Category Archives: Iraq

The following item is from the Inter Press Service, an organization that I don't know much about. According to the not-100%-reliable Wikipedia, IPS is an Italian-based organization dedicated to giving third world news and journalists more prominence. The fact of the raid is also reported by the International Federation of Journalists. What is most disturbing, though, is the all-too-plausible account of what motivates these raids quoted below; how much credence you give this, despite its plausibility, must turn at least in part on what one makes of the source.

IRAQ: Another U.S. Military Assault on Media

BAGHDAD, Feb 23 (IPS) – Iraqi journalists are outraged over yet another U.S. military raid on the media.

U.S. soldiers raided and ransacked the offices of the Iraq Syndicate of Journalists (ISJ) in central Baghdad Tuesday this week. Ten armed guards were arrested, and 10 computers and 15 small electricity generators kept for donation to families of killed journalists were seized.

This is not the first time U.S. troops have attacked the media in Iraq, but this time the raid was against the very symbol of it. Many Iraqis believe the U.S. soldiers did all they could to deliver the message of their leadership to Iraqi journalists to keep their mouth shut about anything going wrong with the U.S.-led occupation.

“The Americans have delivered so many messages to us, but we simply refused all of them,” Youssif al-Tamimi of the ISJ in Baghdad told IPS. “They killed our colleagues, closed so many newspapers, arrested hundreds of us and now they are shooting at our hearts by raiding our headquarters. This is the freedom of speech we received.”

Some Iraqi journalists blame the Iraqi government.

“Four years of occupation, and those Americans still commit such foolish mistakes by following the advice of their Iraqi collaborators,” Ahmad Hassan, a freelance journalist from Basra visiting Baghdad told IPS. “They (the U.S. military) have not learned yet that Iraqi journalists will raise their voice against such acts and will keep their promise to their people to search for the truth and deliver it to them at any cost.”

There is a growing belief in Iraq that U.S. allies in the current Iraqi government are leading the U.S. military to raid places and people who do not follow Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's directions.

And these same people think they are smart enough to avoid become Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz's puppets? (Have you read Sy Hersh’s latest yet? You really should.)

Law students are notorious for suffering from exam stress — and complaining about it.

It seems we in the legal world don't know what real stress is: consider this letter from an Iraqi father, writing about waiting to hear whether his daughter has survived her midterms — a ten-day period of being a “sitting duck” for suicide bombers.

She, like thousands of university students in Iraq, is taking her mid-term tests, starting today. They have a fixed schedule, i.e. are sitting ducks – for ten days.

Since the beginning of this academic year, the students in her college have been led quite a dance; a deadly dance. The college is situated in an area that has become more like a war zone than a normal neighborhood; it is too near Haifa Street for it to quiet down for more than a few days at a stretch.

They started out by going to college every day. Their college more like a fortress for its security, than an educational facility.

Attack after attack on the surrounding residential area frightened the Dean into improvising a random lecture schedule that allows them to attend their lectures in no pattern that lasts more than one week.
…
With heavy heart I am won over by her insistence, and she attends the random lectures for three weeks.

A great big double explosion takes place at the main entrance of Al-Mustansiriya one Tuesday, killing more than 120 students and wounding more than 200, most of whom were female students. One car bomb and one explosive belt … body parts were brought down from the date palms, as were remnants of their uniforms.

Although hurting for all the families that weredevastated that afternoon, I thanked God my daughter was not harmed.

At home for another two weeks.

Go attend Baghdad University. Also protected. No way.

All this time studying at home and online, doing her best not to lose yet another year to chaos, she is now taking her mid term exams at her college. A sitting duck.

She is mad to continue.

I am mad to let her.

Via Juan Cole, a link to this article reporting that US bombing 'terror targets'. The US spin is that

air strikes were aimed at insurgent strongholds in Bo'aitha, a sparsely populated neighbourhood on the west bank of the Tigris, south of the city centre.

While lying within the city limits, Bo'aitha is a district of farms and smallholdings, whose scattered villages are known to house the hideouts of Sunni insurgent gangs linked to al-Qaeda.

In contrast, Prof. Cole writes,

Late Saturday, the US Air Force launched a series of bombing raids on southeast Baghdad. This is absolutely shameful, that the US is bombing from the air a civilian city that it militarily occupies. You can't possibly do that without killing innocent civilians, as at Ramadi the other day. It is a war crime. US citizens should protest and write their congressional representatives. It is also the worst possible counter-insurgency tactic anyone could ever have imagined. You bomb people, they hate you. The bombing appears to have knocked out what little electricity some parts of Baghdad were still getting.

As near as I can make up by comparing this map, which shows Bo'aitha as region 89, but lacks a legend showing the scale, with this map which has a scale but no marking for Bo'aitha, that region is about six kilometers from the city center, which is roughly the distance between the University of Miami and the center of downtown Miami.

Regardless of the legal issues, this doesn't seem to be a tactic well-calculated to win the hearts and minds of the average Baghdad resident.

And, hey, since that's all going so well, let's plan to attack Iran! (link is to Sy Hersh's latest). How long before we start calling this a 'tilt' to the Sunnis?

A bunch of evening clicking around led to me to what purports to be an unofficial English translation of the latest draft text of a proposed Iraqi Oil Law. Apparently, this draft text has been a closely held secret.

According to this blog, if passed this draft would have some serious distributional consequences:

Please feel free to widely distribute this document. It's important to start a stronger debate and to try to educate Iraqis and Americans about this catastrophic law that will facilitate the further looting of Iraqi oil, and will achieve nothing other than increasing the levels of violence and anger in Iraq.

This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatising Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq's enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states.

Unfortunately, I can't vouch for the authenticity of the translation or the commentator as they are all complete strangers to me.

Nor am I so sure that dividing Iraq yet sharing oil revenue is necessarily such a terrible outcome, at least compared to the other imaginable outcomes. As for PSAs, I'd think the devil is in the details — Iraq is presumably short of capital for exploration and development (the capital having been destroyed, denuded. and of course stolen) so unlike its neighbors it may need these deals — if somehow they were concluded in an equitable fashion…which I admit is not all that likely in the current circumstances where the government has such a weak hand to play.

By raising these questions I don't want to sound like I'm claiming the blog quoted above is wrong. I simply don't have enough information to form a judgment either way. And, for what it's worth, the same bout of clicking did bring to me to Digby's quotation of this line by conservative she-guru Ann Coulter, “Liberals are always talking about why we shouldn't go to war for oil. But why not go to war for oil? We need oil.”

I suppose I ought to be happy that the House has passed a non-binding Measure Opposing Troop Surge.

But. It seems clearer each day that there is no serious strategy for victory in Iran — however defined (and it usually isn't defined by those who shout for it most loudly). There is no serious plan for how we will staff the conflict other than extending the rotation of troops who have suffered enough. There is no serious plan even for equipping the troops on the ground, many of whom are being deployed without the armor that might protect their vehicles against IEDs and the like.

There is, at last, some sort of plan in the next budget for paying to replace the equipment this war is chewing up. The contractors will be OK; if only we had equally good plans for the soldiers and families being chewed up by this war. Not to mention the Iraqis.

Otherwise, what planning we find in the White House seems to be about rattling sabers at Iran and hoping they take the bait, allowing massive air strikes in retaliation. This is the sort of planning you expect from drug addicts scheming for a new fix.

In this atmosphere, the House of Representatives has labored hard. Members debated for 44 hours and 55 minutes. Over the past four days, a total of 393 Members spoke on the House Floor: 221 Democrats, and 172 Republicans. And then they voted. And now we have a totally precatory resolution aimed at the surge that doesn't even condemn the war, and doesn't address the Iran situation.

The radio said “Bush suffers a major political defeat.” Let me tell you how much that defeat matters: while the House was debating today, the Pentagon shipped off another 1,000 troops.

I understand the argument that this is a first step in a long campaign. Members who voted for this will see that they are not struck dead by lightening and this will embolden them.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!

And, yes, it could be even worse: the Senate tomorrow will vote on whether it can even vote on a similar, equally precatory, resolution. UPDATE: And may not even pass the resolution with the 60 votes needed to allow debate.

I'm so excited and heartened I can't hardly stand it.

British people get told this via the BBC, but (unless you live in Alaska) will you see it in your daily paper?

Iraq invasion plan 'delusional': The US invasion plan for Iraq envisaged that only 5,000 US troops would remain in Iraq by December 2006, declassified Central Command documents show.

The material also shows that the US military projected a stable, pro-US and democratic Iraq by that time.

The August 2002 material was obtained by the National Security Archive (NSA). Its officials said the plans were based on delusional assumptions.

The US currently has some 132,000 troops in the violence-torn state.