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

Kara, they'd have had to have been incompetent to not have Iraq in their sights. Clinton had Iraq in his sights perpetually, came within minutes of triggering the invasion himself, and ultimately decided to turn the blind eye while Saddam murdered millions. Sell partisan nonsense and paranoid delusions to someone else; I'm not buying.

Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power.

Friday, February 04, 2005

Marine General's Idea of Fun

Marine Lt. General James Mattis said Thursday


' "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." '



T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia," was tortured and almost driven mad when he realized he got a thrill from shooting a man dead. His sadistic pleasure in killing Ottoman troops in Syria seems to have been wrought up with his rape by an Ottoman officer who thought him a Circassian Jordanian rather than a British secret agent. At one point he writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom about how beautiful the dead Ottoman soldiers looked in the moonlight, lined up straight, after a battle.

One of the reasons that the Neoconservatives are wrong that unilateral war can be used for good, for spreading democracy, is that war brings out the worst in human beings, making some of them sadists and racists. Sometimes it is necessary to fight a war to defend oneself. An elective war is always a mistake. It twists one's own society, and someone else's as well.

Just as few priests are pedophiles, few soldiers are sadists. Mattis has brought dishonor on the US Marine Corps with his words. Killing is never appropriately called "fun." I think he should resign.

I'm on the road and haven't seen how the Arab satellite television channels are covering this one. But it isn't hard to imagine. The US military was popular in Iraq in spring of 2003. It isn't any more. Attitudes like those of Mattis are part of the reason for the change.

posted by Juan @ 2/4/2005 06:01:36 AM

I've think you've forgotten, Bill, that George, Colin and Condi considered Saddam a non-issue before 9-11. That was Dr. Rice on TV saying in early 2001 that he had been relegated to some kind of afterthought, but that's because she is incompetent.

February 2, 2005
After the Election
The Future of Iraq and the US Occupation

By NOAM CHOMSKY

Editors' Note: The following is an except from a presentation by Noam Chomsky on January 26th at a forum sponsored by the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, NM to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the International Relations Center (IRC), online at Chomsky is a member of the IRC's board of directors. AC / JSC

Let's just imagine what the policies might be of an independent, sovereign Iraq, let's say more or less democratic, what are the policies likely to be?

Well there's going to be a Shiite majority, so they'll have some significant influence over policy. The first thing they'll do is reestablish relations with Iran. Now they don't particularly like Iran, but they don't want to go to war with them so they'll move toward what was happening already even under Saddam, that is, restoring some sort of friendly relations with Iran.

That's the last thing the United States wants. It has worked very hard to try to isolate Iran. The next thing that might happen is that a Shiite-controlled, more or less democratic Iraq might stir up feelings in the Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia, which happen to be right nearby and which happen to be where all the oil is. So you might find what in Washington must be the ultimate nightmare--a Shiite region which controls most of the world's oil and is independent. Furthermore, it is very likely that an independent, sovereign Iraq would try to take its natural place as a leading state in the Arab world, maybe the leading state. And you know that's something that goes back to biblical times.

What does that mean? Well it means rearming, first of all. They have to confront the regional enemy. Now the regional enemy, overpowering enemy, is Israel. They're going to have to rearm to confront Israel--which means probably developing weapons of mass destruction, just as a deterrent. So here's the picture of what they must be dreaming about in Washington--and probably 10 Downing street in London--that here you might get a substantial Shiite majority rearming, developing weapons of mass destruction, to try to get rid of the U.S. outposts that are there to try to make sure that the U.S. controls most of the oil reserves of the world. Is Washington going to sit there and allow that? That's kind of next to inconceivable.

What I've just read from the business press the last couple of days probably reflects the thinking in Washington and London: "Uh, well, okay, we'll let them have a government, but we're not going to pay any attention to what they say." In fact the Pentagon announced at the same time two days ago: we're keeping 120,000 troops there into at least 2007, even if they call for withdrawal tomorrow.

And the propaganda is very evident right in these articles. You can even write the commentary now: We just have to do it because we have to accomplish our mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. If they have an elected government that doesn't understand that, well, what can we do with these dumb Arabs, you know? Actually that's very common because look, after all, the U.S. has overthrown democracy after democracy, because the people don't understand. They follow the wrong course. So therefore, following the mission of establishing democracy, we've got to overthrow their governments.

I think that conscription is going to be a last resort. The reason is the Vietnam experience. The Vietnam experience, I think, is the first time in the history of European imperialism that an imperial power tried to fight a colonial war with a citizen's army. I mean the British didn't do it, and the French had the Foreign Legion In colonial wars, civilians are just no good at. Colonial wars are too brutal and vicious and murderous. You just can't take kids off the street and have them fight that kind of war. You need trained killers, like the French Foreign Legion.

In fact you could see it happening in Vietnam. To its credit, the U.S. army fell apart. It took too long, but finally the army essentially fell apart. Soldiers were on drugs, they were fragging officers, not following orders, and so on and the top brass wanted them out. If you look back at the military journals in the late Sixties, they were writing about how we gotta get this army out of here or the army's going to collapse--much like the head of the Army reserves said two or three days ago. He said this is becoming a broken force.

Talk about your partisan nonsense. So Saddam was killing millions during the Clinton Administration? un uh. During the Iraq-Iran war, yes, in which we supported Iraq, we even put the American flag on Iraqi tankers to get them through the Straits of Hormuz. Remember? And just after Desert Storm, yes, after the first Bush administration allowed Saddam the use of helicopters to go after the Marsh Shi'a in the Southern NO FLY Zone. His forces killed about a half a million people (Gosh, I wonder why those Shi'a are voting so strongly for the pro-Iranian parties??) But on Clinton's watch? No. So stop saying that, please.

U.S. to Pull 15,000 Troops Out of Iraq

1 hour, 42 minutes ago

By Bradley Graham, Washington Post Staff Writer

Buoyed by a higher turnout and less violence than expected in Sunday's Iraqi elections, Pentagon (news - web sites) authorities have decided to start reducing the level of U.S. forces in Iraq (news - web sites) next month by about 15,000 troops, down to about 135,000, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said yesterday.


The reduction involves about three brigades of Army soldiers and Marines whose tours were extended last month to bolster security ahead of the elections, and an additional 1,500 airborne soldiers who were rushed to Iraq for a four-month stint.


"I think we'll be able to come down to the level that was projected before this election," Wolfowitz said.


But testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites), Wolfowitz also warned of "a very difficult road ahead" in defeating Iraqi insurgents and indicated that no further drop in U.S. troops was planned this year. Another senior Pentagon official said after the hearing that the initial decrease did not reflect an improved security situation in Iraq but was simply a recognition that the forces kept specifically for the election were no longer needed and could leave as previously scheduled.


The question of when U.S. forces can begin to withdraw from Iraq has generated intense political debate that has accelerated since Sunday's elections. President Bush (news - web sites) and other administration officials have said the pace of withdrawal will depend on how quickly Iraqi forces can be trained and equipped to maintain security there.


As a sign this effort continues to lag, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reported at yesterday's hearing that less than one-third of the troops and police that the Pentagon says have been trained and equipped are adequately prepared to handle most threats.


Wolfowitz also disclosed that a decision had been made to make room in the Pentagon budget for a permanent increase in Army forces starting in fiscal 2007. Up to now, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had backed only a temporary three-year rise of 30,000 troops in the size of the Army, to 512,000, to facilitate a restructuring of brigades. Plans have called for this increase to be paid for in supplemental appropriations through 2006.


A number of lawmakers and defense specialists have argued that a permanent increase in troop level is needed to relieve the continuing stress on active and reserve units likely to result from the long-term demands of the war in Iraq, worldwide counterterrorism operations and other potential threats.


Wolfowitz said the exact extent of the Army's growth will be a focus of a major review of Pentagon strategy and programs this year, indicating that Rumsfeld had made no final judgment. But a revised five-year defense budget that will be released next week as part of Bush's 2006 budget request will provide for a permanently larger Army, he said.


"We've had to make some very considerable adjustments in the rest of the defense program in order to pay for that," Wolfowitz said.


Democratic senators pressed yesterday for the administration to outline a clear exit strategy. While Republicans on the committee appeared more willing to accept the administration's wait-and-see approach, several joined with Democrats in seeking more definite information about the number of Iraqi security forces currently ready and clearer estimates of the size of the insurgency. Both Wolfowitz and Myers appeared to struggle for answers.


The Pentagon officials displayed a chart showing a total of 136,065 Iraqi forces "trained and equipped" or "operational" as of Monday, including 56,284 army troops and 57,290 police. Myers also reported a surge in recruits over the past two days of 2,500 a day.


But under questioning, Myers said only about 40,000 troops were deployable, meaning they "can go anywhere and do anything." He said he had more confidence about the Iraqi army figures than the police ones. Wolfowitz, in turn, acknowledged high absentee rates in many units, reaching about 40 percent in the Iraqi army.


Both officials cautioned against focusing on numbers, saying capability is more important. But both conceded that the Pentagon still lacks clear ways of assessing such critical Iraqi capabilities as leadership and motivation.


"We're going to have to move to a way where we can start tracking the capability," Myers said. "This is not easy."


The general also fumbled for estimates on the size of the insurgency under questioning first by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee's ranking minority member. Levin noted that U.S. estimates have proved grossly inaccurate in the past. He cited a statement last week by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, that 15,000 suspected insurgents had been killed or captured in the past year, after U.S. military authorities had said only 6,000 to 9,000 hard-core fighters existed.


Myers declined to provide a new estimate, saying the Pentagon's figures were classified. He also said coming up "with accurate estimates is just very, very difficult in this type of insurgency," in which common criminals are mixed with foreign fighters, Islamic extremists and former members of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s government.


This drew a sharp rebuke from two senior committee Republicans -- Sen. John W. Warner (news, bio, voting record) (Va.), the chairman, and Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) (Ariz.) -- who said the public was due some estimate.

"I am disappointed that you don't have even a rough estimate of the number of insurgents," McCain said. "I don't know how you defeat an insurgency unless you have some handle on the number of people that you are facing."

Warner also expressed frustration with NATO (news - web sites)'s involvement in Iraq, saying it has had time to follow through on a commitment last summer to set up an officer training program for Iraqis.

"The numbers are not where we would like them in terms of NATO's contribution," Wolfowitz agreed. He said the program still lacks 50 out of a total planned staff of 459 but is scheduled to start operating Feb. 20.

Shiite Coalition Takes a Big Lead in Early Vote Count in Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS and DEXTER FILKINS

Published: February 4, 2005


AGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 3 - Preliminary election returns released Thursday by Iraqi authorities showed that 72 percent of the 1.6 million votes counted so far from Sunday's election went to an alliance of Shiite parties dominated by religious groups with strong links to Iran. Only 18 percent went to a group led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who favors strong ties to the United States. Few votes went to Sunni candidates.

Although the early votes were drawn only from Baghdad and from five southern provinces where the Shiite parties were expected to score strongly, and from only 10 percent of the 5,216 polling stations, the scale of the vote for both religious and secular Shiites underscored the probability of a crushing triumph and a historic shift from decades of Sunni minority rule in Iraq.

The religious alliance, an amalgam of political parties and independents forged by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful religious leader, took nearly 1.2 million votes, more than a third of them in Baghdad, against about 295,000 for the coalition led by Dr. Allawi.

The scale of the lead held by the Shiites and the possibility of their coalition with the Kurds seemed certain to cause anxiety among Sunnis, who largely boycotted the election and remain deeply suspicious of the emerging Shiite dominance.

Indeed, some Sunni leaders said the Shiites' strong showing so far validated the deep sense of alienation felt by the Sunnis.

"The Shia were determined and encouraged their supporters to vote and to register, and the Sunnis didn't care that much, either out of fear or apathy," said Adnan Pachachi, 82, a foreign minister in the years before Saddam Hussein and a prominent Sunni leader. "This is the story really."

But signs also emerged on Thursday that some Sunni leaders were ready to involve themselves at least in a limited way in the political debate. The leaders of 13 mostly Sunni political parties that stayed out of the election had agreed Monday that they would take part in writing the constitution, the next step in the establishment of a new Iraqi state.

Election officials emphasized that the results were preliminary, and pleaded for caution in extrapolating from them. They noted that there were no returns from the Sunni heartland and that the returns were primarily from Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad. And in a turnabout, the officials said they would not announce a figure for the overall voter turnout until all votes were tabulated next week.

The early returns drew a flurry of concern from the main secular groups competing in the election.

In recent days Dr. Allawi has been trying to offer himself as a leader who can span Iraq's many ethnic and sectarian divides and head off moves by the religious Shiites to increase the role of religion in the country. The leaders of the religious alliance have pledged that Iraq will not be ruled by clerics, but they face pressure on religious issues from influential clerics.

With the Shiite coalition off to a commanding lead, some Iraqi leaders here speculated that Dr. Allawi might try to peel off some secular members of the religious alliance as he tried to assemble a coalition of his own. But the partial returns suggested he might have trouble doing so.

The partial returns prompted Shiite leaders to begin talks with the main Kurdish coalition for a possible alliance, which would become an overwhelming majority in the new 275-seat national assembly.

Though the Shiite leaders are confident of gaining a clear majority, the complex rules of Iraq's interim constitution will require two-thirds of the assembly votes to choose a new president and prime minister, and to adopt a permanent constitution, which will be needed before another election this year for an assembly with a full five-year term.

The first electoral results came in as a relative lull in the Sunni insurgency broke down.

The American military command said guerrillas had dragged Iraqi soldiers off a bus near Kirkuk late Wednesday and shot 12 of them dead. On Thursday, an ambush in the Abu Ghraib district west of Baghdad killed 2 policemen, wounded 14 and left 36 others missing.

Two United States marines were killed Wednesday in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, the command said.

According to the partial returns, the religious alliance's support in the capital, in the provinces centered on two holy cities, Karbala and Najaf, and in three other Shiite provinces further south, Qadissiyah, Dhi Qar and Muthanna, represented about four votes for every one won by Dr. Allawi's group. The remainder of the vote in the six districts, less than 10 percent, was divided among 109 other parties.

The strong showing by the religious group, the United Iraqi Alliance, appeared especially in the partial returns for Baghdad, home to 6 million of Iraq's 28 million people and counted as a province in itself. Although Baghdad is a cosmopolitan city, with large populations of Sunnis and Kurds as well as Shiites, the religious alliance took 61 percent of the early vote in the capital, against about 25 percent for Dr. Allawi's group, known as the Iraqi List.

Only one other party took more than 1 percent of the first votes counted in Baghdad and the southern provinces, and that was another group with Shiite religious ties.

The group, the National Independent Elites and Cadres, which has strong links to Moktada al-Sadr, the young cleric who twice last year led uprisings against American forces, had 1.5 percent of the votes counted so far. In Baghdad, where the Sadr City neighborhood is Mr. Sadr's main bastion, the group took nearly 2 percent.

Other groups that had hoped to make a significant showing did not make much impact. A secular group known as the Independent Democratic Party, led by Mr. Pachachi, took less than three-tenths of 1 percent of the early vote.

The religious alliance's leader, Ayatollah Sistani, has tolerated the American presence in Iraq, but has consistently pushed for faster elections. Though the group's leaders have put just five clerics onto their list of 228 national assembly candidates, the coalition's two main partners, the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, are religiously based and have close Iranian links from years of exile under Saddam Hussein.

The Kurds, whose precincts in the north have not been publicly counted, also turned out enthusiastically for Sunday's election. The main Kurdish alliance is expected to pick up a substantial share of the seats in the national assembly, perhaps as many as a third.

Despite the early signs of victory, the main concern of Shiite leaders on Thursday seemed to be holding their unwieldy group together. At Ayatollah Sistani's urging, the alliance fought the elections with an awkward mix of candidates, some secular, some religious. About half its candidates had no party affiliation. "We have to cement the list so it does not disintegrate," said Adnan Ali, a senior leader of the Dawa Party, as he hurried past with a tabulation of the initial returns.

The group led by Mr. Pachachi, the former foreign minister, was one of the groups that appeared likely to improve its showing when votes from the west and north start flowing in, from areas where there are far fewer Shiites, a large Sunni population and, in the larger towns and cities, a strong secular element. But the largest gainer from the northern vote is almost certain to be the Kurdish alliance, which is expected to garner a rush of votes from the three Kurdish provinces, perhaps enough to push it into second place in the final results.

Iraq's constitution is to be submitted to voters later this year. Under the ratification rules, it can be defeated if two-thirds of the voters in any three of the 18 provinces vote against it. The Sunnis are a majority in three provinces. "We think our participation could help improve the security situation, by getting all part of Iraq involved," said Amar Wajid, a spokesman for the Islamic Party of Iraq, a largely Sunni political party that boycotted the elections.

Election commission officials, announcing the votes at a news conference, said it would take another week to compile final results with the complex system of tabulation that has been adopted in a country that has held no elections even approximately like Sunday's in more than 50 years. After the voting, the commission's initial estimate of turnout was that about eight million people had voted, out of a potential electorate of 14.2 million, a turnout of about 57 percent.

A member of the election commission, Safwat Rashid, a 59-year-old lawyer from Sulaimaniya, in the Kurdish region, was evasive about the turnout, implying it might end up significantly lower than the initial estimate. The figure has been see-sawing as a result of protests being fielded by the commission about irregularities in the voting and in some of the counting. There was also a dispute in Mosul involving large numbers of would-be voters in mainly Kurdish districts who had found polling centers closed, or with too few ballot papers to accommodate an unexpectedly large number of voters. "Only God Almighty knows the final turnout now," Mr. Rashid said.

In Baghdad, where the returns showed 570,000 votes counted, the commission said they represented 25 percent of the total number cast; in Najaf and Karbala, it put the figure at about 45 percent, with similarly fractional returns for the other southern provinces.

Another reason for caution, the commission said, was that the Baghdad figures gave no indication where the votes had been cast, in a city where many neighborhoods have a strong preponderance of Sunnis or Shiites. Away from the news conference, election officials said most of the Baghdad votes came from polling stations in the city's eastern districts, where Shiites predominate.

Still more significant, the initial returns included no votes from the areas west and north of Baghdad, where the Sunni population is concentrated.


James Glanz and Iraqi staff members of The New York Times contributed reportingfor this article.

It appears that the American people decided on November 2, 2004 that Sen. Kennedy was wrong and President Bush was right about Iraq and America's security. Only - Kennedy isn't man enough to admit it,

Annan Promises Change, Seeks End to the Bashing

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan promised swift action and major management changes yesterday in the hope of repairing relations with the United States and boosting morale among his own staff -- both badly shaken by the United Nations' protracted role in Iraq. But in the hours after an independent inquiry suggested that a former top U.N. official may have profited from his position, Annan's office also said it was time to stop bashing the humanitarian organization. He announced that he will take disciplinary action against Benon Sevan, who ran the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, and said diplomatic immunity will be lifted from any U.N. employee who may face criminal charges stemming from the ongoing investigation of allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the program.

The measures were some of the toughest of Annan's tenure, and aides and former colleagues said they were intended to assure critics that he is serious about fixing problems. "The whole scandal, and then the avalanche of criticism and personal charges against him, sent him a wakeup call the likes of which he has never seen," said John Ruggie, a former assistant secretary general at the United Nations who teaches at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "In that sense, the scandal may have done Annan a favor."

It is unclear whether those actions will be enough to quell a torrent of criticism and calls for Annan's resignation from some Republican quarters in Washington. Rep Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said yesterday's findings by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker paint a "picture of mismanagement, neglect and political manipulation." "I am reluctant to conclude that the U.N. is damaged beyond repair, but these revelations certainly point in this direction," Hyde said. But Annan's new chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, countered during a news conference that the report also showed that the United Nations fed millions of Iraqis under the oil-for-food program and reversed a slide toward a humanitarian disaster in a country under harsh U.N. sanctions. He urged countries to halt sharp attacks on the organization and give Annan's team a chance to put revisions and management changes in place.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61871-2005Feb3.html

Joe Nation wrote:

I've think you've forgotten, Bill, that George, Colin and Condi considered Saddam a non-issue before 9-11. That was Dr. Rice on TV saying in early 2001 that he had been relegated to some kind of afterthought, but that's because she is incompetent.

I thought that PNAC dictated that IRAQ was to be invaded asap? It's good to see you coming around on this issue Joe.

Oh by all means we can't use State Dept. data used by the entire U.S. Congress; we have to go to anti-war sources to be reliable I guess.

Any writer who does not damn the U.S. government, president, and any conservative initiative is a 'predictable rightwing article' to some no matter how good the statistics cited.

The third is the text from a National Press Club speech and can be easily verified from other sources if one thinks the text suspect and is too lazy to look it up.

Luckily, (James Dobson), we (Diane Knippers) live (Franklin Graham) in a (Charles Colson) country (Jerry Falwell) where (Jay Sekulow)we (David Barton) don't (Richard John Neuhaus) have (Rick Warren) unelected mullahs, and our (Abu Ghraib) record on (thousands held without charge in the US) human rights is (Guantanemo) beyond reproach.