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

Joe - Armitage leaving State is a loss, Powell getting booted out isn't.

Toleration is not harboring

I truly think the US would have not only prevented Saddam's troops from entering northern Iraq and doing what Powell claims the US had asked him to do, apprehend and turn over al Zarqawi.

Colin Powell alleged to the UN, 2/5/2003 [boldface added by me]:
OLD: www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/17300pf.htm
NEW: www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2003/17300.htm

1. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator of Usama bin Laden and his al-Qaida lieutenants.

2. When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp, and this camp is located in northeastern Iraq. ... Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq. But Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization Ansar al-Islam that controls this corner of Iraq. In 2000, this agent offered al-Qaida safe haven in the region. After we swept al-Qaida from Afghanistan, some of those members accepted this safe haven. They remain there today.

3. We asked a friendly security service to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi and providing information about him and his close associates. This service contacted Iraqi officials twice and we passed details that should have made it easy to find Zarqawi. The network remains in Baghdad. Zarqawi still remains at large, to come and go.

It is unlikely that the US would enlist Saddam to do something that the Kurds themselves were fully capable of handling.

I truly think the Kurds, and especially the PUK--who were the Kurds in particular who were in a position to decisively deal with Ansar al-Islam--would have absolutely nothing to do with Saddam Hussein.

Well, all I can say Ican is that it is so sweet to find someone so euphorically sure of the future, I haven't seen such foaming happy giddiness since the dogs found that bag of special mushrooms and ate the whole thing.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace!—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethen are already in the field. Why stay we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me:give me liberty, or give me death!

Babylon wrecked by war

US-led forces leave a trail of destruction and contamination in architectural site of world importance

Rory McCarthy in Baghdad, and Maev Kennedy
Saturday January 15, 2005
The Guardian

Troops from the US-led force in Iraq have caused widespread damage and severe contamination to the remains of the ancient city of Babylon, according to a damning report released today by the British Museum.
John Curtis, keeper of the museum's Ancient Near East department and an authority on Iraq's many archaeological sites, found "substantial damage" on an investigative visit to Babylon last month.

The ancient city has been used by US and Polish forces as a military depot for the past two years, despite objections from archaeologists.

"This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," says the report, which has been seen by the Guardian.

Among the damage found by Mr Curtis, who was invited to Babylon by Iraqi antiquities experts, were cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate.

He saw a 2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles, archaeological fragments scattered across the site, and trenches driven into ancient deposits.

Vast amounts of sand and earth, visibly mixed with archaeological fragments, were gouged from the site to fill thousands of sandbags and metal mesh baskets. When this practice was stopped, large quantities of sand and earth were brought in from elsewhere, contaminating the site for future generations of archaeologists.

Mr Curtis called for an international investigation by archaeologists chosen by the Iraqis to record all the damage done by the occupation forces.

Last night the US military defended its operations at the site, but said all earth-moving projects had been stopped and it was considering moving troops away to protect the ruins.

Babylon, a city renowned for its beauty and its splendour 1,000 years before Europe built anything comparable, was chosen as the site for a US military base in April 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq.

Military commanders set up their camp in the heart of one of the world's most important archaeological sites and surrounded the enclosed part of the ancient city. At least 2,000 troops were installed, daily passing iconic relics like the enormous basalt Lion of Babylon sculpture.

In September 2003 the base was passed to a Polish-led force, which held it until today's formal handover of the site to the Iraqi culture ministry.

In his report, Mr Curtis accepted that initially the US military presence helped protect the site from looters. But he described as "regrettable" the decision to set up a base in such an important spot.

He found that large areas of the site had been covered in gravel brought in from outside, compacted and sometimes chemically treated to provide helipads, car parks and accommodation and storage areas. "The status of future information about these areas will therefore be seriously compromised," he said.

Archaeologists were horrified by the confirmation of reports which have been filtering out of Iraq for months.

"Outrage is hardly the word, this is just dreadful," said Lord Redesdale, an archaeologist and head of the all-party parliamentary archaeological group. "These are world sites. Not only is what the American forces are doing damaging the archaeology of Iraq, it's actually damaging the cultural heritage of the whole world."

Tim Schadla Hall, reader in public archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, said: "In this case we see an international conflict in which the US has failed to take into account the requirements of the Hague convention ... to protect major archaeological sites - just another convention it seems happy to ignore."

Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan, a US military spokes man in Baghdad, said engineering works at the camp were discussed with the head of the Babylon museum. "An archaeologist examined every construction initiative for its impact on historical ruins."

He said plans were being considered to move some of the units in order "to better preserve the Babylon ruins."

"The significance of Babylon is not lost on the coalition," he added. "The site dates back to the time of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, but there are very few visible original remains to the untrained eye."

The UN committee which oversaw the Iraqi oil-for-food programme had American representation. It is therefore fatuous, whatever the faults were and there were many, to pretend that the USA was somhow outside of it, and the "UN" was working on its own. America is one of the key members.

Gelisgesti, apparently it is what we are since we have accepted it. (as in the majority of americans)

What I am wondering mostly is why?

Too bad we didn't have the group intelligence to send them packing.

Is stereotyping a part of it, a group-think that allows us to see "those people" over there as inferior to us, a group that must be brought into line with our administration's grand view for the world?

If it is, it should be easy for you, Frank and Ge to understand. What you describe is the same stereotypical arrogance being practiced here on conservatives who aren't in line with YOUR grand view of the world. Inferior is one of the more restrained connotations.

Kara wrote:

Is stereotyping a part of it, a group-think that allows us to see "those people" over there as inferior to us, a group that must be brought into line with our administration's grand view for the world?

If it is, it should be easy for you, Frank and Ge to understand. What you describe is the same stereotypical arrogance being practiced here on conservatives who aren't in line with YOUR grand view of the world. Inferior is one of the more restrained connotations.

January 14, 2005
Fallujah's Refugees Won't Return Home, Won't Vote
"The Tent of Occupation"

By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

Baghdad.

They live beneath old fly-blown tents in the car-park of the Mustafa mosque and their canvas-roofed kitchen stands next to a pool of raw sewage, but the refugees from Fallujah will not return home.

First, because many have no homes to go to; second, because they are - with the encouragement of local clerics - listing a series of demands that include the withdrawal of all American soldiers from the city, the maintenance of security by Fallujans themselves, massive compensation payments and the return of money and valuables which those who have just visited Fallujah say were stolen by American troops.

And they are very definitely not going to vote in the 30 January elections. Squatting on the floor of his concrete-walled office in his black robes to eat a lunch of chicken and rice, Sheikh Hussein - he pleads with me not to print his family name - insists that his people are not against elections.

"We are not rejecting this election for the sake of it," he says. "We are rejecting it because it is the 'tent' of the occupation. It is the vehicle for the Americans to ensure that [interim President Iyad] Allawi gets back in. And we are still under occupation."

A bearded and bespectacled academic is sitting beside the sheikh, Dr Abdul-Kader of the department of Islamic Science at Baghdad University, who gravely reminds me of the civilian dead of Fallujah. "There were hundreds," he says. "We found bodies in homes and graves in the gardens of homes."

The sheikh's closest relatives live in Fallujah; his own Sunni mosque lies at the centre of the camp in Baghdad where 925 of Fallujah's 200,000 refugees are living. But he says he has travelled twice to his family's homes and tells a disturbing story of what he found. "The first time I visited after the Americans occupied the city, our main house was standing. It had survived. All the things inside, beds, furniture, rugs, were safe. But when I went back a week later, it had been destroyed. Many other houses were in the same state.

"They survived the American-resistance battles intact but were then destroyed afterwards. Why? People there told me they saw movie cameras and that the Americans fired shells into the empty houses and that they were making some kind of film."

Tales of American theft in Iraqi cities are not new. Amnesty International has listed numerous incidents in which US troops took money from homes or from the clothes of arrested men. The US authorities acknowledged one case of large-scale pilfering by a young American officer south of Baghdad in 2003 but said that he had been moved out of Iraq and would be "too difficult" to trace.

The stories of looting in Fallujah are only adding to the refugees' sense of grievance. And to the over-enthusiastic demands for compensation. "We will settle for $5bn (£2.7bn) to $10bn," Sheikh Hussein says. "This is for the destruction in Fallujah, the shedding of blood and the killing of innocents; history will write of this. The Americans started off by killing native Americans and still they kill people they look down on." Everyone in the room, including a student of computer sciences from Fallujah who has so far listened in total silence, vigorously nod their heads.

"One day," the sheikh continues, "I was stopped and taken to an American base and questioned by the CIA, and they said, 'You are a religious man and we want advice'. I said, 'What I want to tell you is not to enter the cities because the people are waiting for a chance to attack you. They will make you suffer in different ways. Pull out your troops to the deserts, far away from the gunfire of the resistance, though that stretches a long way'. But they were very, very stupid. They didn't take the chance to go out. They stayed to force us to have elections so they could get out and leave their agents in power. I say this; the American troops will retreat suddenly, or they will find themselves prisoners inside the trap of Iraq.

"You know, you Westerners laugh at us Easterners, especially when we say, 'If Allah wills'. But the Prophet - peace be upon him - once said that the Iraqis would be scourged, that they would not receive a single dirham or a grain of rice in the hand, and this happened in the economic embargo of the 1990s.

"Then America came here after 9 April, 2003, with all its power and soldiers, so proud of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. But now the morale of these soldiers is rotting each day. They have psychological problems. My advice to them is to leave. They have a choice to make: they must leave or they will be forced out."

Fighting continues each night in Fallujah despite American claims of victory and to be "breaking the back" of the insurgency. As the sheikh puts it, not without some humour: "The Americans move in the streets during the day from 6am to 6pm but they do not move when the muqawama (resistance) imposes its own curfew on them between 6pm and 6am."

Outside in the windy car-park, the tents flap and the refugees queue to take soup from a 4ft-deep cauldron of yellow, scummy soup. Bags of dates have broken open and spilled on to the concrete.

It is Fallujah in miniature. Twenty teachers from the city are now running a camp school for 120 children. Doctors see patients in the sheikh's private home. A great-grandfather in the camp says he cannot go back to his city while the Americans are there. And when I ask him if he will vote, he laughs at me. "The Americans must leave Fallujah unconditionally," the sheikh says. "They have done too much harm there to be accepted."

I suggest that Fallujah's troubles started the day the 82nd Airborne killed 18 protesters outside a local school just after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Dr Abdul-Kader admonishes me. "It started even before that," he says. "Fallujah people suffered under Saddam and they liberated their own city. They did not do so to live under occupation."

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

Kara wrote:

Is stereotyping a part of it, a group-think that allows us to see "those people" over there as inferior to us, a group that must be brought into line with our administration's grand view for the world?

If it is, it should be easy for you, Frank and Ge to understand. What you describe is the same stereotypical arrogance being practiced here on conservatives who aren't in line with YOUR grand view of the world. Inferior is one of the more restrained connotations.