Real Reason We’re in Iraq

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.18.07]

Susie Bright has an interesting take on the scandal surrounding Paul Wolfowitz’s promotion and salary increase of his lover and unearths some info I wasn’t aware of.

The appointment of George Bush’s leading hawk as head of the World Bank was heading for a crisis over his relationship with a senior British employee.

Influential members of staff at the international organisation have complained to its board that Paul Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is so besotted with Oxford-educated Shaha Riza he cannot be impartial.

Extraordinarily, they claim she played a key role in pushing the 61-year-old Pentagon official into the Iraq War. And the row comes amid claims that Wolfowitz’s wife Clare once warned George Bush of the threat to national security any infidelity by her husband could cause.

A British citizen - at 51, eight years younger than Wolfowitz’s wife - Ms Riza grew up in Saudi Arabia and was passionately committed to democratising the Middle East when she allegedly began to date Wolfowitz.

After they moved to America, Shaha worked for the Iraq Foundation, set up by expatriates to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. She subsequently joined the National Endowment for Democracy, created by President Ronald Reagan to promote American ideals.

Bulent Riza said Shaha started to “talk to Paul” about reforming the Middle East. And New Yorker magazine’s respected commentator Paul Boyer observed that a senior World Bank official “named Shaha Ali Riza” was an “influence”.

From Hullabaloo (April 2005)

And even though staff complained then, it didn’t change anything. So, the pen is mightier than the sword?

The World Bank is staffed by a well-paid, highly educated secretariat, the vast majority of whom are non-Americans. … Nearly 90 percent of the staff opposed Wolfowitz’s nomination. A day after the banks directors confirmed his appointment, Bank Swirled, a satirical magazine produced by bank employees, reported that a moving crew had delivered some personal items to his new office, including a 1768 map of Iraq, with hundreds of red X’s denoting WMD’s, hundreds of black X’s denoting ‘Oil Well$,’ and one blue X denoting a ‘decent sushi restaurant’.

The zine is as good as The Onion in it’s way and worth a look see (latest issue here).

It may have sounded goofy when it first came out in 2005, but now that he’s had to apologize for the girlfriend fiasco, evidently it was all too true: we went into Iraq as part of a top-bottom love triangle between Wolfie, his mistress and her ex-husband! And I thought Condie was butch!

As Susie says:

So World Bank Prez Paul Wolfowitz’s siphoning of $100,000’s to tip his demanding dominatrix mistress has backfired. This wasn’t the spanking he had in mind.

Woe is he! The whole bank staff booed him when Wolfie tried to “explain,” and you can hardly blame them.

The hubris of Bush’s unpopular appointee provides the “sexy” reason the Bank’s Board can use to force his removal, since apparently ruining the world on the whim of one’s own conceits is not cause for dismissal.

“His womanising has come home to roost,” a Washington insider said.

What Price Surge?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.15.07]

From the New York Times, April 2nd:

The most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq has rejected an American-backed proposal to allow thousands of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party to return to government service, an aide to the cleric said Monday.

The rejection by the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, appears certain to fuel hostility between the majority Shiites and the former ruling Sunni Arabs, since many Sunni Arabs say they were unfairly purged from the government in the clampdown on the Baath Party.

The Americans say a partial reversal of the de-Baathification process, which began in 2003, is one of the most crucial steps the Iraqi government can take in wooing back disaffected Sunni Arabs and draining the Sunni-led insurgency of its zealotry. The White House has repeatedly told the Iraqi government that the process must be changed.

Cenk Uyger has written an article about this development. In the Iraqi world, it’s the turning point for the American experiment in Iraq. Let’s just break down the article into an easy-to-read schedule of developments, as follows:

1. Sunnis denied government jobs by Shiite Ayotollah; have no incentive to join in legitimizing the government; fight back against a government that excludes them

2. Insurgency grows and“surge” fails to stem growing insurgency
-either-2a. U.S. begins withdrawal; is replaced by Shiite militias

-or-

2a. “Stay the course”

2b. Shiite militias become impatient with lack of progress; begin attacking Sunnis

2c. U.S. engages Shiite militias in battle

3. U.S. is now in the middle of a Civil War, fighting both sides

-either-

3a. We hastily withdraw

-or-

3a. Our military experience heavy losses

4. We withdraw

Latest Poll: Natives Restless

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.6.07]

From Bob Scheer’s Saddam Has the Last Laugh on Truthdig:

For 3 years, the Iraqi people have been polled at great risk by 150 pollsters sponsored jointly by ABC, BBC and USA Today.

The 2006 results are in.

Percentage of Iraqis who:

believe that the country is better off today than under Hussein — 38
oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq — 79
think it is OK to attack coalition troops — 51
-Sunnis — 94
-Shiites — 35
-Kurds — 7
agree that “from today’s perspective, and all things considered,” it was “wrong that U.S.-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in spring 2003.” — 53
call the availability of jobs “bad” — 80
call the availability of electricity “bad” — 88
call the availability of clean water and medical care “bad” — 69
call the availability of fuel for cooking and driving “quite bad” — 88
say the U.S.-led coalition has done a bad job — 76
say the source of neighborhood violence is “unnecessary violence against citizens by U.S. or coalition forces” — 44
say Bush or coalition forces are the most to blame for the violence occurring in the country — 40
say al-Qaida is most to blame — 18

Stalemate

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.5.07]

Matt Taibbi comments on the political situation in Washington vis a vis continually re-funding the War in Iraq, instead of ending it:

In my visits to Washington in the past few months I’ve heard different stories from Democratic congressional aides about what the party’s intentions are. Some say they think the leadership is just going to stall and pass a bunch of non-binding, symbolic, Kumbayah horseshit to help propel whoever the Democratic candidate is into the White House two years from now.

Others claim with a straight face that all of these non-binding resolutions are only a start, that the strategy is to really end the war via a death-by-a-thousand-cuts type of legislative grind, with the leadership sending to the floor bill after bill after bill designed to eat away at either war policy or war funding. They claim that all of these votes are exercises in coalition-building, necessary steps to gathering the support needed to pass real biting measures later on.

But I’ll believe that when I see it. Right now, it all looks too convenient. With Bush a thrashing, drowning lame-duck whose endorsement in ‘08 will almost certainly be political poison to whomever has the misfortune to earn it, Republicans like Hagel and Oregon Senator Gordon Smith are conspicuously free to break ranks and save themselves.

Moreover, the Democratic measure is crafted in such a way that the Hagels and Smiths and Ben Nelsons of the world can safely get on a soapbox about the war without having to face accusations of depriving the troops of equipment and “what they need” to fight, which just so happens to be the leitmotif/preoccupation of the Rush/Hannity talk shows of late.

You’ll know that something real is going on in Washington when either a) the Democrats force the “antiwar conservatives” to actually cast a vote on whether or not to cut off spending for the war, or b) a dozen or so more Republicans cross the picket line to set up a possible override of a Bush veto.

Until and unless one of those unlikely moments arrives, it sure looks like what we’ve got is one of those rare “good for both teams” baseball trades, an arranged standoff in which everybody gets to suck a little of that hot nourishing blood in the ballooning antiwar poll numbers.

False Conquest

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.28.07]

Chalmers Johnson has just released Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, completing his trilogy on the United States as empire. He’s been making the circuit, giving long interviews.

What follows is the most logical explanation of why we invaded Iraq, the reaction of the Arab world and a cognizant assessment of the developing political and military situation:

Karlin: When Bush says we have to accomplish the mission, or Cheney says we have to achieve victory, the question hangs out there as to what our mission is now? And what could possibly be victory in these circumstances? To them, mission or victory mainly means that we are perceived as winning and Iraq remains under our control.

Johnson: I believe that’s absolutely true. It’s one of the reasons why we didn’t have a withdrawal strategy from Iraq — we didn’t intend to leave. Several people who retired from the Pentagon in protest at the start of the war — I’m thinking of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman particularly — have testified that the purpose of the invasion was to establish a new, stable pillar of power for the United States in the Middle East. We had lost our main two bases of power in the region — Iran, which we lost in 1979 because of the revolution against the Shah, whom we ourselves placed in power — and then Saudi Arabia, because of the serious blunder made after the first Gulf War — the placing of American Air Force and ground troops in Saudi Arabia after 1991. That was unnecessary. It’s stupid. We do not have an obligation to defend the government of Saudi Arabia. It was deeply resented by any number of sincere Saudi patriots, including former asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden. Their reaction was that the regime that is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites of Islam — Mecca and Medina — should not rely upon foreign infidels who know next to nothing about our religion and our background.

The result was that, over the 1990s and going into the 2000s, the Saudis began to restrict the uses we had of Prince Sultan Air Base at Riyadh. They became so restricted that, finally, in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we moved our main headquarters to Qatar and conducted the war from there. This left us, however, with only the numerous small bases we have in the Persian Gulf. But these are in rather fragile countries.

Iraq was the place of choice, to these characters, who knew virtually nothing about the Middle East. Spoke not a word of Arabic or knew even the history of it. Iraq was the one they picked out because it’s the second largest source of oil on earth, and it looked like an easy conquest.

We now know that the President himself didn’t understand the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam — that he did not appreciate that Saddam Hussein’s regime was a minority Sunni dictatorship over the majority Shia population. That once you brought about regime change there, the inevitable result would be unleashing the Shia population, who had previously been suppressed, to run their country, and that they would align themselves with the largest Shia power of all, a Shia superpower, namely, Iran, right next door, where most of their leaders had spent the period of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship.

That’s essentially what’s happened. It’s hard to imagine how this served our interests, given the deep hostility between Iran and the United States ever since we started interfering in that country back in 1953. It is hard to imagine how this served the interests of Israel, in that it gave Shia support there. Support from Iran now spreads throughout the Middle East to Hezbollah, Hamas, and other organizations.

Full interview is here.

Thousands of angry Iraqis pillage billion-dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.26.07]

Congress has appropriated nearly $1 billion to build the largest embassy in the world. A significant portion of that money is for security infrastructure. This future “fortress” is housed in Saddam Hussein’s former palace — providing more bad symbolism to the Iraqis.

The embassy complex is on 104 acres, with 21 buildings and facilities. It will eventually house a U.S. staff of 5,000. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, it has more than twice the staff and 20 times the budget of our Beijing embassy. The embassy will surpass all others in terms of size and staffing. from Alternet

The embassy is set to open this summer…

Hometown Baghdad

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.23.07]

The first 3 webisodes of the new series detailing life amongst the vanishing educated peoples of Baghdad are up and running.

My favorite is “Forbidden Salad,” the new notion that eating a mixed salad is punishable by death narrated and starring 23-year-old Adel (pictured below).

Check it out!

Future Changes I: We Will Be Overrun in Iraq

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.15.07]

[Note: In response to Aaron, this the first of 3 or 4 articles about the changes we’ll experience in the near future–the next 24 months. Will I be proved right? Time will tell.]

Within the next 24 months, our campaign in Iraq will fail and our army will be defeated. Why will this happen?

• Reason I: The Army knows how an insurgency must be defeated. But, that’s not the way they are being directed to proceed.
  

Released in December 2006, the US Army’s Handbook on Counterinsurgency states unequivocally:

Unsuccessful Practices
Place priority on killing and capturing the enemy, not on engaging the population.
Conduct battalion-sized operations as the norm.
Concentrate military forces in large bases for protection.
Focus special operations forces primarily on raiding.

Our forces are doomed to failure.

• Reason II: Our military will be shortly or are right now being faced with overwhelming force. Robert Fisk, veteran war correspondent, one of the world’s most experienced journalists covering the Middle East for the past thirty years made the following comments:
  

There was a very interesting comment from the British Ministry of Defense about a month ago…They said British troops are now in the most violent combat they’ve experienced since the Korean War. And British defense correspondents sort of put this up as a great sign…And I thought, hang on a minute, that’s not the point.

What happened in Korea? The Gloucestershire Regiment were overwhelmed by millions of Chinese troops crossing the Yalu River. We couldn’t stand up to the vast numbers of soldiers that were coming in from the north in Korea. They were just overrunning us, totally.

And what was happening, I realized immediately, in Afghanistan is that soldiers were being so totally outnumbered, they were having to retreat out of villages. In one case, I understand, twelve British troops in a school in a village were facing 300 Taliban and had to call in US air strikes to destroy the rest of the village to save themselves.

…one story…I know it’s a fact, because I’ve investigated it fully in Iraq — is that in the first battle of Fallujah…, there were twelve US Marines guarding the mayor’s office at Ramadi,…and they were attacked by hundreds of Iraqi insurgents, and that twelve-man US Marine unit was liquidated. They were totally eliminated. They were killed, all of them. They were wiped out.

…So the dangers you see that we’re now facing, very much — I don’t mean to make too facile a comparison — very much the same dangers that the crusaders faced with overwhelming force from the Muslim armies of the 12th century, is that the local populations are now so full of fury and anger against us that they are attacking us in their hundreds, overwhelming force.

This Past Week

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.5.07]

Surfing has its benefits. So much to discover and learn. First, a few quotes recently discovered:

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

“Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

-George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

“Of all the enemies to liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other…. (Delegating) such powers (to the president) would have struck, not only at the fabric of the Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.”

-James Madison

Next,

• While looking (again) for Busted, which I recommended last year, (it was created by flexyourrights and the ACLU–I discovered it had been withdrawn from youtube), I found this great video archive, jonhs.net, which has a treasure trove of videos including:
  

• Full-length feature films from all eras of the 20^th century (e.g., M, Buster Keaton, Chaplan, etc.)
  


• Documentaries (Oil, Smoke & Mirrors, Hitler’s Private World, Gangs in El Salvador, 911 Truth, Big Brother, Big Business)


• Animation, Music vids and performace docs,TV shows

• Thanks to the latest issue of Rolling Stone, I downloaded and watched the 10-minute Justin Timberlake video for What Goes Around Comes Around (available in .torrent form–check google for download links). Written and directed by Nick Cassevetes, it stars super-sensual Scarlett Johansson in dark club & mansion settings with a cast of 20-somethings. The car-crash at the end in a pre-dawn downtown L.A., is so great. Timberlake has chops!
  

• Again thanks to RS, I looked through the top press photos of 2006 on the World Press Photo web site, where you can view everything from portraits of Clint Eastwood to shots of war zones all over the world.
  

Then, there was the usual plethora of blog articles on the usual plethora of subjects of immediate importance:

• Rose Ann Demoro writes in Public Health Alert: Stage Red:
  

In the past 30 years, the number of public hospitals in America has fallen by 30%. Public hospitals and clinics could soon be as extinct as the woolly mammoth.

In that same period the combined debt of state and local governments has exploded, climbing by 852% to nearly $200 billion. The devastating consequences become more apparent every day.

While our public facilities are starved for resources, hospital profits the past 20 years totaled $310 billion. The 13 largest drug companies recorded $62 billion in profits in 2004. The 20 largest HMOs made $10.8 billion in 2005.

David Roberts writes in 24 Sucks about Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan’s meeting with the creators of 24 to tell them to cut it out: torture doesn’t work and the show’s continual use of it is nothing more than bullshit propaganda. He also details the rise of torture in movies and television and what it might mean:

There’s been an unsettling change in not only what heroes do, but what makes a hero at all. Any comic book reader knows that what separates heroes from evildoers is their unwillingness to kill, torture, or even personally punish the guilty. Restraint, in and of itself, is a heroic attribute. … You can’t transgress ever, or you blur that line separating you from your enemies (another treasured trope is the defeated villain taunting the hero to give in and kill him, the subtext being that if the evildoer can make the hero act the villain, he will have won even as he died).

[24’s Jack] Bauer, of course, is the antithesis of that attitude. His heroism stems from his brutality, his willingness to dissolve every ethical boundary in pursuit of higher ends. His is a heroism for a weak and scared nation, one that’s decided the old ways of restraint and ethical exceptionalism are insufficiently effective and is trying to convince itself that a loosening of those bonds could restore order and security. That’s a scary shift in the culture.

Finally, Amy Goodman of democracynow interviewed General Wesley Clark (our next Democratic President, for my money) last Tuesday, then podcast the entire interview on Friday. General Clark is honest, decisive and active, in a way completely unlike Obama, Hillary and even Gore, and he is someone to watch in the coming months and year ahead.

Gas Rationing Next

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.2.07]

Writing for The Daily Reckoning Australia, Bill Bonner says it better than I ever could:

The worldwide media is speculating as to what the Bush administration will do next. The general tone of the guesswork is this: just how dumb are these people?

So widespread is the belief that the United States is run by idiots, we feel compelled to rush to their defence. They are morons, maybe… but not idiots.

There are two major parts to the administration’s program: deficit spending and war. Either one would be ruinous in itself. But what is remarkable is that neither seems to take any notice of the other. Normally, in times of war, the whole budget is put toward winning it. Citizens see the necessity of sacrifice. They cinch up their own belts and resign themselves to living lean until the battles are over and the boys come home.

But this war breaks all the rules. Spending on non-war items continues to go up, even though the war itself is incredibly expensive. And even though the nation lacks the money to pay for it, no ‘war bonds’ are being offered. No collections for scrap tin or iron are taken up. No ration tickets are distributed.

Guns or butter, Lyndon Johnson was warned. You can have one or the other, but try to go for both and you will make a mess of things. Of course, Johnson did try for both. His Great Society was also the society that was trying to kick butt in Vietnam. As it turned out, it got its own butt kicked…and the economy went into the worst period of inflation in its history, followed by the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The Bush boys knew these facts as well as us. Even better known, since Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have been Capitol Hill insiders since the Nixon Administration… and hardly a major blunder in Washington has been committed since the 1970s without their help.

No… the Bush administration is not just plain stupid. It is stupid in a more complex way. Will it now turn its stupidity on Iran? We don’t know. It would be a very stupid thing to do. But put that way, it sounds like a certainty.

War in Iran?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.26.07]

General Wesley Clark has partnered up with VoteVets, the site for veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars, to start a new web site built to collect signatures on a petition to be presented to El Presidente Decider that War with Iran is not the answer with the Axis of Evil country to the East.

You can go to stopIranWar to sign the petition and find other ways you might make a difference and do something about the future start of WWIII.

Will Work for Food

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.26.07]

“A country with two great rivers should have been the biggest exporter in the world, but now we beg for food from those who participated in killing us.”

Iraq is rich in agricultural resources.

Barley, wheat, pulses and the famous Iraqi dates are staple diet. Common meals in Iraq include rice, lamb, chicken and locally grown vegetables like cucumbers, onions and tomatoes.

But, when Paul Bremer began governing Iraq after the invasion, he lowered tariffs on imported goods, including food, Iraq farmers could not compete and many went into bankruptcy.

And then the cost of imported food inflated dramatically, fueling stability-challenging inflation. The farmers who remained in business are hampered getting their produce to market by the scarcity of gas and the security situation in the country.

Initially, international aid helped provide food, but much of that was stopped after aids workers were kidnapped as the insurgency began. That left Australian and other US contractors to send in food stuffs. But there are problems:

Low quality – In July 2006, thousands of tons of contaminated food was destroyed that was past its expiry date and that had already caused wide-spread food poisoning. Distributions of Australian wheat were found to contain steel fragments.

Corruption – Sectarian favoritism or simple corruption in the distribution of food rations, which 60% of Iraqis use and which 6.5 million are “highly dependent” upon.

When something as basic eating is a big problem, people aren’t thinking about democracy or feeling any gratitude toward their “liberators.”

“The whole country has been stolen from us. If this goes on another six months, we will be just like any starving country.”

More here.

Just Saying No

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.19.07]

This explains everything. A blogpost Bob Burnett theorizes that Bush’s failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror spring directly from the neo-con, fundamentalist theories about the 60s upheavals and cultural changes (sexual revolution, feminism, abortion, welfare, Vietnam protests).

Many Americans wonder why the White House promotes just say no programs when they don’t work. The answer is simple and disturbing: George Bush is a dogmatic ultra-conservative; he believes that the maxim, “just say no,” solves a variety of social problems ranging from pre-marital sex to terrorism.

Beginning in the Reagan Administration, conservatives attacked a so-called “culture of permissiveness” they claimed had been unleashed by the social events of the sixties. They accused liberals of espousing sixties values: “if it feels good, do it.” Conservatives declared that a mythical liberal attack on traditional values produced many of America’s problems such as poverty, promiscuity, and drug use. In 1993, conservative scholar Myron Magnet produced the seminal expression of this philosophy, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass. Magnet argued that liberal ideology promoted a culture of victimization that held “the poor back from advancement by robbing them of responsibility for their fate and thus further squelching their initiative and energy.” The Dream and the Nightmare influenced many conservatives: among them a Texas gubernatorial candidate and his campaign manager. George W. Bush , “told the Wall Street Journal that it was the most important book he’d ever read after the Bible. [Furthermore] Bush strategist Karl Rove call[ed] The Dream and the Nightmare a roadmap to the president’s ‘compassionate conservatism.’”

The Bush-Rove brand of ultra-conservatism–their belief that liberalism has fostered a culture of victimization–strongly influenced this Administration’s domestic and foreign policy. Combined with the naive belief that the free market will inevitably solve most social problems, Bush’s conservatism produced a potpourri of aberrant social policies: Don’t give poor children free lunches or special tutoring because that will enhance their sense of being victims. Don’t teach teenagers about birth control because that will cause them to become promiscuous. Don’t provide clean needles for drug users because that will legitimize their behavior. And so forth.

In response to every American social problem, the Bush Administration relied upon a simple maxim: individual behavior equates to individual responsibility. Therefore, they argued that Government programs are unnecessary because behavior change requires only willpower; all an individual needs to do is to just say no and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The free market provides unlimited opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of it.

Internationally, Bush’s “Just say no” response to terrorism mirrors his domestic policy on sex-education. He views the decision to join with terrorists, or to engage in pre-marital sex, in simplistic moral terms: a contest between good and evil; a choice that an individual makes regardless of the social context. This seems bizarre unless one understands that in Bush conservatism there is no social context except for the marketplace that, in the President’s mind, always rewards heroic individual action.

George W. Bush is a true believer. Only he’s not a devotee of mainstream Christianity, but rather of an ultra-conservative social philosophy that believes the best form of sex education is simply not to talk about it, to chant, “just say no” and hope for the best. An extreme ideology that believes the best way to eradicate terrorism is to kill everyone who might be a terrorist and, in the process, ignore the root causes of their violent extremism; to respond to the anger on the Arab street with a simple mantra: “just say no.”

Around for the Long Haul

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.15.07]

This is fairly old, but underreported news. We are building an enduring, military presence in Iraq. Check out more on military news here.

As of mid-2005, the U.S. military had 106 forward operating bases in Iraq, including what the Pentagon calls 14 “enduring” bases – all of which are to be consolidated into four mega-bases.

1) Green Zone (Baghdad) includes the main palaces of Saddam Hussein. The area houses the offices of major U.S. consulting companies and the temporary U.S. embassy facilities.

2) Camp Anaconda (Balad Airbase) Logistical base is spread over 15 square miles and is being constructed to accommodate 20,000 soldiers.

3) Camp Taji (Taji) Former Iraqi Republican Guard “military city,“ is now a huge U.S. base equipped with a Subway, Burger King and Pizza Hut.

4) Camp Falcon-Al-Sarq (Baghdad) In late September 2003, the 439th Engineering Battalion delivered over 100,000 tons of gravel and is assisting with building roads, walls, guard towers, and buildings for Camp Falcon planned to house 5,000 soldiers.

5) Post Freedom (Mosul) Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Mosul is currently home to the 101st Airborne Division.

6) Camp Victory- Al Nasr (Baghdad Airfield) Is a U.S. Army base situated on airport grounds about 5 kilometers from Baghdad International Airport. The base can house up to 14,000 troops.

7) Camp Marez (Mosul Airfield) Located at an airfield southwest of Mosul, has a tent dining capacity for 500.

8) Camp Renegade (Kirkuk) Strategically located near the Kirkuk oil fields and the Kirkuk refinery and petrochemical plant, has a dormitory that houses up to 1,664 airmen.

9) Camp Speicher (Tikrit) Named after F/A-18 pilot Michael “Scott” Speicher who was shot down during the first Gulf War in 1991, is located near Tikrit in northern Iraq.

10) Camp Fallujuh (Rail Station?) The exact whereabouts and name is unknown. Analysts believe that the U.S. is building an “enduring base” in Fallujah, a large town forty miles west of Baghdad. Fallujah has proved to be the most violence prone area in Iraq.

11) Unknown name (Nasiriyah) The exact whereabouts and name is unknown. Analysts believe that the U.S. is building an “enduring base” near Nasiriyah, a provincial capital of South-East Iraq.

12) Unknown name (between Irbil and Kirkuk)

13) & 14) Unknown Locations

Better Living through Technology

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.14.07]

From the BBC:

As the communal bloodshed has worsened, some Iraqis have set up advice websites to help others avoid the death squads.

One tip - on the Iraq League site, one of the best known - is for people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth’s detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block.

For some time now, vigilante-style guard forces have been operating in many neighbourhoods, especially in Sunni areas targeted by Shia militias.

With Google Earth, the Iraq League website suggests, people can also work out the most likely approach of their attackers.

It’s thought that insurgents have also used the map site, examining the detailed images to pick out potential targets.

More here.

More War Blogs

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.8.07]

Riverbend Blog, which I wrote about previously, is featured in the current issue of Rolling Stone along with several other Iraqi bloggers. It’s worth a look:

Iraqi Confused Kid – “news and articles about the absurdity of living in Iraq by an Iraqi former heavy-metal guitarist in a no-particular-place-to-go heavy-metal band.”

Great list of “Important Iraqi Videos” links.

In the past, I didn’t want to leave Iraq - earlier to February 2006, life was difficult, but in a way, Iraqis got used to it, after my friends were killed, it took on a whole new meaning, and two days after the last friend passed to the world beyond, I heard this story, it was all I needed to know that there is no life for me here anymore.[1/7/07]

A Family in Baghdad – “mother: Faiza, sons: Raed, Khalid , and Majid writing down their diaries. Father: Azzam is not interested.”

Each son has his own sub blog; mom has a blog to teach you Arabic.

Peace be upon you…

What does it mean for a human being to live in a state of waiting? What does it mean when his whole life is restless, unstable, and hanging from a thread?

This is how I feel, and so are the feelings of millions of Iraqis inside Iraq and abroad, since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, until now…

At the beginning, we used to wait for services to get better, for the emergence of a new government; one that would think in a new way and act with a democratic mentality, an advanced professional mentality that would improve the infrastructure of the country: the water services, the electricity, the communication systems, the schools, hospitals, etc…

Iraq has oil, water, fertile lands, and precious metals. Iraq is the of land of resources since ancient times, and the Iraqis, like all other nations in the world, dream of living a secure, and settled life…[1/25]

Iraq the Model – “New points of view about the future of Iraq.”

This one is pro-Bush, pro-American. Has a link to Pajamas Media.

In Baghdad when it is suddenly quiet around you for any length of time you can expect someone nearby to turn to you and say suspiciously, “Isn’t it quiet outside?”

By “quiet” the speaker means that there have been no sounds of explosions or gunfire for a few hours. Those sounds are now part of normal daily life in Baghdad while “quiet” is a state that invites amazement and suspicion. In this city it’s usual to respond to the above question with “Let’s hope it stays like this.”[1/26]

Healing Iraq – “Daily news and comments on the situation in post Saddam Iraq by an Iraqi dentist.”

Great links to other Iraqi blogs (e.g., The Mesopotamian, Ishtar Talking, Roads to Iraq, Baghdad Girl, etc.).

Another close call today in my neighbourhood in Baghdad. It was showered with over 30 mortar shells from nearby Shi’ite districts after news of the attacks against Shia pilgrims in Diyala got out. One shell tore through a bedroom on the second floor of my grandmother’s house, which is next to ours. No one was hurt, thankfully. Another hit a nearby house and killed our long-time neighbour who was on the roof.

U.S. soldiers, who have cordoned the district for the last few days, knocked on our door at 6 a.m. My family was asleep and they didn’t hear it. The U.S. soldiers then went to my grandmother’s house next door and stayed for four hours, drinking tea and chatting with my uncle. My uncle, a former army officer and a fierce Arab nationalist, seems to have told the American soldiers all about the history of Iraq’s colonisers, all the way back to the Mongols and Hulago. My family said the American soldiers, who listened attentively to my uncle’s story, apologised and told him that they did not want to be in Iraq either but they did not have much of a choice.[1/31]

Early Histories III: Afghanistan

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.7.07]

1979: April — Zbigniew Brzezinski instructs the CIA to develop a comprehensive plan for a secret war in Afghanistan backed by the US. July – Carter signs document authorizing US to arm the mujahideen. December – USSR invades Afghanistan. “It [the US arming of the rebels] had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap” – Z. Brzezinski

1979 — 88: US pours $3 billion into Afghanistan (matched by $3 bil from Saudi-Arabia); Green Berets are sent in to teach the rebels how to use the high-tech weapons the US is supplying.

Saudi intelligence, with US approval, uses the young engineer, Osama bin Laden, to funnel millions of dollars to rebel forces. Starting in ’87, CIA begins issuing visas to Middle East applicants to come to the US for training in terrorism for the war in collaboration with bin Laden (this continues into the 90s).

1988 — 89: Soviets withdraw from Afghanistan; the USSR begins to unravel.

1992: With half their population affected (1 million dead, 3 million wounded, 5 million refugees), Afghan society is destroyed. Having no further use for the country, the US walks away. The Taliban rises from the ruins.

A “fixation with combating the Soviet threat,” writes historian Douglas Little, “had led a generation of US policymakers to neglect the appeal of revolutionary nationalism and radical Islam among the people of the Muslim world” – an appeal that our actions served to deepen.

“That the Pakistani and US intelligence services helped stroke the fires of radical Islam among bin Laden and the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s is one of the cruelest ironies of the Cold War,” says Little; both bin Laden and the Taliban, he points out, “were to some degree Frankenstein’s monsters created by US and Pakistani political experiments that were too clever by half.”

While it is true that a good part of the resistance to the Soviets was indigenous, the fact is that we instigated an anti-Communist “proxy” war that resulted in worldwide terrorist blowback. If, concludes Little, we had had some sympathy for revolutionary nationalism in the 1950s, for figures such as Mossadegh [see my Early Histories I] and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser – whose aspirations were hardly those of a clash of civilizations – we might have avoided Khomeini and bin Laden.

– Morris Berman, Dark Ages America (This was the main source for the Early Histories Series)

Early Histories II: Iraq

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.7.07]

1920: League of Nations makes Mesopotamia a British protectorate.

1921: British install King Faisal I on the throne, then sign a treaty with the King placing military and economic control of the country in British hands.

1927: Oil is discovered in Iraq just north of Kirkuk.

1929: The Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC) is founded with shares to British, French, Dutch, American and Portuguese companies and none to Iraq.

1958: Abdul Karim Qasim leads a military coup overthrowing the pro-British government and executing King Faisal II and his family. Seen even today by Iraqis as the moment of liberation from the British.

1961: Qasim demands the IPC grant Iraq 20% ownership and 55% of the profits. IPC refuses so he decrees that by ’63 IPC will be stripped of 99.5% of its concession in the country and establishing the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company.

1959 — 63: Once again, as in Iran, Arab nationalists are seen as Communist by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. After numerous attempts at assassination by the CIA (including a plot using a poisoned handkerchief and another with the young Saddam Hussein playing a role), Qassim is removed by coup. The Ba’ath party comes to power just before the new law on IPC was to go into effect. New regime reaffirms IPC’s control over Iraq oil fields.

1964 — 68: New leadership dismisses and arrests Ba’athist leaders. Saddam is imprisoned until he escapes in ’67. In ’68, Ba’athists overthrow the government; Saddam is made deputy to the president, but quickly emerges as the more powerful.

1972: Iraq becomes the first Arab country to nationalize its oil. By ’79, oil exports flood Iraqi coffers with $47 billion (in that year alone). Unlike Iran, petrodollars in Iraq filter down to the Iraqi people, creating an extensive free public services, a large body of small landowners and a strong public sector.

1979: Saddam takes the presidency after the former president begins making treaties with Syria (also Ba’athist) to unite the 2 countries (and marginalize Saddam forever). He begins purging “disloyal” party members and is considered the worst of all Middle-East tyrants before or since. US considers him a bulwark against Communism, so doesn’t care what he does to his people.

1980 - 88: Opportunistic Saddam invades Iraq with US tacit approval. Envisioning a quick victory, he is rebuffed by the Iranians.

1982: Reagan administration secretly provides Saddam with satellite photos of Iranian troop movements; funnels black market arms to Iraq; takes Iraq off the state terrorist list (even though intelligence showed Saddam supporting terrorism), so Iraq is eligible to buy arms and technology.

1983: While receiving intelligence that Iraq is using chemical weapons on Iranians almost daily, Reagan responds by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq and authorizing the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax and bubonic plague.

1986: American air force officers sent to work with Iraqis; US Navy sinks 3 Iranian patrol boats and 2 offshore oil platforms.

1988: US forces blow up 2 oil rigs and put half the Iranian navy out of action.

1988: After Iran-Iraq war ends, Saddam uses US-made helicopters to drop chemical bombs on 30 Kurdish cities killing 3 – 5, 000. Pentagon concocts story that Iran is responsible.

1989: Iraqi personnel are allowed to attend the 9^th annual Symposium on Detonation at Los Alamos; all during the 80s, US military exports are knowingly sent to Iraqi nuclear installations.

1990 I: After the Voice of America broadcasts an editorial criticizing Iraqi’s abysmal human rights record, US ambassador to Iraq is forced to apologize, then all future VOA broadcasts have to be cleared by the State department.

1990 II:

July 24: Margaret Tutwiler, State Department spokesperson: “there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait.”

July 25: US Ambassador Glaspie, who is fluent in Arabic, tells Sadddam “we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait.”

August 2: Iraq invades Kuwait.

August 6: Bush, Sr. declares intention to eject Iraq from Kuwait.

During August: Saddam’s regime attempts (5 times) to negotiate with US (all are rejected or ignored).

1991: After a young Kuwaiti woman testifies about babies being thrown from incubators to the ground (she is actually the daughter of a Kuwaiti leader, coached by a US PR firm from a script), US invades Iraq, buying off other Arab nations (and punishing those who don’t support the action by cutting aid), stationing troops in Saudi-Arabia (the start of infidels on Arab lands). US bombs Iraqi infrastructure (in violation of international law): 200,000 die. In February, after a cease-fire is in place, US pilots (jokingly calling it a “turkey shoot”) slaughter retreating Iraqi troops, killing upwards of 30,000 (in violation of international law).

1991 – 2003: Sanctions meant to pressure Saddam into resigning only serve to consolidate his power and succeed in killing 500,000 children (over just the first 8 years). US fights aggressively to prevent Iraq from purchasing dangerous weapons such as: items necessary to generate electricity, dialysis, dental and firefighting equipment, water tankers, milk- and yogurt-production equipment, vaccines for children, flour milling contracts, wheelbarrows, toilet paper, the list goes on and on. Images of mal-nourished and dead kids flood the Arab world.

Early Histories I: Iran

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.7.07]

1908: British company strikes oil in what is then known as Persia. British government moves in taking a 50% interest in the company.

1919: The Anglo-Persian Agreement is signed finalizing British control of Persian army, treasury, transport system and communication network. Martial law is declared. Huge amounts of oil are extracted. Persian people get nothing.

1921 – 25: British assist a military coup, co-lead by Reza Khan Mirpanj, who eventually forces the King into exile and has himself made 1^st Shah.

1933: Change in oil agreement giving Persia some of the oil profits (£7mil out of the £40mil made in 1947). The Shah changes Persia to Iran in 1935 to signify the Aryan origins of Persia, influenced by his close ties to Nazi Germany.

1941: UK and Russia invade Iran and depose the Shah, who is too close to the Nazis. His son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, is placed in power.

1949: Independent audit of the British oil company reveals it has been cheating Iran out off huge sums of money. The Majlis (Iran Parliament) begins moving towards either a 50-50 split or outright nationalization.

1951: Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, an upper-class Iranian committed to democracy and self-determination, gets a law through Parliament nationalizing the petroleum industry. Mossadegh comes to address the UN to defend his policies. He is made Time’s Man of the Year for 1951 (“the Iranian George Washington”).

1952 – 53: Regime changes; Newly-elected President Eisenhower’s Administration includes the Dulles brothers, who are proponents of the Cold War and see Communists everywhere. Meanwhile, Churchill’s Conservative party comes back into power in the UK, hell bent on keeping their grasp on the oil of Persia. The English persuade the US to attempt a coup of Mossadegh.

Although Roger Coiran, CIA chief of station in Tehran, warned Dulles that a coup would result in Iranians forever viewing the United States as a supporter of colonialism, the CIA orchestrates a series of dirty tricks, bribes and kickbacks (called Operation Ajax) to depose Mossedegh. The Shah retakes the throne. A new oil agreement is signed splitting Iran oil profits amongst UK (40%), US (40%) and other European (20%) oil corporations.

1954: Elections for Parliament are blatantly rigged; the Majdis become a rubber stamp for the Shah. Over the next 25 years, the Shah uses his secret police, the notorious Savak (trained by the CIA and Mossad), to torture more than a half million (of which at least 10,000 were killed).

The US action is transparent to the peoples and leaders of the Mid-East and tilts the region away from freedom and democracy toward dictatorships. The message is clear: oppressive regimes are ok as long as they are friendly to the West.

The Shah is allowed to purchase any weapons short of nuclear from the US and given the aid to do so. In the 70s, one-third of all US military purchases were made by Iran. Regular Iranians saw none of the plentiful US aid the Shaw was raking in during this time. People were doing so badly (average annual wage: $350), they turned to religion. The Ayotollahs gained influence.

1978 - 79: Anti-Shah demonstrations begin; President Carter sends riot-control equipment and is blamed by angry Iranians. The Shah is forced to flee to Panama, then comes to the US for medical treatment, making the Iranians suspicious that the US will once again try a coup. Iranians take hostages from the American Embassy as “insurance” against this widely-held assumption.

1980: Carter fails to free the hostages and as negotiations drag along, Regan is elected and suddenly, the hostages are freed. Iran nationalizes oil.

After We Leave

[Originally posted on goofyblog 1.18.07]

El Presidente Decider announced an escalation along with a not-so- subtle declaration of his war intentions on Iran and Syria the other day. Whatever we do over there in the coming months (or years), we will lose, have lost already. To see why, go no further than to Netflix to rent Battle of Algiers (1966), the true story of the beginning insurgency against the French occupation of Algiers.

Now, Bill Bonner or Empire of Debt fame, has written briefly about the conquest of Bagdad, the French experience in Algeria and its aftermath:

If life were like school, George W. Bush would have known that Iraq would test him and his administration. He might have done a little study before getting involved in the area.

He could have begun his research with the life of one of the world’s most successful men of action - Alexander the Great. Alexander conquered the entire ‘known’ world. But even Alexander couldn’t survive Iraq. He died in Babylon in 323 AD.

In retrospect, George W. Bush might have spent a few hours studying more recent conflicts between Christendom and the Muslim world. America’s current president surely could have learned something from reading a little about France’s war in Algeria. The French are always ahead of us; no military campaign or political project is so stupid that the French haven’t already tried it.

It was after World War II that an independent movement in Algeria took hold. France sent its brave young men to put down the uprising, but after fighting for a few years, the French had had enough. They could win the battles, but they could never win ‘hearts and minds’ by killing Algerians. Only when the French had withdrawn, did the real killing begin and the real heroes appear.

Hundreds of thousands of local Algerian soldiers had fought next to the French. These ‘Harkis’ had been loyal to the French for many years. But when the time came for the French to leave, the Harkis were to be left behind. What awaited them was vengeance.

An article in Le Point from February 2002 noted that were 200,000 Muslim Harkis who had fought with the French. And after the French left, approximately 50,000 of them - including many entire families as well as civilian authorities that had cooperated with the French - were murdered. Whether the French saw it coming or not, we don’t know. But a few officers realized that their men - if they were left behind - would be massacred.

Brave men follow orders. But braver ones have the courage to disobey.

“One colonel didn’t want to abandon his men. He marched them up to Oran where the ships were taking the French back to France. He went up to the ship’s captain and demanded that he load on his troops - who were not French, but local Harkis…you know, Arabs. The captain of the ship said he was not authorized to take the Harkis. The colonel pulled out his pistol and put it up to the captain’s head. ‘Take them all, or I’ll blow your brains out,’ he said. He got them back to France. But I think the colonel was arrested. And the Harkis were sent back.”

Still a few officers - such as Daniel Abolivier - were able to organize an underground railway to get the Harkis to France. A few survived. The others were lucky if their throats were cut.

George W. Bush likes to be thought of as a man of action. But there is a time for thought…and a time for action. A married man who has fallen in love with his secretary, for example, has already gone too far. He should have thought about it earlier. And when George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq, too, a crucial opportunity for reflection, for study and for preparation was missed. Now, he has to wonder what will happen to his own Harkis when he leaves.