The War in Iraq

[lofter1]

More photos have been released from Abu Ghraib: http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Australian_TV_station_releases_new_Abu_0215.html

Shameful.

Couple these with other recent events ( http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=82740&postcount=69 ) and the entire Iraq mess just gets worse and worse.

[lofter1]

Abu Ghraib Called Incubator for Terrorists

By THOM SHANKER (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/thom_shanker/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
NY Times
Feb. 15, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/international/middleeast/15detain.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — American commanders in Iraq (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) are expressing grave concerns that the overcrowded Abu Ghraib prison has become a breeding ground for extremist leaders and a school for terrorist foot soldiers.

The reason is that the confinement allows detainees to forge relationships and exchange lessons of combat against the United States and the new Iraqi government. "Abu Ghraib is a graduate-level training ground for the insurgency," said an American commander in Iraq.

The American military has halted transferring detainees to Iraqi jailers until the Iraqis improve their prisoner care. But concerns about the growing detainee population under American control have prompted a number of officers to stop sending every suspect rounded up in raids to Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Many inmates might instead be released if initial questioning indicated that they were not hardened fighters against the American troops and the Iraqi government.

"These decisions have to be intelligence driven, on holding those who are extreme threats or who can lead us to those who are," another American officer in Iraq said. "We don't want to be putting everybody caught up in a sweep into Jihad University."

The officers insisted on anonymity to discuss their individual field operations because they are not involved in creating policy for the military across Iraq.

The perception of the prison as an incubator for more violence is the latest shift in how Abu Ghraib has been seen — once a feared torture dungeon of the Hussein government, then the center of the storm over prisoner abuse by Americans and ever since a festering symbol of the unsolved problems of handling criminals, terrorists, rebels and holdovers from the Baathist era.

Officials at the Pentagon say the latest questions about the prison have been raised by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and by Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, commander of the American-run prison system there.

General Gardner has ordered a number of steps to deal with the problem, with the goal being to isolate suspected terrorist ringleaders from the broader detainee population and to limit clandestine communications among those in custody.

"We are clearly concerned about the potential for extremists and insurgents to use our detention facilities as recruiting and networking centers and are aggressively taking actions to disrupt their efforts," Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for General Gardner, wrote in an e-mail exchange. "Central to our program is a continuous and systemic analysis of the population inside each compound to identify extreme negative influences and corresponding actions to separate the insurgent and extremists from the general population.

"We also attempt to reduce illicit communications between detainees in separate compounds to disrupt their ability to network and recruit."

Plans to turn over Abu Ghraib, three other prisons and their inmates to the new Iraqi government have been stalled despite American commanders' concerns that overseeing the detainees saps personnel and continues to blot the American image. After a series of raids on Iraqi-run detention centers late last year uncovered scores of abused prisoners, commanders at American and allied prisons said no detainees, or centers, would be handed over to Iraqi jailers until American officials were satisfied that the Iraqis were meeting international standards for detainee care.

Concerns voiced by military officers in Iraq have intensified in recent weeks, with a growing prison population at the four major detention centers under American and allied control. The overall detainee population stood at 14,767 this week, an increase from 10,135 in June 2005 and a significant jump even from the end of December, when the number stood at 14,055, according to American military statistics.

Abu Ghraib held 4,850 detainees as of Jan. 31, a steep increase from 3,563 last June but a slight dip from 4,924 in late December.

At present, Iraqis may be freed from the American-run detention centers after review by a special panel, the Combined Release Board. Detained Iraqis are turned over to Iraqi jailers only if they are convicted by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, American officials said.

The problem of insurgent networking and instruction in the detention system is part of a broader problem in the American counterterrorism effort. American military and intelligence officers say Iraq has become a magnet for violent extremists from across the Islamic world. The officials warn that violent extremists who are not killed, captured and held or persuaded to give up the struggle will emerge battle tested, and more proficient at carrying out terror attacks elsewhere.

Some officers warn of a parallel to the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, when radical Islamic fighters drawn to fight the Soviet occupiers forged strong relationships with religious extremists from within Afghanistan and across the Islamic world.

Copyright 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[lofter1]

This could be the turning point ...

http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/shiite_mosque_bombing/7.html

http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2006/shiite_mosque_bombing/images/splash.jpg (http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/shiite_mosque_bombing/1.html)

[lofter1]

Civil War ??

[click image]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/ap/Iraqexplode.jpg (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060222/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq;_ylt=ApErYvQF8UV0XG6Bg84frQ.s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMT A2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--)
From thewe.cc

[lofter1]

Whew!! Just when everything was looking so bleak ... no need for despair:

Only on Fox:
"All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"

mediamatters
Feb. 24, 2006

http://mediamatters.org/items/200602240003

Summary: Fox News featured two onscreen captions during a segment on escalating violence in Iraq that read: " 'Upside' To Civil War?" and "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"

A segment about escalating sectarian violence (http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/international/middleeast/23iraq.html?ex=1298350800&en=7ed5985028309493&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss) in Iraq on the February 23 edition of Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto featured onscreen captions that read: " 'Upside' To Civil War?" and "All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?"

The segment, guest-hosted by Fox News Live (noon-1:30 pm hour ET) anchor David Asman (http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/search_results?qstring=David+Asman), featured commentary by Fox News military analyst Lt. Col. Bill Cowan (http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,60314,00.html) and Center for American Progress (http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.americanprogress.org/site/c.biJRJ8OVF/b.8473/) senior fellow Col. P.J. Crowley (http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=13267).

http://mediamatters.org/static/images/item/cavuto-20060224-2.jpg

[ablarc]

May or may not be a good thing, but it's probably inevitable.

Possible outcome: emergence of a strongman who'll keep oder, like Saddam Hussein. Maybe Saddam himself.

At least he'll keep down the terrorists.

[lofter1]

Army to Pay Halliburton Unit Most Costs Disputed by Audit

By JAMES GLANZ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/james_glanz/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
NY Times
Feb. 27, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/international/middleeast/27contract.html?ex=1298696400&en=075a4c9d410f6860&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary for nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.41 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair oil equipment in Iraq (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo), even though the Pentagon's own auditors had identified more than $250 million in charges as potentially excessive or unjustified.

The Army said in response to questions on Friday that questionable business practices by the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had in some cases driven up the company's costs. But in the haste and peril of war, it had largely done as well as could be expected, the Army said, and aside from a few penalties, the government was compelled to reimburse the company for its costs.

Under the type of contract awarded to the company, "the contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement," said Rhonda James, a spokeswoman for the southwestern division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, based in Dallas, where the contract is administered.

The contract has been the subject of intense scrutiny after disclosures in 2003 that it had been awarded without competitive bidding. That produced criticism from Congressional Democrats and others that the company had benefited from its connection with Dick Cheney (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/dick_cheney/index.html?inline=nyt-per), who was Halliburton's chief executive before becoming vice president.

Later that year auditors began focusing on the fuel deliveries under the contract, finding that the fuel transportation costs that the company was charging the Army were in some cases nearly triple what others were charging to do the same job. But Kellogg Brown & Root, which has consistently maintained that its costs were justified, characterized the Army's decision as an official repudiation of those criticisms.

"Once all the facts were fully examined, it is clear, and now confirmed, that KBR performed this work appropriately per the client's direction and within the contract terms," said Cathy Mann, a company spokeswoman, in a written statement on the decision. The company's charges, she said, "were deemed properly incurred."


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/02/26/international/20060227_CONTRACTS_2_GRAPHI.gifhttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifThe New York Times


The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency had questioned $263 million in costs for fuel deliveries, pipeline repairs and other tasks that auditors said were potentially inflated or unsupported by documentation. But the Army decided to pay all but $10.1 million of those contested costs, which were mostly for trucking fuel from Kuwait and Turkey.

That means the Army is withholding payment on just 3.8 percent of the charges questioned by the Pentagon audit agency, which is far below the rate at which the agency's recommendation is usually followed or sustained by the military — the so-called "sustention rate."

Figures provided by the Pentagon audit agency on thousands of military contracts over the past three years show how far the Halliburton decision lies outside the norm.

In 2003, the agency's figures show, the military withheld an average of 66.4 percent of what the auditors had recommended, while in 2004 the figure was 75.2 percent and in 2005 it was 56.4 percent.

Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said despite the difficulties of doing business in a war zone, the low rate of recovery on such huge and widely disputed charges was hard to understand. "To think that it's near zero is ridiculous when you're talking these kinds of numbers," he said.

The Halliburton contract is referred to as a "cost-plus" agreement, meaning that after the company recovers its costs, it also receives various markups and award fees. Although the markups and fees are difficult to calculate exactly using the Army figures, they appear to be about $100 million.

One of Halliburton's most persistent critics, Representative Henry A. Waxman (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/henry_a_waxman/index.html?inline=nyt-per), a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a written statement about the Army's decision, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus."

About $208 million of the disputed charges was mostly related to the cost of importing fuel, which was at the heart of the controversy surrounding the contract. Kellogg Brown & Root hired a little-known Kuwaiti company, Altanmia, to transport fuel in enormous truck convoys. The Pentagon auditors found that in part because of the transportation fees that Kellogg Brown & Root agreed to pay Altanmia, the cost for a gallon of gasoline was roughly 40 percent higher than what the American military paid when it did the job itself — under a separate contract it had negotiated with Altanmia.

The Army said in a written statement that it had largely accepted Kellogg Brown & Root's assertions that costs had been driven up by factors beyond its control — the exigencies of war and the hard-line negotiating stance of the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. The Army said the Kuwaiti fuel company blocked attempts by Kellogg Brown & Root to renegotiate its transportation contract with Altanmia. In the end, the Army decided to pay the Halliburton subsidiary all but $3.81 million of the $208 million in fuel-related costs questioned by auditors.

The Kellogg Brown & Root contract, called Restore Iraqi Oil, or RIO, will be paid with about $900 million of American taxpayer money and $1.5 billion of Iraqi oil proceeds and money seized from Saddam Hussein's (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein/index.html?inline=nyt-per) government.

Official criticism of the work became so intense that in November, an auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended that the United States repay some or all of the $208 million related to the alleged fuel overcharges — an allegation Halliburton says has never been justified.

In fact, Ms. Mann said, the Army's decision clearly showed that "any claims that the figures contained in these audit reports are 'overcharges' are uninformed and flat wrong." She said that the fuel charges themselves had been 100 percent reimbursed and that the reductions all came from adjustments on administrative costs associated with that mission.

Still, the Army conceded that some of the criticisms of the company's business practices were legitimate. As a result, the Army said, it would exclude about half of the auditors' questioned charges from the amount used to derive the markups and fees, which are calculated as a sliding percentage of the costs. That decision could cost the company a maximum of about $7 million.

Ms. James, the Corps of Engineers spokeswoman, said that in addition to the other modest penalties that Kellogg Brown & Root had been assessed by the Army's contracting officers, the sliding percentages on some of the fees had been lowered by unspecified amounts to reflect shortcomings in the company's dealings in Iraq. "All fees were awarded in accordance with the award fee plan set out in the contract, which placed more emphasis on timely mission accomplishment than on cost control and paperwork," Ms. James said.

Mr. Barton, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that with the relatively small penalties paid by the company for falling short in its performance in Iraq, it was hard to see what the Army's scrutiny of the company's practices had amounted to in the end.

"When they say, 'We questioned their business model or their business decisions' — well, yeah, so what?" Mr. Barton said. "You questioned it but there was no result."

In answer to written questions, a spokesman for the Defense Contract Audit Agency, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said the settlement of the disputed charges was based on "broader business case considerations" beyond just Pentagon audits.

But when asked whether the Army's decision reflected on the quality of the audits, Colonel Maka said only that the agency "has no indication of problems with the audit process," and he referred questions on the settlement itself to the Army.

A former senior Defense Department manager knowledgeable about the audits and the related contracting issues said, "That's as close as D.C.A.A. can get to saying, 'We're not happy with it either.' "

Because of the size of the contract and the contention surrounding Halliburton's dealings with the government, the RIO audits were carried out by the agency's top personnel and were subjected to extraordinarily thorough reviews, the former manager said.

This is unlikely to be the last time the Army and Halliburton meet over negotiated costs. On a separate contract in Iraq, for logistics support to the United States military, more than $11 billion had been disbursed to Kellogg Brown & Root by mid-January, according to the Army Field Support Command, based in Rock Island, Ill. Pentagon auditors have begun scrutinizing that contract as well.


Copyright 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[lofter1]

George Will: “This Is A Civil War”

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/02/26/george-will-this-is-a-civil-war/

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/02/will.jpg


Conservative columnist George Will this morning on ABC’s This Week:STEPHANOPOULOS: What does civil war look like?

WILL: This. This is a civil war.

Later, Will even questioned whether Iraq can truly be said to have a government:Now, does Iraq have a government? Let me just postulate the question. A government exists when it has a reasonable monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. As long as the militias are out there, the existence of an Iraqi government is questionable.

Think of Los Angeles. If Los Angeles said the Bloods and the Crips are going to be tolerated, they’re going to be armed and police their areas and enforce the law in certain areas, what sense would Los Angeles have of government?

Full transcript below:ZAKARIA: It was a very bad week for iraq. The fundamental problem here remains the original one, which is when people don’t have a sense of security because there were not enough American troops, they will revert to their script, their tribal loyalty, the Sunni and Shiite. This happens in every society. That is what is happening, a pervasive sense of insecurity has made them search for security in the things they can find, which is their sectarian identities. But the fact that a few hundred people died — and it is a terrible tragedy — it does not necessarily mean we’re on the brink of civil war. India goes through sectarian violence from time to time. Nigeria does —

STEPHANOPOULOS: What does civil war look like?

WILL: This. This is a civil war.

[lofter1]

These guys are good at what they do ...


From "The Prissy Patriot" : http://prissypatriot.blogspot.com/Google video from the Iraqi Resistance in English. This will come as no surprise-they want us to LEAVE.
[/URL]
[URL="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5292613146163171775&q=iraqi+resistance+english"]A message From The Iraqi Resistance (http://javascript<b></b>:void(0);)

[lofter1]

What we have wrought ...

Toll in Iraq's Deadly Surge: 1,300

Morgue Count Eclipses Other Tallies Since Shrine Attack

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; A01


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/27/AR2006022701128_pf.html

BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 -- Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

"After he came back from the evening prayer, the Mahdi Army broke into his house and asked him, 'Are you Khalid the Sunni infidel?' " one man at the morgue said, relating what were the last hours of his cousin, according to other relatives. "He replied yes and then they took him away."

Aides to Sadr denied the allegations, calling them part of a smear campaign by unspecified political rivals.

By Monday, violence between Sunni Arabs and Shiites appeared to have eased. As Iraqi security forces patrolled, American troops offered measured support, in hopes of allowing the Iraqis to take charge and prevent further carnage.

But at the morgue, where the floor was crusted with dried blood, the evidence of the damage already done was clear. Iraqis arrived throughout the day, seeking family members and neighbors among the contorted bodies.

"And they say there is no sectarian war?" demanded one man. "What do you call this?"

The brothers of one missing man arrived, searching for a body. Their hunt ended on the concrete floor, provoking sobs of mourning: "Why did you kill him?" "He was unarmed!" "Oh, my brother! Oh, my brother!"

Morgue officials said they had logged more than 1,300 dead since Wednesday -- the day the Shiites' gold-domed Askariya shrine was bombed -- photographing, numbering and tagging the bodies as they came in over the nights and days of retaliatory raids.

The Statistics Department of the Iraqi police put the nationwide toll at 1,020 since Wednesday, but that figure was based on paperwork that is sometimes delayed before reaching police headquarters. The majority of the dead had been killed after being taken away by armed men, police said.

The disclosure of the death tolls followed accusations by the U.S. military and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days.

The bulk of the previously known deaths were caused by bombings and other large-scale attacks. But the scene at the morgue and accounts related by relatives indicated that most of the bloodletting came at the hands of self-styled executioners.

"They killed him just because he was a Sunni," one young man at the morgue said of his 32-year-old neighbor, whose body he was retrieving.

Much of the violence has centered on mosques, many of which were taken over by Shiite gunmen, bombed or burned.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, aides to Sadr denied any role in the killings.

"These groups wore black clothes like the Mahdi Army to make the people say that the Shiites kidnapped and killed them," said Riyadh al-Nouri, a close aide to Sadr.

Sahib al-Amiri, another close aide, said: "Some political party accused [Sadr's political party] and the Mahdi Army because they considered us as competitive to them. So they recruited criminals to kill Shiites and Sunnis."

After Wednesday's mosque attack in Samarra, Sadr and other Shiite clerics called on their armed followers to deploy to protect shrines across Iraq.

Clutching rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles, the militias rolled out of their Baghdad base of Sadr City. Residents of several neighborhoods reported them on patrol or in control of mosques. U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces did not appear to challenge the militias, which are officially outlawed.

Sunni leaders charged that more than 100 Sunni mosques were burned, fired upon or bombed in the retaliatory violence after the attack on the Samarra mosque.

Iraqi officials, at the urging of Sunni leaders, imposed what became a round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad to try to quell the violence.

Sunnis speaking at the morgue said many of the dead had been taken away at night, when security forces were supposed to have been enforcing the curfew.

By Monday, the reported violence had subsided. Four mortar rounds hit a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, killing four people, news agencies reported. More mortar attacks boomed in other parts of the capital.

Also Monday, Iraq's interim government lifted the round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad. The new curfew orders residents inside from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Residents rushed out of their homes to refill gas tanks and kitchen shelves.
Lines at gas stations stretched for miles and sometimes clogged both sides of highways. One motorist in the line was seen clutching a blanket and pillow, apparently anticipating an overnight wait for gas.

Making their way through the traffic were a few cars with plastic-wrapped corpses in crude wooden coffins strapped to the roofs.

During two hours at the morgue on Monday, families brought in two more victims of the violence to receive death certificates. Other families carried away 10 dead. Most of the victims were Sunni.

At the blue steel doors of the morgue, dozens more bloody bodies could be seen on the floor or on gurneys. Two hundred were still unidentified and unclaimed, morgue workers said.

Claiming the dead has become automated. Morgue workers directed families to a barred window in the narrow courtyard outside the main entrance. A computer screen angled to face the window flashed the contorted, staring faces of the dead: men shot in the mouth, men shot in the head, men covered with blood, men with bindings twisted around their necks.

Men and a few women in black abayas pressed up to the window's black bars as the reek of the bodies inside spilled out.

"What neighborhood?'' a morgue worker asked one waiting man.

"Adhamiyah,'' the man said, naming a predominantly Sunni neighborhood.

Tapping at the keyboard, the morgue worker fast-forwarded through the scores of tortured faces.

"Criminals. How can you kill another human for nothing?" someone clutching the bars asked.

"Good news, we found the body," another man called out. "We found him."

Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf, staff writer Nelson Hernandez and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[ablarc]

^ Pig sty.

[ZippyTheChimp]

How can you kill another human for nothing?"
.

[BrooklynRider]

Bush Priorities: Halliburton Pillaging (Yes) Veteran's Needs (No)

Veterans May Face Health Care Cuts in 2008

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
Mon Feb 27, 9:56 PM ET

WASHINGTON - At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half — if the White House is serious about its proposed budget.


After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. n though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.

In fact, proposed cuts are so draconian that it seems to some that the White House is simply making them up to make its long-term deficit figures look better. realistic numbers, however, would raise doubts as to whether Bush can keep his promise to wrestle the deficit under control by the time he leaves office.

ther the administration is proposing gutting VA health care over the next five years or it is not serious about its own budget," Rep. Chet Edwards (news, bio, voting record) of Texas, top Democrat on the panel overseeing the VA's budget. "If the proposals aren't serious, then that would undermine the administration's argument that they intend to reduce the deficit in half over the next several years."

In fact, the White House doesn't seem serious about the numbers. It says the long-term budget numbers don't represent actual administration policies. Similar cuts assumed in earlier budgets have been reversed.

"Instead, the president's subsequent budgets have increased funding for all of these programs," said White House budget office spokesman Scott Milburn. "The country can meet the goal of cutting the deficit in half and still invest in key programs for vulnerable Americans, and claims to the contrary aren't supported by the facts of recent budget history."

The veterans' medical care cuts would come even though more and more people are trying to enter the system and as the number of people wounded in Iraq keeps rising. Even though Iraq war veterans represent only about 2 percent of the Veterans Administration's patient caseload, many are returning from battle with grievous injuries requiring costly care.

The White House budget office, however, assumes that the veterans' medical services budget — up 69 percent since Bush took office and which would rise by 11 percent next year under Bush's budget — can absorb cuts for three years in a row after that.

The cuts are outlined in a 673-page computer printout that has not been officially released by the White House budget office. However, it found its way into the hands of the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning Washington think tank.

The administration insists it makes spending policies one year at a time and that the long-term veterans' budget figures are therefore subject to change.

"We don't make multiyear discretionary funding requests," said Veterans Administration spokesman Scott Hogenson, who declined to speculate on whether long-term cuts were realistic. "We look at our needs and assess our needs on a year-to-year basis."

The rapidly growing budget for veterans' medical services, funded for the current year at $24.5 billion, would leap to $27.7 billion in 2007 under Bush's budget. But the medical services budget faces a 3 percent cut in 2008 and would hover below $27 billion for the next four years, even as increasing numbers of veterans from the Iraq war claim their benefits and the costs of providing care to elderly World War II and Korean War veterans continue to rise.

Those cuts would prove traumatic to the already troubled VA medical system, and would force staff cuts, delay investment in new medical equipment and deny care to hundreds of thousands of veterans.

"The only way you can do what they want to do in terms of actually cutting the budget is to throw a lot of veterans out who are already in the system and/or redefine who is a veteran," said Rick Weidman, director of government relations for the Vietnam Veterans of America.

Even with recent funding increases, cost-cutting moves have locked more than a quarter million veterans out of the system. Those excluded have no illnesses or injuries attributable to their military service and earn more than the average wage in their community.

In Bush's proposal to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term, he's assuming spending on domestic agency operating budgets can be frozen over the next few years.

"Each year the budget numbers go up," said Jeff Schrade, spokesman for Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Larry Craig, R-Idaho. "Speculation beyond 2007's budget is, at this point, just speculation."

But without the cuts, Bush's plan to halve the deficit would be far more difficult to achieve. For example, just freezing the budget for veterans' medical services below $27 billion understates the deficit for 2009 by perhaps $5 billion.

[lofter1]

No joke -- I really do believe that Bush et al are evil beings.

Their intentions and actions are self centered and uncaring of others.

anti-Christian is a term that springs to mind.

[BrooklynRider]

The Bush Family is evil to its core. Generations of this family have worked against the people of this country.

[lofter1]

U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006

Zogby International
February 28, 2006

http://zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075



Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay “as long as they are needed”
While 58% say mission is clear, 42% say U.S. role is hazy
Plurality believes Iraqi insurgents are mostly homegrown
Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11, most don’t blame Iraqi public for insurgent attacks
Majority of troops oppose use of harsh prisoner interrogation
Plurality of troops pleased with their armor and equipmentAn overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.

The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

Different branches had quite different sentiments on the question, the poll shows. While 89% of reserves and 82% of those in the National Guard said the U.S. should leave Iraq within a year, 58% of Marines think so. Seven in ten of those in the regular Army thought the U.S. should leave Iraq in the next year. Moreover, about three-quarters of those in National Guard and Reserve units favor withdrawal within six months, just 15% of Marines felt that way. About half of those in the regular Army favored withdrawal from Iraq in the next six months.

The troops have drawn different conclusions about fellow citizens back home. Asked why they think some Americans favor rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, 37% of troops serving there said those Americans are unpatriotic, while 20% believe people back home don’t believe a continued occupation will work. Another 16% said they believe those favoring a quick withdrawal do so because they oppose the use of the military in a pre-emptive war, while 15% said they do not believe those Americans understand the need for the U.S. troops in Iraq.

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

“Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction is not a reason for U.S. troops being there,” said Pollster John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International. “Instead, that initial rationale went by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real mission became to remove Saddam Hussein.” Just 24% said that “establishing a democracy that can be a model for the Arab World" was the main or a major reason for the war. Only small percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).

The continuing insurgent attacks have not turned U.S. troops against the Iraqi population, the survey shows. More than 80% said they did not hold a negative view of Iraqis because of those attacks. About two in five see the insurgency as being comprised of discontented Sunnis with very few non-Iraqi helpers. “There appears to be confusion on this,” Zogby said. But, he noted, less than a third think that if non-Iraqi terrorists could be prevented from crossing the border into Iraq, the insurgency would end. A majority of troops (53%) said the U.S. should double both the number of troops and bombing missions in order to control the insurgency.

The survey shows that most U.S. military personnel in-country have a clear sense of right and wrong when it comes to using banned weapons against the enemy, and in interrogation of prisoners. Four in five said they oppose the use of such internationally banned weapons as napalm and white phosphorous. And, even as more photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq surface around the world, 55% said it is not appropriate or standard military conduct to use harsh and threatening methods against insurgent prisoners in order to gain information of military value.


Three quarters of the troops had served multiple tours and had a longer exposure to the conflict: 26% were on their first tour of duty, 45% were on their second tour, and 29% were in Iraq for a third time or more.

A majority of the troops serving in Iraq said they were satisfied with the war provisions from Washington. Just 30% of troops said they think the Department of Defense has failed to provide adequate troop protections, such as body armor, munitions, and armor plating for vehicles like HumVees.

Only 35% said basic civil infrastructure in Iraq, including roads, electricity, water service, and health care, has not improved over the past year. Three of every four were male respondents, with 63% under the age of 30.

The survey included 944 military respondents interviewed at several undisclosed locations throughout Iraq. The names of the specific locations and specific personnel who conducted the survey are being withheld for security purposes. Surveys were conducted face-to-face using random sampling techniques. The margin of error for the survey, conducted Jan. 18 through Feb. 14, 2006, is +/- 3.3 percentage points.


Copyright by Zogby International

[lofter1]

Blowing Up History

Healing Iraq

Daily news and comments on the situation in post Saddam Iraq by an Iraqi dentist

Sunday, March 05, 2006

http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/ (http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/)

Governmental sources are reporting that militants have blown up the Abbasid palace north of Samarra.

The source blamed the same groups that bombed the Al-Askari shrine over a week ago.

http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/abbasid-palace-samarra-759429.jpg

The Abbasid palace in Samarra was built by Abbasid caliph Al-Mu'tasim in 836, when he moved his capital from Baghdad to Samarra. It is one of the largest Abbasid era palaces to have survived to this day, in addition to the Abbasid palace in central Baghdad. It is regarded, together with the Grand mosque of Sammara (famous for its spiral minaret) and the Al-Askariyyain shrine (the golden mosque), as one of the most prominent historical landmarks of the city.

No further details on the incident were provided, but still, it boggles the mind that such an operation could be carried out twice at the same area in just over a week. Given the historical and cultural value of these palaces and mosques in such a tense area, where a similar attack took place last week, one would think that they would be closely guarded. But why protect buildings in a country where human life has no value anyway?

You won't see sectarian riots over this one. It's only an archaeological site, and too much of those have been destroyed or looted over the last three years for people to care anymore. Not even bricks have been spared our misery.

# (http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/archives/2006_03_01_healingiraq_archive.html#11415888741010 2531) posted by Zeyad : 3/05/2006 10:46:00 PM

[lofter1]

Envoy to Iraq Sees Threat of Wider War

He supports the White House view that an early pullout would backfire,
but he is bleak about the Sunni-Shiite conflict and says it could spread.

By Borzou Daragahi
Times Staff Writer
March 7, 2006

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-envoy7mar07,0,4443056,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

BAGHDAD — The top U.S. envoy to Iraq said Monday that the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime had opened a "Pandora's box" of volatile ethnic and sectarian tensions that could engulf the region in all-out war if America pulled out of the country too soon.

In remarks that were among the frankest and bleakest public assessments of the Iraq situation by a high-level American official, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the "potential is there" for sectarian violence to become full-blown civil war.

For now, Iraq has pulled back from that prospect after the wave of sectarian reprisals that followed the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra, he said. But "if another incident [occurs], Iraq is really vulnerable to it at this time, in my judgment," Khalilzad said in an interview with The Times.

Abandoning Iraq in the way the U.S. disengaged from civil wars in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Somalia could have dramatic global repercussions, he said.

"We have opened the Pandora's box and the question is, what is the way forward?" Khalilzad said. "The way forward, in my view, is an effort to build bridges across [Iraq's] communities."

Khalilzad's central message that the United States cannot immediately pull out of Iraq jibed with Bush administration policy. But he offered a far gloomier picture than assessments made in recent days by U.S. military spokesmen.

On Sunday, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a televised interview that things in Iraq were "going very, very well, from everything you look at."

Khalilzad's comments came just before key U.S. decisions are expected on whether the situation in Iraq has improved enough to allow for a reduction in U.S. forces this year.

Army Gens. John P. Abizaid, who heads U.S. Central Command, and George W. Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, plan to meet with President Bush as early as this week to make recommendations on troop levels.

Military officials must decide this month whether to cancel deployments of several Army combat brigades — a cancellation that would lead to a reduction in the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq by midyear, from about 130,000 to about 100,000. For nearly a year, Casey has said that a "substantial reduction" in troops could occur in 2006, and cited spring as the time when the critical decisions would be made.

A reduction would signal the administration's confidence in progress in the country. On Friday, however, Casey said that war planners would take the recent violence as "certainly something that we will consider in our decisions."

Without touching on the issue of troop reduction, Khalilzad described a highly combustible atmosphere in Iraq that dates at least to the polarizing Dec. 15 legislative elections, which handed Shiites a dominant role in the government.

"Right now there's a vacuum of authority, and there's a lot of distrust," said the diplomat, who is among the architects of the U.S. plan to reshape the political balance of the Middle East after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Samarra bombing and the subsequent outbreak of violent reprisals by Shiites against Sunni Muslims demonstrated that insurgents fully understand Iraq's fragility and will seek to exploit it, Khalilzad said.

"It indicates that they recognize this vulnerability of Iraq or this problem in Iraq, which they have tried to fan," he said. "There is a concerted effort to provoke civil war. The guys who want to start a civil war are there looking or considering other things they could do."

Khalilzad, who is actively and publicly involved in Iraq's government talks, repeated his weeks-long assertion that the best way to prevent civil war or large-scale sectarian violence is to form a government drawing from all of Iraq's disparate groups as a way "to build trust and narrow the fault line that exists" between Shiites and Sunnis.

"Once a national unity government is formed, the effort to provoke a civil war will face a huge obstacle," he said.

Shiite leaders loudly objected last week to Khalilzad's involvement in government talks, saying he was improperly taking the side of the Sunni minority.

"I have gotten some negative reaction," Khalilzad said, adding that he had not tried to intervene on the Sunni side. He said he had called for nonsectarian figures to run key ministries. "Sectarian Sunnis are as bad as sectarian Shias," he said.

In any case, Khalilzad said the U.S. has little choice but to maintain a strong presence in Iraq — or risk a regional conflict in which Arabs side with Sunnis and Iranians back Shiites, in what could be a more encompassing version of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, which left more than 1 million dead.

The ambassador warned of a calamitous disruption in the production and transport of energy supplies in the Persian Gulf. He described a worst-case scenario in which religious extremists could take over sections of Iraq and begin to expand outward.

"That would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child's play," said Khalilzad, an American of Afghan descent who served as U.S. envoy to Afghanistan before taking on the post in Iraq.

The U.S. vision for a broad-based government "reflects the aspirations of the people," he said. "If we were at variance with the aspirations of the people, we'd be in trouble."

Khalilzad said U.S. officials had tried to enlist the support of governments of neighboring countries, even exploring "modalities of setting up a meeting" with Iran. He named Iran and Syria as two nations that had been "particularly unhelpful" in Iraq.

On Monday, Iraqi politicians continued to wrangle over the composition of a new government. Interim President Jalal Talabani announced a decision to convene parliament on Sunday, only to be quickly countered by Shiite political leaders who asked him to postpone the session.

Shiites have nominated interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari to serve a full term. Kurds and Sunnis have pushed to derail his candidacy.

Khalilzad described such day-to-day political jousting as healthy. "They are bargaining. They are shadowboxing," he said. "This is a much better way than with guns."

Still, the politics of the gun spoke loudly Monday.

Violence, much of it with sectarian overtones, left at least 18 Iraqis dead across the country as multiple car bombs exploded. One U.S. soldier was reported killed in a combat incident in western Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Mubdar Hatim Hazya Duleimi, commander of the Iraqi army in Baghdad, was killed in western Baghdad, the U.S. military announced.

He was killed by a single bullet while driving in a long convoy shortly after 5 p.m., said Mohammed Askari, a Defense Ministry advisor.

Duleimi, a Sunni, commanded a force that is seen by many as a counterweight to that of the Interior Ministry, whose Shiite-dominated police and commando units have been accused of extrajudicial killings.

The U.S. military reported Monday that a U.S. soldier had died Sunday as a result of "enemy action." The soldier was killed in rural western Iraq, although much of the insurgent violence in the country has shifted to religiously diverse urban areas, said a U.S. official who requested anonymity.

A car bomb in a crowded market in downtown Baqubah, a religiously mixed provincial capital about 35 miles northeast of the capital, killed at least six people, including two children, and injured 21. The bomb exploded as police and passersby gathered near the scene of a slaying, one of three fatal shootings reported in Baqubah.

Gunmen killed three Shiite laborers in the Sunni town of Hawija, near the northern city of Kirkuk. A roadside bomb targeting a U.S. patrol in Mosul killed an Iraqi civilian.

At least two car bombs and sporadic mortar fire shook the capital. A car bomb near a bank killed one person and injured five in the Dora district.

A car bomb on the road to the Industry Ministry injured five. Another car bomb struck a police commando patrol in the Mustansiriya district, though there were no reports of injuries.

Yarmouk Hospital officials reported receiving at least three unidentified corpses from Sunni neighborhoods.

Gunmen kidnapped a prominent university professor. Ali Hussein Khafaji, dean of the engineering college at Mustansiriya University, was taken by two carloads of men as he left home.

[I]Times staff writers Mark Mazzetti in Washington and Suhail Ahmad in Baghdad and special correspondents in Baqubah, Kirkuk and Mosul contributed to this report.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

[BrooklynRider]

Reid criticizes President Bush as 'dangerously incompetent'
By KATHLEEN HENNESSEY
ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid called President Bush "dangerously incompetent" on Wednesday and said the administration ought to be doing more to prevent increasing sectarian violence in Iraq.

"Where is (Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice? Why isn't she over in the Middle East, as the chief diplomat of this country should be, trying to get the political forces to form a government over there?" Reid told The Associated Press.

Reid said the U.S. was "failing three different ways in Iraq." Military efforts have lagged, the economy is crippled by decreased oil and electricity production, and attempts to form a representative government are behind schedule, he said.

Reid criticized Bush for a series of recent appearances in key political states in which the president defended his Iraq war policies.

"Why isn't he spending time with these leaders in the Middle East trying to get this government formed?" Reid said.

Reid described the conditions Iraq as "low-grade civil war."

"I don't know how you define civil war. We know they're killing an average of 50 Iraqis a day. At least it's a low-grade civil war, that's for sure," he said.

The Nevada senator's critical remarks about Bush came after a Las Vegas news conference on immigration reform. He was scheduled to appear later on the Mexico-California border to tout Democratic proposals for border security.

Reid also responded to comments the president made Tuesday when he said his successor in the White House would likely be responsible for deciding when U.S. troops leave Iraq.

"To me it shows how dangerously incompetent he is," Reid said. "'Stay the course, mission accomplished, bring 'em on,' the American people are sick of that. We need to change course in Iraq. ... I think the president burying his head in the sand is not going to do the trick."

Copyright 2006 Las Vegas Sun

--

[lofter1]

Not only is Bush incompetent in his execution of the war, he will leave a black hole of debt for Americans for generations to come ... and something for which he refuses to take much responsibility, basically saying it will be the next president's problem:

George Bush's Trillion-Dollar War

By BOB HERBERT
OP-ED COLUMNIST
NY Times
March 23, 2006
The meter's running on Iraq.

We're at a trillion dollars, and counting.


The rest of the piece is only available via the dreaded TimesSelect: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23herbert.html&OQ=_rQ3D1&OP=1aa7204fQ2FQ24s8wQ24ZgEiiZQ24vNNVQ24NHQ24vHQ24i tcGciGQ24vHQ3F8Ew8EZfQ3FZ,M

Some of the highlights ...


Gerorge W. Bush's war in Iraq was never supposed to be particularly expensive. Administration types tossed out numbers like $50 billion and $60 billion ...

Some in the White House tried to spread the fantasy that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the war. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and fanatical hawk, told Congreess that Iraq was "a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

... Now a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, that estimates the "true costs" of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion ...

It's not easy to explain just how much money $1 trillion really is. Imagine a stack of bills worth $1 million that is roughly six inches high. (Think big denominations -- a mix of $100 bills and $1,000 bills, mostly $1,000's.) If the six-inch stack were enlarged to the point where it was worth $1 billion, it would be as tall as athe Washington Monument,about 500 feet. If it were worth $1 trillion, the stack would be 95 miles high.

Ms. Bilmes said that the $1 trillion we're spending on Iraq amounts to about $10,000 for every household in the U.S.

At his press conference on Tuesday, President Bush made it clear that whatever the cost, American forces owuld not be leaving Iraq soon. When asked whether a day would come when there were no U.S. forces in Iraq, he said that decision would be make by future presidents and future governments of Iraq.


The Study: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/consequences/2006/01costs.pdf

[lofter1]

Must be good to be a Bush ...

Bush uncle benefits from war spending

By WALTER F. ROCHE JR.
Los Angeles Times
March 22, 2006

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/03-06/03-23-06/11world-nation.htm

WASHINGTON — As President Bush embarks on a new effort to shore up public support for the war in Iraq, an uncle of the chief executive is collecting $2.7 million in cash and stock from the recent sale of a company that profited from the war.

A report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows that William H.T. Bush collected a little less than $1.9 million in cash plus stock valued at more than $800,000 as a result of the sale of Engineered Support Systems Inc. to DRS Technologies of New Jersey.

The $1.7 billion deal closed Jan. 31. Both businesses have extensive military contracts.

The elder Bush was a director of Engineered Support Systems. Recent SEC filings show he was paid cash and DRS stock in exchange for shares and options he obtained as a director.

Missouri-based ESSI experienced record growth prior to its purchase by DRS through expanded U.S. military contracts — many to supply current U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan — and an aggressive buyout strategy targeted at other defense contractors. The military contracts, some awarded on a sole-source basis, include a $77 million pact to refit military vehicles used in Iraq with armor.

Other ESSI products used in the war include radar and detection services, field medical stations and field electrical generator units.

SEC filings show there are two ongoing federal investigations of ESSI — one involving a stop order issued by the federal government on the ESSI contract to supply field generators. The order was issued because of operational problems with the units.

The field-generator contract was a major source of revenue, but SEC files show ESSI did not inform stockholders of the stop order until last June, about seven months after it was issued.

During the interim, several ESSI executives, including Bush's uncle, cashed in stock and stock options worth millions of dollars, SEC filings show.

According to one recent filing, both the SEC and the U.S. attorney in St. Louis are investigating the delayed disclosure and other matters.
Unnamed members of the ESSI board and corporate officers have been subpoenaed, according to documents filed with the SEC.

William Bush, 67, SEC filings show, exercised options on 8,348 shares of ESSI stock Jan. 18, 2005, about two months after the stop order was issued. He collected about $450,000 in cash.

Bush, known in the president's family as "Uncle Bucky," joined ESSI's board in 2000, several months before his nephew became president.

The Bush uncle heads a St. Louis investment firm and is a younger brother of former President Bush.

William Bush declined to comment yesterday. However, in an interview last year, he said he played no role in ESSI getting federal contracts.

"I don't make any calls to the 202 (Washington, D.C.) area code," he said.

Patricia Williamson, a spokeswoman for DRS, would not comment on the status of the federal investigations. The company has disclosed that it is cooperating in the investigations, which also involve an inquiry into an ESSI insurance contract.

[ZippyTheChimp]

March 27, 2006

Leaders

Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says

By DON VAN NATTA Jr.

LONDON — In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush's public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.

But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

"Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning," David Manning, Mr. Blair's chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

"The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

The timetable came at an important diplomatic moment. Five days after the Bush-Blair meeting, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was scheduled to appear before the United Nations to present the American evidence that Iraq posed a threat to world security by hiding unconventional weapons.

Although the United States and Britain aggressively sought a second United Nations resolution against Iraq — which they failed to obtain — the president said repeatedly that he did not believe he needed it for an invasion.

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan.

Consistent Remarks

Two senior British officials confirmed the authenticity of the memo, but declined to talk further about it, citing Britain's Official Secrets Act, which made it illegal to divulge classified information. But one of them said, "In all of this discussion during the run-up to the Iraq war, it is obvious that viewing a snapshot at a certain point in time gives only a partial view of the decision-making process."

On Sunday, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said the president's public comments were consistent with his private remarks made to Mr. Blair. "While the use of force was a last option, we recognized that it might be necessary and were planning accordingly," Mr. Jones said.

"The public record at the time, including numerous statements by the President, makes clear that the administration was continuing to pursue a diplomatic solution into 2003," he said. "Saddam Hussein was given every opportunity to comply, but he chose continued defiance, even after being given one final opportunity to comply or face serious consequences. Our public and private comments are fully consistent."

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

The latest memo is striking in its characterization of frank, almost casual, conversation by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about the most serious subjects. At one point, the leaders swapped ideas for a postwar Iraqi government. "As for the future government of Iraq, people would find it very odd if we handed it over to another dictator," the prime minister is quoted as saying.

"Bush agreed," Mr. Manning wrote. This exchange, like most of the quotations in this article, have not been previously reported.

Mr. Bush was accompanied at the meeting by Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser; Dan Fried, a senior aide to Ms. Rice; and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Along with Mr. Manning, Mr. Blair was joined by two other senior aides: Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide and the author of the Downing Street memo.

By late January 2003, United Nations inspectors had spent six weeks in Iraq hunting for weapons under the auspices of Security Council Resolution 1441, which authorized "serious consequences" if Iraq voluntarily failed to disarm. Led by Hans Blix, the inspectors had reported little cooperation from Mr. Hussein, and no success finding any unconventional weapons.

At their meeting, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair candidly expressed their doubts that chemical, biological or nuclear weapons would be found in Iraq in the coming weeks, the memo said. The president spoke as if an invasion was unavoidable. The two leaders discussed a timetable for the war, details of the military campaign and plans for the aftermath of the war.

Discussing Provocation

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

Mr. Sands first reported the proposals in his book, although he did not use any direct quotations from the memo. He is a professor of international law at University College of London and the founding member of the Matrix law office in London, where the prime minister's wife, Cherie Blair, is a partner.

Mr. Jones, the National Security Council spokesman, declined to discuss the proposals, saying, "We are not going to get into discussing private discussions of the two leaders."

At several points during the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, there was palpable tension over finding a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that would be acceptable to other nations, the memo said. The prime minister was quoted as saying it was essential for both countries to lobby for a second United Nations resolution against Iraq, because it would serve as "an insurance policy against the unexpected."

The memo said Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush, "If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs."

Running Out of Time

Mr. Bush agreed that the two countries should attempt to get a second resolution, but he added that time was running out. "The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," Mr. Bush was paraphrased in the memo as saying.

The document added, "But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action would follow anyway."

The leaders agreed that three weeks remained to obtain a second United Nations Security Council resolution before military commanders would need to begin preparing for an invasion.

Summarizing statements by the president, the memo says: "The air campaign would probably last four days, during which some 1,500 targets would be hit. Great care would be taken to avoid hitting innocent civilians. Bush thought the impact of the air onslaught would ensure the early collapse of Saddam's regime. Given this military timetable, we needed to go for a second resolution as soon as possible. This probably meant after Blix's next report to the Security Council in mid-February."

Mr. Blair was described as responding that both countries would make clear that a second resolution amounted to "Saddam's final opportunity." The memo described Mr. Blair as saying: "We had been very patient. Now we should be saying that the crisis must be resolved in weeks, not months."

It reported: "Bush agreed. He commented that he was not itching to go to war, but we could not allow Saddam to go on playing with us. At some point, probably when we had passed the second resolutions — assuming we did — we should warn Saddam that he had a week to leave. We should notify the media too. We would then have a clear field if Saddam refused to go."

Mr. Bush devoted much of the meeting to outlining the military strategy. The president, the memo says, said the planned air campaign "would destroy Saddam's command and control quickly." It also said that he expected Iraq's army to "fold very quickly." He also is reported as telling the prime minister that the Republican Guard would be "decimated by the bombing."

Despite his optimism, Mr. Bush said he was aware that "there were uncertainties and risks," the memo says, and it goes on, "As far as destroying the oil wells were concerned, the U.S. was well equipped to repair them quickly, although this would be easier in the south of Iraq than in the north."

The two men briefly discussed plans for a post-Hussein Iraqi government. "The prime minister asked about aftermath planning," the memo says. "Condi Rice said that a great deal of work was now in hand.

Referring to the Defense Department, it said: "A planning cell in D.O.D. was looking at all aspects and would deploy to Iraq to direct operations as soon as the military action was over. Bush said that a great deal of detailed planning had been done on supplying the Iraqi people with food and medicine."

Planning for After the War

The leaders then looked beyond the war, imagining the transition from Mr. Hussein's rule to a new government. Immediately after the war, a military occupation would be put in place for an unknown period of time, the president was described as saying. He spoke of the "dilemma of managing the transition to the civil administration," the memo says.

The document concludes with Mr. Manning still holding out a last-minute hope of inspectors finding weapons in Iraq, or even Mr. Hussein voluntarily leaving Iraq. But Mr. Manning wrote that he was concerned this could not be accomplished by Mr. Bush's timeline for war.

"This makes the timing very tight," he wrote. "We therefore need to stay closely alongside Blix, do all we can to help the inspectors make a significant find, and work hard on the other members of the Security Council to accept the noncooperation case so that we can secure the minimum nine votes when we need them, probably the end of February."

At a White House news conference following the closed-door session, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair said "the crisis" had to be resolved in a timely manner. "Saddam Hussein is not disarming," the president told reporters. "He is a danger to the world. He must disarm. And that's why I have constantly said — and the prime minister has constantly said — this issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months."

Despite intense lobbying by the United States and Britain, a second United Nations resolution was not obtained. The American-led military coalition invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, nine days after the target date set by the president on that late January day at the White House.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says



http://www.radicalruss.net/blog/images/downing-street-memo.jpg
http://www.pamspaulding.com/graphics/1radicalruss-chicklet.gif (http://www.radicalruss.net/)

[GoBUSH]

Hi -

I seem to have misplaced my post on George Bush. Anyone see it? (looks under covers) I don't see it there. Golly - Is this a forum only for democrats and Bush haters? If so, let me know and I will no longer scare you with free thought and my support of a President who fights terrorists so we don't have another attack like September 11. Did I spark some embers in someone? You are sooooo focused on what a BAD MAN he is for removing a dictator that gassed his own people that you can't handle MY little opinion? Wow - well, Hmm, maybe my posts were deleted as you don't want anyone with an alternate view of a man I believe to be a great President who protects us from terrorists. That could be it. Intimdated to have an open discussion I see. :rolleyes:

[lofter1]

Hi -

I seem to have misplaced my post on George Bush.

... Hmm, maybe my posts were deleted as you don't want anyone with an alternate view ...

Look here: http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=89826&postcount=229

btw: I like your tag. I agree that Bush should GO as soon as possible ;)

[BrooklynRider]

Hi -

I seem to have misplaced my post on George Bush. Anyone see it? (looks under covers) I don't see it there. Golly - Is this a forum only for democrats and Bush haters? If so, let me know and I will no longer scare you with free thought and my support of a President who fights terrorists so we don't have another attack like September 11. Did I spark some embers in someone? You are sooooo focused on what a BAD MAN he is for removing a dictator that gassed his own people that you can't handle MY little opinion? Wow - well, Hmm, maybe my posts were deleted as you don't want anyone with an alternate view of a man I believe to be a great President who protects us from terrorists. That could be it. Intimdated to have an open discussion I see. :rolleyes:

Actually, a view of your posts to date shows that you had NO problem posting this and a similarly provocative post looking to create flame wars here. Just post your thoughts. I promise we can handle them.

By the way, you are posting in a forum about New York and largely made up of a community of New Yorkers. You might want to be a little more respectful of the fact that WE experienced 9/11 first hand.

I see that you refused to post your location. Are you feeling that alienated already?

I strongly urge you to read the forum rules before continuing any further.

[GoBUSH]

I didn't post an flames.

I live in New York City.
So, "Me" = "We."

Sleep well.

GB

[milleniumcab]

Take your head out of you know what....:p Mr.Bush and his pals played the fear factor well to make you and likes of you think he is fighting terrorists in Iraq. He is doing nothing less than creating more terrorists... Time will tell the real story...Hi -

I seem to have misplaced my post on George Bush. Anyone see it? (looks under covers) I don't see it there. Golly - Is this a forum only for democrats and Bush haters? If so, let me know and I will no longer scare you with free thought and my support of a President who fights terrorists so we don't have another attack like September 11. Did I spark some embers in someone? You are sooooo focused on what a BAD MAN he is for removing a dictator that gassed his own people that you can't handle MY little opinion? Wow - well, Hmm, maybe my posts were deleted as you don't want anyone with an alternate view of a man I believe to be a great President who protects us from terrorists. That could be it. Intimdated to have an open discussion I see. :rolleyes:

[ZippyTheChimp]

GoBush: I deleted your first 6 posts on this forum. They were childish in nature (5 of them were), but I considered the late hour they were posted, and decided to just give you a chance to start over.

I take your complaints to be tongue-in-cheek, so you seem to have gotten the message. I think your positions are ridiculous, but that is permitted here.

[Ninjahedge]

I didn't post an flames.

I live in New York City.
So, "Me" = "We."

Sleep well.

GB

Yes you did you little brushfirestarter.

You come in, say "Gee whillikers Wally, I can't believe all these people could be so dumb as to not like Bush!!!".

You say you do not want to start anything, but this is looking to start something.

If you want to talk about Bush as you see him, that is all well and good. But if you continue to post things you know will start fights (as shown before deletion) and refuse to discuss anything, then you might be looking under the sheets for more than your posts for a very long time.

[lofter1]

Congressman Conyers Calls on the President to Publish the Hadley Memo

RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/)
March 30, 2006

http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Congressman_Conyers_Calls_on_President_to_0330.htm l

Congressman John Conyers today called on president Bush to make publicly available a memo submitted to him by Stephen Hadley in October 2002.

This memo clearly explained to the president that the Departments of State and Energy both rejected White House claims that Iraq was seeking materials to build a nuclear weapon. This is a very important document revealing the administration's efforts to build a case for war based on Iraq's nuclear threat to our country when overwhelming evidence disputed this claim.

The text of the letter follows:

Dear Mr. President:

I write to ask that you release publicly an October 2002 memorandum that informed you that the Energy Department and State Department disagreed with assessments that Iraq was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons materials. The memorandum was submitted to you by then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley.

Throughout the past several years, you have claimed frequently that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire the materials necessary to build nuclear weapons. In fact, during your 2003 State of the Union Address, you stated, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Shortly after this speech, the United States invaded Iraq, but no nuclear weapons materials have been located.

According to National Journal, you were aware prior to the 2003 State of the Union that Iraq did not possess such materials. In summarizing a National Intelligence Estimate for you in October 2002, Mr. Hadley noted that, while many agencies believed the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons." In short, these two intelligence agencies disagreed with your State of the Union assertion.

I am certain you would agree that, as we enter the fourth year of the invasion, it is important for the American people to understand exactly what set of circumstances led to your authorization of military action. For that reason, I ask that you release Mr. Hadley's memorandum.

Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr.

[ZippyTheChimp]

This morning, I saw a photo of Jill Carroll after her release. She appears to have gained 15 pounds. That happened to me once; I was on a six week vacation.

Questions About Carroll's Captivity

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 31, 2006; 10:21 AM

I spoke to David Bloom days before he died and then covered his memorial service. I wrote about the death of Michael Kelly. I said goodbye to Bob Woodruff before he went to Iraq and got badly injured by a roadside bomb.

In short, death and violence involving the brave journalists who have gone to Iraq is an ever-present part of my beat. And yet, like many people, I was especially floored by the kidnapping of Jill Carroll and greatly relieved by her release yesterday.

Reporters for big news organizations, after all, generally travel with security details, while Carroll is a 28-year-old freelancer who went to Baghdad on her own, became a stringer for the Christian Science Monitor and clearly was bent on understanding Iraqi culture.

This is a courageous young woman.

I must say, though, that I found her first interview yesterday rather odd. Carroll seemed bent on giving her captors a positive review, going on about how well they treated her, how they gave her food and let her go to the bathroom. And they never threatened to hit her. Of course, as we all saw in those chilling videos, they did threaten to kill her. And they shot her Iraqi translator to death.

Why make a terrorist group who put her family and friends through a terrible three-month ordeal sound like they were running a low-budget motel chain?

Now perhaps this is unfair, for there is much we do not know. We don't know why Carroll was kidnapped and why she was abruptly released. She says she doesn't either, but surely she must have gotten some clues about her abductors' outlook and tactics during her 82-day captivity. Maybe she was just shell-shocked right after being let go. Maybe she won't feel comfortable speaking out until she's back on American soil.

As my colleagues in Baghdad point out, when that interview was taped, Carroll was still in the custody of a Sunni political party with ties to the insurgency. It may have just made sense for her to be especially cautious. And they tell me that Carroll did cry -- off camera -- when the subject of her murdered translator came up. Still, people are buzzing because her taped remarks have been played over and over again on television. I hope she'll be able to share a fuller account of her ordeal soon.

Despite the happy ending, Carroll's kidnapping has driven home how dangerous Iraq remains for Western journalists, who admit it's getting increasingly difficult to do their jobs, even as they challenge the administration's claims that they are excessively focused on violence and negative news.

As CBS's Lara Logan told me in a CNN interview this week, "When journalists are free to move around this country, then they will be free to report on everything that's going on. But as long as you're a prisoner of the terrible security situation here, then that's going to be reflected in your coverage . . .

"You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack. Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked . I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country."

Let's be grateful that Jill Carroll didn't wind up the latest victim.

Adding to the mystery:

"In a videotape posted Thursday on the Internet , made before her release, Ms. Carroll denounced the American presence in Iraq and praised the insurgents who were fighting here," says the New York Times .

"In the video, Ms. Carroll smiled, laughed once and gestured in a seemingly relaxed manner, saying she felt guilty about being released while so many Iraqis were still suffering.

"Ms. Carroll, still in captivity but apparently knowing she would be released, denounced what she described as the 'lies' told by the American government and predicted that the insurgents would defeat the Americans in Iraq.

" 'I feel guilty. I also feel that it just shows that the mujahedeen are good people fighting an honorable fight, a good fight. While the Americans are here, the occupying forces, you know, treating the people in a very, very bad way. So I can't be happy totally for my freedom because there are people still suffering in prisons, in very difficult situations.' . . .

"Ms. Carroll's seeming sympathy for her captors suggested either that she was pretending to gain her release or that, after suffering weeks of extreme duress, she had fallen under the sway of her kidnappers."

The Washington Post became part of the story:

"Just after noon Thursday, Tariq al-Hashimi, secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, called The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau to say that Carroll had been released by 'unknown people.' " 'I have sent armored cars to bring her to the [party] headquarters,' he said. 'She requested me to talk to you and inform you directly and will be here within half an hour. Will you come here? She is okay. She is safe. She is more or less scared. I told her to calm down and we would take care of her.' " What a phone call.

Monitor Editor Richard Bergenheim says:

"The chorus of Muslim leaders condemning this kidnapping has been larger and louder than has been heard for some time. We hope that these voices of opposition to this crime will continue on behalf of all hostage victims until this practice stops."

Think Progress rips John Podhoretz for "attacking her mental state" with this comment:

" It's wonderful that she's free, but after watching someone who was a hostage for three months say on television she was well-treated because she wasn't beaten or killed -- while being dressed in the garb of a modest Muslim woman rather than the non-Muslim woman she actually is -- I expect there will be some Stockholm Syndrome talk in the coming days .

"This is a day that we should celebrate Jill Carroll's courage. She put herself in danger to try to give the world a more accurate picture of Iraq. It is totally inappropriate to assume that her description of how she was treated is motivated by anything other than a desire to tell the truth."

Little Green Footballs drips with disdain: "She says the terrorists treated her well. Her interpreter, murdered during the kidnapping, was not available for comment."

[lofter1]

Buckley Says Bush Will Be Judged on Iraq War, Now a `Failure'

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=anN._IfoJo1M&refer=us


March 31 (Bloomberg) -- William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq that is now a failure.

"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq,'' Buckley said in an interview that will air on Bloomberg Television this weekend. "If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam.''

Buckley said he doesn't have a formula for getting out of Iraq, though he said "it's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure.''

The 80-year-old Buckley is among a handful of prominent conservatives who are criticizing the war. Asked who is to blame for what he deems a failure, Buckley said, "the president,'' adding that "he doesn't hesitate to accept responsibility.''

Buckley called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a longtime friend, "a failed executor'' of the war. And Vice President Dick Cheney "was flatly misled,'' Buckley said. "He believed the business about the weapons of mass destruction.''

National Review

Buckley, often called the father of contemporary conservatism in America, articulated his beliefs in National Review magazine, which he founded in 1955. His conservatism calls for small government, low taxes and a strong defense. Both Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater said they got their inspiration from the magazine.

In the interview, Buckley criticized the so-called neo- conservatives who enthusiastically embraced the Iraq invasion and the spreading of American values around the world.

"The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country,'' Buckley said.

While praising Bush as "really a conservative,'' he was critical of the president for allowing expansion of the federal government and never vetoing a spending bill.

The president's "concern has been so completely on the international scope that he can be said to have neglected conservatism'' on the fiscal level, Buckley said.

Appraising Presidents

Buckley also offered his perspectives on other recent presidents:

-- Richard Nixon "was one of the brightest people who ever occupied the White House,'' he said, ``but he suffered from basic derangements,'' which precipitated his own downfall.

-- Ronald Reagan "confounded the intellectual class, which disdained him.'' Every year though, Buckley said, "there is more and more evidence of his ingenuity, of his historical intelligence.''

-- Bill Clinton "is the most gifted politician of, certainly my time,'' Buckley said. "He generates a kind of a vibrant goodwill with a capacity for mischief which is very, very American.'' He doubted that "anyone could begin to write a textbook that explicates his (Clinton's) political philosophy because he doesn't really have one.''

Buckley exalted in what he sees as the conservative success stemming from his call a half century ago in the National Review to "stand athwart history and yell stop.''

That, he remembered, was when Marxism was widely considered "an absolute irreversible call of history.'' The folly of that notion was demonstrated by the demise of communism a decade and a half ago, he said.

Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. "I think that the impact of that bill should have been welcomed by us,'' he said.

©2006 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved

[lofter1]

Civilians in Iraq Flee Mixed Areas as Killings Rise

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/02/world/iraq.large.jpghttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif
Samir Mizban/Associated Press
A family of Iraqi Shiites in a refugee center in Baghdad last month. Sectarian bloodshed has
prompted thousands of Iraqis to flee their homes.

By EDWARD WONG (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/edward_wong/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
and KIRK SEMPLE (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/kirk_semple/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
NY Times
April 2, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?ei=5090&en=a31c2c1015e003ac&ex=1301634000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 1 — The war in Iraq has entered a bloodier phase, with American casualties steadily declining over the past five months while the killings of Iraqi civilians have risen tremendously in sectarian violence, spurring tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee from mixed Shiite-Sunni areas.

The new pattern, detailed in casualty and migration statistics and in interviews with American commanders and Iraqi officials, has led to further separation of Shiite and Sunni Arabs, moving the country toward a de facto partitioning along sectarian and ethnic lines — an outcome that the Bush administration has doggedly worked to avoid over the past three years.

The nature of the Iraq war has been changing since at least late last autumn, when political friction between Sunni Arabs and the majority Shiites rose even as American troops began to carry out a long-term plan to decrease their street presence. But the killing accelerated most sharply after the bombing on Feb. 22 of a revered Shiite shrine, which unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodletting.

About 900 Iraqi civilians were killed in March, up from about 700 the month before, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent organization that tracks deaths. Meanwhile, at least 29 American troops were killed in March, the second-lowest monthly total since the war began.

The White House says that little violence occurs in most of Iraq's 18 provinces. But those four or five provinces where most of the killings and migrations take place are Iraq's major population and economic centers, generally mixed regions that include Baghdad, and contain much of the nation's infrastructure — crucial factors in Iraq's prospects for stability.

The Iraqi public's reaction to the violence has been substantial. Since the shrine bombing, 30,000 to 36,000 Iraqis have fled their homes because of sectarian violence or fear of reprisals, say officials at the International Organization for Migration, based in Geneva. The Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration estimated that at least 5,500 families had moved, with the biggest group being 1,250 families settling in the Shiite holy city of Najaf after leaving Baghdad and Sunni-dominated towns in central Iraq.

The families are living with relatives or in abandoned buildings, and a crisis of food and water shortages is starting to build, officials say.

"We lived in Latifiya for 30 years," said Abu Hussein al-Ramahi, a Shiite farmer with a family of seven, referring to a village south of Baghdad that is a stronghold of the Sunni Arab insurgency. "But a month ago, two armed people with masks on their faces said if I stayed in this area, my family and I would no longer remain alive. They shot bullets near my feet. I went back home immediately and we left the area early next morning for Najaf."

Mr. Ramahi's family and other migrants are now squatting in a derelict hotel in the holy city.

"It's almost a creeping polarization of Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In the chaos, he said, "we see a slow, steady loss of confidence, a growing process of distrust which you see day by day as people at the political level bicker. Everything has become sectarian and ethnic."

The shifting violence and new migration patterns are fueling discussion about whether Iraq is devolving into civil war. Although that determination may be impossible to make in the short term, the debate itself could increase the political pressure that President Bush is facing at home to draw down the force of 133,000 American troops here. Even if American deaths keep falling, polls show the American public has little appetite for engagement in an Iraqi civil war.

Commanders in Iraq say the insurgent groups in the country, particularly Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, have shifted the focus of their attacks in an effort to foment civil war and undermine negotiations to form a four-year government.

"What we are seeing him do now is shift his target from the coalition forces to Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security forces," said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a senior spokesman for the American command. "The enemy is trying to stop the formation of this national unity government; he's trying to inflame sectarian violence."

Dozens of bodies, garroted or executed with gunshots to the head, are turning up almost daily in Baghdad alone. The gruesome work is usually attributed to death squads or Shiite militias, some in Iraqi police or army uniforms. Meanwhile, powerful bombings, a favorite tactic of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, continue to devastate civilian areas and Iraqi bases or recruitment centers.

The number of kidnappings of Iraqis is surging because of an explosion of criminal gangs working for their own gain or with armed political groups.
Scores of civilians are abducted every week, usually for ransoms of $20,000 to $30,000. In recent weeks, masked men have stormed offices in Baghdad and hauled away all the workers.

At the same time, American commanders have decreased the number of their patrols and have tried to push the Iraqi security forces into a more visible role.

That shift, along with improved armor and bomb detection, may partly explain the drop in casualties. Last October, 96 American troops died. That number has decreased every month since then, but fell most sharply between February and March — to 29 in March from 55 in February.

Iraqi civilian deaths generally increased in the same period, from 465 in October, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, which tallies deaths from a wide range of news media reports, a method believed to give rough though under-reported estimates.

The broad trend is also supported by statistics on the number of attacks. A senior Pentagon official said that attacks on Americans, Iraqi forces and Iraqi civilians had remained at about 600 per week since last September but that the focus of the attacks have changed. In September, 82 percent of attacks were against American-led forces and 18 percent against Iraqis; in February, 65 percent were against the foreigners and 35 percent against Iraqis.

Top American officials are concerned that despite the growing number of trained and equipped Iraqi security forces being fielded, and the large number of insurgents killed or captured in the past six months, the number of overall attacks has not declined, the Defense Department official said.

"It should be worrisome to us that it's still at the same level," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the trend. "With the number of operations that are occurring and the number of people we are detaining growing, and truly with the number of tactical successes that we're having, you would expect to see a reduction in the trend."

American officials say the solution to the sectarian bloodshed lies in the Iraqis' quickly forming a national unity government, with representatives of all major groups in Iraq checking each other through compromises.

But with each political milestone — the transfer of sovereignty in 2004, two sets of elections in 2005, the referendum on the constitution — the Americans have asserted that the country would stabilize. Instead, the violence has continued unabated, sometimes changing in nature, as it is doing now, but never declining. And as the resulting migration continues, Iraq's political groups could have even less incentive to compromise with one another, as they separate into their enclaves.

Many Iraqis who are moving say they are fleeing out of fear of increasingly partisan Iraqi security forces.

The police and commando forces are infested with militia recruits, mostly from Shiite political parties, and are accused by Sunni Arabs of carrying out sectarian executions. One Sunni-run TV network warned viewers last week not to allow Iraqi policemen or soldiers into their homes unless the forces were accompanied by American troops.

"The militias are in charge now," said Aliyah al-Bakr, 42, a Sunni Arab schoolteacher who had two male relatives abducted and executed by black-clad gunmen in Baghdad on Feb. 22. "I'm more afraid of Iraqi militias than of the Americans. But the American presence is still the cornerstone of all the problems."

Some of the migration is happening within Baghdad, with families moving from one block to the next, from neighborhood to neighborhood, increasingly segregating the capital.

Others are fleeing across wide swaths of territory. At least 761 families have settled in Baghdad after moving from Anbar Province and other Sunni-dominated areas to the west, according to Iraqi government statistics. The same is happening on the Sunni Arab end — there are reports of 50 families moving from Baghdad to the Sunni city of Falluja.

Aid groups have been handing out mattresses, blankets, cooking sets and other gear to families throughout central and southern Iraq. Jemini Pandya, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, says it is a short-term response to what could be a more lasting issue. "We've been doing emergency work," she said. "The situation for those displaced won't be resolved anytime soon."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington, Khalid W. Hassan from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Najaf.

Copyright 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[lofter1]

Good to see that our tax dollars are being put to such good use ...

U.S. Plan to Build Iraq Clinics Falters

Contractor Will Try to Finish 20 of 142 Sites

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, April 3, 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/02/AR2006040201209_pf.html

BAGHDAD -- A reconstruction contract for the building of 142 primary health centers across Iraq has run out of money, after two years and roughly $200 million, with no more than 20 clinics now expected to be completed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says.

The contract, awarded to U.S. construction giant Parsons Inc. in the flush, early days of reconstruction in Iraq, was expected to lay the foundation of a modern health-care system for the country, putting quality medical care within reach of all Iraqis.

Parsons, according to the Corps, will walk away from more than 120 clinics that on average are two-thirds finished. Auditors say its failure serves as a warning for other U.S. reconstruction efforts due to be completed this year.

Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps commander overseeing reconstruction in Iraq, said he still hoped to complete all 142 clinics as promised and was seeking emergency funds from the U.S. military and foreign donors. "I'm fairly confident," McCoy said.

Coming with little public warning, the 86 percent shortfall of completions dismayed the World Health Organization's representative for Iraq. "That's not good. That's shocking," Naeema al-Gasseer said by telephone from Cairo. "We're not sending the right message here. That's affecting people's expectations and people's trust, I must say."

At the end of 2006, the $18.4 billion that Washington has allocated for Iraq's reconstruction runs out. All remaining projects in the U.S. reconstruction program, including electricity, water, sewer, health care and the justice system, are due for completion. As a result, the next nine months are crunchtime for the easy-term contracts that were awarded to American contractors early on, before surging violence drove up security costs and idled workers.

Stuart Bowen, the top U.S. auditor for reconstruction, warned in a telephone interview from Washington that other reconstruction efforts also may fall short. "I've been consumed for a year with the fear we would run out of money to finish projects," said Bowen, the inspector general for reconstruction in Iraq.

The reconstruction campaign in Iraq is the largest such U.S. undertaking since World War II. The rebuilding efforts have remained a point of pride for U.S. troops and leaders as they struggle with an insurgency and now Shiite Muslim militias and escalating sectarian conflict.

The Corps of Engineers says the campaign so far has renovated or built 3,000 schools, upgraded 13 hospitals and created hundreds of border forts and police stations. Major projects this summer, the Corps says, should noticeably improve electricity and other basic services, which have fallen below pre-war levels despite the billions of dollars that the United States has expended toward reconstruction here.

Violence for which the United States failed to plan has consumed up to half the $18.4 billion through higher costs to guard project sites and workers and through direct shifts of billions of dollars to build Iraq's police and military.

In January, Bowen's office calculated the American reconstruction effort would be able to finish only 300 of 425 promised electricity projects and 49 of 136 water and sanitation projects.

U.S. authorities say they made a special effort to preserve the more than $700 million of work for Iraq's health-care system, which had fallen into decay after two decades of war and international sanctions.

Doctors in Baghdad's hospitals still cite dirty water as one of the major killers of infants. The city's hospitals place medically troubled newborns two to an incubator, when incubators work at all.

Early in the occupation, U.S. officials mapped out the construction of 300 primary-care clinics, said Gasseer, the WHO official. In addition to spreading basic health care beyond the major cities into small towns, the clinics were meant to provide training for Iraq's medical professionals. "Overall, they were considered vital," she said.

In April 2004, the project was awarded to Parsons Inc. of Pasadena, Calif., a leading construction firm in domestic and international markets. McCoy, the Corps of Engineers commander, said Parsons has been awarded about $1 billion in reconstruction projects in Iraq.

Like much U.S. government work in 2003 and 2004, the contract was awarded on terms known as "cost-plus," Parsons said, meaning that the company could bill the government for its actual cost, rather than a cost agreed to at the start, and add a profit margin. The deal was also classified as "design-build," in which the contractor oversees the project from design to completion.

These terms, among the most generous possible for contractors, were meant to encourage companies to undertake projects in a dangerous environment and complete them quickly.

McCoy said Parsons subcontracted the clinics to four main Iraqi companies, which often hired local firms to do the construction, creating several tiers of overhead costs.

Starting in 2004, the need for security sent costs soaring. Insurgent attacks forced companies to organize mini-militias to guard employees and sites; work often was idled when sites were deemed too dangerous. Western contractors often were reduced to monitoring work sites by photographs, Parsons officials said.

"Security degenerated from the beginning. The expectations on the part of Parsons and the U.S. government was we would have a very benign construction environment, like building a clinic in Falls Church," said Earnest Robbins, senior vice president for the international division of Parsons in Fairfax, Va. Difficulty choosing sites for the clinics also delayed work, Robbins said.

Faced with a growing insurgency, U.S. authorities in 2004 took funding away from many projects to put it into building up Iraqi security forces.

"During that period, very little actual project work, dirt-turning, was being done," Bowen said. At the same time, "we were paying large overhead for contractors to remain in-country." Overhead has consumed 40 percent to 50 percent of the clinic project's budget, McCoy said.

In 2005, plans were scaled back to build 142 primary clinics by December of that year, an extended deadline. By December, however, only four had been completed, reconstruction officials said. Two more were finished weeks later.

With the money almost gone, the Corps of Engineers and Parsons reached what both sides described as a negotiated settlement under which Parsons would try to finish 14 more clinics by early April and then leave the project.

The agreement stipulated that the contract was terminated by consensus, not for cause, the Corps and Parsons said.

Both said the Corps had wanted to cancel the contract outright, and McCoy rejected the reasons that Parsons put forward for the slow progress.

"In the time they completed 45 projects, I completed 500 projects," he said.

Parsons has a number of other contracts in Baghdad, from oil-facility upgrades to border forts to prisons. "The fact is it is hard, but there are companies over here that are doing it."

Bowen called the outcome "a worst-case scenario. I think it's an anomaly."

He said, however, that U.S. reconstruction overseers overwhelmingly have neglected to keep running track of the remaining costs of each project, leaving it unclear until the end whether the costs are equal to the budget.

"I can't say this isn't going to happen again, because we really haven't gotten a grasp" of the cost of finishing the many pending projects, Bowen said.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[BrooklynRider]

Let's all remember that ALL of this was started by George W. Bush and his invasion. An invasion that was justified with lies.

[Ninjahedge]

When building, you must always keep in mind the bottom line.

That and teh fact that unlike engineers and architects who will, more likely than not, keep working on a project if it goes overtime or over budget at their own expense, contractors will simply walk away.

They have more power to do that than the academia that designs the buildings.

The only thing that bothers me is that if they HAD all this stuff to begin with, and were able to get 120 started, why the hell did they not look at the bottom lines and realize that they could only finish 80? Was this their way to squeeze more $$ out of us for all these uncomplete structures? :P

[MrSpice]

Let's all remember that ALL of this was started by George W. Bush and his invasion. An invasion that was justified with lies.

Yes. GW Bush is the root of all evil. But you've said that about 100 times. Any new/original thoughts on the issue?

[Ninjahedge]

Yes. GW Bush is the root of all evil. But you've said that about 100 times. Any new/original thoughts on the issue?

About as original as your retorts Spice.

Both of you, enough. No snide snippets w/o either some FACTS or something clever and original!

;)

[GoBUSH]

Zippy:

What was the point to deleting my posts?
This is or isnt a free forum for opinions?
You just delete what rubs you wrong or if
someone says something you don't like?

That's not right.

GB

[ZippyTheChimp]

I already explained why your posts were deleted.

What didn't you understand?

If it was for "opinions that I didn't like," you wouldn't have any posts at all, would you?

[Ninjahedge]

Zippy:

What was the point to deleting my posts?
This is or isnt a free forum for opinions?
You just delete what rubs you wrong or if
someone says something you don't like?

That's not right.

GB


GB, where in the website does it say that you can post whatever you want, whenever you want, and that that is protected?

You think that just because your opinion is confrontary and contrary to the general opinions of the mods here that that is the only reason you have been "singled out" and somehow 'unfairly' handled?

Come on man! I hear this argument on so many websites it is not funny. Someone comes in looking to start an argument, does not provide any real information and insults those that are on "the other side". When they then get moderated (look up the definition of moderation) they claim innocence and try to make it look like the board is somehow going against the constitution by somehow denying freedom of speech (ironically, much like many of Bush's town-hall "meetings").

If you think it is just because of the friction you caused on an easily contestable issue, go take a look at some other threads here and realize that there ARE arguments all the time. The only thing this board tries to do is keep them more based on information rather than rhetoric and it TRIES to keep it away from outright name-calling.

Learn from that and you might get your words heard more often.

[GoBUSH]

What I don't understand is what happened to you early on in life that makes you so insecure that you delete ANYTHING you just dont like to hear? Are you so scared of free thought that you are the judge jury and executioner for anyone who posts a supposed "challenge" to your narrowed point of view? That's the problem with liberal democrats. You take any challenge to your thought as a "threat" or an "attack". No, Zip Meister - on the contrary - there are just people who plain don't agree with your whiny attitude on George Bush or anything else of that matter. SO what do you do? You pout like a baby and say, "I don't like that! How dare he challenge me when I own the bully pulpit! I'm a moderator! I say what goes on here!" No, you aren't...You are actually an executioner of any thoughts that are the polar opposite of yours. Your only excuse is "Oh I've heard those Bush comments before"...Well, Zip, EVERYONE has heard your tired, boring stance on Bush over and over and over. Yawn to you also...

So, all you are left with is to push DELETE on my posts. If that empowers you and makes up for whomever beat you up as a child and invalidated you, then go for it. But I sleep well knowing I rattled you so much with MY OPINIONS that all you could do was push DELETE. I have read many of your posts - some of them quite rude and insulting, accusatory to others and inflammatory - so for you to say that I just made my initial posts with the sole purpose to start trouble? Zippy, grow up.

The FACTOR is on now...Time to watch some tv. By the way ZIP, you are a very very good writer. Perhaps you should get off the Dictator-Executioner trip and really be a moderator?

Just a "thought". :)

[ZippyTheChimp]

I will not waste time with a third explanation.

Expect to be contacted by the forum administrator. Don't bother posting anything until this matter is settled.

[BrooklynRider]

What I don't understand is what happened to you early on in life that makes you so insecure that you delete ANYTHING you just dont like to hear?

Actually, unlike the Republican majority in this country and the mentally deranged Christian wingnuts, we at Wired New York come to this forum with an understanding and general commitment to following the rules of posting.

Are you so scared of free thought that you are the judge jury and executioner for anyone who posts a supposed "challenge" to your narrowed point of view?

The only narrow point of view is yours. It is clear you are here as an agitator and not a serious poster because you are only concerned with your views being given the podium. There's plenty of discourse on here that provided contrary viewpoints. Your own failure to read or inability to comprehend cannot be blamed on one of the most even-handed and respected moderators on this site. And my praise comes as someone who has disagreed with him on a number of points.

That's the problem with liberal democrats. You take any challenge to your thought as a "threat" or an "attack".

It might be time for you to pack your bags. Frankly, your posts are revealing you to be more of an asshole than a serious contributor. We have people here from every ideology, but you are the first poster that I have witnessed to come out and paint this whole forum in such broad terms. I think you would find some conservative voices in this forum embarrassed by your parrot-like responses that mimic the worst of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. They have an audience for their ignorant, pandering incendiary words. You'll find no audience for your words here and that's why you must resort to labeling other people. Your posts don't stand on their own and have no intelligent philosophy or thought to back them up.

No, Zip Meister - on the contrary - there are just people who plain don't agree with your whiny attitude on George Bush or anything else of that matter. SO what do you do? You pout like a baby and say, "I don't like that! How dare he challenge me when I own the bully pulpit! I'm a moderator! I say what goes on here!" No, you aren't...You are actually an executioner of any thoughts that are the polar opposite of yours. Your only excuse is "Oh I've heard those Bush comments before"...Well, Zip, EVERYONE has heard your tired, boring stance on Bush over and over and over. Yawn to you also...

Classic Republican wingnut behavior. Attack and discredit the messenger. I suggest you take a look at the number of postings that Zippy has in these forum and then look at your paltry number. You are charging into a very real community here and you have not built up a body of posts that gives you (1) an ounce of credibility, (2) any kind of moral high ground from which to preach (3) any kind of respect that is commonly given to new members looking to make constructive contributions.

So, all you are left with is to push DELETE on my posts. If that empowers you and makes up for whomever beat you up as a child and invalidated you, then go for it. But I sleep well knowing I rattled you so much with MY OPINIONS that all you could do was push DELETE.

Actually, it was you who admitted early on that you couldn't master the basic activity of hitting the "post reply" button. But, I am glad you have admitted that you came here simply to attempt to "rattle" things up. I'm responding to your post as have others, so again you have zero credibility for your claims that your moronic ranting is not being given air time.

I have read many of your posts - some of them quite rude and insulting, accusatory to others and inflammatory - so for you to say that I just made my initial posts with the sole purpose to start trouble?

You are rude and inflammatory. Your initial posts claimed that previous posts had been deleted because this was a "liberal" site that wasn't interested in letting other opinions be heard. A review of your posts up until that date showed that you had not in fact posted anything previously. You simply were unable to follow the self-evident process for posting. I don;t think it is inflammatory, insulting or incorrect to reiterate my previous statement that you have offered sufficient evidence for me to declare - with absolute confidence - that you are a fool.

The FACTOR is on now...Time to watch some tv. By the way ZIP, you are a very very good writer. Perhaps you should get off the Dictator-Executioner trip and really be a moderator?

And so the automaton goes back to the boob-tube to get recharged as a zombie without an original thought, without any substantive back-up for statements and, in general, to get fluffed up for the next emergence as undisputed forum fool.

Just a "thought". :)

It is appropriate that the word "thought" is in parentheses. You post was anything but. A thought requires input from the brain. You either had no input or have no brain. In either case, it is a pity, but it is hard to find any compassion for a person responsible for such foolish postings.

[Ninjahedge]

BR, Zip has moderated the goofball.

"GOBUSH" is gone, for now. No need to reply to all of his rantings.

[NYatKNIGHT]

If anyone would like to hear the thoughts of GoBUSH, or would like to be dressed down and called names, you can merely watch FoxNews or any of the other multitude of media outlets that simply regurgitate the Republican talking points and propaganda that they receive daily from the shameful current West Wing. They all make the same Kool-Aid.

[BrooklynRider]

BR, Zip has moderated the goofball.

"GOBUSH" is gone, for now. No need to reply to all of his rantings.

I tell you, man. Nothing will silence me! Not even the cricket chirping in the dead silence of desolation.

I didn't write as much for GoBush as I did for me.

I feel clean now.

[ZippyTheChimp]

GoBUSH will have a month to relax, and contemplate posting etiquette.

[lofter1]

Meanwhile, something for him -- and others -- to contemplate ...

In Notification of Military Deaths, More Pain

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/07/us/07noti395.jpghttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif
Dilip Vishnawat for The New York Times
Gay and Fred Eisenhauer with a photo of their son, Wyatt,
who was killed in Iraq. They criticized how the Army dealt
with their son's death.

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/lizette_alvarez/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/us/07notify.html)
April 7, 2006

After Neil Santorello heard the news that his son, a tank commander, had been killed in Iraq (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo), from the officer in his living room, he walked out his front door and removed the American flag from its pole. Then, in tears, he tore down the yellow ribbons from his tree.

Rather than see it as the act of a man unmoored by the death of his 24-year-old son, the officer, an Army major, confronted Mr. Santorello, saying, "Don't be disrespectful," Mr. Santorello recalled. Then, the officer, whose job it is to inform families of their loss, quickly disappeared without offering any comfort.

Later, the Santorellos heard a piece of crushing but inaccurate news: They would not be allowed to look inside their son's coffin. First Lt. Neil Santorello, of Verona, Pa., had been killed by an improvised bomb. His body, the family was told, was unviewable.

The Santorellos eventually learned that families have the right to see a loved one's body.

"I asked them to open the casket a few inches so I could reach in and touch his hand," recalled Mr. Santorello, who is still struggling with his son's death, in large part because he was not allowed to see him.

"The government doesn't want you to see servicemen in a casket, but this is my son. He is not a serviceman. You have to let his mother and I say goodbye to him."

Scores of families whose loved ones have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone head-to-head with a casualty system that, in their experience, has failed to compassionately and competently guide them through the harrowing process that begins after a soldier's death.

When the system works smoothly, and it often does, families say they feel a profound sense of comfort. But others have seen their hurt deepen.

They have complained about coffins placed in cargo bays alongside crates, personal belongings that disappear, questions about how their loved ones died that go unanswered for months or even years, and casualty assistants who are too poorly trained to walk them through the labyrinth of their anguish.

After three years of war in Iraq, with the number of active-duty deaths there surpassing 2,330, the military is scrambling to improve the way it cares for surviving relatives and honors soldiers who have been killed in battle. Even senior officials, including the secretary of the Army, have acknowledged flaws in the system.

Not since the Vietnam War have so many service members in dress uniforms knocked on so many doors to deliver such somber news.

The Army, which has suffered the largest number of deaths, 1,589 as of March 28, has faced an enormous challenge and has received the sharpest criticism for its treatment of surviving families and soldiers killed in action.

Now it is rushing through new regulations to overhaul the casualty process, which has been tinkered with, but not fully revised, since 1994. "We take it to heart whenever something is not done properly and are painfully aware of the additional grief it brings to the family concerned," said Col. Mary Torgersen, the director of the Army's Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operation Center, in an e-mail response to questions, adding that some changes have already been put in place.

For some grieving families, the cracks in the system have deepened their distress and many have been turned to Congress, state officials and private lawyers for help.

Many wonder why it has taken the military so long to address their concerns.
The answer appears straightforward: The military did not expect to be fighting this long. It also did not expect to lose this many soldiers.

Lapses in the past few years run from the heart-wrenching to the head-scratching. Families have said that items like cameras and computers containing treasured e-mail messages and photographs have been lost or damaged.

Gay and Fred Eisenhauer, of Pinckneyville, Ill., whose son, Wyatt, an Army scout, was killed last May in Iraq by an improvised bomb, are still hoping to receive their son's watch, eyeglasses and cellphone. The phone is precious because it holds a recording of their son's voice. A combat patch they were promised has never arrived.

"I know these are little things," Mrs. Eisenhauer said. "What makes it important to me is that my son was good enough to go over there to fight, but he is not important enough to get his stuff back to his family."

Colonel Torgersen said the Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operation Center "aggressively monitors the movement" of personal effects. Mortuary specialists inventory, photograph, clean and then ship belongings to the center via Federal Express.

Soldiers, in their coffins, usually arrive from Dover Air Force Base in the belly of a commercial flight. But honor guards have not always been present as the coffins come off the plane.

The Eisenhauers had hoped to take comfort in the military rituals. Instead, the airline placed Private Eisenhauer's coffin in a cargo warehouse with crates and boxes stacked high around it. There was no ceremony, no flag over the coffin.

Only the airport firefighters did their bit to honor him, hoisting flags on their ladder trucks.

"I just wanted to scream," Mrs. Eisenhauer said. "My son was owed that. He was owed that."

When Joan Neal of Gurnee, Ill., went to the airport for the body of her son, Specialist Wesley Wells, 21, she was aghast. "To glance over and see your child's casket on a forklift is not really the kind of thing you want to see," Ms. Neal said.

News of a death has also been delivered at awkward times. Ms. Neal was at work when she was notified in September 2004 that her son had been killed in Afghanistan, and Mrs. Eisenhauer's 6-year-old niece was in the room when Mrs. Eisenhauer received the news.

As parents to a married son, the Santorellos experienced something that is commonplace: The Army focuses on the spouse and has often left parents to fend for themselves.

The Santorellos were not assigneda casualty assistant and were expected to pay their own way to a memorial ceremony in Fort Riley, Kan., and to find transportation to the burial at Arlington Cemetery.

"We were not considered next of kin," said Mr. Santorello, who with his wife, Dianne, opposes the war. "He was my son for 25 years. He was her husband for 22 months, and I had no say."

Recognizing the distress of parents with married children, the Army in mid-February began assigning casualty assistants to mothers and fathers.

Unanswered Questions

Some families say that the most upsetting aspect of the casualty process may be the lack of information about how the loved ones died.

In a 2005 survey of 50 military families by The Military Times, about half of the families said they did not know enough about their loved ones' deaths.

Parents and spouses crave details to help them cope, particularly because they cannot visit the spot where loved ones died: Who held his hand? Did he say anything?

"You know what my casualty assistant said? 'These are just questions you will never get answers to,' " Ms. Eisenhauer said. "But there were men there. Why can't I get answers?"

The Santorellos were told by the Army that their son had died instantly. A few weeks later, they received a letter saying he had lived for four hours.

Mrs. Santorello learned the time of death by reading the autopsy report. "I don't think anyone should be forced to read an autopsy report to find out when their son died," she said.

Ms. Neal's casualty officer told her that her son had been killed in action by a gunshot wound to the chest. After her son's funeral, Ms. Neal learned that he might have been killed by his own forces.

She had been told that she would be notified in 30 days. Seven months later, when she still had not received further news, she took a plane to Hawaii, where her son had been stationed, to talk with his superiors, who greeted her warmly.

"They did confirm he was killed by American bullets," she said. "The autopsy was done within a week of his death. They knew that when they did the autopsy."

A Personal Apology

Karen Meredith's son Lt. Ken Ballard, 26, a fourth-generation Army officer and a tank commander, was killed in Iraq in May 2004.

Her experience went so awry that she received a personal letter of apology last September from the secretary of the Army, Francis J. Harvey.

The problems began when her casualty officer abandoned her after 10 days, just as the process was beginning. It also took five months to receive Lieutenant Ballard's personal belongings. His clothes were returned washed, which might have made some families thankful, but devastated her. But there was worse to come.

The week her son died, Ms. Meredith was told that he had been killed by enemy fire.

Fifteen months later, there was a knock on the door. Ms. Meredith was told by an Army casualty official that her son's death had been accidental. Her son had been killed when his tank backed into a tree branch, setting off an unmanned machine gun.

"It was not a secret," said Ms. Meredith, now an outspoken critic of the war. "It was incompetence."

"The subliminal assumption is that they take care of everything," added Ms. Meredith, who credits the Army for responding to her complaints and working to fix the system. "They don't. I was tenacious."

Even when soldiers are alive, it can be difficult to get answers. Laura Youngblood, 27, was seven months pregnant with their second child in New York last July when her husband was wounded by an improvised bomb in Iraq.

Because of the pregnancy, she said, the corpsman assisting her did not want to tell her that her husband was "very seriously injured." When she was finally told he was off his ventilator, she recalls saying, "Good, because you never told me he was on one."

Six days after being wounded, he died.

A Sensitive Duty

Many casualty assistants say they recognize the sensitive nature of their task and are assiduous about getting it right. Although all services have different casualty policies. The Marines, steeped in tradition, have been mostly praised for the way they handle the jobs.

But all agreed that the job of a casualty assistant is a difficult one. At times, they have become the focus of a family's anger. Sometimes they suffer emotionally, watching as wives crumble or children hysterically cry "Daddy."

Afterward, some casualty assistants seek counseling.

"It's hard," said Sgt. First Class Julio Correa, 44, who is based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and has notified two families of deaths and assisted two others. "You see the kids screaming. You think, 'It could be my kids.' "

But typically the Army's notification officers, who bring news of the death, and its casualty assistants, who help families afterward, are picked simply because they are nearby. Their training often amounts to reading a manual and watching a video. Casualty duty is a side job. The officers and assistants are told to focus on families as long as needed, typically six weeks.

Sometimes they retire or are reassigned midstream. Eric K. Schuller is a senior policy adviser for the Illinois lieutenant governor, Pat Quinn, whose office has dealt with distraught families, including the Eisenhauers and Ms. Neal.

"This had to be fixed," Mr. Schuller said. "There were so many of them over a large period of time."

Still, the casualty process has improved since the Vietnam War, when it amounted to little more than face-to-face notification of a death.

"It is dramatically different now in terms of how they respond and the number of survivor benefits," said Morton Ender, a West Point sociology professor. "They really embrace the family."

The Army acknowledges that more can be done. Mr. Harvey, the Army secretary, ordered an investigation last September to help address families' concerns.

The report, issued in January, included suggestions that the Army is planning to implement, including upgrading training materials, creating a 24-hour hot line and sending mobile casualty assistance training teams across the country.

The Army now requires commanders to telephone families within a week of a death and to cross-check casualty reports.

Congress has asked for an investigation by the Government Accountability Office.

These instances, Colonel Torgersen said, "do cause us to reflect on our processes."

She added, "In the end, however, this work is carried out by human beings and however hard we may strive, none of us are invulnerable to error on occasion."

Copyright 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Ninjahedge]

I tell you, man. Nothing will silence me! Not even the cricket chirping in the dead silence of desolation.

I didn't write as much for GoBush as I did for me.

I feel clean now.

IOW, Zip deleted his posts.

Your reply just quoted and repeated what he said. I am kind of suggesting that you remove the ant so that noone has to read what he wrote in the first place!!

;)

[Ninjahedge]

"I just wanted to scream," Mrs. Eisenhauer said. "My son was owed that. He was owed that."

No.

YOU were owed that. Your son is DEAD. Until people start realizing that funerals and mourning are all for the living we will always focus just slightly right of the real targets of grief and suffering.


When someone dies, it is the people who are left that suffer. It is also them that should be taken care of and helped to handle the news.

You don't ship their son back like ski gear and tell them that they cannot see him.

[lofter1]

David Hare's 'Stuff Happens':
All the President's Men in 'On the Road to Baghdad'

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/14/arts/Stuff600.jpg
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
The War Room: Condoleezza Rice (Gloria Reuben), left, and company.

By BEN BRANTLEY (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ben_brantley/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
NY TIMES
April 14, 2006

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/theater/reviews/14stuf.html

CONTRARY to what the American politicians of David Hare's (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/david_hare/index.html?inline=nyt-per) "Stuff Happens" might believe, bigger doesn't always mean more powerful.

The Public Theater's invigorating new production of Mr. Hare's journalistic drama about the road to war in Iraq, first mounted with epic proportions at the National Theater in London in 2004, is here conducted on the modest scale of a town-hall meeting. It is as if a telescope, first set up to be looked through at the wrong end, were now righted, changing not composition but perspective.

The characters, who include the sitting American president and British prime minister and many of their cabinet members, feel closer to the audience — not just physically but emotionally. Often, they seem less like destiny-shaping, arbitrary gods than like the ego-trippers in your office. If that means they are too close for comfort, then "Stuff Happens," which opened last night under the smart, sharp direction of Daniel Sullivan, is doing its job.

Shrinkage may be the best thing that could have happened to Mr. Hare's quasi-documentary play. When I saw it in London, on the immense stage of the Olivier auditorium at the National, directed by Nicholas Hytner (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/filmography.html?p_id=95334&inline=nyt-per), the play had the marmoreal quality of mythic events carved into a temple frieze. Its eye was Olympian, and its principal figures might have been summoned by a latter-day Homer, outsize and sometimes grotesque creatures acting out a mortal pattern of which we already knew the final shape.

Mr. Sullivan's production does away with this sweeping distance. In placing "Stuff Happens" in the comparatively small Newman Theater at the Public, and putting the performers in a corridor of stage that runs between the two seating areas, the effect is as if the audience too is participating in this re-creation of recent events.

The play now seems less an arrogant, animated history book with a fixed agenda than a fluid public speculation — a collective work of imagination that attempts to grasp how and why an unnecessary and unwinnable war was allowed to happen. The first-rate cast members — who notably include Jay O. Sanders as President Bush, Peter Francis James as Colin Powell (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/colin_l_powell/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Gloria Reuben as Condoleezza Rice (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/condoleezza_rice/index.html?inline=nyt-per) — become the audience's investigative agents.

There's a new Brechtian distance between player and part, though in the cases of Mr. James and Ms. Reuben, the performances are also steeped in warmly insightful empathy that lends the production a concrete (as opposed to abstract) humanity.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/14/arts/Stuff190.jpg
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Peter Francis James as Colin Powell
in David Hare's play about the road to Iraq.

I don't have to summarize the plot for you, do I? "Stuff Happens" charts the staff meetings (at the White House and at No. 10 Downing Street), closed-door conferences, public addresses, and backdoor diplomacy and betrayals that led to the American-spearheaded invasion of Iraq. Some of the material (including its title, famously uttered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/donald_h_rumsfeld/index.html?inline=nyt-per) about looting in newly liberated Baghdad) is taken directly from transcripts of press conferences, United Nations (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org) assemblies and television interviews.

Many of the more compelling scenes, however — especially those involving private conversations between Bush and Tony Blair (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/tony_blair/index.html?inline=nyt-per) (Byron Jennings), the British prime minister — are indeed speculative. And it feels appropriate to the newly ruminative tone of "Stuff Happens" that we are aware that what we are seeing is not necessarily exactly how it was.

One quick but relevant aside: In his program notes for the National Theater, Mr. Hare wrote, while admitting that not everything in the play was taken from the record: "What happened happened. Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue." In an interview in The New York Times last month, he was more forthright about the scenes behind closed doors: "It's pure guesswork."

This greater openness about his dramatic methods has the paradoxical effect of making me trust more the undocumented moments in "Stuff Happens." Mr. Sullivan appears to have encouraged his cast members, most of whom play multiple roles, to use their imaginations to draw characters taken from real life in deeper, more realistic detail, avoiding the editorial cartoon sneers and snarls of many of their London counterparts. (Jeffrey De Munn's Donald Rumsfeld, Zach Grenier's Dick Cheney (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/dick_cheney/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and David Pittu's Paul Wolfowitz (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/paul_d_wolfowitz/index.html?inline=nyt-per) are all models of finely etched political portraiture.)

Well, in most cases. Bush, who as embodied by Alex Jennings was unquestionably the psychological linchpin of the National production, is less complex here. Mr. Jennings's Bush initially registered as a boyish pretender playing cowboy-president. But as the drama progressed, you sensed an unwavering conviction that seemed to spring from a belief in a president's divine right to rule. The audience's growing realization that this character was not the joke he first appeared to be might be said to parallel changing perceptions about the real Mr. Bush.

Square of jaw and mountainous of build, Mr. Sanders's Bush is, from the beginning, a monolithic presence, less an evolving character than a fixed historical force. The same could be said of Byron Jennings's Tony Blair, a part Mr. Hare has tweaked to put more emphasis on the prime minister's idealism and less on his political survival strategies. (In London, Nicholas Farrell seemed to glisten with the oil of self-preservation.)

This automatically shifts the play's center. If "Stuff Happens" were indeed the Shakespearean history play it aspires to be, its London production might have been called "George II"; the New York version is unmistakably "The Tragedy of Colin Powell."

As portrayed by Mr. James, in what is surely the performance of his career, Powell becomes the character everyone is most likely to identify with. Here is a smart careerist who winds up believing that his boss's agenda is neither ethical nor desirable. Most of us, at least those of us who like to imagine we still have some integrity, have found ourselves in comparable situations in the workplace. Now imagine that situation with the stakes raised to world-changing, life-annihilating heights.

From his first audience with the president through his increasingly tortured dealings with the United Nations Security Council (led by an Inspector Clouseau-accented Robert Sella as Dominique de Villepin), Mr. James's Powell progresses from apprehensive but hopeful good faith into fiery indignation and finally into numbed, appalled resignation. Mr. James seems to flame up and then freeze into moral paralysis as Powell perceives that he has been blindsided by his colleagues. He is Brutus in "Julius Caesar," an honorable man forced to run a race he no longer believes in.

Correspondingly, the central relationship in this production is not that of Bush and Blair but of Powell and Rice, who are, in different ways, good soldiers and usually the calmest, most objective minds in a room. Tellingly, Mr. Hare has restructured "Stuff Happens" so the first act now ends with a cryptic encounter between Powell and Rice. (The original version had Hans Blix (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/hans_blix/index.html?inline=nyt-per) being summoned from a hiking expedition to begin the inspection for weapons of mass destruction.)

Ms. Reuben is a worthy match for Mr. James, which is saying something. She exudes the preternatural cool and poise we associate with the real Ms. Rice, while registering barely perceptible tremors of ambivalence beneath the glacial facade. (Mr. Hare has tempered his original, less charitable portrait.)

As in London, varied points of view, including some supporting the invasion of Iraq, are given passionate and articulate voice. But it is the excellent Ms. Reuben and Mr. James who become our most immediate connection to the chain of events of "Stuff Happens." Surely some theatergoers will identify with Mr. James's aching suggestions of the enduring guilt of not speaking up in public dissent — in any context — when it still might have made all the difference.

Copyright 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[lofter1]

US firms suspected of bilking Iraq funds

Millions missing from program for rebuilding

By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff
BOSTON GLOBE
April 16, 2006

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2006/04/16/us_firms_suspected_of_bilking_iraq_funds/

WASHINGTON -- American contractors swindled hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraqi funds, but so far there is no way for Iraq's government to recoup the money, according to US investigators and civil attorneys tracking fraud claims against contractors.

Courts in the United States are beginning to force contractors to repay reconstruction funds stolen from the American government. But legal roadblocks have prevented Iraq from recovering funds that were seized from the Iraqi government by the US-led coalition and then paid to contractors who failed to do the work.

A US law that allows citizens to recover money from dishonest contractors protects only the US government, not foreign governments.

In addition, an Iraqi law created by the Coalition Provisional Authority days before it ceded sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004 gives American contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraq.

''In effect, it makes Iraq into a 'free-fraud zone,' " said Alan Grayson, a Virginia attorney who is suing the private security firm Custer Battles in a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by former employees. A federal jury last month found the Rhode Island-based company liable for $3 million in fraudulent billings in Iraq.

Even the United Nations panel set up to monitor the use of Iraq's seized assets has no power to prosecute wrongdoers.

''The Iraqi people are out of luck, the way it stands right now," said Patrick Burns, spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a watchdog group that helps US citizens file cases such as the Custer Battles action.

Iraqi leaders, paralyzed by political deadlock in forming a new government, have so far made no formal complaint about funds that were paid out to dishonest contractors. But US officials say the need for Iraq to recoup the stolen money has become more urgent as it faces a budget shortfall of billions of dollars.

The problem has become so acute that an interagency working group, which includes officials from the State Department and the Department of Justice, has been set up to try to come up with a mechanism to return the funds, according to two US officials who are involved.

The issue dates to the earliest days after the March 2003 invasion, when US officials thought Iraqi money would cover the costs of reconstruction. As the Coalition Provisional Authority took control just after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it seized Iraq's oil revenues, money found in bank accounts and in Hussein's palaces, and the balance from the UN's oil-for-food program.

The coalition ultimately controlled more than $20.7 billion in Iraqi funds. The money was deposited into an account called the Development Fund for Iraq, or DFI, which was set up, in the words of the US administrator at the time, L. Paul Bremer III, ''for the benefit of the Iraqi people."

The fund represented the first cash reservoir US officials turned to as they worked to rebuild roads, bridges, and clinics. It carried fewer restrictions than the $18.4 billion in US funds appropriated around that time for reconstruction because those funds could only be used in ways designated by Congress.

But the Coalition Provisional Authority lacked basic controls and accounting procedures to keep track of the billions in Iraqi money it was doling out to contractors, according to a series of audits issued in 2005 and 2006 by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a temporary office set up by Congress to oversee the use of reconstruction funds. One review of the files relating to 198 separate contracts found that 154 contained no evidence that goods or services promised by contractors were ever received, according to an April 2005 audit by the inspector general.

In some cases, contractors were paid twice for the same job. In others cases, they were paid for work that was never done.

In June 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority handed power and control of the DFI back to an Iraqi government. By then, the coalition had spent or disbursed about $14 billion of the Iraqi fund on reconstruction projects and on the administration of the government, according to the audits.

Among the contracts paid for out of the Iraqi fund was Halliburton's controversial no-bid contract to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure, worth $2.4 billion. The Pentagon's auditors found $263 million in excessive or unsubstantiated costs for importing gasoline into Iraq, but the Pentagon said in February that it had agreed to pay a Halliburton subsidiary all but $10 million of the contested charges.

The special inspector general's investigations have resulted in the arrests of five suspects on criminal charges and is investigating 60 more cases involving alleged fraud and corruption in Iraq involving both US and DFI funds, according to James Mitchell, a spokesman for the inspector general.

In addition, at least seven more cases against contractors have been filed in US civil courts under the federal False Claims Act, according to two private lawyers who have personal knowledge of the suits. The act, which dates to the Civil War, allows citizens to sue on behalf of the government when they suspect fraud in federal contracting. The cases are currently under seal until the Justice Department investigates them to determine whether the government will join the suit.

The cases eventually could help the US Treasury recover hundreds of millions of dollars from corrupt contractors, according to Grayson, the attorney suing Custer Battles, the first such case to reach the courts and become public.

But the False Claims Act has not helped Iraq. Last month, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that it only protects the US government from fraud and that the United States suffered no direct economic loss from fraud involving Iraqi funds.

The result is a victory for American taxpayers, but a loss for Baghdad: In the first phase of the fraud claim involving Custer Battles, the jury ruled in March that the company should pay triple damages to the US Treasury for the $3 million it was paid for delivering a fleet of trucks that didn't work and old, spray-painted Iraqi cranes that were passed off as new imports. But the company, which has denied the charges in court and in other statements, does not have to repay any of the $12 million that came from the Development Fund for Iraq on the same contract, according to the judge's ruling.

Grayson said the injustice surrounding wasted Iraqi funds has helped fuel the insurgency.

''The DFI was essentially treated as a 'slush fund' for various quasi-military projects, run by US contractors over whom Iraqis had no control," he said. ''Like a colonial power, the Bush administration took Iraq's oil money, and wasted it. The Iraqis well know that. That's one reason why they're shooting at US soldiers."

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, has urged the administration to repay Iraq for the money paid to Custer Battles. ''This was Iraqi money, and it should be returned to the Iraqi people," he said in a statement.

The Justice Department, which is pursuing criminal cases against contractors, says there is a chance that Iraq eventually could receive some restitution.

In February, Robert J. Stein Jr., a North Carolina man who issued contracts on behalf of the Coalition Provisional Authority, pleaded guilty to conspiring with at least three others to steal more than $2 million from the Iraqi fund.
The money, earmarked for refurbishing a police academy and library in the town of Hillah, was spent on expensive cars, machine guns, jewelry; hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash was also smuggled into the United States.

As part of a plea deal, Stein has agreed to pay $3.6 million in restitution, but Bryan Sierra, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said it is too early to say whether Iraq will receive the money as part of that deal.

''It is possible that some of the money could go back to the Development Fund for Iraq," he said. ''But that hasn't been determined yet."

http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/spacer.gif
© Copyright (http://www.boston.com/help/bostoncom_info/copyright) 2005 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

IRAQ: U.S. Contractor Admits Bribery For Jobs in Iraq

Occupation Officials Got Cash and Gifts for Deals

by Griff Witte
The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801742_pf.html)
April 19th, 2006

An American businessman who is at the heart of one of the biggest corruption cases to emerge from the reconstruction of Iraq has pleaded guilty to conspiracy, bribery and money-laundering charges, according to documents unsealed yesterday in federal court in Washington.

As part of the plea, Philip H. Bloom admitted his part in a scheme to give more than $2 million in cash and gifts to U.S. officials in exchange for their help in getting reconstruction contracts for his companies. Bloom's firms won $8.6 million in reconstruction deals, with an average profit margin of more than 25 percent.

Yesterday's filings included e-mails that provide insight into the fraud. In one, an Army Reserve officer who allegedly helped Bloom secure his contracts expresses gratitude for Bloom's largesse.

"The truck is Great!!! I needed a new truck . . . People I work with cannot stop commenting on how much they love it," the officer wrote in a Sept. 2, 2004, message to Bloom. The officer then added a bit of reassurance: "If there were any smoking guns, they would have been found months ago."

The reassurance was premature. Bloom's deals soon attracted the interest of investigators, and the case has ensnared three officials of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq for a year after Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled.

More arrests are likely. The documents unsealed yesterday refer to an unidentified co-conspirator who was chief of staff for the CPA office in Al-Hillah, which supervised the reconstruction of all of south-central Iraq.

According to Bloom's plea agreement, which was signed in February, he faces up to 40 years in prison, five years of supervised release and a fine of $750,000. He also must repay the government $3.6 million and forfeit $3.6 million in assets.

John N. Nassikas, Bloom's attorney, said that his client is cooperating with investigators and that he hopes to have Bloom's prison sentence reduced.

Bloom's cooperation may provide investigators with further insight into a case that highlights how some were able to exploit the chaotic, freewheeling and cash-rich environment that characterized Iraq in the months after the U.S. invasion. That initial period was marked by little oversight, but that changed as auditors have fanned out across the country looking for signs of impropriety.

"This shows oversight is working," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office uncovered Bloom's crimes. "It will send a message to those involved in similar schemes that we are on the case."

Bowen said his office is investigating 70 other cases that involve criminal allegations.

The Bloom case came to light in November when he and CPA official Robert J. Stein Jr. were charged with fraud, money-laundering and conspiracy -- the first criminal corruption case arising from the Iraq reconstruction. Stein, already a convicted felon when he was hired as a CPA contracting officer, pleaded guilty in February.

Two others have been charged in connection with the case. They are Michael Brian Wheeler and Debra Harrison, both lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve.

The court papers unsealed yesterday paint a picture of how Bloom, a businessman with operations in the United States and Romania, used gifts of cash, cars, plane tickets and jewelry to secure lucrative reconstruction contracts from December 2003 to December 2005. Bloom also supplied women to provide sexual favors at his Baghdad villa to the CPA officials who helped ensure that his companies won the contracts he wanted.

In many cases, the documents show, Bloom submitted multiple bids on the same contracts but did so under different names to disguise the fact that the CPA officials were steering the deals his way. He also used elaborate money-laundering tactics to hide the bribes he handed out in return.

E-mail exchanges between Bloom and his conspirators show that they had highly specific demands for what bribes they wanted. One official coveted a 2004 GMC Yukon sport-utility vehicle with all-wheel drive, a "Summit White" exterior and a "Sandstone Leather" interior. Another, the chief of staff, apparently instructed Bloom through an intermediary that he wanted an electric-blue Nissan 350Z hard-top convertible but that there were only two such cars in the western United States. "There is a car in California that has all these features, plus a satellite radio. Cost (including shipping to Salt Lake City): $35,990," the unidentified intermediary wrote to Bloom in a June 25, 2004, message.

Another official wrote to Bloom two months later: "I'll let you know when I actually pick up the car. At that point you'll get a great big thank you and I owe you from me."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[NYatKNIGHT]

These people who are so greedy that it isn't enough to simply profit from the war but to go outside the bounds of the law to make millions should be made an example of. I wish they had to do hard time.

[Ninjahedge]

Still goes to show you how STUPID some of these people are.

They still do not realize how permanent, AND tracable E-mail can be!

[lofter1]

For these Total POS we should install some of these \/ in public places.

Noon.

Bryant Park.

All are Welcome.

Supply Tomatoes and Douche Bags.

http://www.secretshropshire.org.uk/Content/Images/00011867a.jpg

[Citytect]

btw: I like your tag. I agree that Bush should GO as soon as possible ;)

Haha. That's funny.

But it makes me think... Are we all Bush-hating liberals on WNY? Not that there's anything wrong with it if we are, of course.

[lofter1]

If so then it seems we're just a small piece of the 67% of Americans who now think Bush pretty much sucks.

[lofter1]

My deeper distaste is reserved for DICK ...

Billion-Dollar-Cheney (http://billiondollarcheney.cf.huffingtonpost.com/) (A-1 music vid)

[Azazello]

Haha. That's funny.

But it makes me think... Are we all Bush-hating liberals on WNY? Not that there's anything wrong with it if we are, of course.There are even members who are not Bush-haters and are certainly not liberals. Vocal ones, too. I am not part of those "we".

[lofter1]

... we're just a small piece of the 67% of Americans who now think Bush pretty much sucks.
Even FOX finds this to be pretty much the case ...

FOX Poll:
Gloomy Economic Views; Bush Approval at New Low

By Dana Blanton
http://www.foxnews.com/images/foxnews_story.gif
Thursday, April 20, 2006

NEW YORK — More Americans disapprove than approve of how George W. Bush (http://javascript<b></b>:siteSearch('George W. Bush');), Donald Rumsfeld and Congress are doing their jobs, while a majority approves of Condoleezza Rice.

President Bush’s approval hits a record low of 33 percent this week, clearly damaged by sinking support among Republicans.

Opinions are sharply divided on whether Rumsfeld should resign as secretary of defense. In addition, views on the economy are glum; most Americans rate the current economy negatively, and twice as many say it feels like the economy is getting worse rather than better. These are just some of the findings of the latest FOX News national poll.

President Bush’s job approval rating slipped this week and stands at a new low of 33 percent approve, down from 36 percent two weeks ago and 39 percent in mid-March. A year ago this time, 47 percent approved and two years ago 50 percent approved (April 2004).

Approval among Republicans is below 70 percent for the first time of Bush’s presidency. Two-thirds (66 percent) approve of Bush’s job performance today, down almost 20 percentage points from this time last year when 84 percent of Republicans approved. Among Democrats, 11 percent approve today, while 14 percent approved last April.

"It seems clear that many Republicans, while they may still like and support George Bush, are growing uneasy with what may happen to their candidates — and the policies they support — in the November elections," comments Opinion Dynamics Chairman John Gorman.

This unease about the direction of the party is now showing up as an erosion of the near unanimous support Bush has enjoyed among the Republican rank-and-file for the last six years."

In a follow-up question the poll asked respondents to explain why they approve or disapprove of the job Bush is doing. Of the 33 percent who approve, 52 percent say "he is doing a good job" in general, 21 percent cite Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism and 18 percent mention their agreement with him on the issues. The only other reason to receive double-digit mentions is the president’s honesty and character.

Overall, 57 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Bush is doing, and the most frequently mentioned reason is Iraq (48 percent). The other top reasons include generally "doing a bad job" (24 percent), disagreement on issues (22 percent) and the economy/jobs (17 percent).

Eleven percent of Americans say they disapprove because they "don’t like him" and 10 percent because he "doesn’t care about average people."
Opinion Dynamics Corp. (http://javascript<b></b>:siteSearch('Opinion Dynamics Corp.');) conducted the national telephone poll of 900 registered voters for FOX News on April 18 and April 19.

The other end of Pennsylvania Avenue (http://javascript<b></b>:siteSearch('Pennsylvania Avenue');) fares even worse: 25 percent of the public approves of the job Congress is doing and 52 percent disapprove. About a year ago, 40 percent approved and 36 percent disapproved (29-30 March 2005). Furthermore, a 54 percent majority agrees that this is a "do nothing" Congress, including 56 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s job approval rating also hit a record low this week with 35 percent of Americans saying they approve, down from 40 percent in December and 44 percent last April.

On a more upbeat note for the GOP, a 60 percent majority approves of the job Secretary of State Rice is doing — far more than the one in five who disapprove (22 percent). These ratings are consistent with previous results.

Rumsfeld: Should He Stay or Go?

Americans are split evenly on whether Rumsfeld should stay on as secretary of defense. Four in 10 Americans say they think Rumsfeld should resign, but 41 percent disagrees and one in five is unsure. Partisanship is clear on this issue: 57 percent of Democrats think Rumsfeld should resign, while 67 percent of Republicans think he should stay.

Earlier this week President Bush repeated his support saying, "What’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as secretary of defense."

Recently a handful of retired generals criticized Rumsfeld’s leadership and called for his resignation. A majority of Americans say they are OK with this public criticism: 57 percent think it is appropriate for retired military generals to openly criticize Rumsfeld during wartime. Four in 10 think it is inappropriate.

Rating the Economy

Americans are more than twice as likely to rate the nation’s economy negatively as positively. Nearly 3 in 10 rate economic conditions as either "excellent" (6 percent) or "good" 22 percent, while the widespread consensus is gloomier: about 4 in 10 say the economy is "only fair" (42 percent) and another 30 percent say it is in "poor" shape.

Like on most issues these days, there are clear partisan differences on the economy. Among Republicans, views are evenly divided between a positive rating (50 percent excellent/good) and a negative rating (49 percent only fair/poor). In contrast, almost all Democrats rate the condition of the economy negatively (85 percent only fair/poor).

As can happen on many issues, Americans view their personal situation differently — more positively in this case — than they see things for the nation overall.

Even though ratings are almost 20 points more positive on the individual level than for the country, people are still slightly more negative than positive.

Nearly half of the public says their personal financial situation is "excellent" (10 percent) or "good" (36 percent), while just over half rate their situation as "only fair" (35 percent) or "poor" (17 percent).

"It is worth noting that perceptions of how well people are doing are tied directly to their income," comments Gorman. "Most of those making over $75,000 per year are positive, while most of those making less than $50,000 are negative. Those between $50,000 and $75,000 are just about evenly split."

In addition, even though economic indicators conclude the nation’s economy has been growing for some time, the new poll shows this is at odds with the public’s perception. By 56 percent to 21 percent, Americans say it feels to them and their families that the economy is getting worse rather than better.

The poll asked respondents to explain why they feel the economy is getting better/worse, without being aided by a read list. Those who think it seems like things are getting better point to reasons such as "more jobs" (49 percent), "pay increases" (23 percent), a "general sense" (14 percent) and the stock market (12 percent). One in 10 say they think the economy is getting better because stores are busier and it seems like business is improving.

Far and away the top reason for those saying it feels like the economy is getting worse is gas prices. Six in 10 cite rising gas prices, outdistancing other frequently mentioned reasons such as the lack of jobs (28 percent) and grocery prices (15 percent).

When read a list of factors that could play a part in assessing the economy, large majorities of Americans say the availability of good jobs (89 percent) and gas prices (83 percent) are either "extremely" or "very" important factors in deciding whether the economy is in good shape.

By three-to-one the public says the recent news reports they have been hearing have been more bad news stories (54 percent) than good news on the economy (17 percent). Does this factor in to the decision-making process on how the economy is doing?

Overall, nearly half (48 percent) say their views on economic conditions are based more on their own personal experiences and one in five (21 percent) say more on news reports.

Finally, when asked to look ahead 10 years, a 58 percent majority of Americans say they are optimistic about the future of the United States, down from 73 percent in October 2003.

PDF: Click here for full poll results. (http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/FOX224_release_web.pdf)

Copyright 2006 FOX News Network, LLC

[lofter1]

Rebuilding of Iraqi Pipeline as Disaster Waiting to Happen

http://graphics9.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/25/world/25pipeline.xlarge1.jpg
Christoph Bangert/Polaris, for The New York Times

The partly destroyed bridge over the Tigris River at Al Fatah, Iraq, which was bombed
by American forces in April 2003, cutting off a road and a series of oil pipelines.

By JAMES GLANZ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/james_glanz/index.html?inline=nyt-per)
NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/world/middleeast/25pipeline.html?hp&ex=1146024000&en=06dbad0d8a941bb0&ei=5094&partner=homepage)
April 25, 2006

When Robert Sanders was sent by the Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River, 130 miles north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines, which had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along a giant drill bit in their desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the project's crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway.

A few weeks later, after the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt.

The project, called the Fatah pipeline crossing, had been a critical element of a $2.4 billion no-bid reconstruction contract that a Halliburton subsidiary had won from the Army in 2003. The spot where about 15 pipelines crossed the Tigris had been the main link between Iraq's (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) rich northern oil fields and the export terminals and refineries that could generate much-needed gasoline, heating fuel and revenue for Iraqis.

For all those reasons, the project's demise would seriously damage the American-led effort to restore Iraq's oil system and enable the country to pay for its own reconstruction. Exactly what portion of Iraq's lost oil revenue can be attributed to one failed project, no matter how critical, is impossible to calculate. But the pipeline at Al Fatah has a wider significance as a metaphor for the entire $45 billion rebuilding effort in Iraq. Although the failures of that effort are routinely attributed to insurgent attacks, an examination of this project shows that troubled decision-making and execution have played equally important roles.

The Fatah project went ahead despite warnings from experts that it could not succeed because the underground terrain was shattered and unstable.

It continued chewing up astonishing amounts of cash when the predicted problems bogged the work down, with a contract that allowed crews to charge as much as $100,000 a day as they waited on standby.

The company in charge engaged in what some American officials saw as a self-serving attempt to limit communications with the government until all the money was gone.

And until Mr. Sanders went to Al Fatah, the Army Corps of Engineers, which administered the project, allowed the show to go on for months, even as individual Corps officials said they repeatedly voiced doubts about its chances of success.

The Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, had commissioned a geotechnical report that warned in August 2003 that it would be courting disaster to drill without extensive underground tests.

"No driller in his right mind would have gone ahead," said Mr. Sanders, a geologist who came across the report when he arrived at the site.

KBR defended its performance on the project, and said that the information in the geotechnical report was too general to serve as a warning.

Still, interviews by The New York Times reveal that at least two other technical experts, including the northern project manager for the Army Corps, warned that the effort would fail if carried out as designed. None of the dozen or so American government and military officials contacted by The Times remembered being told of the geotechnical report, and the company pressed ahead.

Once the project started going bad, senior American officials said, an array of management failures by both KBR and the Corps allowed it to continue. First, some of those officials said, they seldom received status reports from the company, even when they suspected problems and made direct requests.

"Typically when you manage a project, you have people who can tell you that you've got so much of your project finished and this much money that has been spent," said Gary Vogler, a senior American official in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. "We couldn't get anything like that."

Some warnings did in fact make their way to senior officials who could have stopped the project, said Donna Street, a Corps engineer who examined correspondence on the project after it failed. But neither the Corps nor the company seemed to act on them, Ms. Street said.

"It seems to me that there was pretty much an absence of anything," she said. "The reports went out. The questions were asked. But there was just no response."

An independent United States office, The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, began an investigation of the project and issued a report earlier this year. It sharply criticized KBR for not relaying the problems, and concluded that "the geological complexities that caused the project to fail were not only foreseeable but predicted."

The company received a slap on the wrist when it got only about 4 percent of its potential bonus fees on the job order that contained the contract; there was no other financial penalty.

In interviews, two of the top Army Corps commanders who have had involvement at Al Fatah were reluctant to criticize the work done by KBR in Iraq. That was also the case in February when the Army Corps agreed to pay Halliburton most of its fees on a large fuel supply contract in Iraq, even though Pentagon auditors had found more than $200 million of the charges were questionable.

Congressional Democrats have accused Halliburton of enjoying special privileges because Vice President Dick Cheney (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/dick_cheney/index.html?inline=nyt-per) was its chief executive before he became vice president.

Although independent experts have noted that it is one of a handful of companies with the experience and size to handle enormous jobs like the reconstruction effort, KBR is often sheltered by a military that is heavily dependent on it.

Through a spokeswoman, Melissa Norcross, KBR rejected the criticisms leveled at it in the Fatah pipeline case by the inspector general and other officials, saying that the company had responded properly to an urgent request by the United States government to build the crossing quickly in a dangerous area.

Ms. Norcross asserted in a written response to questions that the geotechnical report was too general to suggest any measures but extensive ground testing, which would have required sophisticated equipment. "Such equipment was not available in the region, and certainly not in Iraq," she said.

She said statements that the company did not report regularly about the project are "completely without merit" and that daily and monthly reports were duly filed. Ms. Norcross said that when serious problems arose, "the Corps directed KBR to continue" with the drilling.

With the failed effort at Al Fatah, the inspector general estimated lost money from crude oil exports at as much as $5 million a day. The United States was forced to issue a new $66 million job order that includes another attempt to run pipelines across the Tigris — this time using a different technique.

Stunned by a Change in Plans

On April 3, 2003, invading American troops had reached the outskirts of Baghdad and were eyeing its smoking skyline. A naval aircraft dropped a single bomb on the Fatah crossing.

Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff who was the allied air commander, said that bridges were not generally targets in the war, but that he approved the Fatah strike to stop the enemy from crossing the bridge on which the original pipelines had run through openings beneath the road.

The pipelines had carried crude oil from the fields around Kirkuk, 60 miles to the northeast, crossed the Tigris at Al Fatah and transported the crude to refineries or to export terminals in Turkey.

Still, there was reason for optimism. The Fatah bridge was one of three bridges chosen as high priorities in an initial $680 million rebuilding program mandated by Congress. Army Corps engineers estimated that it would cost some $5 million and take less than five months to string the pipelines across the bridge once it was repaired.

"There is an urgent and compelling need to accomplish this feat as soon as possible," Douglas Lee Cox, the northern Iraq project manager for the Army Corps, wrote in a memo on June 9, 2003.

Then, as quickly as the bridge project had been approved, it was dropped with little explanation, in favor of a bridge in Tikrit. Older buried pipelines were able to carry limited amounts of oil, American officials said, but breakdowns were a constant worry.

Army Corps officials were stunned. Without the Fatah bridge, they were forced to consider new ways of putting pipelines across the river. They debated options like digging a huge trench in the riverbed and laying the pipelines in it — the option that would later be chosen after the KBR project failed.

KBR ultimately settled on trying to put the pipelines under the Tigris using a technique called directional drilling, in which nearly horizontal holes are bored out in an arc through the riverbed. In a written response to questions, the company said it chose the technique because it was the only one that could be used to complete the project as quickly as the Army Corps had demanded.

Mr. Cox said he had not even been consulted. Gary Loew, another senior Corps official in Iraq at the time, remembers that the idea for drilling came from KBR and said that the Corps approved it verbally in the summer of 2003.

Mr. Cox, who was familiar with the technique from his own work in Texas, knew that with the heavy equipment and supplies needed for the job, his colleagues' claims that Fatah could be finished in 60 to 90 days were nonsense, particularly with the deteriorating security on the road from Kirkuk, where the supply planes would land.

"I said, 'Now how in the heck do you think you're going to do directional drilling with the situation we have here?' " Mr. Cox recalled, adding that he had told KBR officials, "It takes us forever to get enough security to drive down this road, and that's at 70 miles an hour."

That same month, a KBR pipeline expert saw a preliminary design and advised the company "that the project would probably fail," according to the inspector general report.

The most blatant warning came from the study that KBR had commissioned from Fugro South, a geotechnical firm. The study stated repeatedly that the project should not begin without extensive field exploration and laboratory testing of the area.

KBR went ahead with the work without sharing the report with senior oil officials in Iraq. Nor did it carry out the testing that the report strongly recommended.

The report had cited "past tectonic activities near the site." The words, suggesting slippage of the earth's crust in eons past, would prove prophetic.

Troubles From the Start

The Fugro report did have one important consequence.

KBR included it in a "request for proposals" to drilling subcontractors — along with contradictory information from KBR suggesting that the ground was made of ordinary clays, silts and sandstones, the inspector general report found.

Faced with that contradictory information, the subcontractor that won the bid negotiated a contract that required it only to try drilling holes on a daily basis — not necessarily succeed.

"There was no requirement that the subcontractor complete any holes," the inspector general wrote.

Ms. Norcross, the KBR spokeswoman, said that no subcontractor would have been "willing to mobilize equipment and personnel to an unstable war zone" if the contract had been written more stringently.

An official in the inspector general's office saw it differently. "It was a horrible contract," the official said. "It's basically, 'Give it your best shot, spend six months doing it.' "

In late January, 2004, drilling began. The plan called for boreholes to accommodate 15 pipelines, which would arc beneath the Tigris at shallow angles. Troubles turned up instantly. Every time workers plied the riverbed with their drills, they found it was like sticking their fingers into a jar of marbles: each time they pulled the drills out, the boulders would either shift and erase the larger holes or snap off the bits.

The area had turned out to be a fault zone, where two great pieces of the earth's crust had shifted and torn the underground terrain into jagged boulders, voids, cobblestones and gravel. It was just the kind of "tectonic" shift that the Fugro report had warned of — hardly the smooth clays and sandstones that KBR had suggested the drillers would find.

The crew abandoned the first borehole and started a second, the inspector general reported. Twenty-six days later, the borehole went through. But the crews found it impossible to enlarge the hole enough for a 30-inch pipe to pass through. By the end of March, five months after arriving in Iraq, they managed to jam a 26-inch pipe through.

The crews would never again get anything larger than that across the riverbed. To make matters worse, the project suffered from constant equipment shortages, just as Mr. Cox, the Army Corps project manager, had predicted.

If KBR had declined to write performance clauses into the drill subcontract, the company had also included language that prevented the crews from speaking directly with the Army Corps, let alone passing along word that some of them knew that the effort was futile.

The company "restricted subcontractor communications by requiring all communications be addressed to them," the inspector general found.

Mr. Vogler, the senior Oil Ministry official, said he began hearing rumors from Iraqis in the ministry in Baghdad that something had gone terribly wrong, but the company itself seemed determined not to clarify what had happened.

"We couldn't get a good status report," Mr. Vogler said.

"We kept asking for it," he said. "We couldn't get one."

Still, a trickle of information found its way through the command structure of the Army Corps. Ms. Norcross of KBR said that in April 2004, the company notified a contracting officer in Baghdad that 75 percent of the $220 million allocated for the job order had been exhausted.

By then the insurgency had worsened, and the camp suffered regular attacks. The threat became so severe that drilling was temporarily suspended "while KBR and the Army Corps of Engineers worked to address the lack of adequate force protection," Ms. Norcross said.

After security concerns were addressed, the work at Al Fatah resumed and so did problems with the drilling. Troubling reports from KBR officials at the site eventually reached higher in the Army Corps, but there was little reaction.

J. Michael Stinson, an American who took over as senior oil adviser to the Oil Ministry in March, said not all of the blame for the project lies with the company.

"I don't know that the Corps covered itself with glory either," Mr. Stinson said. "The engineers, the managers, probably should have said: 'Time out. Let's send a bunch of people home. Let's find out if this is going to work.' "

'Culpable Negligence'

Finally, in early July 2004, some eight months after the project began, the Army Corps sent Mr. Sanders to Al Fatah.

A geologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and a former oilman, the blunt-spoken Mr. Sanders, now 68, said he joined the Army Corps when he grew bored with retirement. One of the first documents he found at the site was the Fugro report, and it set off alarm bells.

"You just don't see a consultant's report like that that is totally dismissed," he said.

"That put them on notice," Mr. Sanders said. "When they didn't take that notice, they accepted what I would call culpable negligence."

KBR maintains that the report did not contain enough detailed information to raise questions about the project.

But Mr. Sanders said drill supervisors at the site, the kind of workers he liked to call "tool pushers," had indicated otherwise.

Hoping to start a conversation with them during his visit, Mr. Sanders said the geology around the area looked as if it could be tough on a drilling operation. The men did not hesitate. "They agreed that it was just the wrong place for horizontal drilling," Mr. Sanders said. "They didn't see any probability of getting one of the big holes done."

But he said they had been told to keep drilling — pushing their tools, anyway. Of course, by giving Mr. Sanders any information, they had probably violated their contract with KBR.

Mr. Sanders, outraged by the poor quality of the work and what he described as the indifference of the Army Corps to it, contacted the inspector general.

"Everything I could see out of it was being swept under the rug," he said.

But it was already too late. One morning at about the time of his visits, American officials in the Oil Ministry in Baghdad finally obtained a status report from KBR.

All the money had been spent.

Col. Emmett H. Du Bose Jr., who in December 2003 assumed command of the task force of the Corps in charge of the project, said other items in the $220 million job order, like putting emergency power generators at oil installations, did get done.

KBR provided him with optimistic assessments nearly to the end of the line, Colonel Du Bose said in a telephone interview, and he was convinced that the project would be a success. But he said that he was not sure who, if anyone, might have seen the contradictory information in the Fugro report.

"In hindsight, knowing what I know today, I would have probably said we need more geology information before we start drilling those holes," Colonel Du Bose said.

The new Al Fatah project is being carried out by a joint venture involving Parsons Corporation and the Australian company Worley, said Col. Richard B. Jenkins, commander of the Gulf Region Division-North for the Army Corps, in a telephone interview from Iraq.

The work relies on a less risky method in which the pipelines are laid down in a trench dug into the river bottom and encased in concrete. Colonel Jenkins said that Al Fatah was now "essentially a completed project."

But as of last week, an official at Iraq's State-owned North Oil Company said, oil was still not flowing at Al Fatah.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk, Iraq.

Copyright 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html)The New York Times Company (http://www.nytco.com/)

[Ninjahedge]

Building a pipeline, saying that "the information was too general to be taken as a warning" but yet not admitting that THE INFORMATION WAS TOO GENERAL TO DO AN ADEQUATE DESIGN!!!


GJ!!!

Management at its best!

[lofter1]

Speaking of inadequate information, it seems that the current administration's management style thrives on it.

Hence:

"The information was too general to ... (choose from the list below)"
Invade Iraq.

Intercept the hijacked airplanes.

Adequately evacuate New Orleans.

Take action to counter global warming.

Pull down the costs of health care.

Repair the voting system.

[Ninjahedge]

Speaking of inadequate information, it seems that the current administration's management style thrives on it.

Hence:

"The information was too general to ... (choose from the list below)"
Invade Iraq.
~Not invade Iraq (security)

Intercept the hijacked airplanes.
~Leave those children in that classroom alone

Adequately evacuate New Orleans.
~Warrant additional deficit spending for Dyke repair (or marriage)

Take action to counter global warming.
~Sell our stock in winter outerwear.

Pull down the costs of health care.
~Stop funding for such important drugs as Proventil, Plavix, Lunesta and Viagra.

Repair the voting system.
~Prove anything was rigged....


Hmmm..... DO you want to shoot him now or wait till you get home?

[lofter1]

No need for that ... just have him crawl back to Crawford and clear some more brush.

[lofter1]

Lessons in Democracy ...

http://www.miqel.com/images_1/random_images/r1/iraqsspl.jpg
Graffiti / Mural / Political statement in IRAQ

[BrooklynRider]

There are even members who are not Bush-haters and are certainly not liberals. Vocal ones, too. I am not part of those "we".

The challenge of course is to get the people like you who support this president to actually articulate why you would still be supporting him. He has his critics here, but I don't see anyone coming the this president's defense. His actions are indefensible. While not casting stones at you directly, at this stage, one could only assume that anyone supporting him is a beneficiary of the corrupt policies and war-profiteering, and is cold with a heart of stone toward others less fortunate. And, they are also incredibly misinformed and unable to comprehend evidence. This man is the worst president ever and a danger to our society and the world at large. Every death in Iraq (both American and Iraqi) since the star of this war could be categorized as a "murder" by this law-defying regime.

I look forward to you being more vocal in your opinions and explaining why or how I have it wrong. Five years into this regime's plan, Bill and Hillary will not be accepted as excuses or scapegoats.

[ManhattanKnight]

This man is the worst president ever and a danger to our society and the world at large. .

Am I the only one here who remembers RMN?

[lofter1]

New Iraqi Vice President's Sister Killed

By THOMAS WAGNER
Associated Press Writer
April 27, 2006

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060427/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

A sister of Iraq's new Sunni Arab vice president was killed Thursday in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad, a day after the politician called for the Sunni-dominated insurgency to be crushed by force.

In southern Iraq, a bomb hit an Italian military convoy, killing four soldiers — three Italians and a Romanian — and seriously injuring another passenger, officials in Rome said. The bomb struck the convoy near an Italian military base in Nasiriyah, a heavily Shiite city 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, said local Iraqi government spokesman Haidr Radhi.

Elsewhere, a U.S. jet fired two missiles at insurgent positions in Ramadi, U.S. officers said. Fighting also broke out northeast of Baghdad between Iraqi forces and insurgents, killing several Iraqi policemen and civilians.

The violence came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Baghdad to meet with officials in Iraq's new government. Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite hard-liner recently tapped as Iraq's prime minister, is trying to form a national unity government aimed at stopping a wave of sectarian violence.

Al-Maliki has 30 days to assemble a Cabinet from divided Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties. The most contentious question will be filling key ministries that control security forces amid demands to purge them of militias blamed for the rise in bloodshed.

Mayson Ahmed Bakir al-Hashimi, 60, whose brother, Tariq al-Hashimi, was appointed by parliament as vice president Saturday, was killed by gunmen in a sedan as she left her southwestern Baghdad home with her bodyguard, said police Capt. Jamel Hussein. The bodyguard also died.

It was the second recent killing in Tariq al-Hashimi's immediate family. On April 13, his brother, Mahmoud al-Hashimi, was shot while driving in a mostly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad.

Mayson al-Hashimi had worked on the government's audit commission and was married with two grown children. The television station Baghdad, owned by the vice president's Iraqi Islamic Party, showed family photos of her wearing an orange headscarf and footage of her bullet-riddled white SUV, while playing mournful music.

"What astonished us is that they targeted a woman. This shows how wicked the attackers are," Ziyad al-Ani, a senior official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, told The Associated Press. He said the killings "by the enemies of Iraq" will fail in their goal of driving al-Hashimi and his party from government.

The party is one of three major Sunni political groups in the Iraqi Accordance Front, which won 44 seats in the Dec. 15 parliamentary election.

On Wednesday, Tariq al-Hashimi called for Iraq's insurgency to be put down by force. Shiites had demanded that Sunni officials make such a statement to demonstrate their commitment to building a democratic system.

Al-Hashimi also shrugged off a video released this week by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, during which the al-Qaida in Iraq leader tried to rally Sunnis to fight the new government and denounced Sunnis who cooperate with it as "agents" of the Americans.

"I say, yes, we're agents. We're agents for Islam, for the oppressed. We have to defend the future of our people," al-Hashimi said at a news conference with President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and his fellow vice president, Shiite Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

All three Iraqi leaders met with Rice and Rumsfeld on Wednesday.

On Thursday, al-Maliki met with Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in the holy city of Najaf. Al-Sistani has played a big role in restraining Shiite anger in the face of Sunni insurgent attacks that have pushed Iraq toward civil war. Top politicians, especially Shiite ones, often seek al-Sistani's advice.

Afterward, the cleric said he urged the prime minister to form a government with politicians who put Iraq's national needs ahead of "their personal, party or sectarian interests."

More important, al-Sistani said, the government must improve security by ending widespread bombings, drive-by shootings and kidnappings, reduce government corruption, and restore electricity and clean drinking water to many people.

After the meeting, al-Maliki said he was determined to form a government that includes Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds and to disarm militias aligned with Iraq's political parties.

Al-Maliki also met in Najaf with anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who praised the new government and urged it to set a withdrawal timetable for U.S. forces.

Al-Sadr denounced the Rice-Rumsfeld visit as "a clear interference in Iraqi affairs."

The clashes northeast of Baghdad occurred when insurgents attacked four Iraqi police checkpoints in Baqouba, a Sunni-Shiite city 35 miles northeast of the capital, police and residents said. Five Iraqis were killed — five policemen and two civilians — said Dr. Ahmed Foad, director of a local morgue. U.S. forces have been gradually turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqis in Baqouba.

In Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, U.S. forces exchanged fire with insurgents who attacked with small arms and shoulder-fired rockets from a former train station and a nearby building.

Lt. Col. Ronald Clark, commander of the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, said a U.S. jet fired two laser-guided missiles at the buildings and U.S. forces returned fire with mortars and rockets, killing eight of the attackers.

In a separate incident in Ramadi, one Iraqi soldier was killed during a fire fight with insurgents, army officers said.

A roadside bomb in Baghdad hit an Iraqi army patrol, killing a soldier, police said.

The bodies of 16 Iraqis who had been kidnapped and tortured were found Thursday in Baghdad and other cities, police said.

At least 141 Iraqis have been killed in insurgency- or sectarian-related violence since al-Maliki was tapped as prime minister Saturday and asked to form a new government.

Insurgents have targeted prominent men and women politicians in the past.

On April 17, the brother of another leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, was found dead after he was kidnapped.

Associated Press Writer Maria Sanminiatelli contributed to this report from Rome.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press

[Ninjahedge]

It looks like they are no longer trying to get any coalition of resistance to american occupation, but more of a splintering and a crushing of all the current governmental forces to facilitate the dissoultion of large portions of the Iraqi nation for occupation and declaration under a radical group, faction, or people.


It is a land grab.

[BrooklynRider]

Am I the only one here who remembers RMN?

I remember him, but I think this guy is a danger because of what he doing to this country from a foreign policy and multiple-crime perspective. Nixon, for all his faults, was intelligent. Bush is an idiot and has no reservations about acting against the interests of the American people. Nixon, on the other hand, was caught in a criminal act of the kind that still goes on to this day. Nixon seemed to be caught up in this crime of breaking in a Democratic office. The crimes of his administration outstrip anything Nixon had done.

[lofter1]

I'd put RMN and GWB on the same level in terms of bad deeds:

VIETNAM: Bombing of Cambodia, SECRET WAR (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4444638.stm) , etc.
"Publicly, we say one thing - actually, we do another," the president said in a memo ...

Ordered CIA involvement in Military Coup in CHILE (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm)
FBI's Cointelpro (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/USDomCovOps1.html) actions that violated basic civil rights of US Citizens
But like you say Nixon was far more intelligent than Bush, and didn't seem to have guidance directly from an wrathful almighty (nor did he have a father who was once President -- a part of the puzzle that shouldn't be ignored).

[BrooklynRider]

Pentagon Bills Injured Soldiers $1.2 Million
From the Associated Press
April 28, 2006

WASHINGTON — After suffering paralysis, brain damage, lost limbs and other wounds in war, nearly 900 soldiers have been saddled with $1.2 million in government debt because of the military's "complex, cumbersome" pay system, congressional investigators said Thursday.

The report from the Government Accountability Office said another 400 who died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had $300,000 in debt but that the Defense Department did not pursue reimbursement from the estates of those who were killed in combat.

"We found that hundreds of separated battle-injured soldiers were pursued for collection of military debts incurred through no fault of their own," said the report. It said that included seeking reimbursement for errors in pay or for equipment left on the battlefield.

The problem became known months ago as soldiers began to complain and lawmakers asked for the report.

The Pentagon said it had been working to resolve it.

"My experience is the military … when these things are reported to them, work aggressively to resolve them," said Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman. "Not by way of trying to make any excuses, it's clear that our … processes could be shored up to try to prevent some of these … from happening."

"It's unconscionable," Ryan Kelly, 25, a retired staff sergeant who lost a leg to a roadside bomb, told the Washington Post. He said he spent more than a year trying to fend off a debt of $2,231. "It's sad that we'd let that happen," Kelly said.

Kelly told the Post that in 2004, months after learning to walk on a prosthesis, he opened his mailbox to find a letter saying he was in debt to the government — and in jeopardy of referral to a collection agency. "It hits you in the gut," he said. "It's like, 'Thanks for your service, and now you owe us.' "

The Post reported that the underlying problem is an antiquated computer system for paying and tracking members of the military. Pay records are not integrated with personnel records, creating numerous errors. When soldiers leave the battlefield, for example, they lose a pay differential, but the system can take time to lower their pay.

The government then tries to recoup overpayments, docking pay for active-duty troops and sending debt notices to those who have left the military. Eventually, the government sends private agencies to collect debts and notifies credit bureaus.

[lofter1]

Powell Says He Urged More Troops for Iraq

LINK (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060430/ap_on_re_mi_ea/powell_iraq;_ylt=AvBntsagA1EnlUKZ2m2p7Pus0NUE;_ylu =X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ)
Sun Apr 30, 2006

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell advised President Bush before the Iraq war to send more troops to the country, but the administration did not follow his recommendation, Powell said in an interview broadcast Sunday.

Critics accuse Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of failing to send enough soldiers to secure the peace in Iraq after the invasion three years ago.

Powell said he gave the advice to now retired Gen. Tommy Franks, who developed and executed the Iraq invasion plan, and Rumsfeld while the president was present.

"I made the case to Gen. Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld before the president that I was not sure we had enough troops," Powell said in an interview on Britain's ITV television, according to a transcript released by the network.

"The case was made, it was listened to, it was considered. ... A judgment was made by those responsible that the troop strength was adequate."

Powell, who served as chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Gulf War, is known for his belief in deploying decisive force with a clear exit strategy in any conflict.

"The president's military advisers felt that the size of the force was adequate, they may still feel that years later. Some of us don't, I don't," Powell said. "In my perspective, I would have preferred more troops but you know, this conflict is not over."

"At the time the president was listening to those who were supposed to be providing him with military advice," Powell said. "They were anticipating a different kind of immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, it turned out to be not exactly as they had anticipated."

Rumsfeld has rejected criticism that he had sent too few U.S. troops to Iraq, saying that Franks and two other generals who oversaw the campaign's planning — John Abizaid and George Casey — had determined the overall number of troops, and that he and Bush agreed with them.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press

[monica]

I hate the war because there's a victims specially in iraq those people did nothing to be attacked by bush and tony but hidden reason of this war is (oil) yes i mean it

[MrSpice]

I hate the war because there's a victims specially in iraq those people did nothing to be attacked by bush and tony but hidden reason of this war is (oil) yes i mean it

I think it's a very simplistic and incorrect view. You can critisize the war that is getting more and more unpopular. But oil has very little to do with it. The majority in Congress, including many democrats, gave GW an OK to go to war if he chooses to. Did they do so because of oil? Did oil companioes benefit from this war? Last time I checked, 99.9% of oil companies' record profits this year had nothing to do with Iraq. Virtually all of the Iraqis that die today, die from the hands of terrorists and Iraqi militants, not US soldiers. You can say that the our war is the cause of this and this may be partially true. But US Army's intentions are good and it should be taken into account.

[ZippyTheChimp]

But oil has very little to do with it.Oil had so much to do with it that oil revenue from Iraq that was supposed to finance rebuilding was a "selling point" for going to war.

The majority in Congress, including many democrats, gave GW an OK to go to war if he chooses to. Did they do so because of oil?Why not? Just because they are in Congress, or because some are Democrats?

Did oil companioes benefit from this war?Yes, they did.

Last time I checked, 99.9% of oil companies' record profits this year had nothing to do with Iraq.Usually, when someone uses the figure 99.9%, they are making it up.

But US Army's intentions are good and it should be taken into account.The US Army's intentions are not relevant. They follow orders. It's the government's intentions that are important. So what are the government's good intentions?

[BrooklynRider]

Targeted Killings Surge in Baghdad
Nearly 4,000 civilian deaths, many of them Sunni Arabs slain execution-style, were recorded in the first three months of the year.
By Louise Roug, Times Staff Writer
May 7, 2006

BAGHDAD — More Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad during the first three months of this year than at any time since the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime — at least 3,800, many of them found hogtied and shot execution-style.

Over 3800 Iraqi's have died during the first three months of 2006 in targeted killings. That is more than at any other time since the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. The morgue in Iraq on an average day, handles about 40 bodies. That itself is more than an average day since the war started. There has been a spike in sectarian violence since the Golden mosque was blown up in March. Sunni against Shia violence is responsible for at least 90% of the killings since February. Most of the dead bodies found have either been strangled, electrocuted, stabbed, garroted, hanged, or hogtied and shot execution style.

Those who say that Iraq is not in a civil war, are just fooling themselves.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-civ...

[BrooklynRider]

Bush complains Iraq war drowns out good economic news

President George W. Bush, battling a slump in his poll ratings, expressed frustration that bad news from Iraq is drowning out what he called good news on the US economy.

In an interview with the financial news network CNBC, Bush said he had "been spending a lot of time on the economy" in his public pronouncements, to little avail.

"The problem is that we're in war, and sometimes it's hard for people to get a positive message about the economy when they're troubled by scenes of violence on the TV screens," the president said.
(snip/...)

http://www.todayonline.com/articles/116962.asp

[lofter1]

I recently saw a fantastic documentary -- "SIR! NO, SIR!" -- about the resistance within the US armed forces during the Viet Nam war.

Check it out: http://www.sirnosir.com/ (http://www.sirnosir.com/)

For those of you who lived through that period it will awken some memories -- and offers some great clarification. For those too young to have been around for those tumultuous times it is a real eye-opener -- and inadvertantly makes the best case as to why the US may NEVER have another military draft.

As the war in Iraq continues on over the next few years it will be interesting to see how the enlisted men and women serving there come to view their war-time experience.

[kz1000ps]

Funny, cause my father is always telling me to hurry up and get my bachelor's degree so that way if and when (if is out of the question in his mind) the draft is reinstated, I can be an officer, as without a degree you can't get to that position. He really thinks the draft is coming in the somewhat-near future. I haven't pondered the idea much, but I guess watching this documentary would help me face the issue.

Regardless, I'm a musician with tons of formal classical experience, and if enlistment ever seems inevitable, I'm gonna make a beeline for one of the military bands. Hell, my favorite drummer took that route when he was drafted in the late '60s, and now he's considered the greatest alive. (The guy has been Eric Clapton's drummer for the last 10 years, studio and live).

Plus, I'm over half Canadien-french (father is 100%), so if need be, I'll just move over the border :D

[BrooklynRider]

US military needs regime change
By Sandy Shanks

Wednesday 26 April 2006

"I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," George Bush, December 12, 2005, speaking in Philadelphia.

Les Roberts, the lead author of The Lancet medical journal, differs and reported on February 8, 2006, that there may be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. Roberts is one of the world's leading epidemiologists and lectures at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has also worked for the World Health Organisation and the International Rescue Committee. If true, and Roberts’s methodology is unquestioned, this human That surrendering to jihadists could prompt serious repercussions around the world doesn’t seem to concern these short-sighted Americans.

Another option is to keep on doing what we have been doing for the past three years since the fall of Baghdad, to "stay the course", as our president puts it to an increasingly jaded public.

Polls indicate that Bush’s approval rating for the conduct of the war in Iraq has plummeted to the low 30s. All of this produces a conundrum. A minority of Americans favours withdrawal, and a minority of Americans feels that Bush is doing a terrific job in conducting his war.

Whether or not one completely accepts the dire reporting of The Lancet, it appears that the tragedy in Iraq is far more extensive than we in America have been led to believe, and what we have been led to believe is more than dismal in the first place. Iraq is a disaster crying for a solution, and, to be frank, little is getting done.

Many Americans are extremely concerned – as well we should be because we created the problem – but proposed solutions to the dilemma vary widely. One option is escapism. A minority of Americans believes that we should simply withdraw now because we have already lost the war and the idea of winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis is a quest long dead.

It appears that even Bush is disconsolate over the conduct of the war. Recently he said: "That [eventual withdrawal of American troops], of course, is an objective. And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." Bush is scheduled to remain president until January 2009.

Senator John McCain, noting that "sweeping and leaving" was not working, suggested: "Rather than focusing on killing and capturing insurgents, we should emphasise protecting the local population, creating secure areas where insurgents find it difficult to operate."

This is called the Oil Spot Theory, implying that the secure areas would increase in size like "oil spots".

Furthermore, he said that such a strategy would require more troops and resources, arguing against the idea of reducing US forces this year. This plan was suggested in November and not much has been said about it since. Good thing.

It is merely a variance of the Bush theme, a half-measure, and it is like putting a sticking plaster on the chest of a man who has just had a heart attack. However, it should be noted that Senator McCain is not at all happy with the progress of the war, like most Americans and Iraqis.

In fact there is a widespread hue and cry concerning the desperate plight of the Iraqi people. Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow in defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, states that Iraq is undergoing an undeclared civil war.

He also says: "Communal civil wars … feature opposing sub-national groups divided along ethnic or sectarian lines; they are not about universal class interests or nationalist passions. In such situations, even the government is typically an instrument of one communal group, and its opponents champion the rights of their subgroup over those of others.

"Unfortunately, many of the [Bush] policies … are ill-adapted to the war being fought. Turning over the responsibility for fighting the insurgents to local forces, in particular, is likely to make matters worse. Such a policy might have made sense in Vietnam, but in Iraq it threatens to exacerbate the communal tensions that underlie the conflict and undermine the power-sharing negotiations needed to end it.

"Washington must stop shifting the responsibility for the country's security to others and instead threaten to manipulate the military balance of power among Sunni, Shia, and Kurds in order to force them to come to a durable compromise. Only once an agreement is reached should Washington consider devolving significant military power and authority to local forces."

Biddle’s position is buttressed by Sidney Blumenthol, former senior adviser to President Clinton. After noting that violence from the "incipient communal civil war" is on a sharp rise and that last month there were eight times as many Iraqi killings by Shia militia then by the Sunni resistance, which continues to mutate, Blumenthol concluded: "President Bush's strategy of training Iraqi police and army to take over from coalition forces – ‘when they stand up, we'll stand down’ - is perversely and portentously accelerating the strife.



"State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war."



Thomas Friedman, a writer for the New York times and a frequent visitor to the Middle East, states: "Once this kind of venom gets unleashed - with members of each community literally beheading each other on the basis of their religious identities - it poisons everything. You enter a realm that is beyond politics, a realm where fear and revenge dominate everyone's thinking - and that is where Iraq is heading.”



He adds: "People conclude that the only thing that can protect them is a militia from their own sect, not the police or the army." He then criticises as "criminally negligent" the decision by Donald Rumsfeld, "not to deploy enough troops in Iraq to begin with, creating this security vacuum".



Which, of course, leads us to the conclusion reached by some prominent generals recently. Their credentials read like the Who’s Who in the military.

Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni is a former commander of CentCom. Major General Charles Swannack led the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold is the former director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Major General Paul Eaton is the former commander of US and other forces in Iraq, and Major General John Batiste commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.

These formidable men all came to the same conclusion. Rumsfeld must resign because of his ineptness, arrogance, for ignoring the advice of his field commanders, and the stark evidence of three years of failure.

Bush wants to turn matters over to the Iraqi army as soon as possible so that Americans can withdraw. However, US and Iraqi commanders have become increasingly critical of a policy that lets Iraqi soldiers leave their units virtually at will - essentially deserting with no punishment. They blame the lax rule for draining the Iraqi ranks, in some cases by 30% or even half. The Iraqi army does not require its soldiers to sign contracts.

That means they can quit any time and casually treat enlistments as temporary jobs. Soldiers can even pick up their belongings and leave during missions - and often do without facing punishment. The thud you just heard was the coffin slamming shut on this piece of Bush strategy.

The US has no choice but to finish what it started, to bring peace to Iraq. Moreover, simply installing a central government in Baghdad won’t quell the violence, another exquisite piece of Bush fantasy.

Sadly, this brings us to the third option. Failure is not an option because endless death and destruction in Iraq is not acceptable. The US uses less than a quarter of its available military strength in Iraq. Battle-weary units are rotated out of Iraq as units that have been there before return, often ordered to take the same places they took on an earlier tour of duty.

This vicious cycle has been going on for three years. One of the more compelling reasons for Rumsfeld’s resignation is that the US needs a fresh look. A new defence secretary is needed, one that will listen to his field commanders and give them the resources they need to accomplish their mission.

The third option - a massive effort to bring security to Iraq - is a gamble, but war is always a gamble. However, the prize is a peaceful, thriving Iraq as opposed to what we have now. That is worth fighting for, and it is assumed that the Iraqis will do their part for their nation.

Sandy Shanks is the author of two novels, The Bode Testament and Impeachment. A keen historian, he is also a columnist specialising in political/military issues.

[BrooklynRider]

Rumsfeld Leaves 60 Percent of Funds For Iraqi Forces Unspent, Blames Congress for Cuts

At yesterday’s press briefing, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld criticized Congress for not adequately funding Iraqi security forces:

In addition, cuts and delays in providing funds for the Iraqi security forces will delay what has been truly significant progress in turning over greater responsibility and territory to Iraq’s army and police. A slowdown in training and equipping the Iraqi security forces will have unacceptable harmful effects of postponing the day when our men and women in uniform can return home with the honor and appreciation they deserve.

Rumsfeld is right to say we need to effectively train Iraqi security forces; the quicker we do so, the quicker our troops can come home. But he forgets that under his watch, the Pentagon has not spent the the money Congress already appropriated for this purpose. From an AP report last month:

The U.S. military has spent just 40 percent of the $7 billion appropriated in 2005 for the training of Iraqi and Afghanistan security forces, a top Pentagon priority that is lynchpin for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Rumsfeld should stop blaming Congress and concentrate on effectively managing the taxpayer funding he’s been given.

www.thinkprogress.org

[Azazello]

Oil had so much to do with it that oil revenue from Iraq that was supposed to finance rebuilding was a "selling point" for going to war.To add to this, Robert Fisk made an interesting comment: "...The foundation of the Iraq war is built on...an ideological war... It was also based on oil. Because if the chief export of Iraq was asparagus, we wouldn't be there, would we?"

[lofter1]

Murtha: Scandal may undermine Iraq effort

By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL
Associated Press Writer
Sun May 28, 2006

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060528/ap_on_go_co/marines_iraq_investigations

The fallout from the killing of as many as two dozen Iraqi civilians by Marines could undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq more than the Abu Ghraib prison scandal did, a lawmaker who is a prominent war critic said Sunday.

The shootings last November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, were covered up, said Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa.

"Who covered it up, why did they cover it up, why did they wait so long?" Murtha said on "This Week" on ABC. "We don't know how far it goes. It goes right up the chain of command."

A bomb rocked a military convoy on Nov. 19, killing a Marine. Marines then shot and killed unarmed civilians in a taxi at the scene and went into two homes and shot other people, according to Murtha, who has been briefed by officials.

Murtha said high-level reports he received indicated that no one fired upon the Marines or that there was any military action against the U.S. forces after the initial explosion. Yet the deaths were not seriously investigated until March because an early probe was stifled within days of the incident, he said.

"I will not excuse murder, and this is what happened," Murtha said. "This investigation should have been over two or three weeks afterward and it should have been made public and people should have been held responsible for it."

Lt. Col. Scott Fazekas, a Marine Corps spokesman, told The Associated Press that the investigation was ongoing and he would have no comment.

Murtha, a former Marine and a prominent critic of Bush administration policies in Iraq, repeated his view that the war in Iraq cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions, which he said were damaged by such incidents involving the U.S.

"This is the kind of war you have to win the hearts and minds of the people," he said. "And we're set back every time something like this happens. This is worse than Abu Ghraib."

The U.S. effort to win over Iraqis and others in the Arab world by fostering a democratic government was severely damaged when it was revealed that U.S. military personnel had abused and humiliated people held at Abu Ghraib, a prison outside of Baghdad.

The incident at Haditha has sparked two investigations — one into the deadly encounter itself and another into whether it was the subject of a cover-up.

The second, noncriminal investigation is examining whether Marines sought to cover up what actually occurred that day and, in doing so, lied about having killed civilians without justification. The Marine Corps had initially attributed 15 civilian deaths to the car bombing and a firefight with insurgents, eight of whom the Marines reported had been killed.

A defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Associated Press on Friday that evidence gathered so far strongly indicated that the Haditha killings were unjustified.

Early this year, a videotape of the aftermath of the incident, showing the bodies of women and children, was obtained by Time magazine and Arab television stations. The military then undertook another investigation.

Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would hold hearings on the killings but cautioned against reaching conclusions until the military concluded its investigation.

"There is this serious question, however, of what happened and when it happened and what was the immediate reaction of the senior officers in the Marine Corps when they began to gain knowledge of it," Warner said.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into the shootings is not expected to be completed earlier than in June. Whether violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including murder, would be pursued would be determined by a senior Marine commander in Iraq.

The NCIS also is conducting a criminal investigation into another incident, the death of an Iraqi civilian on April 26, involving Marines in Hamandiyah, west of Baghdad.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press

[antinimby]

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed in air raid


http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg.com/p/ap/20060608/capt.6ac39bd6d16a45d7aabcddeb58799d1f.iraq_zarqawi _ny118.jpg


By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer
June 8, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and kidnappings, has been killed in an air raid north of Baghdad — a major victory in the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the broader war on terror. Iraq's prime minister and U.S. officials said his identity was confirmed by fingerprints and a first-hand look at his face.

The announcement came six days after the Jordanian-born terror leader appeared in a videotape, railing against Shiites in Iraq and saying militias are raping women and killing Sunnis and the community must fight back.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said al-Zarqawi was killed along with seven aides Wednesday evening in a house 30 miles northeast of Baghdad in the volatile province of Diyala, just east of the provincial capital of Baqouba, al-Maliki said.

"Today, al-Zarqawi was eliminated," al-Maliki told a news conference, drawing loud applause from reporters as he was flanked by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and U.S. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Al-Maliki said the air strike was the result of intelligence reports provided to Iraqi security forces by residents in the area, and U.S. forces acted on the information.

"Those who disrupt the course of life, like al-Zarqawi, will have a tragic end," he said.

He also warned those who follow the militant's lead that "whenever there is a new al-Zarqawi, we will kill him."

"This is a message for all those who embrace violence, killing and destruction to stop and to (retreat) before it's too late," he said. "It is an open battle with all those who incite sectarianism."

Khalilzad added "the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a huge success for Iraq and the international war on terror." He also gave a thumbs up and said it was a good day for the United States.

Casey said the hunt for al-Zarqawi began in the area two weeks ago, and al-Zarqawi's body was identified by fingerprints and facial recognition.

The Jordanian-born militant, who was believed to have personally beheaded at least two American hostages, became Iraq's most wanted militant, as notorious as Osama bin Laden, to whom he swore allegiance in 2004. The United States put a $25 million bounty on his head, the same as bin Laden.

In the past year, he moved his campaign beyond Iraq's borders, claiming to have carried out a Nov. 9, 2005, triple suicide bombing against hotels in Amman, Jordan, that killed 60 people, as well as other attacks in Jordan and even a rocket attack from Lebanon into northern Israel.

U.S. forces and their allies came close to capturing al-Zarqawi several times since his campaign began in mid-2003.

His closest brush may have come in late 2004. Deputy Interior Ministry Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal said Iraqi security forces caught al-Zarqawi near the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah but then released him because they didn't realize who he was.

In May 2005, Web statements by his group said al-Zarqawi had been wounded in fighting with Americans and was being treated in a hospital abroad — raising speculation over a successor among his lieutenants. But days later, a statement said al-Zarqawi was fine and had returned to Iraq. There was never any independent confirmation of the reports of his wounding.

U.S. forces believe they just missed capturing al-Zarqawi in a Feb. 20, 2005 raid in which troops closed in on his vehicle west of Baghdad near the Euphrates River. His driver and another associate were captured and al-Zarqawi's computer was seized along with pistols and ammunition.

U.S. troops twice launched massive invasions of Fallujah, the stronghold used by al-Qaida in Iraq fighters and other insurgents west of Baghdad. An April 2004 offensive left the city still in insurgent hands, but the October 2004 assault wrested it from them. However, al-Zarqawi — if he was in the city — escaped.

[ZippyTheChimp]

They should have spared the wigmaker.

[TomAuch]

Waahoo! I'm glad that Zarqawi has finally been killed. As for the political side of this, I don't think that the insurgency will die, but I think that they might weaken in the short term. I also think that Bush will get a small bounce in his job approval (from the low-mid 30's to the low-mid 40's maximum) but it will mean less than when Saddam was captured. I still oppose the war, but Zarqawi is a hateful douchebag who deserved to get bombed.

[lofter1]

U.S. military acknowledges Iraq anti-gay killings

Exiled leader claims troops involved in Baghdad gay harassment

By LOU CHIBBARO JR.
Jun 7, 6:02 PM
http://www.washblade.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=7336

The U.S. military is aware of a rash of anti-gay killings in Iraq during the past eight months and is taking steps to curtail sectarian violence against all Iraqis, including gays, according to a spokesperson for the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq.

http://www.washblade.com/thelatest/images/gay-iraqi-deaths.jpg
(Photo by Bilal Hussein/AP)
At least three men suspected of being gay
were gunned down March 20 in the Iraqi city
of Ramadi.
U.S. forces say they are concerned about
the rising number of anti-gay killings in Iraq.

"If someone is in danger of being slaughtered or persecuted, we do all we can to stop it," said Army Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, chief of the Media Relations Division of the Multinational Corps in Iraq.

Breasseale spoke by telephone from his office at U.S. military headquarters in a section of Baghdad known as the Green Zone.

Faced with a highly volatile atmosphere brought about by warring Islamic factions, the U.S. and its coalition allies must use caution in addressing the issue of homosexuality, Breasseale said.

"It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, when we're in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, 'Here's these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you,'" he said. "We're trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing."

Breasseale's comments came in response to questions about how the U.S. was responding to a decision last October by a powerful Islamic leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to issue a fatwa calling for the killing of gays in Iraq. Bush administration officials have cited al-Sistani as a moderate voice among Iraqi Shiites.

Islam considers homosexuality sinful. A website published in the Iranian city of Qom in the name of Sistani, says: "Those who commit sodomy must be killed in the harshest way," according to BBC news reports. The statement appeared in an Arabic section of the website dealing with questions of morality, but not in the English-language equivalent.

A network of gay Iraqi exiles in Europe reported that the fatwa triggered a flurry of assassinations, kidnappings and death threats against Iraqi gays.

Ali Hili, founder and spokesperson for the exile group LGBT Iraqis U.K., said Islamic death squads came to life in response to Sistani's fatwa and brought about an atmosphere of terror among gays. He said some death squad members arranged meetings with gays through chat rooms by posing as gays themselves, then captured and sometimes assaulted or killed their targeted victims.

A call for action

International human rights groups, including the U.S.-based International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, complained that the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq did not appear to be taking any action to stop the anti-gay killings.

In a May 11 letter to IGLHRC executive director Paula Ettelbrick, a State Department official said the American government was troubled over reports of violence against gays in Iraq and said the U.S. embassy in Baghdad would meet with gay rights groups to address the problem.

The letter came in response to a letter from IGLHRC calling on the State Department to speak out against the anti-gay killings in Iraq.

Breasseale's comments mark the first time a U.S. military spokesperson in Iraq has publicly discussed the anti-gay killings there.

"The problem is it's such a widespread [and] concerted effort of violence against so many disparate groups and organizations," Breasseale said. "It's essentially anyone who runs afoul of anyone who has a mind to do it winds up getting killed. So we're very much aware of it, and we take both the murders and the political assassinations very seriously.

"When it's possible, we work to investigate and try to track down who did it.
But as you can imagine, it's a massive, massive concerted effort we're up against."

Claims of anti-gay abuse by U.S. military denied

Breasseale's telephone interview comes shortly after American military authorities disclosed they were investigating allegations that a Marine Corps unit intentionally shot and killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, a rural farming town in the Upper Euphrates Valley.

Hili, the head of the gay Iraqi exile group in London, alleged that in two cases, U.S. soldiers verbally abused and, in one case, assaulted gay Iraqis during routine searches of houses in Baghdad. In yet another incident, Hili said he learned through contacts in Iraq that a gay Iraqi was killed by one of the death squads after U.S. officials refused his request to gain access to the Green Zone for protection.

"We try to attack these issues as they come up, and all accusations of misbehavior that is attributed to bigotry are taken very seriously," Breasseale said in discussing Hili's reports of abuse against gay Iraqis by U.S. soldiers.

Breasseale called on Hili to provide more details about the incidents, such as dates, locations, and descriptions of the soldiers involved.

"All I can do at this point is reassure your readers that these allegations are taken very seriously, and that our soldiers — the vast 99.9 percent of them — do their jobs with honor and integrity day in and day out in what is easily one of the world's most grueling situations," Breasseale said. "And I can assure your readers that when allegations pan out, service members and their leadership are held accountable," he said.

© 2006 | A Window Media Publication (http://www.window-media.com/)

[lofter1]

I'm glad that Zarqawi has finally been killed...
But it's a crime that Bush et al didn't go after him years ago when they had many chances -- instead they used Zarqawi and his gang as another excuse to go to war:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601

[ManhattanKnight]

Some days you gotta love the Post . . .

http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/5918/front0609066hm.gif

[antinimby]

I saw that too, but just didn't get what was meant by "warm up the virgins."

[SilentPandaesq]

I believe that it involves batteries (or a kick start) :eek:

[Ninjahedge]

I saw that too, but just didn't get what was meant by "warm up the virgins."

Seriously? :confused:

[ablarc]

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006052707305

[lofter1]

Pentagon talking points on Iraq, war on terror

RAW_STORY (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Republican_talking_points_on_Iraq_war_0615.html)
June 15, 2006

An incredibly lengthy "prep book" for discussion of the Iraq war and US efforts to end terrorism has been issued to supporters in Congress, and acquired by RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/).

The 74 page document seems to be an election year guide for Republicans and Democratic supporters of the war, with many of the "points" seeming to be rebuttals to arguments made by opponents of the war.

Other portions seek to categorize opponents of the war as "cut and run" advocates.

Though certain images could not, as of the time of publication, be transferred, we are making available to readers the entire Pentagon playbook for debate, which follows:

#

Global War on Terrorism

In this new century, freedom is once again assaulted by enemies determined to roll back generations of democratic progress. Once again, we're responding to a global campaign of fear with a global campaign of freedom. And once again, we will see freedom's victory. - President George W. Bush 10/6/05

America is at war with a transnational terrorist movement fueled by a radical ideology of hatred, oppression, and murder. From the beginning, this war has been both a battle of arms and a battle of ideas.

We have a comprehensive approach to the War on Terror. Not only do we employ military power, we use all elements of national power and influence – including diplomatic, intelligence, financial, and law enforcement activities – to protect the Homeland, disrupt terrorist operations, and deprive our enemies of what they need to operate and survive.

The War on Terror is an international effort, and continued success depends on the actions of a powerful coalition of nations maintaining a united front against terror. Since September 11, 2001, most of our important successes against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups have been made possible through effective international partnerships.

The War on Terror will be a long war. Yet we have mobilized to win other long wars, and we can and will win this one.

We have made and will continue to make real progress with concrete successes in the War on Terror...

"entire Pentagon playbook" HERE (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Republican_talking_points_on_Iraq_war_0615.html)

[lofter1]

OOOPS!!!

Pentagon recalls war talking points document
RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/)
June 15, 2006

LINK (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Pentagon_recalls_war_talking_points_document_0615. html)

A one-line email sent to recipients of the Pentagon's Prep book on the Iraq and terror wars attempted to retract the document.

The incredibly lengthy "prep book (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Republican_talking_points_on_Iraq_war_0615.html)" for discussion of the Iraq war and US efforts to end terrorism was issued to supporters in Congress, and acquired by RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/). It can be read here (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Republican_talking_points_on_Iraq_war_0615.html).

The 74 page document seems to be an election year guide for Republicans and Democratic supporters of the war, with many of the "points" seeming to be rebuttals to arguments made by opponents of the war.

Other portions seek to categorize opponents of the war as "cut and run" advocates.

The message, acquired by RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/), was just one-sentence long, and follows in its entirety:
#

From: Scott, Traci CIV OSD LA [mailto: REDACTED BY RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/)]
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 5:41 PM To: [Redacted by RAW STORY (http://rawstory.com/)]

Subject: Recall: Prep Book

The sender would like to recall the message, "Prep Book".

[lofter1]

Troops refusing Iraq duty get a haven

By MIKE BARBER
P-I REPORTER
June 15, 2006

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/273988_sanctuary15.html)

Prompted by a Fort Lewis Army officer's decision to refuse to fight in Iraq, the First United Methodist Church of Tacoma has declared itself a sanctuary for servicemen and servicewomen who also don't want to go to Iraq.

The 300-member congregation's administrative council voted last weekend to open its doors beginning this Saturday after 1st Lt. Ehren Watada announced that he thinks the war in Iraq is illegal and that he has sought to resign his commission.

A statement from the church on Wednesday said that service members "who are unable to deploy to combat areas for reasons of conscience" can find protection behind its doors.

"Our initiative was because of Lieutenant Watada's gesture and a clear sense that we have, as a reconciling congregation, deeply involved in justice issues throughout the city, that any war, particularly this one, is inconsistent with Christian teachings," the Rev. Monty Smith said Wednesday night.

Smith said the church stands "in solidarity" with others who hold similar social-justice convictions. The church essentially is providing a protective space and resources to those contemplating whether to resist deployment to Iraq, he said.

Smith said the church so far has received no applications for sanctuary from members of the armed forces. It has protocols and precautions to ensure that anyone who seeks sanctuary is doing so for legal and religious reasons.

The decision marks the latest action by peace activists and war resisters in recent weeks in the Tacoma-Olympia corridor near Fort Lewis.

While troop supporters continue their vigils at a bridge near the post's main gate, Tacoma and Olympia seem to have become a new epicenter for an invigorated anti-war movement usually seen in Seattle.

Two weeks ago, demonstrations in Olympia against the movement of military vehicles from Fort Lewis to Iraq via the Port of Olympia resulted in civil disobedience and arrests.

Last week, Watada, a company-grade military officer with the Stryker Brigade about to deploy to Iraq this month, said off-post and after working hours that he does not conscientiously object to war. He would serve in Afghanistan but not in Iraq, which he considers an illegal war.

Watada, who has tried twice before to resign from the Army, continues to work and train as an artillery-targeting officer but is under investigation, his lawyer and military officials said.

Smith said he's a bit surprised that activism is taking root in the area.

"Before, the huge demonstrations and marches were in Seattle," he said.

Spokesmen for the Church Council of Greater Seattle could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The Seattle council has expressed support for Watada, and urged support for an Interfaith Network of Concern petition to the Seattle City Council for a resolution urging an exit strategy from Iraq.


On its Web site, the Seattle church group said:"The Church Council appreciates the difficulty for Lt. Watada in making such an important decision, given his military service, and the potential consequences that he likely will face, including a court-martial. Our support and prayers go to Lt. Watada at this time. We continue to pray and call for an expedited end to the war in Iraq and for the preservation of all lives in the areas of conflict."

Smith, joined by other local clergy members, has scheduled a news conference for noon Friday to explain the church's position and to answer questions.

The church, at 423 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Tacoma's Hilltop neighborhood, has a long history of supporting social justice since opening its doors in 1876.


© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Ninjahedge]

Hmmm.

Lotta "Smith"s around these days....

[lofter1]

'Wash Post' Obtains Shocking Memo from U.S. Embassy in Baghdad,
Details Increasing Danger and Hardship

By Greg Mitchell
June 18, 2006 6:20 PM ET

Editor & Publisher (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002690071)

NEW YORK The Washington Post has obtained a cable, marked "sensitive," that it says show that just before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, "the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees."

This cable outlines, the Post reported Sunday, "the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government."

It's actually far worse than that, as the details publish below indicate, which include references to abductions, threats to women's rights, and "ethnic cleansing."

A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the SecState in Washington, D.C. from "AMEmbassy Baghdad" on June 6. The typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad -- the name of the U.S. Ambassador, though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.

The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office -- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord."

As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militiast are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."

Among the other troubling reports:
-- "Personal safety depends on good relations with the 'neighborhood' governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant...People no longer trust most neighbors."

-- One embassy employee had a brother-in-law kidnapped. Another received a death threat, and then fled the country with her family.

-- Iraqi staff at the embassy, beginning in March and picking up in May, report "pervasive" harassment from Islamist and/or militia groups. Cuts in power and rising fuel prices "have diminished the quality of life." Conditions vary but even upscale neighborhoods "have visibly deteriorated" and one of them is now described as a "ghost town."

-- Two of the three female Iraqis in the public affairs office reported stepped-up harassment since mid-May...."some groups are pushing women to cover even their face, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative." One of the women is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats.

-- It has also become "dangerous" for men to wear shorts in public and "they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts." People who wear jeans in public have also come under attack.

-- Embassy employees are held in such low esteem their work must remain a secret and they live with constant fear that their cover will be blown. Of nine staffers, only four have told their families where they work. They all plan for their possible abductions. No one takes home their cell phones as this gives them away. One employee said criticism of the U.S. had grown so severe that most of her family believes the U.S. "is punishing populations as Saddam did."

-- Since April, the "demeanor" of guards in the Green Zone has changed, becoming more "militia-like," and some are now "taunting" embassy personnel or holding up their credentials and saying loudly that they work in the embassy: "Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people." For this reason, some have asked for press instead of embassy credentials.

-- "For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members for translation at on-camera press events....We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their 'cover.'"

-- "More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate."

-- The overall enviroment is one of "frayed social networks," with frequent actual or perceived insults. None of this is helped by lack of electricity. "One colleague told us he feels 'defeated' by circumstances, citing his example of being unable to help his two-year-old son who has asthma and cannot sleep in stiflng heat," which is now reaching 115 degrees.

-- "Another employee tell us that life outside the Green Zone has become 'emotionally draining.' He lives in a mostly Shiite area and claims to attend a funeral 'every evening.'"

-- Fuel lines have grown so long that one staffer spent 12 hours in line on his day off. "Employees all confirm that by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without.....One staff member reported that a friend lives in a building that houses a new minister; within 24 hours of his appointment, her building had city ppwer 24 hours a day."

-- The cable concludes that employees' "personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials."

The final line is: KHALILZAD

© 2006 VNU eMedia Inc (http://www.vnuemedia.com/).

[Azazello]

The challenge of course is to get the people like you who support this president<snip>

I look forward to you being more vocal in your opinions and explaining why or how I have it wrong.You have it very wrong - read my statement (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=94206&postcount=321) again. It's confusing at first - my total bad - but you will then see that I am in agreement with your statements.

[ablarc]

You have it very wrong - read my statement again. It's confusing at first - my total bad - but you will then see that I am in agreement with your statements.
Hard to sort through such a pile of double negatives.

[Azazello]

Sorry! I'll improve me gramma' next time! :)

[Ninjahedge]

Sorry! I'll improve me gramma' next time! :)

She's just fine. It's you that needs the improvement! ;)

[lofter1]

GIs May Have Planned Iraq Rape, Slayings

Raw Story / My Way (http://rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060701/D8IJ59F00.html)

By RYAN LENZ
Jul 1, 6:54 AM (ET)

BEIJI, Iraq (AP) - Investigators believe a group of U.S. soldiers suspected of raping an Iraqi woman, then killing her and three members of her family plotted the attack for nearly a week, a U.S. military official said Saturday.

Up to five soldiers are being investigated in the March killings, the fifth pending case involving alleged slayings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.

The Americans entered the Sunni Arab's family home, separated three males from the woman, raped her and burned her body using a flammable liquid in a cover-up attempt, a military official close to the investigation said. The three males were also slain.

The soldiers had studied their victims for about a week and the attack was "totally premeditated," the official said on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. The family had just moved into the home in the insurgent-riddled area around Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad.

The U.S. military issued a terse statement about the killings Friday, saying only that Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, ordered a criminal investigation into the alleged slaying of a family of four in Mahmoudiya.

U.S. officials said they knew of the deaths but thought the victims were killed in sectarian violence. But Mahmoudiya police Capt. Ihsan Abdul-Rahman said Iraqi officials received a report on March 13 alleging that American soldiers had killed the family in the Khasir Abyad area, about 6 miles north of Mahmoudiya.

There were some discrepancies over how many soldiers were being investigated. The U.S. military official said it was at least four. Two other U.S. officials said Friday that five were under investigation but one already had been discharged for unspecified charges unrelated to the killings and was believed to be in the United States.

The four still in the Army have had their weapons taken away and were confined to a U.S. base near Mahmoudiya, officials said. If convicted of premeditated murder, the soldiers could receive a death sentence under U.S. military law.

The suspects were from the 502nd Infantry Regiment and belonged to the same platoon as two soldiers kidnapped and killed south of Baghdad this month, another official close to the investigation said Friday. The soldiers' mutilated bodies were found June 19, three days after they were abducted by insurgents near Youssifiyah southwest of Baghdad.

The military has said one and possibly both of the slain soldiers were tortured and beheaded. The official said the mutilation of the slain soldiers stirred feelings of guilt and led at least one member of the platoon to reveal the rape-slaying on June 22.

One soldier was arrested after admitting his role in the alleged attack on the family, the official said on condition of anonymity because the case was under way. The official said the rape and killings appeared to have been a "crime of opportunity," noting that the soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.

One of the family members they allegedly killed was a child, said a senior Army official who also requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The senior official said the alleged incident was first revealed by a soldier during a routine counseling-type session. The official said that soldier did not witness the incident but heard about it.

A second soldier, who also was not involved, said he overhead soldiers conspiring to commit the crimes and then later saw bloodstains on their clothes, the official said.

The allegations of rape could generate a particularly strong backlash in Iraq, a conservative, strongly religious society in which many women will not even shake hands with men who are not close relatives.

The case is among the most serious against U.S. soldiers allegedly involved in the deaths of Iraqi civilians. At least 14 U.S. troops have been convicted.

Last week, seven Marines and one Navy medic were charged with premeditated murder in the shooting death of an Iraqi man near Fallujah west of Baghdad.

U.S. officials are also investigating allegations that U.S. Marines killed two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians Nov. 19 in the western town of Haditha in a revenge attack after a fellow Marine died in a roadside bombing.

Other cases involve the deaths of three male detainees in Salahuddin province in May, the shooting death of an unarmed Iraqi man near Ramadi in February and the death of an Iraqi soldier after an interrogation at a detention camp in Qaim in 2003.

AP correspondent Ryan Lenz is embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Beiji, Iraq. He was previously embedded with the 502nd Infantry Regiment in Mahmoudiya. AP correspondent Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

[lofter1]

The suspects were from the 502nd Infantry Regiment and belonged to the same platoon as two soldiers kidnapped and killed south of Baghdad this month, another official close to the investigation said Friday. The soldiers' mutilated bodies were found June 19, three days after they were abducted by insurgents near Youssifiyah southwest of Baghdad.

Why does the media continue to refer to these two soldiers as "kidnapped" and "abducted"?

Are we not at war?

Then should not these soldiers -- and others who are taken by enemy forces -- be referred to as "captured"?

[ablarc]

Why does the media continue to refer to these two soldiers as "kidnapped" and "abducted"?

Are we not at war?
No, we're not. Not as a technical matter, and not by the realities. In a war, there are rules defined by the Geneva convention. There aren't mutilations and beheadings, and combatants are answerable to higher authorities with some degree of legitimacy.

[lofter1]

Dang, you're right.

If I'd just listen to those in charge I'd know that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply (at least not LAST week) -- and therefore we can't be at war.

So what are we spending all that money on?

[Ninjahedge]

A strong "disagreement".

[lofter1]

U.S. Military Braces for Flurry of Criminal Cases in Iraq

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/world/middleeast/09abuse.html)
By ROBERT F. WORTH
July 9, 2006

No American serviceman has been executed since 1961. But in the past month, new cases in Iraq have led to charges against 12 American servicemen who may face the death penalty in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians.

Military officials caution against seeing the cases as part of any broader pattern, noting that the incidents in question are isolated and rare. But the new charges represent an extraordinary flurry in a conflict that has had relatively few serious criminal cases so far.

As investigators complete their work, military officials say, the total of American servicemen charged with capital crimes in the new cases could grow substantially, perhaps exceeding the total of at least 16 other marines and soldiers charged with murdering Iraqis throughout the first three years of the war.

Some military officials and experts say the new crop of cases appears to arise from a confluence of two factors: an increasingly chaotic and violent war with no clear end in sight, and a newly vigilant attitude among American commanders about civilian deaths.

At least five separate incidents involving the deaths of Iraqis are under investigation, setting off the greatest outcry against American military actions since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. By far the best known of the cases is the one in Haditha, where marines are being investigated in the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in November. No charges have been filed in that case, but some say news of the incident may have helped bring some later cases to light.

"Unusual criminal acts raise the level of concern, whether in the military or among civilians, and with increased concern comes increased reporting," said Gary Solis, a former marine who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University.

In April, Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the No. 2 American commander in Iraq, issued an order that specified for the first time that American forces must investigate any use of force against Iraqis that resulted in death, injury or property damage greater than $10,000. Maj. Todd Breasseale, a spokesman for the American command, said he knew of no clear link between General Chiarelli's order and the recent homicide investigations.

But Major Breasseale said that General Chiarelli, who took over day-to-day military operations in Iraq in January, has made clear to subordinates that he puts a high priority on avoiding and scrupulously reporting civilian casualties.

American commanders in Iraq will be scrutinizing civilian deaths more intensely as the United States moves toward transferring authority to Iraqis, Major Breasseale said. Details about the five incidents under investigation are still emerging, and none of those charged have yet had an Article 32 hearing, the military's equivalent of a grand jury proceeding.

The incidents are far from the only ones in which American forces killed Iraqis. But serious criminal charges in such cases have been rare until now. In many earlier cases, the killings have been found to be justifiable, and the soldiers or marines in question have often been handled through administrative or nonjudicial processes.

The last soldier to be executed was John A. Bennett, hanged in 1961 after being convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl.

In the Iraq war, when soldiers or marines have been charged, convictions — and harsh sentences — have been rare. Of the 16 American servicemen known to have been previously charged with murder, only six were convicted or pleaded guilty to that charge, and none received the death penalty. In all, 14 service members have been convicted of any charge in connection with the deaths of Iraqis and have received sentences as varied as life in prison or dismissal from the service.

Among the new incidents, all five took place in central Iraq, in areas where the Sunni Arab insurgency is firmly entrenched despite years of effort to quell it by American and Iraqi forces. To some, that is the only thing that seems to link them.

"This is a war in which soldiers and civilians are constantly mingling, and they often don't understand each other," said Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute. "The enemy has a conscious strategy of demoralizing U.S. forces by disorienting and confusing them. Against that backdrop, the number of alleged atrocities is quite low compared with other conflicts in the past."

In Vietnam, a much longer conflict, 95 American soldiers and 27 marines were convicted of killing noncombatants.

Some of the men under investigation in Iraq had done multiple tours in Iraq, and that, too, may have played a role.

"They can become almost numb to the killing," said Charles W. Gittins, a former marine and a lawyer who has represented marines accused of murder in Iraq. "The more you're in it, the more you want to live through it. You think more about preserving your own life than about what's the right thing to do."

In many of the cases where American troops killed Iraqi civilians, they were later found to have acted within their rules of engagement. Some of those cases became notorious, at least in the Arab world.

In Falluja in November 2004, for instance, the freelance journalist Kevin Sites filmed a Marine corporal shooting an apparently wounded and unarmed Iraqi in a mosque. The videotape generated a frenzy of negative publicity, but in May 2005 a military review cleared the corporal, stating that he had acted within the rules of engagement.

The definition of murder can be far more elusive in a war zone than in civilian life. In some previous criminal cases, soldiers or marines have claimed they acted in self-defense or carrying out mercy killings.

Cpl. Dustin M. Berg of the Indiana National Guard, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for killing his Iraqi police partner, said he acted because he feared his partner was going to shoot him.

In 2004, Staff Sgt. Johnny Horne said he killed a wounded 16-year-old Iraqi boy to put him out of his misery after a gun battle with Shiite militants.
Sergeant Horne pleaded guilty to unpremeditated murder and was sentenced to three years in prison, later reduced to one year.

In the heaviest penalty yet issued in the Iraq war, Sgt. Michael P. Williams was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of premeditated murder last year in the killing of two Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. The sentence was later reduced to 25 years.

"I think there's a recognition that these are weird environments," said Eugene R. Fidell, a specialist in military law. "The danger is, carried to an extreme, that can mean throwing the law books out."

The flurry of new cases has taken on a high profile in the news media and public discussion. The barriers to conviction, though, will be formidable. Recovering credible evidence in Iraq's chaos can be very difficult, and Iraqi witnesses are open to challenge.

"There's going to be very little forensic evidence," Mr. Gittins said. "Jury members who have served in Iraq know that it is pretty common for Iraqis to lie to Americans. Also, the military pays the relatives of civilians who are killed — so they have an incentive to lie."

Some members of the military juries are likely to have served in Iraq, and are familiar with the chaotic atmosphere surrounding any decision to use force. "The presumption of innocence is going to reign supreme," Mr. Gittins said.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[milleniumcab]

By Owen Matthews
Newsweek International

May 8, 2006 issue - Could another front be opening in the Iraq war? Over recent weeks, some 200,000 Turkish troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, have massed along the mountainous border with Iraq. Trucks passing from Turkey, ferrying the imported goods and foodstuffs that are the lifeblood of the Kurdish economy, have slowed from 1,000 a day to just a couple of hundred. The Turkish military says its troops are there only to prevent armed insurgents of the Kurdish PKK rebel group from crossing into Turkey from their bases on Iraq's Kandil Mountain. But last week, according to angry Foreign Ministry officials in Baghdad, Turkish commandos briefly crossed 15 kilometers into Iraqi territory in pursuit of PKK rebels—a move that could signal dangerous new frictions to come.
Story continues below ↓ (file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Baba/My%20Documents/Turkey%20%20Going%20After%20the%20Kurds%20-%20Newsweek%20%20International%20Editions%20-%20MSNBC.com.htm#storyContinued) advertisement ad_nw('2');


Compared with the rest of the country, Iraqi Kurdistan has been a haven of stability—still subject to insurgent bombings, but generally free of the kind of sectarian violence that has racked Baghdad and other major cities in recent weeks. But tensions are rising. Shia militiamen from Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army have begun moving into oil-rich Kirkuk, claimed as part of Kurdistan. In neighboring Iran last month some 10,000 troops attacked PKK-affiliated rebels who defy Tehran's rule in the region. And the Turks have grown increasingly frustrated with the 5,000 guerrillas holed up at Kandil. Over the last two months, the PKK and its political affiliates have stepped up violence inside Turkey to levels not seen in a decade. At least eight government troops were killed in a series of ambushes in Turkey's southeast; two bombs linked to the PKK were planted in Istanbul and, last month, 14 civilians were killed as Kurdish cities all over the southeast erupted in violence.
Ankara is losing patience with the United States, which has promised to deal with the PKK problem. Last week Gen. Hilmi Ozkok, chief of the politically powerful General Staff, claimed that Turkey had the right to defend itself under the United Nations Charter, hinting strongly that the military was seriously considering hot-pursuit cross-border raids. (Before Saddam was toppled in 2003, Turkish troops used to cross the border regularly chasing the PKK, often with the connivance of local Iraqi Kurdish groups which had their own differences with the PKK.) And Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Ankara last week to try to defuse the crisis, that "we expect the U.S. to do more and to be more active." In reply, Rice warned that any cross-border operations would have "a destabilizing effect" on Iraq's fragile security.
Washington is caught between two allies—NATO member Turkey, its closest friend in the Muslim world, and the Iraqi Kurds, its closest ally within Iraq. By rights, of course, dealing with the PKK "should be the responsibility of the Iraqi government," as a senior Iraqi official puts it, not wishing to speak publicly on security matters. "We will not allow any PKK attacks on [Turkey] from our soil. But the limits on the central government are obvious. According to one U.S. official, also not wishing to be quoted on such a sensitive topic, Washington has been trying to pressure Iraq's Kurds to crack down on the PKK themselves, before Ankara steps up its campaign. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has several points of leverage. One is that the Kurds are desperate to have a more or less permanent American military base on their territory as insurance against a future anti-Kurdish regime in Baghdad. Another is that the Kurds will need U.S. help to contain any Shia designs on oil-rich Kirkuk. Also, they need Washington's support in any deal on the parceling out of the country's future oil revenues.
So, the big question is why the Iraqi Kurds aren't cracking down on the PKK insurgents, with whom, after all, they once used to clash. One reason is that, under Saddam, the precarious autonomy of Iraq's Kurds was largely dependent on the good will of Ankara. That was ample incentive to keep the PKK in check. But today, Iraqi Kurds are much more confident. For the first time, they have their own nation in all but name—and are thus more willing to support the nationalistic aspirations of their 14 million countrymen living in Turkey. In words widely interpreted in Ankara as a veiled threat to support a Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey if the cross-border raids continue, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government, warned last week that if Turkey tries "to stop our people from profiting or progressing," then Turkey's own "stability and security" would suffer. That kind of talk is likely to reinforce Turkey's determination to stamp out the PKK once and for all—and take their war inside Iraq if necessary.
With Sami Kohen in Istanbul, John Barry in Washington and Scott Johnson in Baghdad
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
Rate this sto

[milleniumcab]

By Owen Matthews and Sami Kohen
Newsweek International

July 31, 2006 issue - Israel launched airstrikes on Lebanon in response to attacks by Hizbullah earlier this month, and George W. Bush called it "self-defense." But what to tell the Turks, who over the last week lost 15 sol-diers to terror attacks launched by sepa-ratist Kurds from neighboring Iraq? Many Turkish leaders are pressing for cross-border tactical air assaults on the guerrillas. But Bush, fearing yet another escalation of the Middle East's violence, urged Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to hold off. "The message was, unilateral action isn't going to be helpful," says a senior U.S. official, describing the 15-minute phone conversation. "The president asked for patience."
Story continues below ↓ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13990129/site/newsweek/#storyContinued) advertisement ad_nw('2');


And so Turkish forces are holding fast—for now—in deference to their half-century alliance with the United States. But that patience is bound to be challenged, probably sooner than later. Domestic political pressures are building to take a leaf from Israel's book and hit back at the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Work-ers' Party, or PKK. Since the beginning of the year, attacks on Turkish military garrisons and police stations have esca-lated across the country's southeast, along with random shootings, bombings and protests—many of them, authorities suspect, organized in Iraq. Already the Turkish military has laid detailed plans for possible helicopter-and-commando assaults, government sources tell NEWSWEEK. Meanwhile, Ankara's frustration with Washington has grown palpable. For all the Bush administration's repeated promises to crack down on the PKK, little if anything has happened. With elections coming next year, Erdogan could be pardoned for soon concluding that his forbearance might prove politically dangerous. "Moderate, liberal people in Turkey are becoming increasingly anti-American," warns Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. "That isn't good."
Erdogan has built a career on skillfully riding populist waves, and he's not going to miss this one. On the one hand, he recognizes the importance of maintaining good relations with America, if only to foil critics who lambaste him for being too Islamist. On the other, popular anger at the PKK is getting explosive. At the funeral of a murdered soldier in Izmir last week, crowds destroyed wreaths sent by Erdogan's Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu and the city's governor, Oguz Kaan Koksal. Some mourners chanted slogans accusing the government of cooperating with the PKK. And when a group of 60 human-rights activists were arrested in the resort of Kiyikoy on suspicion of being PKK sympathizers last week, locals attacked the detainees with stones and iron bars.
The Turkish press has been baying for action, with even the solidly pro-American Turkish Daily News railing in an editorial that "Turkey is no banana republic that can leave its security to the mercy of others." Another editorial posed the question more directly. "Why is it that Israel has the right to 'self-defense'," the paper asked, "and not Turkey." The country's usually fractious parliamentary opposition, in a rare moment of unity, called for active intervention. "Opposition," says True Path Party leader Mehmet Agar, "ends at Habur"—Turkey's border crossing with Iraq.
Can Washington keep the lid on this bubbling pot? Not for long, many experts fear. Despite past assurances, the U.S. military has been unwilling or unable to mount operations against the guerrillas. With its hands full elsewhere, Washington can realistically offer little more than in-telligence-sharing, coupled with possible measures to cut off PKK funding. That's just not enough, says a senior Erdogan aide: "We want action, not words." Nor can the Turks expect much from the Iraqis. "We will not tolerate any terrorist groups on the territory of Iraq," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshir Zebari told NEWSWEEK. But even he acknowledges that it may be a while before the government's security forces get around to dealing with the PKK. By contrast, Iran last week began shelling PKK positions around Kandil Mountain on northern Iraq's Iranian and Turkish border. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also called Erdogan to assure him of Teh-ran's willingess to help quell the guerrillas —unlike the United States. Story continues below ↓ (file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Baba/My%20Documents/Turkey%27s%20Impatience%20With%20the%20Kurds%20-%20Newsweek%20%20International%20Editions%20-%20MSNBC.com.htm#storyContinued) advertisement ad_nw('2');


This won't automatically lead to another front in the region's wars. For all the clamor for a military strike, "the sane members of the Turkish General Staff are aware of the costs of going into northern Iraq," says independent analyst Grenville Byford. Those include possible all-out civil disorder across Turkey's Kurdish southeast provinces—which, if rioting this spring is anything to go by, would lead to a brutal crackdown, hurting Ankara's hopes for joining the EU. "There is no good way out of this for the Turkish government," says Byford.
All this comes at a bad time, clearly. Turkey could play a key diplomatic role in dealing with the burgeoning crisis in southern Lebanon, NATO officials say, especially if Turkey were willing to provide troops to the sort of international force being promoted by France and other European leaders, including Tony Blair. Not only are Turks Muslims, which should reduce frictions with the local population, but Ankara also enjoys good working relations with many of the countries and forces active behind the scenes. As one of Damascus's few friends in the region, for example, Ankara would be in a good position to rein in Syrian ambitions in Leba-non. Erdogan has been trying to play the role of mediator with Iran, Israel and the Palestinians as well—precisely why Turkey would "encourage and support" an international peacekeeping force, says Foreign Ministry spokesman Namik Tan.

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Objectively, Turkey knows that it has no real option but to remain within the Western Alliance. As for Erdogan himself, who has pushed through so many dramatic reforms to win membership in the European Union, he, too, will be reluctant to break with the West, however sorely provoked by the PKK. Still, if attacks continue to the point where his political survival is at stake, that sense of restraint could abruptly give way. Last week rumors swirled in Ankara and Istanbul that he was close to such a move. For the United States and others, the diplomatic challenge is to help save Erdogan from having to make such a choice. If they fail, the next occasion may require more than a phone call from Bush.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.

[lofter1]

Hussein, on Hunger Strike, Gets Feeding Tube

NY TIMES
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/world/worldspecial/23cnd-iraq.html?hp&ex=1153713600&en=b2452bd698996ee5&ei=5094&partner=homepage)By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 23 — Saddam Hussein was hospitalized Sunday morning, fed with a tube and given a battery of tests to ensure that he could stand trial later this week despite a hunger strike that began July 7, Iraqi and American officials said.

Iraq, meanwhile, was shaken Sunday by widespread sectarian violence after two days of relative calm, with at least 57 people killed in bombings in Baghdad and Kirkuk, shootings all over the country, and 11 bodies found in the Tigris river, bound and with gunshot wounds to the head or chest.

Jaafar al-Musawi, the lead prosecutor in Mr. Hussein’s trial, said Sunday evening that Mr. Hussein was conscious and talkative, and would be expected in court on Tuesday for the final stages of his case. The deposed Iraqi leader and seven co-defendants are accused of executing 148 men and boys from the Shiite town of Dujail.

“We had to move him to the hospital to make sure that he stays healthy,” Mr. Musawi said. “We wanted to make sure that he would be O.K.”

Lawyers for the Mr. Hussein and three other defendants on a hunger strike also said Sunday that they would not attend this week’s court proceedings, extending a boycott that started July 10.

Mr. Hussein and three co-defendants stopped eating more than two weeks ago to protest the Iraqi court’s procedures and to demand greater security for their defense lawyers. Three of the lawyers have been killed since the trial started in October.

Mr. Hussein ended an earlier hunger strike during his court case after a few days.

One of Mr. Hussein’s defense lawyers, Ziyad al-Najdawi, said in a telephone interview that his colleagues saw Mr. Hussein on Saturday at 4 p.m. local time and that he seemed healthy and in good spirits. If his condition worsened, Mr. Najdawi said, it would be because the American military — which has guarded him since he was captured in 2003 — provided inadequate care.

“They are responsible for his condition, his health and everything,” he said.
Until the hospitalization, Mr. Hussein was drinking coffee with sugar, and water with nutrients.

Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American-run detention operation said Mr. Hussein “continues to maintain his hunger strike and is voluntarily receiving nutrition through a feeding tube. His condition is constantly monitored by medical personnel and is not life-threatening.”

Mr. Hussein’s decline came on a day that offered further evidence that Iraq is slipping toward civil war.

On Saturday, Iraqi officials met for the first time to discuss plans for reconciling the country’s warring factions, producing little more than buoyant assertions and plans for more meetings.

Sunday, dozens of Iraqis were killed or found dead, in nearly every region of the country, with Sunni Arab, Shiite and mixed areas all being hit.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew up a minibus at a busy market in the Shiite-dominated Sadr City area, killing at least 35 people, including several teenagers, and injuring 75, the authorities said.

Gunmen killed one man in the city’s mixed area of Dawra.

A volley of mortars in western Baghdad killed one person and wounded 12, including five children and two women.

Three policemen were killed in the al-Qadasiya neighborhood in western Baghdad after gunmen opened fire on their car, according to an Interior Ministry official.

In the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Adhamiya, four unidentified bodies were found in the Tigris river, bound and with gunshot wounds to the head; an additional 20 bodies were found throughout the city, according to officials.

Along another bend in the Tigris, about 25 miles south near the majority Shiite town of Suwayra, Iraqi police retrieved the bodies of seven others who had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head and chest, according to news agency reports.

One person was killed when a mortar hit a house in Mussayib, another town south of Baghdad. Near Ramadi, west of the capital, where American marines have fought a pitched battle with insurgents for weeks, gunmen attacked three trucks carry fuel, killing the drivers. Also in Anbar province, an American soldier was killed “due to enemy action,” according to statement from military officials.

And in the north, gunmen killed a least two near the city of Baquba, including a butcher.

The car bomb that exploded in Kirkuk, in addition to those it killed, left 100 wounded outside the city’s crowded courthouse. Brigadier Yadekar Abdulla, head of the local police, said the bombing was the most gruesome attack the oil-rich, ethnically-mixed city has suffered since the American invasion in 2003.

American officials have acknowledged in recent days that the violence here is worsening. Gen. John P. Abizaid of the Army, the top American commander for the Middle East, said in an interview on Friday that the killings and reprisals among Sunni Arabs and Shiites had become more problematic than the insurgency. He said that additional forces would probably be sent to the Iraqi capital, where daily attacks recorded by the military have recently increased to 34 a day.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, has yet to make significant progress in his plans for bringing Sunni Arabs and Shiites together.

On Sunday, Mr. Maliki arrived in London to meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. He will visit Washington and President Bush on Tuesday.

Among some Iraqis, there are still buds of hope that somehow, with the help of outside powers, the country will unify against the violence and widening segregation by sect.

But far more common were dire predictions of an imminent civil war, and frustration with the government and American military’s inability to staunch the killing.

In Sadr City on Sunday, the American military conducted a raid before dawn that netted eight people suspected of planning violence, according to a military statement.

A few hours later, a minivan exploded within walking distance from another market where a car bombing killed at least 66 three weeks earlier.

Military officials said there was no evidence of a connection between the raid and bombing, but for Iraqi residents like Muhammad Abdul Sada, 57, a poor Shiite store owner who lost two teenaged sons in the explosion, the day as a whole looked like a symbol of the country’s dependent, dangerous state.

At Al Kindi Hospital a few miles away, where some of the injured were taken after the blast, families struggled to make sense of the carnage.

Saad Farhan, 21, said he came to Baghdad from Nasiriya, near Basra, as a boy in 1991 to make money for his sick father at home. On Sunday, he was on his way home when the van exploded. In the hospital, he lay in bed, with blood all over his face and plastic bag under his head, holding his clothes and the money he never had a chance to deliver. Aadil Kadhum Ugla, 28, a Shiite mechanic, lay nearby. He said his life was saved because he was sitting low, on a curb behind a barrel when the bomb sent shrapnel screaming. All he wanted, he said, was freedom from fear.

“We can live on a piece of bread and a cup of tea without facing such filthy activities from other Iraqis,” he said.

With bandages on his chest, and his mother beside him wailing accusations at the government, Mr. Ugla said he was not certain it would ever happen.

“We were hopeful after collapse of the regime, but unfortunately we haven’t received anything from the government that has been promised,” he said. “Year after year, it has gone from bad to worse.”

Reporting for this articlewas contributed by Wisam A. Habeeb, Hosham Hussein, Omar al-Neami, Sahar Najeeb, Qais Mizher and an employee of The New York Times in Kirkuk.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

[ablarc]

All he wanted, he said, was freedom from fear.
The time will come when that's all any of us will want. Then they'll offer us a deal...

[BrooklynRider]

“In the past two weeks, more Iraqi civilians have been killed than have died in Lebanon and Israel.” July 26, 2006

[MrSpice]

“In the past two weeks, more Iraqi civilians have been killed than have died in Lebanon and Israel.” July 26, 2006

This is certainly true. So do you have any ideas on how to solve the Iraq problem? What do you propose that we do now that we're already there?

[Ninjahedge]

MrS.

He was just pointing out that we cannot forget what problems we still have, which are getting worse, just because one of the countries we have dumped more money into is currently engaging in a... "Border Security" issue.

[MrSpice]

MrS.

He was just pointing out that we cannot forget what problems we still have, which are getting worse, just because one of the countries we have dumped more money into is currently engaging in a... "Border Security" issue.

I don't think anyone is forgetting. This mid east conflict is something new and developing and changing, that's why this is on the news 24/7.

[lofter1]

The only thing new is that the cameras are on Lebanon / Israel 24/7.

Curious that we didn't get this type of wall-to-wall endless coverage in Iraq for the past 1+ year. Doesn't the US control the entire country? Aren't things going well? Why aren't we seeing all the progress :confused: :rolleyes:

[Ninjahedge]

I don't think anyone is forgetting. This mid east conflict is something new and developing and changing, that's why this is on the news 24/7.

So is Iraq.

Lebanon/Israel is ironically new in this conflict.

What is being pointed out is the general distaste by this poster and others, for the whole idea that we have more casualties occuring in the mess we have been in for 5 years than for the one that has had a few weeks of combat.

I am not saying, and noone else is, that we should drop coverage, but this shift to the latest and the focus of both the press AND our government on the one and not the other is bad.

[milleniumcab]

This is certainly true. So do you have any ideas on how to solve the Iraq problem? What do you propose that we do now that we're already there?

The only way to solve the Iraq problem is to let them have their CIVIL WAR ( not that they are not having it yet )and then have three different countries..... OR put SADDAM back in power....

[milleniumcab]

It seems like the thread by BrooklynRider, titled "THE IRAN PLAN", might not be just a theory...

It is taking a slightly different path but becoming a reality....

[milleniumcab]

Did that just rhymed???:p

[ZippyTheChimp]

This is certainly true. So do you have any ideas on how to solve the Iraq problem? What do you propose that we do now that we're already there?.

If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there.
Lewis Carroll
When you dance with a bear, you can't quit just because you're tired.
Russian proverb

[BrooklynRider]

This is certainly true. So do you have any ideas on how to solve the Iraq problem? What do you propose that we do now that we're already there?

Actually, I have a perfect way to solve the United State's problem in Iraq: draft the Bush twins and send them into combat. You'll see the President work mighty quick to endthe war and Laura just might forgo the self-medication for a day and go meet with casualties of te war and gold star mothers.

Or, we can simply reinstate the draft. Once the sons and daughters of rich white people start getting drafted (or try dodging it as Bush, Cheney, Bolton, and Rove have done), then we'll see the war start making the news and hear the outrage over the deaths.

And, this Israeli war in nothing new. It has been going on since 1947 and Israel has never complied with Resolution 242 - which in part called for total withdrawl from the occupied territories. In 1947 Palestinians were thrown out of their homes and country and told to assimilate in other Arab states after mellennia of living in Palestine. What we see on the news are the "outrages" and "painful removals" of Israelis from new settlements in occupied territories where they have lived forwhat, 7 - 10 years? I'm supposed to feel bad about that? Israel has abandoned all sense of its own history as a people. They are not defending themselves. They are on an offensive mission. I went from being a very pro-Israel voter to be about as far to the other side of the spectrum on this issue. The only way the Palestinians will ever see peace in THEIR territory is for Hezbollah and Hamas to send Israel back within its pre-1967 borders badly beaten. It is beyond me why Israel is beyond the reah of international law or why Iran and Iraq's nuclear programs are such and issue as Israel has and maintains a nuclear arsenal that has never been subject to inspectins by ANYONE - not the IAEA, not the US, not ANYONE. Sorry, no sympathy for the country of Israel here. Sympathy for the people suffering, but the country acts as irresponsibly and illegally as the US under Bush.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Israel has abandoned all sense of its own history as a people. They are not defending themselves. They are on an offensive mission.

The only way the Palestinians will ever see peace in THEIR territory is for Hezbollah and Hamas to send Israel back within its pre-1967 borders badly beaten.

It is beyond me why Israel is beyond the reah of international law or why Iran and Iraq's nuclear programs are such and issue as Israel has and maintains a nuclear arsenal that has never been subject to inspectins by ANYONE
Pre Six Day War: 1967

Gaza: Occupied by Egypt, not Israel. Yasser Arafat was an Egyptian national.

West Bank: In the 1948 Arab-Israel war, the West Bank was captured by Jordan, and annexed by Jordan in 1950.

If you are going to go back to 1947, how can you ignore the twenty year period when there was no occupation of the two territories, but the same condition of terrorism-reprisal existed?

We can always go back to 1921 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transjordan), or maybe several millenia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judea).

Hezbollah is a wing of the Iranian army operating in Lebanon. They have no interest in the plight of Palestinians except as an excuse to kill Jews.

I wish no one had nuclear weapons, but if some countries are to have them, I am more at ease that Israel is one of them, and not Iran.

[MrSpice]

Actually, I have a perfect way to solve the United State's problem in Iraq: draft the Bush twins and send them into combat. You'll see the President work mighty quick to endthe war and Laura just might forgo the self-medication for a day and go meet with casualties of te war and gold star mothers.

Or, we can simply reinstate the draft. Once the sons and daughters of rich white people start getting drafted (or try dodging it as Bush, Cheney, Bolton, and Rove have done), then we'll see the war start making the news and hear the outrage over the deaths.

And, this Israeli war in nothing new. It has been going on since 1947 and Israel has never complied with Resolution 242 - which in part called for total withdrawl from the occupied territories. In 1947 Palestinians were thrown out of their homes and country and told to assimilate in other Arab states after mellennia of living in Palestine. What we see on the news are the "outrages" and "painful removals" of Israelis from new settlements in occupied territories where they have lived forwhat, 7 - 10 years? I'm supposed to feel bad about that? Israel has abandoned all sense of its own history as a people. They are not defending themselves. They are on an offensive mission. I went from being a very pro-Israel voter to be about as far to the other side of the spectrum on this issue. The only way the Palestinians will ever see peace in THEIR territory is for Hezbollah and Hamas to send Israel back within its pre-1967 borders badly beaten. It is beyond me why Israel is beyond the reah of international law or why Iran and Iraq's nuclear programs are such and issue as Israel has and maintains a nuclear arsenal that has never been subject to inspectins by ANYONE - not the IAEA, not the US, not ANYONE. Sorry, no sympathy for the country of Israel here. Sympathy for the people suffering, but the country acts as irresponsibly and illegally as the US under Bush.

This sounds wonderful and witty. But the reality is, the generals currently in Iraq risk their own lives and I am sure are dedicated to the success of the operation whether GW's twins are in combat or not. Some people who were in combat (like McCain) strongly support not only abandoning Iraq, but increasing the number of troops in there. So, I understand what you're saying and I too have problems when a couple of draft dodgers (GW & Cheney) send soliders to risk their lives, but that is not the solution.

[lofter1]

The only thing new is that the cameras are on Lebanon / Israel 24/7.

Curious that we didn't get this type of wall-to-wall endless coverage in Iraq for the past 1+ year. Doesn't the US control the entire country? Aren't things going well? Why aren't we seeing all the progress?


Frank Rich:

Why the television networks 'canceled' the war in Iraq

RawStory (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Frank_Rich_Network_helping_to_cancel_0729.html)
07/29/2006 @ 5:00 pm

Referring to a report that Iraq coverage on the three major network evening newscasts dropped 60 percent since 2003, New York Times columnist Frank Rich argues that the war has been "canceled" partly because the American viewing audience may not have the "stomach to watch" such a "big, nightmarish story" that has garnered the "specter of defeat," and which "lacks the thread of a coherent plot," RAW STORY has found.

Excerpts from Rich's Sunday column in the Times:


As America fell into the quagmire of Vietnam, the comedian Milton Berle joked that the fastest way to end the war would be to put it on the last-place network, ABC, where it was certain to be canceled. Berle's gallows humor lives on in the quagmire in Iraq. Americans want this war canceled too, and first- and last-place networks alike are more than happy to oblige.

CNN will surely remind us on Sunday that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war -- now branded as Crisis in the Middle East -- but you won't catch anyone saying it's Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq.

On the Big Three networks' evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a "shame on you" e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

....

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don't know what we -- or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops -- are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It's a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

....

That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad's civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what Americans would have the stomach to watch?




TIMES SELECT SUBSCRIBERS CAN READ FULL RICH COLUMN AT THIS LINK (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/opinion/30rich.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26hp&OP=551f6f99Q2FQ20aMQ60Q20JtQ7BQ5CQ5CJQ202Q22Q22mQ2 0Q22Q2FQ20Q3AQ22Q20Q5CP5l5Q5ClQ20Q3AQ22Q7B5Q5DQ3Dp Q3DJQ2A9)

[lofter1]

Audit Finds U.S. Hid Cost of Iraq Projects

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/world/middleeast/30reconstruct.html?hp&ex=1154318400&en=73cfd3a2aeaf9597&ei=5094&partner=homepage)
By JAMES GLANZ
July 30, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29 — The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Called the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., the agency administers foreign aid projects around the world. It has been working in Iraq on reconstruction since shortly after the 2003 invasion.

The report by the inspector general’s office does not give a full accounting of all projects financed by the agency’s $1.4 billion budget, but cites several examples.

The findings appeared in an audit of a children’s hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq. American and Iraqi officials reported this week that the State Department planned to drop Bechtel, its contractor on that project, as signs of budget and scheduling problems began to surface.

The United States Embassy in Baghdad referred questions about the audit to the State Department in Washington, where a spokesman, Justin Higgins, said Saturday, “We have not yet had a chance to fully review this report, but certainly will consider it carefully, as we do all the findings of the inspector general.”

Bechtel has said that because of the deteriorating security in Basra, the hospital project could not be completed as envisioned. But Mr. Higgins said: “Despite the challenges, we are committed to completing this project so that sick children in Basra can receive the medical help they need. The necessary funding is now in place to ensure that will happen.”

In March 2005, A.I.D. asked the Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office at the United States Embassy in Baghdad for permission to downsize some projects to ease widespread financing problems. In its request, it said that it had to “absorb greatly increased construction costs” at the Basra hospital and that it would make a modest shift of priorities and reduce “contractor overhead” on the project.

The embassy office approved the request. But the audit found that the agency interpreted the document as permission to change reporting of costs across its program.

Referring to the embassy office’s approval, the inspector general wrote, “The memorandum was not intended to give U.S.A.I.D. blanket permission to change the reporting of all indirect costs.”

The hospital’s construction budget was $50 million. By April of this year, Bechtel had told the aid agency that because of escalating costs for security and other problems, the project would actually cost $98 million to complete. But in an official report to Congress that month, the agency “was reporting the hospital project cost as $50 million,” the inspector general wrote in his report.

The rest was reclassified as overhead, or “indirect costs.” According to a contracting officer at the agency who was cited in the report, the agency “did not report these costs so it could stay within the $50 million authorization.”

“We find the entire agreement unclear,” the inspector general wrote of the A.I.D. request approved by the embassy. “The document states that hospital project cost increases would be offset by reducing contractor overhead allocated to the project, but project reports for the period show no effort to reduce overhead.”

The report said it suspected that other unreported costs on the hospital could drive the tab even higher. In another case cited in the report, a power station project in Musayyib, the direct construction cost cited by the development agency was $6.6 million, while the overhead cost was $27.6 million.

One result is that the project’s overhead, a figure that normally runs to a maximum of 30 percent, was a stunning 418 percent.

The figures were even adjusted in the opposite direction when that helped the agency balance its books, the inspector general found. On an electricity project at the Baghdad South power station, direct construction costs were reported by the agency as $164.3 million and indirect or overhead costs as $1.4 million.

That is just 0.8 percent overhead in a country where security costs are often staggering. A contracting officer told the inspector general that the agency adjusted the figures “to stay within the authorization for each project.”

The overall effect, the report said, was a “serious misstatement of hospital project costs.” The true cost could rise as high as $169.5 million, even after accounting for at least $30 million pledged for medical equipment by a charitable organization.

The inspector general also found that the agency had not reported known schedule delays to Congress. On March 26, 2006, Bechtel informed the agency that the hospital project was 273 days behind, the inspector general wrote. But in its April report to Congress on the status of all projects, “U.S.A.I.D. reported no problems with the project schedule.”

In a letter responding to the inspector general’s findings, Joseph A. Saloom, the newly appointed director of the reconstruction office at the United States Embassy, said he would take steps to improve the reporting of the costs of reconstruction projects in Iraq. Mr. Saloom took little exception to the main findings.

In the letter, Mr. Saloom said his office had been given new powers by the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, to request clear financing information on American reconstruction projects. Mr. Saloom wrote that he agreed with the inspector general’s conclusion that this shift would help “preclude surprises such as occurred on the Basra hospital project.”

“The U.S. Mission agrees that accurate monitoring of projects requires allocating indirect costs in a systematic way that reflects accurately the true indirect costs attributable to specific activities and projects, such as a Basra children’s hospital,” Mr. Saloom wrote.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Meanwhile it's good to know that our military is keeping it's eye out for our well being ...

Army:
We Don't Ask, Don't Tell About Community Theater

tpmmuckraker (http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001229.php)
By Justin Rood
July 28, 2006, 2:20 PM

I posted (http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001220.php) yesterday about a decorated Army Arabic linguist who was kicked out for being gay. Among other questions posed to him by an Army investigator attempting to confirm his gayness, Sgt. Bleu Copas of the 82nd Airborne Division says he was asked if he was involved in community theater.

I called the Army yesterday and asked: Did someone really ask about Sgt. Copas' involvement community theater? Is that question standard for homosexuality investigations?

"Asking about involvement in community theater is not a standard question," Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty emailed this morning in response. Hilferty, a senior public affairs official for the Army, added:
"I expect that that question was not actually asked, but there are more than one million Soldiers in the Army and at my level we work Army policy, not specific cases, so I know nothing about this particular case."So Hilferty doesn't know and shows no desire to find out. If that attitude had been applied to Copas' situation, perhaps I would find it refreshing. As it is, I'm a bit surprised: did the Army just call their former decorated Arabic linguist a liar?

Maybe it's time to talk with Mr. Copas himself.

[BrooklynRider]

44 U.S. service members have died in Iraq in July 2006.

[lofter1]

Meanwhile, up north in Kurdistan things are looking a bit rosier ...

http://www.theotheriraq.com/index.html

http://www.theotheriraq.com/images/Kurdistan-logo2.gif

Have you seen the Other Iraq?

It's spectacular.

It's peaceful.

Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Where democracy has been practiced for over a decade. It's not a dream.


It's the other Iraq.The people of Iraqi-Kurdistan invite you to discover their peaceful region, a place that has practiced democracy for over a decade, a place where the universities, markets, cafes and fair grounds buzz with progress and prosperity and where the people are already sowing the seeds of a brighter future.


http://www.theotheriraq.com/images/map.gif




Open, Safe For Businesshttp://www.theotheriraq.com/images/Shaklawa.jpg

Tourists relaxing at the Shaklawa Resort in Kurdistan

"The tiny town of Shaqlawa had 1.2 million visitors last summer, mostly from other parts of Iraq. They came for the mild climate and mountain vistas, but the big draws were peace and safety."

"When the region opened its first international airport near Erbil a year ago, planners expected one arrival and departure a week. Now they see about 65 to 70 flights a week to a dozen or more destinations. You can fly directly to Frankfurt, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden; Copenhagen, Denmark; Vienna, Austria; Athens, Greece; Istanbul, Turkey; Amman, Jordan; and Tehran, Iran."


Brought to you by ...

http://www.kurdistancorporation.com/images/flash_placeholder.jpg

[milleniumcab]

It seems reasonable enough for us that Kurdistan is free and recognized as a soverign country and I believe this will happen soon.. But what are we going to risk by creating and recognizing Kurdistan in that region?.. That should be studied carefully and thouroughly before this or next administration make a decision on that..

It shouldn't be like the decision to go into Iraq and take Saddam out.. We all know how that turned out..Just look at the mess in Iraq. And how about unbalance we created by changing the regime there.

Kurdistan will be sorrounded by enemies who do not want a Kurdistan to be established..They will need protection.. Are we going to give it to them?.. and if we do, what price are we going to or willing to pay??.

Turkey is a Nato Member and an important ally of the West.. They do not want a Kurdistan.. Once we recognize Kurdistan. what is going to happen to the relationship we have with Turkey..

Also, Iran will be the neighbor to the east and Syria to the west and who will be to the south remains to be seen...

The real problem with recognizing Kurdistan is that it will be a country with expectations to create a greater Kurdistan, which most of it is in Turkey, Iran and Syria..I see that as a big problem, even bigger than the Iraq problem.

Can we allow that to happen, most importantly, can we afford it??

[ablarc]

Every group that feels strongly should have a country. Palestine. Kurdistan. Chechnya. Kosovo. Tibet.

Scotland? Wales? Catalonia? Basque Country?

[lofter1]

^^^ NYC ???

A return to the city - state of old :cool:

[Ninjahedge]

I think that they should be allowed a bit of autonomy...


Unfortunately there are limits (Slavery, subjigation, womens rights).

It just gets hard to draw those lines. In the case of the US, anything that can effect someone easily that lives ni any state should be a global control, but local municipalities should have more control over otehr issues....


But how would we get things like national highways (or counter that, bridges to nowhere in Alaska) if it was not for the central governmental agencies?

[SilentPandaesq]

But how would we get things like national highways (or counter that, bridges to nowhere in Alaska) if it was not for the central governmental agencies?

By force. Me and my highway warriors out on the Bronx frontier would maintain the road and saftey for a sizable donation to the cause (of defending us from the barbarians accross the Husdon )

Capitalism at its purist.

[milleniumcab]

By force. Me and my highway warriors out on the Bronx frontier would maintain the road and saftey for a sizable donation to the cause (of defending us from the barbarians accross the Husdon )

Capitalism at its purist.

Let's not get too much out of touch with the issue in hand....

[milleniumcab]

Every group that feels strongly should have a country. Palestine. Kurdistan. Chechnya. Kosovo. Tibet.

Scotland? Wales? Catalonia? Basque Country?

That is totally fine with me too ablarc but it is just not that simple in reality of the world we live in..Every political decision, our elected governments make, comes with a price to pay and it is not the politicians but the whole nation who will pay for it... ARE WE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT...

Look what has happened with the actions of " BUSH THE IDIOT" in Iraq.. our kids will be paying for his mistakes for many years to come...

He is still making the same kind of mistakes in Lebanon and causing more damage to our nations standings in the world, that's if we care about the whole thing...

And we should as we are creating our own enemy in the name of DEMOCRACY...

[milleniumcab]

I think that they should be allowed a bit of autonomy...

That's fine but I don't think they will be satisfied with just an autonomy... I believe they see the opportunity and they will try to seize it to create a sovereign country own their own and try to expand on that...

There will be heavy price to pay for us if we back them up...

[lofter1]

Gays flee Iraq as Shia death squads find a new target

Evidence shows increase in number of executions as homosexuals plead for asylum in Britain

The GUARDIAN (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838222,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12)
Jennifer Copestake
August 6, 2006

Hardline Islamic insurgent groups in Iraq are targeting a new type of victim with the full protection of Iraqi law, The Observer can reveal. The country is seeing a sudden escalation of brutal attacks on what are being called the 'immorals' - homosexual men and children as young as 11 who have been forced into same-sex prostitution.

There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused. The threat has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Iraqi homosexuals now seeking asylum in the UK because it has become impossible for them to live safely in their own country.

Ali Hili runs the Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) group out of London. He used to have 40 volunteers in Iraq but says after recent raids by militia in Najaf, Karbala and Basra he has lost contact with half of them. They move to different safe houses to protect their identities, but their work is incredibly dangerous.

Eleven-year-old Ameer Hasoon al-Hasani was kidnapped by policemen from the front of his house last month. He was known in his district to have been forced into prostitution. His father Hassan told me he searched for his son for three days after his abduction, then found him, shot in the head. A copy of the death certificate confirms the cause of death.

Homosexuality is seen as so immoral that it qualifies as an 'honour killing' to murder someone who is gay - and the perpetrator can escape punishment. Section 111 of Iraq's penal code lays out protections for murder when people are acting against Islam.

'The government will do nothing to tackle this issue. It's really desperate when people get to the stage they're trading their children for money. They have no alternatives because there are no jobs,' Hili says.

Graphic photos obtained from Baghdad sources too frightened to identify themselves as having known a gay man, and seen by the Observer, show other gay Iraqis who have been executed. One shows two men, suspected of having a relationship, blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs - guns at the ready behind their heads - awaiting execution. Another picture captured on a mobile phone shows a gay man being beaten to death. Yet another shows a corpse being dragged through the streets after his execution.

One photograph is of the mutilated, burnt body of 38-year-old Karar Oda from Sadr City. He was kidnapped by the Badr Brigade in mid-June. They work with the Ministry of Interior and are the informal armed wing of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who make up the largest Shia bloc in the Iraq parliament. Oda's family were given an arrest warrant signed by the Ministry of Interior which said their son deserved to be arrested and killed for immorality as a homosexual. His body was found ten days later.

Dr Haider Jaber is currently seeking asylum in the UK after fleeing Iraq in 2004. He says the abuse started to escalate in his neighbourhood after the invasion. One night, walking home from work, he was surrounded by five men, who told him he had to become a heterosexual Muslim. He says they abused him for wearing jeans and a T-shirt with English writing, and told him he should adopt traditional robes. As a crowd gathered to watch, he was then beaten and kicked to the ground.

The threats continued. Armed militiamen broke into his family home and then his workplace looking for him. Jaber finally left the country in April. His partner, Ali. was not so lucky. Jaber learned of his Ali's murder a few days after leaving Iraq. 'They didn't send the body to the family to have a grave or a flower garden. They said he didn't deserve it because he was an animal,' he said.

Ibaa Alawi has also fled Iraq. A former employee at the British embassy in Baghdad, Alawi met Tony Blair on one of his surprise visits to Iraq. He said Blair was concerned about the safety of the Iraqis working there and praised their bravery. 'Tony Blair said the British government was thankful for our efforts and knew we were putting our lives at risk working for the British embassy in Baghdad.'

Alawi is upset the same government is not willing to help him out. He believes the Home Office will refuse him asylum because it would have to face up to the level of chaos in Iraq, and how much influence is being waged by radical Islamists - and face the fact that, for some, there is still no freedom in Iraq.

· Jennifer Copestake's film on homosexual executions in Iraq will be shown on More4 News on August 7 at 8pm

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
http://pix01.revsci.net/E05516/a3/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/noscript.gif

[milleniumcab]

I wonder how many of those asylum requests are legitimate?...;)

[lofter1]

One way to figure that out is to deny a few seeking asylum and see if they end up dead.

Do you doubt that the threat described exists?

Under the current conditions it would seem that the very act of asking for asylum because of one's homosexuality is a set up for a death sentence. Once the word gets out the death squad is probably not far behind.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Horrible situation.

[milleniumcab]

Do you doubt that the threat described exists?

No, I don't doubt at all.. I just wonder how many will try to take advantage of the horrible situation?

[lofter1]

Center for war-related brain injuries faces budget cut

USA TODAY (http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-08-brain-center_x.htm)
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
Posted 8/8/2006

Congress appears ready to slash funding for the research and treatment of brain injuries caused by bomb blasts, an injury that military scientists describe as a signature wound of the Iraq war.

House and Senate versions of the 2007 Defense appropriation bill contain $7 million for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center — half of what the center received last fiscal year.

Proponents of increased funding say they are shocked to see cuts in the treatment of bomb blast injuries in the midst of a war.

"I find it basically unpardonable that Congress is not going to provide funds to take care of our soldiers and sailors who put their lives on the line for their country," says Martin Foil, a member of the center's board of directors. "It blows my imagination."

The Brain Injury Center, devoted to treating and understanding war-related brain injuries, has received more money each year of the war — from $6.5 million in fiscal 2001 to $14 million last year. Spokespersons for the appropriations committees in both chambers say cuts were due to a tight budget this year.

"Honestly, they would have loved to have funded it, but there were just so many priorities," says Jenny Manley, spokeswoman for the Senate Appropriations Committee. "They didn't have any flexibility in such a tight fiscal year."

George Zitnay, co-founder of the center, testified before a Senate subcommittee in May that body armor saves troops caught in blasts but leaves many with brain damage. "Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of the war on terrorism," he testified.

Zitnay asked for $19 million, and 34 Democratic and six Republican members of Congress signed a letter endorsing the budget request.

The House of Representatives approved its version of the spending bill June 20. A vote in the Senate is pending.

Scientists at the center develop ways to diagnose and treat servicemembers who suffer brain damage. The work is done at seven military and Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, including the center's headquarters at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and one civilian treatment site.

The center has clashed with the Pentagon in recent months over a program to identify troops who have suffered mild to moderate brain injuries in Iraq from mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs — the most common weapons used by insurgents.

Preliminary research by the center shows that about 10% of all troops in Iraq, and up to 20% of front line infantry troops, suffer concussions during combat tours. Many experience headaches, disturbed sleep, memory loss and behavior issues after coming home, the research shows.

The center urged the Pentagon to screen all troops returning from Iraq in order to treat symptoms and create a database of brain injury victims.

Scientists say multiple concussions can cause permanent brain damage.

The Pentagon so far has declined to do the screening and argues that more research is needed.

Copyright 2006 USA TODAY

[milleniumcab]

First they send our soldiers in harm's way, for their personal agendas, and then say, "sorry but you are on your own"... Despicable!...:mad: :mad: :mad:

[lofter1]

Sickened Iraq vets cite depleted uranium

http://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/AP_Photo/2006/08/12/1155400589_9019/410w.jpg
(AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain)
Herbert Reed, 52, a veteran of Iraq, sits at the kitchen table
of his home with the medicines and medical records that he keeps
with him Wednesday, May 17, 2006, in Columbia, S.C.
Reed was exposed to radioactive depleted uranium while serving
a few months with the 442nd Military Police out of New York.

Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2006/08/12/is_an_armament_sickening_us_soldiers/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News)
By Deborah Hastings, AP National Writer
August 12, 2006

NEW YORK --It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills -- morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.

Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military's new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.

"I'm just a zombie walking around," he says.

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it -- thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his previously healthy life.

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says. "The doctors said, 'It's all in your head.' "

Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.

But the medic knew something the others didn't.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching depleted uranium."

Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.

Then they hired a lawyer.

------

Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey's Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.

The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.

The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA.

Those results were negative, Reed said. "Their test just isn't as sophisticated," he said. "And when we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn't one. They've lied to us all along."

The VA's testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.

The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.

"The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all," said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. "Then you have far-left groups that ... declare it a crime against humanity."

Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.

Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous -- not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation.

A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before leaving the military as a conscientious objector.

"I've been working on this since '93 and I've just given up hope," he said. "I've spoken to successive federal committees and elected officials ... who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes."

At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide. Two of the most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile, not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.

"The bottom line is it's more hazardous than the Pentagon admits," Fahey said, "but it's not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it is. And there's a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans."

There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.

Iraqi authorities "found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities," the U.N. reported.

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops.

------

Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.

Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.

The study group's size is controversial -- far too small, say experts including Fahey -- and so are the findings of the voluntary, Baltimore-based study.

It has found "no clinically significant" health effects from depleted uranium exposure in the study subjects, according to its researchers.

Critics say the VA has downplayed participants' health problems, including not reporting one soldier who developed cancer, and another who developed a bone tumor.

So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged despite the government's spending of at least $300 million.

About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed's unit.

Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.

But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.

But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they'd been exposed?

Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell. And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested?

It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange -- a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy -- was linked to those sufferings.

It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.

In 2002, Congress voted to not let that happen again.

It established the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses -- comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates. It reports to the secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients against a single standard: Have sick soldiers been made better?

The answer, according to the committee, is no.

"Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal," stated its December 2005 report.

"Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective."

And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the deserts of Iraq.

------

Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall. He strides into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a soldier. Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.

His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased. But there is something wrong, a niggling imperfection made more noticeable by a bearing so disciplined. It is a limp -- more like a hitch in his get-along.

It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.

Even sleep offers no release. He dreams of gunfire and bombs and soldiers who scream for help. No matter how hard he tries, he never gets there in time.

At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the Riker's Island prison.

He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.

According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed. He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity. He says he didn't get anything of the kind. Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up for the current war, according to veterans' groups.

Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians' offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.

But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.

Some days he feels fine. "Some days I can't get out of bed," he said from his home in Colorado.

Now 29, he's had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small stroke -- one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.

"Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it," he said. "Except I couldn't move the right side of my body."

After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.

He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from a series of "non-related conditions." He knows he was exposed to DU.

"A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles."

No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed's, is self-taught from the Internet.

Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn't feel up to the fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.

He'd really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel the same.

"I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape. Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they're in as good as shape as a professional athlete.

"Then we come back and we're all sick."

They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.

© Copyright 2006 Associated Press

http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/spacer.gif
© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[lofter1]

Those Goat-Diapers (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/08/those_goatdiape.html)

Andrew Sullivan (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/08/those_goatdiape.html)
13 Aug 2006

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/images/nubiangoat.jpg (http://time.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/nubiangoat.jpg)

It's hard to get them out of my head. Here's the story (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/08/islamists_and_s.html) if you missed it: Iraqi Islamists are threatening shepherds with violence if they don't clothe their goats with diapers to avoid tempting lonely shepherds. Another facet of the "new Middle East." Yes, it's funny. But it's also revealing about the way fundamentalism and sex interact. What most male-run religious fundamentalisms include is a major exception for the hetero-male sex drive. Sex outside of missionary-position reproduction with legal wife/wives is officially verboten; but when frail male flesh gives in, the blame is almost always the object of desire - not the guy actually responsible. Hence: it's the goat's fault. The way they were dressed, they were asking for it.

So it's not the men buggering the goats who need monitoring: it's the goats and the shepherds for not covering them up sufficiently! As we know, holding straight men accountable for anything sexual is very tough in fundamentalist circles, be they Islamic or Christian. So Catholic priests and bishops were granted church and moral immunity for the rapes and molestations of thousands of minors for decades. The history of wayward pastors and priests getting away with sexual abuse and harassment is long and colorful. In many Islamic cultures, Women are deemed responsible for their own rape or molestation if they haven't dressed modestly enough. Gay soldiers are to blame if straight men cannot help themselves and start buggering them in the shower. It's never up to the straight guys to restrain themselves from getting a blow-job; it's always up to the gay men not to offer temptation. Adultery, likewise, is almost always the woman's fault in Islamist circles - and the women are the ones most often punished. The goat diapers are funny. But they are a function of a sexual pathology, maintained by religious norms, and all for sustaining the immunity of heterosexual males from the consequences of their sex drives - and the subjugation of women into near-slavery throughout many enclaves in the Muslim world. I don't see much progress toward democratic culture in the Middle East until their deeply disturbed sexual culture gets healthier.

[Ninjahedge]

Bah!

[bubdanose]

That article just makes me want to bitch slap someone....the gov. needs to give their heads a shake....

[Edward]

Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it -- thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.



A complete nonsense. Serious medical studies show that DU poses no danger, so how is it relevant what a guy thinks about the cause of his illness? Apparently the thinking goes that if something is radioactive, it must be dangerous, no scientific proof needed. Why don't we outlaw CT scans and Nuclear Medicine then.

As for the "fine radioactive dust", one might say that human body is a cloud of fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 50 years, does this make it bad?

[Ninjahedge]

i was thinking something similar.

After all, why does he need Morphine AND Viagra?

Last time I heard, radiation did not cause impotence. Pending lawsuits do (depending on what side you are on in one!!!)

[milleniumcab]

Iraq Runneth Over
What Next?


By Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Washington Post


The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war. Indeed, the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into total Bosnia-like devastation is 135,000 U.S. troops -- and even they are merely slowing the fall. The internecine conflict could easily spiral into one that threatens not only Iraq but also its neighbors throughout the oil-rich Persian Gulf region with instability, turmoil and war.

The consequences of an all-out civil war in Iraq could be dire. Considering the experiences of recent such conflicts, hundreds of thousands of people may die. Refugees and displaced people could number in the millions. And with Iraqi insurgents, militias and organized crime rings wreaking havoc on Iraq's oil infrastructure, a full-scale civil war could send global oil prices soaring even higher.

However, the greatest threat that the United States would face from civil war in Iraq is from the spillover -- the burdens, the instability, the copycat secession attempts and even the follow-on wars that could emerge in neighboring countries. Welcome to the new "new Middle East" -- a region where civil wars could follow one after another, like so many Cold War dominoes.

And unlike communism, these dominoes may actually fall.

For all the recent attention on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, far more people died in Iraq over the past month than in Israel and Lebanon, and tens of thousands have been killed from the fighting and criminal activity since the U.S. occupation began. Additional signs of civil war abound. Refugees and displaced people number in the hundreds of thousands. Militias continue to proliferate. The sense of being an "Iraqi" is evaporating.

Considering how many mistakes the United States has made in Iraq, how much time has been squandered, and how difficult the task is, even a serious course correction in Washington and Baghdad may only postpone the inevitable.

Iraq displays many of the conditions most conducive to spillover. The country's ethnic, tribal and religious groups are also found in neighboring states, and they share many of the same grievances. Iraq has a history of violence with its neighbors, which has fostered desires for vengeance and fomented constant clashes. Iraq also possesses resources that its neighbors covet -- oil being the most obvious, but important religious shrines also figure in the mix -- and its borders are porous.

Civil wars -- whether in Africa, Asia, Europe or the Middle East -- tend to spread across borders. For example, the effects of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, which began in the 1920s and continued even after formal hostilities ended in 1948, contributed to the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars, provoked a civil war in Jordan in 1970-71 and then triggered the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90. In turn, the Lebanese conflict helped spark civil war in Syria in 1976-82.

With an all-out civil war looming in Iraq, Washington must decide how to deal with the most common and dangerous ways such conflicts spill across national boundaries. Only by understanding the refugee crises, terrorism, radicalization of neighboring populations, copycat secessions and foreign interventions that such wars frequently spark can we begin to plan for how to cope with them in the months and years ahead.

REFUGEES SPREAD THE FIGHTING

Massive refugee flows are a hallmark of major civil wars. Afghanistan's produced the largest such stream since World War II, with more than a third of the population fleeing. Conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s also generated millions of refugees and internally displaced people: In Kosovo, more than two-thirds of Kosovar Albanians fled the country. In Bosnia, half of the country's 4.4 million people were displaced, and 1 million of them fled the country altogether. Comparable figures for Iraq would mean more than 13 million displaced Iraqis, and more than 6 million of them running to neighboring countries.

Refugees are not merely a humanitarian burden. They often continue the wars from their new homes, thus spreading the violence to other countries. At times, armed units move from one side of the border to the other. The millions of Afghans who fled to Pakistan during the anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s illustrate such violent transformation. Stuck in the camps for years while war consumed their homeland, many refugees joined radical Islamist organizations. When the Soviets departed, refugees became the core of the Taliban. This movement, nurtured by Pakistani intelligence and various Islamist political parties, eventually took power in Kabul and opened the door for Osama bin Laden to establish a new base of operations for al-Qaeda.

Refugee camps often become a sanctuary and recruiting ground for militias, which use them to launch raids on their homelands. Inevitably, their enemies attack the camps -- or even the host governments. In turn, those governments begin to use the refugees as tools to influence events back in their homelands, arming, training and directing them, and thereby exacerbating the conflict.

Perhaps the most tragic example of the problems created by large refugee flows occurred in the wake of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. After the Hutu-led genocide resulted in the death of 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front "invaded" the country from neighboring Uganda. The RPF was drawn from the 500,000 or so Tutsis who had already fled Rwanda from past pogroms. As the RPF swept through Rwanda, almost 1 million Hutus fled to neighboring Congo, fearing that the evil they did unto others would be done unto them.

For two years after 1994, Hutu bands continued to conduct raids in Rwanda and began to work with Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The new RPF government of Rwanda responded by attacking not only the Hutu militia camps, but also its much larger neighbor, bolstering a formerly obscure Congolese opposition leader named Laurent Kabila and installing him in power in Kinshasa. A civil war in Congo ensued, killing perhaps 4 million people.

The flow of refugees from Iraq could worsen instability in all of its neighboring countries. Kuwait, for example, has just over 1 million citizens, one-third of whom are Shiite. The influx of several hundred thousand Iraqi Shiites across the border could change the religious balance in the country overnight. Both these Iraqi refugees and the Kuwaiti Shiites could turn against the Sunni-dominated Kuwaiti government, seeing violence as a means to end the centuries of discrimination they have faced at the hands of Kuwait's Sunnis.

Numbers of displaced people are already rising in Iraq, although they are nowhere near what they could be if the country slid into a full civil war. About 100,000 Arabs are believed to have fled northern Iraq under pressure from Kurdish militias. As many as 200,000 Sunni Arabs reportedly have been displaced by the fighting between Sunni groups and the American-led coalition in western Iraq. In the past 18 months, 50,000 to 100,000 Shiites have fled mixed-population cities in central Iraq for greater safety farther south. So far, in addition to the Palestinians and other foreigners, only the Iraqi upper and middle classes are fleeing the country altogether, moving to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon or the Gulf States. As one indicator of the size of this flight, since 2004 the Ministry of Education has issued nearly 40,000 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. If the violence continues to escalate, even those without resources will soon flee to vast refugee camps in the nearest country.

TERRORISM FINDS NEW HOMES

The war in Iraq has proved to be a disaster for the struggle against Osama bin Laden. Fighters there are receiving training, building networks and becoming further radicalized -- and the U.S. occupation is proving a dream recruiting tool for young Muslims worldwide. As bad as this is, a wide-scale civil war in Iraq could make the terrorism problem even worse.

Such terrorist organizations as Hezbollah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were all born of civil wars. They eventually shifted from assaulting their enemies in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Algeria, Northern Ireland and Israel, respectively, to mounting attacks elsewhere. Hezbollah has attacked Israeli, American and European targets on four continents. The LTTE assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi because of his intervention in Sri Lanka. The IRA began a campaign of attacks in Britain in the 1980s. The GIA did the same to France the mid-1990s, hijacking an Air France flight then moving on to bombings in the country. In the 1970s, various Palestinian groups began launching terrorist attacks against Israelis wherever they could find them -- including at the Munich Olympics and airports in Athens and Rome -- and then attacked Western civilians whose governments supported Israel.

In Afghanistan, the anti-Soviet struggle in the 1980s was a key incubator for bin Laden's movement. Many young mujaheddin went to Afghanistan with only the foggiest notion of jihad. But during the fighting in Afghanistan, individuals took on one another's grievances, so that Saudi jihadists learned to hate the Egyptian government and Chechens learned to hate Israel. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda convinced many of them that the United States was at the center of the Muslim world's problems -- a view that almost no Sunni terrorist group had previously embraced. Other civil wars in Muslim countries, including the Balkans, Chechnya and Kashmir, began for local reasons but became enmeshed in the broader jihadist movement. Should Iraq descend into a deeper civil war, the country could become a sanctuary for both Shiite and Sunni terrorists, possibly even exceeding the problems of Lebanon in the 1980s or Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Right now, the U.S. military presence keeps a lid on the jihadist effort. There are no enormous training camps such as those the radicals enjoyed in Afghanistan. Likewise, Hezbollah and other Shiite terrorist groups have maintained a low profile in Iraq so far, but the more embattled the Shiites feel, the better the chance they will invite greater Hezbollah involvement. Shiite fighters may even strike the Sunni backers of their Iraqi adversaries, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, or incite their own Shiite populations against them. And lost in the focus on Arab terrorist groups is the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), an anti-Turkish group that has long fought to establish a Kurdish state in Turkey from bases in Iraq. The more Iraq is consumed by chaos, the more likely it is that the PKK will regain a haven in northern Iraq.

The Sunni jihadists would be particularly likely to go after Saudi Arabia given its long, lightly patrolled border with Iraq, as well as their interest in destabilizing the ruling Saud family. The turmoil in Iraq has energized young Saudi Islamists. In the future, the balance may shift from Saudis helping Iraqi fighters against the Americans to Iraqi fighters helping Saudi jihadists against the Saudi government, with Saudi oil infrastructure an obvious target.

RADICALISM IS CONTAGIOUS

Civil wars tend to inflame the passions of neighboring populations. This is often just a matter of proximity: Chaos and slaughter five miles down the road has a much greater emotional impact than a massacre 5,000 miles away. The problem worsens whenever ethnic or religious groupings also spill across borders. Frequently, people demand that their government intervene on behalf of their compatriots embroiled in the civil war. Alternatively, they may aid their co-religionists or co-ethnics on their own -- taking in refugees, funneling money and guns, providing sanctuary.

The Albanian government came under heavy pressure from its people to support the Kosovar Albanians who were fighting for independence from the Serbs. As a result, Tirana provided diplomatic support and covert aid to the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1998-99, and threatened to intervene to prevent Serbia from crushing the Kosovars. Similarly, numerous Irish and Irish American groups clandestinely supported the Irish Republican Army, providing money and guns to the group and lobbying Dublin and Washington.

Sometimes, radicalization works in the opposite direction if neighboring populations share the grievances of their comrades across the border, and as a result are inspired to fight in pursuit of similar goals in their own country. Although Sunni Syrians had chafed under the minority Alawite dictatorship since the 1960s, members of the Muslim Brotherhood (the leading Sunni Arab opposition group) were spurred to action when they saw Lebanese Sunni Arabs fighting to wrest a share of political power from the minority Maronite-dominated government in Beirut. This spurred their own decision to organize against Hafez al-Assad's regime in Damascus. By the late 1970s, their resistance had blossomed into civil war, but Assad's regime was not as weak as Lebanon's. In 1982, Assad razed the center of the city of Hama, a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold, killing 20,000 to 40,000 people and snuffing out the revolt.
Iraq's neighbors are vulnerable to this aspect of spillover. Iraq's own divisions are mirrored throughout the region; for instance, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all have sizable Shiite communities. In Saudi Arabia, Shiites make up about 10 percent of the population, but they are heavily concentrated in its oil-rich Eastern Province. Bahrain's population is majority Shiite, although the regime is Sunni. Likewise, Iran, Syria and Turkey all have important Kurdish minorities, which are geographically concentrated adjacent to Iraqi Kurdistan.

Populations in some countries around Iraq are already showing dangerous signs of radicalization. In March, after the Sunni jihadist bombing of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Iraq, more than 100,000 Bahraini Shiites took to the streets in anger. In 2004, when U.S. forces were battling Iraqi Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, large numbers of Bahraini Sunnis protested. There has been unrest in Iranian Kurdistan in the past year, prompting Iran to deploy troops to the border and even shell Kurdish positions in Iraq. The Turks, too, have deployed additional forces to the Iraqi border to prevent any movement of Kurdish forces between the two countries.

Iraq's neighbors are just as fractured as Iraq itself. Should Iraq fragment, voices for secession elsewhere will gain strength. The dynamic is clear: One oppressed group with a sense of national identity stakes a claim to independence and goes to war to achieve it. As long as that group isn't crushed immediately, others with similar goals can be inspired to do the same.

The various civil wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s provide a good example. Slovenia was determined to declare independence, which led the Croats to follow suit. When the Serbs opposed Croatian secession from Yugoslavia by force, the first of the Yugoslav civil wars broke out. The European Union foolishly recognized both Slovene and Croatian independence, hoping that would end the bloodshed. However, many Bosnian Muslims wanted independence, and when they saw the Slovenes and Croats rewarded for their revolts, they pursued the same course. The new Bosnian government feared that if it did not declare independence, Serbia and Croatia would gobble up the respective Serb- and Croat-inhabited parts of their country. When Bosnia held a March 1992 referendum on independence, 98 percent voted in favor. The barricades went up all over Sarajevo the next day, kicking off the worst of the Balkan civil wars.

It didn't stop there. The eventual success of the Bosnians -- even after four years of war -- was an important element in the thinking of Kosovar Albanians when they agitated against the Serbian government in 1997-98. Serbian repression sparked an escalation toward independence that ended in the 1999 Kosovo War between NATO and Serbia. Kosovo, in turn, inspired Albanians in Macedonia to launch a guerrilla war against the Skopje government in hope of achieving the same or better.

In Iraq's case, the first candidate for secession is obvious: Kurdistan. If any group on Earth deserves its own country, it is surely the Kurds -- a distinct nation of 25 million people living in a geographically contiguous space with their own language and culture. However, if the Iraqi Kurds declare their independence and are protected by the international community, it is not hard to imagine Kurdish groups in Turkey and Iran following suit.

Moreover, the Kurds are not the only candidates. Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Hakim has called for autonomy for Iraq's Shiite regions -- a likely precursor for demands of outright independence. If Iraqi Shiites try to split off, other Shiites in the Gulf region might agitate against their own regimes along similar lines. Moreover, if ethnic or sectarian self-determination begins spreading throughout the Middle East more generally, secessionist movements could also spread to unlikely groups such as Iran's minority Azeri and Baluch populations.

BEWARE OF NEIGHBORLY INTERVENTIONS

Another critical problem of civil wars is the tendency of neighboring states to get involved, turning the conflicts into regional wars. Foreign governments may intervene overtly or covertly to "stabilize" the country in turmoil and stop the refugees pouring across their borders, as the Europeans did during the Yugoslav wars. Neighboring states will intervene to eliminate terrorist groups setting up shop in the midst of the civil war, as Israel did repeatedly in Lebanon. They also may intervene to stem the flow of "dangerous ideas" into their country. Iran and Tajikistan intervened in the Afghan civil war on behalf of co-religionists and co-ethnicists suffering at the hands of the rabidly Sunni, rabidly Pashtun Taliban, just as Syria intervened in Lebanon for fear that the conflict there was radicalizing its Sunni population.

In virtually every case, these interventions brought only further grief to the interveners and to the parties of the civil war.

Opportunism is another powerful motive. States often harbor designs on their neighbors' land and resources and see the chaos of civil war as an opportunity to achieve long-frustrated ambitions. Much as Croatia's Franjo Tudjman and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic may have felt the need to intervene in the Bosnian civil war to protect their ethnic brothers, it seems clear that a more important motive for both was to carve up Bosnia between them.

Many states attempt to influence the course of a civil war by providing money, weapons and other support to one side. In effect, they use their intelligence services to create proxies who can fight the war for them. But states find that proxies are rarely able to secure their interests, typically leading them to escalate to open intervention. Both Israel and Syria employed proxies in Lebanon, for example, but found them inadequate, prompting their own invasions.Pakistan is one of the few countries to succeed in using a proxy force (the Taliban) to secure its interests in a civil war. However, the nation's support of these radical Islamists encouraged the explosion of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan itself -- increasing the number of armed groups operating from Pakistan and creating networks for drugs and weapons to fuel the conflict. Today, Pakistan is a basket case, and much of the reason lies in its costly effort to prevail in the Afghan civil war.

Covert foreign intervention is proceeding apace in Iraq, with Iran leading the way. U.S. military and Iraqi sources think there are several thousand Iranian agents of all kinds already in Iraq. These personnel have simultaneously funneled money, guns and other support to friendly Shiite groups and established the infrastructure to wage a large-scale clandestine war if necessary. Iran has set up an extensive network of safe houses, arms caches, communications channels and proxy fighters, and will be well-positioned to pursue its interests in a full-blown civil war. The Sunni powers of Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are frightened by Iran's growing influence and presence in Iraq and have been scrambling to catch up.

Turkey may be the most likely country to overtly intervene in Iraq. Turkish leaders fear both the spillover of Turkish secessionism and the possibility that Iraq is becoming a haven for the PKK. Turkey has already massed troops on its southern border, and officials are threatening to intervene.

What's more, none of Iraq's neighbors thinks that it can afford to have the country fall into the hands of the other side. An Iranian "victory" would put the nation's forces in the heartland of the Arab world, bordering Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria; several of these states poured tens of billions of dollars into Saddam Hussein's military to prevent just such an occurrence in the 1980s. Similarly, a Sunni Arab victory (backed by the Jordanians, Kuwaitis and Saudis) would put radical Sunni fundamentalists on Iran's doorstep -- a nightmare scenario for Tehran.

Add in, too, each country's interest in preventing its rivals from capturing Iraq's oil resources. If these states are unable to achieve their goals through clandestine intervention, they will have a powerful incentive to launch a conventional invasion.

* * *

Much as Americans may want to believe that the United States can just walk away from Iraq should it slide into all-out civil war, the threat of spillover from such a conflict throughout the Middle East means it can't. Instead, Washington will have to devise strategies to deal with refugees, minimize terrorist attacks emanating from Iraq, dampen the anger in neighboring populations caused by the conflict, prevent secession fever and keep Iraq's neighbors from intervening. The odds of success are poor, but, nonetheless, we have to try.

PROVIDING SUPPORT

The United States, along with its Asian and European allies, will have to make a major effort to persuade Iraq's neighbors not to intervene in its civil war. Economic aid should be part of such an effort, but will not suffice. For Jordan and Saudi Arabia, it may require an effort to reinvigorate Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, thereby addressing one of their major concerns -- an effort made all the more important and complex in light of the recent conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. For Iran and Syria, it may be a clear (but not cost-free) path toward acceptance back into the international community.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would be extremely difficult for the United States to coerce, and the best Washington might do is to convince them that their intervention is unnecessary because the United States and its allies will take great pains to keep Iran from meddling, which will be one of Riyadh's greatest worries.

When it comes to foreign intervention, Iran is the biggest headache of all. Given its immense interests in Iraq, some involvement is inevitable. For Tehran, and probably for Damascus, the United States and its allies probably will have to put down red lines regarding what is absolutely impermissible -- such as sending uniformed Iranian military units into Iraq or claiming Iraqi territory. Washington and its allies will also have to lay out what they will do if Iran crosses any of those red lines. Economic sanctions would be one possibility, but they could be effective only if the European Union, China, India and Russia all cooperate. On its own, the United States could employ punitive military operations, either to make Iran pay an unacceptable price for one-time infractions or to persuade it to halt ongoing violations of one or more red lines.

DON'T PICK WINNERS

From Washington, it is tempting to consider ways to play one Iraqi faction against another in an effort to manage the civil war from within. The experiences of other powers, however, suggest how difficult this is. The Soviet Union tried to prop up President Najibullah when it left Afghanistan, and Israel used various Maronite militias as its proxies in Lebanon, but they all proved ineffective. Syria tried to use the Palestine Liberation Army to secure its interests in Lebanon, but its failure forced Damascus to invade instead. Washington tried to use a proxy force and intervene directly in Somalia, with equally disastrous results.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine a priori who will prevail in a civil war. The victor is rarely a key player in the country beforehand. Hezbollah did not exist in Lebanon at the start of the civil war there, nor did the Taliban in Afghanistan.In Iraq, it is not clear which proxy would be the most effective militarily. Many communities are divided, fighting against one another more than against their supposed enemies. Iraq's Shiites may go the way of the Palestinians or the various Lebanese factions, who generally killed more of their own than of their declared enemies.

MANAGE THE KURDS

Should chaos engulf Iraq, the Kurds will understandably want out, but this risks inspiring secessionists elsewhere in Iraq and throughout the region. In return for the Kurds agreeing to postpone formal secession, Washington should offer them extensive economic aid, assistance with refugees and security assurances (perhaps backed by U.S. troops) -- as well as promising support for their eventual independence when Iraq is more stable.

BUFFER THE BORDERS

One of Washington's hardest tasks would be to prevent the flow of dangerous people across Iraq's borders in either direction -- refugees, militias, foreign invaders and terrorists.

One option might be to create a system of buffer zones and refugee collection points inside Iraq staffed by U.S. and other coalition personnel. These collection points would be located on major roads, preferably near airstrips along Iraq's border -- thus on the principal routes that refugees would take to flee, providing a good logistical infrastructure to house, feed and otherwise care for tens or hundreds of thousands of refugees. Iraqi refugees would be gathered at these points and held there. In addition, coalition military forces would defend the refugee camps against attack, pacify and disarm them, and patrol large swaths of Iraqi territory nearby.

These zones would serve as "catch basins" for Iraqis fleeing the fighting, offering a secure place to stay within the nation's borders and thus preventing them from destabilizing neighboring countries. At the same time, they would serve as buffers between Iraq and its neighbors, preventing other forms of spillover -- such as militia movements, refugee flows out of Iraq and invasions into Iraq.

The catch-basin concept, while potentially useful, faces at least one big problem: Iran. Unlike Iraq's borders with Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria, the Iranian border is too long and has too many crossing points for it to be policed effectively by smaller numbers of coalition troops. Iran will never allow the United States the access across its territory, let alone logistical support, that would be necessary to make catch-basins along the Iran-Iraq border realistic. Thus, this scheme could make it look as though the United States was turning Iraq over to the Iranians, with the catch-basins effectively preventing intervention by Iraq's Sunni neighbors while doing nothing to deter Iran. For this reason, the United States's clear red lines to Iran about not intervening (at least overtly) would have to be enforced assiduously.

Perhaps most important, the catch-basin proposal requires Americans to endure significant long-term costs -- both in blood and treasure -- in Iraq. The United States would still need to deploy tens of thousands of troops to the nation (albeit on its periphery), as well as supplies to feed and care for hundreds of thousands of refugees. The United States would still occupy parts of Iraq, and the U.S. presence would remain a recruiting poster for the jihadist movement. Finally, all of these costs would have to be endured for as long as the war rages; recall that refugees from the wars in Afghanistan lived away from their homes for more than 20 years.

* * *

No country in recent history has successfully managed the spillovers from a full-blown civil war; in fact, most attempts have failed miserably. Syria spent at least eight years trying to end the Lebanese civil war before the 1989 Taif accords and the 1991 Persian Gulf War gave it the opportunity to finally do so. Israel's 1982 invasion was also a bid to end the Lebanese civil war after its previous efforts to contain it had failed, and when this also failed, Jerusalem tried to go back to managing spillover. By 2000, it was clear that this was again ineffective and so Israel pulled out of Lebanon altogether.

Withdrawing from Lebanon was smart for Israel for many reasons, but it did not end its Lebanon problem -- as the latest conflict showed all too clearly. In the Balkans, the United States and its NATO allies realized that it was impossible to manage the Bosnian or Kosovar civil wars and so in both cases they employed coercion -- including the deployment of massive ground forces -- to bring them to an end.

That point is critical: Ending an all-out civil war typically requires overwhelming military power to nail down a political settlement. It took 30,000 British troops to bring the Irish civil war to an end, 45,000 Syrian troops to conclude the Lebanese civil war, 50,000 NATO troops to stop the Bosnian civil war, and 60,000 to do the job in Kosovo. Considering Iraq's much larger population, it probably would require 450,000 troops to quash an all-out civil war there. Such an effort would require a commitment of enormous military and economic resources, far in excess of what the United States has already put forth.

How Iraq got to this point is now an issue for historians (and perhaps for voters in 2008); what matters today is how to move forward and prepare for the tremendous risks an Iraqi civil war poses for this critical region. The outbreak of a large-scale civil conflict would not relieve us of our responsibilities in Iraq; in fact, it could multiply them. Unfortunately, in the Middle East, one should never assume that the situation can't get worse. It always can -- and usually does.

dlb32@georgetown.edu

kpollack@brookings.edu

Daniel L. Byman is director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies. Kenneth M. Pollack is research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

[lofter1]

Bush’s Shift of Tone on Iraq:
The Grim Cost of Losing

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/world/middleeast/02prexy.html?ref=washington)
By DAVID E. SANGER
September 2, 2006

News Analysis

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — President Bush’s newest effort to rebuild eroding support for the war in Iraq features a distinct shift in approach: Rather than stressing the benefits of eventual victory, he and his top aides are beginning to lay out the grim consequences of failure.

It is a striking change of tone for a president who prides himself on optimism and has usually maintained that demeanor, at least in public, while his aides cast critics as defeatists.

But in his speech on Thursday in Salt Lake City — the first in a series to commemorate the Sept. 11 anniversary — he picked up on an approach that Gen. John P. Abizaid, Vice President Dick Cheney and others have refined in the past few months: a warning that defeat in Iraq will only move the battle elsewhere, threatening allies in the Middle East and eventually, Mr. Bush insisted, Americans “in the streets of our own cities.”

“We can allow the Middle East to continue on its course — on the course it was headed before September the 11th,” Mr. Bush said, “and a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. Or we can stop that from happening, by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope.”

It is reminiscent of — updated for a different war, and a different time — President Lyndon B. Johnson’s adoption of the “domino theory,” in which South Vietnam’s fall could lead to Communism’s spread through Southeast Asia and beyond. In the case of Iraq, Mr. Bush’s argument boils down to a statement he quoted from General Abizaid, his top commander in the Middle East: “If we leave, they will follow us.”

There have been elements of such themes before, of course. But Mr. Bush’s previous efforts to bolster public support for the war have focused more on the positive — on an argument, crystallized in his address at his second inaugural, that it was the mission of the United States to spread democracy and freedom.

Last Nov. 30, in the start of a series of speeches intended to quiet calls for withdrawal, Mr. Bush turned out a 32-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” and he argued that Iraq could eventually become a shining example of democracy’s power.

“Advancing the cause of freedom and democracy in the Middle East begins with ensuring the success of a free Iraq,” he told midshipmen at Annapolis, Md. “Freedom’s victory in that country will inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran,” he said, “and spread hope across a troubled region.”

Mr. Bush’s aides say he still fervently believes that, and they insist that the new tone is simply to make the stakes clear. Indeed, he referred in the Salt Lake City speech explicitly to the prospect of victory. But his aides, speaking on condition that their names not be used, acknowledge that the message of optimism no longer fits the moment.

“The problem with stressing the benefits of democracy is that they take a long time to mature, and it’s no sure bet that it will ever happen,” said a senior official who has participated in formation of the administration’s message since the war’s start. “The consequences of failure, though, are right in your face.”

No one has been more willing to set out the new domino theory than the administration’s chief hawk, Mr. Cheney. In private meetings with foreign visitors and members of Congress, according to several participants in those sessions, he raises the prospect that if America fails in Iraq, Saudi Arabia will be the next target and then maybe Pakistan — which, he notes, has a good-sized nuclear arsenal. No one would benefit more from an American withdrawal, he continues, than the Iranians.

For Mr. Cheney, this is a major rhetorical reversal. In the prelude to the war, he argued that ousting Saddam Hussein would usher in a new era of stability in the Middle East.

Missing from Mr. Bush’s latest speeches, at least so far, is detail about the progress of his previous plan, the “Strategy for Victory” of November, billed as the product of a review and rethinking of what had worked and what had failed.

One of its most notable features was Mr. Bush’s willingness to acknowledge past errors, from failing to anticipate the rise of the insurgency to focusing the early reconstruction effort on big infrastructure projects, which will take years to deliver benefits to the Iraqi people, if they are completed at all.

The Pentagon’s latest report to Congress about progress on that strategy painted a mixed but largely grim picture, especially about the rise of sectarian violence and the failed effort to create an effective Iraqi police force. So why not announce a new change of strategy? A senior official said this week that the president could only talk about a change of strategy so many times, without looking as if he is constantly casting about for solutions.

To some of Mr. Bush’s allies, that is a mistake. “Look, the public understands the consequences of not winning,” said David Frum, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush and now a conservative columnist who has argued for a major widening of the American military effort in Iraq.

“What they really want to hear is a plan, and a plan that addresses the new problem, the sectarian violence,” he said in an interview. “It doesn’t help to talk about the consequences of failure unless the public thinks some measure of success is possible.”

Mr. Bush has not been specific about his thinking about what victory might require, in American and Iraqi casualties, in money and in time. The specifics may emerge in two speeches planned for next week, and another in New York, at ground zero on the fifth anniversary of the event that redefined his presidency.

For now, with a critical election looming in just 10 weeks and nervous members of his own party searching for an argument they can sell back home, he is trying to focus voters not on the high price of winning but on the harder-to-define cost of letting the dominoes fall.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[OmegaNYC]

Damn, just gotta love that spin!

[lofter1]

Army Recommends Death for Accused GIs

breitbart.com (http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/09/02/D8JST4QG0.html)
Sep 02, 2006

An Army investigator has recommended the death penalty for four soldiers accused of murder during a raid in Iraq.

Lt. Col. James P. Daniel Jr. made the recommendation in report obtained Saturday by The Associated Press.

Daniel found several aggravating factors that warrant a sentence of death in the case of four soldiers accused of killing three men during the May raid in the Salahuddin province.

Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, and Spc. Juston R. Graber, all of the Fort Campbell, Ky.- based 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, were accused in the deaths.

The soldiers have claimed they were ordered to "kill all military-age males" during a raid on an island on a canal in the province. According to statements from some of the soldiers, they were told that the target was an al-Qaida training camp.

Hunsaker told investigators that he and Clagett were attacked by the three men and shot them in self-defense. Clagett said he was hit in the face and Hunsaker claimed he was stabbed during the attack. "I had felt this action necessary for they had tried to use deadly force on me and my comrade," Hunsaker wrote in a statement.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

[lofter1]

The US Government response to katrina should have come as no surprise to anyone ...

Best-Connected Were Sent to Rebuild Iraq
"In May 2003, a team of law enforcement experts from the Justice Department concluded that more than 6,600 foreign advisers were needed to help rehabilitate Iraq's police forces.
The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik ...
When it came to his own safety, Kerik took no chances. He hired a team of South African bodyguards, and he packed a 9mm handgun under his safari vest.
He told the Associated Press that security in Baghdad 'is not as bad as I thought. Are bad things going on? Yes. But is it out of control? No. Is it getting better? Yes.'"
Raw Story / Washington Post (http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washington post.com%2Fwp-dyn%2Fcontent%2Farticle%2F2006%2F09%2F16%2FAR20060 91600193.html)
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer

September 16, 2006
Adapted from "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, copyright Knopf 2006

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation that sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

The CPA had the power to enact laws, print currency, collect taxes, deploy police and spend Iraq's oil revenue. It had more than 1,500 employees in Baghdad at its height, working under America's viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, but never released a public roster of its entire staff.

Interviews with scores of former CPA personnel over the past two years depict an organization that was dominated -- and ultimately hobbled -- by administration ideologues.

"We didn't tap -- and it should have started from the White House on down -- just didn't tap the right people to do this job," said Frederick Smith, who served as the deputy director of the CPA's Washington office. "It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings."

Endowed with $18 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds and a comparatively quiescent environment in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, the CPA was the U.S. government's first and best hope to resuscitate Iraq -- to establish order, promote rebuilding and assemble a viable government, all of which, experts believe, would have constricted the insurgency and mitigated the chances of civil war. Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq -- training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation -- could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA.

But many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.

By the time Bremer departed in June 2004, Iraq was in a precarious state. The Iraqi army, which had been dissolved and refashionedby the CPA, was one-third the size he had pledged it would be. Seventy percent of police officers had not been screened or trained. Electricity generation was far below what Bremer had promised to achieve. And Iraq's interim government had been selected not by elections but by Americans. Divisive issues were to be resolved later on, increasing the chances that tension over those matters would fuel civil strife.

To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.

Smith said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.

O'Beirne, a former Army officer who is married to prominent conservative commentator Kate O'Beirne, did not respond to requests for comment.

He and his staff used an obscure provision in federal law to hire most CPA personnel as temporary political appointees, which exempted the interviewers from employment regulations that forbid questions about personal political beliefs.

There were a few Democrats who wound up getting jobs with the CPA, but almost all of them were active-duty soldiers and State Department Foreign Service officers. Because they were career government employees, not temporary hires, O'Beirne's office could not query them directly about their political leanings.

One former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched résumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the President's vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was 'uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC [Republican National Committee] contributors."

As more and more of O'Beirne's hires arrived in the Green Zone, the CPA's headquarters in Saddam Hussein's marble-walled former Republican Palace felt like a campaign war room. Bumper stickers and mouse pads praising President Bush were standard desk decorations. Other than military uniforms and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" garb, "Bush-Cheney 2004" T-shirts were among the most common pieces of clothing.

"I'm not here for the Iraqis," one worker noted to a reporter over lunch. "I'm here for George Bush."

When Gordon Robison, who worked in the Strategic Communications office, opened a care package from his mother to find a book by Paul Krugman, a liberal New York Times columnist, people around him stared. "It was like I had just unwrapped a radioactive brick," he recalled.

Finance Background Not Required

Twenty-four-year-old Jay Hallen was restless. He had graduated from Yale two years earlier, and he didn't much like his job at a commercial real-estate firm. His passion was the Middle East, and although he had never been there, he was intrigued enough to take Arabic classes and read histories of the region in his spare time.

He had mixed feelings about the war in Iraq, but he viewed the American occupation as a ripe opportunity. In the summer of 2003, he sent an e-mail to Reuben Jeffrey III, whom he had met when applying for a White House job a year earlier. Hallen had a simple query for Jeffrey, who was working as an adviser to Bremer: Might there be any job openings in Baghdad?

"Be careful what you wish for," Jeffrey wrote in response. Then he forwarded Hallen's resume to O'Beirne's office.

Three weeks later, Hallen got a call from the Pentagon. The CPA wanted him in Baghdad. Pronto. Could he be ready in three to four weeks?

The day he arrived in Baghdad, he met with Thomas C. Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing state-owned enterprises. (Foley, a major Republican Party donor, went to Harvard Business School with President Bush.) Hallen was shocked to learn that Foley wanted him to take charge of reopening the stock exchange.

"Are you sure?" Hallen said to Foley. "I don't have a finance background."

It's fine, Foley replied. He told Hallen that he was to be the project manager.
He would rely on other people to get things done. He would be "the main point of contact."

Before the war, Baghdad's stock exchange looked nothing like its counterparts elsewhere in the world. There were no computers, electronic displays or men in colorful coats scurrying around on the trading floor. Trades were scrawled on pieces of paper and noted on large blackboards. If you wanted to buy or sell, you came to the exchange yourself and shouted your order to one of the traders. There was no air-conditioning. It was loud and boisterous. But it worked. Private firms raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling stock, and ordinary people learned about free enterprise.

The exchange was gutted by looters after the war. The first wave of American economic reconstruction specialists from the Treasury Department ignored it. They had bigger issues to worry about: paying salaries, reopening the banks, stabilizing the currency. But the brokers wanted to get back to work and investors wanted their money, so the CPA made the reopening a priority.

Quickly absorbing the CPA's ambition during the optimistic days before the insurgency flared, Hallen decided that he didn't just want to reopen the exchange, he wanted to make it the best, most modern stock market in the Arab world. He wanted to promulgate a new securities law that would make the exchange independent of the Finance Ministry, with its own bylaws and board of directors. He wanted to set up a securities and exchange commission to oversee the market. He wanted brokers to be licensed and listed companies to provide financial disclosures. He wanted to install a computerized trading and settlement system.

Iraqis cringed at Hallen's plan. Their top priority was reopening the exchange, not setting up computers or enacting a new securities law. "People are broke and bewildered," broker Talib Tabatabai told Hallen. "Why do you want to create enemies? Let us open the way we were."

Tabatabai, who held a doctorate in political science from Florida State University, believed Hallen's plan was unrealistic. "It was something so fancy, so great, that it couldn't be accomplished," he said.

But Hallen was convinced that major changes had to be enacted. "Their laws and regulations were completely out of step with the modern world," he said. "There was just no transparency in anything. It was more of a place for Saddam and his friends to buy up private companies that they otherwise didn't have a stake in."

Opening the stock exchange without legal and structural changes, Hallen maintained, "would have been irresponsible and short-sighted."

To help rewrite the securities law, train brokers and purchase the necessary computers, Hallen recruited a team of American volunteers. In the spring of 2004, Bremer approved the new law and simultaneously appointed the nine Iraqis selected by Hallen to become the exchange's board of governors.

The exchange's board selected Tabatabai as its chairman. The new securities law that Hallen had nursed into life gave the board control over the exchange's operations, but it didn't say a thing about the role of the CPA adviser. Hallen assumed that he'd have a part in decision-making until the handover of sovereignty. Tabatabai and the board, however, saw themselves in charge.

Tabatabai and the other governors decided to open the market as soon as possible. They didn't want to wait several more months for the computerized trading system to be up and running. They ordered dozens of dry-erase boards to be installed on the trading floor. They used blackboards to keep track of buying and selling prices before the war, and that's how they'd do it again.

The exchange opened two days after Hallen's tour in Iraq ended. Brokers barked orders to floor traders, who used their trusty white boards.
Transactions were recorded not with computers but with small chits written on in ink. CPA workers stayed away, afraid that their presence would make the stock market a target for insurgents.

When Tabatabai was asked what would have happened if Hallen hadn't been assigned to reopen the exchange, he smiled. "We would have opened months earlier. He had grand ideas, but those ideas did not materialize," Tabatabai said of Hallen. "Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia."

'Loyalist' Replaces Public Health Expert

The hiring of Bremer's most senior advisers was settled upon at the highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon. Some, like Foley, were personally recruited by Bush. Others got their jobs because an influential Republican made a call on behalf of a friend or trusted colleague.
That's what happened with James K. Haveman Jr., who was selected to oversee the rehabilitation of Iraq's health care system.

Haveman, a 60-year-old social worker, was largely unknown among international health experts, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.

Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Before his stint in government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.

Haveman replaced Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues, and he was a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which sent him to Baghdad immediately after the war.

He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia and in northern Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."

But a week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID sent Burkle an e-mail saying the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture with the president.

Haveman arrived in Iraq with his own priorities. He liked to talk about the number of hospitals that had reopened since the war and the pay raises that had been given to doctors instead of the still-decrepit conditions inside the hospitals or the fact that many physicians were leaving for safer, better paying jobs outside Iraq. He approached problems the way a health care administrator in America would: He focused on preventive measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment.

He urged the Health Ministry to mount an anti-smoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team -- who turned out to be a closet smoker himself -- to lead the public education effort. Several members of Haveman's staff noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily lives than tobacco. The CPA's limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies.

Haveman didn't like the idea that medical care in Iraq was free. He figured Iraqis should pay a small fee every time they saw a doctor. He also decided to allocate almost all of the Health Ministry's $793 million share of U.S. reconstruction funds to renovating maternity hospitals and building new community medical clinics. His intention, he said, was "to shift the mind-set of the Iraqis that you don't get health care unless you go to a hospital."

But his decision meant there were no reconstruction funds set aside to rehabilitate the emergency rooms and operating theaters at Iraqi hospitals, even though injuries from insurgent attacks were the country's single largest public health challenge.

Haveman also wanted to apply American medicine to other parts of the Health Ministry. Instead of trying to restructure the dysfunctional state-owned firm that imported and distributed drugs and medical supplies to hospitals, he decided to try to sell it to a private company.

To prepare it for a sale, he wanted to attempt something he had done in Michigan. When he was the state's director of community health, he sought to slash the huge amount of money Michigan spent on prescription drugs for the poor by limiting the medications doctors could prescribe for Medicaid patients. Unless they received an exemption, physicians could only prescribe drugs that were on an approved list, known as a formulary.

Haveman figured the same strategy could bring down the cost of medicine in Iraq. The country had 4,500 items on its drug formulary. Haveman deemed it too large. If private firms were going to bid for the job of supplying drugs to government hospitals, they needed a smaller, more manageable list. A new formulary would also outline new requirements about where approved drugs could be manufactured, forcing Iraq to stop buying medicines from Syria, Iran, and Russia, and start buying from the United States.

He asked the people who had drawn up the formulary in Michigan whether they wanted to come to Baghdad. They declined. So he beseeched the Pentagon for help. His request made its way to the Defense Department's Pharmacoeconomic Center in San Antonio.

A few weeks later, three formulary experts were on their way to Iraq.

The group was led by Theodore Briski, a balding, middle-aged pharmacist who held the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Haveman's order, as Briski remembered it, was: "Build us a formulary in two weeks and then go home." By his second day in Iraq, Briski came to three conclusions. First, the existing formulary "really wasn't that bad." Second, his mission was really about "redesigning the entire Iraqi pharmaceutical procurement and delivery system, and that was a complete change of scope -- on a grand scale."
Third, Haveman and his advisers "really didn't know what they were doing."

Haveman "viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack," said George Guszcza, an Army captain who worked on the CPA's health team. "Somehow if you went into the ghettos and projects of Michigan and just extended it out for the entire state -- that's what he was coming to save."

Haveman's critics, including more than a dozen people who worked for him in Baghdad, contend that rewriting the formulary was a distraction. Instead, they said, the CPA should have focused on restructuring, but not privatizing, the drug-delivery system and on ordering more emergency shipments of medicine to address shortages of essential medicines. The first emergency procurement did not occur until early 2004, after the Americans had been in Iraq for more than eight months.

Haveman insisted that revising the formulary was a crucial first step in improving the distribution of medicines. "It was unwieldy to order 4,500 different drugs, and to test and distribute them," he said.

When Haveman left Iraq, Baghdad's hospitals were as decrepit as the day the Americans arrived. At Yarmouk Hospital, the city's largest, rooms lacked the most basic equipment to monitor a patient's blood pressure and heart rate, operating theaters were without modern surgical tools and sterile implements, and the pharmacy's shelves were bare.

Nationwide, the Health Ministry reported that 40 percent of the 900 drugs it deemed essential were out of stock in hospitals. Of the 32 medicines used in public clinics for the management of chronic diseases, 26 were unavailable.

The new health minister, Aladin Alwan, beseeched the United Nations for help, and he asked neighboring nations to share what they could. He sought to increase production at a state-run manufacturing plant in the city of Samarra. And he put the creation of a new formulary on hold. To him, it was a fool's errand.

"We didn't need a new formulary. We needed drugs," he said. "But the Americans did not understand that."

A 9/11 Hero's Public Relations Blitz

In May 2003, a team of law enforcement experts from the Justice Department concluded that more than 6,600 foreign advisers were needed to help rehabilitate Iraq's police forces.

The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.

Bernard Kerik had more star power than Bremer and everyone else in the CPA combined. Soldiers stopped him in the halls of the Republican Palace to ask for his autograph or, if they had a camera, a picture. Reporters were more interested in interviewing him than they were the viceroy.

Kerik had been New York City's police commissioner when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. His courage (he shouted evacuation orders from a block away as the south tower collapsed), his stamina (he worked around the clock and catnapped in his office for weeks), and his charisma (he was a master of the television interview) turned him into a national hero. When White House officials were casting about for a prominent individual to take charge of Iraq's Interior Ministry and assume the challenge of rebuilding the Iraqi police, Kerik's name came up. Bush pronounced it an excellent idea.

Kerik had worked in the Middle East before, as the security director for a government hospital in Saudi Arabia, but he was expelled from the country amid a government investigation into his surveillance of the medical staff. He lacked postwar policing experience, but the White House viewed that as an asset.

Veteran Middle East hands were regarded as insufficiently committed to the goal of democratizing the region. Post-conflict experts, many of whom worked for the State Department, the United Nations or nongovernmental organizations, were deemed too liberal. Men such as Kerik -- committed Republicans with an accomplished career in business or government -- were ideal. They were loyal, and they shared the Bush administration's goal of rebuilding Iraq in an American image. With Kerik, there were bonuses: The media loved him, and the American public trusted him.

Robert Gifford, a State Department expert in international law enforcement, was one of the first CPA staff members to meet Kerik when he arrived in Baghdad. Gifford was the senior adviser to the Interior Ministry, which oversaw the police. Kerik was to take over Gifford's job.

"I understand you are going to be the man, and we are here to support you," Gifford told Kerik.

"I'm here to bring more media attention to the good work on police because the situation is probably not as bad as people think it is," Kerik replied.

As they entered the Interior Ministry office in the palace, Gifford offered to brief Kerik. "It was during that period I realized he wasn't with me," Gifford recalled. "He didn't listen to anything. He hadn't read anything except his e-mails. I don't think he read a single one of our proposals."

Kerik wasn't a details guy. He was content to let Gifford figure out how to train Iraqi officers to work in a democratic society. Kerik would take care of briefing the viceroy and the media. And he'd be going out for a few missions himself.

Kerik's first order of business, less than a week after he arrived, was to give a slew of interviews saying the situation was improving. He told the Associated Press that security in Baghdad "is not as bad as I thought. Are bad things going on? Yes. But is it out of control? No. Is it getting better?
Yes." He went on NBC's "Today" show to pronounce the situation "better than I expected." To Time magazine, he said that "people are starting to feel more confident. They're coming back out. Markets and shops that I saw closed one week ago have opened."

When it came to his own safety, Kerik took no chances. He hired a team of South African bodyguards, and he packed a 9mm handgun under his safari vest.

The first months after liberation were a critical period for Iraq's police. Officers needed to be called back to work and screened for Baath Party connections. They'd have to learn about due process, how to interrogate without torture, how to walk the beat. They required new weapons. New chiefs had to be selected. Tens of thousands more officers would have to be hired to put the genie of anarchy back in the bottle.

Kerik held only two staff meetings while in Iraq, one when he arrived and the other when he was being shadowed by a New York Times reporter, according to Gerald Burke, a former Massachusetts State Police commander who participated in the initial Justice Department assessment mission.
Despite his White House connections, Kerik did not secure funding for the desperately needed police advisers. With no help on the way, the task of organizing and training Iraqi officers fell to U.S. military police soldiers, many of whom had no experience in civilian law enforcement.

"He was the wrong guy at the wrong time," Burke said later. "Bernie didn't have the skills. What we needed was a chief executive-level person. . . . Bernie came in with a street-cop mentality."

Kerik authorized the formation of a hundred-man Iraqi police paramilitary unit to pursue criminal syndicates that had formed since the war, and he often joined the group on nighttime raids, departing the Green Zone at midnight and returning at dawn, in time to attend Bremer's senior staff meeting, where he would crack a few jokes, describe the night's adventures and read off the latest crime statistics prepared by an aide. The unit did bust a few kidnapping gangs and car-theft rings, generating a stream of positive news stories that Kerik basked in and Bremer applauded. But the all-nighters meant Kerik wasn't around to supervise the Interior Ministry during the day. He was sleeping.

Several members of the CPA's Interior Ministry team wanted to blow the whistle on Kerik, but they concluded any complaints would be brushed off.

"Bremer's staff thought he was the silver bullet," a member of the Justice Department assessment mission said. "Nobody wanted to question the [man who was] police chief during 9/11."

Kerik contended that he did his best in what was, ultimately, an untenable situation. He said he wasn't given sufficient funding to hire foreign police advisers or establish large-scale training programs for the Iraqi police.

Three months after he arrived, Kerik attended a meeting of local police chiefs in Baghdad's Convention Center. When it was his turn to address the group, he stood and bid everyone farewell. Although he had informed Bremer of his decision a few days earlier, Kerik hadn't told most of the people who worked for him. He flew out of Iraq a few hours later.

"I was in my own world," he said later. "I did my own thing."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/images/TBWEcovernew.png

Humor video: Iraq 'best war ever' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qGAqA-muYU&eurl=)

The Book: http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/index.html (http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/index.html)

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Anti-War Activists Line Fifth Avenue In Silent Protest

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/images/live/104/206552.jpg

ny1 (http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=62678)
September 17, 2006

Activists lined 5th Avenue in a silent protest over the war in Iraq Sunday.

Each person represented one soldier killed in Iraq by holding up a small sign with the soldier's name, age and hometown.

The line stretched from 8th Street all the way up to 75th Street.

The group United for Peace and Justice is behind the event. Protestors say the line helps demonstrate the effect the war is having.

"I think the effect is to make people realize or to say to our neighbors that we care not only about this not only in terms of a political action, but also the personal, that this is a very personal action," said Rachel Dearagon.

"I think it makes it a lot more obvious to people. You can hear a number, but to actually see the number in front of you, to see people that are in effect dead, standing in front of you, it's really powerful," said Jordan Maki.

"Just out here, just so people know what a horrible job Bush is doing, with the whole everything," said Michael Gilhool. "The way the war's being run and just to let people be aware of all the soldiers who've died and the innocent civilians who've died in Iraq. It's a travesty."

United for Peace and Justice is planning another anti-war march near the U.N. on Tuesday.

Copyright © 2006 NY1 News

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Number the Dead

http://www.numberthedead.com/
Sunday, September 17th 2006 10:00am
New York, NY USA

"Number the Dead" demonstration has two objectives: To illustrate - and draw awareness - to the significant number of US soldiers and Iraqis whose lives have been lost as a result of the war in Iraq. To honor that reality with a moment of silence for the US soldiers and Iraqis who have fallen in the name of freedom.

On September 17, 2006, we are organizing roughly 2700 people to stand on the east sidewalk of 5th Avenue, from 8th Street to 98th Street at 10AM.

The number of participants will correspond to the number of US soldiers that have died in Iraq. Each person will hold a poster board with the name, age and hometown of every fallen US soldier written on it.

In addition, we will have someone holding a poster board on each block, marking the number of Iraqis who have been killed as a result of this war. Each block will represent 1,000 Iraqis.

From 10-11AM we will stand together in a silent demonstration and vigil.

Location: 5th Avenue (From 8th Street to 98th Street) New York NY

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Theater of War

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/17/books/buru2.450.jpghttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif
Ray Bartkus

NY TIMES (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Buruma.t.html)
By IAN BURUMA
September 17, 2006
THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD
The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina


By Frank Rich
341 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

As a former theater critic, Frank Rich has the perfect credentials for writing an account of the Bush administration, which has done so much to blur the lines between politics and show business. Not that this is a unique phenomenon; think of Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul and master of political fictions, or Ronald Reagan, who often appeared to be genuinely confused about the difference between real life and the movies. Show business has always been an essential part of ruling people, and so is the use of fiction, especially when going to war. What would Hitler have been without his vicious fantasies fed to a hungry public through grand spectacles, radio and film? Closer to home, in 1964, to justify American intervention in Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson used news of an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never took place. What is fascinating about the era of George W. Bush, however, is that the spinmeisters, fake news reporters, photo-op creators, disinformation experts, intelligence manipulators, fictional heroes and public relations men posing as commentators operate in a world where virtual reality has already threatened to eclipse empirical investigation.

Remember that White House aide, quoted by Rich in his introduction, who said that a “judicious study of discernible reality” is “not the way the world really works anymore”? For him, the “reality-based community” of newspapers and broadcasters is old hat, out of touch, even contemptible in “an empire” where “we create our own reality.” This kind of official arrogance is not new, of course, although it is perhaps more common in dictatorships than in democracies. What is disturbing is the way it matches so much else going on in the world: postmodern debunking of objective truth, bloggers and talk radio blowhards driving the media, news organizations being taken over by entertainment corporations and the profusion of ever more sophisticated means to doctor reality.


http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/17/arts/cover450.jpghttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif Ray Bartkus

Rich’s subject is the creation of false reality. “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” is not about policies, or geopolitical analysis. The pros and cons of removing Saddam Hussein by force, the consequences of American military intervention in the Middle East and the threat of Islamist extremism are given scant attention. The author, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, has his liberal views, which are not strikingly original. I happen to agree with him that Karl Rove and George Bush manipulated public fear and wartime patriotism to win elections, and that Dick Cheney and his neocon cheerleaders favored a war in Iraq long before 9/11 “to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East.”

Whether Rich is right to say that this has “little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda” is debatable. The neocons may well have believed that an American remake of the Middle East was the best way to tackle terrorism.

They were almost certainly mistaken. But the point of Rich’s fine polemic is that the Bush administration has consistently lied about the reasons for going to war, about the way it was conducted and about the terrible consequences. Whatever the merits of removing a dictator, waging war under false pretenses is highly damaging to a democracy, especially when one of the ostensible aims is to spread democracy to others. If Rich is correct, which I think he is, the Bush administration has given hypocrisy a bad name.

This is how the war was sold: We were told by Dick Cheney in late 2001 that an official Iraqi connection with the 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta was “pretty well confirmed.” In the summer of 2002, Cheney said that Saddam Hussein “continues to pursue a nuclear weapon” and that there was “no doubt” he had “weapons of mass destruction.” The vice president mentioned aluminum tubes (they had been reported on by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller in The New York Times), which Hussein would use “to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” This uranium, we were told, had been procured by the Iraqis from Niger. President Bush, in October 2002, said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

We now know that none of these claims, which together constituted the official reason for unleashing a war, were even remotely true. The later excuses about honest beliefs based on faulty intelligence would have been more convincing if a memo had not surfaced from the British government, quoting the head of British intelligence as saying that the Bush administration had made sure that “the intelligence and facts” about the W.M.D.’s “were being fixed around the policy” of going to war. He said this in July 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq. Even without the memo, it has long been clear that some of the United States government’s own analysts had cast severe doubts on the reasons for going to war.

Yet — and this is where Rich is particularly acute — most serious papers published the White House claims on their front pages, and buried any doubts in small news items at the back. Political weeklies with a liberal pedigree, like The New Republic, fell in line with the neoconservative Weekly Standard, stating that the president would be guilty of “surrender in the war on international terrorism” should he fail to make an effort to topple Saddam Hussein. Bob Woodward, the scourge of the Nixon administration, wrote “Bush at War,” a book that seemed to take everything his White House sources told him at face value.

As soon as the fighting began, showbiz kicked in. Already in Afghanistan, the Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer had been given access to the troops to make a television series about American bravery, even as reporters from papers like The Washington Post were kept away from the scene. Then in Iraq, heroic stories, like the brave battle of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, were invented and packaged for the press, and those who pointed out the fakery were denounced as leftist malcontents. President Bush dressed up as Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” and landed on an aircraft carrier for a photo op declaring a great victory. And the press, by and large, took the bait.

How could this have happened? How could some of the best, most fact-checked, most reputable news organizations in the English-speaking world have been so gullible? How can one explain the temporary paralysis of skepticism? This is perhaps the most painful question raised by Rich’s book, since his own newspaper was clearly implicated. An air of intimidation, which hung over the United States like a noxious vapor after 9/11, is part of the explanation. Susan Sontag became a national hate figure just for saying that United States foreign policy might have had something to do with violent anti-Americanism. When John Ashcroft declared to the Senate that people who challenged his highly questionable policies “give ammunition to America’s enemies,” he was simply echoing the ranters and ravers of talk radio. But they are poisonous buffoons. He was the attorney general. No wonder that the mainstream press, after being continuously accused of “liberal bias,” preferred to keep its head down.

Newspaper editors should not have to feel the need to prove their patriotism, or their absence of bias. Their job is to publish what they believe to be true, based on evidence and good judgment. As Rich points out, such journals as The Nation and The New York Review of Books were quicker to see through government shenanigans than the mainstream press. And reporters from Knight Ridder got the story about intelligence fixing right, before The New York Times caught on. “At Knight Ridder,” Rich says, “there was a clearer institutional grasp of the big picture.”

Intimidation is only part of the story, however. The changing nature of gathering and publishing information has made mainstream journalists unusually defensive. That more people than ever are now able to express their views, on radio shows and Web sites, is perhaps a form of democracy, but it has undermined the authority of editors, whose expertise was meant to act as a filter against nonsense or prejudice. And the deliberate confusion, on television, of news and entertainment has done further damage.

The Republicans, being more populist than the Democrats, have exploited this new climate with far greater finesse. Accusing the media of bias is an act of remarkable chutzpah for an administration that pitches its messages straight at radio talk show hosts and public relations men. Rich gives many examples. One of the more arresting ones is of Dick Cheney appearing on a TV show with Armstrong Williams, a fake journalist on the government payroll, to complain about bias in the press. Something has gone askew when one of the most trusted critics of the Bush administration is Jon Stewart, host of a superb comedy program. It was on his “Daily Show” that Rob Corddry, an actor playing a reporter, lamented that he couldn’t keep up with the government, which had created “a whole new category of fake news — infoganda.” Rich is right: “The more real journalism fumbled its job, the easier it was for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.”

THERE may be one other reason for the fumbling: the conventional methods of American journalism, marked by an obsession with access and quotes. A good reporter for an American paper must get sources who sound authoritative and quotes that show both sides of a story. His or her own expertise is almost irrelevant. If the opinions of columnists count for too much in the American press, the intelligence of reporters is institutionally underused. The problem is that there are not always two sides to a story. Someone reporting on the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1938 would not have added “balance” by quoting Joseph Goebbels. And besides, as Judith Miller found out, what is the good of quotes if they are based on false information?

Bob Woodward, one of Rich’s chief bêtes noires, has more access in Washington than any journalist, but the weakness of his work is that he never seems to be better than his sources. As Rich rightly observes, “reporters who did not have Woodward’s or Miller’s top-level access within the administration not only got the Iraq story right but got it into newspapers early by seeking out what John Walcott, the Knight Ridder Washington bureau chief, called ‘the blue collar’ sources further down the hierarchy.” This used to be Woodward’s modus operandi, too, in his better days. Fearing the loss of access at the top and overrating the importance of quotes from powerful people, as well as an unjustified terror of being accused of liberal bias, have crippled the press at a time when it is needed more than ever. Frank Rich is an excellent product of that press, and if it ever recovers its high reputation, it will be partly thanks to one man who couldn’t take it anymore.

Ian Buruma is the Henry Luce professor at Bard College. His latest book is “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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Despair Echoes From the Arms of Defeat

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/18/arts/Persians2650.jpg
Takis Diamantopoulos/National Theater of Greece
Yannis Kranas, left, Lydia Koniordou and the cast of Aeschylus’ “Persians” in Greek at City Center.

NY TIMES (http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/theater/reviews/18pers.html?ref=arts)
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
September 18, 2006


THEATER REVIEW | 'THE PERSIANS'“The Persians” says, gravely and discomfortingly, that on a profound level war is all loss. Loss upon loss upon loss.The ruler of a rich and powerful empire leads his countrymen into a disastrous war on foreign soil in “The Persians,” a play Aeschylus wrote in the fifth century B.C. It seems the guy was acting on advice from bad counselors.
And trying to finish some business started by papa, who ruled before him.

Ring any bells?

Maybe yes and maybe no, depending on your political views. But Lydia Koniordou, the director and star of a new production of the play from the National Theater of Greece, at City Center through Wednesday, does not cheapen Aeschylus’s drama by plastering it in up-to-the-minute allusions. Her intense, full-blooded staging relies on the simple force of this strange, dirgelike tragedy, the oldest in existence, to compel our attention. Despairing or consoling reflections on age-old and ever-current follies of political leaders can be harvested or ignored, as you like. First performed in 472 B.C., “The Persians” is the earliest surviving Greek tragedy, and it is unique in the canon in treating roughly contemporary events. It commemorates the dramatic Greek victory over the Persian forces at Salamis just eight years earlier.

Aeschylus fought in the battle and had lost a brother in the earlier Greek conflict with Persian forces at Marathon. But he wasn’t interested in flag-waving. Among the play’s radical aspects was its insistence on imaginative sympathy with the suffering of its audience’s enemies. “The Persians” says, gravely and discomfortingly, that on a profound level war is all loss. Loss upon loss upon loss.


http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/18/arts/Persians650.jpg
Takis Diamantopoulos/National Theater of Greece
Christos Loulis as Xerxes in Aeschylus’ “Persians,” a Greek-language production of the National Theater of Greece.

Even by the relatively static standards of Greek tragedy “The Persians” is stubbornly action-free. Bad news is suspected, received, lamented at length. That’s about it, event-wise, although there is a supernatural visit from the ghost of Darius, the father of the ill-starred Persian leader, Xerxes. And since this production is performed in Greek, with English titles projected above and to the side of the stage, you might expect the experience to be like listening to a long series of speeches in a foreign tongue.

But Ms. Koniordou unleashes the deep currents of feeling in the text by finding vibrant physical expression for its rhetorical movement. She doesn’t treat it as a poem whose lyrical integrity would be somehow violated by an excess of emotional intensity. She hears it as a slowly building, ultimately ear-shattering cry of despair, and is accordingly unafraid to pump up the volume.

The chorus, too often treated as talking scenery in productions of Greek tragedy, is her most potent resource. It opens the play in a vaguely celebratory mood, rehearsing the names of the great Persian leaders who have sailed for Greece. But a note of foreboding steals into the discourse quickly, and the chorus members’ tense, herky-jerky movements transmit a clearly readable sense of nervousness.

Moving up, down and across the bleacherlike steps that constitute the set by Lili Kentaka, they strike sudden, off-balance poses, like men caught by a photographer in flight from a scene of carnage, or leaning into the howling winds of a storm. They toss the verse from man to man: anxiety and fear stop their tongues suddenly, and so someone else must take up the tale.
Atossa (Ms. Koniordou), mother of the young king Xerxes and widow of Darius, emerges from the palace to share an ill-omened dream and seek guidance. Imposing in her blue royal gown and a resplendent gold robe manipulated by four attendants (Ms. Kentaka also designed the costumes), she is present when a messenger from the front arrives to tell of the overwhelming Persian defeat.

Like an airborne toxin, the news convulses the bodies of chorus and queen alike. It seems to scald the tongues of those who tell it too. The role of the messenger is shared by several extraordinary actors, who, like the chorus, blurt out the horror in gasping, hair-raisingly intense bursts of speech that stop as suddenly as they begin. As they choke out the details of the army’s bloody defeat, in rhythmic step with haunting music by Takis Farazis, horror seems to permeate the air and have no discernible source.

It never lets up. Chorus and queen seek solace from the spirit of Darius (Yannis Kranas), who returns from the beyond to moralize about the folly of his son’s misadventure. But he too brings bad news, assuring them that even the vestiges of the army have been all but destroyed. “The Persians” is unusual in its insistence on recording the numbers and names of the dead.

The messengers cry out the names and provenance of each lost legion and its leader, and describe in detail the terrible rout and the subsequent flight and disarray. It’s like war reportage raised to operatic dimension.

The long iteration of loss can be numbing of course. Ms. Koniordou’s production peaks a little early. The climactic arrival of Xerxes (Christos Loulis), who immediately begins his own bout of breast-beating and anguished recollection of the bloody defeat, finds the audience wrung out and a little weary, like the chorus, which slowly drags itself offstage in the final moments, ululating and emitting strangled moans.

The Athenians back in the fifth century B.C. must have been sent reeling too at the spectacle of their great, recent victory transformed into tragedy. The defeat of the Persian army was a triumph of democracy over tyranny, so what lessons could the sufferings of a tyrannical power be expected to impart? Maybe, to begin with, that the hubris and folly and greed that led the Persians to defeat are not institutional failings but human ones.

AESCHYLUS’ THE PERSIANS

By Aeschylus; directed by Lydia Koniordou; translation from ancient Greek to modern Greek, Nikoletta Fridzilla, with English translation by Yannis Papadakis and English supertitles edited by Louisa Mitsakou; sets and costumes by Lili Kentaka; lighting by Lefteris Pavlopoulos; music by Takis Farazis; choreography by Apostolia Papadamki; voice coaching by Mirka Germentzaki.

Presented by the National Theater of Greece, Nikos Kourkoulos, artistic director; at the City Center, 100 West 55th Street, Manhattan, (212) 581-1212.

Through Wednesday. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

WITH: Lydia Koniordou (Atossa), Yannis Kranas (Darius) and Christos Loulis (Xerxes).

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[scillers]

The very first comment here was correct, who cares if they found WMD's now,(actually over 2 metric tons of Uranium oxide were found, yellow cake, but the main stream press won't report it, because they are liberal left wing Bush haters) it's a FACT that he used them in the past, chemical weapons to kill tens of thousands of kurds, and he tortured , raped, dismembered, and killed untold thousands of his own people, these are all facts, yet the liberals, and democrats cry stop the war, run home, this war is about far more than just WMD's, and removing a brutal evil dictator , (which was a good thing by the way), it's about defeating terrorism, world wide, Osama is not the only terrorist people! Going into Iraq was brilliant, it has concentrated terrorist there, and we have killed alot more of them because of Iraq, thats just that many we don't have to go search the whole world over for, stop the Bush hating, and wake up, get behind our country, and winning the war against the Islamic terrorist.

[Ninjahedge]

The very first comment here was correct, who cares if they found WMD's now,(actually over 2 metric tons of Uranium oxide were found, yellow cake, but the main stream press won't report it, because they are liberal left wing Bush haters)

Please state where you found this information and where/when this stuff was found.

You do not give any source, and then you go on to use the "L" word to bash any contrary statement by defaming the messenger before they even say anything.

it's a FACT that he used them in the past, chemical weapons to kill tens of thousands of kurds, and he tortured , raped, dismembered, and killed untold thousands of his own people,

It is also a fact that you do not use periods in your rants.

It is a fact that WE SOLD HIM THESE WEAPONS. We supported this dictator when it suited our own purposes. Then we pulled out, he no longer served us, and we were pissed off that others did not pull out when we did. We went on to call Russia and other countries names for supporting a dictator that we only recently stopped supporting.

One thing to keep in mind. Although he did dismember and torture his enemies, he gave his country a stability that we mistook as easily obtainable just by taking over. We removed the despot to see that fear of him was the ONLY thing keeping even his own people from fighting each other.

these are all facts, yet the liberals, and democrats cry stop the war, run home, this war is about far more than just WMD's, and removing a brutal evil dictator , (which was a good thing by the way),

No they don't. You are straw-manning this argument with no facts or defined statements.

Name a liberal and state what he has said and what you contest. Otherwise keep your Trolling flame bait to yourself.

it's about defeating terrorism, world wide, Osama is not the only terrorist people!

No it wasn't. It never was. Afghanistan was, and we failed there. We initially succeeded, but Iraq was on Cheney's plate long before 9-11. "Terrorist" was used as a mutual evil to get people to believe that there was somehow one unified front against them that they had to defeat.

BS.

Going into Iraq was brilliant, it has concentrated terrorist there, and we have killed alot more of them because of Iraq,

No, it gave THEM a target that they have succeeded in killing more Americans than any other terrorist attack outside of 9-11 ever did. It is easier for them to attack, and we are easier to find. It also takes MUCH less time to do so. Your statements ring so false they do not even ring anymore.

thats just that many we don't have to go search the whole world over for, stop the Bush hating, and wake up, get behind our country, and winning the war against the Islamic terrorist.

You are so hopeless.

[scillers]

So what dork! Walmart sold me a shot gun, is Walmart responsible if I kill someone, your agruement is childish, and ridiculas. You mean to tell me you don't know about the Kurds, who were slaughterd by Sadam? The chemical weapons he used on his own people is well documented, even the liberals, and democraps can't make that go away! Try google for starters if you don't know about Sadam's use of WMD's.

[Ninjahedge]

So what dork!

Dork? How old ARE you?

Walmart sold me a shot gun, is Walmart responsible if I kill someone,

I believe they should be. Especially if they see the side of you we are seeing. Your example does not strengthen your argument.

your agruement is childish, and ridiculas.

My "agruement" is "rediculas"? First of all, try not to call someone childish when you are having trouble using grammar and spelling things correctly. Secondly, you did not counter my argument, you just insulted it.

That kind of thing may work at your HS, but it does not work here.

You mean to tell me you don't know about the Kurds, who were slaughterd by Sadam?

Where did I say that? Point it out to me where I said I did not know it. Point it out where I approved it. Do it. Stop making things up in order to help your losing argument.

The chemical weapons he used on his own people is well documented, even the liberals, and democraps can't make that go away! Try google for starters if you don't know about Sadam's use of WMD's.

Liberals and Democraps... Hmmmm, you get your political responses from the GOP "Mad Libs"?

And you totally sidestepped all points I made. I never said he did not HAVE them in the past, and I also asked YOU to prove that he had 2 tons of yellow-cake. You are asking me to do the work to support your argument?

Man, you are stupid. Or lazy. Actually, probably both.

Ed, this guy is trolling, could we nix him and get back to talking instead of flame bait like this?

[lofter1]

scillers: a mind is a terrible thing to waste

[lofter1]

scillers' rants have succeeeded in shutting down one thread: Muslim protest protestor...Too much? (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9796)

I'm hoping that scillers will be banned rather than closing down discussion on important topics.

[OmegaNYC]

scillers: a mind is a terrible thing to waste

Well, in this case, wasted. :)

[milleniumcab]

scillers' rants have succeeeded in shutting down one thread: Muslim protest protestor...Too much? (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9796)

I'm hoping that scillers will be banned rather than closing down discussion on important topics.I agree with you lofter1. It was pleasure to see scillers banned... But why close a good thread?

[lofter1]

The Apocalypse in Iraq

Andrew Sullivan (http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/09/the_apocalypse_.html)
23 Sep 2006 03:23 pm

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/images/alsadralijarekjireuters.jpg (http://time.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/alsadralijarekjireuters.jpg)

I mean literally.

Juan Cole notes that Moqtadr al-Sadr is aligning himself (http://www.juancole.com/2006/09/3000-demonstrate-in-tikrit-for-saddam.html) with Ahmadinejad
on the imminent return of the Twlefth Imam, a Shiite sign of the Apoclaypse:


3,000 Demonstrate in Tikrit for Saddam Return

Muqtada: US DoD has File on Shiite Messiah

INFORMED CONSENT (http://www.juancole.com/2006/09/3000-demonstrate-in-tikrit-for-saddam.html)
Juan Cole
September 23, 2006

The Associated Press reports (http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Sunni-mosques-attacked-in-Baghdad/2006/09/23/1158431935255.html) Friday's major events in Iraq:

'In the city of Tikrit north of Baghdad, 3,000 persons came out on Friday to demonstrate for the return of Saddam Hussein to power. Tikrit is his birthplace. 'In the mixed Hurriyah district of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked Sunni Arab homes and mosques. The guerrillas shot down 4 persons.

Muqtada al-Sadr called for a joint Sunni-Shiite nonviolent campaign against the presence of US troops in Iraq.

In a worrisome sign that Muqtada al-Sadr has gone deep into an apocalyptic sense of the end of the world [Ar.] (http://www.azzaman.com/azzaman/http/display.asp?fname=/azzaman/articles/2006/09/09-22/999.htm), al-Zaman reports that the young nationalist Shiite cleric maintained that the US Department of Defense has compiled an enormous file on the hidden Twelfth Imam, that is virtually complete save that it lacks his photograph.

[For Shiite Muslims, the Twelfth Imam or Imam Mahdi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_al_Mahdi) is a little like Jesus Christ for evangelical Christians. Shiites believe that the Imam was translated by God into a supernatural realm, from which he secretly rules the world and from which he will one day return to restore the world to justice.]

Al-Sadr said during his Friday prayer sermon in Kufa that "The United States has been preparing for ten years a rapid reaction force against the awaited Imam Mahdi and the US provoked the Gulf War so as to fill the region with military outposts for this purpose."

He said that he had not stood against the elections held under conditions of foreign military occupation, because he wanted to see a political opposition to the Occupation develop. He said that nevertheless, conflicts between him and the Americans had continued and would continue.

He added, "I want it to be a peaceful war against them. I do not want a single drop of blood to be spilled, since are dear to me. Fight them with a popular, nonviolent, political war."

Of the recent arrest in Najaf by the US forces of his lieutenant, Salah al-Ubaidi, Muqtada alleged, "This is an extension of the attacks on Islam."

He added, "Have you asked yourselves what the US has given the Iraqi people save the killing and destruction that you see? . . . That is only a preparation for the advent of the Imam Mahdi."

Oliver Poole reports from Baghdad (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/crime-pays-way-for-baghdad-sectarian-killers/2006/09/22/1158431897967.html) that the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr had taken over gasoline stations in Baghdad and were smuggling petroleum from them, earning $1 mn. a day. Apparently the US considers the Sadrists' control of the Ministry of Transportation worrisome in this regard. Muqtada seems to be losing control of local branches of the Mahdi Army, often to Shiite clerics who have taken a more radical position vis-a-vis the new government and the Americans than has he. An example is Abu Dara' in Baghdad, said to be extremely violent

In addition, Reuters reports 18 killed and dozens wounded in Iraq's civil war (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L22756989.htm). One of the dead was a US GI. Among the major incidents:

'BAGHDAD - Two car bombs in Shi'ite districts of southern Baghdad wounded 16 people late on Friday, an Interior Ministry source said. Five were hurt in a market in the Abu Chehr district and 11 in a street near an Agriculture Ministy office in Zaafaraniya . . .BAGHDAD - Police found 10 bodies [[I]AP says 17], including those of two women, in different parts of Baghdad. Most bore signs of torture and had been shot, police said. The two women were found in the western Shi'ite district of Shula. None of the bodies was immediately identified. 'US military commanders in Baghdad want 3,000 more Iraq troops to join the current operation (http://www.startribune.com/722/story/695767.html), but have been unable to get them because Iraqi soldiers refuse to leave their regional posts for the capital.

[ablarc]

^ These folks put the ooga-booga back in religion.

[Jake]

These stories just keep reading like scripts from B Hollywood movies and frankly they haven't produced anything good lately....

I've just scrolled up and down 10 times looking at that pic of Al-Sadr and it makes me laugh, the guy must think he's scary or something.

http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/CARI.AlSadr.gif

http://www.lindasog.com/pics/0106/al-sadr.jpg

I think I saw him on the 4 train yesterday^, he wanted change or something



BTW, "sources" say Bin Laden is sick, that poor thing.

[milleniumcab]

I say, DOWN WITH THE WICKED PERVERTS!....:mad: .....ALL OF THEM...

[Slick]

His Idea of removing all muslems was to radical, but the war in Iraq is a good thing, it has provided a front to fight the terrorist on, and Afganistan, better over there, than here.

[OmegaNYC]

His Idea of removing all muslems was to radical, but the war in Iraq is a good thing, it has provided a front to fight the terrorist on, and Afganistan, better over there, than here.

Huh, are you kidding me? Do you have any idea how much radicalism have spread over the Middle East, all because of our presence in Iraq. Seriously think about it. How will the Middle East be in 10, 15, or 20 years from now? All because of the U.S. is in Iraq fighting a fight that shouldn't been fought in the first place. The Geopolitical map of the Bush admin, has to be the worst in American history.

[ablarc]

The Geopolitical map of the Bush admin, has to be the worst in American history.
Nobody likes us anymore.

Can't say I blame them.

Still, it's a shame.

[Jake]

Nobody there has EVER liked us, nothing has changed.

[ryan]

Actual polling (http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=252)indicates that world public opinion has soured significantly since the beginning of the Iraq war:

http://pewglobal.org/reports/images/252-1.gif

[ablarc]

Yeah, that's right, ryan; Jake is wrong. I was in Paris in 1999, and I was blown away by the positive vibes. Everywhere I went, the French went out of their way to tell me how much they liked Americans. You think I'd encounter that in 2006?

Doesn't take long for things to change when there's a bozo in charge.

[milleniumcab]

Again I say, DOWN WITH THE WICKED PERVERTS... ALL OF THEM...:mad:

[Jake]

I'm sorry that my statement was rather short, I had the Middle East in mind. What I'm trying to say is that ALL these problems are many decades, if not millenia, in the making.

Look at it this way, with hindsight, that Saddam was a threat to the US with its nuclear program and yet we didn't know about it. We've never had fans in that region. Accept the fact that they are killing each other over the proper heir to Mohammed, what do you think their opinion is of us?

Maybe Bush did screw things up, noone can tell until 10 years from now, maybe he was completely right.

Simply put if you think what Bush is doing changed these countries from US lovers to US haters, you are completely wrong. He certainly hurt our relations but he really hasn't done anything the US hasn't been doing for the past whatever years.

Besides, all the news show is US-everyone else relations, do you actually follow France-Germany relations? Do you think THOSE have blossomed over the past 6 years?

So far IMO Bush's actions have not caused any major problem in a world where it takes very little to create one. The oil is flowing, our lives continue normally, there haven't been any attacks on the US, there's no nuclear war. Things are much better than they could be.

[ZippyTheChimp]

A perfect example of the phoniness of the war the the White House keeps reminding us we are in.

Might be like the actual Phony War that preceded the real thing in 1939, except people have been dying in this one for three years....

but our lives are normal, there's no nuclear war, and of couse, the oil is flowing.

Life is good.

[milleniumcab]

Maybe Bush did screw things up, noone can tell until 10 years from now, maybe he was completely right.

Bush did screw things up, one does not have to be a geniuos to be able to tell today, he was completely wrong....

[lofter1]

... Saddam was a threat to the US with its nuclear program and yet we didn't know about it.

Israel took care of that back in the early 80's. We found nada ...



Maybe Bush did screw things up, noone can tell until 10 years from now, maybe he was completely right.


Our own Agencies tell us otherwise (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=121901&postcount=266) :WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.



...he really hasn't done anything the US hasn't been doing for the past whatever years.

Uhh, besides INVADING Iraq -- something the US had NOT done there or anywhere else in the nearby vicinity over the past whatever + years.


So far IMO Bush's actions have not caused any major problem in a world where it takes very little to create one.

See above regarding the creation of a new generation of terrorists.

Add that to this: nearly one-third of Americans still believe that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 terror attacks. (http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Poll_Nearly_third_of_Americans_still_0922.html)

***

[Slick]

What kind of comment is that? People ,we were not in Iraq when 911 happend! So all those comments about going into Iraq caused more terrorism is wrong! The countries and people who do not like America are the ones harboring terrorist, and helping them, in one way or another, like France, and Germany, who just turn a blind eye to it, and give lip service to appear against the terrorist. Who cares if those countries like us our not, they were not attacked like we were on 911.

Thank God we have a president strong enough, and resolute enough to ignore the left wing liberals, and democrats who are against this war on terrorism. Iraq is full of terrorist, they were there before the war, and 911, and now they have concentrated there, making it much easier to kill them. Why is that so hard for some people to grasp? Why does it matter where we kill the terrorist, a dead bad guy is a dead bad guy, would you people against the war in Iraq, rather see all those terrorist who have been killed in Iraq, still alive? Roaming the earth some where else, still killing Americans, maybe here at home?

[RandySavage]

Iraq is full of terrorist, they were there before the war, and 911,

On a forum composed of intelligent people you had better be prepared qualify a claim such as yours with reliable evidence.

Al Qaida may have moved into Iraq since the invasion, but there is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq was a haven for terrorism under Saddam:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/09/ap/politics/mainD8K118AG0.shtml

You've made false assumptions, therefore your argument is invalid. Do your homework next time.

[OmegaNYC]

Ouch^^^

[Ninjahedge]

I was going to pick apart Slick's arguement, but then I read Randy's reply and I agree with him.

Slick, you have backed nothing up, provided no information on what is going on, and outright misstated the entire situation.

Germany and France do not support terrorists just because they do not like our Presidents, and for that matter, Liberals do not support terrorism either. You are using blind generalizations to simplify a situation not into something that you can understand, but rather into what you want to believe.


We are all for discussion on this board, sometimes getting heated, but you can't just come on here and say "Iraq is full of Terrorist" and thinks that validates every political mishandled decision in the past 4-6 years.

[Slick]

Are you kidding me? No eveidence of terrorist in Iraq before 911? That is barely worth a response, everyone knows that Iraq has been full of anti American, anti freedom, anti human rights, terrorist, and terrorist training camps, oh, and I suppose Sadam didn't offer $25,000 to any suicide bombers family's either right? but that dosn't make Sadam a terroristic threat either right? give me a break, how far will you people on the left lean to help the enemy?

I also find it amazing how fast all you Bush haters are quick to blame him when something goes wrong, but 5 years have gone by with no attack on American soil, and have you given Bush any credit for that? No , so it proves once again, that the liberals, and the democrats care more about attacking Bush, than they do the enemy! WE need all of our people together to defeat these bad guys, let's get behind our leader and help him, not try to discredit him, what purpose does that serve?

[ZippyTheChimp]

^
Hello Scillers - I mean Slick.

I can read your IP address. Try the library next time. Any vary your schtick. You stick out like a sore thumb.

Everyone say goodby to Scillers - I mean Slick.

[Jake]

The US has been in Iraq since the first Gulf War. Forgetting the no-fly zones which were virtually deserted because of the US and the American deployments to Saudi Arabia? In the scope of things this "war" is chickenshit. We essentially control the Persian Gulf and have military bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Bush didn't fundamentally change anything in the Middle East, he just finally started doing something. Our dependence on a country like Iraq was scary, not the prospect of waging a war with them. Without the war in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia could've maintained their hold on our economic survival. Bottom line is that Iraq was a country that was nothing but threatening to us and our allies since the 80s. I don't think any rational person can outline for me the positives of Iraq still being the way it was.


Middle Eastern terrorism is as old as time itself and the only thing that was holding it back (this I admit was an error on our part) was the totalitarian regimes of the region. These people have messed with us for decades. The scores of blown up airplanes and buildings, hundreds of westerners murdered for being white or Christian.

I don't support many of the strategic decision undertaken with respect to this war but the only reason why I think this war should not have taken place is that all the people in that country aren't worth a single American. That being said this is a volunteer army in a country whose foreign policy hasn't changed in the last 85 years. There are thing that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Some of you have grown accustomed to the complete strategic ****-ups of the inability to act by the Clinton administration but this is nothing new.

I don't care for some last minute reports by some DoD intern that claim to identify patterns that may not even be there. Rather take a train to Stanford or Harvard, or even liberal colleges and sit in on a lecture by people who actually know more than all of us about international policy. There were also DoD reports on the strategic ease of invading Vietnam and the political stability of the Somalian government, those just worked out really great.

I don't agree that we should have college administrators as national security advisors and don't necessarily believe lawyers make the best strategists but honestly very few administrations had well qualified advisors since Carter's Brzezinski.

[OmegaNYC]

Hello Scillers - I mean Slick.

I can read your IP address. Try the library next time. Any vary your schtick. You stick out like a sore thumb.

Everyone say goodby to Scillers - I mean Slick.

Zippy, you're the boss. Though, I wish you'll unblock him. I'll love to take him on in a debate. ;)

[milleniumcab]

I was just about to say sciller=slick...Then it was time to read Zippy's comment...:D :D :D

[milleniumcab]

What kind of comment is that? People ,we were not in Iraq when 911 happend! So all those comments about going into Iraq caused more terrorism is wrong!

I did not read any comment from a reasonable person in this thread that said " going into Iraq caused more terrorism ".. A lot of us did say though " going into Iraq caused population of terrorists to increase... They will certainly be cause of the future terrorism...

Thank God we have a president strong enough, and resolute enough to ignore the left wing liberals, and democrats who are against this war on terrorism.

Invasion of Iraq had absouletly nothing to do with the War on Terror... Afganistan did and we, the Liberal Democrats, supported that war fully.. If we would have concentrated only on Afganistan instead of dividing our focus by going into Iraq, by this time we would have silenced even more of the Taliban and Al-Qaida members and not have created a new base for the fanatics to tap into....



I felt , I had to quote slick=scillers, one more time even though they are both banned..;)

[Gregory Tenenbaum]

Look, people are dying in Iraq. We have already made a large sacrifice by staying there. But do you wish to expose the people there by pulling out now? Especially expose the vulnerable to the insurgents? It's a vital question for all of us.

This video I recently saw on ogrish shows the shocking reality for our men and women on the ground.

WARNING: video while not gory contains disheartening and demoralising footage of over 60 sniper kills/casualties of our servicemen - not for the fainthearted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNUhz2FG5lU

It also appears to be propaganda for some insurgent cause, with the music and arabic titles etc so bear that in mind and treat it with the respect that it deserves (none).

However the video itself does seem to show a piece of the reality of hell there in Iraq now for our boys.

[milleniumcab]

I don't know whether prolonging the pull out is going to do any good as far as helping Iraq come out of this ordeal as an undivided country. It seems they are already trying to arrange the constitution to create three autonomous regions. All the talks and negotiations should be about how to divide Iraq as quickly as possible and get our troops out of there...Enough of the brave young men and women have been sacrificed for the wrong cause...

[Jake]

Perhaps a system of self governed states bound by a common constitution is exactly what they need. If there's anything America can teach anybody is that such a system works and works well.

For one I think it's unfair to define a country by its colonial borders. If memory serves me right Iraq was originally a 3 state country. As long each state doesn't have its own military force I think that system would work fine.

[milleniumcab]

If memory serves me right Iraq was originally a 3 state country.

Your memory serves you wrong... Iraq was created by the British, at the end of the World War 1, from the remains of the Ottoman Empire.

Check this out..


http://ehistory.osu.edu/middleeast/index.cfm

[Jake]

So I double checked it and my memory serves me right. Under Ottoman rule Iraq was divided into 3 administrative divisions. The divisions were Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad and roughly corresponded to the ethnic make-up of the country.

This system existed for 400 years.

[milleniumcab]

So I double checked it and my memory serves me right. Under Ottoman rule Iraq was divided into 3 administrative divisions. The divisions were Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad and roughly corresponded to the ethnic make-up of the country.

This system existed for 400 years.

Exactly; 3 different ethnicities, not states...But soon there will be 3 states, 3 governments divided along the 3 ethnic groups...

[Gregory Tenenbaum]

Did you see in the video the reality for some of the brave soldiers? - they dont stand a chance against that - they're practically sitting ducks.

You are right, there was no such thing as Iraq before the British invaded. It was a simple way for them to administer their new colony.

Think of the Kurds, they have always been portrayed in the media as a separate ethnic group from the Iraquis.

It seems natural to split it into several groups but that is difficult because you always have some minority living in another region - I suppose they can always join together later if they want to - but this idea is being mooted by our government and theirs (from what I have read in the mainstream media).

There is a global trend toward fragmentation. Take Hungary - used to include Slovak Rep, Croatia, Slovenia, and Rumania - each now have their own country. More recently take Jugoslavia or Czechoslovakia (now 2 countries). Take the former Soviet Union. Split for different reasons, but
now there are real independent states such as the 'Stans in the south.

Since the colonial era ended and the British lost their power (which started in WWI and really picked up with the Fall of Singapore in 1942 - but surely ended 50 years ago with the Suez Crisis) there has been a world trend of independence movements.

Its called Post-Colonialism and it's still happening in Iraq.

[Jake]

That's exactly the point though. Austrians are different from Hungarians and Slovaks and Czechs and Romanians. There are FAR larger minorities living outside of their countries in Europe.

What I'm trying to say is that the regions that existed for so many years pretty much grouped similar people in the same regions. They had completely different rulers and were highly autonomous with a central authority in Baghdad.

In this unified state the Kurds have been murdered for 70 years and have no major non-Kurdish populations in their region. Why not separate them?

Besides Iraq is fragmented as it is with the US, Britain, and Poland controlling their own regions.

[milleniumcab]

In this unified state the Kurds have been murdered for 70 years and have no major non-Kurdish populations in their region. Why not separate them?

You are wrong again Jake... The population of the Turkmens in Northern Iraq is in millions...That's the region claimed as Kurdistan by Kurds, which never really existed in history.

There is a serious public relations effort going on, by the Kurds, to advertise Southern Kurdistan (and Kerkuk as it's capital) in Northern Iraq to the Western World... Kerkuk is a city with a very diverse population... It is not as kurdish as it's claimed by Kurds.. Kurds have been moving to Kerkuk from other parts of Iraq, preparing to declare majority in that city in the next Census Report for Iraq. This is being watched very carefully by Turkey because Kerkuk have a substantial Turkmen population along with some other cities in Northern Iraq...

The Kurd's long term goal is a Greater Kurdistan which includes territories in Turkey, Iran and Syria. They are not shy to mention that in their website..

I see this as a big problem for the future of the Middle East.. You might say, so what but let me tell you this... If we recognize Kurdistan and give them our full support and promise of military protection, we will be in even bigger trouble than we are in Iraq. Syria might be weak but we might have to take on such power houses like Turkey and Iran... Iran to one side ( we don't have much relationship with her), Turkey have the second biggest army in Nato, after US...They are well armed and have tremendous amount of experience in that region's terrain...They have been fighting the PKK for over 30 years..

I don't think these countries will look favoribly to the Kurds looking to expand into their land... What will we do then? Declare war against them, especially Turkey, a Nato Member and a staunch ally of US for decades...

Throwing away Turkey's friendship and support in that region will not be the same as throwing away our support of Saddam.. I think that would be a bigger mistake than Iraq and a huge dissaster for us...

[lofter1]

So relieved to see our fate is in the good hands of our smart leaders ...

Lott On Iraq:

‘Why Do Sunnis Kill Shiites?
… They All Look The Same To Me’

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/lott.JPG

think progress (http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/28/lott-iraq/)

Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), who famously suggested the U.S. wouldn’t have “all these problems (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/09/lott.comment/)” had Strom Thurmond been elected President, said today that the religious differences among Iraqis makes the conflict very difficult for him to understand (http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/blogs/politicalticker/2006/09/lott-bush-barely-mentioned-iraq-in.html):
“It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people,” he said. “Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli’s and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.“
Speaking shortly after a meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Lott added that Iraq wasn’t among the White House’s priorities.
“No, none of that,” Lott told reporters after the session when asked if the Iraq war was discussed. “You’re [the media] the only ones who obsess on that. We don’t and the real people out in the real world don’t for the most part.“
Digg It! (http://www.digg.com/political_opinion/Lott_On_Iraq_Why_Do_Sunnis_Kill_Shiites_They_All_L ook_The_Same_To_Me)

[milleniumcab]

One more thing about Iraq...Now that Saddam is out of there, who is going to fill his shoes to balance the power struggle between Shiites and the Sunnis... Somebody or some country will have to step up to stop the domination of the Middle East by Iran...Who is it going to be?...

Saddam was a mean old bastard but he was actually good for that part of the world...

[lofter1]

U.S. says Baghdad Iraqi police unit helped death squads

CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/10/04/iraq.main/index.html)
October 4, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- An Iraqi police brigade is being pulled off the streets of Baghdad because of its apparent complicity with death squads, according to a