Some more positive news from BBC.
Lebanon MPs demand Syria pullout
Druze leader Jumblatt hosted the opposition talks at his home Lebanese opposition leaders have demanded the withdrawal of Syrian forces and the immediate resignation of Lebanese security chiefs.
They said the moves had to precede any talks with Syrian-backed President Emile Lahoud on forming a government.
Prominent Druze leader Walid Jumblatt announced the list of demands after hosting a meeting of opposition groups to discuss a common strategy.
The government resigned on Monday in the face of anti-Syrian protests.
Prime Minister Omar Karami's government quit after two weeks of protests over the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Crisis talks
The leaders of the various opposition groups held talks hosted by Mr Jumblatt at his home east of the capital, Beirut, on how to react to the ongoing political crisis.
"The... step that the opposition considers essential in its demands on the road to salvation and independence is the total withdrawal of the Syrian army and intelligence service from Lebanon," they said in a statement.
The opposition also called for "a Syrian response through an official announcement to be issued by the president of the Arab Syrian Republic [Bashar al-Assad] to withdraw" its forces.
Mr Jumblatt said the opposition would only take part in discussions on forming a new government after Mr Lahoud accepted the demands.
Some MPs want Mr Lahoud himself to quit, saying he is too close to Syria, which still dominates much of Lebanon.
Hariri inquiry
Popular protests continued in Beirut on Wednesday.
But reports said only a few hundred people remained in Martyrs' Square, in contrast with the 25,000 or more who were there on Monday. The rallies have focused on demands for Syria to withdraw its 15,000 troops and to stop other interference in Lebanon.
President Assad told a US magazine that a military pullout could begin "very soon", but Mr Jumblatt and Israeli officials responded with scepticism, saying they wanted action rather than words.
Damascus is also coming under increasing pressure from outside the region, with US President George W Bush leading Western calls for Syria to cut its influence in Lebanon.
The protesters in Beirut have also been calling for an international inquiry into the killing of Mr Hariri in a massive car bombing last month.
The body of another victim of the blast was recovered from the debris in central Beirut on Wednesday, 16 days after the attack.
Back in Iraq.
***********
Suicide Bombers Kill 13 Iraqi Army Soldiers
By ROBERT F. WORTH
and EDWARD WONG
Published: March 2, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 2 - Suicide bombers killed 13 Iraqi Army soldiers in two separate attacks here this morning, the latest incidents in a recent surge of violence aimed at Iraq's beleaguered security forces.
In the first bombing, a Toyota sedan packed with explosives sped into a crowd gathered outside an army compound in the former Muthanna airport in central Baghdad at about 7 a.m., killing six soldiers, Iraqi officials said. The compound has been attacked by insurgents several times over the past year.
The blast, which could be heard miles away, wounded 28 others, including 10 new recruits and three civilian women standing outside the compound selling cigarettes, officials at Iraq's Interior Ministry said.
revel wrote: ... This is what comes of splitting everything up so evenly.
I think this is what comes from too long tolerating and not confronting an evil. The longer the delay to confront it, the more difficult becomes its extermination.
Evil has existed in the past and it will exist in the future, and the US has been responsible for playing footsies with the worst of them. Pol Pot comes to mind.
Anybody else see the collapse?
February 22, 2005
Imperial Entropy
Collapse of the American Empire
By KIRKPATRICK SALE
It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is now possible to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse.
The neocons in power in Washington these days, those who were delighted to talk about America as the sole empire in the world following the Soviet disintegration, will of course refuse to believe in any such collapse, just as they ignore the realities of the imperial war in Iraq. But I think it behooves us to examine seriously the ways in which the U.S. system is so drastically imperiling itself that it will cause not only the collapse of its worldwide empire but drastically alter the nation itself on the domestic front.
All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities.
In my reading of the history of empires, I have come up with four reasons that almost always explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book Collapse also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, slightly overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than empires.) Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present American empire.
First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying the lands and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they build and farm and grow without limits, and ours is no exception, even if we have yet to experience the worst of our assault on nature. Science is in agreement that all important ecological indicators are in decline and have been for decades: erosion of topsoils and beaches, overfishing, deforestation, freshwater and aquifer depletion, pollution of water, soil, air, and food, soil salinization, overpopulation , overconsumption, depletion of oil and minerals, introduction of new diseases and invigoration of old ones, extreme weather, melting icecaps and rising sealevels, species extinctions, and excessive human overuse of the earth's photosynthetic capacity. As the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has said, after lengthy examination of human impact on the earth, our "ecological footprint is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it is getting larger." A Defense Department study last year predicted "abrupt climate change," likely to occur within a decade, will lead to "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy, endemic "disruption and conflict," warfare that "would define human life," and a "significant drop" in the planet's ability to sustain its present population. End of empire for sure, maybe end of civilization.
Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive resource exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away from the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or become too expensive for all but the elite. This is exactly the path we are on-peak oil extraction, for example, is widely predicted to come in the next year or two-and our economy is built entirely on a fragile system in which the world produces and we, by and large, consume (U.S. manufacturing is just 13 per cent of our GDP). At the moment we sustain a nearly $630 billion trade deficit with the rest of the world-it has leapt by an incredible $500 billion since 1993, and $180 billion since Bush took office in 2001-and in order to pay for that we have to have an inflow of cash from the rest of the world of about $1 billion every day to pay for it, which was down by half late last year. That kind of excess is simply unsustainable, especially when you think that it is the other world empire, China, that is crucial for supporting it, at the tune of some $83 billion on loan to the U.S. treasury.
Add to that an economy resting on a nearly $500 billion Federal budget deficit, making up part of a total national debt of $7.4 trillion as of last fall, and the continual drain on the economy by the military of at least $530 billion a year (not counting military intelligence, whose figure we never know). Nobody thinks that is sustainable either, which is why the dollar has lost value everywhere-down by 30 per cent against the euro since 2000-and the world begins to lose faith in investment here. I foresee that in just a few years the dollar will be so battered that the oil states will no longer want to operate in that currency and will turn to the euro instead, and China will let the yuan float against the dollar, effectively making this nation bankrupt and powerless, unable to control economic life within its borders much less abroad.
Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther and farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops are unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts. The American empire, which began its worldwide reach well before Bush II, now has some 446,000 active troops at more than 725 acknowledged (and any number secret) bases in at least 38 countries around the world, plus a formal "military presence" in no less than 153 countries, on every continent but Antarctica-and nearly a dozen fully armed courier fleets on all the oceans. Talk about overstretch: the U.S. is less than 5 per cent of the world's population. And now that Bush has declared a "war on terror," instead of the more doable war on Al Quada we should have waged, our armies and agents will be on a battlefield universal and permanent that cannot possibly be controlled or contained.
So far that military network has not collapsed, but as Iraq indicates it is mightily tested and quite incapable of establishing client states to do our bidding and protect resources we need. And as anti-American sentiment continues to spread and darken-in all the Muslim countries, in much of Europe, in much of Asia-and as more countries refuse the "structural adjustments" that our IMF-led globalization requires, it is quite likely that the periphery of our empire will begin resisting our dominance, militarily if necessary. And far from having a capacity to fight two wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon once hoped, we are proving that we can't even fight one.
Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without, and so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of rebellion or secession-thanks both to the increasing repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to the success of our modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the general public into stupor. But the tactics of the Bush II administration show that it is so fearful of an _expression of popular dissent that it is willing to defy and ignore environmental, civil-rights, and progressive groups, to bribe commentators to put out its propaganda, to expand surveillance and data-base invasions of privacy, to use party superiority and backroom tactics to ride roughshod over Congressional opposition, to use lies and deceptions as a normal part of government operations, to break international laws and treaties for short-term ends, and to use religion to cloak its every policy.
It's hard to believe that the great mass of the American public would ever bestir itself to challenge the empire at home until things get much, much worse. It is a public, after all, of which, as a Gallup poll in 2004 found, 61 per cent believe that "religion can answer all or most of today's problems," and according to a Time/CNN poll in 2002 59 per cent believe in the imminent apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation and take every threat and disaster as evidence of God's will. And yet, it's also hard to believe that a nation so thoroughly corrupt as this-in all its fundamental institutions, its boughten parties, academies, corporations, brokerages, accountants, governments-and resting on a social and economic base of intolerably unequal incomes and property, getting increasingly unequal, will be able to sustain itself for long. The upsurge in talk about secession after the last election, some of which was deadly serious and led on to organizations throughout most of the blue states, indicates that at least a minority is willing to think about drastic steps to "alter or abolish" a regime it finds itself fundamentally at odds with.
Those four processes by which empires always eventually fall seem to me to be inescapably operative, in varying degrees, in this latest empire. And I think a combination of several or all of them will bring about its collapse within the next 15 years or so.
Jared Diamond's recent book detailing the ways societies collapse suggests that American society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is aware of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the failures of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen, and for a reason Diamond himself understands.
As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the early 15th century: "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we will abandon those.
Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books, including Human Scale, The Conquest of Paradise, Rebels Against the Future, and The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.
cicerone imposter wrote:Evil has existed in the past and it will exist in the future, and the US has been responsible for playing footsies with the worst of them. Pol Pot comes to mind.
I'm talking about extermination of
an evil not extermination of
all evil. I think tolerating and delaying confrontation with
an evil, makes it more difficult to exterminate
that evil.
I thought Pol Pot's extermination of two million of his fellow countrymen was in addition to the approximately million of South Vietnamese we left behind to be murdered by the North Vietnamese when the US fled from South Vietnam. I don't call that "playing footsies." I call that playing cowards.
Of course evil perpetrators like Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Castro are relatively small evils compared to Stalin, Hirohito, Mao Zedong, and Hitler. However, in all these cases of evil, earlier confrontation would have made their extermination easier and less costly in human lives.
cicerone imposter wrote:Anybody else see the collapse?
February 22, 2005
Imperial Entropy
Collapse of the American Empire
By KIRKPATRICK SALE
It is quite ironic: only a decade or so after the idea of the United States as an imperial power came to be accepted by both right and left, and people were actually able to talk openly about an American empire, it is showing multiple signs of its inability to continue. And indeed it is now possible to contemplate, and openly speculate about, its collapse.
The neocons in power in Washington these days, those who were delighted to talk about America as the sole empire in the world following the Soviet disintegration, will of course refuse to believe in any such collapse, just as they ignore the realities of the imperial war in Iraq. But I think it behooves us to examine seriously the ways in which the U.S. system is so drastically imperiling itself that it will cause not only the collapse of its worldwide empire but drastically alter the nation itself on the domestic front.
All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities.
In my reading of the history of empires, I have come up with four reasons that almost always explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book Collapse also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, slightly overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than empires.) Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present American empire.
First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying the lands and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they build and farm and grow without limits, and ours is no exception, even if we have yet to experience the worst of our assault on nature. Science is in agreement that all important ecological indicators are in decline and have been for decades: erosion of topsoils and beaches, overfishing, deforestation, freshwater and aquifer depletion, pollution of water, soil, air, and food, soil salinization, overpopulation , overconsumption, depletion of oil and minerals, introduction of new diseases and invigoration of old ones, extreme weather, melting icecaps and rising sealevels, species extinctions, and excessive human overuse of the earth's photosynthetic capacity. As the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has said, after lengthy examination of human impact on the earth, our "ecological footprint is already too large for the planet to sustain, and it is getting larger." A Defense Department study last year predicted "abrupt climate change," likely to occur within a decade, will lead to "catastrophic" shortages of water and energy, endemic "disruption and conflict," warfare that "would define human life," and a "significant drop" in the planet's ability to sustain its present population. End of empire for sure, maybe end of civilization.
Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive resource exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away from the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or become too expensive for all but the elite. This is exactly the path we are on-peak oil extraction, for example, is widely predicted to come in the next year or two-and our economy is built entirely on a fragile system in which the world produces and we, by and large, consume (U.S. manufacturing is just 13 per cent of our GDP). At the moment we sustain a nearly $630 billion trade deficit with the rest of the world-it has leapt by an incredible $500 billion since 1993, and $180 billion since Bush took office in 2001-and in order to pay for that we have to have an inflow of cash from the rest of the world of about $1 billion every day to pay for it, which was down by half late last year. That kind of excess is simply unsustainable, especially when you think that it is the other world empire, China, that is crucial for supporting it, at the tune of some $83 billion on loan to the U.S. treasury.
Add to that an economy resting on a nearly $500 billion Federal budget deficit, making up part of a total national debt of $7.4 trillion as of last fall, and the continual drain on the economy by the military of at least $530 billion a year (not counting military intelligence, whose figure we never know). Nobody thinks that is sustainable either, which is why the dollar has lost value everywhere-down by 30 per cent against the euro since 2000-and the world begins to lose faith in investment here. I foresee that in just a few years the dollar will be so battered that the oil states will no longer want to operate in that currency and will turn to the euro instead, and China will let the yuan float against the dollar, effectively making this nation bankrupt and powerless, unable to control economic life within its borders much less abroad.
Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther and farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops are unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts. The American empire, which began its worldwide reach well before Bush II, now has some 446,000 active troops at more than 725 acknowledged (and any number secret) bases in at least 38 countries around the world, plus a formal "military presence" in no less than 153 countries, on every continent but Antarctica-and nearly a dozen fully armed courier fleets on all the oceans. Talk about overstretch: the U.S. is less than 5 per cent of the world's population. And now that Bush has declared a "war on terror," instead of the more doable war on Al Quada we should have waged, our armies and agents will be on a battlefield universal and permanent that cannot possibly be controlled or contained.
So far that military network has not collapsed, but as Iraq indicates it is mightily tested and quite incapable of establishing client states to do our bidding and protect resources we need. And as anti-American sentiment continues to spread and darken-in all the Muslim countries, in much of Europe, in much of Asia-and as more countries refuse the "structural adjustments" that our IMF-led globalization requires, it is quite likely that the periphery of our empire will begin resisting our dominance, militarily if necessary. And far from having a capacity to fight two wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon once hoped, we are proving that we can't even fight one.
Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without, and so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of rebellion or secession-thanks both to the increasing repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to the success of our modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the general public into stupor. But the tactics of the Bush II administration show that it is so fearful of an _expression of popular dissent that it is willing to defy and ignore environmental, civil-rights, and progressive groups, to bribe commentators to put out its propaganda, to expand surveillance and data-base invasions of privacy, to use party superiority and backroom tactics to ride roughshod over Congressional opposition, to use lies and deceptions as a normal part of government operations, to break international laws and treaties for short-term ends, and to use religion to cloak its every policy.
It's hard to believe that the great mass of the American public would ever bestir itself to challenge the empire at home until things get much, much worse. It is a public, after all, of which, as a Gallup poll in 2004 found, 61 per cent believe that "religion can answer all or most of today's problems," and according to a Time/CNN poll in 2002 59 per cent believe in the imminent apocalypse foretold in the Book of Revelation and take every threat and disaster as evidence of God's will. And yet, it's also hard to believe that a nation so thoroughly corrupt as this-in all its fundamental institutions, its boughten parties, academies, corporations, brokerages, accountants, governments-and resting on a social and economic base of intolerably unequal incomes and property, getting increasingly unequal, will be able to sustain itself for long. The upsurge in talk about secession after the last election, some of which was deadly serious and led on to organizations throughout most of the blue states, indicates that at least a minority is willing to think about drastic steps to "alter or abolish" a regime it finds itself fundamentally at odds with.
Those four processes by which empires always eventually fall seem to me to be inescapably operative, in varying degrees, in this latest empire. And I think a combination of several or all of them will bring about its collapse within the next 15 years or so.
Jared Diamond's recent book detailing the ways societies collapse suggests that American society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is aware of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the failures of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen, and for a reason Diamond himself understands.
As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the early 15th century: "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we will abandon those.
Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books, including Human Scale, The Conquest of Paradise, Rebels Against the Future, and The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.
The US is neither an empire nor a colonist. Instead of Americans colonizing other countries, the people of other countries have been colonizing the US ever since our beginning.
Our primary objective is to participate in free trade with the countries of the world. We sell our stuff to them; they sell their stuff to us. Our primary means to secure that objective has always been elimination of those governments or and/or people which seek to murder Americans and/or the rest of humanity.
Has the US deviated from its primary objective and means to that objective? Yes damn it! But for the most part we have kept to our true course.
Yes, our republic, like the many before it, is susceptible to decline and fall. The principal cause of the declines and falls of previous republics has been their unarrested departure from the rule of law. We also are steadily departing from the rule of law (e.g., recent Supreme Court decisions that it, not only Congress, can make as well as interpret the law) and are suffering the symptoms of decline as a result. If the history of past republics (e.g., the Roman Republic not the Roman Empire) is applicable to us also, unless our departure from the rule of law is soon arrested, the fate of our republic is eventual dissolution into a tyranny, an empire and a colonizer.
I wonder how often that scene is reenacted over and over in our military camps?
ha ha ha ha ha.... That's really funny! Greenspan is saying that the federal deficit is unsustainable, and the government is spending money like there's no tomorrow. Guess who's gonna end up paying for all this? Any of you play the Monopoly board game? The US dollar - the real stuff is gonna start being used in all of them. There isn't enough products and services to support all the dollars floating around in this world in addition to the private and public debt. It wasn't that long ago that I made the statement investment in gold was unwise. I now change my mind. c.i.
Gold is up quite a bit in the last 18 months.
Cycloptichorn
Yes, it is up quite a bit for the past 18 months; that's the reason why I said gold was a bad investment. Things change...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/international/middleeast/03cnd-iraq.html
March 3, 2005
2 Car Bombs Kill at Least 5 Policemen in Baghdad
By ROBERT F. WORTH and EDWARD WONG
AGHDAD, Iraq, March 3 - Two suicide car bombs exploded outside a checkpoint at the heavily fortified Interior Ministry this morning, killing at least five policemen and injuring seven others, ministry officials said.
One of the bombs exploded as policemen opened fire on the car, which was hurtling toward the outer cordon set up around the tall ministry building in Baghdad.
Two mortars also exploded in the capital this morning at an Iraqi Army checkpoint, injuring a number of civilians, interior ministry officials said.
[Today in Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber blew himself up near the local headquarters of the National Guard, killing at least one civilian and wounding 14 people, Reuters reported.]
The attacks came during a wave of extraordinary violence aimed directly at the Iraqi security forces and showed that the insurgency still has the energy and organization to strike at will, even in the heart of the capital. The guerilla movement has a seemingly endless supply of men or women willing to blow themselves up to sow violence and fear across the country in hopes of driving out the Americans and breaking the back of the Iraqi government.
The continuing violence threatens to dampen or erase any optimism left over from the Jan. 30 elections, when large numbers of voters, especially Shiite Arabs, defied insurgent warnings in central and southern Iraq and made their way, mostly on foot, to the ballot boxes.
Suicide bombers killed 13 Iraqi soldiers in two separate attacks here Wednesday morning.
In the first bombing, a sedan packed with explosives sped into a crowd gathered outside an army compound at the former Muthanna airport in central Baghdad about 7 a.m., killing six soldiers, Iraqi officials said. The compound has been attacked by insurgents several times over the past year.
The blast wounded 28 others, including 10 new recruits and 3 civilian women selling cigarettes, officials at the Interior Ministry said.
The second bomber struck an hour later, driving into an army convoy as it traveled near the highway leading south out of the city in the Dawra neighborhood. That explosion killed seven soldiers and wounded two, officials said.
Later on Wednesday, an Islamist Web site posted a statement by the network of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claiming responsibility for the second attack. The statement made no mention of the first attack.
Scattered violence broke out in central and northern Iraq. A police officer was fatally shot in the northern city of Mosul, witnesses said, and a headless body in a police uniform was found elsewhere in the city. In Baghdad, police officials said a police lieutenant and his son were kidnapped late Tuesday night by men in police uniforms and carrying pistols like those used by the police.
Also on Wednesday, top Shiite and Kurdish political leaders finished two days of meetings in their efforts to form a new government following the national elections on Jan. 30.
Adnan Ali, a deputy head of the Dawa Islamic Party, the Shiite group that has offered up Ibrahim al-Jaafari as prime minister, said in an interview that an announcement could be made in as soon as 10 days.
Safeen Dizayee, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, did not offer an estimate, but said it would not take a few months to form the government, as some predict.
Dr. Jaafari is a member of the Shiite political alliance assembled by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq. The alliance won a slim majority of constitutional assembly seats in the elections, but still needs a two-thirds assembly vote to form a government. The Kurds won more than a quarter of the seats, so together the groups could form a government.
Dr. Jaafari's trip to the north signaled the start, or the acceleration, of heavy negotiations with the Kurdish leaders. His main rival is Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister and an avowed secularist.
Dr. Jaafari met on Tuesday with Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and on Wednesday met with Jalal Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish nominee for president.
Mr. Ali said, "This shows that we can reach an agreement very soon." He added that the Kurdish leaders and Dr. Jaafari had agreed to separate the issue of the formation of the government from "strategic demands" that should be discussed in the new assembly. Those demands, Mr. Ali said, involve the heated questions of where to draw the boundary of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, and whether the Kurds should be allowed to administer the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk.
The Kurds appeared to have softened their stand on having Mr. Talabani as president. Mr. Dizayee said the Kurds might be satisfied with any of the top three posts in the government - president, prime minister or head of parliament.
Mr. Ali said "other groups" would have to be consulted before the Kurds could be given the presidency. He was alluding to parties representing Sunni Arabs, who make up a fifth of the population but largely boycotted the elections.
"The overall feeling is engagement of all parties," Mr. Dizayee said.
Many predict that if the Sunni Arabs continue to feel disenfranchised, the insurgency will worsen. One indication of the insurgency's strength was the assassination Tuesday of Judge Parwiz Muhammad Mahmoud al-Merani and his son, Aryan Mahmoud al-Merani, a lawyer, who both worked at the special tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein and other members of his government. It was the first known case of a tribunal member being killed.
At a funeral ceremony on Wednesday at a Baghdad mosque, Judge Mahmoud's two remaining children said they believed the two men had been killed because of their roles on the tribunal, dismissing reports of a personal motive for the killings. Judge Mahmoud, 59, was also a high-ranking member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and had been imprisoned and tortured as a young man by Mr. Hussein's government.
"He knew it was a dangerous job, he knew he might get killed," said Mariwan Mahmoud al-Merwani, the judge's remaining son.
The two tribunal officials were killed outside their Baghdad home by gunmen who drove up and fired automatic weapons. Members of the tribunal are provided with security guards, but it was not clear whether any guards were present. A spokesman for the tribunal declined to comment on the killings, saying a statement would be issued later.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/03/03/iraq.main/index.html
Quote:U.S. death toll in Iraq passes 1,500
Thursday, March 3, 2005 Posted: 9:51 AM EST (1451 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Bombers struck two Iraqi security targets on Thursday, killing five police officers near the Interior Ministry in Baghdad and another person in front of a police headquarters in Baquba, authorities said.
As the U.S. death toll in the war passed 1,500, Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi extended a state of emergency throughout the country for 30 days, his office said Thursday.
The extension came as insurgents struck for a third consecutive day, igniting two explosive-laden vehicles near the Interior Ministry, police said.
The Baghdad bombs -- inside a Kia and a Jeep Cherokee -- went off within minutes of each other, police said, after guards had stopped the vehicles. Five police officers were killed and seven others were wounded.
In Baquba, a suicide car bomber detonated outside a headquarters for Iraqi emergency police, killing one person and wounding a dozen others, police and hospital sources said.
The attack appeared to target a convoy of Mudhafar Shahab Jiburi, chief of the police agency in Diyala province, said police spokesman Sattar al-Karkhi.
In a separate incident in Baghdad, an Iraqi army patrol used small arms to fire on a vehicle as it approached a traffic control point. The vehicle and a vehicle behind it both detonated.
The incident is under investigation, said a spokesman for the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, who offered no other details.
A car bomb attack on Monday, the single most deadly attack of the war, killed at least 127 people lined up at a police recruiting center in Hilla. On Tuesday, a judge and his lawyer son who work with the Iraqi war crimes tribunal were assassinated in Baghdad. On Wednesday, 13 people died in two Baghdad bombings aimed at Iraqi police and soldiers.
The killing of three U.S. troops on Wednesday brought the American military death toll in the Iraq war to 1,502, according to the U.S. military.
A roadside bomb killed two Task Force Baghdad soldiers on patrol in the capital late Wednesday, the military said Thursday.
The number of U.S. dead in the war reached 1,500 Wednesday when a U.S. Army soldier died in combat in northern Babil province -- an area south of Baghdad nicknamed the "Triangle of Death."
The soldier was serving with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, a Marine Corps statement said. No other details were released, including the soldier's identity, so relatives could first be notified.
An overwhelming number of all U.S. troops killed in the war have died battling the insurgency that arose after the U.S.-led ouster of the Saddam Hussein regime. The number of those who died in combat totals 1,147, according to the military.
There has been no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-government estimates have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000.
Last October, public health experts published a survey in the British health journal The Lancet that estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the U.S.-led invasion.
'Continuing of the conditions'
Interim Prime Minister Allawi's office said the reason for the extension of the state of emergency was "continuing of the conditions" under which it was first issued.
A state of emergency essentially puts Iraq under martial law and permits the government to restrict freedom of movement, establish curfews and impose any required security and military measures.
The autonomous, mostly Kurdish region in northern Iraq is exempt from the declaration, which has been in place since the U.S.-led operation in November to oust insurgents from Falluja.
Another horrible landmark passed.
The really sad thing is that the true number of dead for the US is much higher. They massage the numbers as much as possible to keep them low... and we're STILL over 1500....
I understand to you oldsters who lived through/around WW2 that that number doesn't sound high... but it does to me...
Cycloptichorn
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/03/03/iraq.main/index.html
Quote:U.S. death toll in Iraq passes 1,500
Thursday, March 3, 2005 Posted: 9:51 AM EST (1451 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Bombers struck two Iraqi security targets on Thursday, killing five police officers near the Interior Ministry in Baghdad and another person in front of a police headquarters in Baquba, authorities said.
As the U.S. death toll in the war passed 1,500, Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi extended a state of emergency throughout the country for 30 days, his office said Thursday.
The extension came as insurgents struck for a third consecutive day, igniting two explosive-laden vehicles near the Interior Ministry, police said.
The Baghdad bombs -- inside a Kia and a Jeep Cherokee -- went off within minutes of each other, police said, after guards had stopped the vehicles. Five police officers were killed and seven others were wounded.
In Baquba, a suicide car bomber detonated outside a headquarters for Iraqi emergency police, killing one person and wounding a dozen others, police and hospital sources said.
The attack appeared to target a convoy of Mudhafar Shahab Jiburi, chief of the police agency in Diyala province, said police spokesman Sattar al-Karkhi.
In a separate incident in Baghdad, an Iraqi army patrol used small arms to fire on a vehicle as it approached a traffic control point. The vehicle and a vehicle behind it both detonated.
The incident is under investigation, said a spokesman for the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division, who offered no other details.
A car bomb attack on Monday, the single most deadly attack of the war, killed at least 127 people lined up at a police recruiting center in Hilla. On Tuesday, a judge and his lawyer son who work with the Iraqi war crimes tribunal were assassinated in Baghdad. On Wednesday, 13 people died in two Baghdad bombings aimed at Iraqi police and soldiers.
The killing of three U.S. troops on Wednesday brought the American military death toll in the Iraq war to 1,502, according to the U.S. military.
A roadside bomb killed two Task Force Baghdad soldiers on patrol in the capital late Wednesday, the military said Thursday.
The number of U.S. dead in the war reached 1,500 Wednesday when a U.S. Army soldier died in combat in northern Babil province -- an area south of Baghdad nicknamed the "Triangle of Death."
The soldier was serving with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, a Marine Corps statement said. No other details were released, including the soldier's identity, so relatives could first be notified.
An overwhelming number of all U.S. troops killed in the war have died battling the insurgency that arose after the U.S.-led ouster of the Saddam Hussein regime. The number of those who died in combat totals 1,147, according to the military.
There has been no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-government estimates have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000.
Last October, public health experts published a survey in the British health journal The Lancet that estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the U.S.-led invasion.
'Continuing of the conditions'
Interim Prime Minister Allawi's office said the reason for the extension of the state of emergency was "continuing of the conditions" under which it was first issued.
A state of emergency essentially puts Iraq under martial law and permits the government to restrict freedom of movement, establish curfews and impose any required security and military measures.
The autonomous, mostly Kurdish region in northern Iraq is exempt from the declaration, which has been in place since the U.S.-led operation in November to oust insurgents from Falluja.
Another horrible landmark passed.
The really sad thing is that the true number of dead for the US is much higher. They massage the numbers as much as possible to keep them low... and we're STILL over 1500....
I understand to you oldsters who lived through/around WW2 that that number doesn't sound high... but it does to me...
Cycloptichorn
