THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

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There is no reason to suspect that what the NYT reported is inaccurate. Does your source give the Baghdad morgue figures for June and July?

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Ican .... what possible macabre interest could you have in dead Iraqis? If you could get an accounting with 100 % accuracy ........ wtf would you do with it.

Just curious

Iraqi Shiite: No interference from Iran
By PATRICK QUINN, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 39 minutes ago

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician, defended Iran on Tuesday against American allegations that it trained and equipped Shiite militias, and said the U.S. has not provided any proof.

Al-Hakim, a key ally of Iran, also lamented the 73 deaths in fighting Monday between Iraqi government forces and Shiite militiamen of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, calling the clashes in the southern city of Diwaniyah "annoying and painful."

Minority Sunni Arabs have been urging the Shiite-led government to crack down on Shiite militias, blamed for rampant violence against Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere.

"None of us accept any interference from Iran or from any others. The Iranians have been emphasizing the independence of Iraq," al-Hakim said in an interview with The Associated Press. "They do not want to interfere in Iraqi affairs."

Al-Hakim noted the Iranians have made similar claims of American and British meddling in their country ?- using Iraq as a base. "We see that such problems exist and we hope that they will be solved by peaceful means," al-Hakim said of the climate of mutual allegations between Washington and Tehran.

In the interview, which took place in a reception room of his heavily guarded residence along the Tigris River in an upscale Baghdad neighborhood, al-Hakim also called on the government to expand efforts to reconcile Iraq's ethnic and religious groups ?- but not so far as to include Islamic extremists or Saddam Hussein loyalists.

Although al-Hakim holds no senior government post, he is widely regarded as the most influential Shiite politician in Iraq. A cleric, he heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the senior partner in an alliance of Shiite religious parties.

SCIRI was founded in Iran in 1982 and run by al-Hakim's late brother until he was killed in a truck bombing in August 2003. SCIRI is believed to have close ties to predominantly Shiite Iran, although it has denied such claims.

Al-Hakim, who opposed Saddam from exile in Iran before returning to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, said Americans have never backed up their allegations of Iranian interference in Iraq. Iraqis, he said, would never accept any meddling from their neighbors.

He added that "there are allegations from the Americans and from others from time to time, even from the first month of the collapse of Saddam's regime."

"We demanded any documents and evidence, but none was presented to us," al-Hakim said. "On the other side, Iran has similar allegations toward the United States, or the British, saying that they are interfering in their internal affairs using Iraq as a base for that."

U.S. officials have made various claims of Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs, mostly in the southern Shiite areas of the country.

On Aug. 22, Brig. Gen. Michael Barbero, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it was "irrefutable that Iran is responsible for training, funding and equipping" some Shiite groups in Iraq.

Barbero added that it was a "policy of the central government in Iran" to destabilize Iraq and increase the violence there.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told The New York Times earlier this month that Iran's prodding led to a surge in mortar and rocket attacks on the fortified Green Zone, the compound that houses the main components of the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy. He said splinter groups of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army were behind the attacks.

All the major Shiite political parties in Iraq are believed to receive money from Iran. Al-Sadr, however, is not believed to be the major recipient, and on some major issues his policies differ from what is assumed to be Iran's agenda.

On other subjects, al-Hakim lauded a national reconciliation plan launched last week by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite. The plan offers amnesty to members of the Sunni-led insurgency not involved in terrorist activities, calls for disarming primarily Shiite sectarian militias and promises compensation for families of Iraqis killed by U.S. and government forces.

But no major Sunni Arab insurgent groups have publicly agreed to join the plan, and many of the Shiite militias are controlled by legislators themselves.

"It is our duty and the duty of the government to continue contacts and make efforts to attract as many people as possible. Generally, we are very optimistic about the future," al-Hakim said.

Of the more extreme elements in the Sunni insurgency, he said "it is obvious that Takfiris and Saddamists can never conduct any dialogue and they are not ready for that. They are the real enemies of the Iraqi people."

There have been hiccups in the prime minister's plan, including fighting Monday between Iraqi government forces and Shiite militiamen in Diwaniyah that left 73 people dead ?- 23 soldiers and 50 gunmen, according to the government.

"What took place in Diwaniyah, of fighting in this manner, was annoying and painful, because it was unjustified killing of Iraqis who were not Takfiri or Saddamists. We hope that such events will not be repeated and should be tackled and contained," he said.

Al-Hakim also said parliament should forge ahead with the establishment of a federal system in Iraq that would include a southern Shiite province.

"We need to legislate the mechanism and the rules inside in the parliament and that is supposed to take place in the coming few weeks.

Establishing such a Shiite federal region will entail an amendment to the constitution and approval in a referendum.

That province would resemble the northern Kurdish region. Sunni Arabs could wind up squeezed into Baghdad and Iraq's western provinces. Many Sunnis fear that federalism will lead to the breakup of the country.

Associated Press reporter Qassim Abdul-Zahra participated in this interview.

We negotiate with the Muslim societies that harbor the terrorists, not with the terrorists themselves. How hard is that to understand?

It's easy to understand your opinion. It is difficult to understand why you hold that opinion. Why do you think we can negotiate with Muslim societies that harbor terrorists without negotiating with the IT(i.e., Islamo Totalitarians) who via fear control both the terrorists and the people in those societies

We have to remove their base of support. The average Muslim doesn't want to see the US turned to Islaam by force, they just want us to stop propping up their dictators and killing their kids; as well as stop riling up the **** in their society!!!

Yes, "we have to remove their base of support." The USA finally, after too many years, stopped "propping up their dictators," when we invaded Afghanistan and removed its Taliban dictatorial government, and invaded Iraq and removed its Baathist dictatorial government. The consequence of the removals of such governments by force is unavoidably "killing their kids; as well as ... riling up the **** in their society." However, the "propping up" we did before removing those governments resulted in those governments "killing their kids; as well as ... riling up the **** in their society" to an even greater extent.

An alternative is to pay extortion to the IT. For example, in return for an IT promise to not kill non-combatants, pay 'em off. Of course, the problem with that approach is we cannot control whether they will subsequently inflate their monetary demands, or even what they will do with whatever payoff they receive.

Another alternative is to extort the IT by proceeding ruthlessly and persistantly to completely defeat them.

Another alternative is to kiss, hug and profusely apologize to 'em.

Another alternative is ...

I infer that you recomend persistent negotiations to get the IT or the people in the IT controlled states to understand the necessity for growing the courage they must have to themselves rid themselves of the IT.

Should we take your approach, I would immediately start looking for the appearance of another "star in the east" to grow hope for the success of your approach, even while the IT continue "killing their kids; as well as ... riling up the **** in their society".

Cycloptichorn

It's easy to understand your opinion. It is difficult to understand why you hold that opinion. Why do you think we can negotiate with Muslim societies that harbor terrorists without negotiating with the IT(i.e., Islamo Totalitarians) who via fear control both the terrorists and the people in those societies.

ican
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What must be done is to conduct ourselves in such a way so as not to create new terrorist.
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If we can convince Muslims in general that cooperating with the US will be better for them in the long run than cooperating with terrorists, then we will have won.

I think that outcome from your approach is improbable in the lifetimes of any of our contemporaries. I do wish reality were otherwise.
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You seem to operate off of a model in which peace will be achieved once the average Muslim fears us more than they fear the terrorists, and therefore does what we say (put the terrorists out of their societies) instead of what the terrorists say. I think this attitude shows a real lack of understanding about how people and societies respond to pressure and threats.

You have accurately described my model as far as your description goes. Subsequent to the Muslims coming to fear us more than the IT, and "put the terrorists out of their societies," we provide the help they request for keeping "the terrorists out of their societies" and for rebuilding the basic infrastructure of their societies (e.g., water, electricity, comunications, roads, railways, waterways, airways). That is, do the kind of stuff we did in Japan and Germany after WWII.

Cheers

Cycloptichorn

I think that outcome from your approach is improbable in the lifetimes of any of our contemporaries. I do wish reality were otherwise.

But, it will never happen. They will never cooperate with us if fear is the lever used.

When sufficient fear was used as the lever before it worked fine (e.g., WWI, WWII, Bosnia, Kuwait). Why not this time? And insufficient fear didn't work before (e.g., Korea, Vietnam)
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Gotta start working on it sometime. I could easily live another 80 years; that's long enough to see a great deal of change happen.

Cycloptichorn

Rummy's Reverie: "The Media made me lose the War"

By Mike Whitney

08/30/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Don Rumsfeld may be a lousy Secretary of Defense, but he's the best buck-passer this country's ever had.

Nothing is ever his fault. Not Guantanamo, not Abu Ghraib, not Falluja, not Haditha, not de-Baathification, not the insurgency; nothing. Ever.

Of course, ever since Saddam's bronze torso hit the pavement in Fidros Square, the occupation has steadily unraveled and turned into a quagmire. But that's not Rummy's fault either. Like President Bush said, "He's doin' a heck-uva job".

Sec-Def Houdini put his excuse-making talents on full-display yesterday in a speech at Fallon Naval Air Station in Nevada. He accused terrorist groups of "manipulating the media" to erode support for the war on terror.

"What bothers me the most," he opined, "is the way they are actively manipulating the media in this country. They can lie with impunity…That's the thing that keeps me up at night."

Some of us were hoping that Iraq was keeping Rummy "up at night"…or maybe that niggling issue of torture and abuse that keeps popping up in the newspapers. But, noooo; it's the looming specter of Zarqawi at his keyboard e mailing his hypnotic prose to unwitting Americans who are seduced by his vile propaganda.

Huh?

What exactly is Rumsfeld talking about? Or are these just the early signs of delirium praecox?

"The enemy is so much better at communicating," he moaned. "I wish we were better at countering that because the constant drumbeat of the things they say?-all of which are not true?-is harmful."

"Better at communicating"? Better than FOX News, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the whole alphabet-soup of cable stations that pitch Rumsfeld's flag-waving jingoism ad nauseum? Are Bin Laden's scratchy video-tapes really that much of a threat?

How can the press corps (some of America's best and brightest) sit through this rubbish? Isn't there anyone in the crowd who's plucky enough to put a stop to Rumsfeld's ruminations by saying,

"No offense, Mr. Secretary, but you're losing the goddamn war and you're blaming it on some fictitious Islamic media which only exists in your fevered imagination."

Rumsfeld's precipitous decline into senility is painful to watch. At one time the square-jawed Rumsfeld embodied the swaggering self-confidence and élan of the Bush administration. His friendly banter with the adoring Washington press corps made him a darling among conservatives and elevated him to rock star status.

No one could lay a glove on old Rummy; he was too smart and too quick on his feet.

And, now this; an embattled old man, trying to cover his failures with one absurd diversion after the other?

Rumsfeld should be on the front porch shooing kids off the lawn not steering the world's most powerful military towards an impending catastrophe.

We need new leadership; pronto. Rumsfeld can swap his stories about Bin Laden Media with his fellows at the Senior Center, not from the podium at the Pentagon

Cycloptichorn wrote:

But, it will never happen. They will never cooperate with us if fear is the lever used.

When sufficient fear was used as the lever before it worked fine (e.g., WWI, WWII, Bosnia, Kuwait). Why not this time? And insufficient fear didn't work before (e.g., Korea, Vietnam)
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Gotta start working on it sometime. I could easily live another 80 years; that's long enough to see a great deal of change happen.

Cycloptichorn

Go for it! Maybe you'll live to 113! I'm guessing that will give you another 93 years.

Success!

When sufficient fear was used as the lever before it worked fine (e.g., WWI, WWII, Bosnia, Kuwait). Why not this time?

For an Iraq Cut in 3, Cast a Wary Glance at Kurdistan
By EDWARD WONG

08/27/06 "New York Times" -- -- QARADAGH, Iraq -- -THE Kurdish policeman's mother died in 1988 when a boulder crushed her as she fled to Iran after the aerial bombardment of their village. His older brother had been killed earlier, in combat with Saddam Hussein's troops.

"But I don't just hate Saddam," the policeman, Lt. Ismail Ibrahim Said, 29, said in this mountain town's station house before the start last week of Mr. Hussein's trial on the charge of genocide against the Kurdish minority. "I see it in the new government of Iraq. When they have power, they'll oppress us like Saddam did."

The policeman's sentiments, widely shared across the autonomous Kurdish homeland, reflect a lack of will among many Iraqis to forge a unified nation, and could herald the breakup of the country into three self-governing regions. As Iraq writhes in the grip of Sunni-versus-Shiite violence, a de facto partitioning is taking place. Parts of the country are coming to look more and more like Iraqi Kurdistan, with homogenous armed regions becoming the norm.

But if Kurdistan increasingly portends the future shape of Iraq, it also signals the hazards inherent in a fracturing of the country. American and Iraqi officials agree that the greatest danger to a politically divided Iraq, or to an Iraq riven by civil war, is hostile intervention by the country's neighbors. The resulting regional conflagration could remake the Middle East through mass bloodshed. Here in Kurdistan, interference by border nations is already happening more overtly than elsewhere in the country.

More than a week ago, Iran lobbed artillery shells for several days at villages around Qandil Mountain in the remote north of Iraqi Kurdistan, killing at least two civilians, wounding four and driving scores from the area, said a senior politician, Mustafa Sayed Qadir. Iran has been shelling the area sporadically for months, he said.

Qandil Mountain is a base for militant groups fighting for Kurdish independence or autonomy in Turkey and Iran.

Like Iran, Turkey has been increasing the pressure against Kurds who are pushing for self-governance. This month, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, warned Tariq al-Hashemi, the Iraqi vice president and a Sunni Arab, that the Iraqi government needed to take "satisfactory steps" against the Kurdistan Workers Party, a guerrilla group with hideouts in this region. Turkish officials have also warned Iraqi Kurdistan against seizing control of the oil city of Kirkuk.

The top Kurdish politicians in Iraq officially are not pushing for an independent Kurdistan. They are all too aware that a Kurdish nation would draw intense hostility from Turkey, Iran and Syria, which all have Kurdish minorities chafing to raise their own flag. Kurds in those countries and in Iraq have long dreamed of uniting to form the nation of greater Kurdistan, encompassing up to 30 million people and stretching from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean to southern Iraq.

"Both Turkey and Iran are not happy with what's going on in Iraqi Kurdistan ?- having a special region, having a government, having a Parliament, and so on," said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish member of the Iraqi Parliament. "That's why they do those special operations, those bombings. It's a blow against the Kurdish government in Kurdistan."

"We have to be very careful, and we are very careful," he added.

The type of cross-border disputes occurring in Kurdistan could spread across Iraq should the country splinter. Some Shiite leaders are working to create a nine-province autonomous Shiite region in the south, one that would include the oil fields around Basra. If this were to happen in the context of a large-scale civil war, Saudi Arabia and Syria, countries with Sunni Arab majorities, could openly back Sunni militias in Iraq against the Iranian-supported Shiite fief.

Yet whether Iraq's neighbors like it or not, this country's regions are heading toward greater autonomy, not less.

Iraqi Kurdistan has been virtually independent of the national government since 1991, when the American military established a no-flight zone across the region. The toppling of Mr. Hussein in 2003 only pushed the Kurds to reinforce their autonomy. Seeing that, many Shiites in the south began clamoring for the same.

The endgame for this nation, however bloodily it may come, could be an Iraq divided into three self-governing regions dominated respectively by Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. (The Shiite Arabs make up 60 percent of Iraq's population; the other two groups 20 percent each.)

Here in Kurdistan, the people are open about their reluctance to participate in the project of a greater Iraq. In January 2005, 98 percent of Kurds voted for independence in an unofficial referendum. The Kurds often point out the artificial nature of Iraqi nationhood, created when colonial powers carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and ask why the people should be expected to possess a strong sense of Iraqi identity now when they never really had one.

"Iraq was never a unified country," said Asos Hardi, editor in chief of Awene, an independent Kurdish newspaper. "When you released the only factor keeping this country together, Saddam, all the problems came to the surface."

In the market square of Sulaimaniya, the main city of eastern Kurdistan, a schoolteacher said the historical enmity between Arabs and Kurds would not disappear anytime soon.

"The Kurds and the Arabs have been like neighbors, but the Arabs have always been occupiers on this land," said the teacher, Anwar Abu Bakr Muhammad, 33, as he chatted with friends before dusk. "Being separated from them is much better."

The drive for independence is evident simply from a glance around the square. On one side of a building is a towering painting of Sheik Mahmoud al-Hafid, who fought for a Kurdish homeland in the early 20th century. The square's center is dominated by a bust of Piramerd, a poet best known for his writings on Kurdish nationalism.

Across Kurdistan, the Iraqi flag is almost nowhere to be seen. The red, white and green banner of Iraqi Kurdistan, with a yellow sunburst in the middle, flutters along streets and from government buildings.

Children are not required to learn Arabic in schools, which means an entire generation is growing up without the ability to communicate with other Iraqis. Arabs arriving from other parts of the country have to register with local security forces. The Kurdish regional government has its own militia, called the pesh merga, which is estimated to number more than 100,000 and operates checkpoints on the border between Kurdish Iraq and Arab Iraq.

Moreover, the rift between Arabs and Kurds could be widened rather than healed by the trial of Mr. Hussein and six aides for their brutal 1988 military campaign against the Kurds, called Anfal. Survivors on the stand last week used a term that has recently entered the Kurdish vocabulary to describe the fate of relatives taken by government forces and never seen again: "Anfalized."

Such memories of suffering might hinder Iraqi unity, but they serve to reinforce the foundation of Kurdish nationhood.

"The Arab nationalists think of us as inferior to them," said Bahman Jabar, 30, another teacher in Sulaimaniya's market square. "It'll be better for us to split from the Arabs and have our Kurdish state."

Yerevan Adham contributed reporting from Sulaimaniya for this article.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Rumsfeld More Stubborn than Bush

July was the deadliest month ever in Iraq. More than 3,000 Iraqis died violent deaths. Or as Maliki said, "The violence is not increasing.... No, we're not in a civil war. In Iraq, we'll never be in civil war. What you see is an atmosphere of reconciliation." Baghdad Bob couldn't have said it better.

Or let's get even more detached. Here's Bush from his press conference last week: "You know, I hear people say, Well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box."

It's sort of like saying, "The people of New Orleans know that the federal government loves poor black people." Because something has happened since then that makes you look, I don't know, out of touch now.

The morgue in Baghdad counted more than 1,800 bodies last month, which was a record high. Or a normal month in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. But this month, the morgue is on track to receive less than a quarter of that. Why? Because we've redeployed 8,000 U.S. soldiers and 3,000 Iraqi troops to Baghdad and sent them on house-to-house sweeps for militants and weapons caches. In other words, we've knocked Baghdad back from complete and total madness to borderline chaos.

Geez, it's almost like more soldiers works better. And it only took three years to figure this out.

Of course, the forces weren't added; they were moved from other parts of the country, which will now descend back into complete and total madness. Whack-a-mole, as they say.

Isn't this just more confirmation that Rumsfeld's plan was totally inadequate? And I don't mean that just as an attack. I just want to know how to get things right for when we invade Iran the week before the election.

Bill Maher is the host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" which airs every Friday at 11PM.

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When sufficient fear was used as the lever before it worked fine (e.g., WWI, WWII, Bosnia, Kuwait). Why not this time? And insufficient fear didn't work before (e.g., Korea, Vietnam)
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Different situations. We weren't threatening any of those nations, but responding to the agression of others. We didn't win any of those situations through intimidation.

Cycloptichorn