December it has been used selectively by both the American air force and army to cover the flights of aircraft to and from the Balkans.
These range from Learjet 35 executive jets to C-130 transport planes and MC-130P Combat Shadows, which are specially adapted for clandestine missions in politically sensitive or hostile territory.
A Sunday Times analysis of flight plans and radio logs has placed these aircraft at locations including Tuzla in Bosnia, Pristina in Kosovo, Aviano, the site of a large joint US-Italian military air base in northern Italy, and Ramstein in Germany, the headquarters of the US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE).
On December 11, 2004, USAFE in Ramstein filed a flight plan for a Learjet 35 to fly from Tuzla to Aviano. The flight plan was copied to 15 addressees including Tuzla airport, Aviano airport and a mysterious recipient labelled “xxxxxxxx”.
The aircraft’s identity was given as JGO 80, the flight was a Learjet 35 operated by the Department of Defence and the registration was 99999E.
The status of the flight was given as “humanitarian”. But it was also given as “state”, which means government, and as “protected”, which means diplomatic.
During the time the plane was in the air, USAFE changed some of the flight plan timings and at the same time the registration changed. The aircraft metamorphosed into 40112E but continued to be a Learjet 35 and was still JGO 80 and a humanitarian, government and diplomatic flight.
While the Learjet was on the ground at Tuzla, an Ilyushin 76 was loading a cargo of 45 tons of surplus weapons and ammunition sold off by the Bosnian military and destined for Rwanda in defiance of a UN embargo.
The Ilyushin left Tuzla, flew over Italy and headed south in the direction of Africa. The American Learjet took off 55 minutes later.
In a report exposing arms trafficking to war-torn central Africa, Amnesty International has suggested that “US security authorities were engaged in a covert operation to ferry arms to Rwanda in the face of political opposition from the European Union”.
Another interesting convergence of flights occurred in February 2004. On February 24, an MC-130P Combat Shadow using the call sign JGO 50 took off from Aviano for an unknown destination.
Two days later, on February 26, the aircraft left Pristina for Tuzla. A short while after that, a Gulfstream 5 executive jet, call sign JGO 47, flew from Tuzla to Aviano, arriving at 23.11 GMT. The next day, a Learjet 35 using the call sign SPAR 92 left Aviano for an unknown destination.
SPAR is short for Special Air Resources, an American military airlift service that transports senior military officers and civilian VIPs.
However, SPAR 92 has been identified as the aircraft which was used by the CIA secretly to transport a Muslim preacher who was kidnapped by CIA agents in Milan in 2003.
A USAFE spokesman last week said American aircraft using the JGO call sign were performing “Joint Guard Operations” for the Nato/European peacekeeping mission in the Balkans.
However, inquiries have shown that the military operation called “Joint Guard” ended in 1998. They also show that none of the US aircraft deployed in it match ones using the JGO call sign.
A spokesman for the ICAO said: “Our records indicate that the designator JGO is still assigned to Jetsgo and the ICAO does not assign the same code to two operators.”
Additional reporting: Peter Danssaert
Friday, February 16, 2007
Iran accuses U.S. of backing terrorists who killed soldiers
Thursday, February 15, 2007
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
The Associated Press
TEHRAN, Iran — A car bomb killed 11 members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday in the deadliest attack in years near the Pakistani border, and Iran accused the United States of backing militants to destabilize the country.
A Sunni Muslim militant group called Jundallah, or God's Brigade, which has been blamed for past attacks on Iranian troops, claimed responsibility for the bombing, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency.
An al-Qaida-linked group of the same name has carried out attacks in neighboring Pakistan. Iranian officials say the militants in southeast Iran find a safe haven in Pakistan, but it is not clear whether the two groups are connected. Pakistani officials say they are not.
The blast represented a sharp flare-up of violence in the remote southeast corner of Iran, near Pakistan and Afghanistan, that has long been plagued by lawlessness. The area is a key crossing point for opium from Afghanistan and often sees clashes between police and drug gangs.
At the same time, Jundallah has waged a low-level insurgency in the area, led by Abdulmalak Rigi, a member of Iran's ethnic Baluchi minority, a community that is Sunni Muslim and is present in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rigi has said his group is fighting for the rights of impoverished Sunnis under Iran's Shiite government.
Five of those behind Wednesday's explosion were arrested, Soltan Ali Mir, a local Interior Ministry official, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency. The Fars news agency reported four arrested and cited officials saying they were not Iranian citizens.
Iranian officials blamed "insurgents" and "terrorists" for Wednesday's bombing — and accused the United States of backing them to sow instability in Iran.
"This was done by a group that gets support from America," the Islamic Republic News Agency said, quoting unidentified officials.
Iran has increasingly raised the alarm that the United States may attack it or try to foment an uprising against the government as the standoff between the two countries has escalated in recent weeks over the country's nuclear program and over the turmoil in Iraq.
President Bush on Wednesday repeated accusations that Iran was supplying weapons to militants in Iraq and vowed to stop the support. The U.S. has also built up its military presence in the Persian Gulf and has vowed action against Iranian operatives in Iraq.
Iranian officials have often raised concerns that Washington might incite members of Iran's many ethnic and religious minorities against the Shiite-led government.
Wednesday's bombing took place near Zahedan, capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, when a car packed with explosives pulled to a stop in front of a bus carrying members of the Revolutionary Guard.
The car exploded, killing 11 guards and wounding 31, the provincial governor, Hassan Ali Nouri, told IRNA. He said one attacker was also killed.
Report: Bomb explodes in Tehran near last deadly blast; police clash with gunmen
Related
Bomb blast in Iran, police clash with gunmen Reuters, 21 minutes ago
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Bomb blast in Iran, police clash with gunmen Reuters, 21 minutes ago
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Bomb explodes in Tehran near last blast
AP 44 minutes ago
A bomb exploded in southeastern Iran late Friday, near the site where an earlier explosion this week killed 11 members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, the state-run news agency IRNA reported.
"Minutes ago, the sound of a bomb explosion was heard in one of Zahedan's streets," the agency said. The report offered no further details, including whether there were casualties.
On Wednesday, a car blew up a bus owned by the elite troops in Zahedan, capital of the Sistan-Baluchestan province on the border with Pakistan.
The US will have to accept a multipolar world
Like it or not, the US will have to accept a multipolar world
Around the three poles of Europe, India and South America, we could create a more balanced and democratic world orderDavid Clark
Friday February 16, 2007
The Guardian
One of the many casualties of 9/11 and its aftermath has been the idea, fashionable in the 1990s, that a world with only one superpower would be a more comfortable place to live. This hinged on the argument that in a unipolar world order the dominant state, in pursuit of its global interests and responsibilities, acts as a producer of global public goods from which everyone benefits, such as security, stability and free trade.
That is the basis on which the advocates of US primacy have always defended its legitimacy. Paul Wolfowitz's famous Defence Planning Guidance paper of 1992 talked about the need for the US to "account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established economic and political order". Far from being the conceit of neoconservative intellectuals, faith in the benign effect of US power was shared by Republicans and Democrats alike.
Things look very different today. The intervention in Iraq has strengthened the very forces of extremism and violence it was meant to weaken, with the result that we are in much greater danger. The Bush administration continues to drag its heels on the environment and prevent the action needed to meet an even greater threat in the form of climate change. The US's unwillingness to address its $764bn trade deficit and its determination to continue consuming beyond its means is responsible for global economic imbalances that threaten meltdown and worldwide depression. Instead of acting as a provider of global public goods, the US looks more like a global free rider, using its power selfishly and irresponsibly to the detriment of the greater good.
A common mistake is to see this as a reflection of the American character, rather than as the inevitable consequence of unrestrained power. The truth is that any other nation in the US's position would do the same and probably much worse. Dominant powers are always prone to trampling on the interests and rights of others. The problem with US hegemony is that it's hegemonic, not that it's American. As Vladimir Putin pointed out in a speech at the weekend (an extract of which was published on these pages), the unipolar model is inherently flawed because it concentrates power in ways that are unhealthy and undemocratic.
Very true, but how strange to hear it from the lips of the Russian president. In each of the criticisms he levelled at the US, more or less the same could be said about the government he leads. Putin deplores America's conduct of the war on terror, but the brutality of his assault on Chechnya makes the abuses at Guantánamo look mild by comparison. The bullying of Russia's neighbours through energy cut-offs, trade embargoes and the sponsorship of local insurgencies shows scant regard for the high-minded diplomatic principles espoused in his speech.
And when it comes to ripping up treaties and ignoring international law, Putin has little to learn from Bush. He refuses to accept Russia's obligations as a signatory of the Energy Charter Treaty, for instance, and prefers the unilateral use of energy dominance for geopolitical and commercial advantage. Putin's only real objection to a unipolar world order is that Russia is not the unipole. In every other respect his foreign policy doctrine is similar to the neoconservative approach he purports to oppose. Anyone who takes his concern for democratic standards seriously hasn't been paying enough attention to the erosion of political and civil rights under his leadership.
Britain, along with the rest of Europe, certainly needs a strategy for creating a more balanced and legitimate distribution of global power, but it shouldn't be one that follows Jacques Chirac's efforts to offset US influence through big power summitry with an authoritarian Russia. It must be one that is true to Europe's democratic values. Of course, the concept of power balancing is in itself controversial. For some, such as Tony Blair, the suggestion that US power needs to be balanced is evidence of anti-Americanism. But his alternative of seeking influence in Washington has been given more than a fair wind, and he has precious little to show for it.
There is an alternative that allows Europe to pursue an effective power balancing strategy without resort to the cynical realpolitik of old, and it has been made possible by the remarkable political transformations of the last three decades. Almost two-thirds of the world's population, accounting for three-quarters of nation states, now live under democratic rule. It is those states collectively that form the body of legitimate world opinion and must be mobilised. US policymakers have marginalised the United Nations on the grounds that universal membership confers power and legitimacy on despots and tyrants. But what was striking about the debate on Iraq was the fact that most world democratic opinion was opposed to America's approach. The objective of power balancing must be to ensure it is brought to bear more effectively in future.
India will, on current trends, overtake China to become the world's most populous country by the middle of the century. Unlike China, it is an established democracy and ought to be a natural ally in any attempt to create a more balanced and democratic world order. Another priority should be South America, where the democratic gains of the last 20 years have been as great as those of eastern Europe. Its regional trade blocks, the Andean Community and Mercosur, are in the process of merging to form a South American Community of Nations modelled on the EU. With a population of 361 million, there are plans for a single market, a common currency and a common foreign policy.
Around these three poles - Europe, India and South America - it would be possible to galvanise a new global democratic sentiment that rejects unipolarist assumptions without being antagonistic towards the US. The end of American primacy is coming, whether Washington likes it or not. The choice is between a bipolar system in which it faces an authoritarian and increasingly confident China, or a multipolar order in which it can share the challenges of global leadership with other centres of democratic power. The shift from unipolarity to a democratic multipolarity should be our common project of the 21st century.
· David Clark is chairman of the Russia Foundation and was a special adviser at the Foreign Office from 1997 to 2001
Dkclark@aol.com
Monday, February 12, 2007
Blast Reported Near U.S. Base in Japan: "Investigators suspected a "guerrilla attack""
Feb 12 11:02 AM US/Eastern
TOKYO (AP) -- An explosion was heard near a U.S. Army base south of Tokyo late Monday and police suspected an attempted attack on the base, Kyodo News agency reported.
The blast was in the area of the U.S. Army's Camp Zama, Kyodo said. The report did not say whether there were injuries or damage.
Police found parts of "launch pad" near the base, Kyodo said, and investigators suspected a "guerrilla attack."
No further details were immediately available.
TOKYO (AP) -- An explosion was heard near a U.S. Army base south of Tokyo late Monday and police suspected an attempted attack on the base, Kyodo News agency reported.
The blast was in the area of the U.S. Army's Camp Zama, Kyodo said. The report did not say whether there were injuries or damage.
Police found parts of "launch pad" near the base, Kyodo said, and investigators suspected a "guerrilla attack."
No further details were immediately available.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
America is doped up in Colombia for a bad trip in Afghanistan
February 11, 2007
Simon Jenkins
Last week Nato defence ministers met in Seville to review the coming spring offensive in Afghanistan. It was like Great War generals dining in Versailles to discuss the trenches. The new Nato commander, US General John Craddock, asked for 2,000 more troops. Just one more push and the Taliban would be defeated, the Afghan army readied to fight, the opium dealers arrested and more aid committed to reconstruction. It was as simple as that. Anyone for paella?
How does this strategy look from the other place in the world where it is being tried, Colombia? This month Washington is redeploying one of its star diplomats, William Wood, from Bogota to Kabul with the enthusiastic blessing of the Pentagon. Wood has been overseeing Plan Colombia, President Clinton’s eight-year effort to fight the cocaine cartels and left-wing insurgents and make Latin America safe for pro-Americanism.
Wood will be joining the new US Nato commander in Kabul, General Dan McNeill, and reversing the allegedly feeble policies of the outgoing British commander, General David Richards. The fourfold increase in violence over the past year is attributed by the Americans to an excess of soft hearts and minds. Wood will want to beef up poppy eradication to starve the insurgency of revenue.
Colombia is undeniably a country which, six years ago, faced disaster. Main roads were blocked by mafiosi and kidnappings and massacres were endemic. Drug lords, revolutionaries and right-wing paramilitaries fought for control of a trade that supplied 90% of America’s cocaine. The Cali and Medellin cartels offered to finance public services and pay off Colombia’s foreign debt in return for quasi-recognition by Bogota. This admirably capitalist innovation — de facto legalising supply — was too much for the Americans.
Background
Karzai bids for peace in furore with London
Instead Washington pumped $600m a year into Colombia’s army and police, enabling the central government to reestablish a measure of command over its own country. An independent, Alvaro Uribe, was elected president in 2002 and hurled men and money at security. The murder rate fell by a third and kidnappings by two thirds. Most of Colombia is now as safe as anywhere in Latin America. Uribe was reelected last year with 62% of the vote in a fair election.
Uribe cannot stem the cocaine trade. Crop-spraying shifts production into Bolivia, Peru and the Amazon jungle, where mile upon mile of virgin forest is lost to coca each year, an ecological disaster that is a direct result of western drugs policy. As long as prohibition sustains a lucrative market for narcotics, countries such as Colombia will supply it. Traditional coca-growing nations on the Andean spine will have their politics and economics blighted by criminality. Growth will be stifled and governments left vulnerable to left-wing rebellion. The war on drugs is the stupidest war on earth.
The best that elected leaders such as Uribe can hope for is to establish a desperate equilibrium: drug suppliers kept relatively nonviolent while right-wing vigilantes are half-tolerated to counterbalance left-wing guerrillas. The only test is survival and as long as Uribe survives America smiles. On an increasingly rabid antiAmerican continent he is one sure ally.
Cut to Afghanistan. Here, too, the West is intervening in a narco-economy that is destabilising a pro-western government. Here, too, quantities of aid have been dedicated to security yet have fed corruption. Here, too, intervention has boosted drug production and stacked the cards against law and order. This year’s Afghan poppy crop is predicted to be the largest on record. European demand has boosted the price paid for Afghan poppies to nine times that of wheat. At this differential a policy of crop substitution is absurd.
Afghanistan is not Colombia. Here the West is not using a local government to implement its drugs and counter-insurgency policy. Some 40,000 Nato troops from more than 30 different countries are gathered in Kabul. Since many of them refuse to fight, the city has become a holiday camp for the world’s military elite. Outside the capital, military occupation acts as a recruiting sergeant for insurgency, leaving Nato bases constantly on the defensive. The war in Afghanistan is proving that an enemy can be held at bay but only at vast expense in money and casualties. It will not be defeated.
The British policy of occupying small towns to win hearts and minds has been a bloody failure. It was wisely replaced last autumn with deals struck with local power brokers, the so-called Musa Qala and Helmand protocols. Up to $5m is handed over to any warlord who can claim provincial control, accepting the pragmatism of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who on January 29 even called for negotiation with the Taliban. The local British commander, Brigadier Jerry Thomas, was explicit in seeking to “empower local people to use traditional tribal structures . . . to find an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem”. In truth, there is no other conceivable way to disengage from this mess. A similar “endgame” is being pursued by the new American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, in securing safe areas policed by local militias.
Now the Americans wish to reverse British realpolitik. To them what Afghanistan needs is a taste of Colombia and Ambassador Wood.
Musa Qala must be reoccupied and poppy-spraying must commence. This defies the view of western intelligence in Kabul which has been convinced that America’s heavy-handed tactics and addiction to aerial bombardment have cost the West five years in Afghanistan. Local commanders are equally opposed to the opium eradication that obsesses the defence ministry in London and the Foreign Office’s Kim Howells. Apart from the futility of trying to spray so vast an area as Helmand, drug lords are the only counterweight to the Taliban. Poisoning Afghanistan’s staple crop and contaminating fields and water supply will push up the price of opium and further breed hatred of the occupation. It is madness.
In Colombia the Americans achieved a sort of equilibrium because local politics was left to police the narco-economy. In Afghanistan Karzai is treated as an American puppet whose authority outside Kabul depends entirely on occupying forces. There is no way that provincial Afghanistan will be pacified by Nato and left to Karzai’s army. Afghan troops (like the Iraqis) will not fight local militias. Training them to do so is pointless as they merely switch sides when the occupiers depart. Ask the few journalists brave enough to visit the battlefields of Helmand and the Pakistan border.
In Colombia the central government enjoyed sufficient democratic legitimacy for its army to drive insurgents into the jungle and induce the drug lords and paramilitaries to surrender (some of) their guns and power, albeit at a heavy cost in justice and human rights. Afghanistan has never enjoyed such central authority, except briefly under the Taliban. It will not do so under the guns of 30 occupying powers. The south of the country craves security and gets only bombs and bullets and is increasingly inclined to the iron rule of the Taliban. Since any prospective Karzai/Taliban coalition is unlikely to please the Tajiks and other tribes of the north, all western meddling will achieve is to set Afghanistan on the road back to the 1990s.
Having visited both Afghanistan and Colombia, I have no doubt that those countries’ miseries start and end in narcotics. With an almighty and bloodthirsty effort, the production of cocaine in Colombia and opium in Afghanistan might possibly be displaced, but only to other benighted countries. What would be the point? As long as rich countries consume these substances in massive quantities it is hypocritical to lay waste the poor countries producing them and thus make them poorer.
Punishing supply is not a “parallel” policy to curbing demand, as economically illiterate policy makers pretend. Demand is never curbed by limiting supply, since supply responds to price. It just will not work.
Hence pretending to victory in Colombia is no different from staving off defeat in Afghanistan. Both are cruel expiations of western narco-guilt. The difference is that in Afghanistan intervention has led us into an unwinnable war.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
Simon Jenkins’s book, Thatcher & Sons, was last week named as Channel 4 political book of the year
Simon Jenkins
Last week Nato defence ministers met in Seville to review the coming spring offensive in Afghanistan. It was like Great War generals dining in Versailles to discuss the trenches. The new Nato commander, US General John Craddock, asked for 2,000 more troops. Just one more push and the Taliban would be defeated, the Afghan army readied to fight, the opium dealers arrested and more aid committed to reconstruction. It was as simple as that. Anyone for paella?
How does this strategy look from the other place in the world where it is being tried, Colombia? This month Washington is redeploying one of its star diplomats, William Wood, from Bogota to Kabul with the enthusiastic blessing of the Pentagon. Wood has been overseeing Plan Colombia, President Clinton’s eight-year effort to fight the cocaine cartels and left-wing insurgents and make Latin America safe for pro-Americanism.
Wood will be joining the new US Nato commander in Kabul, General Dan McNeill, and reversing the allegedly feeble policies of the outgoing British commander, General David Richards. The fourfold increase in violence over the past year is attributed by the Americans to an excess of soft hearts and minds. Wood will want to beef up poppy eradication to starve the insurgency of revenue.
Colombia is undeniably a country which, six years ago, faced disaster. Main roads were blocked by mafiosi and kidnappings and massacres were endemic. Drug lords, revolutionaries and right-wing paramilitaries fought for control of a trade that supplied 90% of America’s cocaine. The Cali and Medellin cartels offered to finance public services and pay off Colombia’s foreign debt in return for quasi-recognition by Bogota. This admirably capitalist innovation — de facto legalising supply — was too much for the Americans.
Background
Karzai bids for peace in furore with London
Instead Washington pumped $600m a year into Colombia’s army and police, enabling the central government to reestablish a measure of command over its own country. An independent, Alvaro Uribe, was elected president in 2002 and hurled men and money at security. The murder rate fell by a third and kidnappings by two thirds. Most of Colombia is now as safe as anywhere in Latin America. Uribe was reelected last year with 62% of the vote in a fair election.
Uribe cannot stem the cocaine trade. Crop-spraying shifts production into Bolivia, Peru and the Amazon jungle, where mile upon mile of virgin forest is lost to coca each year, an ecological disaster that is a direct result of western drugs policy. As long as prohibition sustains a lucrative market for narcotics, countries such as Colombia will supply it. Traditional coca-growing nations on the Andean spine will have their politics and economics blighted by criminality. Growth will be stifled and governments left vulnerable to left-wing rebellion. The war on drugs is the stupidest war on earth.
The best that elected leaders such as Uribe can hope for is to establish a desperate equilibrium: drug suppliers kept relatively nonviolent while right-wing vigilantes are half-tolerated to counterbalance left-wing guerrillas. The only test is survival and as long as Uribe survives America smiles. On an increasingly rabid antiAmerican continent he is one sure ally.
Cut to Afghanistan. Here, too, the West is intervening in a narco-economy that is destabilising a pro-western government. Here, too, quantities of aid have been dedicated to security yet have fed corruption. Here, too, intervention has boosted drug production and stacked the cards against law and order. This year’s Afghan poppy crop is predicted to be the largest on record. European demand has boosted the price paid for Afghan poppies to nine times that of wheat. At this differential a policy of crop substitution is absurd.
Afghanistan is not Colombia. Here the West is not using a local government to implement its drugs and counter-insurgency policy. Some 40,000 Nato troops from more than 30 different countries are gathered in Kabul. Since many of them refuse to fight, the city has become a holiday camp for the world’s military elite. Outside the capital, military occupation acts as a recruiting sergeant for insurgency, leaving Nato bases constantly on the defensive. The war in Afghanistan is proving that an enemy can be held at bay but only at vast expense in money and casualties. It will not be defeated.
The British policy of occupying small towns to win hearts and minds has been a bloody failure. It was wisely replaced last autumn with deals struck with local power brokers, the so-called Musa Qala and Helmand protocols. Up to $5m is handed over to any warlord who can claim provincial control, accepting the pragmatism of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who on January 29 even called for negotiation with the Taliban. The local British commander, Brigadier Jerry Thomas, was explicit in seeking to “empower local people to use traditional tribal structures . . . to find an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem”. In truth, there is no other conceivable way to disengage from this mess. A similar “endgame” is being pursued by the new American commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, in securing safe areas policed by local militias.
Now the Americans wish to reverse British realpolitik. To them what Afghanistan needs is a taste of Colombia and Ambassador Wood.
Musa Qala must be reoccupied and poppy-spraying must commence. This defies the view of western intelligence in Kabul which has been convinced that America’s heavy-handed tactics and addiction to aerial bombardment have cost the West five years in Afghanistan. Local commanders are equally opposed to the opium eradication that obsesses the defence ministry in London and the Foreign Office’s Kim Howells. Apart from the futility of trying to spray so vast an area as Helmand, drug lords are the only counterweight to the Taliban. Poisoning Afghanistan’s staple crop and contaminating fields and water supply will push up the price of opium and further breed hatred of the occupation. It is madness.
In Colombia the Americans achieved a sort of equilibrium because local politics was left to police the narco-economy. In Afghanistan Karzai is treated as an American puppet whose authority outside Kabul depends entirely on occupying forces. There is no way that provincial Afghanistan will be pacified by Nato and left to Karzai’s army. Afghan troops (like the Iraqis) will not fight local militias. Training them to do so is pointless as they merely switch sides when the occupiers depart. Ask the few journalists brave enough to visit the battlefields of Helmand and the Pakistan border.
In Colombia the central government enjoyed sufficient democratic legitimacy for its army to drive insurgents into the jungle and induce the drug lords and paramilitaries to surrender (some of) their guns and power, albeit at a heavy cost in justice and human rights. Afghanistan has never enjoyed such central authority, except briefly under the Taliban. It will not do so under the guns of 30 occupying powers. The south of the country craves security and gets only bombs and bullets and is increasingly inclined to the iron rule of the Taliban. Since any prospective Karzai/Taliban coalition is unlikely to please the Tajiks and other tribes of the north, all western meddling will achieve is to set Afghanistan on the road back to the 1990s.
Having visited both Afghanistan and Colombia, I have no doubt that those countries’ miseries start and end in narcotics. With an almighty and bloodthirsty effort, the production of cocaine in Colombia and opium in Afghanistan might possibly be displaced, but only to other benighted countries. What would be the point? As long as rich countries consume these substances in massive quantities it is hypocritical to lay waste the poor countries producing them and thus make them poorer.
Punishing supply is not a “parallel” policy to curbing demand, as economically illiterate policy makers pretend. Demand is never curbed by limiting supply, since supply responds to price. It just will not work.
Hence pretending to victory in Colombia is no different from staving off defeat in Afghanistan. Both are cruel expiations of western narco-guilt. The difference is that in Afghanistan intervention has led us into an unwinnable war.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
Simon Jenkins’s book, Thatcher & Sons, was last week named as Channel 4 political book of the year
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Baghdad Operation Turns Up Little As US, Iraqi Commanders Clash
| Posted on Fri, Feb. 09, 2007 |  |
| Infighting hampering Baghdad crackdown Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi commanders are urging the Americans to go after Sunni targets as the first focus of the military push to secure Baghdad, displaying a sectarian tilt that is delaying full implementation of the plan to drive gunmen from the streets, U.S. officers say. American officers, interviewed at the sprawling Camp Victory base at the western edge of the capital, also acknowledge they are finding little in their initial searches of Baghdad neighborhoods - suggesting either they received faulty intelligence or that the massive publicity that preceded the operation gave militants time to slip away. The chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said Wednesday that the much-anticipated Baghdad security operation was under way. His remarks came about a month after President Bush announced he was dispatching 21,500 more troops to curb sectarian bloodletting. Under the plan, Baghdad is to be divided into nine zones, with Iraqi and American soldiers working side-by-side to clear each sector of Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents so that reconstruction programs can begin in safety. Although Iraqis have seen an increase in the number of checkpoints and other security measures, there is little sign of a "surge" of troops in the streets. U.S. officials insist the public will see a big increase soon. U.S. officers told The Associated Press that the delays in implementing the plan were in part a result of disagreements between American and Iraqi commanders about what neighborhoods should be cleared first. During joint planning sessions, the Iraqis have been urging U.S. officials to focus on neighborhoods believed to harbor Sunni insurgents, according to officers familiar with the discussions. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject is sensitive. Several U.S. officers said the Iraqis, especially representatives of the Shiite-run Interior Ministry, played down the threat posed by the biggest Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army. They blamed much of the violence against Sunnis on fringe elements. That led some U.S. officers to conclude that the Iraqis were afraid that confronting the Mahdi Army, led by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, would undercut support for the Shiite-led government and trigger even more violence. "The targeting focus from our (Iraqi) counterparts indicates a leaning toward Sunni al-Qaida-based targets as opposed to Shiite militias," one U.S. officer said. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, however, has offered assurances that the security operation will not target any specific religious or ethnic group and that the law will be enforced evenhandedly. "Some say that the plan targets Shiites, and others say it targets Sunnis. I want to say it targets all, but all those who break the law," al-Maliki said last month. But one Iraqi general, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged there were differences between U.S. and Iraqi planners on the best way to conduct the operation, with each side insisting on the final say. The Iraqi said his colleagues have the feeling the Americans "don't trust us." The U.S. officers said they had no intention of knuckling under to the Iraqi demands and were confident the Iraqis would come around in the end. But the dispute has resulted in delays, they said. Those differences have also held up a final decision how to carve up the city into the nine zones and where to deploy Iraqi units that are being sent in for the operation, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Iraqi commanders are supposed to send about 8,000 mostly Shiite and Kurdish troops into the city from southern and northern Iraq. Although Iraqi units have been arriving on schedule, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week that they were coming with only 55 to 65 percent of their intended troops. Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for the U.S. military command in Baghdad, said the district plan was still evolving, but insisted that last-minute changes do not suggest failure. He said such adjustments were to be expected. "This is a collaborative planning process. The adjustments are going to be slight," Bleichwehl said. Al-Maliki, a Shiite, is under intense pressure from the United States to crack down on Shiite militias, many of which maintain close links to members of his political alliance. Al-Sadr, for example, controls 30 of the 275 parliament seats and six ministries and has been a strong ally of the prime minister. Shiite politicians have long maintained that Sunni militants pose the greater threat. Thousands of Shiite civilians have been killed in bombings and suicide attacks carried out by al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni groups. Shiite leaders insist that the Shiite militias flourished because the U.S. and its allies could not protect civilians. They say if the Sunni insurgents were crushed, the threat from Shiite hard-liners would go away. U.S. officials believe extremists in both Islamic sects must be routed to halt the tit-for-tat kidnappings and killings which have plunged this country into civil conflict. Some U.S. officials suspect the Shiites are more interested in solidifying their grip on Baghdad after Shiite militias forced many Sunnis from the city. Many Iraqis of both sects have been complaining that the security operation has been slow in taking off, enabling extremists to launch more attacks, such as a devastating truck bombing that killed 137 people on Feb. 3 in a mostly Shiite area of central Baghdad. Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers have been stepping up the search for militants and weapons, including a sweep through Hurriyah, a Baghdad neighborhood where rampaging Shiite militiamen drove hundreds of Sunni families from their homes last December. Paratroopers from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, the first of the new U.S. commands to arrive for the operation, have begun moving into some of the cleared areas. But the results of some operations have been less than expected. This week, a joint U.S.-Iraqi force swept through Shaab, a largely Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad where militiamen clashed with American soldiers last year. The search was the largest so far since the new operation began. Most Iraqis welcomed soldiers into their homes with offers of tea. But the troops managed to capture only 16 suspects and seize three Kalashnikov rifles in a neighborhood that intelligence said was a hotbed of bomb-makers. "I don't know if it's bad information, bad intelligence, of if they knew we were coming and left," said Capt. Isaac Torres of the Army's 3rd Brigade Stryker Combat Team. "They were all dry holes." --- Associated Press reporter Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report. | |
Friday, February 9, 2007
Time to say no
To continue kowtowing to the US administration's demands over Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine would be suicidal, writes Hassan Nafaa
Gaping wounds in some of the most sensitive areas of the Arab world, most notably in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, have begun to suppurate. The current American administration, headed by a clique of anti-Arab Islamophobes, will stop at nothing, out of deference to Israel and commitment to the Christian-Zionist preaching in which they believe so fervently. This same administration believes the fact that neither the president's nor the vice-president's running for re-election gives them greater freedom of movement, at least until the electoral campaigns officially kick-off in February a year from now. Until then they will steamroll through measures in an attempt to complete an enterprise refuse to admit they have failed. And such is the catatonic stupor into which Arab regimes have fallen that they are prepared to allow the same doctor who caused the disease to treat their wounds.
Two factors forced Bush to re-adjust his policy and plans for Iraq and the region. The Baker- Hamilton report, drafted by a joint Democratic- Republican commission, concluded the administration's policy was a fiasco and demanded changes. Then, the Republicans lost their majority in both houses of Congress just as the growing anti-war movement was reminding the American public of the failings of the Vietnam era. In response, Bush dug in his heels. Instead of cooperating with Iran and Syria to restore an element of calm in order to pave the way for an honourable withdrawal, as the Baker-Hamilton report recommended, he did the opposite, ordering 20,000 more US troops to Iraq, two aircraft carriers to the Gulf, and furnishing his friends in the neighbourhood with anti-missile defence systems. Such moves were obviously in preparation for a military strike against Iran and the tightening of the siege around Syria, yet Bush was confident of his allies' support. Just in case, though, he sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on another tour of the region.
Here was the envoy of supposedly the greatest democracy on earth appealing to foreign friends in order to tip the scale of American public opinion back in favour of the executive after Congress had won the first round. The close observer might have detected Rice's inward sneer as she discovered how immeasurably more malleable decision-makers in this part of the world are than lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Certainly she shed no tears. Quite the opposite: she was delighted, full of confidence, pleased to see eight Arab foreign ministers climbing over one another in Kuwait to declare their support for America's "new" plans for Iraq and for the region. She had grounds for her confidence. She knows, after all, that she is the only person capable of getting this number of Arab foreign ministers to meet in any place she designates, in the Arab world or abroad, at the snap of her fingers. Perhaps, too, she felt a measure of malicious glee as she watched them fight to win her favour, in the full knowledge that while each and everyone of them is a member of the Arab League they would never come together on their own initiative in order to develop an independent policy to further their common interests.
When the rush of Arab governments to support an American policy that American society itself deplores stirred angry reactions among sectors of Arab public opinion, various diplomatic quarters tried to stem the damage. Some Arab foreign ministers, for example, tried to convey the impression that their support was qualified, that it was contingent upon results on the ground.
It was hardly convincing. Governments generally formulate policies on the basis of considerations and expectations that have not yet been put to the test. When other governments come out in support of those policies they are committing themselves, as partners, to working for its success regardless of what the future may bring. And just as they anticipate sharing the fruits of the policy, should it succeed, they must also be prepared to sustain their share of losses should it fail.
The Bush plan entails actions hostile to both Iran and Syria. To support it is to side unequivocally against these two countries. The same applies to the fact that the plan is opposed by the majority of the American people, not to mention powers such as China, Russia and the EU.
Bush's reckless adventurism is well known and the tide of opposition to his policy will swell further, both at home and abroad. While this makes failure even more likely it will not forestall the disasters that will undoubtedly be inflicted on Arabs and Muslims. So certain is the prognosis that it is only possible to wonder at the considerations upon which Arab regimes base their support of US policy. The most obvious premises for their behaviour are probably the right ones: first, they think Iran's expansionist designs more dangerous than the Zionist version, and second, they believe the need to placate the US in order to sustain their strategic relationships with Washington outstrips all other regional and international considerations.
Without underestimating the potential threat to the Arab world of Iran's growing power and influence, it is impossible to accept this presents a greater peril than the Zionist enterprise. The best way for the Arabs to confront Tehran's regional power bid is not to fall in with US-Israeli plans to strike Iran but to establish a unified Arab policy towards Iran. This would involve opening a dialogue with Tehran, to which end they would have to rely on Syria. A strike against Iran, by the US and/or Israel, may weaken Iran temporarily but it will not strengthen the hand of any Arab power. It could easily plunge the entire region into a state of chaos, triggering any number of local civil wars if not a full-fledged regional war.
Arab leaders who believed the claims that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein would eliminate one of the greatest impediments to regional stability should look at what has in fact been eliminated. It is Iraq as a state that has been destroyed. And who, apart from Iran and Israel, has gained from the catastrophe that has befallen Iraq? Does it not also follow that the sole beneficiary of any war against Iran will be Israel, for whom the destruction of Iran would come as the most crucial step towards realising Israel's dream of re-organising the Middle East into disparate sectarian-based statelets as it transforms itself into the engineer of their multi-farious rivalries and alliances?
As important as the strategic relationship with the US might be, Arab leaders should realise that Bush and his gang of neo-conservatives are not synonymous with the United States. They are a band of thugs bent on steering the world to unmitigated disaster, a fact grasped by the majority of the American people upon whom it has dawned that this administration is no less fanatical and racist than Hitler and the Nazis. Nor can a strategic relationship be founded upon handing over the determination of the fates of our peoples to the White House, regardless of whether its incumbent is a Democrat or Republican, an extremist or moderate. The US is a mighty power and acts as mighty powers mostly do: it respects the strong and crushes the weak once it can dispense with their services. When will Arab rulers open their eyes to the reality that their current weakness and disarray is hastening the day when the US finds them too much of a burden and drops them? When will they realise that they will never be able to make the transition from a dependent to a partner or build a strategic relationship that is truly mutually beneficent until they demonstrate their ability to effectively play what few cards they have left to their advantage?
Would it be excessive to suggest that the current crisis offers Arab countries that are on good terms with the US a rare opportunity to regain some of their forfeited leverage? I don't think so. This is one of those paradoxes of the current situation though to capitalise on it the ruling elites -- contrary to what they seem to believe -- must summon the resolve to convey to Bush a resounding no, and then enter immediately into talks with Iran, Syria and, perhaps, Turkey. Such a dialogue would seek to promote a range of interrelated objectives: an end to the internecine bloodshed in Palestine, the creation of a national unity government and the immediate lifting of the economic blockade on the Palestinian people; an end to the Lebanese crisis by pressuring rival parties to return to the negotiation table with the purpose of resolving their differences and safeguarding Lebanese independence while simultaneously ensuring Syria's security requirements; a reconciliation between rival Iraqi factions so as to preserve Iraq's territorial integrity and set in motion a new political process that will lead to a government that represents Iraqis regardless of sectarian affiliations; establishing channels of communication and dialogue with US leaders opposed to Bush's policies in order to generate pressure for an international conference, in which all concerned parties take part, the purpose of which is to resolve, in tandem, all the interconnected crises in the Middle East, and to establish agreed-upon systems for collective and humanitarian security so as to ensure the settlements are acceptable regionally and internationally.
It is mistaken to believe that what is happening in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine are civil wars or even the beginning of civil wars. They are political conflicts fuelled by the US-Israeli drive for regional hegemony.
* The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Al-Ahram Weekly Online
Iraqi insurgents offer peace in return for US concessions
Robert Fisk
For the first time, Sunni insurgents disclose their conditions for ceasefire in Iraq
Published: 09 February 2007
For the first time, one of Iraq's principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.
The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet - but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army.
Al-Jeelani's group, which also calls itself the "20th Revolution Brigades'', is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003. The statement is, therefore, of potentially great importance, although it clearly represents only the views of Sunni Muslim fighters.
Shia militias are nowhere mentioned. The demands include the cancellation of the entire Iraqi constitution - almost certainly because the document, in effect, awards oil-bearing areas of Iraq to Shia and Kurds, but not to the minority Sunni community. Yet the Sunnis remain Washington's principal enemies in the Iraqi war.
"Discussions and negotiations are a principle we believe in to overcome the situation in which Iraqi bloodletting continues," al-Jeelani said in a statement that was passed to The Independent. "Should the Americans wish to negotiate their withdrawal from our country and leave our people to live in peace, then we will negotiate subject to specific conditions and circumstances."
Al-Jeelani suggests the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations and would have to guarantee the security of the participants.
Then come the conditions:
* The release of 5,000 detainees held in Iraqi prisons as "proof of goodwill".
* Recognition "of the legitimacy of the resistance and the legitimacy of its role in representing the will of the Iraqi people".
* An internationally guaranteed timetable for all agreements.
* The negotiations to take place in public.
* The resistance "must be represented by a committee comprising the representatives of all the jihadist brigades".
* The US to be represented by its ambassador in Iraq and the most senior commander.
It is not difficult to see why the Americans would object to those terms. They will not want to talk to men they have been describing as "terrorists" for the past four years. And if they were ever to concede that the "resistance" represented "the will of the Iraqi people" then their support for the elected Iraqi government would have been worthless.
Indeed, the insurgent leader specifically calls for the "dissolution of the present government and the revoking of the spurious elections and the constitution..."
He also insists that all agreements previously entered into by Iraqi authorities or US forces should be declared null and void.
But there are other points which show that considerable discussion must have gone on within the insurgency movement - possibly involving the group's rival, the Iraqi Islamic Army.
They call, for example, for the disbandment of militias and the outlawing of militia organisations - something the US government has been urging the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to do for months.
The terms also include the legalisation of the old Iraqi army, an "Anglo-American commitment to rebuild Iraq and reconstruct all war damage" - something the occupying powers claim they have been trying to do for a long time - and integrating "resistance fighters" into the recomposed army.
Al-Jeelani described President George Bush's new plans for countering the insurgents as "political chicanery" and added that "on the field of battle, we do not believe that the Americans are able to diminish the capability of the resistance fighters to continue the struggle to liberate Iraq from occupation ...
"The resistance groups are not committing crimes to be granted a pardon by America, we are not looking for pretexts to cease our jihad... we fight for a divine aim and one of our rights is the liberation and independence of our land of Iraq."
There will, the group says, be no negotiations with Mr Maliki's government because they consider it "complicit in the slaughter of Iraqis by militias, the security apparatus and death squads". But they do call for the unity of Iraq and say they "do not recognise the divisions among the Iraqi people".
It is not difficult to guess any American response to those proposals. But FLN [National Liberation Front] contacts with France during the 1954-62 war of independence by Algeria began with such a series of demands - equally impossible to meet but which were eventually developed into real proposals for a French withdrawal.
What is unclear, of course, is the degree to which al-Jeelani's statement represents the collective ideas of the Sunni insurgents. And, ominously, no mention is made of al-Qa'ida.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
US Airstrike Kills 45 Civilians US Airstrike Kills 45 Civilians
Iraq airstrike reportedly kills civilians
Military says 13 insurgents killed; photos show children at nearby hospital
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:54 a.m. MT Feb 8, 2007
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. airstrike Thursday killed 13 insurgents in a volatile area west of Baghdad, the military said. Local officials said 45 civilians, including women and children, died in the attack.
American forces launched the attack after intelligence showed suspected insurgents were assembled in two safe houses for foreign fighters northeast of Amiriyah, 25 miles west of Baghdad, the military said.
Five militants were detained and a weapons cache including armor-piercing ammunition was found in an initial raid on a nearby target, the military said. That operation was followed by the airstrike on the two suspected safe houses in which the military said 13 insurgents died.
Police and hospital officials in the area offered a conflicting account, saying the airstrike hit the village of Zaidan south of Abu Ghraib and flattened four houses, killing 45 people, including women, children and old people.
An Associated Press photo showed the body of a boy in the back of a pickup truck at the nearby Fallujah hospital and people there said he was a victim of the Zaydan airstrike. Other photos showed several wounded children being treated in the hospital.
Thamir al-Dulaimi, a doctor with the Fallujah Public Hospital, said 20 other civilians from the village were being treated, while a highway patrol officer said civilian cars were being used to bring the wounded to the hospital.
Amiriyah is in volatile Anbar province, an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad where hundreds of U.S. troops have been killed.
Military says 13 insurgents killed; photos show children at nearby hospital
The Associated Press
Updated: 8:54 a.m. MT Feb 8, 2007
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. airstrike Thursday killed 13 insurgents in a volatile area west of Baghdad, the military said. Local officials said 45 civilians, including women and children, died in the attack.
American forces launched the attack after intelligence showed suspected insurgents were assembled in two safe houses for foreign fighters northeast of Amiriyah, 25 miles west of Baghdad, the military said.
Five militants were detained and a weapons cache including armor-piercing ammunition was found in an initial raid on a nearby target, the military said. That operation was followed by the airstrike on the two suspected safe houses in which the military said 13 insurgents died.
Police and hospital officials in the area offered a conflicting account, saying the airstrike hit the village of Zaidan south of Abu Ghraib and flattened four houses, killing 45 people, including women, children and old people.
An Associated Press photo showed the body of a boy in the back of a pickup truck at the nearby Fallujah hospital and people there said he was a victim of the Zaydan airstrike. Other photos showed several wounded children being treated in the hospital.
Thamir al-Dulaimi, a doctor with the Fallujah Public Hospital, said 20 other civilians from the village were being treated, while a highway patrol officer said civilian cars were being used to bring the wounded to the hospital.
Amiriyah is in volatile Anbar province, an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad where hundreds of U.S. troops have been killed.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Bombs away over Baghdad
By withholding figures on the expenditure of various kinds of munitions in air strikes, the Pentagon conceals information on the size, scope and damage involved in its air operations in Iraq. In the coming months, however, as the US "surge" in Baghdad bites, the true nature of the air war - and the devastation it causes - will emerge.
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Tomgram: Nick Turse, America's Secret Air War in Iraq
Just last week, in a typical air strike of the Iraq War, two missiles were fired at targets somewhere in the city of Ramadi, capital of al-Anbar province in the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, in the course of a battle with American forces stationed there. According to newspaper accounts, "18 insurgents" were killed.
Air power has, since World War II, been the American way of war. The invasion of Iraq began, after all, with a dominating show of air power that was meant to "shock and awe" -– that is, cow -- not just Saddam Hussein's regime, but the whole "axis of evil" and other countries the Bush administration had in its mental gun sights. Among the largest of America's "permanent" megabases in Iraq is Balad Air Base with the sorts of daily air-traffic pile-ups that you would normally see over Chicago's O'Hare Airport. And yet, as Tomdispatch.com has written numerous times over these last years, reporters in Iraq almost determinedly refuse to look up or report on the regular, if intermittent, application of American air power especially to heavily populated neighborhoods in Iraq's cities.
Now, the Bush "surge" is officially beginning. Little about it is strikingly new or untried -- except possibly the unspoken urge to ratchet up the use of air power in Iraq, the only thing a Pentagon with desperately overstretched ground forces really has to throw into the escalation breach (as in recent months it has drastically escalated the use of air power in Afghanistan). Pepe Escobar, the superb globe-trotting correspondent for Asia Times, has recently warned that the new Bush administration "plan" signals "the dire prospect... of a devastating air war over Baghdad" in which "Iraqification-cum-surge" will prove "a disaster mostly for every Baghdadi caught in the crossfire."
Just last week, Julian E. Barnes of the Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Air Force has the Iraqi itch and is getting ready to scratch it. Air Force commanders are preparing for a "heightened role in the volatile region." They are, he reported, already "gearing up for just such a role in Iraq as part of Bush's planned troop increase" -- an expansion of air power that "could include aggressive new tactics designed to deter Iranian assistance to Iraqi militants… [and] more forceful patrols by Air Force and Navy fighter planes along the Iran-Iraq border to counter the smuggling of bomb supplies from Iran."
Until now, U.S. air power in Iraq has been a non-story -- if you weren't an Iraqi. In the coming months, however, it may force its way onto the front pages of our papers and onto the nightly TV news -- but not if the Pentagon has anything to say about it. Doing some journalistic sleuthing, Nick Turse has discovered just how secretive the Pentagon has been about offering any significant information on the size, scope, and damage involved in its air operations over Iraq. The story of this secret American air war is now told for the first time -- and at this website. Tom
Bombs over Baghdad
The Pentagon's Secret Air War in Iraq
By Nick TurseA secret air war is being waged in Iraq -- often in and around that country's population centers -- about which we can find out little. The U.S. military keeps information on the munitions expended in its air efforts under tight wraps, refusing to offer details on the scale of use and so minimizing the importance of air power in Iraq. But expert opinion holds that the forms of aerial assault being employed in that country, though hardly covered in our media, may account for most of the U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths there since the 2003 invasion.
While some aspects of the air war remain a total mystery, Air Force officials do acknowledge that U.S. military and coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of bombs on targets in Iraq in 2006. This figure, 177 bombs in all, does not include guided missiles and unguided rockets fired, or cannon rounds expended; nor, according to a U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) spokesman, does it take into account the munitions used by some Marine Corps and other coalition aircraft or any of the Army's helicopter gunships. Moreover, it does not include munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many private security contractors flying their own missions in Iraq.
Air War, Iraq: 2006
In statistics provided to Tomdispatch, CENTAF reported a total of 10,519 "close air support missions" in Iraq in 2006, during which its aircraft dropped 177 bombs and fired 52 "Hellfire/Maverick missiles." These air strikes presumably included numerous highly publicized missions ranging from the January air strike outside the town of Baiji that reportedly "killed a family of 12," including at least three women and three young children, to the December attack on an insurgent safehouse in the Garma area, near Fallujah, that reportedly killed "two women and a child" in addition to five guerillas. Then there were the even less well remembered events, such as those on July 28th when, according to official reports, an Air Force Predator unmanned aerial vehicle destroyed an "anti-Iraqi forces" vehicle with Hellfire missiles, while Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons "expended a GBU-12, destroying an anti-Iraqi forces location," both in the vicinity of the city of Ramadi.
The latter weapon, Guided Bomb Unit-12, a laser-guided bomb with a 500-pound general purpose warhead, was the most frequently used bomb in Iraq in 2006, according CENTAF statistics provided to Tomdispatch. In addition to the ninety-five GBU-12s "expended," sixty-seven satellite-guided, 500-pound GBU-38s and fifteen 2,000-pound GBU-31/32 munitions were also dropped on Iraqi targets last year, according to official Air Force figures.
One weapon conspicuously left out of this total is rockets -- such as the 2.75-inch Hydra-70 rocket which can be outfitted with various warheads and is fired from fixed-wing aircraft and most helicopters. The number of rockets fired is withheld from the press so as, according to a CENTAF spokesman, not to "skew the tally and present an inaccurate picture of the air campaign." The number of rockets fired may be quite significant as, according to a 2005 press release issued by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who helped secure a $900 million Hydra contract from the Army for General Dynamics, "the widely used Hydra-70 rocket… has seen extensive use in Afghanistan and Iraq… [and] has become the world's most widely used helicopter-launched weapon system." Early last year, Sandra I. Erwin of National Defense Magazine noted that the U.S. military was looking to the Hydra to serve as a low-cost weapon for Iraq's urban areas. "The Army already buys and stockpiles thousands of the 2.75-inch Hydra rockets, and is seeking to equip as many as 73,000 with the laser kits, under a program called 'advanced precision kill weapon system,' or APKWS. The Navy would purchase 8,000 for Marine Corps helicopters," she wrote.
The number of cannon rounds fired -- some models of the AC-130 gunship, for instance, have a Gatling gun that can fire up to 1,800 rounds in a single minute-- is also a closely guarded secret. The official reason given is that "special forces often use aircraft such as the AC-130" and since "their missions and operations are classified, so therefore these figures are not released."
Repeated inquiries concerning another reporter's statistics on cannon rounds fired by CENTAF aircraft prompted the same official to emphatically state in an email: "WE DO NOT REPORT CANNON ROUNDS." His superior officer, Lt. Col. Johnn Kennedy, the Deputy Director of CENTAF Public Affairs, followed up, noting:
Glad to see you appreciate the tremendous efforts [my subordinate] has already expended on you. Trust me, it's probably much more significant than the relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds.But the number of cannon rounds and rockets fired by U.S. aircraft is not an insignificant matter, according to Les Roberts, formerly an epidemiologist for the World Health Organization in Rwanda during that country's civil war and an expert on the human costs of the war in Iraq. According to Roberts, who was last in Iraq in 2004 (where, he says, he personally witnessed "the shredding of entire blocks" in Baghdad's Sadr City by aerial cannon fire), "rocket and cannon fire could account for most coalition-attributed civilian deaths." He adds, "I find it disturbing that they will not release this [figure], but even more disturbing that they have not released such information to Congressmen who have requested it."
Non-CENTAF military officials were equally tight-lipped about such munitions -- at least with me. A Public Affairs officer from U.S. Central Command told me that the Command didn't track such information. When I questioned a coalition spokesman in Baghdad about the number of rockets and cannon rounds fired by Army and Marine Corps helicopters in Iraq in 2006, I was told, "We cannot comment on your inquiry due to operational security."
I then pointed out that just last month, in National Defense Magazine, Col. Robert A. Fitzgerald, the Marine Corps' head of aviation plans and policy, was quoted as saying that, in 2006, "Marine rotary-wing aircraft flew more than 60,000 combat flight hours, and fixed-wing platforms completed 31,000. They dropped 80 tons of bombs and fired 80 missiles, 3,532 rockets and more than 2 million rounds of smaller ammunition."
When asked if this admission had endangered operational security, the spokesman responded, "I cannot comment on the policies or release authority of a Marine colonel."
While the Marine Corps' statistics presumably include totals of munitions used in Afghanistan, where American air power has played a large role in the fighting, they do remind us that the minimal figures given out by CENTAF don't give an accurate picture of the air war in Iraq. These particular totals are, according CENTAF, "separate from the data provided" to Tomdispatch on Iraqi bomb and missile expenditure in 2006.
"Relentless Pursuit"
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the American air war in Iraq, often targeting urban areas, has been given remarkably short shrift in the media. In 2004, Tom Engelhardt, writing at Tomdispatch, called attention to this glaring absence. Seymour Hersh's seminal piece of reportage, "Up in the Air," published in the New Yorker in late 2005, ushered in some mainstream attention to the subject. Articles by Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who covered the American occupation and war in Iraq, before and after the Hersh piece, are among the smattering of pieces that have offered glimpses of the air campaign and its impact. To date, however, the mainstream media has not, to use the words of Lt. Col. Kennedy, engaged in a "relentless pursuit of the number of cannon rounds" fired or any other aspect of the air war or its consequences for the people of Iraq.
While we will undoubtedly never know the full extent of the human costs of the U.S. air campaign, just a few dogged reporters assigned to the air-power beat might, at the very least, have offered some sense of this one-sided air war. Since this has not been the case, we must rely on the best available evidence. One valuable source is a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, it estimated 655,000 "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." The study, published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, in October 2006, found that from March 2003 to June 2006, 13% of violent deaths in Iraq were caused by coalition air strikes. If the 655,000 figure, including over 601,000 violent deaths, is anywhere close to accurate -- and the study offered a possible range of civilian deaths that ran from 392,979 to 942,636 -- this would equal approximately 78,133 Iraqis killed by bombs, missiles, rockets, or cannon rounds from coalition aircraft between March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began and last June when the study concluded.
There are indications that the U.S. air war has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. According to statistics provided to Tomdispatch by The Lancet study's authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes.
The Lancet study used well-established survey methods, which have been proven in conflict zones from Kosovo to the Congo, and interviewers actually inspected death certificates from 92% of the households surveyed where they were requested (which they did 87% of the time). The Iraq Body Count Project, a group of researchers based in the United Kingdom who maintain a public database of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the war, carefully restricts itself to the sparser media reports of civilian fatalities that come out of Iraq. While a much lower number (currently the range of media-reported deaths stands at: 55,441-61,133) than the The Lancet's findings, an analysis of their carefully limited data also offers a glimpse of the human costs of the air war.
Statistics provided to Tomdispatch by the Iraq Body Count Project show that since the U.S. invasion in 2003, coalition air strikes have, according to media sources alone -- which as we know have covered the air war poorly -- caused between 15,593-17,067 Iraqi civilian casualties, including 3,625-4,093 deaths. Last year, media reports listed between 169-200 Iraqis killed and 111-112 injured in twenty-eight separate coalition air strikes, according to the IBC project.
These numbers also appear to be on the rise. In an email message to Tomdispatch last month, John Sloboda, the co-founder and spokesperson for the IBC Project, notes that the "vast majority [of lethal air strikes] have been in the last half of the year."
When asked about the modest air power casualty figures provided by the Iraq Body Count Project and whether CENTAF accepts them, Lt. Col. Kennedy dodged the question, telling Tomdispatch, "We do not track such numbers and so cannot comment on the Project's efforts or validity." He had a similar answer when it came to The Lancet study's findings.
Asked about the assertion that the second half of 2006 was much deadlier for Iraqis due to U.S. air strikes and the possible reasons for this, Kennedy waxed eloquent, "War, by its very nature has ebbs and flows, and we constantly review the application of airpower to best support the forces on the ground in theater. We view this as simply part of our contract to the warfighters. As we do not discuss operational aspects of missions, I'll decline further comment."
Kennedy went on to say that the U.S. makes "every effort" to "minimize collateral damage regardless of whether the enemy is on open ground or within the confines of a city." Just days ago, in the Los Angeles Times, Lt. Gen. Carrol H. "Howie" Chandler, the Air Force's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Requirements, expanded on this line of thought, noting, "I wouldn't automatically write off air power in an urban environment for fear of collateral damage… We have the capability with precision targeting and the new weapons to operate in an urban environment."
Sarah Sewall, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993 to 1996 and is now Director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, agrees that air power has a role to play in urban operations, and may even mitigate civilian harm in certain instances. She warns, however, "I have a lot of skepticism about the applicability of air power for all types of problems and particularly for the types of problems that we see commonly, on a day to day basis, in Iraq today." As she told Tomdispatch, "The problem comes when you think it is the functional equivalent of ground forces."
The Pace Quickens
In 2005, CENTAF reported using 404 bombs and missiles in Iraq. In 2006, an apparent lull (whether in lethal attacks or just in their reporting) in the first half of the year seems to have given way to a rise in deadly attacks during the second half. Only days into 2007, the U.S. military had already conducted air strikes in three nations -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. And in Iraq, the air war may be increasing in pace and ferocity. For example, on January 9th, the U.S. unleashed its air power on Baghdad's Haifa Street, a "mostly Sunni Arab enclave of residential buildings and shops." According to the Washington Post, "F-15 fighter jets strafed rooftops with cannons, while the Apache[ helicopter]s fired Hellfire missiles." Elsewhere in Iraq that day, according to Air Force reports, F-16s strafed targets near Bayji with cannon fire, while others dropped GBU-38s on targets near Turki Village; and F-15Es provided "close-air support" to troops near Basrah.
That same evening, back in the U.S., a broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Brit Hume" offered a brief glimpse of the air war in a story by reporter David Macdougall who was, said Hume, "embedded with the Air Force in a location we cannot identify, where not only fighter jets, but bombers roared into the air headed for other targets in Iraq." Macdougall reported that the B-1B Lancer, the long-range bomber that carries the largest payload of weapons in the Air Force was, for the first time in over a year, again being employed in combat in Iraq.
"These B-1 bombers were central to the raid. We're told they flew a ten-hour mission, and by the looks of their empty bomb bays, these planes dropped thousands of pounds of munitions. They bombed 25 targets deep inside Iraq," he said. At one of these sites, he reported, Army troops sent in after the air strike reportedly found a "command and control center, insurgent hospital, and a closet-sized room covered in blood." We may never know if that "room covered in blood" was a torture center, part of the hospital, or if it became "covered" in the same manner that caused the 280 Iraqi civilian casualties from air strikes reported in the media, and the many more that undoubtedly went unreported and ignored, last year. This is yet another facet of the air war that will remain a mystery.
The Secret Air War
While reporting on the air war has often been barely evident, except as the odd paragraph in daily round-up battle pieces from Iraq (which rely mainly on military handouts or press briefings), the gaps in our knowledge about the air war have been facilitated by the U.S. military's failure to be honest and forthcoming with both data and doctrine. In this respect, the military has been the media's enabler.
Given CENTAF's knowledge that, no matter how "smart" their munitions or how precise their targeting, noncombatants, especially in urban neighborhoods, are sure to die in air strikes, I had a question for Lt. Col. Kennedy: Could he explain how CENTAF decided what was an acceptable level of civilian caualties it was willing to sacrifice for military aims? His answer: "Not in a sufficient manner that you would be happy with."
Kennedy's response echoed a running theme in his replies to my questions. At one point in our exchanges, he actually suggested that an article on the air war in Iraq was not "a viable story" and told me not to contact him again until I was under contract to produce an article that met his standards. He later claimed that his viability comment was due to my "apparent freelance status" and the fact I had not provided "a copy of any contract, nor contacts with a publisher."
"When you provide such information I'll be happy to entertain your questions," he wrote. After providing proof that I was, indeed, a journalist, he deigned to answer me again, concluding, "This is the last email I will respond to from you."
Kennedy was just one of a number of U.S. military officials who thwarted attempts to uncover the barest outline of the real extent and nature of the American air war and its toll on Iraqis. Aside from the Air Force's daily release of airpower summaries of dubious worth, the military's efforts have kept almost all substantive aspects of the air war essentially a secret from Americans at home.
During the Vietnam War, the United States conducted a clandestine air war in Cambodia, lied about it to the press, and hid it from the American public. In Iraq, the military has, these last years, engaged in a different kind of secretive air campaign, but their methods of keeping it a mystery appear to have certain similarities. A few years ago, at a meeting at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event, Les Roberts, a co-author of The Lancet study and now on faculty at Columbia University's Program on Forced Migration and Health, recalls a Pentagon spokesman's declaration that, aside from some sites in Najaf and al-Anbar province, the military had refrained from any attacks on mosques in Iraq. Roberts said that the spokesman's rhetoric differed markedly from the facts on the ground, recalling that "just weeks before I had seen helicopter gunships destroy a beautiful Mosque about an hour south of Baghdad."
When I asked Lt. Col. Kennedy why CENTAF did not track figures on civilian casualties of the air war, he laid the blame on higher headquarters, namely the Office of the Secretary of Defense: "Go ask OSD as we do not set policy here," he wrote.
"I think that it's a red herring," Sewall, the former Pentagon official, told Tomdispatch. "They spend a tremendous amount of energy using computer models to predict where the glass shards are going to go, and then they don't actually care about whether or not that effort to control the direction of the glass shards results in killing fewer people, because they've never bothered to find out whether it, in fact, succeeded in killing fewer people." As she pointed out in a telephone interview, it is "a rather absurd position."
"If they wanted to, they could certainly, as a matter of their own internal procedures, do it," Sewall said of tracking civilian casualties. "I think it's inexcusable that they don't do a better job."
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.
Copyright 2007 Nick Turse
U.S. soldier to be tried in Italy
By MARTA FALCONI, Associated Press Writer 31 minutes ago
A judge Wednesday ordered a U.S. soldier to stand trial in absentia for the fatal shooting of an Italian intelligence agent at a checkpoint in Baghdad, the prosecutor said.
Spc. Mario Lozano is indicted for murder and attempted murder in the death of Nicola Calipari, who was shot on March 4, 2005, on his way to the Baghdad airport shortly after securing the release of an Italian journalist who had been kidnapped in the Iraqi capital, prosecutor Pietro Saviotti said.
Another agent, who was driving the car, and the journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, were wounded.
"This looks to me like the first step on a long road toward truth and justice, and I hope justice will come in the end," said a visibly emotional Rosa Calipari, the agent's widow.
Lozano was not at the hearing and his whereabouts are not known, but defendants can be tried in absentia in Italy. Judge Sante Spinaci set his trial date for April 17.
Prosecutors so far have not sought the soldier's arrest. Lozano, a member of the New York-based 69th Infantry Regiment, has said through friends in the military that he had no idea the car was carrying the Italians.
The case has strained U.S.-Italian relations. The United States and Italy drew different conclusions in reports on the incident. U.S. authorities have said the vehicle was traveling fast, alarming soldiers, who feared an insurgent attack. Italian officials claimed the car was traveling at normal speed and accused the U.S. military of failing to signal there was a checkpoint.
Calipari's death angered Italians, already largely opposed to the war in Iraq, and the agent was mourned as a national hero.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
The USA and Saudi Arabia Combat the Axis of Oil - Iran, Russia and Venezuela
Commodities / Analysis & Strategy
Feb 05, 2007 - 01:27 AM
By Gary_Dorsch
Crude oil is the key weapon in the battle between Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE, aligned with the United States, against the “Oil Axis” of Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. The Persian Gulf Oil kingdoms fear the emergence of a Tehran-led axis linking Iran, Iraqi Shiites, Syria, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, and Islamic militants linked to al Qaeda trying to topple the Saudi royal family.
Earlier this month, Riyadh fired the first shot in the war against Iran, by knocking the price of crude oil to as low as $50 per barrel. The goal is to squeeze Iran's budget and wreck havoc on its economy, as much as possible, before the Ayatollahs can get their hands on the nuclear bomb. According to a Jan 24th report in the UK Telegraph, that indicated North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.
Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran's nuclear scientists, to assist Teheran's preparations to conduct its own test, possibly by the end of this year.
--MORE--
Feb 05, 2007 - 01:27 AM
By Gary_Dorsch
Crude oil is the key weapon in the battle between Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE, aligned with the United States, against the “Oil Axis” of Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. The Persian Gulf Oil kingdoms fear the emergence of a Tehran-led axis linking Iran, Iraqi Shiites, Syria, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas in Gaza, and Islamic militants linked to al Qaeda trying to topple the Saudi royal family.
Earlier this month, Riyadh fired the first shot in the war against Iran, by knocking the price of crude oil to as low as $50 per barrel. The goal is to squeeze Iran's budget and wreck havoc on its economy, as much as possible, before the Ayatollahs can get their hands on the nuclear bomb. According to a Jan 24th report in the UK Telegraph, that indicated North Korea is helping Iran to prepare an underground nuclear test similar to the one Pyongyang carried out last year.
Under the terms of a new understanding between the two countries, the North Koreans have agreed to share all the data and information they received from their successful test last October with Teheran's nuclear scientists, to assist Teheran's preparations to conduct its own test, possibly by the end of this year.
--MORE--
Monday, February 5, 2007
Seen through a Syrian lens, 'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq
Robert Fisk
Published: 28 April 2006
In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.
His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.
The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."
Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable. And I know where much of the Syrian information is gleaned: from the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims who come to pray at the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus. These men and women come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and Iskandariyah as well as the cities of Najaf and Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi also visit Damascus to see friends and relatives and talk freely of American tactics in Iraq.
"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."
Just who these "Americans" might be, my source did not say. In the anarchic and panic-stricken world of Iraq, there are many US groups - including countless outfits supposedly working for the American military and the new Western-backed Iraqi Interior Ministry - who operate outside any laws or rules. No one can account for the murder of 191 university teachers and professors since the 2003 invasion - nor the fact that more than 50 former Iraqi fighter-bomber pilots who attacked Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have been assassinated in their home towns in Iraq in the past three years.
Amid this chaos, a colleague of my source asked me, how could Syria be expected to lessen the number of attacks on Americans inside Iraq? "It was never safe, our border," he said. "During Saddam's time, criminals and Saddam's terrorists crossed our borders to attack our government. I built a wall of earth and sand along the border at that time. But three car bombs from Saddam's agents exploded in Damascus and Tartous- I was the one who captured the criminals responsible. But we couldn't stop them."
Now, he told me, the rampart running for hundreds of miles along Syria's border with Iraq had been heightened. "I have had barbed wire put on top and up to now we have caught 1,500 non-Syrian and non-Iraqi Arabs trying to cross and we have stopped 2,700 Syrians from crossing ... Our army is there - but the Iraqi army and the Americans are not there on the other side."
Behind these grave suspicions in Damascus lies the memory of Saddam's long friendship with the United States. "Our Hafez el-Assad [the former Syrian president who died in 2000] learnt that Saddam, in his early days, met with American officials 20 times in four weeks. This convinced Assad that, in his words, 'Saddam is with the Americans'. Saddam was the biggest helper of the Americans in the Middle East (when he attacked Iran in 1980) after the fall of the Shah. And he still is! After all, he brought the Americans to Iraq!"
So I turn to a story which is more distressing for my sources: the death by shooting of Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon - an awesomely powerful position - and Syrian Minister of Interior when his suicide was announced by the Damascus government last year.
Widespread rumours outside Syria suggested that Kenaan was suspected by UN investigators of involvement in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in a massive car bomb in Beirut last year - and that he had been "suicided" by Syrian government agents to prevent him telling the truth.
Not so, insisted my original interlocutor. "General Ghazi was a man who believed he could give orders and anything he wanted would happen. Something happened that he could not reconcile - something that made him realise he was not all-powerful. On the day of his death, he went to his office at the Interior Ministry and then he left and went home for half an hour. Then he came back with a pistol. He left a message for his wife in which he said goodbye to her and asked her to look after their children and he said that what he was going to do was 'for the good of Syria'. Then he shot himself in the mouth."
Of Hariri's assassination, Syrian officials like to recall his relationship with the former Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Alawi - a self-confessed former agent for the CIA and MI6 - and an alleged $20bn arms deal between the Russians and Saudi Arabia in which they claim Hariri was involved.
Hariri's Lebanese supporters continue to dismiss the Syrian argument on the grounds that Syria had identified Hariri as the joint author with his friend, French President Jacques Chirac, of the UN Security Council resolution which demanded the retreat of the Syrians from Lebanese territory.
But if the Syrians are understandably obsessed with the American occupation of Iraq, their long hatred for Saddam - something which they shared with most Iraqis - is still intact. When I asked my first "security" source what would happen to the former Iraqi dictator, he replied, banging his fist into his hand: "He will be killed. He will be killed. He will be killed."
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Captain America calls it friendly fire. We call it murder
Jasper Gerard
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer
You can see where America is coming from: having killed so many in Iraq - some innocent, some not - is it worth making a fuss about one more? The one more is Lance Corporal Matty Hull of Windsor. He died four years ago in a so-called 'blue on blue' killing, which has usurped that other laughably hollow euphemism: 'friendly fire'. A pair of circling American A-10 tankbuster planes opened fire on the Household Cavalry troop in 2003 and Hull died of multiple injuries in his blazing Scimitar armoured truck. So far, so Iraq.
Sunday February 4, 2007
The Observer
You can see where America is coming from: having killed so many in Iraq - some innocent, some not - is it worth making a fuss about one more? The one more is Lance Corporal Matty Hull of Windsor. He died four years ago in a so-called 'blue on blue' killing, which has usurped that other laughably hollow euphemism: 'friendly fire'. A pair of circling American A-10 tankbuster planes opened fire on the Household Cavalry troop in 2003 and Hull died of multiple injuries in his blazing Scimitar armoured truck. So far, so Iraq.
But now it emerges there is a cockpit recording of the incident which America refuses to allow our - visibly furious - coroner to play in court. This despite the tape's crucial importance, as it is said to contain 'incriminating' information, including the line: 'Someone's going to jail for this.'
Susan, Hull's widow, is rather keen to hear it. Alas, our Ministry of Defence is complicit in a cover-up. Not merely because it will not let the Oxfordshire coroner flick the 'play' switch until America gives permission, but because, scandalously, for four years it has denied 'categorically' that any such recording exists, knowing this to be a lie. The MoD claims to be 'in discussions' with America, but that promises quite a phone bill. How many years can one conversation take?
Hitherto, Des Browne, bumbling Defence Secretary, has escaped parliamentary gunfire because even Mrs Browne would struggle to put a face to him. But if he can't ensure this tape is admissible when the inquest reconvenes later this month, shouldn't he be fired in a manner most unfriendly?
And what of America? It claims the right to try foreign nationals in foreign countries for 'crimes' defined by American law. It requires Britain to extradite suspects while failing to ratify a treaty that would let us try Americans, such as those who kill our citizens. So often, British ministers plead with this administration to show some slight consideration that would make our support for the Iraq war easier, but usually they are rebuffed.
And so, while George and Tony smile on deck suggesting a chipper Anglo-American relationship, below, the good ship Atlantic slowly sinks. Not only are their policies in Iraq diverging - Britain pulling out, America pushing in - but British hearts are hardening.
Proof came last week when William Hague called on Britain to be less slavish. Hague! If the American ambassador gives a damn about British domestic opinion, he must have choked on his pretzel.
Hague was the arch-Atlanticist who urged war in Iraq - not, primarily, because he gave much of a hoot about Iraq - but because he believed the world tends to be safer when Britain acts in consort with America.
The sadness is that with a Democrat Congress and - we hope - a less ideological President, American activism and interventionism could become a more consensual force for good in the world once again. But that might be too late for Britain. It certainly is for Lance Corporal Hull.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
US to support major Fatah troop boost
Related
US to support up to 10000 extra Abbas troops
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US to support troop boost
Feb 4, 2007 [Sunday]
The United States will expand assistance to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to include about 8,500 members of his national security forces and possibly 1,000 Fatah fighters based in Jordan, US documents show.
US to support up to 10000 extra Abbas troops
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US to support troop boost
Feb 4, 2007 [Sunday]
The United States will expand assistance to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to include about 8,500 members of his national security forces and possibly 1,000 Fatah fighters based in Jordan, US documents show.
Providing non-lethal equipment and training to units of Abbas's National Security Forces, and possibly the Jordan-based Badr Brigade could increase Washington's role in the power struggle between Abbas's Fatah faction and the governing Hamas movement.
US assistance has largely been limited until now to around 4,000 members of Abbas's presidential guard. But documents obtained by Reuters on Sunday showed that the US government's US$86.4 million security assistance programme could cover at least 13,500 troops loyal to Abbas.
The National Security Forces (NSF) is the largest security force under Abbas's control and is viewed by many Palestinians to be the equivalent of an army, though it is poorly trained and equipped compared to the smaller presidential guard.
Under the US security programme, US$76.4 million will fund "projects to transform and strengthen elements of the Palestinian Authority's security structure, specifically the National Security Forces and Presidential Guard in an effort to improve public order and fight terror in the West Bank and Gaza," the documents said.
"These projects have been developed in coordination with the office of the PA president (Abbas), and the overall plan enjoys the support of the government of Israel," said the documents, marked "sensitive but unclassified".
Another US$10 million would fund security improvements at the Karni commercial crossing between Israel and Gaza.
Western officials involved in the programme said security service members who participate in the US-funded programme will undergo a vetting process to ensure they are qualified and have no ties to militant groups.
Hamas has denounced US security assistance as part of a coup against its government. Hamas gunmen on Friday attached a truck convey in Gaza that it said was meant to resupply Abbas's presidential guard, triggering a wave of fighting.
US officials say they will only provide training and non-lethal equipment to forces loyal to Abbas. Guns and ammunition are being supplied by key US allies Jordan and Egypt, with Israeli approval, Israeli officials say.
Under the US$86.4 million programme, US$35.5 million will be used to provide non-lethal equipment, including riot gear and communications equipment, to about 8,500 members of Abbas's National Security Forces.
Another US$15 million in US funds would provide at least one NSF unit, estimated to have 668 members, with an initial six months of training to counter "civil disorder", most likely at a facility in Jordan, the documents say.
The funds will be used "in support of NSF deployment throughout the West Bank and Gaza so that the NSF may establish a visible public presence, improve public order and help improve border security," the documents said.
The United States expected other donors to provide extra training, the documents said, but gave no further details.
Palestinian officials estimate that the National Security Forces have as many as 40,000 members. Western diplomats say the number of active members is closer to 20,000.
Badr brigade
The US$86.4 million also includes US$25.9 million to provide non-lethal equipment to Abbas's elite presidential guard, which is expected to grow to 4,700 members with US help near-term. Palestinian officials say the force could eventually top 10,000.
The documents said up to US$8 million of these funds may be used to provide equipment to the Badr Brigade, a Fatah-dominated force, "in the event of a deployment in Gaza". Badr would fall under the presidential guard's operational command.
The United States and Israel have backed a proposal by Abbas to let about 1,000 members of the Badr Brigade, into the Palestinian territories, though no date has been set.
Diplomats say Abbas's military build-up was meant to counter strides by Hamas in smuggling more powerful weapons into Gaza for its fast-growing "Executive Force" and armed wing.
Some analysts have warned that fighting between Hamas and Fatah could turn into a proxy war, with the United States supporting Abbas and Iran backing Hamas.
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