Siege continues in Iraq as US escalates threats against Iran

Dandelion Salad

By Joe Kay
wsws.org
26 April 2008

The United States military’s brutal offensive in Sadr City continued this week, with overnight raids killing dozens of people, including many civilians. The US offensive against the impoverished Baghdad neighborhood of 2 million people is entering its second month.

The direct target of US operations in Sadr City is the Mahdi Army militia led by Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr’s followers are drawn from the largely working class Shiite population in Sadr City. He also has substantial support in southern Iraq, including Basra. The recent wave of violence in Iraq was triggered last month, when the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched an offensive, backed by the US, against Sadr’s forces in Basra.

According to media reports, the US military killed at least 11 people in Sadr City on Thursday night, and wounded another 74. “Criminals” have replaced “terrorists” as the label affixed by the US military to those it has slaughtered, but many are ordinary civilians. According to a report by Agence France-Presse (AFP), a Sadr City medic “said the dead included four old men, two women and a child” and that women and children were among the wounded.

The US military is employing helicopters armed with Hellfire rocket missiles to terrorize the population of Sadr City and target anyone it claims may be preparing rockets or roadside bombs.

According to figures tabulated by AFP from reports by the Iraqi government and the US military, at least 383 people have been killed in Sadr City over the past month. This figure, however, substantially underestimates the real death toll, since it is based only on official reports.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has reported that the main market in Sadr City has been severely damaged in the fighting, exacerbating food and water shortages. Several hospitals have also run out of supplies while attempting to treat the wounded.

…continued

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Inside Iraq: Media influence on Iraq?

US ship confronts boats in Gulf + Iranian Boats shot at by U.S. Navy (video)

Joint Chiefs Chairman Says U.S. Preparing Military Options Against Iran

What the Iraq War is about By Paul Craig Roberts

Dandelion Salad

By Paul Craig Roberts
April 22, 2008

The Bush Regime has quagmired America into a sixth year of war in Afghanistan and Iraq with no end in sight. The cost of these wars of aggression is horrendous. Official US combat casualties stand at 4,538 dead. Officially, 29,780 US troops have been wounded in Iraq. Experts have argued that these numbers are understatements. Regardless, these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg.

On April 17, 2008, AP News reported that a new study released by the RAND Corporation concludes that “some 300,000 U.S. troops are suffering from major depression or post traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 received brain injuries.”

On April 21, 2008, OpEdNews reported that an internal email from Gen. Michael J. Kussman, undersecretary for health at the Veterans Administration, to Ira Katz, head of mental health at the VA, confirms a McClatchy Newspaper report that 126 veterans per week commit suicide. To the extent that the suicides are attributable to the war, more than 500 deaths should be added to the reported combat fatalities each month.

Turning to Iraqi deaths, expert studies support as many as 1.2 million dead Iraqis, almost entirely civilians. Another 2 million Iraqis have fled their country, and there are 2 million displaced Iraqis within Iraq.

Afghan casualties are unknown.

Both Afghanistan and Iraq have suffered unconscionable civilian deaths and damage to housing, infrastructure and environment. Iraq is afflicted with depleted uranium and open sewers.

Then there are the economic costs to the US. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates the full cost of the invasion and attempted occupation of Iraq to be between $3 trillion and $5 trillion. The dollar price of oil and gasoline have tripled, and the dollar has lost value against other currencies, declining dramatically even against the lowly Thai baht. Before Bush launched his wars of aggression, one US dollar was worth 45 baht. Today the dollar is only worth 30 baht.

The US cannot afford these costs. Prior to his resignation last month, US Comptroller General David Walker reported that the accumulated unfunded liabilities of the US government total $53 trillion dollars. The US government cannot cover these liabilities. The Bush Regime even has to borrow the money from foreigners to pay for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no more certain way to bankrupt the country and dethrone the dollar as world reserve currency.

The moral costs are perhaps the highest. All of the deaths, injuries, and economic costs to the US and its victims are due entirely to lies told by the President and Vice President of the US, by the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, and, of course, by the media, including the “liberal” New York Times. All of these lies were uttered in behalf of an undeclared agenda. “Our” government has still not told “we the people” the real reasons “our” government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

Instead, the American sheeple have accepted a succession of transparent lies: weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections and complicity in the 9/11 attack, overthrowing a dictator and “bringing democracy” to Iraqis.

The great moral American people would rather believe government lies than to acknowledge the government’s crimes and to hold the government accountable.

There are many effective ways in which a moral people could protest. Consider investors, for example. Clearly Halliburton and military suppliers are cleaning up. Investors flock to the stocks in order to participate in the rise in value from booming profits. But what would a moral people do? Wouldn’t they boycott the stocks of the companies that are profiting from the Bush Regime’s war crimes?

If the US invaded Iraq for any of the succession of reasons the Bush Regime has given, why would the US have spent $750 million on a fortress “embassy” with anti-missile systems and its own electricity and water systems spread over 104 acres? No one has ever seen or heard of such an embassy before. Clearly, this “embassy” is constructed as the headquarters of an occupying colonial ruler.

The fact is that Bush invaded Iraq with the intent of turning Iraq into an American colony. The so-called government of al-Maliki is not a government. Maliki is the well paid front man for US colonial rule. Maliki’s government does not exist outside the protected Green Zone, the headquarters of the American occupation.

If colonial rule were not the intent, the US would not be going out of its way to force al Sadr’s 60,000 man militia into a fight. Sadr is a Shi’ite who is a real Iraqi leader, perhaps the only Iraqi who could end the sectarian conflict and restore some unity to Iraq. As such he is regarded by the Bush Regime as a danger to the American puppet Maliki. Unless the US is able to purchase or rig the upcoming Iraqi election, Sadr is likely to emerge as the dominant figure. This would be a highly unfavorable development for the Bush Regime’s hopes of establishing its colonial rule behind the facade of a Maliki fake democracy. Rather than work with Sadr in order to extract themselves from a quagmire, the Americans will be doing everything possible to assassinate Sadr.

Why does the Bush Regime want to rule Iraq? Some speculate that it is a matter of “peak oil.” Oil supplies are said to be declining even as demand for oil multiplies from developing countries such as China. According to this argument, the US decided to seize Iraq to insure its own oil supply.

This explanation is problematic. Most US oil comes from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. The best way for the US to insure its oil supplies would be to protect the dollar’s role as world reserve currency. Moreover, $3-5 trillion would have purchased a tremendous amount of oil. Prior to the US invasions, the US oil import bill was running less than $100 billion per year. Even in 2006 total US imports from OPEC countries was $145 billion, and the US trade deficit with OPEC totaled $106 billion. Three trillion dollars could have paid for US oil imports for 30 years; five trillion dollars could pay the US oil bill for a half century had the Bush Regime preserved a sound dollar.

The more likely explanation for the US invasion of Iraq is the neoconservative Bush Regime’s commitment to the defense of Israeli territorial expansion. There is no such thing as a neoconservative who is not allied with Israel. Israel hopes to steal all of the West Bank and southern Lebanon for its territorial expansion. An American colonial regime in Iraq not only buttresses Israel from attack, but also can pressure Syria and Iran from giving support to the Palestinians and Lebanese. The Iraqi war is a war for Israeli territorial expansion. Americans are dying and bleeding to death financially for Israel. Bush’s “war on terror” is a hoax that serves to cover US intervention in the Middle East in behalf of “greater Israel.”

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

h/t: Greg

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Financial Collapse will End the Occupation: And it won’t be “A time of our choosing”

Dandelion Salad

By Mike Whitney

04/14/08 “ICH”

“Come and see our overflowing morgues and find our little ones for us…
You may find them in this corner or the other, a little hand poking out, pointing out at you…
Come and search for them in the rubble of your “surgical” air raids, you may find a little leg or a little head…pleading for your attention.
Come and see them amassed in the garbage dumps, scavenging morsels of food…
Come and see, come…” “Flying Kites” Layla Anwar

The US Military has won every battle it has fought in Iraq, but it has lost the war. Wars are won politically, not militarily. Bush doesn’t understand this. He still clings to the belief that a political settlement can be imposed through force. But he is mistaken. The use of overwhelming force has only spread the violence and added to the political instability. Now Iraq is ungovernable. Was that the objective? Miles of concrete blast-walls snake through Baghdad to separate the warring parties; the country is fragmented into a hundred smaller pieces each ruled by local militia commanders. These are the signs of failure not success. That’s why the American people no longer support the occupation. They’re just being practical; they know Bush’s plan won’t work. As Nir Rosen says, “Iraq has become Somalia”.

The administration still supports Iraqi President Nouri al Maliki, but al-Maliki is a meaningless figurehead who will have no effect on the country’s future. He has no popular base of support and controls nothing beyond the walls of the Green Zone. The al-Maliki government is merely an Arab facade designed to convince the American people that political progress is being made, but there is no progress. Its a sham. The future is in the hands of the men with guns; they’re the ones who have divided Iraq into locally-controlled fiefdoms and they are the one’s who will ultimately decide who will rule the state. At present, the fighting between the factions is being described as “sectarian warfare”, but the term is intentionally misleading. The fighting is political in nature; the various militias are competing with each other to see who will fill the vacuum left by the removal of Saddam. It’s a power struggle. The media likes to portray the conflict as a clash between half-crazed Arabs–“dead-enders and terrorists”—who relish the idea killing their countrymen, but that’s just a way of demonizing the enemy. In truth, the violence is entirely rational; it is the inevitable reaction to the dissolution of the state and the occupation by foreign troops. Many military experts predicted that there would be outbreaks of fighting after the initial invasion, but their warnings were shrugged off by clueless politicians and the cheerleading media. Now the violence has flared up again in Basra and Baghdad, and there is no end in sight. Only one thing seems certain, Iraq’s future will not be decided at the ballot box. Bush has made sure of that.

The US military does not rule Iraq nor does it have the power to control events on the ground. It’s just one of many militias vieing for power in a state that is ruled by warlords. After the army conducts combat operations, it is forced to retreat to its camps and bases. This point needs to be emphasized in order to understand that there is no real future for the occupation. The US simply does not have the manpower to hold territory or to establish security. In fact, the presence of American troops incites violence because they are seen as forces of occupation, not liberators. Survey’s show that the vast majority of the Iraqi people want US troops to leave. The military has destroyed too much of the country and slaughtered too many people to expect that these attitudes will change anytime soon. Iraqi poet and blogger Layla Anwar sums up the feelings of many of the war’s victims in a recent post on her web site “An Arab Women’s Blues”:

“At the gates of Babylon the Great, you are still struggling, fighting away, chasing this or the other, detaining, bombing from above, filling up morgues, hospitals, graveyards and embassies and borders with quesesfor exit-visas.

Not one Iraqi wishes your presence. Not one Iraqi accepts your occupation.

Got news for you Motherfuckers, you will never control Iraq, not in six years, not in ten years, not in 20 years….You have brought upon yourself the hate and the curse of all Iraqis, Arabs and the rest of the world…now face your agony.” (Layla Anwar; “An Arab Women’s Blues: Reflections in a sealed bottle”

Is Bush hoping to change the mind of Layla or the millions of other Iraqis who have lost loved ones or been forced into exile or seen their country and culture crushed beneath the bootheel of foreign occupation? The hearts and minds campaign is lost. The US will never be welcome in Iraq.

According to a survey in the British Medical Journal “Lancet” more than a million Iraqis have been killed in the war. Another four million have been either internally-displaced or have fled the country. But the figures tell us nothing about the magnitude of the disaster that Bush has caused by attacking Iraq. The invasion is the greatest human catastrophe in the Middle East since the Nakba in 1948. Living standards have declined precipitously in every area—infant mortality, clean water, food-security, medical supplies, education, electrical power, employment etc. Even oil production is still below pre-war levels. The invasion is the most comprehensive policy failure since Vietnam; everything has gone wrong. The heart of the Arab world has descended into chaos. The suffering is incalculable.

The main problem is the occupation; it is the primary catalyst for violence and an obstacle to political settlement. As long as the occupation persists, so will the fighting. The claims that the so-called surge has changed the political landscape are greatly exaggerated. Retired Lt. General William Odom commented on this point in an interview on the Jim Lerher News Hour:

“The surge has sustained military instability and achieved nothing in political consolidation….Things are much worse now. And I don’t see them getting any better. This was foreseeable a year and a half ago. And to continue to put the cozy veneer of comfortable half-truths on this is to deceive the American public and to make them think it is not the charade it is…..When you say that the Lebanization of Iraq is taking place, yes, but not because of Iran, but because the U.S. went in and made this kind of fragmentation possible. And it has occurred over the last five years….The al-Maliki government is worse off now…The notion that there;’s some kind of progress is absurd. The al-Maliki government uses its Ministry of Interior like a death squad militia. So to call Sadr an extremist and Maliki a good guy just overlooks the reality that there are no good guys.” (Jim Lerher News Hour)

The war in Iraq was lost before the first shot was fired. The conflict never had the support of the American people and Iraq never posed a threat to US national security. The whole pretext for the war was based on lies; it was a coup orchestrated by elites and the media to carry out a far-right agenda. Now the mission has failed, but no one wants to admit their mistakes by withdrawing; so the butchery continues without pause.

How Will It End?

The Bush administration has decided to pursue a strategy that is unprecedented in US history. It has decided to continue to prosecute a war that has already been lost morally, strategically, and militarily. But fighting a losing war has its costs. America is much weaker now than it was when Bush first took office in 2000; politically, economically and militarily. US power and prestige around the world will continue to deteriorate until the troops are withdrawn from Iraq. But that’s unlikely to happen until all other options have been exhausted. Deteriorating economic conditions in the financial markets are putting enormous downward pressure on the dollar. The corporate bond and equities markets are in disarray; the banking system is collapsing, consumer spending is down, tax revenues are falling, and the country is headed into a painful and protracted recession. The US will leave Iraq sooner than many pundits believe, but it will not be at a time of our choosing. Rather, the conflict will end when the United States no longer has the capacity to wage war. That time is not far off.

The Iraq War signals the end of US interventionism for at least a generation; maybe longer. The ideological foundation for the war (preemption/regime change) has been exposed as a baseless justification for unprovoked aggression. Someone will have to be held accountable. There will have to be international tribunals to determine who is responsible in the deaths of over one million Iraqis.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Dead Remembered, Living Ignored (video)

Dandelion Salad

jperryam

NPR Underreports Iraq Deaths (Action Alert)

Dandelion Salad

www.fair.org
3/26/08

Action Alert

There is no more important question about the Iraq War than the question of how many Iraqis have died. It is impossible to truly evaluate the war or discuss where to go from here without knowing the human cost of the war, and that cost has overwhelmingly been borne by Iraqis. That’s why it’s so disappointing that NPR, looking back on the 5th anniversary of the war, treated this issue with either extreme sloppiness or deliberate dishonesty.

Here’s how NPR anchor Scott Simon introduced a segment on March 15 in which senators James Webb and Jon Kyl talked about “what the war has meant and what the future might hold”:

“This coming Wednesday marks the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. So far 3,975 U.S. service men and women have died. Estimates on the number of Iraqis killed range from 47,000 to 151,000, depending on the source.”

But what sources are those? The New England Journal of Medicine (1/31/08) published a survey conducted by the Iraqi government on behalf of the World Health Organization, which estimated that 151,000 Iraqis had been killed by violence between the March 2003 invasion and June 2006. This, presumably, is the source of NPR‘s 151,000 figure. The write-up in NEJM begins: “Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey).”

Is the 47,668 figure from Iraq Body Count–a group that tabulates accounts of civilian Iraqi deaths that appear in Western news sources–the source for NPR‘s 47,000 number? There does not seem to be another major survey of Iraqi deaths that provides that estimate. Yet this is clearly described as a figure from June 2006–before the biggest peak of violence in late 2006-early 2007. Iraq Body Count currently reports that there have been at least 82,249 reported civilian deaths in Iraq; why didn’t NPR use this
number instead?

And if NPR is taking its lower estimate of Iraqi fatalities from the NEJM report, why does it ignore the higher estimate given in that same report of 601,000? That’s the estimate made by the Johns Hopkins University school of public health, and published by the Lancet medical journal (10/11/06). It’s a well-known study done by highly regarded scholars; indeed, when the 151,000 figure came out, NPR‘s All Things Considered (1/10/08) turned for comment to Les Roberts, co-author of the Johns Hopkins study, which NPR referred to then as “a survey that continues to be debated in the press and political circles.” Between January and March, though, that much-debated study somehow vanished from NPR‘s collective memory.

It’s worth noting that 601,000 figure from Johns Hopkins study and the 151,000 number from WHO both only go up to June 2006, and therefore also leave out the worst of the violence. The most recent survey of Iraqi deaths is the poll conducted by Opinion Research Business, a top British polling firm, in August 2007, which found an estimated 1.2 million deaths by violence among Iraqi households. If NPR really wanted to inform its listeners about the range of credible estimates of Iraqi deaths, it would have included this survey–but instead left them with the impression that the highest plausible estimate was one-eighth as high.

Other outlets also downplayed the likely number of Iraqi dead; Jim Lehrer of PBS‘s NewsHour (3/19/08) reported that the number was “at least 90,000,” without mentioning serious estimates almost 14 times higher. Others were more forthright, as with NBC‘s Richard Engel (NBC Nightly News, 3/19/08): “The number of civilian casualties is unclear. Estimates range from 85,000 to 600,000.” But few outlets misled their audiences about what the highest credible estimates were the way NPR did.

ACTION:

Please ask NPR‘s ombud to investigate how NPR determined the lowest and highest estimates for Iraqis killed in the Iraq War.

CONTACT:
NPR Ombud Alicia Shepard

Email form on NPR‘s website:
http://www.npr.org/templates/contact/index.php?columnId=2781901

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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NPR News: National Pentagon Radio?

It’s March 19 and Blogswarm Day! Posts on Iraq War by Lo

Five Years of Bushco’s Hell on Earth

Dandelion Salad

jperryam

It MUST end.  Added: March 19, 2008

see

It’s March 19 and Blogswarm Day! Posts on Iraq War by Lo

Iraq War as War Crime By Robert, Sam & Nat Parry

Dandelion Salad

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
consortiumnews.com
March 18, 2008

Editor’s Note: The Iraq War – now ending its fifth bloody year – represents not only a human tragedy of enormous consequence and possibly the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history but also a systemic failure of American political and journalistic institutions.

How to Destroy a Country & Get Off Scot-Free By Linda Heard

Dandelion Salad

By Linda Heard
ICH
03/18/08 “Arab News”

Someone once told me if you’re going to tell a lie make it a whopper based on the premise the more outrageous the lie the more likely it is to be believed. At the time, I wrote off his advice as hogwash but as we see from the Iraq debacle, he was right. Five years later, the deceit continues undiminished and nobody has been held to account.

Britain’s Gordon Brown yesterday promised to hold an enquiry into the “mistakes” made in Iraq. Sounds good, but don’t hold your breath. All previous inquiries have been labeled “whitewashes”. They can’t afford the truth to come out else they might get a one-way ticket to The Hague.

Ambassador David Satterfield, and adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is doing the rounds of talk shows lauding America’s victories over Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

On one occasion the host interjected to mention the unpalatable fact that Al-Qaeda members only flocked to Iraq once the Americans were in place leaving Satterfield momentarily nonplussed.

It’s obvious that Satterfield is so saturated in the party line he forgot the Pentagon’s recently published study that found with certainty that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no links to Al-Qaeda. And lest we forget Saddam didn’t have WMD either, which means not only was the war immoral the prewar sanctions on that country that contributed to the deaths of over half-a-million Iraqi children were too.

Think about it for a moment. The warmongers invaded, crushed and occupied a country that was no threat to anyone. They stood by as it was looted, exacerbated sectarianism, flattened entire towns, tortured untold numbers of innocents, brought in gum-chewing, tattooed foreign mercenaries and paid crony companies billions of dollars for mythical reconstruction projects.

They then pretended to hand over sovereignty to that country while at the same time constructing permanent bases and the biggest US Embassy in history resembling a small town. They said they had no interest in Iraq’s oil, yet they are putting immense pressure on the Iraqi government (sic) to sign into law a bill that permits foreign (read American) oil companies to lock up decades-long deals. Let’s be frank. Iraq wasn’t a blunder, it was a crime. So how did they manage to get away with implanting their long-conceived plot to do away with Israel’s No. 1 foe, ensure their competitors couldn’t get their hands on Iraq’s resources and entrench their military might in the region? Future historians will no doubt be scratching their heads over this one. You had to live through it to believe it.

First, they cleverly used the politics of fear to sway public opinion. As noted in the Project for the New American Century’s document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, the warmonger signatories – who later became senior members of the Bush administration – needed “a new Pearl Harbor”. On Sept. 11, 2001 they got it. Americans and their allies were in shock. Almost every country in the world was sympathetic and willing to do anything to help. And, boy, did they capitalize on that empathy even managing to persuade Russia to stay silent as they made deals with Caspian states to allow US bases.

Step one was a country where a giant bogeyman was supposed to be hiding out in a cave presumably equipped with a dialysis machine and a production studio and whose black-turbaned government forced women to wear a burqa and disallowed nail polish. But then Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld was disappointed because there weren’t enough targets for his bombs. It was no fun bombing a country into the Stone Age when it was already there.

Step two was the insidious demonizing of Muslims, thousands of whom were arrested and held for months without charge or access to lawyers. In that climate of fear, it was relatively simple to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein was conniving with the people who brought down the World Trade Center. US officials warned of mushroom clouds; Prime Minister Tony Blair said British interests could be attacked within 45 minutes of Saddam giving the order. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell allowed himself to be used as their fall guy. He spouted the most unbelievable scripted codswallop the UN had ever heard…yet, bullied and bribed nation after nation pretended to believe him as IAEA chief Mohammed El-Baradei and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix did little to discredit the hoax.

Step three entailed replacing Osama in people’s minds with Saddam, who overnight morphed into a hydra-headed monster whose idea of a pleasant weekend was gassing and torturing his own people.

Step four was ‘Shock and Awe’ which illuminated the Baghdad skyline on March 19, 2003. As their bombs and missiles rained down on crowded market places scattering limbs, they told us those bombs and missiles were Saddam’s even though the Independent’s Middle East correspondent inconveniently dug up their Made in the USA shards.

As the months went on, we began to wonder what happened to the WMD. They told us it was only a matter of time before it would be unearthed from under the sands or discovered in a tunnel under one of Saddam’s palaces. They even suggested it may have been shipped off to a neighboring country for safekeeping!!

Step five was an orchestrated administration campaign to inject us with mass amnesia. Never mind about the weapons, they said. We are here to liberate the poor Iraqi people from their evil dictator and deliver freedom and democracy. Look, look, they said. The Iraqis have purple fingers! With up to one million dead, Iraqis are lucky they have any fingers at all.

To be fair, they couldn’t have done it without the aid of a compliant, supine media, which embedded its reporters with US battalions and agreed not to show captured US soldiers, flag-draped coffins, military funerals or scenes of blood-soaked Iraqi civilians. Independent reporters who neglected to abide by the script were discredited, refused access to information and even shelled.

I still recall a live report from David Chater of Sky News, who saw the barrel of a US tank slowly turn toward the Palestine hotel – known to be a journalist’s hang-out – before firing its shell killing three reporters. The Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were also hit.

With so much information on tap I’m flabbergasted that so many people still believe the Iraq fairytale. I wish they’d get in touch with me. I’ve got a few pyramids and a sphinx going cheap. Sad, isn’t it!

sierra12th@yahoo.co.uk

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

see

Mosaic News – 3/17/08: World News from the Middle East

Winter Soldier 1971 Clip + Soldiers Testify About the Horrors of War (videos)

Baghdad: City of walls + Death, destruction & fear + Shabby, tired & scared

MIR: Iraq – Five More Years? (video)

Dandelion Salad

linktv

Five years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and Bush’s photo-op on the USS Lincoln, the War in Iraq continues. Has the “mission been accomplished”? Or will it take another five years?

Answers to these questions and more on Link TV’s Mosaic Intelligence Report, presented by Jamal Dajani.

For more info, visit http://www.linktv.org

Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

.

The Cult of the Suicide Bomber By Robert Fisk

Dandelion Salad

By Robert Fisk
ICH
03/14/08 “The Independent”

Khaled looked at me with a broad smile. He was almost laughing. At one point, when I told him that he should abandon all thoughts of being a suicide bomber – that he could influence more people in this world by becoming a journalist – he put his head back and shot me a grin, world-weary for a man in his teens. “You have your mission,” he said. “And I have mine.” His sisters looked at him in awe. He was their hero, their amanuensis and their teacher, their representative and their soon-to-be-martyred brother. Yes, he was handsome, young – just 18 – he was dressed in a black Giorgio Armani T-shirt, a small, carefully trimmed Spanish conquistador’s beard, gelled hair. And he was ready to immolate himself.

Burying the dead in Baghdad (video)

Dandelion Salad

AlJazeeraEnglish

4 March 08

As attacks across Baghdad continue, there’s growing concern about where to bury the dead. Areas which were once parks and playgrounds, are now replaced by graveyards. Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna reports from Adhamiya, one of the neighbourhoods too overcrowded to bury the dead.

In Tatters Beneath a Surge of Claims by Ali al-Fadhily & Dahr Jamail

Dandelion Salad

by Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail
ICH
02/23/08
BAGHDAD, Feb 22 (IPS)

What the U.S. has been calling the success of a “surge”, many Iraqis see as evidence of catastrophe. Where U.S. forces point to peace and calm, local Iraqis find an eerie silence.

And when U.S. forces speak of a reduction in violence, many Iraqis simply do not know what they are talking about.

Hundreds died in a series of explosions in Baghdad last month. This was despite the strongest ever security measures taken by the U.S. military, riding the “surge” in security forces and their activities.

The death toll is high, according to the website icasualties.org, which provides reliable numbers of Iraqi civilian and security deaths.

In January this year 485 civilians were killed, according to the website. It says the number is based on news reports, and that “actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site.”

The average month in 2005, before the “surge” was launched, saw 568 civilian deaths. In January 2006, the month before the “surge” began, 590 civilians died.

Many of the killings have taken place in the most well guarded areas of Baghdad. And they have continued this month.

“Two car bombs exploded in Jadriya, killing so many people, the day the American Secretary of Defence (Robert Gates) was visiting Baghdad last week,” a captain from the Karrada district police in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.

“Another car bomb killed eight people and injured 20 Thursday (last week) in the Muraidy market of Sadr City, east of Baghdad, although the Mehdi army (the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr) provides strict protection to the city,” the officer said. “There is no security in this country any more.”

Unidentified bodies of Iraqis killed by militias continue to appear in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The Iraqi government has issued instructions to all security and health offices not to give out the body count to the media. Dozens of bodies are found every day across Baghdad, residents say. Morgue officials confirm this.

“We are not authorised to issue any numbers, but I can tell you that we are still receiving human bodies every day; the men have no identity on them,” a doctor at the Baghdad morgue told IPS. “The bodies that have signs of torture are the Sunnis killed by Shia militias; those with a bullet in the head are usually policemen, translators or contractors who worked for the Americans.”

The “surge” of 30,000 additional troops came to Iraq, mostly Baghdad, in February of last year. The total current number of U.S. troops in Iraq is approximately 157,000. They were sent to end violence, and with a declared aim of helping political reconciliation.

But where peace of sorts has descended in Baghdad, Iraq’s capital city of six million (in a population of 25 million), it comes from a partitioning of people along sectarian lines. The Iraqi Red Crescent reports that one in four residents has been driven out of their homes by death squads, or by the “surge”.

According to an Iraqi Red Crescent report titled ‘The Internally Displaced People in Iraq’ released Jan. 27, 1,364,978 residents of Baghdad have been displaced.

The Environment News Service reported Jan. 7 that “many of the capital’s once mixed areas have become either purely Sunni or Shia after militias forced families out for belonging to the other religious branch of Islam.”

Some of the eerie calm in areas of Baghdad comes because togetherness has ended. Sunnis and Shias who lived together for generations are now partitioned. This is not the peace many Iraqis were looking for, surge or no surge.

On Jan. 8, UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond announced that there were at least 2.2 million Iraqis internally displaced within the country, and that at least another two million had fled the country altogether. This, no doubt, would make many areas quieter.

The U.S. military has erected three to four metre high concrete walls around several neighbourhoods, forcing residents to choose either Sunni or Shia areas in which to live. Such separation has brought large-scale displacement, and protests.

Sunni Muslims seem to have the worst of it. Many Iraqis are outraged by the number of Sunni detainees the “surge” has taken.

Residents of Amiriya district of western Baghdad demonstrated Feb. 11 against mistreatment by U.S. and Iraqi forces involved in the “surge”. The “surge” aims to eradicate al-Qaeda from Iraq, but this has meant that most military operations have been carried out in Sunni areas like Amiriya.

“We are here to protest against the unfair arrests and raids conducted against the innocent people of Amiriya,” Salih al-Mutlag, chief of the Arab Dialogue Council in the Iraqi government told IPS at the demonstration. “This has gone too far under the flag of fighting terror.”

Al-Mutlag said they were also demonstrating against arrests in the western parts of Baghdad, despite an apparently peaceful situation there as a result of residents’ cooperation with Iraqi army units. Large numbers of residents came out in the Dora region of southwest Baghdad to protest against the U.S. military for arresting 18 people, including an 80-year-old man.

“We are the ones who improved the situation in western parts of Baghdad without any interference from the Americans and their puppet Iraqi government,” former Iraqi Army Major Abu Wussam told IPS in Amiriya. “We negotiated with our brothers in the Iraqi national resistance who agreed to conduct their activities in a different way from the traditional way they used to work.

“It seems Americans did not like it, and so they are punishing us for it, instead of releasing our detainees as they promised.”

Some of the apparent peace on the street is a consequence of rising detentions. In November last year Karl Matley, head of the Iraqi branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, declared that more than 60,000 prisoners and detainees are held in prisons and other detention centres. A large number of these were taken during the “surge”.

By August 2007, half a year into the “surge”, the number of detainees held by the U.S.-led military forces in Iraq had swelled by 50 percent, with the inmate population growing to 24,500, from 16,000 in February, according to U.S. military officers in Iraq.

The officers reported that nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody were Sunni Arabs.

Given that the majority of the detained are Sunnis, the “surge”, rather than bridging political differences and aiding reconciliation between Sunni and Shia groups, appears to have had the opposite effect.

And yet, there could be more dangerous reasons to doubt such success of the “surge” that is claimed.

Among the recent arrests in Baghdad, the U.S. military counted six members of the Sahwa (Awakening) forces. This is a force of resistance fighters now ostensibly working with the U.S. military. The U.S. pays each member 300 dollars monthly. More than 80 percent of about 70,000 Sahwa members are Sunni.

The arrest of some Sahwa members is indication of U.S. military doubts about the loyalties of some of these Sahwa fighters. Shia political parties and militias already accuse them of being resistance fighters in disguise. Many believe that large numbers of Sahwa forces are resistance fighters simply riding the “surge”.

“How come Sunni parts of Baghdad became so quiet all of a sudden,” says Jawad Salman, a former resident of Amiriya who fled his house in 2006 after Iraqi resistance members accused him of being a government spy. “It is a game well played by terrorists to divert the fight against Shia groups. I lived there and I know that all residents fully support what the U.S. calls the terrorists.”

The Sahwa strategy has brought down the number of U.S. casualties – for now. But the U.S. strategy seems to have done less for Iraq than for its own forces.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East) (FIN/2008)

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see

Dahr Jamail: Beyond the Green Zone (video; 07)

Where’s The Iraqi Voice? By Noam Chomsky

Fort Hood soliders breaking the silence in war in Iraq (video link)

Bush’s Dirty Secret: Bribing Iraq Insurgents Not to Fight By Paul Craig Roberts

Stop-loss Congress (video; over 18 only)

Dandelion Salad

Warning

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This video may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war and should only be viewed by a mature audience.

stoplosscongress

February 16, 2008

Vodpod videos no longer available. from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

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h/t: Lorie and a lot of others who posted this as a bulletin.

Another Killing Spree in Mesopotamia: “Pacifying” Mosul by Felicity Arbuthnot + TIMZ

Dandelion Salad

by Felicity Arbuthnot
Global Research, February 13, 2008
UN Observer

“When I hear anyone talk of Culture, I reach for my revolver.” Hermann Goering (1893-1946.)

In the Orwellian world of the United States military, when a killing spree in Mesopotamia is embarked upon, it is called an “Iraq Pacification Operation’”. There have been hundreds of these (I abandoned counting at three hundred and eighty, with numerous more to go.)

Each ‘pacification’ has a name which brings a glimpse into a very strange mindset: “Operation Devil Thrust”, “Operation Terminator”, “Operation Scorpion Sting”, “Operation Sidewinder”, “Operation Roaring Tiger”, “Operation All American Tiger”, “Operation Panther Squeeze”, “Operation Warhorse Whirlwind”, “Operation Resolute Sword”, “Operation Wolverine Feast”, “Operation Arrowhead Ripper”, “Operations ‘Geronimo Strike’, ‘Rat Trap’ and ‘Grizzly Forced Entry’”. And from a porn show near you: Operations “Squeeze Play”, “Triple Play”, “Therapist” and “Tombstone Thrust”. (http://www.globalsecurity.org )

Bush Turns US Soldiers into Murderers By Robert Parry

Dandelion Salad

By Robert Parry
Consortium News
February 13, 2008

By forcing repeat combat assignments to Iraq and Afghanistan – and by winking at torture and indiscriminate killings – George W. Bush is degrading the reputation of the U.S. military, turning enlisted soldiers and intelligence officers into murderers and sadists.