THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

April 18, 2007: Officials report 233 people killed or found dead across Iraq. At least 183 of those are killed when four large bombs explode in mainly Shiite locations of Baghdad.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

April 18, 2007: Officials report 233 people killed or found dead across Iraq. At least 183 of those are killed when four large bombs explode in mainly Shiite locations of Baghdad.

Cycloptichorn

Bombs set by Iraqi's to kill Iraqi's,yet many of you continue to blame the US for the bombs.

Why is that?
We arent planting them.

And dont say that the bombings wouldnt be happening if we werent there.
You cant possibly know that.
Perhaps all we did was hasten what would have happened when Saddam died naturally.
After all,there was really nobody to take his place.

We cannot fix a problem which does not desire to be fixed.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

April 18, 2007: Officials report 233 people killed or found dead across Iraq. At least 183 of those are killed when four large bombs explode in mainly Shiite locations of Baghdad.

Cycloptichorn

Bombs set by Iraqi's to kill Iraqi's,yet many of you continue to blame the US for the bombs.

Why is that?
We arent planting them.

And dont say that the bombings wouldnt be happening if we werent there.
You cant possibly know that.
Perhaps all we did was hasten what would have happened when Saddam died naturally.
After all,there was really nobody to take his place.

The long awaited tell-all (or at least tell-some) memoir from former CIA director George Tenet is coming at the end of the month. Apparently Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has seen it or been briefed on it because on Chris Matthews' Sunday show today on CNN he spilled some beans about it.

Matthews himself must know something about the book, "At the Center of the Storm," because he said, before kicking it to the columnist, "Tenet takes on vice president Dick Cheney. Cheney has maintained that Tenet told President Bush in December of 2002, two weeks before Bush decided to invade Iraq, that there was a 'slam dunk' case to be made that Saddam Hussein possessed those banned weapons. But now Tenet denies ever making that claim. David, this is a big fight. It's pushback time. How tough is this book gonna be?"

Ignatius replied: "It's going be very tough. George Tenet has been doing a slow burn ever since he left the CIA. He's been angrier and angrier as he saw himself being essentially made the fall guy on WMD in Iraq. And he's gonna come back saying he and his agency, the CIA, were pushed, again and again, by Cheney and Cheney's people to give him the answers that they wanted. And he's got chapter and verse on that."

He added: "He will tell a story that I think will make people's hair curl. But he's been waiting a long time to tell this....And he'll also say---this is a very important part of this---that, on the question of what would happen in Iraq after the invasion, the CIA pretty consistently warned, 'You have trouble ahead. You will not be able to unite this country. Sunnis and Shiites are gonna be 'at daggers.'"

Apparently NBC's Andrea Mitchell knows something, too, because she kicked: "He'll also attack and criticize Condoleezza Rice, who has denied a critical briefing before 9/11...a July briefing. They actually have the slide show that they showed her, where they were telling her that al Qaeda was threatening....You're gonna be re-fighting both sides of who lost Iraq, who lost the WMD struggle. It might get pretty brutal."

At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA by George Tenet is already #132 at amazon.com in sales rankings.

Refugees create new 'Baghdad'
By Lyse Doucet
BBC News, Damascus


Millions of Iraqis have been forced to leave their homes because of the continuing violence in the country. Many of them have fled to Damascus where the Syrian government is asking why the Americans and the British are not doing more to ease the refugee problem.


WHERE IRAQIS HAVE FLED TO
Syria: 1,200,000
Jordan: 750,000
Gulf states: 200,000
Egypt: 100,000
Iran: 54,000
Lebanon: 40,000
Turkey: 10,000
Internally displaced: 1,900,000
Source: UNHCR



"This is Baghdad," asserts Hussain.

We are sitting on brightly coloured plastic chairs on the sidewalk of Sharea al Iraqi (Iraqi street) in the Syrian capital.

The street used to be called something else but no-one remembers that now.

And it does not look like that anymore.


The shop signs tell this story.

There is Baghdad bakery doing a brisk trade, Soulemaniyeh sweets, the Falluja restaurant.

Billboard after billboard announces transport to and from Iraqi cities.

The signs are all Iraqi, so are the accents, so is the way the women arrange their headscarves.


Western countries, including the US and Britain, have so far kept their doors shut for the vast majority of asylum seekers


I ask Hussain why he left the real Baghdad.

He raises one leg of his black and red tracksuit to reveal a round dark circle, a scar.

Then he pulls up one sleeve and shows me another - the marks of bullets meant to kill him when he was working at the Ministry of the Interior, a place reputed to be dominated by Shia hit squads.

He is Shia himself.

Here he sits with Basel, a Sunni Muslim.

So why did Basel leave?

Basel makes a slitting motion across his throat.

Sitting tight

I realise this line of men sipping glasses of hot sweet tea along the side of a shop is not just a grim sign of joblessness but a sad reminder of what has been lost.

"You're all sitting together here," I say, "Shia, Sunnis, Christians..."


Arab neighbours do not dare speak out publicly against a sacred notion of Arab unity but Jordan is quietly tightening its borders and sending some people back


It coaxes the faintest of smiles and then a grimace.

They shake their heads at the horrific sectarian violence threatening to tear Iraq apart.

"This is the new Iraq," declares Basel, with a kick in his voice meant to convince himself and everyone else.

He fled to Damascus last year but then went back to Baghdad a few months ago, hoping the new US-led security plan for his capital would work.

But now he is back in Syria and does not want to return again to what he calls "my death".

That seems to be the view, however reluctant, of many of the more than one million Iraqis now in Syria. And, there are some 750,000 more in neighbouring Jordan.

But where will they go?


Refugee crisis

Western countries, including the US and Britain, have so far kept their doors shut for the vast majority of asylum seekers.

Syria and Jordan euphemistically speak of "visitors" or "guests."

They do not want a new Iraq created on their land.

Sixty years ago, Palestinian refugees flooded across their borders in the 1948 Arab Israeli war and still have not left.

This movement of Iraqis is being called the biggest displacement of people since then, a massive exodus which will change the face of this region.


For now, there are no tented camps. Wealthy Iraqis are buying or renting their own homes - poorer ones slip into poorer neighbourhoods


Just how is still not clear but the scale of this human wave is staggering.

Iraqis now make up about 10-15% of Jordan's tiny population of less than six million.

Arab neighbours do not dare speak out publicly against a sacred notion of Arab unity but Jordan is quietly tightening its borders and sending some people back.

Jordanians and Syrians grumble discreetly about the rising price of everything from houses to tomatoes.

Many ask why should they shoulder a crisis they charge the US and Britain with starting by invading Iraq.

And the UN has been accusing everyone of "abject denial."

Little choice

After this week's conference in Geneva, there are more promises of aid.

But this tide shows no sign of stopping. Tens of thousands pour from Iraq every month.

For now, there are no tented camps. Wealthy Iraqis are buying or renting their own homes while poorer ones slip into poorer neighbourhoods.

But they are becoming increasingly destitute.

It is hard to find work. "I have two choices", says Iman who fled to Damascus with her teenage twins after her husband was assassinated.

She is Shia. Her husband was a Sunni.

"I can go back to Iraq but my brother-in-law will rip my children away from me. Or I can stay here and beg. But my children say it is better for all of us to die than for their mother to be a beggar."

I ask if she would like to go back to Iraq, if she could.

"Don't mention Iraq," she pleads, "it made me love my husband, my job, my life but now I despise it."

I ask her if she has a photograph of her children.

She draws a breath, and pulls a yellowed snapshot from her purse, its corners creased with time.

In the blurred image I see her, a younger woman laughing with ease, hair falling to her shoulders, her arms around her husband, their children in his arms, and a Christmas tree.

"You, a Muslim, celebrated Christmas?" I ask. She nods and looks away.

The past is another country. This was Baghdad of old, an ancient land of cherished traditions, the capital of capitals in the Middle East.

For now, that Baghdad is gone.

mysteryman wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

April 18, 2007: Officials report 233 people killed or found dead across Iraq. At least 183 of those are killed when four large bombs explode in mainly Shiite locations of Baghdad.

Cycloptichorn

Bombs set by Iraqi's to kill Iraqi's,yet many of you continue to blame the US for the bombs.

Why is that?
We aren't planting them.

And dont say that the bombings wouldnt be happening if we werent there.
You cant possibly know that.
Perhaps all we did was hasten what would have happened when Saddam died naturally.
After all,there was really nobody to take his place.

Yeah, nothing to see here, everyone go home. Right?

I don't give a damn whose fault it is/was, MM, the fact is that we broke Iraq and didn't fix it right and now the whole situation is f*cked.

We need to leave that place - pronto. We cannot fix a problem which does not desire to be fixed.

Cycloptichorn

One may also add we are as big a failure in Afghanistan as we are in Iraq. We went into Afghanistan with the very loud intention of destroying Al Qaeda, bring to justice or kill Osama bin Laden and rebuilt the country so it will have a strong unified and free central government.

We succeeded in accomplishing none of those goals. Osama bin Laden is still alive, we assume, the Teliban is making a strong resurgence, the economy and central government is a shambles and, because we abandoned the country, NATO and other outside forces had to come in and try to clean up the mess we left behind.

Iraqi PM criticises Baghdad wall

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has asked for construction to end on a concrete wall around a Sunni enclave in the capital, Baghdad.
Mr Maliki said there were other ways to protect the Adhamiya neighbourhood, which is surrounded by Shia districts.

The US military, which are behind the project, has said the purpose of the wall is to prevent violence between Sunni and Shia militants.

But Iraqi politicians have warned it will increase sectarian tensions.

Unintended consequences

Speaking in Cairo after meeting Arab league officials, Mr Maliki said: "I asked yesterday that it be stopped and that alternatives be found to protect the area."

The prime minister said he feared the wall may have unintended consequences, in an apparent parallel to the former Berlin Wall that divided the German capital.

"I fear this wall might have repercussions which remind us of other walls, which we reject," he said.

Construction of the 5km (3-mile) concrete wall began on 10 April and the US military says it hopes to complete the project by the end of the month.

US troops, protected by heavily-armed vehicles, have been working at night to build the 3.6m (12ft) wall.

Earlier this week, senior Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi, who heads the largest Sunni bloc in parliament, said the barrier would breed yet more sectarian strife.

Residents also said the wall would do little to improve bitter relations between the communities.

US and Iraqi troops have long built cement barriers around key locations in Baghdad and other cities to prevent attacks, especially suicide car bombings.

Iraq has been in the grip of raging sectarian violence since the bombing of an important Shia shrine in Samarra in February 2006.

US forces in Iraq have said they would respond to issues surrounding the barrier on Monday.

WALL CONTROVERSY

In a new military tactic to stop the bombers, U.S. troops have begun walling off some flashpoint neighbourhoods in Baghdad with concrete barriers, but the move has drawn sharp criticism from some Sunni and Shi'ite political parties.

Prime Minister Maliki said on Sunday that he had ordered the U.S. military to stop work on a 12-foot (3.6-metre) high barrier around the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya.

Crocker defended the wall, saying it made "good security sense" to build barriers where there were clear fault-lines and "avenues of attack" between Sunni and Shi'ite areas.

Neither he nor a U.S. military spokesman, Rear Admiral Mark Fox, would say whether construction of the Adhamiya wall would be stopped. Fox said the erection of barriers around Baghdad's markets and neighbourhoods was approved by Iraq's government.

Tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops have been deployed in Baghdad in a bid to curb rampant sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands in the past year.

While they have reduced the number of sectarian murders, there has been a surge in bombings inside and outside Baghdad.

The envoy said he had been in discussions with the Iraqi government and U.S. officials in recent days on how to "take apart" the car bomb cells who have defied a two-month-old security clampdown in the capital.

Crocker said that in conversations with Iraqi officials he had stressed "the American people need to see meaningful progress towards reconciliation in order to ensure that the support is there in the United States at this critical time".

"I think the Baghdad security plan ... can buy time, but what it does is buy time for what it ultimately has to be -- a set of political understandings among Iraqis. So I think these months ahead are going to be critical," Crocker said.

U.S. officials have grown frustrated by the slow political progress on benchmark issues such as a new law on sharing revenues from Iraq's vast oil wealth and rolling back a ban on former members of Saddam Hussein's party holding public office.

Sunni Arabs who were dominant under Saddam Hussein feel marginalised in the new political landscape in which Shi'ites and minority Kurds have sought to cement their grip on power, with all sides showing a reluctance to compromise. (Additional reporting by Ibon Villelabeitia, Yara Bayoumy, Aseel Kami and Dean Yates)

I have a hunch that Maliki knew all about it, probably approved it, and something happened that has caused him to take a different political posture.

BAGHDAD - The American ambassador said Monday the U.S. would "respect the wishes" of the Iraqi government after the prime minister ordered a halt to construction of a three-mile wall separating a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad.

Short-lived exercise in construction.