Today in Iraq

Update: In the Tuesday attack in Muqdadiyah, about 100 gunmen cut phone wires and fired rocket-propelled grenades in a daring operation that freed 18 fellow insurgents who had been captured in police raids just two days earlier. Police said 15 other captives were sprung in the assault on the Muqdadiyah lockup. Twenty Iraqi security men and at least 10 insurgents were killed in the attack. In an Internet posting Tuesday night the military wing of the Mujaheddin Shura Council, a militant Sunni Muslim insurgent group, purportedly claimed it carried out the operation. The Web posting said the group killed ``40 policemen, liberated 33 prisoners and captured weapons.'' The claim was posted on the Iraqi News Web site and could not be independently verified. U.S. helicopters were in the air above the jail after the insurgents had fled. Police said there was firing into the air by residents, but it was not clear if the American aircraft were the target. None was hit. Both U.S. and Iraqi military officials had said last year that the area was no longer an insurgent stronghold, but Tuesday's attack showed the militants still could assemble a large force, capable of operating in the region virtually at will.

Tal Afar; war crimes in Bush’s dystopia: "The strategy that worked so well in Tal Afar did not emerge overnight -- it came only after much trial and error. It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq. Yet the strategy is working." --- George Bush 3-20-06. Bush’s March 20 speech to the City Club of Cleveland was the most derisory string of lies in modern-day oratory. Aside from the dreary repetition of terror-related slogans that appear with mind-numbing frequency, Bush droned on for a good ten minutes about America’s great success in Tal Afar. Huh? If that sounds obscure, it’s because it was intended to be. Independent media has been banned from Tal Afar throughout the conflict so accounts of the massive carnage and devastation have been sketchy at best. This allows the prevaricator-and-chief to simply make up the facts as he goes along; a talent for which Bush has shown amazing aptitude. If Tal Afar is the idyllic, democratic utopia Bush boasts about, then open the city to "unembedded" journalists who can confirm what he says and provide us with the details. That, of course, will never happen because along with the stories of brutality and slaughter, journalists are bound to find trace-elements of the chemical weapons that were used on the civilian population. Proof of war crimes and illegal weapons-use would undoubtedly throw a wrench in Bush’s Pollyanna fairytale. The siege of Tal Afar was recently celebrated on CBS’ 60 Minutes in a segment called "Tal Afar: Al Qaeda’s Town"; a thoroughly absurd piece of Pentagon-inspired propaganda intended to shore up flagging support for Bush’s war. Like Bush’s speech, 60 Minutes devoted considerable energy to revising the city’s’ recent history and creating an upbeat story of benign occupation. The real story of Tal Afar, however, is quite different than the bubbly narrative told by Bush or his acolytes at TV’s most popular news-magazine. According to Bush, Tal Afar was a city of 200,000 that had been taken over by Al Qaida "terrorists", although he fails to explain how a few hundred fighters took control of an entire city. Then, the terrorists did what terrorists always do in Bush-world…they terrorized people. Do we see a theme developing here? It gets even better. Bush says: "The savagery of the terrorists is hard for Americans to imagine. They enforced their rule through fear and intimidation…In one grim incident; the terrorists kidnapped a young boy from the hospital and killed him." (There’s no record of this incident) "And then they booby-trapped his body, he was blown up. (Never happened) "These weren’t random acts of violence; these were deliberate and highly-organized attempts to maintain control through intimidation. In Tal Afar, the terrorists had schools for kidnapping and beheading." (Schools for beheading?) "And they sent a clear message to the citizens of the city: Anyone who opposes their reign of terror will be murdered." (absurd) Bush goes on: "The terrorists were deliberately firing mortars into playgrounds and soccer fields filled with children" (nonsense) "Communities became armed enclaves. If you were in part of Tal Afar that was not considered friendly, the terrorists cut off your basic services like electricity and water." (The US military destroyed the water and power lines prior to the siege) Finally, Bush leans towards his audience and in an ominous-sounding whisper says, "In one cache of weapons we found an axe inscribed with the names of the victims the terrorists had beheaded." (Turned out to be Cheney’s) Patting himself on the back, Bush adds cheerily, "The operation accomplished all this while protecting innocent civilians and inflicting minimal damage on the city." (Goes without saying) The real story of Tal Afar is dramatically different than Bush’s deluded account and considerably more tragic. The siege of Tal Afar began on September 2, 2005. It was the largest military offensive since the assault on Falluja a year earlier. In 2004 the US military attempted to take over the city but was rebuffed by heavy fighting. After that, the guerilla movement inside the city intensified expecting a future attack. A US officer told the Washington Post, "The September operation basically made people angry, which the insurgents were able to take advantage of. It had the opposite effect as intended. We created a power-vacuum and they filled it" Approximately, 5,000 American and Iraqi troops sealed off the city, enclosing it behind a massive wall of sand with military checkpoints. Then the city’s people were forcefully evacuated leaving them to fend for themselves. The Red Cross was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the exodus and was unable to provide shelter, water, or food for many of those who fled. Regrettably, thousands of people chose to stay and withstand the withering assault rather than expose themselves to the Shiite death squads from the Interior Ministry who were operating in conjunction with the American forces. The city was then relentlessly pounded for more than a week by Abrams tanks, F-16s, helicopter gun-ships, and heavy artillery. At least four mosques were bombed and the Sarai area was hammered persistently with 500 and 1000 lb bombs. The Iraqi newspaper Azzaman reported, "Eyewitnesses spoke of 'scores of casualties due to indiscriminate bombing". The entire operation was conducted in relative secrecy because the people in the United States were more focused on the unfolding Katrina tragedy. The siege was executed according to the normal protocols; massive destruction of personal property, leveling areas where resistance appeared, snipers picking off anything that moves on the city streets, and the routine rounding up of anyone who seems at all suspicious. "Thousands of Tal Afar residents were trapped inside Sarai by the cordon of tanks and barbed wire that was flung up around the district to prevent resistance fighters from escaping." (James Cogan WSWS) "Significant parts of Tal Afar are reported to be in ruin. Electricity and phone services have been cut off and hospitals are breaking down. The Iraqi human rights Center issued an urgent appeal t the Iraqi government to stop the assault and allow rescue teams to access the area to deliver food, water and medical supplies." (James Cogan WSWS) "Islam online.net" reported that "Residents of Tal Afar have sent out an SOS to the international community to interfere with the continuing bombing of their devastated city, revealing a terrible humanitarian crisis." "The Americans are bombing the city with chemical weapons", one unidentified man said, adding that other residents are complaining of suffocation and other health problems related to exposure to US ordinance. The report is consistent with evidence of banned weapons that were used in an earlier attack on Falluja. The idea that Tal Afar was an Al Qaida stronghold was a ridiculous public relations scam to conceal the operation’s real objectives. The siege was clearly designed as part of a broader "scotched-earth" policy directed at Sunni cities. That’s explains why "not one foreign fighter was captured in the siege despite claims that the city was a haven for foreign terrorists." (Linda Heard) Colonel Greg Reilly admitted as much to Al Jazeera saying that the resistance "went into hiding, avoiding us. That’s why there’s no fighting. They are not putting up a fight." Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s de-facto news blackout kept this story from receiving any serious attention in the press. Local Iraqi journalist, Nasir Ali, summarized the goals of the siege saying, "Every time the US Army and Iraqi government want to destroy a specific city they claim it hosts Arab fighters and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." Ali is correct, but there is a more sinister motive as well, the deliberate "preemptive" purging of Sunnis to roll back the mounting pressure from the resistance. The attack on Tal Afar was not a battle with terrorists but a clear attempt at ethnic cleansing. Following the siege the Red Crescent reported that "170 people from Tal Afar had been made sick from "inhaling gases" and "curious poisons"; another indication that proscribed weapons were used on civilians. James Cogan reports that, "The US led offensive has left hundreds of homes, shops, offices and mosques severely damaged. US and Iraqi troops have now rampaged through every home in Tal Afar searching for surviving insurgents or weapons caches. When residents are able to return to their houses, they will find their doors and widows kicked in, their furniture smashed, and their personal effects ruined or looted." Summarizing: Tal Afar was forcefully evacuated, ruthlessly bombarded, brazenly captured and laid to waste….but no sign of Al Qaida? As Colonel Reilly said, "They went into hiding". Right. Jonathan Finer clarified what really took place in Tal Afar in a Washington Post article: "Tal Afar was 70% Sunni Turkmen and 30% Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen had thrown in with Saddam, and more recently to radical Islam. The Shiite Turkmen lived in fear of their lives. So Kurds and Shiite are beating up on Sunni Turkmen allies of Sunnis Arabs. …It’s mainly about punishing the Sunni Turkmen for allying with the Sunni Arab guerrillas." So, the US role in this bloody farce has been to aid and abet the forces that are promoting sectarian violence and civil war; that much is crystal clear. None of this has anything to do with Bush’s endless palavering about Al Qaida. Tel Afar was about "ethnic-payback" pure and simple; a strategy that fits seamlessly with the broader aims of the occupation to crush the indigenous resistance and to "divide and conquer". The widely-respected Council of Nineveh issued a statement from the Brussels Tribunal that was ignored in the western media but is worth reiterating here: "The truth of what is happening in Tal Afar of the extreme use of force and the use of internationally forbidden weapons of poison gases, cluster, microwave, and napalm bombs, we demand that autopsies be carried out on the corpses of our sons who fell in the barbaric aggression to verify the inhuman practices carried out by the American forces and the (Iraqi) militias that participated in the massacre of Tal Afar." "The massacre of Tal Afar"? That doesn’t sound much like Bush’s flowery rhetoric about "children playing on the streets and shops opening", does it? And, it doesn’t coincide very well with the president’s version of 'fighting bloodthirsty terrorists’ and their "hateful ideology" or "spreading liberty and democracy" to the people of Tal Afar. What took place in Tal Afar was a massive, protracted war crime engineered by the White House, executed by the Pentagon, and papered over by the collaborative-press. The rest is just the delusional ravings of a homicidal maniac. Bad example…Tal Afar: In his speech yesterday, George Bush said: In this city, we see the outlines of the Iraq that we and the Iraqi people have been fighting for….The story of Tal Afar also shows that with a basic level of safety and security, Iraqis can live together peacefully. A desperate attempt to show Americans that the US is making progress in Iraq, lack of a single example Bush chose Tal Afar as a model. First, Tal Afar is not a “city” as you understand the word, Tal Afar is much, much smaller than a city and something just bigger than a village. To refresh your memory, Tal Afar is the same “city” where US soldiers killed Iraqi children and later faked images by implementing weapons besides their dead bodies. We had a long discussion before on this here. How safe is Tal Afar?, This Arabic link from Iraqi website today says it all, I will translate it as it is: Mortar fire attack on coalition head quarter in Tal Afar injured one soldier, transported later to the hospital. Sister cities: Sitting 230 miles west of Baghdad, Rutbah joins Tal Afar, Mosul and Samarra as cities where the U.S. military has tried to block outsiders and impede insurgent mobility by erecting large sand walls with bulldozers.

Iran's Supreme Leader sanctions talks with U.S. on Iraq, saying Iranian officials would tell the U.S. to leave the country. "If Iranian officials can express Iran's opinion about Iraq to Americans and make them understand Iran's views, talks on this issue are not problematic," Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, said in the northeastern city of Mashhad. "But if (talks) mean opening up an arena for deceitful Americans to continue their bullying attitude, talks with America on Iraq are banned," he said in a televised speech. "Our clear opinion on Iraq is that the American government should leave Iraq and stop provoking ethnic tensions and creating insecurity so that (Iraq) has peace and security," Khamenei said. Iraqi political sources said they expected the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, to meet with Iran's representatives this week. Tehran could be holding the electoral fortunes of the Republicans Republicans as well as the fate and the future of the war-devastated Iraq in its hands. Analysts have lately started to suggest that Tehran could be seen as holding the electoral fortunes of the U.S. Republican Party as well as the fate and future of the war-devastated Iraq in its hands. According to an editorial published earlier on Lebanon’s leading Arab-Language newspaper Annahar, Iran, which America considers its biggest challenge in the Middle East, could help the Bush administration pull its coals out of the Iraqi fire … for a price. The Bush administration, now facing deadlock in Iraq, is trying to get help from regional powers, on top of which is Iran. Washington needs those countries' support which could help it stabilize Iraq and prevent a civil war that would spread and devastate neighboring countries as well. And that’s why Washington is reaching out to Iran for talks regarding the situation in Iraq. But what the Bush administration doesn't know is that Iran will compromise with it if, and only if, it is beneficial to Iran. What the U.S. fails to recognise is that more challenges in the region are awaiting it as a result of its failure in Iraq. There’s a tremendous amount of pressures descending on the American President to take some measure that would improves the situation in Iraq, currently facing an unprecedented level of violence and unrest, before the midterm elections in November. Failing to contain the current turmoil in Iraq, or if the situation aggravates, could mean an end to the Republican majority. A truce with Iran is now more urgent than ever. Rumour: Have 6000 Iranian soldiers surrounded Baghdad? ANN, an Arab news network, just interviewed Riyadh Al Rikabi, a former Shia Baathist living in Najaf, who said that 6000 Iranian soldiers had infiltrated the borders and were taking up positions in and around Baghdad. This is, as yet, of course, unverified news. However, it does mark an interesting turn of events (if true) since the US and Iran are purportedly in talks on how to curb the violence in Iraq.

Robert Fisk: It is the march of folly: In 1914, the British, French, and Germans though they would be home by Christmas. On the 9th of April 2003, corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th US Marine Regiment - the very first American to enter Baghdad - borrowed my satellite phone to call his home in Michigan. "Hi you guys, I'm in Baghdad," he told his mother. "I'm ringing to say 'Hi, I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys.' The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon." (…) Civil war? There never was a civil war? It is a tribal, not a sectarian society. Some organisation wants a civil war; oddly, it was an occupation force's spokesman, a certain Dan Senor, who first warned of civil war in Iraq at an Anglo-American press-conference in 2003. Why? We talk of civil war far more than the Iraqis do. Why? Repeatedly, we are told that Iraqis and Westerners are kidnapped by "Men wearing police uniforms" or by "Men wearing army uniforms". What is this nonsense? Are we really to believe that there is a vast warehouse in Fallujah containing 8,000 made-to-measure police uniforms for potential insurgents? No! The truth is that many of the policemen and soldiers or Iraq, upon whose loyalty and courage our retreat, according to Bush, depends, are themselves insurgents. So deeply have the nationalists/Islamists forces infiltrated these men that the Bush-Blair promises of withdrawal are the very opposite of the truth. We are on our own. We may persuade our ex-spooks, like the former "interim prime minister" Iyad Alawi, who obediently claimed yesterday that therewas a civil war in progress, to try to frighten Iraqis. The reality is that our armed presence in Iraq is destroying an entire people. Accepting Reality: America has lost the war in Iraq. The chance for victory vanished long ago with the hearts, minds, arms, legs and lives of the Iraqi people. The insurgence hasn't won; rather the American government never obtained the formula to win. America, led by war-bent hawks (Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz) entered this war with many interests. Among them, the control of a major supply of Mideast oil, military bases, reconstruction contracts for cronies (i.e. Halliburton and Bechtel), a new ally/puppet in the region, securing Israeli dominance, showcasing new products for the arms community, and the greater concept of making Baghdad a haven for US corporate expansion (thereby planting a McDonalds and Starbucks on every street corner). In this excess of interests, the US neglected a major factor in the equation—the Iraqi people. Every time another suicide bomber enters the marketplace, Iraqis are reminded of the utter failure and incompetence of the US government. Nonetheless, those war-bent hawks couldn't pass up the idea of a cheap war coupled with a swift victory. What they didn't realize (or refused to listen to) was that after decades of heartbreak and struggle under Saddam Hussein, the last thing Iraqis needed was to get "liberated" for an era of struggle under US occupation. The Iraqi people know what to expect from occupation. They remember the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, the 22 year Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon, and the 38 years of oppression that continues to plague the lives of Palestinians. Iraqis also witnessed the US bombing campaign of 1991, the reneged US support of a postwar Shia uprising, and the sanctions that left Iraqi women and children forgotten. While the West mainly erases these events from their minds, the people of the Middle East, and more specifically Iraqis, must endure the consequences of these events. If the Bush administration interviewed my father, a 59 year old, Christian Republican Arab doctor living in the US, they would have realized, "Arabs don't like to be occupied." Arabs—be it Sunni, Shia, Coptic, Orthodox or Maronite—don't want to be invaded by a Western force capable of bombing Baghdad to oblivion. Nevertheless, many Muslim and Christian Arabs in the Middle East send their children to Western schooling and profoundly appreciate Western Culture. As James Zogby—president of the Arab American Institute—pointed out on CNN, Americans can see the integration of US based multinational food chains and stores in Saudi Arabia. More than 70 McDonalds and 32 Pizza Huts spread across the country, while a 69,000 sq ft Chuck E. Cheese opened in Jeddah in 2001, with bumper cars, a bowling alley and a new ice rink. There is thirst for American culture within Saudi society, without the aggression and ramifications of US foreign policy. The most important single factor that shapes Americans' attitudes to any war is whether they think America will win, explains Christopher Gelpi, an associate professor of political science at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy. Over the past year, the percentage of Americans who believe the US is "certain to win" [in Iraq] has plummeted from 79% to 22%; those who are either certain it will not win or believe this to be unlikely have risen from 1% to 41%. "They are in big trouble," explains Gelpi. "Bush's speeches, even as late as December, managed to shore up public opinion a little bit. But what you can do with speeches at this point is pretty limited. It's not even clear who's listening." Victory now may mean little more than avoiding the worst: David Mack, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and one of the organizers of a pre-war State Department study on how to rebuild Iraq, which he says was largely ignored by the administration, said victory now may mean little more than avoiding the worst. "Americans would like to think that for all we've done, we should have gotten something really good for our efforts," he said. "We just have to accept that we are not going be happy with the outcome. In fact, nobody over there in the region is viewing any of this as being positive." Mack added, "Did I imagine when we went in things would become this bad? No, I never envisioned we'd have this disaster."

The two faces of Rumsfeld: Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons. Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration. The reactor deal was part of President Bill Clinton's policy of persuading the North Korean regime to positively engage with the west. Just months after Mr Rumsfeld took office, President George Bush ended the policy of engagement and negotiation pursued by Mr Clinton, saying he did not trust North Korea, and pulled the plug on diplomacy. Pyongyang warned that it would respond by building nuclear missiles. A review of American policy was announced and the bilateral confidence building steps, key to Mr Clinton's policy of detente, halted. By January 2002, the Bush administration had placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and Iran. Two years after leaving ABB, Mr Rumsfeld now considers North Korea a "terrorist regime _ teetering on the verge of collapse" and which is on the verge of becoming a proliferator of nuclear weapons. He Doth Compare Too Much: The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said yesterday that the US could not afford to wait for conclusive proof of Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes before it attacked Iraq, and he equated the reluctance of America's allies to get involved with the appeasement of Nazi Germany. --- The Guardian, 8/21/02 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is comparing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to Adolf Hitler in the final days of Nazi Germany. "Like Hitler in his bunker, this violent extremist, failing to advance his political objectives, now appears committed to destroying everything and everyone around him," Rumsfeld said. --- AP, 5/26/05 "Adolf Hitler wrote things and people didn’t believe it. Here you have a person from an important country, a big country, with an intelligent and educated population that’s acquiring nuclear weapons, seems to be on a path to do that saying those things." --- Donald Rumsfeld on Iran President Ahmadinejad, Fox News, 1/18/06 Rumsfeld...likened al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin while urging Americans not to give in on the battle of wills that could stretch for years. --- WaPo, 2/3/06 Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld likened Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Adolf Hitler, reflecting continuing tension in relations between the United States and the Latin American government. “I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money,” Rumsfeld added. “He’s a person who was elected legally — just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally — and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.” --- AP, 2/3/06 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is warning that Western countries must increase their defense budgets in order to prevent the rise of a "global extremist Islamic empire" that could be as deadly as Hitler's Third Reich. --- Newsmax, 2/6/06 "Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis." --- Donald Rumsfeld, WaPo, 3/19/06 During the past few years in the U.S., we've witnessed state-sanctioned torture, extralegal domestic surveillance, a preemptive war based on false pretenses, and a party-above-nation cult of personality. Those who have noted the lessons learned from 1930's Germany have been dismissed as shrill or loony. So what do Rumsfeld's frequent and increasing use of Hitler analogies betray about him---his veracity, his character, his motives?