THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

State of emergency declared in Baghdad By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer
30 minutes ago

The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew Friday after insurgents set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on U.S. and Iraqi troops outside the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered everyone off the streets of the capital from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m.

U.S. and Iraqi forces also fought gunmen in the volatile Dora neighborhood in south Baghdad.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle southeast of the capital, the U.S. military said.

The military also said two U.S. Marines died in combat in volatile Anbar province in separate attacks on Wednesday and Thursday, and a soldier died elsewhere in a non-combat incident on Wednesday.

At least 2,517 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

A car bomb ripped through a market and nearby gas station in the increasingly violent southern city of Basra, killing at least five people and wounding 18, including two policemen, police said.

A bomb also struck a Sunni mosque in Hibhib, northeast of Baghdad, killing 10 worshippers and wounding 15 in the town where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was slain this month, police said.

At least 19 other deaths were reported in Baghdad.

Throughout the morning, Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed with attackers armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles in busy Haifa Street, which runs into the Green Zone, site of the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government.

Four Iraqi soldiers and three policemen were wounded in the fighting, police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.

The region was sealed and Iraqi and U.S. forces conducted house-to-house searches.

The prime minister's office said the curfew would last from 2 p.m. Friday until 6 a.m. Saturday but later shortened to end at 5 p.m. Friday.

The state of emergency includes a ban on carrying weapons and gives Iraqi security forces broader arrest powers, Defense Ministry official Maj. Gen. Abdul-Aziz Mohamed Jassim said.

"The state of emergency and curfew came in the wake of today's clashes to let the army work freely to chase militants and to avoid casualties among civilians," he said. "They will punish all those who have weapons with them and they can shoot them if they feel that they are danger."

Gunmen also attacked a group of worshippers marching from Sadr City, the Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the city to protest a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shiite shrine. At least one marcher was killed and four were wounded, Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.

Al-Maliki has been trying to rein in unrelenting insurgent and sectarian violence. He launched a massive security operation in Baghdad 10 days ago, deploying tens of thousands of troops who flooded the city, snarling traffic with hundreds of checkpoints.

Police said they found the bodies of five men who apparently were victims of a mass kidnapping from a factory on Wednesday. The bodies, which showed signs of torture and had their hands and legs bound, were floating in a canal in northern Baghdad, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.

A police raid on a farm Thursday freed 17 of the captives

Meanwhile, the U.S. military said it killed four foreign insurgents in a raid north of Fallujah. Two of the dead men had 15-pound bombs strapped to their bodies. The military said an insurgent thought to be an Iraqi also was killed in the raid, which was launched on the basis of information from a suspected arrested in the region in previous days.

Separately, the military said, it detained a senior leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and three other suspected insurgents Monday during raids northeast of Baghdad, near where al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air raid earlier this month.

'The Extremist Is Never Alone'
By FOUAD AJAMI
June 22, 2006 Wall Street Jounral

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's tribe in Jordan, the Al-Khalayleh, claimed last November that they had disowned the man who had sown havoc in Iraq. They made that public declaration in the aftermath of his attack on three Amman hotels. That day, Nov. 9, 2005, was dubbed by the Jordanians as their own 9/11. But blood has its claims, and in truth Zarqawi had been, and remained, a man of high standing in Jordan and in other Arab lands. After his death, the regime in Amman may have announced that his corpse would not "stain Jordan's soil," but his clan held a "martyr's wedding" for him, and four members of Jordan's Parliament turned up at that funeral ceremony. Grant Jordan's rulers their due: They know that a Zarqawi grave on Jordanian soil would become a shrine to his cult.

The four parliamentarians were rounded up by Jordanian security forces and hauled off to prison. But the matter of Zarqawi cannot be written off as the "embarrassing" scandal of a prison bully and enforcer given to macabre videotapes and grim beheadings. For in the way he lived and died, Zarqawi illuminated much of the Arab reality from which he hailed. The bigotry of Zarqawi was not his alone. He came to Iraq to war against Shiite heretics (al-rafida) and Americans, and countless Sunni Arabs shared his aversion to the new order in Iraq. He saw a noble war that had deposed a tyrant as an alliance between "heretics" and "crusaders." America had dared give liberty to the Shiite majority of Iraq, as well as to the Kurdish people, and this perpetrator of terror shared the wider judgment of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, and of Egypt, that the Shiites were "collaborators" in an American project bent on securing dominion over the Arabs. Modern Iraq had been an Anglo-Sunni dominion when it was cobbled together in the 1920s. The Shiites had been the rebels then, and paid dearly for their purity: British hegemony shattered their autonomy and delivered power to the Sunni political class of the towns. Now the Sunni Arabs feared that this new order would be an American-Shiite edifice.

The extremist is never alone; the terrorist on the fringe of political life always works with the winks and nods of the society that gives him cover. Forgive the likes of Zarqawi their belief that the world around them shares their aversion to the Shiites. From the commanding heights of the Arab states around Iraq, to the storefront mosques of Finsbury Park and Toronto, the claim of the Shiite Arabs to a measure of their world's bounty and power has never been recognized. It was in that vein that King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a "Shia crescent" that stretches from Iran to Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, while jihadists from his own country were bringing calamity to Iraq. And it was of a piece with this moral obtuseness that the Egyptian ruler recently said that the loyalty of the Shiite Arabs was to Iran. The regimes in Amman and Cairo were bidding for American patronage, holding out the promise that they would -- and that only they could -- lead the foreign power through the labyrinth of Araby.

Here is a glimpse of these self-appointed guides in America's awkward journey. It comes from Paul Bremer's chronicle of his stewardship of Iraq. It is June 4, 2003, at an American base in Qatar, and President Bush wants to know from his man on the scene if this American project in Iraq will work. "Will they be able to make a free country?" the president asked. "Some of the Sunni leaders in the region doubt it. They say 'All the Shia are liars.' What's your impression?" A whole world of bigotry, a culture that had never found its way out of sectarianism, was being passed onto the Pax Americana, with the distant foreign power being asked to partake of the phobias of the Arab ruling stratum.

The Jordanians are now eager to claim that they were helpful in the hunt for Zarqawi, that their intelligence had found its way to the Sunni Arab tribes of western and central Iraq. In their recent statements, though, the Jordanians tell us much about the ways of our allies: The collaboration with U.S. intelligence, they add, had begun in earnest in the aftermath of the hotel bombings of last November. But Jordanian jihadists had been at work in Iraq long before they struck Amman. For the rulers in the saddle in Arab lands, jihadism has been a commodity for export. There has been a covert and subtle understanding with the perpetrators of terror: The order would avert its gaze from them so long as they took their furies beyond their homelands.

Jordan is not unique. The Saudi realm only awakened to the terror when its perpetrators struck within the peninsula itself. This happened in the spring of 2003. All that had transpired before was sanctioned and perhaps admired. Pamphleteers and preachers had praised the zeal of the jihadists, took their brutal deeds as evidence of youth's purity and faith. In the same vein, the Egyptian regime, merciless in the way it deals with challenges to its power at home, has never owned up to the darkness of Egyptian terrorists operating the world over. No one in Egypt has accepted responsibility for Mohammed Atta; nothing has been said in official life about the culture that shaped Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took out on other lands the wrath bred in him by the violent struggle between the Egyptian Islamists and the military autocracy.
* * *
It is fitting that the early intelligence has identified Zarqawi's successor as an Egyptian, one Abu Ayyub al-Masri (who goes by another nom de guerre, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer). From Jordan to Egypt: We are still in the darkness of regimes in the orbit of American power. With the torture and murder of two young American soldiers, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who had been kidnapped at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, Zarqawi's successor has sent a grim, cruel reminder that the end of this terrible darkness in the Arab world is not yet at hand.

Yet the identity of this successor will be of little consequence: He and his ilk emerge out of a broader context that ought to be familiar to us. Doubtless, they are misfits in their homelands who have come to Iraq to kill and be killed because they were not given a dream of normalcy, nor modern skills, nor a place in the world. Zarqawi epitomized the jihadists: Life in Jordan offered him little. He had been unable to find work that would sustain him. He hit his stride and found his calling in the "fields of battle" in Afghanistan and Iraq. There would come his way fame and money; the "charities" would find their way to him. Devotees would give him -- a one-time prison thug -- the honorific title of sheikh, acclaim him for picking up the Sunni standard against crusaders and apostates. His was no solitary campaign. He was a witness to his own glory: He no doubt watched his own videotapes on the satellite TV channels of the Arab world.

By accounts available, these jihadists are junkies of the Web and the Arabic press: They can read between the lines, and know of the unease in their world at the emergence from serfdom of the Shiites. They partake of the antimodernism and conspiracy theories on the loose in Arab lands. They are virulently anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitism is a familiar weed on contemporary Arab soil. They may be "embarrassing," those jihadists, in their talk of "crusaders" bent on plundering the Arab world, but the respectable Arabic press out of London, and out of Arab capitals, is now filled with anti-Americanism.

No one wishes the distant Great Power well in Arab lands, and the beneficiaries of American largesse are no exception. Zarqawi and al-Masri did not descend from the sky: One was formed by the world of his native Zarqa, east of Amman, the other joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1982, and his odyssey must duplicate that of countless young men who flooded the Islamist movements after Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981. Egypt has been reduced to a terrible standoff between a plundering autocracy and a vengeful Islamist opposition. The regime in Cairo has nothing to offer the young. Embittered Islamists take to the road bereft of mercy, for none has been shown to them on their own soil. A cynical ruler winks at the chaos, and in his silence about his country's breed of radicals, he speaks volumes about the terrible bargain America has struck with his regime. He picks our pockets and sends our way -- and the way of the Iraqis -- the angry outcasts of his domain.
* * *
In the aftermath of his surprise trip to Iraq, President Bush has returned to an old theme: He has called on the Arabs, yet again, to come to the aid of Iraq. On the face of it, this is the most natural of requests, for the fire in Iraq, and a failure in Iraq, is sure to spill into neighboring Arab lands. But here we are face-to-face with the ways of the Arab world. No Arab cavalry shall ride to Iraq's rescue; no Arab development funds -- in a region wallowing in oil wealth -- shall be committed to Iraq. The foreign leaders who have visited Iraq were from Britain, Australia, Poland, South Korea, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ukraine and Spain. No Arab king or president has deemed it fit to turn up in a show of solidarity with Iraq's people. (A prime minister of Jordan came to repair the breach between the two countries, but prime ministers in Jordan come and go; political power is the king's prerogative.) The Arabs who cross into Iraq are jihadists, and "mules" who bring money to keep the insurgency alive. In the main, Arabs are content to pronounce on Iraq's "innate" violence, and on the errors of the American war. No greater sense of responsibility can be expected from the custodians of political power in the Arab lands.

We should be under no illusions about Iraq's Arab neighbors: They are content to see America bleed, and they see this great struggle as a contest between American power and the region's laws of gravity. True cynics, pessimists through and through, they see the American mission in Iraq as one of extravagant optimism and hubris. The mere claim that the Shiite step-children and the Kurdish highlanders can find a way out of darkness galls them. The Arab ruling elites are invested in the insurgents and the jihadists in Iraq. The more these forces of mayhem engage American power, the more time they buy for the entrenched order. There is no "Arab solution" for Iraq, as there was none for Lebanon in its long Syrian captivity. The Iraqis understood the great Arab silence which attended the death of Zarqawi. A clerical leader of Najaf, Sadr al-Din Qabanji, noted the sorrow with which the men of Hamas responded to the hunting down of Zarqawi. Addressing neighboring Arabs, Qabanji asked the question: "Why do you accept the shedding of our blood?"

The borders of Iraq, examined closely, tell of a powerful but overlooked truth. The borders with Arab lands -- Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- are borders with harsh deserts. The more natural borders -- across population centers, contiguous human habitations -- are with Turkey and Iran. In the face of these stark facts of ecology and demography, Arab nationalism and Arab legend, insisting on the "Arabness" of Iraq, declared it the "eastern gate of the Arab world." This willfulness falsified Iraq's life: This was a borderland across Arab-Turkish, and Arab-Persian, divides. And within, there was a Kurdish nation with its own separate memory, its own dream of autonomy and independence. Now this Iraqi order, delivered through American sacrifices, struggles to take hold. The cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was long in coming, fought over, and divided across sect and ethnicity -- a Shiite interior minister, balanced by a Sunni minister of defense, a Kurdish foreign minister, two portfolios given to the forces of Moqtada al-Sadr, etc. But this is Iraq today, and better this diversity, and the ways of the bazaar, than the pharaonic regime of Hosni Mubarak and the servile culture of his court.

A gap has opened between Arab jihadists and the Sunnis of Iraq. As a celebrated Iraqi intellectual, Hassan al-Alawi, put it: The former have their gaze fixed on the green fields of Paradise, while the latter have theirs fixed on the Green Zone. A balance of fear has been arrived at in Iraq between the Sunnis and the Shiites, a development that issued out of a bloody struggle, and this has altered Iraqi politics for the better. For the first time in their history, Sunni Arabs have come to accept that their old hegemony has been irretrievably shattered; this new order gives them a claim to their country's bounty that is, also for the first time, not indecent.

President Bush took with him to Baghdad the right message: a reaffirmation of the American commitment mixed with a reminder that Iraq's salvation lies in the hands of its new government. The Arabs nearby will say, as they have, that the American leader traveled into an occupied country, that he did not venture beyond the Green Zone, that the place he visited was more his domain than Nuri al-Maliki's. But President Bush called on an elected government, a rare plant in Arab soil. This new government should be strengthened by the promise of American resolve. But it should also take to heart that it is reckoning-time for Iraq's leaders, that it is their country, and their history, that lies in the balance.

Mr. Ajami, a 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," forthcoming from the Free Press in July.

Peace deal offers Iraq insurgents an amnesty

From Ned Parker in Baghdad and Tom Baldwin

THE Iraqi Government will announce a sweeping peace plan as early as Sunday in a last-ditch effort to end the Sunni insurgency that has taken the country to the brink of civil war.

The 28-point package for national reconciliation will offer Iraqi resistance groups inclusion in the political process and an amnesty for their prisoners if they renounce violence and lay down their arms, The Times can reveal.

The Government will promise a finite, UN-approved timeline for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq; a halt to US operations against insurgent strongholds; an end to human rights violations, including those by coalition troops; and compensation for victims of attacks by terrorists or Iraqi and coalition forces.

It will pledge to take action against Shia militias and death squads. It will also offer to review the process of "de-Baathification" and financial compensation for the thousands of Sunnis who were purged from senior jobs in the Armed Forces and Civil Service after the fall of Saddam Hussein. A schedule for coalition forces to withdraw

General amnesty for prisoners "who have not shed innocent Iraqis' blood"

A halt to "anti-terrorist operations" by coalition forces in insurgent areas

A review of the process of de-Baathification and of financial compensation to sacked civil servants from the Saddam regime

It would seem that the Iraqis are busy drawing up peace plans which are eerily similar to those offered by... Senate Democrats.
It's comletely acceptable for the newly elected Iraq government to set a timeline for the removal of all foreign troops, but it is completely unacceptable for the USA to set such a time line.
...

So, a UN approved timeline for the removal of all foreign troops from Iraq?
If this is what the Iraqi government wants, this is what the Iraqi government should get.

Cessation of anti-terrorist operations by coalition forces in insurgent areas?
but not in non-insurgent areas?

Amnesty for those who have fought against Coalition forces?
and who are not itm?

Somehow, I don't think this is going to fly very well with the Administration, for various reasons.
The Bush administration will be euphoric if all this happens and the new Iraq government agrees to forbid and prevent sanctuary of the itm (e.g., al-Qaeda) in Iraq. I know I will be euphoric if all this happens -- Hip Hip Hooray

Cycloptichorn

Amnesty for those who have fought against Coalition forces?
and who are not itm?

When the Iraqis ask the US to leave, what happens to all those new permanent military bases being built by the US?

I believe the 'removal of all foreign troops' is going to be a sticking point with the Admin. After all, they aren't building a 2 billion dollar embassy just to have it blown up, and there has been some speculation about the Bush admin refusal to rule out permanent bases in Iraq.
Walmart will buy the new embassy and hire ex-marines to control the crowds.

Amnesty for those who have fought against Coalition forces?
and who are not itm?
In Iraq, the itm (i.e., inhuman terrorist malignancy) are those who murdered Iraqi civilians, those who abetted the murderers of Iraqi civilians, those who advocated the murder of Iraqi civilians, and those who were silent witnesses to the murder of Iraqi civilians.

They didn't say anything about that, so...
Gee, I thought the newly elected Iraqi government said they would not grant amnesty to murderers of Iraqi civilians.

Cycloptichorn

...
Nobody can fix stupid.

Quote:

Peace deal offers Iraq insurgents an amnesty

From Ned Parker in Baghdad and Tom Baldwin

THE Iraqi Government will announce a sweeping peace plan as early as Sunday in a last-ditch effort to end the Sunni insurgency that has taken the country to the brink of civil war.

The 28-point package for national reconciliation will offer Iraqi resistance groups inclusion in the political process and an amnesty for their prisoners if they renounce violence and lay down their arms,
...
Reading directly from the draft package, Mahmoud al-Mashaadani, the Parliament's Sunni Speaker, told The Times: "There will be a general amnesty to release all the prisoners who were not involved in the shedding of innocent Iraqis' blood."
...