"After 9/11 we came to realize that we couldn't let the Middle East keep festering in its dysfunction and hatreds. It was breeding anti-Americanism and terror. With Iraq in particular, business as usual was becoming increasingly difficult. Throughout this discussion we have assumed that there was a simple, viable alternative to war with Iraq, the continuation of the status-quo, i.e., sanctions plus the almost weekly bombing of the no-fly zones. In fact, that isn't really true. America's Iraq policy was broken. You have to contrast the dangers of acting in Iraq with the dangers of not acting and ask what would things have looked like had we simply kicked this can down the road." ..
January 18, 2004
THE WORLD
Surging Shiite Demands Put U.S. in a Bind
Iraqi clerics' mounting pressure for direct elections may leave the White House unable to satisfy them along with the Sunnis and Kurds.
By Alissa J. Rubin, Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD ?- The Bush administration has been backed into a corner on its political plan for Iraq by unexpectedly strident opposition from Shiite Muslim clerics, who played their trump card last week, calling on their followers to stage mass demonstrations.
In the next few days, the administration, along with the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council, plans to craft a new plan for choosing a transitional government that is more satisfactory to all the sects and ethnic groups in the country, including the long-suppressed Shiite majority. But there is every indication that no matter what shape it takes, the proposal could be unacceptable to crucial political players.
"The administration is facing problems on all three fronts ?- with the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds and the situation with the Shiites is looking more and more like a crisis," said Bathsheba Crocker, a fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The picture could get a whole lot uglier."
The bind for the U.S. is that if it accedes to the Shiites' demand for direct elections ?- and thus more clout ?- it risks alienating Sunni Muslims and Kurds as well as secular Iraqis and women, who would probably have more representation under the current plan calling for caucuses and indirect elections. If the United States sticks to the proposal now on the table, it will face potentially destabilizing Shiite street protests.
The key figure in the Shiite play for power is the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who for months restrained the masses from taking a stand against occupation forces, perhaps lulling the Americans into believing that the Shiites would be easy to work with. Shiite-dominated southern Iraq has seen nothing remotely like the violence in the chiefly Sunni central part of the country ?- no mines targeting coalition soldiers, no lobbing of rocket grenades, no mortars fired at military bases.
Through last spring and summer, when the coalition had trouble keeping the electricity on and the gas stations pumping, the reclusive cleric with the long salt-and-pepper beard and dark, intense eyes ?- giving him a startling resemblance to Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ?- told his assistant clerics to preach patience to the Shiite streets and to hold in reserve the threat of violence.
Last week, however, his patience appeared to run out. Tens of thousands of his followers poured into the streets to reinforce his call for direct elections, and a cleric close to Sistani threatened strikes and further disturbances.
The combustibility of the situation was heightened with new signs that a Shiite government may put in place a more theocratic regime than the U.S. had hoped. The most recent reflection of that danger was the Governing Council's enactment a week ago of a law requiring the use of Sharia, or Islamic law, for domestic matters such as divorce, child custody and marriage ?- a move that would roll back women's rights.
The proposal was framed in a way unacceptable to most Kurds, who are secular, and Sunnis, and the council's vote was largely along religious and ethnic lines.
Although it is unlikely that the Coalition Provisional Authority will agree to the law ?- under the terms of the occupation, all laws have to be approved by civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III ?- as soon as the U.S. hands over power, it could be enacted.
"Beneath the new interest of the United States in bringing democracy to the Middle East is the central dilemma that the most powerful, popular movements are ones that we are deeply uncomfortable with," said Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Sistani has objected to a Nov. 15 deal with the Governing Council that calls for a transitional assembly, selected by caucuses in May, to elect a provisional government that will assume sovereignty by July 1. General elections would come in late 2005 after the drafting of a constitution.
Sistani and his fellow Shiites fear that unless there are direct elections, the process will be manipulated and they will be deprived of their fair share of power while the Sunnis and secular representatives receive more than their fair share.
The U.S. continues to assert that it will not bow to the Shiite demands for direct elections for the transitional assembly, but the conflict appears to have reached a new level.
Even if the United States could see its way clear to accepting direct elections, it is difficult to see how it could do so without provoking a backlash from the Sunnis and the Kurds, who fear the rising Shiite tide.
Such a scenario could precipitate more serious violence and civil strife than the country has already seen, which would almost certainly derail the U.S. ambition to have a stable transitional government within six months.
The Shiites are thought to make up roughly 60% of Iraq's population. They were brutally repressed under former President Saddam Hussein.
Across the Shiite urban strongholds in southern Iraq last week, clerics close to Sistani prepared their followers for days of demonstrations and possible violence: "peaceful protests, strikes and, as a last resort, possible confrontation with the occupying forces," in the words of Abdel-Mahdi Salami, the senior cleric close to Sistani in Karbala, one of the two most holy Shiite cities in the country.
"The CPA has to start learning lessons. We don't want them to learn lessons the hard way, but if they keep on being pigheaded, they will be hurt," said Mouwafak Rabii, a Shiite and a member of the Governing Council, who has been present during most of the council's discussions with Sistani.
The tougher tactics came as a Monday meeting in New York between U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Bremer and the Governing Council neared, and it became evident that coalition officials were refusing to look at any major change in the plan to hold caucuses.
Now U.S. officials are talking about a more comprehensive overhaul, although they have said little about specifics. But Washington is known to be pressuring the United Nations to send a team of election experts to Iraq to assess the fairness of its plan. U.S. officials have also been urging the U.N. to expand its role in Iraq.
With the days diminishing before the Governing Council signs off on a law to govern the country during the rule of an interim government ?- the deadline is the end of February ?- Sistani made his move.
"Once the real political process starts, people grab for power," Carnegie's Carothers said. "They aren't going to stop ?- they are just going to keep pushing to see how much they can get. They know the door is open to a renegotiation of the process."
For every step closer to Sistani that the United States takes, it loses ground in its already rocky relationship with the Sunnis, who dominated the country under Hussein.
In an interview Saturday, Sheik Mohammed Bashar Faidi, the spokesman for the Board of Clergy and Scholars, a prestigious Iraqi Islamic religious organization, said that Sunni clerics are likely to issue a communique soon that if the government were elected along the lines requested by Sistani, it should be viewed as illegitimate.
Sistani representatives had already made a similar threat, saying that if the government were chosen through a caucus system, Sistani might issue a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying that the government was illegal.
Reluctant to concede that they are a minority, many Sunni Muslims ?- regardless of their support for Hussein ?- believe that the Shiites are in league with the United States and Israel, always an archenemy, to strip the Sunnis of all power.
In living rooms and on street corners, the talk in Sunni majority neighborhoods was of Sistani's call to action and the Sunnis' fervent hope that the U.S. would fight the Shiites as Hussein did.
"You need to take a strong stand with them. You should treat them like Saddam did ?- he knew how to deal with them," said Ahmad, a Sunni and former diplomat, who asked that his full name not be used. Under Hussein, tens of thousands were killed, and many others were imprisoned and tortured.
Faidi, however, underscored that the near object of Sunni rage was the American presence and that any retaliation would be initially directed at them.
"Our problem is not Sistani ?- our problem is the American forces, because the Americans from the beginning ignored the Sunni people," he said, charging that the U.S. had a plot to spur violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
"We do not rule out the possibility that this is the first step toward triggering sectarian strife," he said.
The way forward is filled with doubt. Some Iraq watchers believe that at the end of the day, Sistani will call off the crowds he urged to take to the streets.
"If the United States brings in the United Nations, that would be a strong signal from Washington, and if there could be some certification that elections were not possible in such a short time, then Sistani might accept that," said Joost Hiltermann, head of the International Crisis Group's Jordan office, which tracks developments in Iraq. ICG is a Washington- and Brussels-based research organization that closely follows democracy development in troubled countries.
"He only has to give one nod and he can turn off this stuff," Hiltermann said.
With the U.N. certifying the difficulty of organizing free and fair elections, perhaps a compromise that called for caucuses with a broader membership, including some locally elected figures, might be palatable, he suggested.
Others are less sanguine. They see Sistani as an unstoppable force who will refuse to back down from his demands.
"They have to find an accommodation, and if they don't, when the transitional government is put in place, it will be broadly viewed as lacking legitimacy [by the Shiite majority], and that is a big problem," said Juan Cole, a professor of modern Arab history at the University of Michigan.
Harder still is that whatever government is put in place will inherit the Sunni insurgency that has racked the center of the country, as well as the terrorist assaults ?- a long way from the stable democracy the United States has envisioned.
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Shiites Gaining Power In Post-Saddam Iraq
A 22-year-old Shiite cleric wields vast power in the impoverished Iraqi city of Kut, overseeing a network of social and security services, collecting taxes and even administering a court of law - all independent of the U.S.-backed local government. Abdul Jawad al-Issawi is an example of the eroding influence of the U.S.-led coalition and of how Shiite clerical power is spreading outside the mosques, partly to fill that gap. It is a pattern that is taking hold in other Shiite Muslim areas as the religious establishment challenges U.S. plans for transferring power to the Iraqis.
?'?'We have told everyone from the start that only failure awaits the occupiers if they try to interfere in how we run our lives,'' al-Issawi said. ?'?'Occupation is humiliation, and we cannot accept humiliation. We never trusted the Americans and we never will.''
The rise of a 22-year-old seminary student to such local prominence reflects vast political power attained by Shiite clerics in the nine months since Saddam Hussein's ouster. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, has renewed his demand that a provisional assembly due to select a government in June must be elected, not chosen from regional caucuses as provided for in a Nov. 15 agreement between L. Paul Bremer, chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, and the Iraqi Governing Council.
Al-Sistani, 75, also demanded Sunday that an agreement on the status of U.S. forces after the transfer of sovereignty and the interim constitution being drafted now by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council must be approved by an elected national assembly. His demands threaten to delay the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government by July 1, a major objective of the Bush administration in this U.S. election year. Al-Sistani is revered by most Shiites, who make up an estimated 60 percent of Iraq's population.
Already, the United States has dropped one political plan for Iraq in the face of objections by al-Sistani, whose insistence that elected rather than appointed representatives draft the new constitution prompted the Americans to speed the timetable for handing over sovereignty and delay the drafting of a new national charter. Bowing a second time could make it appear U.S. policy in Iraq is subject to the demands of one elderly man, who hasn't left his house since April, when Saddam's regime collapsed, because of failing health and fears for his life.
However, Bush administration officials in Washington said Tuesday on condition of anonymity that the Nov. 15 plan may have to be altered. They insist the July 1 deadline for the transfer of sovereignty remains their goal.
The Iranian-born al-Sistani was virtually unknown outside Iraq until the mid-1990s, when two more senior clerics, including his mentor, died in quick succession. Now al-Sistani, who lives in a modest house on a dusty alley in the holy city of Najaf, has become a symbol of Shiite power, despite his proclaimed stand that his spiritual calling takes precedence over politics.
At the lower end of the Shiite clerical hierarchy, al-Issawi in Kut displays the energy and resolve of a much younger generation of robed Shiites intent on addressing problems big and small in their communities. Speaking at his office next to the Tigris River in Kut, 95 miles southeast of Baghdad, al-Issawi outlined activities undertaken by the movement led by maverick cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Issawi is al-Sadr's Kut representative. They include a council to resolve tribal disputes, a security structure that posts sentries throughout the city after nightfall, rural development and a committee of local bureaucrats that meets every two weeks to review services.
Al-Issawi collects a Shiite religious tax called ?'?'khoms'' or ?'?'fifth,'' from well-to-do Kut residents and administers a court that sits once a month to settle domestic, property and inheritance disputes. ?'?'The scope of jurisdiction of this court falls well below our expectations,'' said the bearded al-Issawi, wearing a gray robe, a white turban and fingering prayer beads. Al-Issawi would like to see his court expand into criminal and other judicial matters.
Similar activities are carried out in other Shiite areas where al-Sadr, the son of a cleric killed in 1999 by suspected Saddam agents, enjoys wide support, including in Baghdad and Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. They have been instrumental in softening the impact of the vast economic and security problems since Saddam's ouster. In many cases, occupation authorities have sought, without much success, to push aside Shiite clerics to make way for their own protégés, often secular-minded figures with a Western-oriented education but limited popularity.
Those problems were visible Tuesday in Kut. Long lines snaked from gas stations. Hundreds crowded a depot where scarce heating fuel was on sale. For a second straight day, hundreds of angry residents rioted to demand jobs. One person was killed and two were injured ?- including a 22-year-old woman ?- when Ukrainian troops opened fire to disperse the crowd.
?'?'The Americans say they came to liberate us, but I must say their liberation has become a nightmare,'' said 60-year-old Sajed Abed Abbas, the undertaker of a Shiite mosque. ?'?'I was once a national weightlifting champion and I am now jobless and broke,'' said 19-year-old Majid Zahi, pulling out the empty linings of his pockets.
The hold Shiite leaders wield over this city is evident in the huge murals depicting senior clerics ?- both living and dead. ?'?'The masses are more powerful than the tyrants,'' declares fresh graffiti. ?'?'The faithful are at the disposal of their religious leaders.''
Sunday, January 18th, 2004 - 12:52am GMT
Article courtesy of Associated Press
I Believe In Conspiracies
Believing in conspiracy theories is rather like having been to a grammar school: both are rather socially awkward to admit. Although I once sat next to a sister-in-law of the Duke of Norfolk who agreed that you can't believe everything you read in the newspapers, conspiracy theories are generally considered a rather repellent form of intellectual low-life, and their theorists rightfully the object of scorn and snobbery.
Writing in the Daily Mail last week, the columnist Melanie Phillips even attacked conspiracy theories as the consequence of a special pathology, of the collapse in religious belief, and of a ?'descent into the irrational'. The implication is that those who oppose ?'the West', or who think that governments are secretive and dishonest, might need psychiatric treatment.
Opponents of the USA war machine have been accused before of descending into irrationality.
In fact, it is the other way round. British and American foreign policy is itself based on a series of highly improbable conspiracy theories, the biggest of which is that an evil Saudi millionaire genius in a cave in the Hindu Kush controls a secret worldwide network of ?'tens of thousands of terrorists' ?'in more than 60 countries' (George Bush). News reports frequently tell us that terrorist organisations, such as those which have attacked Bali or Istanbul, have ?'links' to al-Qaeda, but we never learn quite what those ?'links' are.
According to two terrorism experts in California, Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud, this is because they do not exist. ?'In the quest to define the enemy, the USA and its allies have helped to blow al-Qa'eda out of proportion,' they write. They argue that the name ?'al-Qa'eda' was invented in the West to designate what is, in reality, a highly disparate collection of otherwise independent groups with no central command structure and not even a logo. They claim that some terrorist organisations say they are affiliated to bin Laden simply to gain kudos and name-recognition for their entirely local grievances.
By the same token, the USA-led invasion of Iraq was based on a fantasy that Saddam Hussein was in, or might one day enter into, a conspiracy with Osama bin Laden. This is as verifiable as the claim that MI6 used mind control to make Henri Paul crash Princess Diana's car into the 13th pillar of the tunnel under the Place de l'Alma.
With similar mystic gnosis, Donald Rumsfeld has alleged that the failure to find ?'weapons of mass distraction', as Tony Blair likes to call them, shows that they once existed but were destroyed. Indeed, London and Washington have shamelessly exploited people's fear of the unknown to get public opinion to believe their claim that Iraq had masses of anthrax and botulism. This played on a deep and ancient seam of fear about poison conspiracies which, in the Middle Ages, led to pogroms against Jews. And yet it is the anti-war people who continue to be branded paranoid, even though the British Prime Minister himself, his eyes staring wildly, said in September 2002, ?'Saddam has got all these weapons ...and they're pointing at us!'
In contrast to such imaginings, it is perfectly reasonable to raise questions about the power of the secret services and armed forces of the world's most powerful states, especially those of the USA. These are not ?'theories' at all; they are based on fact.
The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other USA secret services spend more than $30,000,000,000 a year on espionage and covert operations. Do opponents of conspiracy theories think that this money is given to the Langley, Virginia Cats' Home?
Donald Rumsfeld has made it his own personal mission to institutionalise the use of lies to achieve strategic government goals.
It would also be churlish to deny that the American military industry plays a very major role in the economics and politics of the USA. Every day at 5 p.m., the Pentagon announces hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to arms manufacturers all over America?-click on the Department of Defense's website for details?-who in turn peddle influence through donations to politicians and opinion-formers.
It is also odd that opponents of conspiracy theories often allow that conspiracies have occurred in the past, but refuse to contemplate their existence in the present. For some reason, you are bordering on the bonkers if you wonder about the truth behind events like 9/11, when it is established as fact that in 1962 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, tried to convince President Kennedy to authorise an attack on John Glenn's rocket, or on a USA navy vessel, to provide a pretext for invading Cuba.
Two years later, a similar strategy was deployed in the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, when USA engagement in Vietnam was justified in the light of the false allegation that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on a USA destroyer. Are such tactics confined to history? Paul O'Neill, George Bush's former Treasury Secretary, has just revealed that the White House decided to get rid of Saddam eight months before 9/11.
Indeed, one ought to speak of a ?'conspiracy of silence' about the role of secret services in politics. This is especially true of the events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is the height of irresponsibility to discuss the post-communist transition without extensive reference to the role of the spooks, yet our media stick doggedly to the myth that their role is irrelevant. During the overthrow of the Georgian president, Eduard Shevardnadze, on 22 November 2003, the world's news outlets peddled a wonderful fairy-tale about a spontaneous uprising?-?'the revolution of roses', CNN schlockily dubbed it?-even though all the key actors have subsequently bragged that they were covertly funded and organised by the USA.
Similarly, it is a matter of public record that the Americans pumped at least $100 million into Serbia in order to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and huge sums in the years before. (An election in Britain, whose population is eight times bigger than Yugoslavia's, costs about two thirds of this.) This money was used to fund and equip the Kosovo Liberation Army; to stuff international observer missions in Kosovo with hundreds of military intelligence officers; to pay off the opposition and the so-called ?'independent' media; and to buy heavily-armed Mafia gangsters to come and smash up central Belgrade, so that the world's cameras could show a ?'people's revolution'.
At every stage, the covert aid and organisation provided by the USA and British intelligence agencies were decisive, as they had been on many occasions before and since, all over the world. Yet for some reason, it is acceptable to say, ?'The CIA organised the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran in 1953', but not that it did it again in Belgrade in 2000 or Tbilisi in 2003. And in spite of the well-known subterfuge and deception practised, for instance, in the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s, people experience an enormous psychological reluctance to accept that the British and American governments knowingly lied us into war in 2002 and 2003.
To be sure, some conspiracy theories may be outlandish or wrong. But it seems to me that anyone who refuses to make simple empirical deductions ought to have his head examined.
Friday, January 16th, 2004 - 11:25pm GMT
Article courtesy of The Spectator
'No blister agent' in Iraq shells
Three dozen mortar shells uncovered in Iraq earlier this month had no chemical agents, the Danish army says.
It is not clear why initial tests first showed they could contain blister gas, the Danish army said in a statement carried by the AP news agency.
The 36 shells were found in southern Iraq buried among building equipment, even though they appeared to have been abandoned for at least 10 years.
World News »
An injured Iraqi walks across Baghdad's al-Jumhuriya Bridge away from the site of a massive suicide truck bomb which blew up at the main gate to the US-led coalition headquarters
Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 18 January 2004 2009 hrs
Worst attack on US seat in Iraq kills 25, hits plans to woo UN back
BAGHDAD : Some 25 people were killed and some 130 wounded in a suicide blast outside coalition headquarters in Baghdad in the boldest assault yet on the symbol of US power in Iraq and a blow to Washington's plans to seek the United Nations' return to the country.
Most of the dead were Iraqis but they included at least two Americans, US military officials said, after a white pick-up truck, crammed with more than 1,000 pounds (500 kilos) of explosives, detonated near the Assassin's Gate checkpoint crowded with people and cars waiting to enter the walled compound.
The huge explosion turned the busy central Baghdad street outside into a battlefield inferno but the headquarters buildings inside the heavily-fortified area known as the Green Zone were unaffected.
The blast came the day before Iraqi and US officials, including US civilian administrator Paul Bremer, are to meet with a wary UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York to discuss a future UN role in Iraq.
"At least 20 people have lost their lives and almost 60 were injured," US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told reporters.
"It would appear from all the indicators this was a suicide bomb. We have confirmation some of those killed were US citizens, US contractors. We believe the current number is two. We are waiting for final confirmation," Kimmitt said.
Another five people were reported dead and 71 wounded at Baghdad hospitals.
Witnesses claimed US soldiers opened fire in panic on Iraqis moments after the blast, but a military spokesman denied this.
"Today's terrorist bombing in Baghdad ... is an outrage -- another clear indication of the murderous and cynical intent of terrorists to undermine freedom, democracy and progress in Iraq," Bremer said in a statement posted on the website of the US-led coalition.
"They will not succeed," he vowed.
Iraqi police chief General Ahmed Ibrahim said, "This is an act of terrorism carried out by foreign groups. This is against Islam. They did not strike the might of the coalition because the majority of victims are Iraqis."
"If the terrorists think that this is the way to return the Baath party (of ousted president Saddam Hussein) to power, they are deluded," Ibrahim said.
The US spokesman said the vehicle exploded 100 metres (yards) from the checkpoint outside the fortress-like headquarters, a former palace of Saddam.
A confirmed death toll of 25 would make it the heaviest single attack in Baghdad since the end of major combat in Iraq on May 1, though 43 people were killed in a series of blasts in the capital last October 27.
A total of 22 people, including the top UN envoy, were killed in a truck-bombing of the UN headquarters on August 19.
This and other attacks against UN and aid agencies prompted Annan to eventually pull out his international staff from Iraq, and the timing of the latest carnage could not be worse as far as the coalition is concerned.
The United States wants the UN to return to Iraq to help prevent its power transfer plans from being wrecked by mounting Iraqi opposition.
Annan requested Monday's meeting in mid-December to get "clarity" on what the world body would be expected to do as the coalition prepares to formally end its occupation and Iraqis begin governing themselves on July 1.
But the talks have taken on new urgency for Washington in the wake of opposition from the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has rejected plans for the handover.
Sistani wants the democracy that the coalition promised after the war to oust Saddam, and says direct elections must be held instead of the caucus system now being prepared to create a provisional government by end June.
He has already drawn tens of thousands of supporters onto the streets to protest putting an unelected government in power, and has threatened strikes and civil disobedience if the United States does not relent.
Bremer said Friday that Washington would consider some "refinements" to the plan, which was originally spelled out in a November 15 agreement between the Governing Council and the coalition.
That deal made no mention of the United Nations.
A spokesman for the main Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Governing Council member, would use the talks to press Sistani's request.
He said Sistani would back down only if a UN fact-finding team "officially concludes" that free and fair elections are impossible in the short term, which Annan has indicated he believes.
In other attacks on the coalition Sunday, two British soldiers suffered minor injuries in an explosion in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the British defense ministry said in London.
The troops were on routine patrol in the southwest of Iraq's second city when a small explosive device detonated at the side of the road at about 9:00 am (0600 GMT), a spokesman said.
In Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, two Iraqis were killed and a third wounded late Saturday when an explosive device they were handling went off in their car, a US military commander said.
Japanese armored vehicles and firearms were meanwhile shipped into Kuwait for use by an advance unit of 39 ground troops now in the emirate to prepare for humanitarian operations into Iraq.
The equipment was taken to Camp Virginia, a US military camp in the Kuwaiti desert, where the Japanese ground troops are staying before moving into Iraq to begin their mission.
The advance unit will prepare for the deployment of a 600-strong force inside the southeastern Iraqi province of Muthanna to engage in non-combat operations.
- AF
The US still remains to be the hope of the world, and no one can suppose that any real existence be the ideal itself. Any real existence cannot be pure good. An simple application of an ideal to the real world is idleness, extremism, or fundamentalism. The value of an ideal is in its existence itself, but not in the simple minded application.
O'Neill's Claims Against Bush Supported By 1998 ?'War' Letters to Clinton Signed By Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz
By: Jason Leopold - 01/19/04
Anyone who doubts former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's recent claims that President Bush mislead the public and secretly planned the Iraq war eight months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 needs to read the two letters sent to then President Bill Clinton in 1998 and Speaker of the House Trent Lott by current members of the Bush administration urging Clinton to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq.
Back then, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz and other pro-war hawks lobbied Clinton and Gingrich to remove former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power using military force and indict him as a "war criminal." Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, both of whom were working in the private sector at the time, were affiliated with the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century, which was founded by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol in 1997 to promote America's foreign and defense policies.
Other familiar names on PNAC's roster of supporters include Richard Armitage, currently Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq war and former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and Robert Kagan, a former Deputy for Policy in the State Department's Bureau for Inter-American Affairs during the Ronald Reagan's presidency. Kagan is also co-chair of PNAC.
PNAC has been instrumental in helping the Bush administration shape its defense policies. Since Bush has been in office, PNAC has succeeded in getting Rumsfeld to scrap the multibillion-dollar Army Crusader Artillery Program and also advising the Defense Secretary to request a $48 billion one-year increase for national defense, both of which were written about extensively in reports posted on PNAC's web site before Rumsfeld was approached by the group.
However, one of PNAC's first goals when it was founded in 1997 was to urge Congress and the Clinton administration to support regime change in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was allegedly manufacturing chemical and biological weapons, claims that today have turned out to be untrue.
"Only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq " PNAC founder Kristol wrote in a 1997 report. Kristol's Weekly Standard magazine is owned by News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox News Channel, considered by many media critics to be the mouthpiece of the Bush administration.
A year after Kristol's report, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Armitage and other PNAC members sent a letter to Clinton, repeating much of what Kristol said in his report a year earlier.
"We urge you to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power," says the letter sent to Clinton. "This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council."
However, in an ironic twist, Clinton rebuffed the advice saying his administration was focusing on the worldwide threat posed by the terrorist group al-Qaeeda and it's leader Osama Bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack and who Iraq war critics say the Bush administration should have been focusing on after 9/11 instead of Saddam Hussein.
The 1998 letters to Clinton and Gingrich seems to back up the revelations made by O'Neil in the book "The Price of Loyalty" that the Iraq war was, in fact, planned in the days after Bush was sworn into office-possibly even earlier-if you consider that between 1998 and late 1999, when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the chief architects of the Iraq war, they spent nearly two years lobbying Congress to use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein from power.
When Clinton refused, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and others from PNAC wrote another letter on May 29, 1998, to Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott, saying that the United States 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."
"We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam Hussein's claim to be Iraq's legitimate ruler, including indicting him as a war criminal," says the letter to Gingrich and Lott. "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily. But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the U.S. can lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that time is not on the side of his regime."
All of the Iraq "war" letters are posted on PNAC's web site, www.newamericancentury.org
The letters offered no hard evidence that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction but it did say that with Saddam Hussein in power "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard . . ."
Jason Leopold, a contributing writer for Liberal Slant, spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. He has written more than 2,000 news stories on the issue and was the first journalist to report that energy companies were engaged in manipulative practices in California's newly deregulated electricity market. Most recently, Mr. Leopold has reported on Enron. He was the first journalist to interview former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Mr. Leopold has broken numerous stories on the financial machinations Enron engaged in and his investigative pieces on the company have been published in The Nation, Salon, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, CBS Marketwatch, Time magazine, The New York Times, Forbes and numerous other national publications. Mr. Leopold is also a regular contributor to CNBC and National Public Radio and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two-dozen energy industry conferences around the country. Mr. Leopold left Dow Jones in April to write a book on California's electricity crisis
Gels, That info no longer matters to the American People. They are happy to see Saddam gone as the justifcation for our aggression against Iraq. Preplanned, WMD's, and connection to al Qaida has no meaning to the American People.
Shia protesters step up demand for Iraq elections
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
20 January 2004
In their greatest show of political strength since the war tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims marched through Baghdad yesterday chanting slogans in favour of free elections for a new government.
About 100,000 protesters marched through Baghdad to al-Mustansiriyah University shouting "Yes to elections" and "No to occupation".
The Shia, believed to number some 15 to 16 million out of a total Iraqi population of 25 million, fear the US and its local allies will seek to rob them of power by appointing members of a new assembly and government to which the US has pledged to hand over power on 1 July.
The demonstration was clearly aimed at Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the UN, seeking to persuade him not to endorse US plans for indirect elections. Mr Annan met Paul Bremer, the chief US official in Iraq, and a delegation from the US-selected Iraq Governing Council in New York yesterday.
The UN is likely to be very wary of returning to Iraq after a suicide bomber killed 31 people and injured 120 - mostly Iraqi labourers - at the entrance to the US headquarters in Baghdad on Sunday.
Many of the demonstrators carried pictures of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shia cleric, who has resolutely rejected the US plan for provincial caucuses to choose an assembly under an agreement signed on 15 November. It was he who called for the demonstration.
Amar Abdul Hassan, a student protester, said: "The Americans want to choose our leaders for us. We want to choose them ourselves through elections."
Giant banners billowed in the wind as the marchers, almost all men, chanted praise to Ali and Hussein, the martyred founders of the Shia faith. US observation helicopters flew overhead.
The US and the Governing Council say that a one-person, one-vote election cannot be organised in time. Demonstrators yesterday were dubious about this. Adnan Saddam, an engineer in the Ministry of Oil, said: "The real reason that Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi [former members of the exiled opposition] don't want elections is that they would not be elected."
Protesters were eager to claim that they were not sectarian and exclusively Shia. Akhil Oda, a student, said: "There is no reason for the Sunni to be frightened of us because it will be a democracy in which everybody will get his rights." But the Sunni know that it is the Shia who will have the majority at the polls.
Unlike Sunni areas of Iraq, many people at the demonstration expressed their opposition to armed resistance. Mahdi Abdul Salman said: "The resistance does not represent us and it harms the Iraqis because we are 90 per cent of the victims - that is what happened when the bomb went off [on Sunday]."
The demonstration marks another stage in the elevation of Ayatollah Sistani, the 73-year-old leader of the Hawza, or network of religious schools in Najaf, as perhaps the most important Iraqi leader. If he issues a fatwa denouncing the political process organised by the US and the Governing Council then it will have little legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis.
The patience of Shia Muslims has been running out in recent months, not least because the economy has failed to improve as Iraqis had expected at the time of the fall of Saddam Hussein last April. In recent weeks there have been protests over unemployment in many Shia cities.
It will be difficult for Mr Bremer to ignore protests such as those yesterday demanding democratic elections.
The US and Britain justified the war last year by claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Failure to find them has largely discredited WMD as a justification for war. This has made the overthrow of Saddam and the introduction of democracy to Iraq more important as a justification for the conflict.
It will be embarrassing for the US to hold elections denounced as undemocratic by Ayatollah Sistani and the largest Iraqi community.
19 January 2004 20:06
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
