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| Iraq + war on terrorism + Middle East conflict + critical perspectives |
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Iraqi peace mission snubbed by Sadr By Michael Georgy, Reuters, August 17, 2004 Radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Tuesday refused to meet an Iraqi peace delegation because of "American aggression" as U.S. troops pounded militia positions in Najaf near the country's holiest Islamic sites. The failure to hold face-to-face talks raises the possibility of a U.S.-led offensive to crush Sadr's Mehdi Army in the city. Braving U.S. bombardment and militia sniper fire, the group of eight political and religious leaders drove to al-Sadr's office seeking to end a rebellion in the holy city and other parts of Iraq. A Sadr aide told reporters accompanying the delegation that Sadr refused to meet them "because of continued aggression by the Americans." [complete article] EMAIL UPDATES -- Click here to sign up for weekly email updates -- a digest of key articles from the last seven days. (Please include your name in the message and put "subscribe" in the subject line.) Iraqi peace mission in Najaf; U.S. pounds militia By Michael Georgy, Reuters, August 17, 2004 An Iraqi peace delegation urged a radical Shi'ite cleric Tuesday to call off his uprising in the city of Najaf where U.S. troops pounded militia positions near the country's holiest Islamic sites. Braving U.S. bombardment and militia sniper fire, the group of eight political and religious leaders drove to the office of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, not far from the Imam Ali Mosque where the firebrand and his Mehdi Army are holed up. They met Sadr's top aides and then waited at the shrine for a meeting with Sadr as fighting raged in a nearby ancient cemetery, witnesses said. The delegation flew in on U.S. Black Hawk helicopters from a meeting in Baghdad where 1,300 delegates sought to select an interim national assembly to oversee the government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Heated debates over Najaf and selecting members to the assembly have dominated the unprecedented gathering in Baghdad, a step on Iraq's tortured road to democracy. [complete article] A unifying factor across Iraq By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, August 18, 2004 Imagine a Muslim army about to bomb the Vatican with the help of a few Christian mercenaries while the Pope is away, recovering from an angioplasty in London and silent about the whole drama. This is roughly what is happening in Najaf, Iraq, where the forces of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the United States stand eyeball to eyeball pending a "final showdown". First, let's take a look at where the main players currently stand. Contrary to widespread media perception, Muqtada is not a punk: he is probably one of the most popular figures in the complex Iraqi political spectrum, certainly at the grassroot Shi'ite level. During the first American siege of Najaf four months ago, his popularity was reported to be above 90%. The second-most popular figure in the country now may be Shi'ite religious eminence Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, although he positions himself as apolitical. As for the American-imposed Prime Minister (over a virtual parliament) Iyad Allawi, his popularity would be somewhere in single-digit territory. He essentially represents no Iraqis. Pierre-Jean Luizard, a researcher at the elite French think-tank CNRS and a Middle East specialist, believes that Muqtada may have been forced by events to occupy this crucial historic role and may not even be fully aware of the awesome implications; but today he offers to most Iraqis "the image of being the only one capable of unifying the country beyond communal divisions". No wonder that Muqtada has widely become an icon of Muslim resistance. [complete article] Protestors accuse political bigwigs of hijacking Iraq's interim legislature Agence France Presse, August 17, 2004 Some 450 delegates at a key national conference accused the main political parties of hijacking a scheduled vote for a new interim legislature for Iraq, saying most members were chosen long ago in secret. Many of them threatened to quit the conference on its last day unless the voting mechanism was changed, before Fuad Maasum, head of the event's preparatory committee, agreed to put the voting procedure itself to a vote. "The mainstream political parties have dominated the conference and have already drawn up their lists for selecting the national council," said Aziz al-Yasseri, from the broad coalition National Democratic Movement. Nineteen of the 100 seats on the council have already been handed to members of the defunct Governing Council, created by the US-led occupation shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and including many exiled regime opponents. According to conference rules, delegates of different leanings -- Islamists, secular, Kurdish, Arab or otherwise -- are supposed to draw up lists for the remaining 81 seats and submit them to an open vote. The one gaining a 51-percent majority would be the winning list. "We refuse this and if this is not dealt with today then the whole conference will fall apart and I will walk out, with hundreds with me," added Yasseri, a Shiite Muslim from Baghdad nominated for the council. He lashed out at the mainstream Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Dawa, the prime minister's Iraqi National Accord, the two largest Kurdish parties and the communists as the main culprits. [complete article] Galloway calls profiling deaths in Iraq the "hardest thing" he's ever written By Charles Geraci, Editor and Publisher, August 16, 2004 Knight Ridder's launch today of a powerful online multimedia package chronicling the last two weeks of 12 U.S. Marines appears seamless, but the project did not come easy for the newspaper chain's famed war correspondent Joseph L.Galloway. "This was the hardest thing I've ever written or edited," he admits. "I sat in a busy newsroom with tears streaming down my face." Galloway, a decorated veteran, co-author of the book "We Were Soldiers Once... and Young" and an embedded reporter in Iraq last year, added, "The Pentagon puts out, on its Web site, every day the names of casualties in Iraq but it's very one-dimensional. It seemed to me it was time to paint a real portrait of a real human being who's lost his life in this war." He told E&P; he wants the country to know "who it is losing when the names are printed in a little box in the paper or flash across on a Web site." [complete article] See Knight Ridder's special report, Ambush in Ramadi. Wiretapping the Web By Brian Braiker, Newsweek, August 13, 2004 We've been told since the dawn of the Internet that the e-mail we send and receive on company time is fair game for our employers to monitor. Many took for granted, though, that e-mail sent from private accounts was just that: private. How naive. As if hacking worries weren't enough, two recent legal developments have raised further fears among Web privacy advocates in the United States. In one case, the Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 last week to prohibit businesses from offering broadband or Internet phone service unless they provide Uncle Sam with backdoors for wiretapping access. And in a separate decision last month, a federal appeals court decided that e-mail and other electronic communications are not protected under a strict reading of wiretap laws. Taken together, these decisions may make it both legally and technologically easier to wiretap Internet communications, some legal experts told Newsweek. "All the trends are toward easier to tap," says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. [complete article] New York vs. the protesters By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia, Washington Post, August 17, 2004 Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters, abortion rights supporters, labor rights activists and anarchists are preparing to unfurl banners, march through the streets and rally in the parks, loosening a cacophonous roar of protest during the Republican National Convention. As many as 250,000 people may march up Seventh Avenue by Madison Square Garden on the Sunday before the convention to protest the war in Iraq. Thousands of abortion rights and women's health advocates plan to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall Park. And the Hip Hop Summit Action Network will lead a march of low-income people to Madison Square Garden, the convention site. That's not to mention the Paul Revere impersonators who plan nightly horseback rides down Lexington Avenue in Midtown (their warning cry: "The Republicans are coming! The Republicans are coming!"). Or the bell ringers who plan to encircle Ground Zero and ring 2,749 bells in memory of the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, and in opposition to the Iraq war. [complete article] THE BROWN-NOSE FACTOR Why the Washington Post inside story on Iraq pre-war coverage falls short By Greg Mitchell, Editor and Publisher, August 17, 2004 E&P; is no enemy of The Washington Post. We have regularly hailed its postwar WMD coverage, singling out Barton Gellman, Dana Priest, Walter Pincus and others for often beating The New York Times. The Post has no Judith Miller albatross hanging around its neck. It put the Kurtz piece in a prominent position, not buried, as The Times did with its May editors' note. It even named a few names, also something The Times failed to do. So why not give The Post a pass on the lax standards and disturbing attitudes revealed in the Kurtz article? If the issue involved nothing more than a housing scandal in Montgomery County, fine. But when a newspaper helps enable a major military strike and lengthy occupation, readers may feel insulted by Downie's we-couldn't-have-stopped-the-war-anyway plea. This is especially true when a war turns out so badly, in lives lost, in money squandered and as a net loss in the war on terrorism. [complete article] Comment -- In his critique of the Washington Post's self criticism, the one element that Greg Mitchell leaves out is the brown-nose factor. Journalism is a way of making a living and journalists -- like individuals in most business organizations -- don't want to close off opportunities to advance their careers by getting themselves labelled as mavericks. In the run-up to war, even among many members of the antiwar movement, there was a pervasive sense of war's inevitability. So for journalists who might have been inclined to investigate reasons why war might be unnecessary (even though it seemed certain), wherever their inquiries might have led, they may well have looked like a route down a professional cul-de-sac. But rather than expose the cynical side of journalism, most journalists would rather portray news reporting as a public service. Criticism can then be deflected by assuming a false modesty in which news reporters are like angels who witness the misery of the world, yet have no power to change it. Death and destruction across the divide By Conal Urquhart, The Guardian, August 17, 2004 "This street [in the Israeli town of Sderot] has been hit five times. When it happens it feel like the whole town is exploding. Fixtures fall off the wall and the children start crying. The children become very tense. It's hard to be very comfortable when you don't know what is going to drop from the sky." The sound of suburban lawn mowers cannot hide the noise of Apache helicopters hovering over Beit Hanoun. "We feel we are very much on the frontline," said Mrs Trabelski. "We hear everything that goes on in Gaza." The Qassam rockets [being fired from Gaza], named after an Arab rebel leader killed by the British in 1935, are crude devices consisting of a steel tube with metal fins. The propellant is a mixture of sugar, oil, alcohol and fertiliser. Their range is up to five miles and they can carry up to 6.8kg (15lb) of explosives. Hamas sees them as essential against Israel's military superiority. Israel has sophisticated defence systems against ballistic missiles but can do nothing to stop the unpredictable Qassams. More than 300 of the rockets have been fired and about 70 have landed in Sderot, including five in Rehefet Street. While the chances of being hit are small, the fear of the new design is great. [complete article] City of defiance By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, August 17, 2004 They came from across Iraq, marching in solidarity with Shia brothers. Civilians -- they bear no arms, for the moment anyway -- who are willing to die on the steps of the Imam Ali shrine. The human shields have arrived in Najaf. Hundreds have come to what is one of the most holy Shia sites on solidarity marches in recent days. Many more have made their way in smaller groups from nearby towns and neighbourhoods. More than 2,000 have now pledged their allegiance to the Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr and are based in the compound at the shrine. Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani, a Sadr spokesman, said the presence of the civilians was intended to deter American forces. By simply turning up, they have maximised the loss of human life that could result from any attempt to storm the holy sites, a course already fraught with danger because of the outrage that serious physical damage to the shrine would provoke across Iraq and well beyond. The human shield supporters also appear ready to take up arms left by insurgents killed or wounded in the fighting. [complete article] Baghdad tries new Najaf peace bid By Luke Harding and Michael Howard, The Guardian, August 17, 2004 A delegation from Iraq's first national conference will today travel to the holy city of Najaf in a bold attempt to broker a peace deal with the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. The group of Iraqi politicians will set off from Baghdad in a fleet of minibuses, pursuing an initiative first suggested by a distant relative of the cleric, Sayed Hussain al-Sadr. The move came after the Najaf fighting dominated a meeting in the Iraqi capital where 1,300 political and religious leaders had gathered to agree a new assembly to oversee Iraq's interim government. In Najaf itself, the fighting between Mr Sadr's Mahdi army and US and Iraqi government forces appeared to have eased off. There were skirmishes near the Imam Ali mosque, where Mr Sadr's supporters are dug in, and in the nearby cemetery. Yesterday's proposal came after Hussein al-Sadr, an ally of the US, appealed for an end to the 12-day uprising in Najaf, which has plunged Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, into his worst crisis so far, damaging his authority. [complete article] Non-Arab recruits scout for al-Qaeda By John Diamond and Toni Locy, USA Today, August 16, 2004 Al-Qaeda allies are believed to be scouting U.S. targets, and the terror organization is using non-Arab recruits to avoid detection, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials say. The FBI has counterterrorism investigations in virtually all 56 of its field offices but has not broken up a known surveillance cell, either because agents are tailing suspects who have not committed crimes or because they have descriptions but not identities. It is unclear how many al-Qaeda scouts are in the USA. "The FBI has their eye on or has opened several hundred investigations of people sympathetic to or supportive of" al-Qaeda, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said. "If we knew somebody was here as an operative -- and we knew who they were or where they were -- they wouldn't be on the street." [...] "There was a legitimate concern right after 9/11 that the face of international terrorism was basically from the Middle East. We know differently," Ridge said. "We don't have the luxury of kidding ourselves that there is an ethnic or racial or country profile." [complete article] FBI goes knocking for political troublemakers By Eric Lichtblau, New York Times, August 16, 2004 The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York. F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass their communities for information about planned disruptions aimed at the convention and other coming political events, and they say they have developed a list of people who they think may have information about possible violence. They say the inquiries, which began last month before the Democratic convention in Boston, are focused solely on possible crimes, not on dissent, at major political events. But some people contacted by the F.B.I. say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans. "The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.'" [complete article] AFGHAN ELECTIONS NATO, U.S. will not accept full responsibility for fairness of election By Ahto Lobjakas, Radio Free Europe, August 16, 2004 Officials from both the NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) and the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) insist that Afghanistan's 9 October elections must be free and fair. Nevertheless, both also insist that the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the security of the poll rests with Afghanistan's own embryonic army and police forces. As a result, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have declined to send large groups of election monitors to Afghanistan. Both will send only small teams to the bigger cities, citing security fears in the regions beyond where warlords and militias rule. [complete article] One Afghan, 6 votes - and 5 up for sale By Carrol Harrington and Jared Ferrie, Toronto Star, August 16, 2004 To supplement his meagre income selling French fries from a cart, Aziz is cashing in on his newfound right to vote in Afghanistan's first national presidential election. After getting six voter registration cards — all containing his real name and photograph — he expects to make $1,000 for five cards and keep one for the Oct. 9 vote. "I have only six cards but I have met many people who have 10 or nine cards," Aziz said. For months, anecdotal stories have been circulating throughout Afghanistan of people illegally obtaining multiple voting cards in exchange for cash — which, in part, explains why the number of voting cards doled out exceeds the total number of estimated eligible voters. After an eight-month voter registration campaign by the United Nations, registration centres throughout the country closed yesterday. Although the final tally is not yet in, U.N. election officials are scrambling to explain why more than 9.9 million cards have been issued, surpassing the original estimated 9.8 million voters. In an election the U.S. had hoped to hold up as an example of democracy dawning in the developing world, there is now growing evidence that attempted vote-rigging has run amok. [complete article] In Najaf, human shields and militants await tanks By Michael Georgy, Reuters, August 16, 2004 With his militants and human shields holed up inside one of Shi'ite Islam's most sacred shrines, radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is playing a shrewd waiting game before an expected American-led offensive. Sadr's militiamen were inside the Imam Ali shrine and positioned along alleyways and on rooftops with a seemingly endless supply of AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades intermittently fired at U.S. troops in a nearby cemetery. But it was about 2,000 impassioned Iraqi civilian "volunteers" cheering Sadr in the marble-floored courtyard of the mosque who made the biggest show of force Monday. Traveling to Najaf from across Iraq, they are swelling the ranks of Sadr's supporters and could be another reason why U.S. troops may think twice before storming the shrine. "These people are a deterrent to the Americans because they are civilians. They are here so that the Americans won't attack the Imam Ali shrine," said Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani, a senior Mehdi Army commander and top aide to Sadr. The longer the Americans wait to launch any offensive, the more time Sadr has to gain new supporters and entrench them inside the sprawling mosque. Any serious damage to the shrine would enrage millions of Shi'ites around the world, including those who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population. [complete article] Police fire at reporters as U.S. tanks roll up to shrine By Adrian Blomfield, The Telegraph, August 16, 2004 The bullet that whistled through the lobby of the Sea Hotel in Najaf yesterday, embedding shards of glass into a foreign reporter's cheek before lodging itself in an air-conditioning unit, carried an unmistakeable message: "Get out." Journalists working in Iraq have long lived with the danger of being targeted by insurgents fighting US-led forces and their Iraqi allies. But in Najaf the roles have been abruptly reversed. Now the Iraqi police threaten journalists, and the insurgents welcome them. [complete article] Rebel cleric wields power from the heart of Baghdad By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, August 15, 2004 This week, Mr. Sadr's fighters, known as the Mahdi Army, gave a foretaste of the destabilizing potential their control of Sadr City gives. After American commanders imposed a 16-hour-a-day curfew on Sadr City, Mr. Sadr responded with a curfew order of his own, over all of Baghdad. Streets in the capital emptied after the 1 p.m. deadline the cleric's aides had set for businesses to close and workers to go home. The Sadr fighters seemed to thumb their noses at the American curfew. Even in daylight, they drive deep into the center of Baghdad in groups of two or three vehicles, firing mortars and rockets at the huge international compound along the Tigris River's west bank where the American Embassy, the American military command and Dr. Allawi are hunkered down. On one occasion, First Cavalry Division spotters on the roof of the Sheraton Hotel, barely 1,000 yards across the river from the center of the compound, watched powerless as one group of fighters emerged from a green van, fired four rockets across the river, then drove off. It is becoming routine for Mahdi fighters to stage attacks in other neighborhoods. In the Shaab area of Baghdad last week, militiamen in pickup trucks drove to a police station, surrounded it and began shooting, killing one officer and wounding two, a police officer from the station said. When Mahdi fighters demanded that a market in Shaab close the next day, vendors immediately complied. [complete article] Why Kerry is right on Iraq By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, August 23, 2004 John Kerry isn't being entirely honest about his views on Iraq. But neither is President George W. Bush. "Knowing what we know now," Bush asked, "would [Kerry] have supported going into Iraq?" The real answer is, of course, "no." But that's just as true for Bush as for Kerry. We now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Is Bush suggesting that despite this knowledge, he would still have concluded that Iraq constituted a "grave and gathering threat" that required an immediate, preventive war? Please. Even if Bush had come to this strange conclusion, no one would have listened to him. Without the threat of those weapons, there would have been no case to make to the American people or the world community. There were good reasons to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, but it was the threat of those weapons that created the international, legal, strategic and urgent rationale for a war. There were good reasons why intelligence agencies all over the world -- including those of Arab governments -- believed that Saddam had these weapons. But he didn't. The more intelligent question is, given what we knew at the time, was toppling Saddam's regime a worthwhile objective? Bush's answer is yes, Howard Dean's is no. Kerry's answer is that it was a worthwhile objective but was disastrously executed. For this "nuance" Kerry has been attacked from both the right and the left. But it happens to be the most defensible position on the subject. [complete article] Fables of the reconstruction By Christian Parenti, The Nation, August 30, 2004 The World Bank estimates that bringing Iraq back to its 1991 level of development will cost $55 billion and take at least four years. In the past seventeen months, US taxpayers have set aside a total of $24 billion to rebuild Iraq. Most of that sum has not been spent, though billions of dollars of poorly accounted for Iraqi oil revenues have been expended, or at least allocated to foreign (mostly American) contractors. Humanitarians see reconstruction as a moral obligation: a form of reparations for two US-led wars and thirteen years of brutal sanctions. From a military standpoint, reconstruction is central to the US counterinsurgency effort. The occupation's star officers, like Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, readily acknowledge that a broken economy means more violence. But seen up close, reconstruction in Iraq looks less like a mission of mercy or a sophisticated pacification program and more like a criminal racket. [complete article] HOME | ABOUT | CONTACT | Copyright © 2002-2004 Paul Woodward 
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