THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Quote:

Troops find 'hostage slaughterhouses' in Falluja
Coalition forces seize 70 percent of city

Wednesday, November 10, 2004 Posted: 12:06 PM EST (1706 GMT)
FALLUJA, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi troops retaking the city of Falluja have found hostage "slaughterhouses" where people were held captive and beheaded, an Iraqi military official said Wednesday.

Maj. Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem Mohan, commander of Iraqi forces in the battle, said his soldiers found CDs that show beheadings and black clothes worn by kidnappers when seen on television.

"We have found hostage slaughterhouses in Falluja that were used by these people (kidnappers) and the black clothing that they used to wear to identify themselves, hundreds of CDs and whole records with names of hostages," The Associated Press quoted the general as saying.

....

What crimes have those that have been abducted and beheaded been found to be guilty of? Trying to rebuild Iraq after years of neglect? Trying to help Iraq become a successful contributor to the world?

As George Bush said in his victory speech, "a new term is a new opportunity." Unfortunately, it will begin with the same old wretched problem of Iraq.

I hope the president will take time to ponder the Iraq conundrum anew, now that he has won the freedom to craft a true strategy rather than a slogan. His "stay the course" rhetoric may have energized the Republican base, but it didn't answer the question of the typical soldier on the ground: How do we win this thing, and, if we can't, how do we get out?

The irony is that Bush can make bold decisions about Iraq now in a way that a victorious John Kerry could not have done. It's the Nixon-to-China phenomenon. Bush doesn't have to prove he's tough on Iraq. His only obligation is to do what makes sense. But what is that, exactly?

Iraq has become a Catch-22: The definition of victory is a stable Iraqi government that can maintain security without depending on U.S. troops. But a viable Iraqi government, again almost by definition, will be one that can claim it ended the U.S. occupation and restored Iraq's dignity and independence.

Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, is caught in this double bind. The more he depends on U.S. help, the less legitimate he appears in Iraqi eyes. For that reason, Allawi has been pushing to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces -- especially two armored divisions he thinks are crucial. I'm told the Iraqi leader was so upset about this issue that when Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad last month, Allawi briefly suggested he might not run in January's elections.

After a strong start last summer, Allawi knows he is losing the confidence of Iraqis. In a poll completed a month ago, the percentage of Iraqis who said the interim government was effective had fallen to 43 percent, compared with 63 percent in July. A frustrated Allawi sent a letter to Bush in October complaining that the training of Iraqi forces wouldn't be completed until well after the elections scheduled in late January, "which is simply too late," according to excerpts published in the New Yorker.

The locus of the Iraqi Catch-22 is the city of Fallujah. In addition to being the center of the anti-American insurgency, it's a symbol of Sunni Muslims' resistance to what they fear will be future domination by Iraq's Shiite majority. Fallujah may be the decisive battle of the war, but it's an especially delicate one. An American-led "victory" that razes the city could further alienate the Sunnis and poison the chances for political reconciliation. That's why Allawi wants the armored units so badly -- so that Iraqi tanks can lead the way into Fallujah and make it look less like an American operation.

U.S. Marines, joined by about 4,000 Iraqi troops, are poised to attack the city. U.S. commanders in Baghdad believe the troops are ready to roll, but the attack isn't likely until after Ramadan ends in about 10 days. Allawi and the Americans will probably make a last effort at negotiation; they know military victory in Fallujah might come at the cost of political defeat.

So what's the right course now in Iraq? As is so often the case in the Middle East, the trick is riding two horses at once. America must keep faith with the Shiite majority, which rightly expects to play a decisive role after decades of oppression. But at the same time, the United States must reassure Sunnis that they have a place in the new Iraq.

Allawi and his American advisers sensibly have been reaching out to Sunni leaders; Jordan, with U.S. support, will be hosting a quiet gathering of Iraqi Sunnis next week. The Sunnis may account for only 20 percent of the population, but if they aren't included in writing Iraq's new constitution, the violence will continue. Thus administration officials should give up their hope that they can rely on Iraq's other two ethnic groups, the Kurds and Shiites, to make January's elections a success.

The key to stability is regaining the support of Iraq's silent majority -- the long-suffering, secular-minded Sunnis and Shiites referred to by some U.S. and British intelligence analysts as the POIs, which is short for "pissed-off Iraqis." These POIs are angry at American occupation, and they want it to end.

So here's my recommendation for President Bush: He should announce that when a new Iraqi government is elected, he is prepared to negotiate the terms and timetable of American withdrawal. If handled wisely, that approach would be an American victory, and an Iraqi victory, as well.

It would seem that the barbarians in Iraq don't exactly find these people innocent, hmmm?

Something to do with them being accessories to crimes against their nation...

Haven't heard of them beheading any freelance Greek reporters there.

You're a mercenary? Guilty, chop chop.
You're a worker for an American corporation that is stealing their resources while your army invades and kills their families? Guilty, chop chop.

You're an Iraqi that is working with the occupiers? Guilty, chop chop.

Dublin-born charity worker Margaret Hassan has lived in Iraq for 30 years, and began working for Care International soon after it began operations there in 1991.

Outside the U.S., Bush’s win is forcing a rethink of conventional wisdom about Americans—and what the president might do with his mandate

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 3:10 p.m. ET Nov. 4, 2004


Nov. 4 - At the top of a letter congratulating the president of the United States on his re-election, French President Jacques Chirac wrote in fountain pen the simple phrase, “Cher George”: “Dear George.” At the end, this Frenchman who has so often postured as George W. Bush’s most dedicated adversary among America’s traditional allies, scrawled a promise of his “most cordial friendship.”

Throughout Europe and the Middle East, politicians and statesmen who’d hoped fervently, if privately, for a change in the White House are now striving to come to terms with the mandate Bush received this week from the American public. Thus Chirac downplayed his old claims that Europe could offer an alternative pole to U.S. power and called instead for “a tight transatlantic partnership.” Karsten Voigt, a close advisor to German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, talked about the need for Bush and Europe to pull closer together “in rhetoric, in gestures, but also in substance.”

Longtime Bush-backers like British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Russian President Vladimir Putin rejoiced, as expected. Others seemed to appear out of nowhere, rushing to show their colors as true-blue friends of the U.S.A. “We have to wake up and stop this simplistic anti-Americanism!” veteran French politician Alain Madelin told a conference sponsored by Chirac’s own party yesterday. Going a step further, party official Pierre Lellouche likened Bush’s determination and independence to the notoriously stubborn Charles de Gaulle himself. Columnist Alexandre Adler told the same group that anti-Bush diatribes like Michael Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 9/11”—which won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival—actually mobilized conservatives to vote for Bush. Shouts of “Bravo!” erupted in the pro-Bush crowd.

So much conventional wisdom is being rethought right now on this side of the Atlantic that for many the world seems upside down. “We are in mourning,” says a Lebanese public-opinion pollster in Beirut. Regardless of their governments’ positions, many Europeans and Middle Easterners assumed Bush was simply a dim bulb and viewed his policies on everything from the environment to nuclear weapons and the war in Iraq as downright dangerous. For almost four years, they had been telling themselves the Bush presidency was an aberration, his first term a fluke of the Electoral College and the courts.

Europeans, especially, made a distinction between the Bush administration and the American people. They tended (and sometimes condescended) to think of the U.S. public as the victim of this moronic cowboy president. Now, Bush-haters have to come to terms with the idea that a majority of U.S. voters really do want this man for four more years. HOW CAN 59,054,087 PEOPLE BE SO DUMB? the British tabloid The Daily Mirror asked on its front page this morning. French intellectual Emmanuel Todd concluded that Americans must “find it normal to just accept wars of aggression waged on other continents, the bombing of civil populations, the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis, the sexual atrocities of Abu Ghraib.”

Stereotypes aside, even the optimism of Bush’s most fervent friend and ally in Europe, Tony Blair, was tempered yesterday as he expressed his hope that in a second term Bush actually will work actively to bring some peace to the Holy Land. Thus far the president has tended to make grand pronouncements that are left hanging in the air while Palestinians and Israelis are dying on the ground. “The need to revitalize the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political challenge in our world today,” Blair told reporters.

There will be chances very soon to see just how much willingness there really is for all sides to work together. Certainly Bush’s new cabinet appointments will be watched closely. But even before he shuffles his staff, a summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh is scheduled this month to address the deepening crisis in Iraq. Can regional adversaries be brought together with the Europeans and the Americans to make some kind of new start there? Even optimists say there are few indications a president re-elected to “stay the course” will correct—or admit—the problems created in his first term.

But François Heisbourg of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, while generally pessimistic, does see one positive factor. If John Kerry had been elected, he’d have felt he had to prove his security credentials, Heisbourg suggests. Bush does not. “Bush has the margin of maneuver to engineer the withdrawal from Iraq,” says Heisbourg. “The question is, will he do it?”

Today, that question is impossible to answer. But by Inauguration Day, for better or worse, we’ll all have a pretty good idea.

Arab Liberals Petition the U.N. to Establish an International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Terrorists

On October 24, 2004, the liberal Arab websites www.elaph.com and www.metransparent.com published a manifesto written by Arab liberals, in which they petition the U.N. to establish an international tribunal which would prosecute terrorists, as well as people and institutions, primarily religious clerics, that incite terrorism.(1)

The idea to petition the U.N. with this request was raised by the Jordanian writer and researcher Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi in early September 2004, in response to the fatwa issued by Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi - one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood movement and one of the most important religious authorities in Islamist circles - which called for the abduction and killing of U.S. citizens in Iraq.(2) The idea was developed and written up by Al-Nabulsi, Tunisian intellectual Al-'Afif Al-Akhdhar, and former Iraqi Minister of Planning Dr. Jawad Hashem.

During the first 24 hours since the manifesto was published on the Internet, it was signed by approximately 2,000 people worldwide, including intellectuals, authors, poets, and journalists. The authors of the manifesto hope that within a week the number of signatures will reach 10,000, at which point it will be presented to the U.N.(3) The following are excerpts from the original English translation of the manifesto, as published by the authors:


Fatwas Are a Primary Cause of Terrorism

"Their Excellencies President and members of the UN-Security Council - His Excellency, The Secretary-General of the U.N.:

"On October 8, 2004, the UNSC unanimously adopted Resolution 1566 (2004) condemning all terrorist acts 'as one of the most serious threats to peace and international stability.' In reaffirming its Resolutions 1267 of October 15, 1999; and 1373 of September 28, 2001; as well as its other resolutions concerning threats to international peace and security caused by terrorism; and in recalling its Resolution 1540 (2004) of April 28, 2004; Resolution 1566 decides:

"...To establish a working group consisted of all members of the Security Council to consider and submit recommendations to the Council on practical measures to be imposed upon individuals, groups, or entities involved in or associated with terrorist activities ... including more effective procedures considered to be appropriate for bringing them to justice through prosecution or extradition, freezing of their financial assets, preventing their movement through the territories of Member States, preventing supply to them of all types of arms and related material, and on the procedures for implementing these measures.

"As you are deliberating to recommend practical measures to be imposed on individuals, groups, or entities involved in or associated with terrorist activities pursuant to Resolution 1566, we, the signatories of this letter, a group of Arab and Muslim liberals, would like to draw your attention to an extremely dangerous source of terrorism. This source is the purported religious pronouncements fatwas issued by some psychotic members of dogmatic Muslims encouraging the commission of terrorist acts in the name of and under the banner of Islam.

"It is not enough for the Security Council to adopt resolutions 'condemning' terrorism. What will be more effective is the establishment of an International Tribunal affiliated to the UN organization for the prosecution of individuals, groups, or entities involved, directly or indirectly, with terrorist activities including, but not limited to, fatwas issued by religious clerics in the name of Islam calling upon Muslims to commit terrorist acts.

"By these fatwas all terrorists have died, or will die, fully convinced that they will immediately enter Paradise. Of course, we are not excluding other causes for committing terrorist acts, such as the ticking-bomb of population explosion with its resultant illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, backwardness in education systems, reactionary religious teaching, and, above all, living under dictatorial systems of governments in almost all Arab countries. But despite the above causes, certain religious fatwas remain the pivotal cause of terrorist acts - fatwas which clothe such terrorist acts with legitimacy as being one of the sacred tenets of Muslim faith."


Examples of Fatwas

"We can provide you with an exhaustive lists of fatwas which incite terrorist acts, but the following few may suffice:

* "When the presiding judge of the Egyptian Court asked Sheikh Mohamed Al-Ghazali (a leader in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement) to opine about the murder of Faraj Foda (an Egyptian secular intellectual) in 1992, Sheikh Al-Ghazali's opinion was, 'The killing of Faraj Foda was in fact the implementation of the punishment against an apostate which the imam (the state) has failed to implement (undertake).' When the defendant heard Al-Ghazali's opinion he shouted, 'Now I will die with a clear conscience (for murdering Mr. Foda).'

* "On February 13, 2002, the London-based Al-Hayat newspapers published a fatwa issued by the Saudi Sheikh Ali Bin Khodair Al-Khodhari approving and condoning Al-Qa'ida's 9/11 terrorist acts in New York and Washington. In his fatwa, the Sheikh said, 'It is astonishing to mourn the [American] victims as being innocents. Those victims may be classified as infidel Americans which do not deserve being mourned, because each American, as to his relation to American government, is a warrior, or supporter, in money or opinion. It is legitimate to kill all of them as combatant; or non-combatant, such as the old, the blind, or non-Muslims...'

* "On February 13, 2002, the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper also published another fatwa issued by the Saudi Sheikh Safar Bin Abdulrahman Al-Hawali in which he described the 9/11 attacks as an equivalent given in return for President Clinton missile attack on Al-Qa'ida's training camps after the terrorists attach on the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. He went on to condone the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon describing them as centers for money laundering, devil's nest, spying cell, and a mafia retreat.

* "The fatwa issued by Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi permitting the killing of 'fetuses' (unborn) Jews, because (according to him) when Jews are born and grown-up they will join the Israeli army. Furthermore, on September 3, 2004, (at the Egyptian Journalist Union) Al-Qardhawi issued a fatwa to kill all American civilians working in Iraq.

* "And on July 3, 2004, he issued another fatwa (published in Al-Ahram Al-Arabi) permitting the killing of Muslim intellectuals as being apostates, claiming that Islam justify the killing of such apostates. The fatwa issued by Rashid Al-Ghannoushi (Tunisian) according to which he permits killing all civilians in Israel, because (according to his fatwa) 'these are no civilians in Israel. The population - males, females, and children - is the army reserve soldiers, thus could be killed."


'Fatwas Issued by the Extremist Muslims Clerics Encourage the Commission of Terrorist Acts'

"As it is difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute these extremists in their native Arab or Islamic countries, they continue to issue and publish their fatwas inciting acts of terror under the false umbrella of Islam. As the fatwas issued by the extremist Muslims clerics encourage the commission of terrorist acts to provoke a state of terror, and, due to the importance of combating terrorism as a matter of urgency, we, the signatories of this letter, respectfully submit to your excellencies and to the Working Group Constituted pursuant to Article-9 of Resolution 1566 to create an International Tribunal to prosecute all terrorists, whether individuals, groups, or entities, including individuals who incite terrorism through the issuance of fatwas in the name of religion."

Endnotes:
(1) http://www.elaph.com/elaphweb/Politics/2004/10/17789.htm , October 24, 2004.
http://www.metransparent.com/texts/arab_liberals_appeal_to_un_for_int_court_against_terror_fatwas.htm , October 24, 2004.
(2) See MEMRI Special Dispatch No.794, October 6, 2004, "Reactions to Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi's Fatwa Calling for the Abduction and Killing of American Civilians in Iraq," http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=jihad&ID=SP79404 .
(3)http://www.elaph.com/elaphweb/ElaphWriter/2004/10/18190.htm , October 24, 2004.

Bill,

Calm down.

He's describing their mentality, not supporting their mentality.

We do have this thing called 'understanding the mind and goals of the enemy' that helps us win, sometimes, yaknow.

Cycloptichorn

We do have this thing called 'understanding the mind and goals of the enemy' that helps us win, sometimes, yaknow.

Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam might be interested in that theory, except he's dead. Guess who killed him.