THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

Kurds lower Iraqi flag in new autonomy move

04/09

A row over a flag is highlighting the second great threat to Iraq's survival as a unified state.

For not only is the country split between Sunnis and Shi'ites, but there is also an increasingly bitter rift between Arabs and Kurds.

In a highly symbolic move, the Kurdish regional government has banned the use of the Iraqi flag on its public buildings.

The president of Iraq's Kurdistan told its parliament that the Iraqi flag was a symbol of his people's past oppression and that Iraqi Kurds would declare independence if they considered it in their interests to do so.

But, for now at least, Massoud Barzani also stressed Kurdistan remains an inseparable part of Iraq.

The move to replace the flag with a Kurdish tricolour is another affirmation of the identify of the Kurds, who live in several countries in the region.

Images of their suffering in Iraq under Saddam Hussein have returned to TV screens worldwide with the opening of a trial in which the former leader stands accused of genocide.

Non-Arab Kurdistan has been autonomous ever since a failed uprising against Saddam in 1991 that led the US and Britain to establish a no-fly zone across the region.

With their own administrations and institutions, the Kurds secured a new victory following the fall of Saddam in 2003. For his elected successor was to be veteran Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani - the first non-Arab to head an Arab state. He has pledged to work for reconciliation between all the nation's religious and ethnic groups.

Strengthened by their first unified regional government, Iraqi Kurds are now eager to make sure their voice is heard - with the row over the flag a sign not only of any separatist aspirations in the region but also a clear indication that it wants to retain as much autonomy as possible in a federal Iraq.

parados wrote:

ican,

The date IBQ updates their numbers has nothing to do with the month people are killed in. It only is the date that a death was added to their database.

Who or what is IBQ? The data I post comes from IBC (i.e., Iraq Body Count).

On May 7th, 2006 IBQ added roughly 1390-1420 deaths because they added both the Feb and March morgue numbers that day. I notice you don't use May as a seperate month. What was your total for the end of March?

Your statements mischaracterize what IBC does and what I do with what IBC does. IBC posts the actual dates of violent civilian deaths as well as the dates of the morgue reports when it posts morgue reports.

Yes, it does post those but they don't become part of the total until they are posted in the database. It can take months to add them to the database. Right now the most recent addition to the database is the May Morgue figures. (It is now September) The database from your end of July to today is over 2000 deaths added to the database for August.

Please remember, my principal interest in these data is in their trend if any. It's my way of eventually determining from what I perceive to be a trustworthy leftist source, if things are improving or worsening in Iraq.

As to chaos created..."Fiasco" is a book you really must read, McG, if you want to know what the military community, the intelligence community, and the State/diplomatic community REALLY think about the Bush administration's policies and personnel and why they think it and if you want to gain greater understanding on the level of chaos now extant in the middle east and how that came about.

Hmmm... read a book by a liberal about an unpopular war. I think I will pass on that opportunity. I get enough liberal propaganda in my diet as it is.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0831/p01s02-woiq.html
Firefights mark further splintering in Iraq

This week's fighting in Diwaniyah between rebels and Iraqi forces highlights the growing power of militias in the country.
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CAIRO
Two days this week of fierce firefights between a Shiite militia and government forces in a usually calm town south of Baghdad left at least 80 dead and an unknown number wounded.

While the top US commander in Iraq said the battle came as a "surprise," it underscores a proliferation of militia groups throughout the country that is making central government control in many places merely notional, many Iraqis and foreign experts say.

The fight in Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, between militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and local forces led by the country's most powerful Shiite parties, demonstrates the growing atomization in Iraq's war. Local politicians, gangsters, and would-be warlords are emerging around the country and taking up arms in service of local ambitions that frequently have little to do with Iraq's sectarian war.

The battle in Diwaniyah, which ended Tuesday when the US Air Force dropped a 500-lb. bomb on what it called a militia position, started just three days after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki led a peace conference among tribal leaders designed mostly to undercut Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions. But, as Diwaniyah demonstrates, sectarian fighting is far from the central government's only security challenge.

"When you say 'civil war' it makes it sound like there are two sides fighting in Iraq,'' says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "There aren't two sides - there are lots of sides."

In much of the Shiite south, local leaders increasingly seek to carve out their own fiefdoms and the economic opportunities they generate.

In Sunni provinces, insurgents continue to feed Iraq's sectarian war, as demonstrated by the Sunni mortar attack on a Shiite neighborhood in the town of Khan Beni Saad, north of Baghdad, that drove 30 Shiite families from their homes. And in the contested northern town of Kirkuk, militiamen loyal to the autonomous Kurdish government continue to seek to create "facts on the ground" to press their claims to the oil-rich city.

The most disturbing recent development for the central government may well be the increasing radicalization and splintering among followers of what many Iraqis refer to as the "Sadr stream."

While Mr. Sadr is generally acknowledged as the head of this movement and its Mahdi Army, it looks increasingly as if centralized command and control within the organization is breaking down. That appears to be causing a great deal of confusion and alarm within the Iraqi government.

Sadr's father was Mohammed Sadek al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1999. The elder Sadr advocated a militant version of Shiism, and appealed specifically to Iraq's dispossessed Shiite poor with a rhetoric that was equal parts salvation and a call for Iraq's traditional underclass to rise up.

Now, original followers of Moqtada's father are seeking to "out-militant" the younger Sadr on a local basis, jockeying for prestige and control, argues Mr. Cole.

"The Sadr movement has spread like lightning through almost all of the southern provinces'' since Iraq's elections in January 2005, when followers of less militant Shiite Islamist groups like the SCIRI won power in many of these provinces.

"So there's a big disjunction between who has power in the south and the mind-set of the people. Now the Sadrists have so much popular support, but they're locked out of local government and patronage.

"It's essentially a class war. The Sadr guys are pressing ... for a kind of Shiite Maoism. SCIRI represents what's left of the Shiite middle classes," Cole says.

This is what our soldiers are dying for. This is the conservatives war. This is the war of those conservatives with the simple-minded mentality of screaming "nuke en, nuke em" to anyone who resists us. Well we "nuked emed" in Iraq and now we can sit back with pride as we watch our young men and women die on a daily basis and the country of Iraq disintegrate into total chaos.

Mahdi Army members in Sadr City, the poor Shiite neighborhood on Baghdad's northeastern edge that serves as Sadr's stronghold, claimed that the fighting was not at Sadr's behest, but also said that some of their ranks went south to participate in the fighting there.

They claimed anger at the recent arrest of a local Shiite preacher who had called for attacks on US forces, and said they felt they had no choice but to fight. "We're the ones resisting the occupiers and the officials who serve them,'' said one, asking that his name not be used. "We're the ones fighting for our people and protecting them. The government is failing."

Nevertheless, Cole and others see economic issues as driving much of the conflict in the south. The deterioration of basic services in the past few years, joblessness estimated at around 60 percent, and rising inflation have left militias squabbling over a shrinking economic pie.

Dominic Asquith, the new British ambassador to Iraq, said that economic stagnation was a crucial component of the collapse of security in Basra in an article he contributed to Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper Monday.

"Basra ... until not long ago enjoyed a stable security climate. However, one of the reasons for the unrest is that there has been no perceptible improvement in the quality and extent of the services,'' he wrote. "This has made the Basra residents restless, and led to a band of criminals exploiting such restlessness in order to undermine the stability of the city and provoke sedition."

It's no wonder our generals refer to Bush as numnuts. What amazes me are how many ignorant Fox News loving conservatives out there believe Bush when he says if we don't fight the terrorist in Iraq we will have to fight them in America. Really! Those Sunnis and Shiite nationalists will hop on a boat and come to America and kill Americans in the streets of New York and Washington DC.

Even in peaceful regions, Iraqi government control is eroding. In Iraqi Kurdistan, local Kurdish officials allow members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) - a group fighting for an independent Kurdish state inside Turkey that the State Department has labeled a terrorist group - are allowed to live and infiltrate into Turkey, even though Prime Minister Maliki wants good relations with Ankara and has promised to shut the group down.

Turkey has continued to complain that little has been done against the group, and a week ago, Turkish planes attacked what it alleged were rebel positions inside Iraqi Kurdistan.

• Awadh al-Taaie contributed in Baghdad to this report.

I believe old europe's citation of statistics concerning current participation in UN police and peacekeeping activities deliberately creates a very deceptive impression, one of which I am quite sure he is well aware.

UN military interventions go a long way back - the resistance to the unprovoked invasion of South Korea by the North was perhaps the largest, and in that one the largest shares of the troops and casualties were borne by South Korea and the United States. I doubt very much that the cumulative statistics of casualties and costs borne exclusively in UN peacekeeping activities would show that the United States is behind (say) Germany in paying its share of the blood price.

Over the past twenty years UN use of the military forces of members to staff its "peacekeeping" efforts (usually so watered down by the irresolution of the Security Council and the UN Secretariat itself) has degenerated to a revenue-producing effort for the third-rate armies of third world countries. None of the major European countries has done its share of staffing these endeavors either - and for the same reason as applies to us. The United States has very frequently provided the transportation and logistic support to sustain these operations, and, overall, has paid more than its fair share of the financial cost.

old europe appears to imply that the United States has been unwilling to expose its military forces to hazard in support of peace and freedom in the world. Putting this idea into words, stating the proposition clearly and directly, instead of merely implying it in a cute set of out-of-context statistics, makes the absurdity of the proposition, and the deceptive intent of its author, rather obvious.

old europe should apologize.

There's a possibility of that Bernie. He'll [thomas hicks, author of "fiasco"] be batting for the Military though.
Which is only one portfolio in Government. So if there was something you could learn it will be with that slant, which I could beat into one sentence if I wanted.

Whenever did any administration not have bad things said about it by the communities you list and their cliques?

Last Updated: Friday, 18 August 2006, 10:54 GMT 11:54 UK

Review: Girl Blog from Iraq
By Charles Pamment
BBC News, Edinburgh

Girl Blog from Iraq
The play is staged by a theatre company from New York
Rarely out of the news, the coalition forces' presence in Iraq has been the subject of much controversy and political debate over the past three years.

Girl Blog from Iraq: Baghdad Burning is based on a blog written by 'Riverbend', a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad prior, during and after the invasion. It is dramatised by a cast of five young American actors.

It takes a few minutes to acclimatise to the style of the play. A time-line narrator walks through the audience interjecting with the actors on stage, reading out the dates of each diary entry and describing the events of conflict that happened on that particular day.

But the spectator quickly begins to focus on the events and experiences of a country decimated by conflict and descending into civil war.

The portrayal of Baghdad before and after the US invasion takes centre stage, with quotes from Western media entwined with extracts from the blog and the horrifying statistics of war.

Character facets

Each actor brings out different areas of Riverbend's character. One emphasises her love for Iraqi culture, another, her awareness of the struggle women face from religious fundamentalists.

The play poignantly describes the changes to everyday life in Iraq since the invasion: the reluctance to leave the house, the stench of death on the streets and the heartstopping fear of another car bomb attack in the city.

Moving accounts of abductions are interjected with concern for the US soldier pounding the streets of an alien land with the threat of death at every corner.

But the concern for the Americans is short-lived. As friends and family die, the blog's emphasis turns to anger.

The play identifies the rise of fundamentalism as a consequence of the invasion itself, suggesting that before the conflict these small groups were not supported by ordinary Iraqis.

Instead of heralding a new life of democracy and post-Saddam freedom, the invasion and subsequent 'occupation' has simply awakened a growing band of fundamentalists, according to Riverbend. With this the "seeds of civil war are being sown".

Girl Blog from Iraq (credit: Ian Stirling)
Four women and a man portray the voice of blogger Riverbend

An emotive reference to the lack of 'weapons of mass destruction' suggests that there is more of a threat now to the West than there was before the invasion.

There is also a constant emphasis on the ordinary Iraqi, their respect for other cultures, religions. An insistence that hatred of the war does not for a moment mean that they dislike Americans or their Western allies.

This gripping piece of theatre presents a personal reflection on the current situation in Iraq, one that is seldom presented in the Western media.

The digital age also makes the performance chillingly up-to-date. Included in the play is a line from her most recent blog "from a city where no-one knows if they will see another day".

It is humbling to write this review from a city where such threats remain simply on the stage.

Girl Blog from Iraq: Baghdad Burning, Pleasance Courtyard, until 28 August