Saturday, June 21, 2003

Dear Friends: Ten weeks to the day after Saddam Hussein's removal, Baghdad is being torn apart by killings, misunderstandings, and the startling failures of America's military occupation. Yesterday, the USD50 payments promised to unemployed Iraqi soldiers did not arrive. Hundreds of ... frustrated young men poured towards the gates of the US-led authority to protest. A nervous American soldier opened fire on them, killing two. The goodwill many Iraqis felt for America is rapidly fading. The US officials who should be listening to their very simple and very real complaints, are instead locked in a cycle of endless meetings from dawn until after midnight. Who then, shall the Iraqi people turn to? __________________________ The Guardian June 19, 2003 Just Another Day in Baghdad by Rory McCarthy The demonstrating Iraqis have no work, no money and are desperate. Two are shot dead. Nearby, an American soldier guarding a gas station is casually killed Baghdad--Hussein Saber shook with fury as he lay on a dirty hospital bed last night and told the story of another day in Baghdad, a city torn apart by killings, misunderstanding and the startling failures of America's military occupation. Yesterday Hussein, 33, should have collected a $50 (£30) emergency payment which all Iraq's now unemployed soldiers are due to receive. The money did not arrive and so he and hundreds of other frustrated young men poured towards the gates of the US-led authority to protest. Within minutes he was shot in his right side by a young, nervous American soldier. Hussein survived but two other Iraqis standing next to him in the crowd were killed. Just a few miles away in the centre of the city, gunmen in a passing car shot dead one American soldier and wounded another as they guarded a propane gas station. It was another strike against the US military by an increasingly bold guerrilla resistance force intent on destabilising the reconstruction. Neither the Iraqis nor the Americans ever dreamed that Baghdad would be like this, ten weeks to the day after Saddam Hussein's regime was finally toppled. The people of this city are still gripped with the deepening problems of poor security, interminable power shortages and unpaid salaries. Their frustration is spilling over into a spate of attacks on the US military, which are met with heavy-handed raids and mass arrests which, in turn, spark yet greater frustration. Searing midsummer temperatures do little to cool tempers on either side. "I hoped and I wished that when the American forces came they would bring us democracy and freedom but unfortunately we have seen the opposite," said Hussein, a non-commissioned officer in the air force for the past 18 years. "The Americans are going to get hurt if the situation remains as it is." All the junior ranks within Iraq's 400,000-strong military, which was formally dissolved last month, have been promised a one-off payment and the chance to apply for a job in the new Iraqi national army. In reality none have been paid since their last wages from the regime in February or March. Recruitment for the new military has not started and, like the thousands of regular government employees still without work, their frustration should be evident for the US authority to see. Hundreds of former soldiers gathered at the national recruitment office in Baghdad yesterday morning where they expected to receive their payouts. Similar payments have been made by the British army in Basra. But yesterday when officials in the building told them they had no money to offer they poured towards the gates of the Republican Palace, once Saddam's home and now the base of the US-led authority. In the eyes of the US military, the crowd of frustrated former soldiers was a threat and they eventually opened fire. The Iraqi soldiers see themselves very differently - as husbands and fathers, struggling to make a living, gripped with defeated pride and disappointment. Khadum Hussain Hani, 32, joined the Iraqi military aged 15 for the same reasons that brought many of the young Americans on patrol in Baghdad into the US army - he wanted to serve his country and he wanted a decent wage. His brother, also a soldier, died during the war with Iran in the 1980s. Following tradition, Khadum married his brother's wife and took responsibility for the couple's three young children. Last year they had another son. Until the war he was paid 75,000 dinars a month (then worth $37). Since March he has received nothing and has had to borrow thousands of dollars to pay the 30,000 dinars monthly rent on his small apartment. "I have borrowed and borrowed and all I have left in my pocket today is my identity card," he said yesterday. Before the war he and his wife talked about whether he would fight. "I told her I wouldn't fight. I was glad the Americans were coming to take us away from this oppression," he said. Now he has to explain to his children why he has no work and no money. "Sometimes they ask: 'Did you bring home any apples today father?'" he said. "I tell them I will bring apples one day when I have some money." It is all too clear that the natural goodwill that many Iraqis felt when the US and British forces brought to an end three decades of brutality and repression is rapidly fading. "There is a big gap between the Iraqis and the Americans right now," said Khadum. American troops speak freely of their own frustrations. They patrol in heavy bulletproof jackets and Kevlar helmets in the suffocating midday heat. Many were first deployed to camps in Kuwait nine months ago and have had little time to rest or recover from the intense three weeks of combat that brought them to Baghdad. The shift from fighting to peacekeeping has been fractured and slow. Still they are being targeted in guerrilla attacks and they don't understand why. The al-Shawaf crossroads outside the Republican Palace, the bloodied site of yesterday's killings, has become the touchstone of the failings of the military occupation. Here there are queues of the articulate and the plain angry. The US officials who should be listening to their very simple and very real complaints are locked in a cycle of meetings from dawn until after midnight in the palace complex, behind the heavily guarded, barbed-wire entrance at the palace gates. Alia Abbas Issa, 42, used to work in the palace as a seamstress, sewing curtains for Saddam's offices and private rooms. She took the job to help pay for English lessons at the local British Council office. It paid her well, up to 200,000 dinars (£2000) a month. Then came the war. Her apartment was looted of all her possessions, even her bed, and her job disappeared. She is left caring for the two daughters of her younger brother, who died in Kuwait during the first Gulf war. "There is nothing I can tell them. We used to have money now there is nothing. We cry from night until morning," she said. "I thought the Americans would bring us a new start. We want to like George Bush but the Iraqis are suffering and suffering," she said. "God will reward those people who come here if they come here to help us." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003 _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact:  Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment  for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:15:11 PM

Re: Thoughts on Iran Dear Friends: Just two months after the "fall of Iraq", US troops are back in a Vietnam-scenario with the ambushing of military convoys, the regular use of grenades and rocket launchers against isolated American targets and indeed suicide bombers. The comparisons to Vietnam grow daily. Why then do we not pay attention to the lessons of Vietnam and previous conflicts? Not content with expending much of America's wealth and the lives of its young service personnel in largely fruitless campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington is now clearly preparing the ground for an attack on Iran. It won't be so easy this time. A wise leader would step very carefully. _______________________ Asia Times June 20, 2003 US Wages War From Within Iran by Richard M Bennett With commendable stupidity usually only reserved for the most powerful and isolated from reality, President George W Bush has managed to go some way towards repeating the catastrophic mistakes of Lyndon Johnson and ensnare the United States in an increasingly unpopular and probably unwinnable foreign military involvement. Just two months after the sudden collapse of organized Iraqi resistance to the US-led invasion, US troops are back in a Vietnam-scenario with the ambushing of military convoys, the regular use of grenades and rocket launchers against isolated American targets and indeed suicide bombers. It has always been a truism that if you cannot avoid wars, then at least learn the lessons of previous conflicts. This, however, the US has signally failed to do. Not content with the ultimate failures of the campaigns in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, of Somalia, and indeed even Afghanistan, to achieve the stated aims and the supposed improvement in the state of the inhabitants of those nations, the US has blindly embarked on a dangerous and unsound course of action. US forces are already launching operations suspiciously similar to the "search-and-destroy" tactics of 40 years ago and with a similar response from an increasingly hostile civilian population. Using a marked degree of devious propaganda about the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction and largely in the dark about the true allegiance and likely response of the majority of Iraqis, the US has now succeeded in alienating much of both the developed and Third World, and indeed signaled to both Russia and China that Washington's new-found military belligerence and diplomatic toughness are a profound threat to their influence and future powerbase. Not content with expending much of America's wealth and the lives of its young service personnel in largely fruitless campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington is now clearly preparing the ground for an attack on Iran. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been in contact with senior Iranian military personnel for several years and are believed to have developed a number of highly valuable operations to undermine Iran's defenses. However, and crucially, they have so far failed in similar attempts with the Islamic Republican Guards or Pasdaran. Aware of the US intelligence agency's success in "turning" large numbers of key Iraqi commanders, the Iranian government has quietly contemplated a mass purge of the possibly "infected" army high command and senior field commanders. This would of course still suit the Pentagon as it would severely disrupt Iranian war planning, the command structure and the likely performance of its combat units in battle. The course that the mullahs have apparently decided on is to ensure a higher degree of integration between Pasdaran and regular army formations in conflict situations and to increase both the penetration of the army by the internal security branch of the intelligence service, SAVAMA, and vastly increase the numbers of trusted Pasdaran officers positioned at brigade and divisional-level headquarters to watch for any signs of treachery by regular officers, much in the manner of commissars or political officers that the Soviets used to deploy. The Iranian government has moved hundreds, if not thousands, of trusted Islamic officers and Pasdaran fighters into the Shi'ite areas of Iraq in order to create a massive subversive campaign in the event of a US attack on their country. However, Washington has more than paid back this action in kind. CIA officers and dissident Iranian agents have expended millions of dollars in recent weeks to foment trouble throughout Iran, and indeed have had some success in Tehran and a number of other cities. In a re-run of the classic campaign that successfully overthrew the regime of prime minister Mohammed Musadeqq in 1953 and which resulted in the return of the Shah, American intelligence operations have been focused mainly on the protesting students, the police and those troops used for internal security. While not expecting the Tehran regime to be toppled easily or quickly, the CIA operations are the beginning of a determined effort to subvert the armed forces of Iran and significantly undermine the ability of the government in Tehran to resist increasing diplomatic pressure to disarm or to organize successfully to resist a US military invasion, perhaps as early as 2004. However, judging by the failure to complete the victories won on the battlefield in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the portents for the coming war with Iran are ominous. Both Afghanistan and Iraq now have developing major insurgencies with which US forces are showing few signs of coming to terms, and without doubt Iran will be a much harder nut to crack. The drain on US resources and lives will almost certainly be that much greater. Any one of these campaigns may indeed be winnable, two are a serious problem, however three may well prove to be just one war too far, even for the world's only superpower. (AFI Research, a leading source of specialist intelligence, defense, terrorism, conflict and political analysis. (C) Richard Bennett Media 2003, rbmedia@supanet.com )      No material from Asia Times Online may be republished in any form without written permission. Copyright 2003, Asia Times Online, 4305 Far East Finance Centre, 16 Harcourt Rd, Central, Hong Kong _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact:  Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment  for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:14:17 PM

Re: The Media Politics of Impeachment Dear Friends: The news media have tended to portray impeachment as an ordeal that involves lot of attorneys and vast piles of legal documents. But beyond the hearings, beyond the gathering of evidence, comes the mustering of moral courage. Few editorial writers or other commentators want to risk seeming too far ahead of the media curve by suggesting that the latest presidential deceptions might rise to the level of impeachable offenses. President Bush and several of his top foreign policy officials lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the lead-up to the war. Impeachment is a reasonable possibility, but with Congress run by Republicans -- and with news media all too deferential to entrenched power -- the chances of a serious investigation in Washington are very slim.  But not impossible. I vote to impeach. ______________________ AlterNet June 20, 2003 The Media Politics of Impeachment by  Norman Solomon Early summer has brought a flurry of public discussion about a topic previously confined to political margins -- the possibility of impeaching President George W. Bush. The idea is still far from the national media echo chamber, but some rumblings are now audible as people begin to think about the almost unthinkable. A few generations of Americans are apt to view impeachment as an extreme step. One factor has been John F. Kennedy's widely read 1956 book "Profiles in Courage," which captured a Pulitzer Prize. The book devoted a chapter to lauding Sen. Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, whose "not guilty" vote prevented the Senate from convicting an impeached president, Andrew Johnson, on May 26, 1868. In real life, Ross -- who promptly put the squeeze on President Johnson for a series of patronage appointments -- was hardly the idealist that Kennedy's book cracked him up to be. But the chapter's melodrama popularized a negative image of impeachment. That outlook was especially strong for nearly 20 years, until a few of President Richard Nixon's lies caught up with him. During many months of the Watergate scandal, throughout late 1972 and 1973, defenders of the president routinely blamed journalists. Republicans insisted that the Washington Post and some other "liberal" news outlets were just trying to make trouble for Nixon -- who, after all, had recently won re-election in a landslide. While the specter of impeachment grew, Nixon diehards insisted that the president was being unfairly targeted -- until released tapes of the chief executive made him politically indefensible. When Nixon finally resigned in August 1974, the new president uttered a phrase that instantly became famous. Gerald Ford told the nation: "Our long national nightmare is over." That's how the news media have tended to portray impeachment, with coverage largely presenting it as an ordeal that involves a lot of attorneys and vast piles of legal documents. But impeachment is not really about law or even about evidence. It's all about politics. As a political weapon, impeachment will be used to the extent that the president's foes believe they can get away with it. While the Constitution speaks of "high crimes and misdemeanors," that provision offers scant clarity about standards for impeachment. In recent decades, we have seen it utilized as an appropriate tool (against Nixon) and as an instrument of political overkill (against Bill Clinton). In both instances, the media climate determined the possibilities and impacts of impeachment. In general, the punditocracy is averse to the option of impeachment and reflexively dismisses any such suggestion. Misuses of presidential power -- and outright mendacity in the service of policy objectives -- are political realities, accepted or even avidly supported as long as they remain within vaguely customary limits. Few editorial writers or other commentators want to risk seeming too far ahead of the media curve by suggesting that the latest presidential deceptions might rise to the level of impeachable offenses. At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, in 1987, journalists frequently made excuses for President Ronald Reagan. There was much media talk about the imperative of avoiding another "failed presidency" scarcely a dozen years after Watergate. On "NBC Nightly News," the venerable broadcaster John Chancellor declared: "Nobody wants another Nixon." Chicago Tribune editor James Squires cautioned reporters not to repeat the "excesses" of Watergate. And the relative restraint of the Washington Post and other outlets was symbolized by the fact that the Post's publisher, Katharine Graham, often socialized with the president's wife, Nancy Reagan, and publicly touted her as a dear friend. Democrats in Congress did little to challenge the demagoguery of fast-talking Jimmy Stewart impersonator Oliver North -- a former Reagan team operative who was greatly assisted by the news media. Lieutenant Colonel North held "an entire nation enthralled" during his congressional testimony, Ted Koppel told ABC viewers. On NBC, Chancellor called it "a terrific performance" that "played in Peoria." During the Iran-Contra hearings on Capitol Hill, journalists frequently reported as though the proceedings would be inconclusive unless a Perry Mason style of ironclad proof emerged. Longtime political analyst Elizabeth Drew commented on the irony that people were "searching for a smoking gun in a room filled with smoke." Midway through 2003, there's plenty of smoke as clear evidence emerges that President Bush and several of his top foreign policy officials lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the lead-up to the war. In this context, impeachment is a reasonable idea. But with Congress run by Republicans -- and with news media all too deferential to entrenched power -- the chances of a serious investigation in Washington are very slim. Norman Solomon is co-author of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You." © 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact:  Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment  for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:13:42 PM

Re: Iraq, the New Vietnam Dear Friends: Iraq is not Vietnam. So why does the rhetoric sound so hideously familiar? The counter-insurgency, the fighting that will not end, the quagmire. We've seen this all before. ________________________ Mother Jones June 16, 2003 The Daily Mojo: War Echoes by Tom Engelhardt Do you remember when, in the wake of Gulf War I, our then president, Bush the Father, exulted that we had finally kicked the "Vietnam thing," that heinous "Vietnam syndrome," that seemed to be all that was left of America's staggering defeat? Well, here's the strange thing -- now, we've supposedly kicked it all over again in the wake of Gulf War II. You know, quick war, low casualties, no quagmire, stupid critics who predicted otherwise (although most didn't) disarmed, the press well embedded, and so on, and so forth. But "Vietnam," which like some deadly virus morphs and morphs, seems unwilling to perform the disappearing act our leaders have long prepared for it. And there are reasons for that. I've been carefully watching recent coverage of the upsurge of fighting in Iraq, and the Vietnam analogy is buried deep not just in the reportorial mind, but in the military and governmental mind as well. On Saturday, for instance, Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times wrote a think piece that had these all-too-familiar, if slightly shocked, lines: "Unlike the rush to Baghdad, this fight will not be measured in days, but in months, if not years... For the Americans, this is a campaign of raids, bombing strikes and dragnets, as American commanders try to isolate and destroy remnants of the old older. It is more like a counterinsurgency than an invasion." I mark that as the first appearance of "counterinsurgency" in the recent record. Here then are a few other startling appearances: Vietnam had its "triangles." (Remember the "Iron Triangle"?) Now Iraq has its own "Sunni Triangle," as our military are calling it. Remember the various military statements in Gulf Wars I and II that we weren't about to count the enemy dead? (One post-Vietnam no-no was reviving the feared "body count" which became the way the military measured the Vietnam War and then a target of critics.) Well, this week, in operations in that "Sunni Triangle," the body count was revived, along with the weapons count. There were a series of official US military announcements of how many enemy (often identified as Ba'athist "remnants" or "Arab" fighters) our troops had killed in various operations, the numbers in some cases exceedingly precise, all clearly meant to provide concrete indicators of success in a not-quite-war in which taking territory has no particular meaning. Along with the body count came another old classic of Vietnam, the weapons count (how many we captured), and on the heels of these, another classic Vietnam tradition, the revised body count. See, for instance, the front-page Washington Post piece by William Booth, which begins: "An attack on Iraqis here by U.S. troops after an American tank patrol was ambushed Friday morning killed seven people, not 27 as initially reported, U.S. military officials said today, and Iraqi witnesses said five of the dead were not involved in the ambush." Another phrase to make a remarkably early appearance in coverage, again attributed to the military, is "hearts and minds," a notorious Vietnam-era phrase. I found it in a Saturday Los Angeles Times piece by Paul Richter and Michael Slackman: "The peninsula operation was over by Tuesday, and U.S. Army officers at the scene two days later said the Army was trying to shift into a hearts-and-minds campaign to win over local support. But it was fighting rumors that it had killed two civilians. The Army denied any responsibility for the deaths, attributing both to heart attacks, but there was a lot of skepticism among residents." The piece also had passages of a sort appearing more frequently these days that rang with a familiar Vietnam-era conundrum -- how do you carry out brutal assaults on hard to find guerrilla forces in civilian areas without knowing the language, area or culture without alienating that population when some of them die, others are mistreated, and many are humiliated? "Yet while the use of massive force -- 4,000 soldiers participated in one operation this week alone -- might achieve military goals, it risks alienating many Iraqis upon whose support the U.S. reconstruction of the country depends." Or this from a Reuters report appended to that LA Times piece: "At the same time, analysts say, it's important for U.S. commanders to lose no time quelling the resistance because of the way mass arrests, and intrusions into homes and businesses, are alienating the people they hope to win over." The Washington Post journalist Anthony Shadid, whose reportage through this period has been of the highest level (and who has the advantage of knowing Arabic), writes on Sunday of a raid on a Sunni town, so blunt-edged that it turned local opinion. "A chubby 15-year-old with a mop of curly black hair and a face still rounded by adolescence, he was quiet, painfully shy. Awkward might be the better word, his family said. For hours every day, outside a house perched near the riverbank, the youngest of six children languidly watched his four canaries and nightingale. Even in silence, they said, the birds were his closest companions. On Monday morning, after a harrowing raid into this town by U.S. troops that deployed gunships, armored vehicles and soldiers edgy with anticipation, the family found Aani's body, two gunshots to his stomach, next to a bale of hay and a rusted can of vegetable oil." Two other key lines in the piece that have a familiar ring to them: "The Americans were shouting in English, and we didn't know what they were saying." And of the situation of those detained for a time and then released: "U.S. soldiers tossed military meals and bottles of water to the crowd. 'They treated us like monkeys -- who's the first one who can jump up and catch the food,' said Mohammed, who was captured by Iran in the Iran-Iraq war and kept as a prisoner for 11 years." Finally, here's another word that implicitly or explicitly can't keep itself out of the news: Quagmire. It just comes to mind. It features in a recent Agence France-Presse headline, but the word's been poking up, explicitly or implicitly everywhere. I know, I know, Iraq's not Vietnam. Quite right in so many ways. But the essential problem may in some ways be worse today than in the Vietnam era. The Bush administration has decided to run its imperial policy based almost solely on the military (and various military-related defense industries) and in an explosive situation like Iraq -- where we don't even have a Ngo Dinh Diem or a population of supportive Catholics -- the military is a painfully blunt instrument with which to create a new state. Every act of mass and messy act of suppression is bound to be an act of creation as well -- the creation of opposition. Now, let me turn to a different matter -- those weapons of mass destruction. By the end of last week, it seemed, the White House/Pentagon may have been counterattacking within the bureaucracy. Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times had a fascinating report on the fates of two key CIA analysts who had been in charge of the Agency's assessments of Iraqi WMD intelligence. These reassignments were, of course, presented as simply well-deserved changes. But an unnamed Agency source told Miller that the two analysts had "essentially been sent into deep exile." The moment was described aptly as "a time when top officials have been alarmed by anonymous complaints showing up in the press." The whole matter has officially been turned over to CIA director Tenet, a leading candidate, if things get worse, to be hung out to dry. "'They handed the whole ball to George,' said one intelligence source familiar with the details of the assignment. He said the message being sent to Tenet seemed clear: 'You said [the banned weapons] were there. You go find them.'" And there's another Vietnam-era oldie-but-goodie to be found in Miller's piece: "They'll be hard-pressed to find any kind of smoking gun, a case of somebody coming in and saying, 'I wrote it this way and it came back from the 7th floor telling me to write it another way,'" the official said, referring to the location at CIA headquarters where Director George J. Tenet and other top officials have offices. Now, none of this is likely to have an immediate effect here. After all, according to recent polls, large numbers of Americans believe we already found WMD in Iraq. ("Poll shows errors in beliefs on Iraq. Still, Nancy Pelosi and other Senate Democrats are now fighting for open hearings in Congress. This is one to stay tuned to. Finally, David Wise, who has been writing about the intelligence community since perhaps Neolithic times, reviews the recent WMD record in The Washington Post's Outlook section. Wise considers the striking on-the-record statements of this administration on the subject, and a far longer record of lying in Washington, and then reminds us of another Vietnam-era phrase, "credibility gap." And Eric Margolis, in his weekly column in the Toronto Sun, coins a new phrase based on an older one that might soon gain traction, "Weaponsgate," as he considers why Americans seem to care so little about administration lies.  --Tom Engelhardt Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute.   This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you. © 2003 The Foundation for National Progress _______________________________ In peace, Otoño ________________________________ Read all about it and get the news that matters by receiving the War and Peace Watch. To subscribe, send an e-mail to:  Reikiworks@compuserve.com Thank you for your support, The War and Peace Watch publisher. contact:  Otoño Johnston ============================================================ (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment  for research and educational purposes only.) ============================================================ 5:13:14 PM