THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, TENTH THREAD.

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Bush thinks he understands the Truman legacy, but fails to understand the history of Iraq. It's not only "wanted dead or alive" and "mission accomplished," but also "I'm a uniter, not a divider" that will haunt him till dooms day.

December 26, 2006
Hundreds Disappear Into the Black Hole of the Kurdish Prison System in Iraq
By C. J. CHIVERS

SULAIMANIYA, Iraq ?- The inmates began their strike with an angry call. "Allahu akbar!" they shouted, 120 voices joining in a cadence punctuated by whoops.

They thrust their arms between the metal bars and ripped away the curtains and plastic sheets covering the windows facing the prison courtyard. Their squinting faces were exposed to light.

Their Kurdish guards gathered, ready to control a prison break. There was no break. The inmates were able only to shove their bunks against the doors and barricade themselves in their cells. They settled into a day of issuing complaints.

They were not allowed the Koran, they said. Their rations were meager and often moldy. Sometimes the guards beat them, they said, and several inmates had disappeared. The entire inmate population had either been denied trials or had been held beyond the terms of their sentences, they said ?- lost in legal limbo in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq.

The prison strike here, on Dec. 4, ended when the local authorities agreed to transfer three unpopular guards and to allow copies of the Koran in the cells. But it exposed an intractable problem that has accompanied Kurdish cooperation with the United States in Iraq.

The Kurdish prison population has swelled to include at least several hundred suspected insurgents, and yet there is no legal system to sort out their fates. So the inmates wait, a population for which there is no plan.

The Kurdish government that holds the prisoners says they are dangerous, and points out that the population includes men who have attended terrorist or guerrilla training in Iraq or Afghanistan. But it also concedes to being stymied, with a small budget, limited prison space and little legal precedent to look back on.

"We have not had trials for them," said Brig. Sarkawt Hassan Jalal, the director of security in the Sulaimaniya region. "We have no counterterrorism law, and any law we would pass would not affect them because it would not be retroactive."

The problems reach back to before the American-led invasion, when northern Iraq was a Kurdish enclave out of Saddam Hussein's control.

This was where Zarkawi and the Al Qaead camp was located, in an area outside of Saddam's control. This was the camp Bush refused to destroy. It was also the same one Bush used to try to link Saddam to Al Qaeda.

At the time, the Kurds in northeastern Iraq were fighting Ansar al-Islam, a small insurgent and terrorist group that seized control of a slice of territory along the Iranian border in 2002.

The Kurds captured several prisoners and suspected terrorists, but had no clear idea what to do with them, other than to hold them in cells.

Several weeks after the war started in 2003, an attack by American special forces and Kurdish fighters pushed Ansar al-Islam off Kurdish turf. But the border with Iran had not been sealed before the attack. Most of the insurgents escaped.

In the years since, Ansar al-Islam's ideological war has spread throughout Sunni Arab regions of Iraq, becoming a far more dangerous insurgency. Kurdish jails have swelled with people accused of participating in it.

A direct result of Bush's invasion and another example of how the terrorist have benefitted from the Iraqi invasion.

Many of the detained men exude menace. But others claim they are innocent. And Kurdish officials say they have a limited capacity to disentangle the groups.

Brig. Hassan Nouri, the Kurdish security official responsible for the prisons in northeastern Iraq, said the detainees are in a status resembling that of the American-held detainees in Guantánamo Bay. "We cannot let them go, and we will hold them as long as we have to," he said.

The population's size is unclear. In this prison run by the local security service on a Kurdish military base at Sulaimaniya's outskirts, 120 accused insurgents are held.

Hania Mufti, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who has investigated the prison conditions and the absence of due process for the inmates, said that about 2,500 people are being held by the security services of the two ruling Kurdish parties. She estimated that two-thirds of them are accused of participating in the insurgency.

Ms. Mufti said she has encouraged Kurdish political leaders to set up an independent commission to review each of the accused insurgents' cases.

"We're not saying, ?'throw open the doors of the prisons,' " she said, but rather are suggesting that the Kurds create a means to examine the merits of each man's detention, and to determine why and whether each of them should be held and for how long, and under what conditions.

Kurdish officials have not yet developed such a policy; the detainees are essentially warehoused. The strike in early December exposed the strains the unresolved status has placed on the Kurdish government and the inmates alike.

The four visible cells here, spaces of about 7 yards by 8 yards, each were packed with 30 men. The men shared a toilet on the floor outside the cells, in a hall. The group seethes. One inmate shouted at two journalists through the bars. "Stop your hatred toward Islam!" he said. "Otherwise we will kill you!"

Speaking from a law enforcement perspective, Mr. Jalal said the close quarters and evident anger had made many of the inmates more radical, and that the prison serves as an insurgents' nest.

The detainees themselves blame the Kurds. As the disruption began, one inmate who had been outside the cells to meet a family member was swiftly pushed into a guard bunkroom and left with two journalists.

The man, Yunis Ahmad, 34, of Kirkuk, said he had been held two years without being charged. He was briefly detained, he said, by the American military, and then turned over to the Kurds.

Behind him on the wall of the guard's room hung two pieces of heavy electric cable, a common tool for beatings.

Mr. Ahmad said that the Americans had treated him decently, interviewing him politely and giving him food and juice. But since being in Kurdish custody, he said, he had been tortured, including having a bed placed on him and then being nearly crushed with weights and having his arms almost pulled from his shoulder sockets by the guards.

"I promise you, if they pulled your arms like that, you will confess to being in Al Qaeda," he said.

Torture is a wonderful way to get high quality information that will save thousands of lives. People always tell the truth when they are tortured.

He was an Islamic cleric, he said, and his brother was an insurgent. He said he did not know the reasons for his incarceration. "The people who are here don't know why they are here," he said.

Later, other prisoners spoke through their windows and cell doors.

One man, Ahmed Jamal, 24, said he was an Australian citizen and had been held without being charged since he was arrested by Kurdish authorities in Aug. 2004.

"They don't give us enough to drink," he said. "They don't give us medicine." He pointed to a middle-aged man who was moaning on a bunk, semi-conscious, and said that the authorities would not provide the man with medical treatment.

Mr. Jamal's own journey into custody appeared strange. Kurdish authorities said that Mr. Jamal came to Iraq to join the insurgency, a topic Mr. Jamal was evasive about.

He said he had flown to Baghdad in 2004 because he planned to drive into Jordan illegally, and was then arrested in Mosul by the Kurds. He could not fly directly to Jordan, he said, because the Jordanian government considered him a terrorist, which he said he was not.

Asked how he ended up in Mosul, which is not on the way to Jordan from Baghdad, he shrugged, and said, "My plans changed."

Andrew S. Todd, a senior spokesman for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, confirmed by telephone that Mr. Jamal is an Australian citizen. He added that he had been visited by consular officials, who have been discussing his circumstances with the Kurdish authorities. He declined to discuss the case further, citing diplomatic protocol.

Another inmate, Haqi Ismail Ibrahim, an Iraqi Arab who had trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, said he had been held without charges or a legal hearing for more than five years. (Mr. Ibrahim has been held since at least 2002, when he was previously interviewed by The New York Times.)

He said 10 to 15 other inmates have vanished, and that he feared they had been executed. "We asked the Red Cross to search for these people," he said through the bars. "But they do not know where they are."

One of the prisoners who Mr. Ibrahim said was now missing, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, was captured in 2002 after an assassination attempt against Barham Salih. Mr. Salih was then the prime minister of the eastern Kurdish enclave and is now a deputy prime minister of Iraq. Five Kurdish guards were killed in the attempt.

Mr. Salih later said he wanted to spare Mr. Khadir's life, as part of an example of official restraint and respect for life in a country that had endured unchecked state violence under Mr. Hussein. Other Kurdish officials, in interviews in 2002 and 2003, dismissed such notions as fancy, and said Mr. Khadir would be executed.

Mr. Khadir's fate has never been disclosed. Mr. Jalal and Mr. Nouri would say publicly only that he is no longer in his custody.

The International Committee for the Red Cross has an office in Sulaimaniya. Its head of mission declined to comment about the prisoners' allegations, other than to say that the organization visits the prison and the inmates and is in contact with the Kurdish authorities.

The United States military said it was also not directly involved in these jails. "We just don't have that role in the Kurdish legal system," said Maj. Derrick W. Cheng, a spokesman for the Third Brigade, 25th Infantry Division. "We have security overwatch in the area, but we don't have an immediate or direct role in the prisons."

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006

1. Myth number one is that the United States "can still win" in Iraq. Of course, the truth of this statement, frequently still made by William Kristol and other Neoconservatives, depends on what "winning" means. But if it means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government with an effective and even-handed army and police force in the near or even medium term, then the assertion is frankly ridiculous. The Iraqi "government" is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias on the streets who are killing one another. It is over with. Iraq is in for years of heavy political violence of a sort that no foreign military force can hope to stop.

The United States cannot "win" in the sense defined above. It cannot. And the blindly arrogant assumption that it can win is calculated to get more tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and more thousands of American soldiers and Marines badly wounded or killed. Moreover, since Iraq is coming apart at the seams under the impact of our presence there, there is a real danger that we will radically destabilize it and the whole oil-producing Gulf if we try to stay longer.

2. "US military sweeps of neighborhoods can drive the guerrillas out." The US put an extra 15,000 men into Baghdad this past summer, aiming to crush the guerrillas and stop the violence in the capital, and the number of attacks actually increased. This result comes about in part because the guerrillas are not outsiders who come in and then are forced out. The Sunni Arabs of Ghazaliya and Dora districts in the capital are the "insurgents." The US military cannot defeat the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement or "insurgency" with less than 500,000 troops, based on what we have seen in the Balkans and other such conflict situations. The US destroyed Falluja, and even it and other cities of al-Anbar province are not now safe! The US military leaders on the ground have spoken of the desirability of just withdrawing from al-Anbar to Baghdad and giving up on it. In 2003, 14 percent of Sunni Arabs thought it legitimate to attack US personnel and facilities. In August, 2006, over 70 percent did. How long before it is 100%? Winning guerrilla wars requires two victories, a military victory over the guerrillas and a winning of the hearts and minds of the general public, thus denying the guerrillas support. The US has not and is unlikely to be able to repress the guerrillas, and it is losing hearts and minds at an increasing and alarming rate. They hate us, folks. They don't want us there.

3. The United States is best off throwing all its support behind the Iraqi Shiites. This is the position adopted fairly consistently by Marc Reuel Gerecht. Gerecht is an informed and acute observer whose views I respect even when I disagree with them. In fact, Washington policy-makers should read Daniel Goleman's work on social intelligence. Goleman points out that a good manager of a team in a corporation sets up a win/win framework for every member of the team. If you set it up on a win/lose basis, so that some are actively punished and others "triumph," you are asking for trouble. Conflict is natural. How you manage conflict is what matters. If you listen to employees' grievances and try to figure out how they can be resolved in such a way that everyone benefits, then you are a good manager.

Gerecht, it seems to me, sets up a win/lose model in Iraq. The Shiites and Kurds win it all, and the Sunni Arabs get screwed over. Practically speaking, the Bush policy has been Gerechtian, which in my view has caused all the problems. We shouldn't have thought of our goal as installing the Shiites in power. Of course, Bush hoped that those so installed would be "secular," and that is what Wolfowitz and Chalabi had promised him. Gerecht came up with the ex post facto justification that even the religious Shiites are moving toward democracy via Sistani. But democracy cannot be about one sectarian identity prevailing over, and marginalizing others.

The Sunni Arabs have demonstrated conclusively that they can act effectively as spoilers in the new Iraq. If they aren't happy, no one is going to be. The US must negotiate with the guerrilla leaders and find a win/win framework for them to come in from the cold and work alongside the Kurds and the religious Shiites. About this, US Ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad has been absolutely right.

4. "Iraq is not in a civil war," as paleo-conservative Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly insists. There is a well-established social science definition of civil war put forward by Professor J. David Singer and his colleagues: "Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain." (Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.)" See my article on this in Salon.com. By Singer's definition, Iraq has been in civil war since the Iraqi government was reestablished in summer of 2004. When I have been around political scientists, as at the ISA conference, I have found that scholars in that field tend to accept Singer's definition.

5. "The second Lancet study showing 600,000 excess deaths from political and criminal violence since the US invasion is somehow flawed." Les Roberts replies here to many of the objections that were raised. See also the transcript of the Kucinich-Paul Congressional hearings on the subject. Many critics refer to the numbers of dead reported in the press as counter-arguments to Roberts et al. But "passive reporting" such as news articles never captures more than a fraction of the casualties in any war. I see deaths reported in the Arabic press all the time that never show up in the English language wire services. And, a lot of towns in Iraq don't have local newspapers and many local deaths are not reported in the national newspapers.

6. "Most deaths in Iraq are from bombings." The Lancet study found that the majority of violent deaths are from being shot.

7. "Baghdad and environs are especially violent but the death rate is lower in the rest of the country." The Lancet survey found that levels of violence in the rest of the country are similar to that in Baghdad (remember that the authors included criminal activities such as gang and smuggler turf wars in their statistics). The Shiite south is spared much Sunni-Shiite communal fighting, but criminal gangs, tribal feuds, and militias fight one another over oil and antiquities smuggling, and a lot of people are getting shot down there, too.

8. "Iraq is the central front in the war on terror." From the beginning of history until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. There was no al-Qaeda in Baath-ruled Iraq. When Baath intelligence heard that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have entered Iraq, they grew alarmed at such an "al-Qaeda" presence and put out an APB on him! Zarqawi's so-called "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" was never "central" in Iraq and was never responsible for more than a fraction of the violent attacks. This assertion is supported by the outcome of a US-Jordanian operation that killed Zarqawi this year. His death had no impact whatsoever on the level of violence. There are probably only about 1,000 foreign fighters even in Iraq, and most of them are first-time volunteers, not old-time terrorists. The 50 major guerrilla cells in Sunni Arab Iraq are mostly made up of Iraqis, and are mainly: 1) Baathist or neo-Baathist, 2) Sunni revivalist or Salafi, 3) tribally-baded, or 4) based in city quarters. Al-Qaeda is mainly a boogey man, invoked in Iraq on all sides, but possessing little real power or presence there. This is not to deny that radical Sunni Arab volunteers come to Iraq to blow things (and often themselves) up. They just are not more than an auxiliary to the big movements, which are Iraqi.

9. "The Sunni Arab guerrillas in places like Ramadi will follow the US home to the American mainland and commit terrorism if we leave Iraq." This assertion is just a variation on the invalid domino theory. People in Ramadi only have one beef with the United States. Its troops are going through their wives' underwear in the course of house searches every day. They don't want the US troops in their town or their homes, dictating to them that they must live under a government of Shiite clerics and Kurdish warlords (as they think of them). If the US withdrew and let the Iraqis work out a way to live with one another, people in Ramadi will be happy. They are not going to start taking flight lessons and trying to get visas to the US. This argument about following us, if it were true, would have prevented us from ever withdrawing from anyplace once we entered a war there. We'd be forever stuck in the Philippines for fear that Filipino terrorists would follow us back home. Or Korea (we moved 15,000 US troops out of South Korea not so long ago. Was that unwise? Are the thereby liberated Koreans now gunning for us?) Or how about the Dominican Republic? Haiti? Grenada? France? The argument is a crock.

10. "Setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is a bad idea." Bush and others in his administration have argued that setting such a timetable would give a significant military advantage to the guerrillas fighting US forces and opposed to the new government. That assertion makes sense only if there were a prospect that the US could militarily crush the Sunni Arabs. There is no such prospect. The guerrilla war is hotter now than at any time since the US invasion. It is more widely supported by more Sunni Arabs than ever before. It is producing more violent attacks than ever before. Since we cannot defeat them short of genocide, we have to negotiate with them. And their first and most urgent demand is that the US set a timetable for withdrawal before they will consider coming into the new political system. That is, we should set a timetable in order to turn the Sunni guerrillas from combatants to a political negotiating partner. Even Sunni politicians cooperating with the US make this demand. They are disappointed with the lack of movement on the issue. How long do they remain willing to cooperate? In addition, 131 Iraqi members of parliament signed a demand that the US set a timetable for withdrawal. (138 would be a simple majority.) It is a a major demand of the Sadr Movement. In fact, the 32 Sadrist MPs withdrew from the ruling United Iraqi Alliance coalition temporarily over this issue.

In my view, Shiite leaders such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim are repeatedly declining to negotiate in good faith with the Sunni Arabs or to take their views seriously. Al-Hakim knows that if the Sunnis give him any trouble, he can sic the Marines on them. The US presence is making it harder for Iraqi to compromise with Iraqi, which is counterproductive.

Think Progress points out that in 1999, Governor George W. Bush criticized then President Clinton for declining to set a withdrawal timetable for Kosovo, saying "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

The problems reach back to before the American-led invasion, when northern Iraq was a Kurdish enclave out of Saddam Hussein's control.

This was where Zarkawi and the Al Qaead camp was located, in an area outside of Saddam's control. This was the camp Bush refused to destroy. It was also the same one Bush used to try to link Saddam to Al Qaeda.

At the time, the Kurds in northeastern Iraq were fighting Ansar al-Islam, a small insurgent and terrorist group that seized control of a slice of territory along the Iranian border in 2002.