THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

British troops under attack after six Iraqis shot dead

Luke Harding in Baghdad
Monday January 12, 2004
The Guardian

Hundreds of Iraqis pelted British soldiers with stones yesterday for the second day running, following earlier clashes in the town of Amara, 230 miles south-east of Baghdad, in which six Iraqis were shot dead.

British troops with batons waded into the crowd after protesters demanding jobs again besieged the city hall, which serves as the British military's HQ.

The protesters threw rocks, and the soldiers from 1st Battalion The Light Infantry responded by blocking off all surrounding roads.

On Saturday Iraqi police shot dead five Iraqis outside the town hall during protests by demonstrators who claimed that an earlier promise to give them jobs had not been kept.

British military officials claimed the police officers were under attack when they opened fire and that explosions had been heard from the crowd.

Soldiers who arrived on the scene in armoured vehicles then shot dead another Iraqi protester as he tried to throw a homemade bomb, officials said. The demonstrators dragged away his body.

"The soldiers shot him because he was in the process of throwing an explosive device at the troops," a spokesman said.

Soldiers also shot and wounded another protester after more bombs were thrown later in the afternoon.

Hospital officials said that at least seven people were injured. Ali Hussein, the police chief, said the bombs were not grenades, but cans packed with explosive powder and nails, and with candlewick fuses.

In another blow for the occupying forces Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, refused to back Washington's plan for handing back power to Iraqis, saying rapid direct elections were the only way to stave off further violence. The US plans to select a transitional assembly first, with elections put off until next year.

The unrest in Amara follows demonstrations in Basra last week by ex-soldiers protesting that they had not been paid.

Since Saddam Hussein's fall there have been a number of protests in Iraq over the lack of jobs. A joint UN-World Bank report in October put the number of unemployed and underemployed people in Iraq at half of the 26 million people.

The demonstrators in Amara claimed they had been promised 8,000 jobs in Iraq's new civil defence corps, only to discover that they did not exist.

"This kind of incident is pretty rare in the south-east," a British military spokesman in Iraq told the Guardian last night. "The ex-soldiers in Basra have now been paid."

But it is clear that anger at British occupation is growing in southern Iraq. Over the weekend unknown attackers shot dead Majeed Hanoun, a US-based Iraqi expatriate, who had been working with the British authorities.

Sir Hilary Synnott, the British administrator of southern Iraq, said last night that the shooting would not stop Iraq's reconstruction.

Elsewhere in Iraq there was more violence. In Mosul, in the north, four mortars exploded at the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan yesterday, damaging the building but causing no injuries.

Special report
Iraq

Bush 'plotted Iraq war from start'


The administration has brushed aside Paul O'Neill's comments
A top official sacked from the US Government has accused President Bush of planning for an invasion of Iraq within days of coming to office.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Mr Bush was looking for an excuse to oust Saddam Hussein.

As a member of the president's National Security team he said he never saw any evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Mr O'Neill also portrayed the president as unwilling to engage in debate - a charge rejected by Bush officials.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction Saddam Hussein was a bad person and he needed to go," the former treasury secretary said in an interview broadcast by CBS News on Sunday.

Mr O'Neill was in office for nearly two years before he was sacked over differences with the administration in December 2002.

The BBC's Washington correspondent, Justin Webb, says his remarks represent the most sustained and damaging criticism of the Bush administration from a former insider since the president came to power.

Mr O'Neill gives an unflattering account of Mr Bush's leadership style, saying that at cabinet meetings the president was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people.

But the current Commerce Secretary, Don Evans, told CNN that the president liked nothing better than vigorous discussion in cabinet.

"He drives the meetings, tough questions, he likes dissent, he likes to see debate," he said.

Republican Representative Mark Foley of Florida accused Mr O'Neill of delivering a "blatant stab in the back".

'What weapons?'

The former secretary gave his interview ahead of the publication of a book, "The Price of Loyalty", which paints an insider's view of the administration based in part on his testimony.

In his interview, Mr O'Neill said the Bush administration appeared to have assumed the right to act as it wished abroad.

"For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," he said.

He was also highly critical of Mr Bush's tax cuts policy.

The author of the new book, Ron Suskind, told CBS that he had received documents from Mr O'Neill and others which showed that during Mr Bush's first 100 days in office his officials were already looking at military options to remove Saddam from power.

Officials were looking into post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil, according to the documents.

Mr Suskind referred to a memo entitled "Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq".

Elusive WMD

In a separate interview for Time magazine, Mr O'Neill said he had never come across any evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) during his period in office.

"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," the former member of the president's national security team said.

"To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else."

Coalition forces have found no hard proof of continuing WMD programmes since the invasion of Iraq in March.

Shells with suspected traces of poisonous gas have been uncovered by Danish troops in the south, but they appear to date from the war with Iran in the 1980s.

"Iraq's oil wealth is for the Iraqis, and if they try to get hold of some, we will use force to stop it" a spokesperson for the Military Division of USUKOIL inc. said.

Home > News > World
Shiite Muslim riot reflects frustration with U.S.-led occupation; soldier dies in bombing

By Nadia Abou El-Magd, Associated Press, 1/12/2004 15:41

KUT, Iraq (AP) Ukrainian soldiers fired into the air Monday to disperse hundreds of Iraqis who rioted for jobs and food as a second southern Shiite Muslim city was rocked by unrest a barometer of rising frustration with the U.S. led-occupation in a region of Iraq considered friendly to the Americans.

Also Monday, a roadside bomb in the capital killed one American soldier and wounded two, bringing the U.S. death toll in the Iraqi conflict to 495. Large explosions rocked central Baghdad later in the day, but officials reported no casualties.

Trouble started in Kut, 95 miles southeast of Baghdad, when about 400 protesters marched for a third straight day on a government building to demand jobs. Someone in the crowd threw a grenade at police and Ukrainian soldiers guarding the building, injuring four Iraqi policemen and one Ukrainian, according to Lt. Zafer Wedad.

The Ukrainians then fired in the air to disperse the crowd, injuring one protester, Wedad said. He said the demonstrators hurled bricks at the building and trashed a post office in the city.

In a similar protest in Amarah on Sunday, waves of protesters rushed British troops guarding the city hall before being pushed back. On Saturday, clashes in Amarah killed six protesters and wounded at least 11.

Unrest in the Shiite areas has spread as the country's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, has spoken out against the U.S.-backed formula for transferring power to the Iraqis.

In a full-page newspaper advertisement Monday, al-Sistani repeated his demand that a proposed provisional legislature be elected rather than chosen by regional committees as called for under a plan endorsed by the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqi Governing Council.

Al-Sistani is highly influential among Iraq's majority Shiites.

No details were available about the death in Baghdad of the 1st Armored Division soldier. Most of the U.S. deaths in Iraq have occurred since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.

Still, U.S. officials said Monday that insurgent attacks against coalition forces declined to an average of 17 a day in the past week, compared to 30 a day before Saddam Hussein was captured on Dec. 13. Most of the attacks are believed carried out by supporters of the ousted regime.

In the late Monday blasts, Iraqi and U.S. security officials said at least two mortars exploded near the Baghdad Hotel in the center of the capital. At least one round exploded in the Tigris River and the other exploded on the river bank, U.S. troops said. There were no casualties, the Americans said.

Also Monday, another roadside bomb exploded near an Army convoy in Ramadi, a town west of Baghdad, but the military said no U.S. casualties were reported. Residents said two Iraqis were killed when the Americans opened fire after the attack.

On Friday, U.S. soldiers uncovered a ''large weapons cache'' with the help of an Iraqi in Ramadi, the U.S. military said in a statement Monday.

It said the Iraqi led the troops to a house, where they found dozens of rocket-propelled grenades and a handful of launchers, nearly 220 pounds of explosives, 16 remote controlled homemade bombs and two surface-to-air missiles, the military said in a statement.

Also acting on an Iraqi tip, U.S. soldiers shot dead seven of the estimated 40 members of an armed gang allegedly trying to steal oil from a pipeline south of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, the Army said Monday.

Meanwhile, the Danish army said Monday that results of a new series of tests to determine whether 36 shells buried in the southern Iraqi desert contain a liquid blister agent could be expected by the end of the week. The shells, thought to be left over from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, were uncovered last week.

Separately, the top U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, said the United States is opposed to the maintenance of armed militias by Iraqi political parties. Groups vying to fill the country's power vacuum will have to lay down arms in a future democracy, he said.

''In a unified Iraq there is no place for political parties having armed groups,'' Bremer told reporters.

Associated Press reporter Paul Garwood in Tikrit contributed to this report.

© 2004 The New York Times Company

US, Iraqi Officials to Go Ahead with Transition Plan
Sonja Pace
Baghdad
12 Jan 2004, 20:17 UTC


U.S. and Iraqi officials say they are going ahead with the agreed plans for transition from U.S. occupation to an Iraqi interim government. Their comments follow a warning from a senior Iraqi cleric that the security situation in the country would worsen if those plans are carried out.

A spokesman for the U.S. coalition authority said work is continuing to implement transition plans within the agreed timeframe. He said disagreements over some details of that transition are part of the new democratic process in Iraq.

On Sunday, one of Iraq's most influential Shi'ite clerics, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, warned of growing instability if the United States goes ahead with plans to hand over power to an un-elected interim government.

The current transition plan calls for nationwide caucuses to chose a Transitional National Assembly, which, in turn, would appoint an interim government in June. That government would run the country until elections late next year.

Ayatollah al-Sistani wants a directly elected government from the outset. He said anything else would lack legitimacy. Iraqi and coalition officials say the country is not yet prepared to hold national elections.

Posted on Mon, Jan. 27, 2003
Invading Iraq not a new idea for Bush clique
4 years before 9/11, plan was set
By WILLIAM BUNCH
[email protected]
THE WAR CABINET

It was 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, and rescue crews were still scouring the ravaged section of the Pentagon that hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 had destroyed just five hours earlier.

On the other side of the still-smoldering Pentagon complex, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was poring through incoming intelligence reports and jotting down notes. Although most Americans were still shell-shocked, Rumsfeld's thoughts had already turned to a longstanding foe.

Rumsfeld wrote, according to a later CBS News report, that he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at the same time. Not only UBL" - meaning Osama bin Laden. He added: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

"S.H.," of course, is Saddam Hussein. The White House has long insisted its strategy for a war against Saddam's Iraq - a war that could now begin in a matter of days - arose from the rubble of the deadly attack that day.

But in reality, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and a small band of conservative ideologues had begun making the case for an American invasion of Iraq as early as 1997 - nearly four years before the Sept. 11 attacks and three years before President Bush took office.

An obscure, ominous-sounding right-wing policy group called Project for the New American Century, or PNAC - affiliated with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld's top deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Bush's brother Jeb - even urged then-President Clinton to invade Iraq back in January 1998.

"We urge you to... enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world," stated the letter to Clinton, signed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others. "That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." (For full text of the letter, see www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm)

The saga of Project for the New American Century may help answer some of the questions being asked both across the nation and around the world as Bush seems increasingly likely to call for military action to remove Saddam from power.

Why does the Bush administration seem hell-bent on war in the Middle East when key world powers and U.S. allies - such as France, Germany, Russia and China - don't support it right now? Or when most Americans say they don't want war, either, as long as the United Nations won't endorse one?

Why the rush, and why now, when Saddam seems weakened by a decade of economic sanctions?

The answers are complicated, but most arise from the concept - endorsed by many of the key players in the Bush administration - that America, as the world's lone superpower, should be putting that power to use.

"The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire," says the PNAC's statement of principles. "The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership."

Ian Lustick, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor and Middle East expert, calls the Cheney-Rumsfeld group "a cabal" - a band of conservative ideologues whose grand notions of American unilateral military might are out of touch and dangerous.

"What happened was 9/11, which had nothing to do with Iraq but produced an enormous amount of political capital which allowed the government to do anything it wanted as long as they could relate it to national security and the Middle East," Lustick said.

Gary Schmitt, the executive director of PNAC, laughs at the notion that his group is a secretive force driving U.S. policy, even as he acknowledges that the current plan for ousting Saddam differs little from what the group proposed in early 1998.

"We're not the puppeteer behind it all," said Schmitt, noting that before Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration had adopted the moderate policies on Iraq favored by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Policy draft on U.S. power

Still, the most hawkish members of the Bush administration, who are clearly in the driver's seat, have ties to PNAC. Their ideas about the aggressive use of American clout and military force arose more than a decade ago, in the wake of the collapse of communism and victory in the Persian Gulf War.
U.S./Iraq History:
A timeline

When the United States routed Saddam's occupying army from Kuwait in March 1991, most aides - including Cheney - approved of the senior Bush's decision to not push forward to Baghdad and oust Saddam.

Cheney asked at a May 1992 briefing: "How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer I would give is not very damn many."

Yet shortly before that, in February 1992, staffers for Wolfowitz - who was deputy defense secretary under Cheney at the time - drafted an American defense policy that called for the United States to aggressively use its military might. The draft made no mention of a role for the United Nations.

The proposed policy urged the United States to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." The draft caused an outcry and was not adopted by Cheney and Wolfowitz.

But in the years immediately following Bush's election defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992, Saddam's tight grip on power in Iraq, and his defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors, began to grate on the former Bush aides.

"They wanted revenge - they felt humiliated," said Penn's Lustick. He recalled the now infamous 1983 picture of Rumsfeld as an American envoy shaking hands with Saddam, at a time when U.S. officials had thought the secular dictator to be a "moderating" force in the Arab world.

At the same time, the heady years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall gave rise to the notion that the removal of Saddam and the establishment of an Arab-run, pro-American democracy might have a kind of "domino effect" in the Middle East, influencing neighbors like Saudi Arabia or Syria.

At the United Nations last November, Bush said that if Iraqis are liberated, "they can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world."

'Remove Saddam'

The neo-conservative ideas about Iraq began to come together around the time that PNAC was formed, in spring 1997. Although the group's overriding goal was expanding the U.S. military and American influence around the globe, the group placed a strong early emphasis on Iraq.

In addition to Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, early backers of the group included Jeb Bush, the president's brother; Richard Armitage, now deputy secretary of state; Robert Zoellick, now U.S. trade commissioner; I. Lewis Libby, now Cheney's top aide; and Zalmay Khalilzad, now America's special envoy to Afghanistan.

In addition to Clinton, the group lobbied GOP leaders in Congress to push for Saddam's removal - by force if necessary.

"We should establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power," the group wrote to Rep. Newt Gingrich and Sen. Trent Lott in May 1998.

Many of the best-known supporters have ties to the oil industry - most notably Cheney, who at the time was CEO of Halliburton, which makes oil-field equipment and would likely profit from the need to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure.

While oil is a backdrop to PNAC's policy pronouncements on Iraq, it doesn't seem to be the driving force. Lustick, while a critic of the Bush policy, says oil is viewed by the war's proponents primarily as a way to pay for the costly military operation.

"I'm from Texas, and every oil man that I know is against military action in Iraq," said PNAC's Schmitt. "The oil market doesn't need disruption."

Lustick believes that a more powerful hidden motivator may be Israel. He said Bush administration hawks believe that a show of force in Iraq would somehow convince Palestinians to accept a peace plan on terms favorable to Israel - an idea he scoffs at.

Both supporters and opponents of a war in Iraq agree on one thing: That the events of Sept. 11 were the trigger that finally put the theory in action.

"That pulled the shades off the president's eyes very quickly," said Schmitt, who'd been unhappy with Bush's initial policies. "He came to the conclusion that the meaning of 9/11 was broader than a particular group of terrorists striking a particular group of cities."

The fact that many U.S. allies, particularly in western Europe, and millions of American citizens haven't reached the same conclusion seems to matter little as the war plan pushes forward.

A frustrated Lustick sees the war plan as the triumph of a simple ideology over the messy realities of global politics.

"This is not a war on fanatics," he said. "This is a war of fanatics - our fanatics."

12 Jan 2004 21:16
Army War College study blasts U.S. war on terrorism

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Iraq invasion was "an unnecessary preventive war of choice" that has robbed resources and attention from the more critical fight against al Qaeda in a hopeless U.S. quest for absolute security, according to a study recently published by the U.S. Army War College.

The 56-page document written by Jeffrey Record, a veteran defense expert who serves as a visiting research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, represents a blistering assessment of what President George W. Bush calls the U.S. global war on terrorism.

Pentagon officials on Monday said Record was entitled to his opinion, but reiterated Bush's view that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism.

Record urged U.S. leaders to refocus Bush's broad war to target Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, and its allies. Record said the Iraq war was a detour from real anti-terrorism efforts.

Record criticized the Bush administration for lumping together al Qaeda and President Saddam Hussein's Iraq "as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat."

"This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action," Record wrote.

"The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda," Record wrote.

Faculty at the Army War College, an academic institute run by the Army since 1901, produce analyses of military and national security issues, with scholars encouraged to take a critical look a existing policies.

Lawrence Di Rita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said, "There's no question he's entitled to his views."

"People are publishing stuff all the time. That's the value of kind of having people throw analysis out there. You learn even from analysis you don't agree with. I don't even want to characterize it as something I don't agree with because I just haven't read it," said Di Rita, adding that he does not know if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plans to read the document.

GRATUITOUS CONFLICT

Record faulted the administration for fusing disparate enemies such as rogue states, terrorist groups and weapons of mass destruction proliferators into a monolithic threat.

In doing so, he said, the administration "may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."

Record said the administration's declared goals "are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security," as well as being fiscally, politically and militarily unsustainable.

These goals include destroying al Qaeda and other such transnational groups, making Iraq a stable democracy, bringing democracy to the rest of the autocratic Middle East, ending terrorism as a means of irregular warfare, and stopping proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to real and potential enemies, Record said.

In an interview, Record took issue with the very concept of a war on terrorism.

"Terrorism is a common noun. It's a technique. How do you make war on terrorism as opposed to specific terrorist organizations?" Record asked.

"I don't think that it is within America's power to rid the world of terrorism. ... The idea that you're going to be able to expunge this form of warfare from the world, I think, is really stretching it."

Douglas Lovelace, head of the Strategic Studies Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Record works, said the report "should enter into the debate or at least be considered by those who are formulating strategy and policy."

BLAIR 'HAS SOME EXPLAINING TO DO'

The fallout from Paul O'Neill's White House revelations continues today. Martin Kettle says the former US treasury chief has shown that Tony Blair never had a chance to dissuade George Bush from invading Iraq. "[Mr Blair] will have to explain how Britain went to war to remain on the right side of a US administration that was always going to attack Iraq, whatever anyone else did," he writes in the Guardian.

Mr O'Neill's former department claims he flourished a "secret document" during his appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes programme, according to the Independent. It "sounded very much like an effort by the Bush administration to punish" him, the paper says - though the president "spoke kindly" of his former colleague as he arrived in Mexico for a Latin American summit yesterday.

But further controversies stalk Mr Bush. The Guardian says Reuters has made a formal complaint to the Pentagon after American troops fired on two cameramen and a driver from the agency.

Tucked away in the Herald Tribune is this report: "The supreme court declined on Monday to review the government's refusal to release information about foreigners held after the terror attacks of September 11 2001."

Many of these have been deported; only one has been prosecuted. The solicitor general argued releasing the names would provide a "road map of law enforcement's activities, strategies and methods".