Today in Iraq

Police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammedawi said Carroll was released near an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the main Sunni political organization, in western Baghdad. The party said in a statement that Carroll walked in at 12:15 p.m. carrying a letter written in Arabic asking the party to help her. Carroll then was transferred to party headquarters, given gifts that included a Quran and handed over to fellow journalists and American officials at about 2:30 p.m., the statement said. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad met with Carroll and said she was in good spirits and anxious to go home. He also said no kidnappers were "yet" in custody, and no one in the U.S. mission was involved in paying a ransom. "No U.S. person entered into any arrangements with anyone. By 'U.S. person' I mean the United States mission," Khalilzad said. During Carroll's months in captivity, she had appeared in three videos broadcast on Arab television, pleading for her life. Her captors had demanded the release of all women detainees in Iraq by Feb. 26 and said Carroll would be killed if that did not happen. The date came and went with no word about her fate. On Feb. 28, Iraq's Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said Carroll was being held by the Islamic Army in Iraq, the insurgent group that freed two French journalists in 2004 after four months in captivity. She was last seen in a videotape broadcast Feb. 9 by the private Kuwaiti television station Al-Rai. Her twin sister, Katie, issued a plea for her release on Al-Arabiya television late Wednesday. Carroll is the fourth Western hostage to be freed in eight days. On March 23, U.S. and British soldiers, acting on intelligence gained from a detainee, freed Briton Norman Kember, 74, and Canadians James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, from a house west of Baghdad. Carroll's televised comments [to Baghdad TV upon release] "I was treated very well, it's important people know that. That I was not harmed, they never said they would hit me, never threatened me in any way." "I was kept in very good small, safe place, safe room, nice furniture, they gave me clothing, plenty of food. I was allowed to take showers, go to the bathroom when I wanted. They never hit me or even threatened to hit me." "I really don't know where I was. The room had a window, but the glass was ... you know you can't see, and curtains... I couldn't hear any sounds." "I once did watch television, but I didn't really know what was going on in the outside world. Here and there I would get some news. One time they brought me the newspaper." "I don't know what happened. They just came to me early this morning and said, 'OK, we are letting you go now.'"

Excerpt from Part 1 Evan: Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein. I will not shrink from this statement. In fact, I believe that even the liberal media in the United States, as well as most true Muslims, believe this deep down, even if they do not always vocalize it. Khalid: Iraq, that was built throughout years, is now destroyed, at all levels, and is still being destroyed everyday, by the occupation and the war that the US started-look at the killing and torture of Iraqis; bombing cities and villages; and installing puppet governments. The fake government that was installed in Iraq, which consists of pro-occupation figures, exists within and only within the boundaries of the Green Zone, which is surrounded by concrete walls, American soldiers, and American tanks-all to protect the government from the anger of people, the Iraqi people, whose voice you never hear in the media anymore. This government that is being attacked everyday at all levels by Iraqis, unable itself, let alone Iraqis, will fall, because it was installed as a result of external pressure and foreign intervention, something that never worked in Iraq throughout history, under many occupations that tried to control it and oppress the will of its people. I believe in the strength of Iraqis. I believe in the spirit of Iraqis. I believe in God above all, and therefore I know that this occupation, too, will be terminated, and that the occupation will leave against its will and against all its plans and despite the presence of the military bases that were built in Iraq for the occupation to stay (just like the American occupation in other countries around the world, except that in Iraq, occupations never last, and are always forced to leave.) Saddam was a terrible dictator, a phase that every country goes through till it revolts and achieves its granted democracy, a natural process that results in a democratic state where people rule themselves by electing governments that represent them. Saddam used violence against everyone who dared to criticize him, and so does the occupation. Saddam killed his enemies, or the people who stood against him, while the occupation kills innocent people everyday, people walking the streets, living in their cities. The occupation used cluster bombs against civilians, bombs that still kill innocent people. They were used against a neighbor who lived right next to where I lived. Their remains kept exploding and killing people whenever they stepped over them. Both Saddam and the occupation kill whoever they think are "bad people" or "insurgents," except that the occupation does that much more widely. Other than that, Saddam was a good "manager" in terms of providing the basic needs of life-water, security, food. Now we still have the same country of secret police and muhabarat (intelligence) except that we lost the small positive side of Saddam; we don't have water, security, electricity, or food rations anymore. Excerpt from Part 2 Evan: I also am disappointed and shocked that Khalid takes such a stand on the "resistance," as this is implicitly saying that he is in favor of the terrorism that continues to kill far more people over the last year than the military battles have for quite some time. (…) At this point I am not asking the readers to even support American military actions, but I am asking the readers to at least see this resistance for what it is, and finally to get involved for peace if they really do want to change things. Join the Red Crescent or the Arab League or various Muslim human rights organizations and go to Iraq-the more hands that there are working for peace, the sooner American soldiers will leave, but more importantly, the sooner the destructive ideology of the "resistance" will be defeated. Khalid: The resistance is the force of the oppressed against this oppressor. The resistance couldn't possibly have started or continued, if it wasn't for the funding and protection of Iraqi people. Imagine four people in a car, carrying their weapons and waiting for an American convoy to pass so they can attack it. How many Iraqis see them? How many Iraqis can report them anonymously? How many Iraqis can attack them? But none of that happens! People protect them, and cheer for them when they perform their operations. They help the attackers in their escape after they are done. Some people even divide their income between their families and the resistance, some people work half-time to provide for their families and dedicate the rest of their day to working with the resistance. It is a public grassroots movement, and the official numbers and report show that it's increasing and getting smarter and stronger. These are facts that AP can't report because they don't know about them, and Talabani won't talk about them because he doesn't like them. I heard you talking over and over about the innocent Iraqis who were killed by the terrorists (well, according to your definition of terrorists, not mine). My question is: Do you support the killing of Iraqis by the American Army? Over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed. Cluster bombs and white phosphorus were used against civilians. Yes, civilians in civilian areas, as you know that kind of weapon doesn't discriminate. It's practically a weapon of mass destruction so to speak, in the sense that it's designed to kill as many people as possible in an area. Well, you might say that some of the resistance were among those civilians that were killed. Do you support killing these numbers of innocent civilians, just because maybe they work with the resistance? If the situation were the opposite and your country were occupied and the occupiers killed civilians, including your family members, by using white phosphorus-which means that they practically burned to death-just because some of the resistance happened to be in the neighbor, what would you think? (Sorry if I sound rude; I need to let you understand that I am not talking about theories. Those people who burned to ashes were families of other people you know.) Excerpt from Part 5 Evan: I pray that you do not view me as someone who is not deeply saddened by the pain in Iraq, someone who does not greatly appreciate Iraq and its people, someone who does not respect Islam, etc. I am simply someone trying to find out what is right, as we all are in this life. Perhaps you as readers are more inclined to believe Khalid's points because he is an Iraqi, and quite probably you are right to do so. Khalid: I have said before and will repeat that the goal of this debate is not getting closer to each other, but to demonstrate the facts and answer the questions, and let the readers see for themselves the elements of the case of each one of us. I represent the common anti-war side, and you represent the common pro-war side, so there is nothing personal here, and I have nothing personal against you of course. If you want a better way to get closer to an Iraqi, consider asking your government to stop occupying his country. (...) Consider the possibility of someone you love being burned or shredded with White Phosphorus (WP) or cluster bombs. Imagine your country occupied and the scenes of the military of another country on your land building military bases, and then spreading a propaganda about protecting your freedom. I hope that you will never have to go through that, but I am asking you to look closely at the life of Iraqis. They are not a political theory; they are people, humans, who are suffering from the lack of medicine, food, and security. But they still have their dignity, which is urging them to fight at all levels, a fight that won't stop, not till the last man falls, not till the last pen is broken, not before Iraq gets its freedom back, someday.

Is Nemesis coming after the U.S.? Excerpt from an interview with Chalmers Johnson by Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch CJ: The officials of this administration are radicals. They're crazies. We all speculate on why they do it. Why has the president broken the constitution, let the military spin virtually out of control, making it the only institution he would turn to for anything - another Katrina disaster, a bird flu epidemic? The whole thing seems farcical, but what it does remind you of is ancient Rome. If a bankruptcy situation doesn't shake us up, then I fear we will, as an author I admire wrote the other day, be "crying for the coup". We could end the way the Roman Republic ended. When the chaos, the instability become too great, you turn it over to a single man. After about the same length of time our republic has been in existence, the Roman Republic got itself in that hole by inadvertently, thoughtlessly acquiring an empire they didn't need and weren't able to administer, that kept them at war all the time. Ultimately, it caught up with them. I can't see how we would be immune to a Julius Caesar, to a militarist who acts the populist. TD: Do you think that our all-volunteer military will turn out to be the janissaries of our failed empire? CJ: They might very well be. I'm already amazed at the degree to which they tolerate this incompetent government. I mean the officers know that their precious army, which they worked so hard to rebuild after the Vietnam War, is coming apart again, that it's going to be ever harder to get people to enlist, that even the military academies are in trouble. I don't know how long they'll take it. Tommy Franks, the general in charge of the attack on Baghdad, did say that if there were another terrorist attack in the United States comparable to September 11, the military might have no choice but to take over. In other words: If we're going to do the work, why listen to incompetents like George Bush? Why take orders from an outdated character like Donald Rumsfeld? Why listen to a Congress in which, other than John McCain, virtually no Republican has served in the armed forces? I don't see the obvious way out of our problems. The political system has failed. You could elect the opposition party, but it can't bring the CIA under control; it can't bring the military-industrial complex under control; it can't reinvigorate the Congress. It would be just another holding operation as conditions got worse. TD: Usually we believe that the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse and, in essence, our victory. A friend of mine put it another way. The United States, he suggested, was so much more powerful than the USSR that we had a greater capacity to shift our debts elsewhere. The Soviets didn't and so imploded. My question is this: Are we now seeing the delayed end of the Cold War? Perhaps both superpowers were headed for the proverbial trash bin of history, simply at different rates of speed? CJ: I've always believed that they went first because they were poorer and that the terrible, hubristic conclusion we drew - that we were victorious, that we won - was off the mark. I always felt that we both lost the Cold War for the same reasons - imperial overstretch, excessive militarism, things that have been identified by students of empires since Babylonia. We've never given Mikhail Gorbachev credit. Most historians would say that no empire ever gave up voluntarily. The only one I can think of that tried was the Soviet Union under him. TD: Any last words? CJ: I'm still working on them. My first effort was Blowback. That was well before I anticipated anything like massive terrorist attacks in the United States. It was a statement that the foreign-policy problems - I still just saw them as that - of the first part of the 21st century were going to be left over from the previous century, from our rapacious activities in Latin America, from our failure to truly learn the lessons of Vietnam. The Sorrows of Empire was an attempt to come to grips with our militarism. Now, I'm considering how we've managed to alienate so many rich, smart allies - every one of them, in fact. How we've come to be so truly hated. This, in a Talleyrand sense, is the sort of mistake from which you can't recover. That's why I'm planning on calling the third volume of what I now think of as "The Blowback Trilogy," Nemesis. Nemesis was the Greek goddess of vengeance. She also went after people who became too arrogant, who were so taken with themselves that they lost all prudence. She was always portrayed as a fierce figure with a scale in one hand - think, Judgment Day - and a whip in the other ... TD: And you believe she's coming after us? CJ: Oh, I believe she's arrived. I think she's sitting around waiting for her moment, the one we're coming up on right now. Imperial overreach accelerating global decline of America: It is clear that the US occupation of Iraq has been a disaster from almost every angle one can think of, most of all for the Iraqi people, not least for American foreign policy. The unpicking of the imperial logic that led to it has already commenced: Hyde's speech is an example, and so is Francis Fukuyama's new book After the Neocons, a merciless critique of Bush's foreign policy and the school of thought that lay behind it. The war was a delayed product of the end of the cold war and the triumphalist mentality that imbued the neocons and eventually seduced the US. But triumphalism is a dangerous brew, more suited to intoxication than hard-headed analysis. And so it has proved. The US still has to reap the whirlwind for its stunning feat of imperial overreach. In becoming so catastrophically engaged in the Middle East, making the region its overwhelming global priority, it downgraded the importance of everywhere else, taking its eye off the ball in a crucial region such as east Asia, which in the long run will be far more important to the US's strategic interests than the Middle East. As such, the Iraqi adventure represented a major misreading of global trends and how they are likely to impact on the US. Hyde is clearly thinking in these terms: "We are well advanced into an unformed era in which new and unfamiliar enemies are gathering forces, where a phalanx of aspiring competitors must inevitably constrain and focus options. In a world where the ratios of strength narrow, the consequences of miscalculation will become progressively more debilitating. The costs of golden theories [by which he means the worldwide promotion of democracy] will be paid for in the base coin of our interests." The promotion of the idea of the war against terror as the central priority of US policy had little to do with the actual threat posed by al-Qaida, which was always hugely exaggerated by the Bush administration, as events over the last four and a half years have shown. Al-Qaida never posed a threat to the US except in terms of the odd terrorist outrage. Making it the central thrust of US foreign policy, in other words, had nothing to do with the al-Qaida threat and everything to do with the Bush administration seeking to mobilise US public opinion behind a neoconservative foreign policy. There followed the tenuous - in reality nonexistent - link with Saddam, which provided in large measure the justification for the invasion of Iraq, an act which now threatens to unravel the bizarre adventurism, personified by Donald Rumsfeld, which has been the hallmark of Bush foreign policy since 9/11. The latter has come unstuck in the killing fields of Iraq in the most profound way imaginable. (...) That the world will be very different within the next two decades, if not rather sooner, is clear; yet there is scant recognition of this fact and what it might mean - not least in our own increasingly provincial country [UK]. The overwhelming preoccupation of the Bush administration (and Blair for that matter) with Iraq, the Middle East and Islam, speaks of a failure to understand the deeper forces that are reshaping the world and an overriding obsession with realising and exploiting the US's temporary status as the sole global superpower. Such a myopic view can only hasten the decline of the US as a global power, a process that has already started. The Bush administration stands guilty of an extraordinary act of imperial overreach which has left the US more internationally isolated than ever before, seriously stretched financially, and guilty of neglect in east Asia and elsewhere. Iraq was supposed to signal the US's new global might: in fact, it may well prove to be a harbinger of its decline. And that decline could be far more precipitous than anyone has previously reckoned. Once the bubble of US power has been pricked, in a global context already tilting in other directions, it could deflate rather more quickly than has been imagined. Hyde's warnings should be taken seriously. The Revolution Will Not Be American (And That's a Good Thing): Unlike the politicians, we have underestimated the American capacity for apathy. There is precedent for this apathy. It is our most favored example of Governments Gone Awry. The Nazi (and here I Godwin my own article) regime did in ten years what the American government is only now approaching after 60 years of political frog-boiling. In ten years the Nazis waged aggressive war on their political neighbors, their geographical neighbors, their racial neighbors, and their religious neighbors, took their businesses and placed them into fascist control, and tortured, mutilated and burned their own citizens in their back yards. A mere ten years of social conditioning, and the apathy of the German people allowed this to occur. And while there were undergrounds and secret groups working against the Nazi government, there was no popular uprising. All the horrors of the Nazi program were not enough to jar the German people into action away from their broken radios and phonographs. And today, Americans have six times the practice at apathy, with 160 channels to Tivo and a hundred different beers and circuses of every shape and style imaginable. Humiliation is public sport ranging from the seediest "reality" broadcasts right through to food preparation. They stare at the TV and wax poetic about how, "Aw'd never be cawt DED on one o' them showz!" while secretly thinking they could insult Simon into speechlessness if only they could get on. No, folks, there is no tearing (or tearing) away the eyes of this America from their idiot box, and they wouldn't dare risk their cell phone bars. Rome did not fall to the Romans. The Nazis were not defeated by Germans. The sole example of genuine popular uprising and destruction of government is the French Revolution, which soon fell to Napoleon, who did not abdicate to any Frenchman. Indeed, the Constitution itself was not an act of popular demand. The Second Revolutionaries of Washington, Paine and Hancock, et al met in secret, and spent years brokering the political deals to eclipse the Articles of Confederation; politicians overthrowing politicians in a new country's elimination rounds. Fundamental changes in government are almost universally external. The spark of the French Revolution was massive foreign debt (including funding the American Revolution as a method of covert war with England ) resulting in extreme taxation of which an absence of fiat money offered no veil of disguise. The Romans imploded against Germanic tribes, and the Nazis fell to American carpet bombings. The collapse of the USSR was not at all a proletariat revolution, but a combination of internal corruption and superior American fiat finesse (a point of pride for many Reaganites, but ultimately no better than proudly proclaiming, "My rapist is slicker than yours!"). So why, in the face of history, do we insist we can manufacture lightning and catch it in a bottle? The conclusion to all of this is one that even I did not want to think of until recently. But the Revolution will not be American. Not anymore. We have learned our lessons well. Modern Americans are riddled with apathy. If you want to know how far it can go, think of the worst atrocities the Nazis committed and realize there were no crowds storming the gates of Auschwitz. Foreign, invading soldiers opened those gates. And so shall it be with us. We can't wake the sleeping giant. But someone, somewhere, can club it in the head. When the Empire is too big, too aggressive, too starved and internally paralyzed (vibrantly demonstrated by Katrina, thank you, Ma'am, for that performance), and it finally oversteps one border too many, China, India, and Europe will implement, shall we say, "corrective procedures." And if we're ready, if we've planted our seeds and cultivated our memes strongly and deeply into the somnambulistic consciousness, the giant might just stumble a few bloody paces in the direction of liberty before slumping over the TV tray.