My Kingdom for a surge!

September 18th, 2007

Today we hear that Condi has apologized for Blackwater and is trying to scab over the problem quickly — the good newz is that the nation’s eyes have turned to scrutinize this long-standing mercenary [privately funded corporate army] group and our dependence on them. This link warns that if we have to remove the Blackboyz from Iraq, it might effect our recently announced drawdown … we “need them to protect our diplomats.”

We have diplomats? Who knew [... and who Believes?] The bottom line is that the contractors are a primary source of defense in the Green Zone; we aren’t even doing that ourselves. The possibility of their ouster has the DoD in panic — the bare truth is that Bush’s war couldn’t have happened without them … and he ain’t done! He wants to keep this up for the next fifty years!

Here’s a quick read on the incident that prompted all this, if you missed it:

Dreadlock in Baghdad
Harkavy, Village Voice
September 18, 2007

Meanwhile, outgoing Joint Chiefs chairman, Gen. Peter Pace, confessed to a series of strategical errors in the Iraq mess, starting with — I assumed the Iraqi people … “would welcome liberation.” [Turned out Iraq got "liberated" in roughly the same way New Orleans got "liberated" from poor and black folks -- just another "Heckuva Job" to carve into Bush's gun butt.]

And … still … yet … [and why I objected in the first place] … the GOP is focused on the verbiage in the MoveOn ad, with Giuliani championing the outrage and placing ads of his own. It’s the tired old “patriotism ploy,” they never get tired of using it like a hammer. Odd — nobody objected when they went after Max Cleland or John Kerry! As Arianna says, over at Huffington, they’ve missed the point of the debate, yet again — and that’s what will be written on their tombstone:

Sorry, Fellow Citizens — We Missed The Point.

Here are two really good reads about the “theatre” going on in Anbar; why the “Sheik chronicles” are a “whopper” like everything else. After that, snips and bits on the Iraq quagmire showing how quickly its spiraling down, and how very ALONE we are in this nasty little “liberation” project. [Point of reference as you read these: Sadr's militia owns Baghdad -- even though the generals say they do.] Last, the face of ethnic cleansing.

Jude

Bush’s Fake Sheik Whacked: The Surge and the Al Qaeda Bunny
A special investigative report from inside Iraq
Greg Palast, BuzzFlash Guest Contribution
Mon, 09/17/2007

Did you see George all choked up? In his surreal TV talk on Thursday, he got all emotional over the killing by Al Qaeda of Sheik Abu Risha, the leader of the new Sunni alliance with the U.S. against the insurgents in Anbar Province, Iraq.

Bush shook Abu Risha’s hand two weeks ago for the cameras. Bush can shake his hand again, but not the rest of him: Abu Risha was blown away just hours before Bush was to go on the air to praise his new friend.

Here’s what you need to know that NPR won’t tell you.

1. Sheik Abu Risha wasn’t a sheik.

2. He wasn’t killed by Al Qaeda.

3. The new alliance with former insurgents in Anbar is as fake as the sheik — and a murderous deceit.

How do I know this? You can see the film — of “Sheik” Abu Risha, of the guys who likely whacked him, and of their other victims.

Just in case you think I’ve lost my mind and put my butt in insane danger to get this footage, don’t worry. I was safe and dry in Budapest. It was my brilliant new cameraman, Rick Rowley, who went to Iraq to get the story on his own.

Rick’s “the future of TV news,” says BBC. He’s also completely out of control. Despite our pleas, Rick and his partner Dave Enders went to Anbar and filmed where no cameraman had dared tread.

Why was “sheik” Abu Risha so important? As The New York Times put it this morning, “Abu Risha had become a charismatic symbol of the security gains in Sunni areas that have become a cornerstone of American plans to keep large numbers of troops in Iraq though much of next year.”

In other words, Abu Risha was the PR hook used to sell the “success” of the surge.

The sheik wasn’t a sheik. He was a fake. While proclaiming to Rick that he was “the leader of all the Iraqi tribes,” Abu lead no one. But for a reported sum in the millions in cash for so-called “reconstruction contracts,” Abu Risha was willing to say he was Napoleon and Julius Caesar and do the hand-shakie thing with Bush on camera.

Notably, Rowley and his camera caught up with Abu Risha on his way to a “business trip” to Dubai, money-laundering capital of the Middle East.

There are some real sheiks in Anbar, such as Ali Hathem of the dominant Dulaimi tribe, who told Rick that Abu Risha was a con man. Where was his tribe, this tribal leader? “The Americans like to create characters like Disney cartoon heroes.” Then Ali Hathem added, “Abu Risha is no longer welcome” in Anbar.

“Not welcome” from a sheik in Anbar is roughly the same as a kiss on both cheeks from the capo di capi. Within days, when Abu Risha returned from Dubai to Dulaimi turf in Ramadi, Bush’s hand-sheik was whacked.

On Thursday, Bush said Abu Risha was killed, “fighting Al Qaeda” — and the White House issued a statement that the sheik was “killed by al Qaeda.”

Bullshit.

There ain’t no Easter Bunny and “Al Qaeda” ain’t in Iraq, Mr. Bush. It was very cute, on the week of the September 11 memorials, to tie the death of your Anbar toy-boy to bin Laden’s Saudi hijackers. But it’s a lie. Yes, there is a group of berserkers who call themselves “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” But they have as much to do with the real Qaeda of bin Laden as a Rolling Stones “tribute” band has to do with Mick Jagger.

Who got Abu Risha? Nothing — NOTHING — moves in Ramadi without the approval of the REAL tribal sheiks. They were none-too-happy, as Hathem noted, about the millions the U.S. handed to Risha. The sheiks either ordered the hit — or simply gave the bomber free passage to do the deed.

So who are these guys, the sheiks who lead the Sunni tribes of Anbar — the potentates of the Tamimi, Fallaji, Obeidi, Zobal, and Jumaili tribes? Think of them as the Sopranos of Arabia. They are also members of the so-called “Awakening Council” — getting their slice of the millions handed out — which they had no interest in sharing with Risha.

But creepy and deadly or not, these capi of the desert were effective in eliminating “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” Indeed, as U.S. military so proudly pointed out to Rick, the moment the sheiks declared their opposition to Al Qaeda — i.e., got the payments from the U.S. taxpayers — Al Qaeda instantly diappeared.

This miraculous military change, where the enemy just evaporates, has one explanation: the sheiks ARE al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Just like the Sopranos extract “protection” payments from New Jersey businesses, the mobsters of Anbar joined our side when we laid down the loot.

What’s wrong with that? After all, I’d rather send a check than send our kids from Columbus to fight them.

But there’s something deeply, horribly wrong with dealing with these killers. They still kill. With new U.S. protection, weapons and cash, they have turned on the Shia of Anbar.

Fifteen thousand Shia families from a single district were forced at gunpoint to leave Anbar. Those moving too slowly were shot. Kids and moms too.

Do the Americans know about the ethnic cleansing of Anbar by our erstwhile “allies”? Rick’s film shows U.S. commanders placing their headquarters in the homes abandoned by terrorized Shia.

Rick’s craziest move was to go and find these Shia refugees from Anbar. They were dumped, over a hundred thousand of them, in a cinder block slum with no running water in Baghdad. They are under the “protection” of the Mahdi Army, another group of cutthroats. But at least these are Shia cutthroats.

So the great “success” of the surge is our arming and providing cover for ethnic cleansing in Anbar. Nice, Mr. Bush. And with the U.S. press “embedded,” we won’t get the real story. Even Democrats are buying into the Anbar “awakening” fairy tale.

An Iraqi government official frets that giving guns and cover to the Anbar gang is like adopting a baby crocodile. “A crocodile is not a pet,” he told Rick. It will soon grow to devour you. But what could the puppet do but complain about his strings?

This Iraqi got it right: the surge is a crock. ++

U.S. Is Paying Off Iraq’s Worst War Criminals in Attempt to Ward Off Attacks
Katie Halper, AlterNet
September 18, 2007
[open link for video clip]

Title: Director’s Cut: New Video shows the truth in Anbar that Petraeus does not want us to see.

When Bush was in Iraq two weeks ago he posed for photographs with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the Anbar Awakening, an alliance of Sunni tribes who vow to back the United States and fight against al Qaeda.

Last Monday, General Petraeus testified to Congress that “a year ago” Anbar province “was assessed ‘lost’ politically … Today, it is a model of what happens when local leaders and citizens decide to oppose al Qaeda and reject its Taliban-like ideology.”

Three days later, the assassination of Abu Risha in Ramadi dramatically undercut Bush and Petraeus’ claims of Anbar victory and peacekeeping. But what else is the administration keeping from us about Anbar?

Rick Rowley, a journalist and independent filmmaker of Big Noise Films, was one of the last people to videotape and interview the Sunni sheikh, and his video report Uncovering the Truth Behind the Anbar Success Story, presents a very different picture of the Anbar Awakening.

Embedded with the U.S. Army and Iraqi militias, Rowley shows us that the Sunni “freedom fighters” with whom the United States is now allied are not just insurgents who had been killing Americans but war criminals responsible for sectarian cleansing.

Rowley, and his co-producers David Enders and Hiba Dawood, are the only Western journalists to bring a camera into the refugee camp where the displaced Shiites recount being attacked, bombed and driven out by the very tribes Petraeus and Bush are hailing as heroes.

Rowley’s report, which includes interviews with candid U.S. soldiers and footage of a military commander handing a Sunni leader a wad of cash, suggests the role of bribery and coercion in building alliances that serve short-term goals in Anbar province, but in the long run deepen a multisided civil war. I talked to Rick Rowley about his report and what he thinks it indicates about Iraq’s future.

Katie Halper: What brought you to Iraq, and what were you hoping to capture?

Rick Rowley: We knew that one of the major stories the Army was going to use to justify keeping troops there was the supposed success in Anbar. The first investigation we did was into the Anbar reconciliation program. We spent six weeks crisscrossing Iraq, embedding with different militias to try to get a picture of the state of Iraq during the surge.

KH: You were the last Western journalists to videotape an interview with Abu Risha. What was he like? What was his significance?

RR: He seemed stiff and scripted. He told us some incredible lies during the interview. Three times he said he was the leader of all the Arab tribes of Iraq — both Shia and Sunni. And like a bad poker player’s tell, every time he told a lie he sniffed loudly.

He was a figurehead for a movement, the face they put on this story. Operationally, militarily, he wasn’t particularly important. In his interview with us he said there was 100 percent security in Ramadi, that he was head of all of the tribes in Iraq. That has proven, in a horrifying way, to not be true. His assassination has blown a hole in the American story about security in Anbar. It’s going to have a chilling effect on other tribes in other parts of the country who were thinking it might be safe to work with the Americans.

KH: Bush and Petraeus are hailing our alliance with Sunni tribes in Anbar. Can you tell us about these “freedom fighters” the U.S. is now allied with?

RR: There have been a lot of reports about the fact that the people who the U.S. is working with, the supposed “freedom fighters,” the “counter-insurgents” are former insurgents. They were Iraqi al Qaeda before they started working with the Americans.

That is troubling because if they were fighting the Americans once, they’ll fight Americans again. And more troubling for the future of Iraq is the fact that many of the tribes that the U.S. is working with are war criminals who are directly responsible for ethnic cleansing and who are using American support to prepare for sectarian civil war. The U.S. is funding Sunni militias. They already funded the Shia militias. They’re now funding all sides of this sectarian war.

KH: How did you discover that the Sunni militias with whom the U.S. is working are engaged in this sectarian violence?

RR: We embedded with the Americans for a week, and we found that in the town Fallahat, where there used to a lot of Shia, there are now no Shia. So we tracked down the displaced Shia families and found them living on the outskirts of Baghdad in a refugee camp that no Western media and certainly no camera crews have ever filmed. There are no services, no doctors, no hospitals, no schools, no running water, no work, no sanitation. People have to walk, in some cases, for miles to just get polluted tap water out of hoses. People who have tried to return home to pick up their rations have been killed on the highway. So no one can leave.

The refugees we talked to knew the names of the people who had kicked them out and bombed their houses. And they are exactly the same tribes the Americans are working with. So the people the Americans are working with are responsible for sectarian ethnic cleansing. Malaki’s head of negotiations with Sunni groups told us the groups the Americans are working with include some of the country’s worst war criminals, responsible for beheadings and mass executions.

KH: Even if these militias are responsible for this violence, how do we know that the U.S. military knows this? Is it possible they don’t?

RR: We have proof that the Americans should know it. The American soldiers set their core operating base in a house they knew used to be inhabited by Shia. And all the Shia were gone. So it’s just whether they decided to ask the obvious question or not.

KH: How does what Petraeus and Bush are saying contrast with what you saw and filmed on the ground?

RR: The story that Petraeus and Bush are saying is fantastic — a Lawrence of Arabia figure named Abu Risha rose out of the desert and behind him the noble tribes of Anbar rose up and they kicked out al Qaeda. Well, it’s safer for American soldiers there, but it’s not safer for the Shia citizens there. The U.S. is funding sectarian militias fighting in a civil war in order to momentarily decrease attacks on Americans.

KH: And how, exactly, is the U.S. supporting the militias?

RR: The soldiers on the ground aren’t hiding anything. They were amazingly open and honest about the whole process with us. Through a combination of threats and enticements like money and releasing their kids from prison, the U.S. military has gotten groups to join a coalition. They’re paid money for small construction projects, and they’re eventually incorporated into the Iraqi police force, where they’re armed and paid, given a gun, a badge and the power to arrest.

There have been reports that some American army units are directly giving them weapons. I didn’t see anyone give an M16 to anyone. But I did see a U.S. captain hand wads of cash to militiamen who were guarding checkpoints. Petraeus says they’re not supplying guns. That might be true. But saying the U.S. military is just applauding from the sidelines and not providing material support to these militias is a lie.

KH: Why would the U.S. want to support these militias?

RR: It’s an easy way to produce immediate statistical successes on the ground, a decrease in attacks on American soldiers. And this is a long-term strategy. Petraeus came in with Negroponte with the so-called “Salvador Option” for Iraq, arming death squads to kill insurgents as the Reagan administration did in the 1980s in El Salvador. In 2004 he incorporated all of the Shia militias into the Iraqi security forces and basically created Shia death squads and secret torture prisons we’ve all heard stories of. Now they’re funding Sunni militias and Sunni death squads…

KH: To be fair and balanced?

RR: Because the Shia don’t control Anbar. And because they’re worried about some of the elements of the Shia militias too. In the last couple of years there’s been another bifurcation. It’s not just Sunni vs. Shiite anymore. It’s truly staggering that there are so many different civil wars being fought simultaneously. There’s a Sunni on Sunni civil war, a Shia on Shia war, a Shia Sunni civil war, an inter-Kurdish struggle and a struggle between the Kurds and the Arabs.

KH: Are we letting them kill each other so they don’t kill American soldiers over there?

RR: I don’t know. Ascribing motive to people is always difficult. I think it’s a systemic thing. When counterinsurgency fails, civil war is the next option. Another way of saying it is divide and conquer. In 2004 when Americans were defeated on the ground, when they had to fight a two-front war against a Shia insurgency in Najaf and a Sunni insurgency in Falluja, from that point on the Americans took a strategy of trying to divide the insurgents against each other. They incorporated the Shia militias and turned all their energy against the Sunni. Now they’re incorporating another chunk of the Sunni militias.

KH: Given that your films and journalism are critical of the war in Iraq, why did the U.S. Army let you embed?

RR: Anbar is their big success story. They don’t think that anyone who comes up there is going to go to the refugee camps and see the other side of it, or going to speak enough Arabic, which David Enders and Hiba Dawood do, to figure out what’s going on. I think they were desperate to get people up there. It was all good news to them. And it was truly amazing. We were able to walk in the street and take our flack jackets off in a neighborhood, which just six months ago had been one of the most dangerous places in the country, where tanks couldn’t even go. And that image is the image they wanted to circulate. Of course that’s only possible because the people who were shooting at them six months ago are now on the payroll.

KH: How has the media been picking up your story?

RR: It’s on Al Jazeera English, which 65 million households see. And internationally, reports have picked up on the story from there. But in the States, it’s only been picked up by outlets like Democracy Now! and the Pacifica stations. There’s a lot of noise now, everyone’s talking. There are so many lies in Petraeus’ report that it’s hard to focus on just one.

KH: When they do discuss Iraq, the U.S. media, politicians, Americans in general are more focused on what’s going to have a direct impact on U.S. soldiers than on Iraqis. Do you think they see this as their issue, their problem? Something that is irrelevant, or eclipsed by the fact that fewer American soldiers are shot?

RR: If Americans ever want their soldiers to leave, then they have to deal with this civil war that we are stoking. Short-term gains for the American army are obvious; there will be fewer attacks on Americans in the short run. But the Shia refugees are not able to return to their homes and as long as you have these misery belts with millions of people living in cinder block houses with no services, no water, you’re going to have a continual engine that drives violence, and you’re just making the problem more intractable in the long run.

This is a huge problem nationwide, there are 4 to 6 million refugees in Iraq who have been forced to flee their homes because of sectarian violence. It’s making the problem infinitely more intractable. It’s making it impossible to leave. We’re arming both sides of the civil war. The longer we’re there, the worse the civil war will become. And the worse it will be when we leave. And the more cataclysmic the civil war will be once the U.S. leaves.

KH: So then what do you see as the solution?

RR: The U.S. has to leave immediately. Overwhelmingly, that’s what Iraqis want, what Americans want. And if you look at the most reliable opinion polls, a recent ABC/BBC poll shows a massive drop in support for American presence. Iraqis are saying the situation has worsened since the surge. And more want the Americans to leave immediately. ++

Sadr group withdraws support to Iraq government
Raw Story
Saturday September 15, 2007

The movement of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday withdrew its support for the embattled Iraqi government, delivering a fresh blow to the political process of the country.

The group declared it has withdrawn from the main Shiite bloc that leads the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

“There has been no positive response from the Shiite alliance following which the political committee in the Sadr movement is announcing its withdrawal from the Shiite bloc,” Liwa Sumaysim, head of the political committee of the Sadr group, said at a press conference in the holy city of Najaf.

Sadr MP Gufran Saad had earlier said the movement was quitting the Shiite bloc alliance because it was no longer being consulted about key decisions by other fellow members.

“The alliance has been taking decisions single-handedly without reverting to the member blocs,” Saad said.

The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) initially comprised four key Shiite factions — the Sadr group, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council of Iraq (SIIC), the Dawa party and the Fadhila party — and held 130 of the 275 seats in parliament.

However, the number dropped to 115 when the Fadhila party pulled out in March. The Sadr bloc has 32 seats in parliament.

Sheikh Saleh al-Obeidi, the movement’s spokesman in Najaf, said the group had decided to abandon the government for a number of reasons, including the “investigation of the Karbala” clashes in the shrine city of Karbala.

On August 27, fierce gun battles between militants and police left 52 peopled dead and 300 wounded during a major Shiite pilgrimage in Karbala.

Widespread allegations were made that the fighters who had clashed with the police were Sadr’s Mahdi Army militiamen.

Two days after the fights, Sadr ordered his militia to suspend all its activities for a period of six months.

Obeidi, last week told AFP the Sadrists were considering withdrawing from the bloc because the SIIC and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa had formed another alliance with two Kurdish groups.

“On the one hand they are taking decisions in the bloc, but on the other hand they are plotting another alliance,” said Obeidi.

Under pressure from Washington to bridge the sectarian divide, Maliki and leaders of his Dawa party on August 27 squeezed out a broadbrush deal with two Kurdish groups and SIIC.

They agreed to ease restrictions on former members of Saddam’s Baath party taking up government jobs.

Sadr MP Saad complained that her group had not been included in the negotiations.

“The Sadrist bloc had no information about the new alliance … they do many things without reverting to the blocs,” Saad said.

The Sadr group has already withdrawn its six ministers, including Sumaysim, from Maliki’s government, saying Baghdad had failed to provide basic services to the people.

On Saturday, Obeidi said the Sadrists were now planning to negotiate with the Fadhila party for a possible “future together.”

Iraq’s fractious government is made up of ministers from both sides of the sectarian divide but there are frequent rows between Sunni and Shiite leaders and it has difficulty governing.

Maliki has said he will announce a cabinet reshuffle but has so far not been able to fill the vacant seats left by the Sunni and Shiite ministers.

He is currently running the government with 23 ministers out of an original 40.

The decision of Sadrists to pull out of the Shiite alliance will paralyse Maliki further, said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmud Othman.

“The government is on a shaky ground. If somebody moves a no-confidence motion in the parliament then we will know who has how much support,” Othman told AFP.

With the Sadr pullout, Maliki’s government can only count on the support of 136 lawmakers, including 53 from two Kurdish groups. If the Sadr bloc votes against him, it would bring the numbers of MPs who oppose him to 127. The other 12 MPs represent various small parties and could vote either way.

Othman said, however, groups opposing the government are themselves not united.

“There is no agreement within the government as well as within the opposition. Maliki is surviving because there is no alternative. Even the Americans say that,” Othman said.

Among the opponents of Maliki is the Sunni National Concord Front which has regularly accused the Sadr movement of killing Sunni Arabs in the ongoing sectarian warfare. ++

Ordinary life hardly the norm in Baghdad
Leila Fadel, McClatchy Newspapers
Friday, September 14, 2007

Today, most of Baghdad’s neighborhoods are being patrolled by coalition and Iraqi forces who live among the people they protect. Many schools and markets are reopening. Citizens are coming forward with vital intelligence. Sectarian killings are down. And ordinary life is beginning to return.

~ President Bush in his speech Thursday on Iraq

BAGHDAD — “Ordinary” isn’t a word that residents of Baghdad use to describe their lives.

Gunmen are driving people from neighborhoods in the city’s southwest. Electricity, depending on which block you live on, is available as little as two hours a day. Running water, if it’s available, is unsafe to drink.

Car bombings are down, but most residents won’t leave their neighborhoods, frightened that they’ll encounter Shiite Muslim militiamen or Sunni Muslim extremists who’ll kill them.

Some markets are reopening in the southern neighborhood of Dora under the watch of U.S. soldiers, but no one from outside the neighborhood visits.

As for schools, it’s hard to say: The school year hasn’t started yet.

Yousef al Mousawi, a 28-year-old Shiite resident of Sadr City, told this story Friday:

Two days ago, his friend Mustafa was kidnapped from his computer shop. He was later found dead, shot in the head. It wasn’t unusual. In his neighborhood — controlled by the Mahdi Army militia, loyal to cleric Muqtada al Sadr — he sees bodies every day.

Traffic jams terrify him, he said. He was wounded by a car bomb last year and has traveled the region since for medical treatment.

“The Mahdi Army isn’t just killing Sunnis now, they are killing Shiites as well,” he said. “I go to university, I’m afraid of suicide bombers and car bombs. I come home and I’m afraid of the Mahdi Army. We’re living in fear, endless fear.”

Even grocery shopping can be risky. Jassim Mohammed, 53, a Sunni from the neighborhood of Sleikh in northern Baghdad, said he rarely left his home, let alone traveled to marketplaces throughout the city.

This week marked the start of the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunup to sundown. The evening meal is a feast, and everyone wants his favorite food. But what Mohammed’s family eats is up to Abu Ahmed, the lone grocer in his neighborhood. If he’s selling okra, they eat okra stew. If he doesn’t have yogurt, they don’t eat yogurt. As a Sunni in what’s become a Shiite capital, Mohammed said, he has no choice.

“It has become a dream for us to shop from any central market,” he said. “No way can I roam freely in Baghdad. I can barely get from home to work, there are so many checkpoints manned by people I don’t trust.”

“By what standards can I consider this life ordinary?” he asked. “Would Mr. Bush consider my life normal if he knew the details? Would any American?”

Muhsin al Ribaawi, 45, a Shiite, lives in Hurriyah, a once-mixed neighborhood in northwest Baghdad that’s been devoid of Sunnis since they were forced out in December. The change was good, Ribaawi thinks. He can travel freely through Shiite neighborhoods throughout the capital, though he never ventures into Sunni enclaves. He no longer sees as many bodies dumped on the streets. As a supervisor for roads and bridges in Baghdad, he used to encounter as many as 20 a day. “I’m so happy for that,” he said.

Still, life is hardly back to normal. Dirty and disease-ridden, the water that comes from his tap is “terrifying.”

Mohammed al Ani, 36, a Sunni, lives in Mansour, in central Baghdad. When he travels elsewhere in the capital, he maps out his route so that he passes only through Sunni neighborhoods.

“If they (militias) have my ID and they see my tribal name, al Ani, I may lose my life,” he said. When he returns home at 5 p.m., the neighborhood is already empty and he shuts himself inside.

On Industry Street in central Baghdad, Mariam Shleimoon, a Christian, said she spent her days cowering in her home. Earlier this week, the Mahdi Army called her husband. They said he’d cursed the militia and that the family must pay — $4,000, a princely sum for a poor man who makes his money repairing kerosene heaters, a skill needed only in winter.

Shleimoon and her husband went to the police but no one would help, so they stay in to avoid the militia. She’d like her children to stay home as well. Her daughter, Rita, barely escaped a bombing, and her son watched a man be killed as he waited to buy bread. But the heat is stifling — they have only two hours of electricity a day, one in the morning and one at night — and her children want to get out of the house.

“We are living in fear,” she said. “I thought about selling out and leaving the country but my husband said, ‘I will live and die here.’ ”

In Saidiyah, in southwest Baghdad, Ali Mohammed, 30, a Sunni, said nearly all the stores in his neighborhood had closed as Shiite and Sunni gunmen battled to control the area.
The only clinic closed three months ago. It didn’t have any medicine, anyway, he said.

A university student, he fears leaving the neighborhood because the checkpoints are manned by police commandos, units known to be rife with Shiite militiamen, who alert gunmen in civilian cars to attack suspected Sunnis. Three days ago, a father and son were killed at a checkpoint, he said.

Bush, he said, “is speaking the opposite of what’s going on on the ground.” ++

McClatchy Newspapers special correspondents Sahar Issa, Mohammed al Dulaimy, Laith Hammoudi and Jenan Hussein contributed to this report.

Iceland Melts in the Baghdad Heat
Spencer Ackerman, TPM Muckracker
September 14, 2007

We had come so close to finding 34 of President Bush’s 36 countries with troops in Iraq. But now it appears we won’t be at 34 for long: next month, Iceland, part of the NATO mission to Iraq, is pulling out its one lone soldier. From the Iceland Review, last week:

Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir has decided to remove an Icelandic Crisis Response Unit (ICRU) member from a NATO training program for the Iraqi army in Baghdad next month, causing disappointment among NATO leaders.

The ICRU member has been working in Baghdad for the last two years, primarily as a media representative, and will cease working there October 1, Morgunbladid reports.

++

36 vs. 33 vs. 25: How the Coalition Coalesces
Spencer Ackerman, TPM Muckracker
September 14, 2007

Let’s clarify a bit about the Iraq coalition. President Bush last night thanked “the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq.” We count 25 of them (including, um, us) as part of Multinational Force-Iraq, most of whom have a tiny presence “on the ground”; six nations that have a non-MNF-I presence as part of a Nato mission that mostly takes place outside of Iraq; and then brave Fiji, which helps protect the United Nations mission. (Also mostly outside Iraq.)

Multinational Forces-Iraq lists 25 members of the coalition. Nearly all of them have minuscule numbers of troops devoted to the Iraq mission, for a total of only 11,732 . The most substantial non-U.S. troop contribution, from the UK, pulled back from Basra earlier this month to assume the non-combat “overwatch” role that General Petraeus believes that the U.S. can adopt at some as-yet-undefined point in the (far) future. Others are pulling out: the Danes, proud contributors of 470 troops in Iraq, have said they would withdraw in August, but that seems not to have happened yet. South Korea is expected to get out at the end of the year. Famous ex-members of the Coalition include Singapore, Honduras, the Netherlands, Ukraine and the Philippines, as well as major partners like Spain and Italy.

But wait! Italy and the Netherlands are listed on the State Department’s latest weekly Iraq status report (pdf) as being part of the Nato contribution to Iraq. What Nato contribution?

In 2004, Nato agreed to devote resources to helping train Iraqi security forces, mostly outside Iraq. As Nato’s website emphasizes, its troop contribution is for “training, equipping and technical assistance — not combat.” Italy and the Netherlands have signed on for that mission, as have Iceland, Slovenia, Turkey and Portugal. (Other Nato countries that are part of MNF-I also assist in the training mission.)

Then there’s Fiji, which devotes 150 troops to helping secure the United Nations’ assistance mission in Iraq — a job mostly done from outside of the country, but with a new mandate approved by the Security Council last month, it may soon have a more substantial presence inside Iraq. Go Fijans!

Still no word on the final mystery three.

The Coalition of the Willing:

* Albania * Armenia * Austrailia * Azerbaijan * Bosnia and Herzegovina * Bulgaria * Czech Republic * Denmark * El Salvador * Estonia * Georgia * Japan * Kazakhstan * South Korea * Latvia * Lithuania * Macedonia * Moldova * Mongolia * Poland * Romania * Singapore * Slovakia * Ukraine * United Kingdom ++

Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields
Joshua Holland, AlterNet
September 17, 2007

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Two provinces — al-Anbar and Karbala — were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn’t give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study’s margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors “actually living on [their] street” had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.

In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Before the study’s release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins’ study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal. Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years of the occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.

The poll’s findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins’ data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.

These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century — the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number ( 1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won’t. That’s because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq — the bloody criminal nightmare that the “reality-based community” has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation’s last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties.

There’s the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions, there’s the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there’s the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

Here’s the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn’t even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That’s less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism — the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don’t launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that’s exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won’t.

But there’s more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That’s wrong morally — we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to “collateral damage.” It’s also factually incorrect — as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz’s number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There’s no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.

Like the earlier study in the Lancet — one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results — this new research is already being dismissed out of hand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it’s become conventional wisdom (based on several studies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, has had trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):

[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year, which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.

1.5 billion rounds per year … more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000 — and is usually given as less than 20,000 — that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around. Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it’s somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.

If it weren’t for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.

Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having an illicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it’s important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.

With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraq war will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage. ++

Editor’s note: much of the ammunition used in Iraq is for training purposes. That was unclear from the article.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves