Concerning the current ongoing debate in foreign policy circles regarding attacking Iran, we are seeing a repeat of the errors committed in Europe in the late 30’s that lead to the German invasion of France in May, 1940. This time it is the foreign policy establishment of the United States (and Israel) that is ossified in its strategic thinking, paralyzed by the need to cling on to past certainties, manifested by the preference for boilerplate solutions to problems instead of actual geopolitical strategic analysis. This situation is leading, as in France in 1940, to US strategists insisting on re-fighting the last war (the Cold War) instead of meeting the new, complicated and profoundly unsettling challenges that actually face them.

Today, ten nations (plus or minus) currently possess nuclear weapons. Ten years from now, this number will be no less than thirty, and in twenty years, 60-70 nations will be nuclear armed.

The Wehrmacht, in May 1940, aided by revolutionary new military tactics, smashed through the French defensive lines at Sedan, in northern France. This is the point at which Europe lost its global hegemony and was henceforth dependent on the US and USSR to save it from itself. The “Sedan” point for nuclear proliferation will be argued about for some time; was it Pakistan developing its nuclear capabilities, was it Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech, or as I prefer, was it the moment that North Korea was allowed to start reprocessing its spent nuclear rods. Combine the Khan group, the fear induced by an aggressive United States, and the multitude of “unknowables” associated with the North Koreans, and one thing becomes clear, the nuclear proliferation genie is out of the bottle, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are not going to be putting this genie back in its bottle again.

Mass nuclear proliferation and non-state geopolitical actors are baffling today’s statesmen in a similar way that the introduction of the Stuka dive bomber and massed armor confounded the prewar French military thinkers, who from painful experience had learned that in modern warfare, quick breakthroughs of your opponent’s line were virtually impossible. The heavy artillery bombardment that necessarily preceded such attacks always alerted the enemy to your intentions and a couple well-placed machine gun embankments could easily hold off battalions of charging infantrymen. If the impossible did happen and a breakthrough occurred, the salient that the attackers thus created was open to murderous machine gun fire along its flanks. The attackers artillery had to move forward into the former frontlines where the ground would have been horribly chewed up by the previous pounding by the artillery. The defending artillery was falling back on to its own lines, which is military infinitely easier to do than to move forward.

German military thinkers solved these problems in two ways. By simply replacing the traditional artillery attacks by waves of Stukas and placing the charging infantry into tanks, the Germans rendered obsolete the French generals preference for static defense and leisurely concepts of time on the battlefield. Only Charles de Gaulle, among French generals, saw the coming danger, but the hierarchical and deeply conservative French military establishment ignored his pleas to forget Verdun and start planning for the true German threat.

Until November 2004, the Europeans (Britain, France and Germany) are providing Iran with the diplomatic version of a Patriot missile defense system. No serious thinker can actually believe that the Iranians are going to give up their nuclear program in this fashion, least of all the Europeans, who are playing along with this charade. Place yourself in the corridors of power in Tehran and try to imagine a coherent argument as to why the Iranians should not acquire nuclear weapons. There is none. Whether they have them already or not is a moot point, they can always buy them from North Korea if they really need them. The only thing left to work out is the endgame of actually declaring themselves a nuclear power.

The Israelis have every right to fear a nuclear-armed Iran, it is indeed not only an existential threat, but because of the threat posed by certain non-state actors, it makes the occupation of Palestine practically impossible to continue.

The US certainly has less to fear than Israel concerning Iran.. MAD still functions with the Iranians and the non-state threat is only slightly increased since Al Qaida is the real problem for the US and they are not relying on Tehran for weapons.

Which brings me back to this November deadline set by the Europeans. Obviously the Israelis would love for the US to attempt some military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program. This entails huge risks for the Bush Administration. Israel is going to need to apply a huge amount of pressure, an existential threat to the Bush Administration, if you will, in order to get the US to move on this. On November 2, the Israelis task of putting pressure to bear on Bush will become infinitely greater (assuming he wins re-election). Anything the Israelis are holding over Bush’s head is much more valuable in October and next to useless in November. For instance, if Mossad had been trailing the Sept. 11^th suspects throughout the US during 2001 and had given the US a detailed warning of what was coming, as has been reported in the press, the leaking of this memo would sink Bush’s re-election chances. One wonders if the recent IAPAC spy scandal is not a Bush Administration attempt to insert some deterrence for Israel into the equation.

The Iranians would no doubt (secretly) welcome an Israeli/American military strike. Such a strike would completely destroy the already moribund Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. The mullahs of Tehran are certainly not stupid enough to have placed their weapon programs in an obvious location, they will have spread them out around the country--buried deep in the ground-- as much as possible, while at the same time leaving one or two obvious targets on which the Israelis could sate their appetites for action. Such an attack would most likely be nuclear. No one, I mean no one could complain, if six months later, the Iranians tested a nuclear device, having themselves just been victims of such an attack, self-defense would be a clear justification. Sanctions would not even be discussed. Not only that, but the Iranians would “owe Israel one”, an IOU they would count on for later collection. Of course, I am not even taking into account here the likelihood of an Iranian counterattack. Almost no one in Washington or Tel Aviv is discussing--the very likely--possibility of Iran already possessing nuclear arms and what the ramification of that is on the military planning for an attack on Iran.

The neoconservative in the US and Israel are still convinced that it was their exaggeration of the Soviet threat in the 70’s and 80’s--subsequent arms build-up--that lead the USSR to collapse, and thus secured victory for the US. Most Soviet commentators would say that it was actually the high standard of living that the Social Democrats in Sweden (among others) had provided for their population—within the capitalist system—compared to the low standard of living in the Soviet bloc, that convinced the Soviets of the futility of Communism. No lessons have been learned by the debacle in Iraq, where fourth generational warfare has again baffled and defeated a western power. The same neoconservative boilerplate solution will be applied to Iran, and the results will be similar; by trying to stop the unstoppable, they will just increase the speed and amplitude of nuclear proliferation. The final battle will be within the Bush Administration itself, balancing political realities with foreign policy fantasies. After the election, it will be much more difficult for Bush to move on this one. Only a nuclear terrorist attack in the US would give him the political cover to try such a risky move.

Gun nuts in the US are proud of the “polite society” created by an armed to the teeth populace. We will be seeing the same phenomenon on the international scene when most major nations are armed with nuclear weapons. The cost of war will again be too high. The antithesis of this polite society will be on the level of non-state actors, where MAD does not function. Finding the synthesis of these two forces is where our future Charles de Gaulle-like geopolitical strategists need to be spending their time, if we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of the French. I don’t even want to imagine what the American equivalent would be of to the situation of a French General standing on the ridge, overlooking the Meuse, and watching Nazi tanks flood into his country through the gaping hole they had just punched through the French lines, sure in the knowledge that there was no longer a damn thing his country could do to stop them.

The nature of the Iraqi conflict is about to change if promises for December 2004 elections are taken seriously. From today's Independent:

US retreats after failing to capture militia chief

United States forces agreed yesterday to withdraw from the Shia holy city of Najaf and end fighting with the militia of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. In a climbdown by the Americans, who had vowed to kill or capture Sadr, it now appears he will be allowed to remain free. His Army of Mehdi militia will also withdraw under the deal.

The Americans appeared to have given up their two main demands to end the fighting in Najaf: that Sadr surrender to them and that the Mehdi Army be disbanded immediately.
The American agreement to withdraw without capturing Sadr will be seen in Iraq as a second embarrassing capitulation in as many months, after US forces ended their April siege of the Sunni city of Fallujah without capturing those responsible for killing and mutilating the bodies of four American contractors - the original reason for the siege in which hundreds of Iraqi civilians are believed to have died.

[….]

Mohammed al-Musawi, a Shia leader who was involved in extensive efforts to arrange a peaceful end to the fighting in Najaf, claimed the deal included an agreement that Sadr will not face any prosecution until after an elected Iraqi government takes office, which will not happen until next year. He also said that under the deal the Mehdi Army would become a political organisation.

Whether Sadr will get that much remains to be seen, but at any rate he appeared to have got the most out of yesterday's deal. It was a good result for him after scores of his militiamen were killed in the past few days.

Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army is about to become Iraq’s version of the Lebanese Shiite militia/political party Hezbollah. For an excellent bckground article on Hezbollah and its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, I recommend Adam Shatz’s recent article, “In search of Hezbollah,” from the New York Times Review of Books.

Most of the residents of southern Beirut, where Nasrallah has his headquarters, are Shiites, who account for 40 percent of Lebanon's population, outnumbering both Christians and Sunnis. Until the 1960s, Lebanon's Shiites were a neglected, invisible community, oppressed by feudal landlords and disdained by their fellow Lebanese. Today, they are a rising political force, thanks in large part to the militant political movement Hezbollah. It is now a virtual state-within-a-state, with an army of several thousand men, an extensive social service network, a popular satellite television station called al-Manar ("the Beacon of Light"), and an annual budget in excess of $100 million, much of which comes from Iran, Hezbollah's major patron.

The movement first emerged during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in which between twelve and nineteen thousand Lebanese died, most of them civilians and many of them Shiites. Militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Hezbollah's original cadres were organized and trained by a 1,500-member contingent of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who arrived in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in the summer of 1982, with the permission of the Syrian government. For Iran, whose efforts to spread the Islamic revolution to the Arab world had been stymied by its war with Iraq, Hezbollah provided a means of gaining a foothold in Middle East politics.

Syria's vehemently secular leader Hafez Assad, for his part, had no affection for Hezbollah's religious ideology but keenly grasped its potential as a proxy militia. For Syria, whose principal goal has been to reclaim the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, Hezbollah is the only "card" it has to pressure its far more powerful neighbor. Unlike the leftist Lebanese forces that, until that point, had led the resistance to the Israelis, Hezbollah guerrillas could not be penetrated by Israeli intelligence. And in their discipline and willingness to die for their cause they had few rivals, as the world was to discover the following year, when members of the clandestine "Islamic Resistance" (a precursor to Hezbollah, which did not yet officially exist) launched a series of terrifying suicide attacks in Lebanon against American, French, and Israeli targets.

Following the bombings, the Western forces made a fast exit from Beirut; in 1985, faced with fierce resistance from Hezbollah fighters, Israel withdrew to a so-called security zone, a strip of territory along Lebanon's southern border that soon became known as its "insecurity zone." Over the next fifteen years, Hezbollah waged an efficient, disciplined, and popular guerrilla war against the Israeli military.

In May 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to bring an end to an occupation that had cost more than one thousand Israeli lives, and ordered a unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The withdrawal did not include a formal peace agreement with Lebanon, and the Israeli army continued to occupy the patch of border territory called the Shebaa Farms, which Hezbollah regards as part of Lebanon. But Lebanese Shiites (as well as a number of Barak's Israeli critics) saw the withdrawal as a major Hez- bollah victory—"the first Arab victory in the history of Arab-Israeli conflict," as Hezbollah often proclaims. It is an event that has helped make Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, one of the most important men in Lebanon.

Hezbollah now has some 100,000 supporters, about half of whom are party members. When Nasrallah raises his voice, the Lebanese pay close attention to what he says, whether or not they like him. Bashar Assad, Syria's young leader and Hezbollah's other major sponsor, is said to revere him. Although Nasrallah depends on Iranian arms and Syria's support for his military operations, he has achieved a significant degree of autonomy from both parties, which may complicate future efforts to disband it. Hezbollah, which adheres to the principle of wilayat al-faqih, or rule by the Islamic jurist, regards Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as its ultimate leader, and maintains close ties to Iran's leadership, especially to the hard-line clerics who helped organize the party in the early 1980s. It was Khamenei who reportedly influenced Hezbollah's decision to maintain its armed wing rather than devote all its energies to Lebanese politics after Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. But Hezbollah has long ceased to be an Iranian-controlled militia. (The last remaining Revolutionary Guards left the Bekaa Valley in 1998.) Although Hezbollah is believed to coordinate foreign policy matters with Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the Lebanese and Western experts I've talked to say it reaches most of its everyday decisions without consulting Iran. Moreover, they say, Khamenei has never overruled Nasrallah.

So far, one excellent historic parallel throughout the second Iraqi conflict has been the 1954-1962 conflict in Algeria. As we move towards possible elections, a new parallel might be the annulled second round of Algerian elections in 1991:

The populist appeal of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) resulted in its astonishing successes in the June 1990 local elections (the first free elections in the nation's history) and the December 1991 first round of delayed parliamentary elections, although the top FIS leaders had been imprisoned since June 1991. Stunned "secular" military and civilian elites fearing the establishment of an Islamic state overthrew President Chadli Benjedid in January 1992. The new High Council of State (HCS) quickly annulled the elections and outlawed the FIS. The 1992 coup outraged many Muslims and led to protests and mounting violence, including the June 1992 assassination of HCS-installed president Mohammed Boudiaf. There was international condemnation of both the government's repression of political liberties and often brutal efforts to suppress the opposition and the increasingly divisive and radicalized Islamic movement's targeting of intellectuals, journalists, feminists, and foreigners.

Again from Adam Shatz, this time from the July 3, 2003 New York Review of Books (no link):

The FIS was about to defeat the FLN in the second round of elections, but Nezzar and his army colleagues made sure that never happened. Always suspicious of the democratic experiment that began in 1989, General Nezzar, who was then Algeria's minister of defense, forced President Chadli Bendjedid, who came to power with army support in 1979, to resign. The elections were canceled, and two months later the FIS was banned. Nezzar declared a state of emergency. The Islamic Salvation Army, the FIS's armed wing, responded with attacks on government security forces. They were soon joined by more radical outfits like the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), a nebulous network of jihadists that included a number of self-described "Afghan Arabs." The jihadists assassinated secular intellectuals and unveiled women; they finally turned against their own followers when they showed insufficient zeal for holy warfare.

The "conciliators" among Algeria's political leaders, among them several former ministers, advocated a political solution, starting with negotiations with the FIS; but the hard-line "eradicators" led by General Nezzar won out. They struck back ruthlessly, borrowing tactics the French paratroopers used against the FLN, including torture, summary execution, and secret detention in camps in the Sahara. Tens of thousands of Algerians, some of them Islamic radicals but many of them ordinary civilians and soldiers, have been killed since 1992; about seven thousand have disappeared, mostly at the hands of security forces, according to a damning report released late this February by Human Rights Watch. The violence has subsided since 1997, when the FIS laid down its arms, but the GIA and other rebels remain active. Almost every day, a few people die in political violence, a pattern that has become so familiar that no one in Algeria pays much attention. The regime, now headed by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was elected in 1999, appears to have no interest in stopping the violence; one former high-ranking Algerian official told me, "The state can't let terrorism die. It's the only thing keeping it afloat."

On his recent visit to Algiers, William Burns, the US assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told President Bouteflika, "Washington has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism." But what exactly does it have to learn? "If we had let the Islamists win, Algeria would have become Afghanistan and you would have had to bomb us," Nezzar said, laughing loudly. I passed on Nezzar's remark to Ahmed Djeddai, the secretary of the Socialist Forces Front, a social-democratic opposition party, largely made up of Berbers, the non-Arab minority who speak their own language and make up between 15 and 20 percent of the population. He sighed with a weary, theatrical air. "If you look at Algeria today—100,000 dead, maybe more; thousands handicapped; a million displaced—it seems to me that the generals are the ones who've turned this country into Afghanistan."

Clearly the fake democracy of Algeria is the best existing model for an occupying power to use to continue their rule by proxy. The government is extremely pro-western and the country has a secular tradition that is somewhat similar to Iraq. If a moderate State Department official is praising the Algerian leader, this is a sure sign of the current US position towards democracy in the Middle East.

My Enemy is my Liberator is my Enemy

The Guardian is staying all over the Chalabi is an Iranian spy story. Yesterday it was Andrew Cockburn adding some nice details to the story:

In the aftermath of last week's raid by Iraqi's police and US forces on the elegant Baghdad mansion currently inhabited by Ahmad Chalabi (it actually belongs to his sister), his angry spokesman cited as evidence of the intruders' barbarity the fact that they seized "even his holy Koran - his personal holy Koran was taken as a document".

If reports that US intelligence has at last woken up to Chalabi's Iranian connection are true, then taking his Koran may have been more than personal spite, since, according to a former close associate, the Pentagon's erstwhile favorite Iraqi owns one bearing an affectionate inscription from the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself, evidence of how deep and long standing a relationship he has had with the Islamic Republic. "Ahmad helped Iran very much during the war [the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s]," recalls this former associate and friend. "Khomeini was very pleased, and he sent him a copy of the Holy Koran inscribed 'To My Son Ahmed.'"

[....]

Chalabi was not shy about his Iranian intelligence connections. "When I met him in December 1997 he said he had tremendous connections with Iranian intelligence," recalls Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector. "He said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and offered to set up a meeting for me with the head of Iranian intelligence." Had Ritter made the trip (the CIA refused him permission), he would have been dealing with Chalabi's chums in Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence, a faction which regarded Saddam with a venomous hatred spawned both by the bloody war of the 1980s and the Iraqi dictator's continuing support of the terrorist Mojaheddin Khalq group.

However, the most stupefying statement comes in the last paragraph of the story:

[Bob] Baer, who served in the CIA outpost in the mid 1990s, says that "a lot of people in the CIA believe that the Iranians used Chalabi, and or Arras, to manipulate us into a war. Maybe they just thought they were steering us to keep up the pressure on Saddam, keeping him under sanctions and no fly zones, never dreaming that he would actually get the US to go to war and put the US army right on the Iranian border. It's the law of unintended consequences."

This statement reeks of denial and wishful thinking. The US military is far more of a threat to Iran while sitting in its US bases, ready to be deployed at a moments notice. The 135,000 troop currently tied down in Iraq are of absolutely no concern to the Iranians. With these troops currently unable to successfully complete their missions in Iraq, I hardly think that invading and occupying Iran is likely to be added to their task lists any time soon.

There is no evidence at all that the Iranians preferred containment over invasion. Chalabi was pushing the WMD line hard, he was feeding lies to nine different western intelligence agencies about the horrific weapons that Saddam possessed. Shiites are a majority in Iraq and there is no way they--or the Iranians--would have actively worked to only contain Saddam and therefore accept Sunni domination for generations to come. No, they wanted Saddam gone and they wanted the US to do it for them.

There is an historic precedent for Shiites using their enemies to liberate them. In the early eighties, during the Lebanese Civil War, the Shiites of southern Lebanon were basically occupied by the PLO. Israel, in 1982, retaliated for the attempted assassination of its ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, by invading Lebanon to crush the PLO. Never mind the fact that the gunmen worked for Abu Nidal, a sworn enemy of the PLO. The Shiites of southern Lebanon at first tolerated the Israeli invasion because it rid them of their hated PLO oppressors, but in 1984 Hezbollah was formed to fight the occupation. In 2000, along with its rivals Amal, they succeeded in forcing an Israeli retreat from Lebanon.

In this light one can see Chalabi not only pushing for an invasion but also promising Shiite cooperation in order to keep the number of American troops down. It is true that if the US had sent 500,000 troops into Iraq, Iran would have had something to worry about. At a little more than 100,000, the Shiites in Iraq--heavily influenced by Iran--hold the keys to a successful American occupation. The second the Shiites became dissatisfied, they can pull the rug out from under the US’s feet since occupying Iraq with a hostile Shiite population would in fact take 500,000 soldier, or about 300,000 more than the US has available. Even better, by having the US dependant on its acquiescence towards the occupation, Iran is assured that Israel will not by striking at its nascent nuclear programs any time soon. For the time being, the Shiites and Iran are content to allow the US to pour money into Iraq and to battle the potential Sunni enemy, knowing full well that at an appropriate time, they will ask the US to leave, and the Shiites will be running Iraq.

I think it would be going to far to say that the Iranians totally created the invasion of Iraq out of thin air, that the idea would have never otherwise occurred to Bush. What can be said for certain is that the Iranians enabled the invasion and helped spread the fatal overconfidence, through the optimistic reports and empty promises of Chalabi, that were ultimately to doom the invasion into a US strategic defeat, and an Iranian victory.

Not So Fast

Four Nations to Seek Delay on U.S. Resolution on Iraq

May 26 (Bloomberg) -- China, France, Germany and Russia say a U.S. and U.K. draft resolution on Iraq shouldn't be adopted by the United Nations Security Council until the Iraqi people and neighboring countries accept the interim government that is scheduled to take over from the U.S.-led coalition June 30.

``Our positions are similar,'' Russian envoy Alexander Konuzin said. ``If the government is accepted by Iraqi society it will be very easy to quickly finalize the resolution. We shall consult the new leaders. We shall invite them here.''

[....]

Konuzin repeated Russia's call for a conference in New York that would include leaders of the interim government and representatives of neighboring countries such as Iran, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. He called acceptance of the interim government by Iraq's neighbors ``very important'' to the resolution's adoption.

The Gang of Four (China, France, Germany and Russia) are holding all the cards this time around at the UN. George W. Bush, for domestic political purposes, wants a light coat of sovereignty to be applied to the next Iraqi “government”, at least until after the November US elections. He needs the UN to sovereignty-wash Iraq in order to counter growing criticism that he a unilateralist.

The Gang of Fout want contracts, oil contracts. No vetoes will be necessary, the Gang control more than enough votes to prevent any resolution being passed. In fact there is no law against them presenting their own resolution that would go far further than the current Anglo-American resolution towards giving the new Iraqi government real powers. Then it would be the US that would be forced into a position of vetoing Iraqi sovereignty.

My guess is that the Gang of Four will win this round but that after the November elections, growing chaos will force the US to desolve the caretaker government and the occupation will resume.

The Maximum-Security Iraqi Penitentiary for Traitors and Collaborators.

It was made perfectly clear in George Bush’s speech last night: that talk of Iraqi sovereignty is meaningless.

A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.

America will fund the construction of a modern maximum security prison. When that prison is completed detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then with the approval of the Iraqi government we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning.

First of all has anyone polled the citizens of Iraq as to whether they want a new maximum-security prison? And if they do want a prison, does anyone really think that the people of Iraq want the United States of America to finance (and surely build) this new prison?

Saddam Hussein’s brutal police state surely excelled at one thing; building prisons. I find it surprising that there is such a shortage that Bechtel needs to start building a new prison right away.

My guess is that if the Iraqi people decided they needed a new prison, they would prefer to design and build it themselves or get help from any other country except the US. It is not really going to be a vote winning idea for an Iraqi politician to be saying the words US and prisons in the same sentence. The signal it sends is a strong one, the US will still be in charge of Iraq after June 30th.

Dachau and Auschwitz were preserved after the Second World War as a reminder of Hitler’s genocidal policies, it is possible that Iraqis would want to preserve Abu Ghraib as a monument against torture, perhaps with help from Amnesty International It would be a huge tourist attraction if and when things finally settle down in Iraq.

Decisions like these should be left to the “sovereign” government of Iraq. Perhaps an idea competition for Iraqi architects and designers could be held, after elections, to settle Abu Ghraib’s future. The sovereign government of Iraq, and not George WTF Bush, could then make the announcement concerning the fate of Abu Ghraib.

Bush’s statement also shows that the US has no plans to leave Iraq any time soon. Designing and building a modern high-security prison is a complicated project, in the best of situations it would take three years from conception to completion. In a war zone, with an American designed building being built in a desert by workers unfamiliar with American building techniques, it will take much longer. Just getting the Iraqi workers up to speed with feet and inches is going to take some time, since surely the incompetent Young Republican project manager, that will be running his first project ever, would never let a system of measurement created by the French to be used in Iraq.

So we are looking at five to six years minimum before Abu Ghraib is torn down and there is no chance that the US will still be in Iraq at that time. If a new prison is ever built it will be by the new Iranian backed Islamist government of Iraq, led by Ayatollah Sadr, and the prison will most likely be built to house all of the Iraqis who collaborated with the US during the occupation. Ahmed Chalabi may even get his own suite.

Operation Iranian Lebensraum

America’s Newspaper of Record is, as usual, performing its job in an exemplary manner.

From today’s Guardian:

US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.
According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.

The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands.
The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr Habib were the channels for much of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case for war.
"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, said: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."

This is the kind of story that can “LBJ-ify” the Presidency of Bush II. This strikes right into the heart of his base, lays bare for all to see the utter ineptness of the current administration’s foreign policy, and makes laughable any claims that the invasion of Iraq has anything to do with “fighting” terrorism. A far better argument is that this military adventure is actually nurturing and promoting terrorism.

Elements within the intelligence community are obviously pushing this story, just as they have been feeding Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker on Abu Ghraib , and adding fuel to the fire on the Plame Affair, where an active CIA agent was outed by the Bush White House.

I find it highly unlikely the George W. Bush will remain the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidency of the United States in 2004.

Iraq Car Bomb Kills Eight U.S. Soldiers

This is very bad news. Eight dead soldiers is horrific, but if this suicide attack is the harbinger of a new insurgent tactic, it will be a devastating blow to the American led coalition in Iraq.

The goal in any insurgency is to crystallize public opinion against the occupying forces. The classic way to do this is to goad the occupiers into committing atrocities against civilians. Iraq is already a place of extreme stress for armed to the teeth American teenage and young adult soldiers. The Arab news channels are already inundating their viewers with images of the civilian suffering in Iraq, which is helping to fuel the growing insurgency. From now on, every car that approaches a checkpoint is a possible rolling bomb, ready to kill the US soldier that wants to check it for weapons. The result will be more innocent civilian casualties as overstressed troops take the easy way out of shooting and asking questions later, effectively driving a further wedge into the already shaky relationship between US troops and the Iraqi public, fueling further violence, and creating an even more stressful situation. It is hard to see an end to this cyclical amplification of violence.

Most commentators will be pointing the finger at Muqtada al-Sadr, who recently threatened to start launching martyrdom operations, which in turn will lead to further pressure on George W. Bush to launch a potentially disastrous assault on Najaf. On the political side, Bush is going to come under increasing criticism from his right-wing base for having not moved decisively against al-Sadr earlier.

The worst part of all this remains, however, the pain that the families and loved ones of these brave soldiers will feel when the news of their depature arrives.

We are witnessing the clash of two world-views in Iraq. From today's Sunday Telegraph:

US tactics condemned by British officers
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent

Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.

One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.

The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for "sub-humans".

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.

"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."

The phrase untermenschen - literally "under-people" - was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925. He used the term to describe those he regarded as racially inferior: Jews, Slaves and gipsies.

Although no formal complaints have as yet been made to their American counterparts, the officer said the British Government was aware of its commanders' "concerns and fears".

The officer explained that, under British military rules of war, British troops would never be given clearance to carry out attacks similar to those being conducted by the US military, in which helicopter gunships have been used to fire on targets in urban areas.

British rules of engagement only allow troops to open fire when attacked, using the minimum force necessary and only at identified targets.

The American approach was markedly different: "When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.

"They may well kill the terrorists in the barrage but they will also kill and maim innocent civilians. That has been their response on a number of occasions. It is trite, but American troops do shoot first and ask questions later. They are very concerned about taking casualties and have even trained their guns on British troops, which has led to some confrontations between soldiers.

"The British response in Iraq has been much softer. During and after the war the British set about trying to win the confidence of the local population. There have been problems, it hasn't been easy but on the whole it was succeeding."

The officer believed that America had now lost the military initiative in Iraq, and it could only be regained with carefully planned, precision attacks against the "terrorists".

"The US will have to abandon the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach - it has failed," he said. "They need to stop viewing every Iraqi, every Arab as the enemy and attempt to win the hearts and minds of the people.

"Our objective is to create a stable, democratic and safe Iraq. That's achievable but not in the short term. It is going to take up to 10 years."

The other side makes its case in The Washington Post:

Iraq's Governing Council to Press for Ceasefire
By Pamela Constable

FALLUJAH, Iraq, April 10 -- U.S. Marines reined in their troops in this urban war zone Saturday, allowing members of Iraq's Governing Council to meet with local leaders to try to negotiate an end to the week-long battle that has pitted 2,500 Marines against hundreds of well-armed insurgents.


Iraqi officials in Baghdad reportedly said insurgent leaders had offered through intermediaries to lay down their arms if the Marines withdraw three kilometers -- about 1.8 miles -- from the city, but it seemed unlikely that U.S. military officials would make such a deal.

Marine officials here expressed deep skepticism that the talks in a local mosque would yield any results. Their troops were impatient to plunge back into fray after a two-day lull in fighting that the U.S. military have already observed to permit tens of thousands of women and children to leave the embattled city, about 35 miles west of Baghdad.

"Given the virulent nature of the enemy, the prospect of some city father walking in and getting Joe Jihadi to give himself up is pretty slim," said Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, who commands the 5th Marine Battalion here, using the Arabic word for Islamic warrior.

"That's fine," Byrne added, "because they'll get whipped up, come out fighting again and get mowed down."

A third battalion of Marines reached Fallujah Saturday, adding more than 1,000 troops to the operation that was launched last Sunday to hunt down and wipe out an armed urban resistance, believed to include Islamic extremists, former members of Saddam Hussein's military forces and common criminals.

As the reinforcements moved into place and civilians continued to stream out of the city, the Marines prepared for a first aggressive thrust into several heavily populated districts, deploying more heavy weapons, including artillery and AC-130 gunships.

"What comes next is the destruction of anti-coalition forces in Fallujah," Byrne told reporters late Saturday. "Their only choices are to submit or die." He said his sniper teams had killed at least 40 insurgents and possibly killed another 15 since the operation, called Vigilant Resolve, began.

But the expected launch of this new offensive -- which Marine officers said Saturday morning might include air strikes from bomber jets based on aircraft carriers -- was abruptly called off at noon when word reached here of the planned negotiating visit by officials from Baghdad.

The meetings were arranged after Iraqi political and religious leaders criticized the U.S. military offensive, which one Governing Council member described as "collective punishment" for an entire city, and concerns mounted that Fallujah residents were trapped and unable to buy food, reach hospitals or bury their dead.

Long after nightfall, Byrne's forces had received no word on the outcome of the meetings, and many Marines expressed concern that the break would give their opponents a chance to regroup after five days of intense combat.

"Any pause in the battle on our part gives a chance for them to refit themselves and come back a little harder," said Sgt. Daryl Hill, 38, whose company has spent four days and nights positioned along the front line between a deserted industrial area where the Marines are based and a residential district from which snipers shoot at them.

Hill said his company, which lost a popular lieutenant and staff sergeant to enemy fire in the same incident Thursday, had since gotten help from night gunship raids. "The gunships relieved some of the stress on us, but now it's time to get moving," he said. "They took some comrades from us, but we can't sit back and grieve over our loss. It's payback time."

Marine officers and troops said they continued to come under fire from snipers with assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades as they searched Fallujah's industrial zone for weapons.

Three Marines were wounded by mortar fragments Saturday, and several mortar attacks shook the Marine base late at night.

Meanwhile, civilians poured out of the besieged city for a second day after U.S. forces urged all women and children as well as elderly men to seek safety elsewhere. Marines reported seeing thousands of people leaving by various roads Saturday, and Byrne estimated that a total of 60,000 had fled.

Byrne said residents choosing to remain were being told to stay in their homes, and he said the Marines may take food and other supplies to individual homes when they are searched.

As they prepare for a full-fledged push into the residential areas that shelter the rebels, Marine forces are being allowed to operate under slightly less restrictive rules, with field officers authorized to approve tank and artillery fire, and troops permitted to pursue attackers more aggressively. "If we're shot at, we won't knock on the door any more, we're going right in," said Sgt. Scott Moss, who was gulping a sandwich at the Marine base between 12-hour stints on the front lines. "But we expect a lot of people will be gone, and when we bring in armor, it's more for dramatic effect than to blast the whole city. It's a statement to say we're serious."

At the same time, the troops said they remained keenly aware of the need not to unnecessarily provoke or upset the civilians who have remained in the city and who may be expecting the worst.

"We trained a lot about this," said Moss. "You don't talk to people with your sunglasses on, you don't show Iraqis the bottoms of your feet, you don't bark commands." He stooped to show how he had reassured a scared child in one house being searched, dropping his gun and holding out both hands.

"I haven't had the chance to enter a building peacefully yet, but I'm looking forward to it," he said.

My blog has been on hold for some time now as I have been trying to juggle caring for our three children and working full-time. My work as an architect looks to be slowing down in the very near future, and the twins are almost one year old now, so I am going to restart the blog, albeit slowly at first, but I should be up to full speed by the end of April.

As war once again began engulfing Iraq last spring, I started reading Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace (Algeria 1954-1962)” which clarified for me what the events in Iraq during the summer and autumn that followed the invasion really meant. I am not sure if Philip Gourevitch has read the book but he has definitely seen the film and written an excellent essay about links between Algeria and Iraq.

One day late last summer, as the tally of bombings, shootings, and acts of sabotage against the American occupation in Iraq took on the unmistakable profile of a war of guerrilla insurgency, the office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, at the Pentagon, designed and distributed e-mail flyers with a cautionary headline: “how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.” The e-mail invited those involved in the “wot”—the war on terrorism—to a private screening of the Italian Marxist director Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, “The Battle of Algiers.” The movie, which will be rereleased in theatres next month, is surely the most harrowing, and realistic, political epic ever filmed. It depicts the conflict between Algerian nationalist insurgents and French colonial forces in the late nineteen-fifties, or, as the flyer put it: “Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar?”

For all the differences between France’s fight to keep Algeria—a country it had occupied since 1830—and America’s current dispensation in Iraq, the parallels between the drama of insurgency and counter-insurgency in “The Battle of Algiers” and our present Iraqi predicament are as clear and as depressing as the Pentagon film programmers promised. The ugly truth that Pontecorvo lays vividly bare, as his camera tacks back and forth between the Algerian guerrillas and the French paratroopers, is that terrorism works. For, although the film focusses on a chapter in the Algerian struggle when France succeeded in crushing the rebel movement, the final moments of the movie show how within a few years the French were forced to accept defeat and retreat, an outcome that in retrospect appears historically inevitable.

Such is the bind that the Bush Administration has led us into in Iraq. Appalling, intolerable—in all senses, maddening—as the terrorist tactics of the Iraqi insurgents may be, their truck bombs, donkey-cart missile launchers, and sniper rifles are tactical political instruments that have steadily and systematically succeeded in isolating American forces in Iraq. They have effectively driven the United Nations, the international staff of the Red Cross, and other aid groups from the country, and—more disastrously—they have fostered a mutual sense of alienation between the American forces and the Iraqi people they are supposed to be liberating.

Triumphalist pronouncements from Washington notwithstanding, our occupying forces are now clearly on the defensive. And the more aggressive their defense becomes, the more it serves the insurgents’ purposes. When an American adviser in Iraq speaks of a new strategy of “terrorism versus terrorism,” as Seymour M. Hersh reported in these pages last week, and an American lieutenant colonel tells the Times, “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them,” one may be forgiven for concluding that the enemy is defining the terms of the fight to his advantage.
In “The Battle of Algiers,” there comes a moment when the commander of the French paratroopers, Lieutenant Colonel Mathieu, realizes that, despite a spate of strategic successes against the insurgency, he is losing the larger battle for public opinion. At a press conference, reporters confront him with allegations that his men have tortured Algerian informants. Mathieu reminds the reporters that the press had originally been unanimous in calling for the suppression of the rebellion. “That’s why we were sent here,” he says. “And we’re neither crazy nor sadistic. . . . We are soldiers. Our duty is to win. Since we’re being precise, I’ll now ask you a question. Is France to remain in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, you must accept all the necessary consequences.”

President Bush has consistently assured us that America will “stay the course” in Iraq, but what he means by that—what that course is—is not clear. Just as the official reasons for the war keep shifting, so does the Administration’s proclaimed objective. For now, we are in Iraq because the President and his most influential advisers wanted to go to war there. Having made a misleading case for the war, the Bush team drastically mismanaged the crucial early period of the occupation, and has recently responded to the Iraqi insurgency by scrapping its original plan for political revitalization in favor of a hastier schedule of “Iraqization.” With Bush’s attention turning ever more urgently to holding on to the White House in next year’s election, he is pushing for the election of an Iraqi transitional government by the middle of next year. “We’re going to get out of there as quickly as we can, but not before we finish the mission at hand,” Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, explained the other day.

Unlike the French mission in Algeria, Washington’s goal in Iraq is not to prevent the people from governing their own country but to help them to do so. Presumably, the insurgents—about whose politics, allegiances, organization, and objectives shockingly little is known—also want to see Iraqis in power, if not the same ones that Washington might favor. The question “Is America to remain in Iraq?” would ultimately receive the same negative answer from the occupiers as from the guerrillas. But, as the Bush Administration pushes for speedy elections and a speedy exit, Algeria’s example is again worth bearing in mind. In the early nineties, an Islamic fundamentalist party won elections in that country by a solid majority but was prevented from taking power by the secular military, which refused to accept the democratic election of an anti-democratic government. As a result, the country descended into a civil war that is reported to have claimed a hundred thousand lives.
Right now, there is no Iraqi state and, in the absence of an Iraqi leader, President Bush holds power. Of course, Iraqis won’t get to vote for him when they do eventually go to the polls, and for that, at least, he can be grateful. His apparent impatience to get out of the country suggests that he recognizes how difficult it will be to maintain the claim that he is that country’s liberator even as he serves as Commander-in-Chief of an increasingly relentless counter-insurgency campaign. The President cannot afford to lose Iraq. What is less obvious, with the guerrillas setting the agenda, is what the price would be to win it.

As many in America hope and pray that the capture of Saddam Hussein will bring a quick end to the resistance against the occupation of Iraq, the US military has a more realistic analysis of the possible consequences that could follow the removal of the former dictator from the Iraqi political equation:

A top-secret report prepared for the American military command in Iraq just before Saddam Hussein was caught predicted that guerrilla attacks would increase after his arrest, as more anti-Saddam Iraqis joined the resistance.

The report argued that seizing Saddam could provoke more attacks by making the insurgency more acceptable to Sunni Muslims who weren't members of Saddam's Baath Party elite, according to senior administration officials who've seen it. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the report is classified.

The insurgency in Iraq has been strongest in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where most of Iraq's Sunni minority lives, and where Saddam drew his strongest political support.

Hopes that Saddam's capture might end the resistance appeared premature Tuesday, as U.S. soldiers captured a senior Iraqi rebel leader and 78 others in a raid on a northeastern village a day after guerrillas ambushed an American patrol in a firefight that left 11 assailants dead.

The top U.S. military official in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, on Tuesday conceded that Saddam's capture has had little effect on the pace of attacks on American troops. He said U.S. troops had clashed with insurgents about 18 times in the past 24 hours. That was the same as the average for the past two weeks, although drastically lower than the 40 attacks a day a month ago.

"We expect it'll be some time before we see any possible effects of what we've accomplished," Sanchez said. "As I've stated over and over, we expect the violence to continue at some level for some time. We're prepared for that."

The report says Sunnis - Baathists and non-Baathists - consider themselves the big losers because they have no place in the evolving provisional government. The majority Shiite Muslims, according to the report, are represented adequately through two parties on the Iraqi Governing Council. So are Kurdish and exile political groups. As a result, Sunnis are more willing to support the resistance, the report says.

The theory is that the Sunnis think it's better to force Americans out now, while there's still a chance of restoring Sunni political power. The Sunnis, including Saddam, have dominated Iraq's political system for most of the last century. They don't want to wait for elections, caucuses, a constitution that would hand power to the majority Shiites or the creation of an anti-Sunni coalition of Shiites and Kurds.

The influence of radical Islamists in the resistance is also likely to grow with Saddam gone. In the coming months, possible confusion caused by the rotation of U.S. troops and activities aimed at preparing for the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on July 1 also could encourage an increase in attacks.

Toussaint (All Saint’s Day) is a public holiday today across Europe; it is the day of the year that is set aside for remembering departed loved ones. Trips are often taken to cemeteries and many candles are lighted in churches. My three-year-old son is working on a painting that we will send to my sister in California to place on my father William’s grave, it was five years ago that he passed away.

Toussaint is also the day that the Algerian War began in 1954, with uprisings against French colonial rule across Algeria. The eventual victory by the F.L.N. is still regarded, across the Arab world, as the one shining example of an Arab victory against a militarily superior Western power.

Juan Cole today links to an article in the Charleston Gazette that describes a call for a “day of resistance” today in Iraq: I have not seen much mention of this in the larger, national newspapers.

Graffiti and fliers that U.S. officials believe were generated by supporters of Saddam Hussein popped up around Baghdad on Friday, calling for a three-day strike starting today to mark the beginning of an uprising against Americans.

“Nov. 1 is resistance day! No to occupation!” read some graffiti on the blue masonry wall of al Farazdak primary school. Fliers threatened that shopkeepers could be killed if they opened for business.

One flier, in Arabic, asked government employees, shopkeepers and transportation workers to stay home, warning: “Anyone who does not take this seriously will be responsible for his life and his possessions.” It also told merchants not to deal in foreign goods, even though such goods were widely available under the old regime.

So far the resistance to the American occupation of Iraq has taken the form of military/terrorist activity, i.e. bombings and attacks on foreign (American usually) soldiers. There has not really been a political element to it. Normally during a guerilla war there are lots of slogans and propaganda being thrown around. General strikes are common tool to disrupt economic activity, thereby putting pressure on the ruling entities. Within the guerrilla movements themselves, there is often much conflict between the political and military wings. But in the end the terrorists/freedom fighters have political goals in mind (i.e. the departure of the American-lead occupation and the installation of a new government that reflects the beliefs of the guerrilla movement). We are witnessing the start of a political campaign by at least one of the participants in the resistance (it is likely there are several different groups fighting the Americans, and that these groups may have very different political aims).

According to Le Monde, the general strike called for in Iraq has been generally observed:

Samedi matin, le trafic routier dans la capitale, habituellement dense, était extrêmement fluide et de nombreuses écoles étaient vides. Les parents ont préféré ne pas envoyer leurs enfants dans les établissements scolaires.

Les administrations et des organisations internationales comme CARE ou l'ONU tournaient au ralenti, une grande partie des employés ne s'étant pas rendue au travail. Des gardiens et des policiers irakiens étaient déployés devant les écoles et les établissements de la ville.

Des rumeurs se sont répandues à travers le pays sur des tracts qui auraient été distribués pour mettre en garde contre des attentats majeurs et proclamant le 1er novembre "Journée de la résistance" contre les forces de la coalition.

Saturday is the beginning of the workweek in the Islamic world. The New York Times is also reporting that the general strike has been a success:

Most Baghdad schools were deserted and normally busy shopping areas were quiet. Residents said they were worried that schools, markets and mosques could be the target of attacks.

"My family wouldn't allow my two sisters to go to school today because of the threats. Even my friends at university and college are staying at home," said Luay Adeeb, 19, a cigarette vendor in a Baghdad commercial district.

"To be honest, I'm scared, but I have to work."

The mainstream media will spin this in a couple of ways. They have been emphasizing the threat of new “spectacular” attacks against Western targets this weekend, when these fail to materialize, the “day of resistance” will be called a failure. The fact is that guerrilla movements usually don’t announce attacks a couple of days before executing them, since guerrilla movements normally prefer not to go up against the enemy at full strength and in a state of heighten awareness. I will be very surprised if there are any major attacks during this three-day period.

The other analytical trail that the mass media consumer will be corralled through will be that the Iraqi people stayed home, not out of sympathy for the resistance, but out of fear of attacks on civilian targets. At best it is extremely difficult for any observer to quantify exactly why people take certain actions, but given the amount of animosity that has built up between the American occupation and the Iraqi people, many will be taking a political decision to stay home today. In fact it is going to be quite difficult for the Bush Administration to continue the “it’s morning in Iraq” storyline if the country is regularly shut down by general strikes. In a country where people have never really been allowed a say, they may be taking the opportunity here to vote against the occupation.

The choice of Toussaint to launch the political side of the Iraqi resistance is not a coincidence. There are many strong parallels between the two conflicts, as well as some strong differences (the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is actually a better match). At the very least, the Algerian War demonstrates some of the problems that a Western power will face in trying to occupy an Arab country. The best single volume history of the conflict is A Savage War of Peace , by Alistair Horne.

I have not updated my links for a while. At the start of the Iraqi invasion I started reading the Daily Kos regularly. My favorite posting were by Steve Gilliard, who was sort of the foreign correspondent for Kos. Anyway, Steve has started his own blog, please go check it out.

It looks like the Kay Report that was supposed to prove what a wise choice it had been to spend $7 billion a week on the Iraqi invasion and occupation by documenting what a clear and present danger the Saddam Hussein was to the rest of the world, is going to finally see the light of day. This should knock about ten more points off Bush’s numbers, if it’s followed up by some strong Democratic attacks.

The hunt for weapons of mass destruction yields – nothing.

Intelligence claims of huge Iraqi stockpiles were wrong, says report

Julian Borger in Washington, Ewen MacAskill and Patrick Wintour
Thursday September 25, 2003
The Guardian

An intensive six-month search of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction has failed to find a single trace of an illegal arsenal, according to accounts of a report circulated in Washington and London.

A draft of the report, compiled by the CIA-led 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group (ISG), has been sent to the White House, the Pentagon and Downing Street, a US intelligence source said, and will contain no evidence of Iraqi stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

"It demonstrates that the main judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in October 2002, that Saddam had hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological agents ready, are false," said the source.

The timing of this disclosure could hardly be worse for Tony Blair, just days before the start of the Labour party conference. Iraq has dogged the prime minister almost continuously for five months, overshadowing the domestic agenda. Downing Street had been hoping for respite after the end of Lord Hutton's inquiry, which closes today.

Mr Blair put forward Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the reason for going to war and he has repeatedly insisted that the weapons would be found.

He told a sceptical Conservative MP in the Commons on April 30 that he was absolutely convinced that Iraq had such weapons and predicted that, when the report was published, "you and others will be eating some of your words."

Although Downing Street last night officially dismissed the leak as speculation, government sources confirmed that it was accurate.

A No 10 spokesman said: "People should wait. The reports today are speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report that has not even been presented yet. And when it comes it will be an interim report. The ISG's work will go on."

He added: "Our clear expectation is that this interim report will not reach firm conclusions about Iraq's possession of WMD."

The government defence will be to stress that failure to find WMD does not mean that it does not exist.

Last night's leak will fuel the anti-war sentiment ahead of Saturday's demonstration in London for withdrawal of US and British troops from Iraq. It will also make it harder for Labour party organisers to resist grassroots pressure for a debate on Iraq.

The interim report is at present pencilled in for publication next week but the Labour, party, anxious to avoid it landing in the middle of its conference, is trying to get that changed.

The results of the ISG's search are also disappointing for the White House.

There is a debate within the administration over whether the report would be delivered to Congress at all, but congressional aides said they expected to hear from the head of the ISG, the former UN in spector David Kay, as early as next week.

He arrived back from Iraq last Wednesday and since then has been working on the report.

It is now thought that the ISG investigation will dwell on Saddam Hussein's capability and intentions.

The NIE was put together by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies, and claimed that the Iraqi leader had chemical and biological stockpiles, and a continuing nuclear programme that could produce a home-made bomb before the end of the decade.

The NIE became a key document in the propaganda war waged by President Bush in the runup to the invasion of Iraq in March, although intelligence officials warned that many of the nuances and cautionary notes from original reports had been removed from the final documents.

According to accounts of the ISG draft, captured Iraqi scientists gave the investigation an account of how weapons were destroyed, but those accounts refer back to the period immediately after the 1991 Gulf war.

The nuclear section of the survey group has also finished its work and left Iraq.

After addressing the Senate in July, a bullish Mr Kay claimed "solid evidence" was being gathered and warned journalists to expect "surprises".

No such surprises appear to be in the draft.

The CIA took the unusual step of playing down expectations of the report yesterday. "Dr Kay is still receiving information from the field. It will be just the first progress report, and we expect that it will reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out," the chief agency spokesman, Bill Harlow, said.

An intelligence official added yesterday that the timing of the report's release "had yet to be determined".

In London, a Foreign Office spokesman said: "It is David Kay's report. We do not have it. We will comment on it when it is presented.

"When it comes, it will be an interim report. ISG's work will continue. The reports are speculation about an unfinished draft of an interim report that has not yet even been presented yet."

David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, said: "It's clear that the US and British governments wildly exaggerated the case for going to war." But he added that the fact that the survey group had not found concrete evidence of weapons did not mean that the Baghdad regime did not have programmes to quickly reconstitute programmes and weapons at short notice.

"Just because they can't find it, doesn't mean its not there," Mr Albright said.

"I'm not surprised, given how incompetent this search had been. They've had bad relations with the [Iraqi] scientists from the start because they treated them all as criminals."

Many of the Iraqi scientists and officials who surrendered to US forces have been held in detention for months without contact with their families, despite assurances they would be well treated if they cooperated.

But recently the Bush administration, under mounting pressure to justify the invasion, has been trying to improve the incentives for former Saddam loyalists to provide information.

Reuters quoted a senior US official yesterday as saying that the former defence minister, Sultan Hashim Ahmed, had been given "effective" immunity in the hope that he would provide information on Saddam's weapons programmes.

The foreign secretary Jack Straw, speaking at the United Nations general assembly in New York, declined to comment on the ISG report.

"If people want evidence, they don't have to wait for Dr Kay's report, what they can do is look at the volumes of reports from the weapons inspectors going back over a dozen years including the final report from Unmovic on March 7 this year, which set out 29 separate areas of unanswered disarmament questions to Iraq," he said.

The shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, described the leak as "another damaging blow to the prime minister's credibility" and renewed calls for a judicial inquiry into the war.

The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell, said: "If this report is true, there was no

Al-Qaeda the winner: Beazley
By Don Woolford
September 24, 2003
The Australian

OSAMA bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been winners from the Iraq war, former Opposition leader Kim Beazley said tonight.

Mr Beazley said the removal of Saddam Hussein gave al-Qaeda the opportunity to operate freely in Iraq and the war had taken pressure off Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The former defence minister, who lost a Labor leadership challenge against Simon Crean in the middle of the year, said in a Perth lecture United States forces in Iraq were a magnet for anti-American Jihadists through the region.

"It is probable that Saddam's security services had communication with al- Qaeda from the time of the organisation's foundation," Mr Beazley said.

"It is also true that bin Laden made supportive remarks about Hussein in the lead up to the war.

"These are tactical issues. Strategically the removal of Saddam Hussein and the provision of political opportunity for jihadist forces to operate freely in Iraq has been a core al-Qaeda objective.

"There is little yet in the Iraqi outcome to cause bin Laden regret."

Mr Beazley said from al- Qaeda's point of view, the shift of the focus from Afghanistan and pressure on Pakistan was even more satisfactory.

This was where bin Laden had been bottled up.

Mr Beazley said Afghanistan was a disgrace.

A resurgent Taliban had been able to move from individual terror acts to more complex military campaigns, temporarily seizing territory, terrifying populations and undermining the government.

This had forced alliances with warlords who flouted control from Kabul and lived off the proceeds of crime, including drug sales to Australians.

"It is good that Saddam has gone, but the price has been high enough to provide an argument for a different way of doing it," he said.

For anyone who still may be questioning whether it was incompetence or just outright lying that led the Bush Administration to claim that Iraq possessed WMD’s and were about to destroy the “free” world with them, the following transcript may clear up the debate:

Transcript: Briefing by Secretary Colin Powell, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amre Moussa

(Iraq sanctions, Mideast peace, U.S.-Egyptian ties)

Following is a transcript of the Powell-Moussa briefing: 24 February 2001
(begin transcript)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman (Jerusalem)
For Immediate Release
February 25, 2001

Remarks by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell And Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa Ittihadiya Palace Cairo, Egypt February 24, 2001

QUESTION: The Egyptian press editorial commentary that we have seen here has been bitterly aggressive in denouncing the U.S. role and not welcoming you. I am wondering whether you believe you accomplished anything during your meetings to assuage concerns about the air strikes against Iraq and the continuing sanctions?

SECRETARY POWELL: I received a very warm welcome from the leaders and I know there is some unhappiness as expressed in the Egyptian press. I understand that, but at the same time, with respect to the no-fly zones and the air strikes that we from time to time must conduct to defend our pilots, I just want to remind everybody that the purpose of those no-fly zones and the purpose of those occasional strikes to protect our pilots, is not to pursue an aggressive stance toward Iraq, but to defend the people that the no-fly zones are put in to defend. The people in the southern part of Iraq and the people in the northern part of Iraq, and these zones have a purpose, and their purpose is to protect people -- protect Arabs -- not to affect anything else in the region. And we have to defend ourselves.

We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. (Emphasis added ) So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue

I usually ignore Friedman’s amateurish attempts to show he knows something about foreign policy, but when I saw the title of today’s commentary, I had to take a peek.

Our War With France

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The New York Times


It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.

This sounds a bit like the outburst of an angry child who, after being told repeatedly by his parents not to play with matches, ended up getting burned anyway when he ignored the warnings.

“I hate you Mommy”

If you add up how France behaved in the run-up to the Iraq war (making it impossible for the Security Council to put a real ultimatum to Saddam Hussein that might have avoided a war), and if you look at how France behaved during the war (when its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to answer the question of whether he wanted Saddam or America to win in Iraq), and if you watch how France is behaving today (demanding some kind of loopy symbolic transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to some kind of hastily thrown together Iraqi provisional government, with the rest of Iraq's transition to democracy to be overseen more by a divided U.N. than by America), then there is only one conclusion one can draw: France wants America to fail in Iraq.

Friedman makes it clear here that France is obviously rattling its sabers in a dangerous, high-stakes game of Strategic Reverse Psychology. Knowing full well that Bush and his neo-con gurus will instinctively do the opposite of what ever France tell them to do, the Gauls have purposefully ensnarled us into this Iraqi quagmire.

If only France 2 had shown footage of Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin home in his chateau, , seated in his recliner watching Fox in nothing but his boxer shorts and a Bud, cheering every time a bomb exploded during the Shock and Awe phase of the ongoing Iraqi war, then our soldiers would have had the proper fighting spirit to make it through the long struggle that they then faced.

“Look Junior, I’m sorry about your burnt fingers, but I told your repeatedly not to play with matches.”

“Mommy, you just want me to fail in life!”

France wants America to sink in a quagmire there in the crazy hope that a weakened U.S. will pave the way for France to assume its "rightful" place as America's equal, if not superior, in shaping world affairs.

This sounds something like an actual conspiracy theory.

“Mommy, I know you put those matches in our neighbors backyard purposely so that I would find them.”

Yes, the Bush team's arrogance has sharpened French hostility. Had President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld not been so full of themselves right after America's military victory in Iraq — and instead used that moment, when the French were feeling that maybe they should have taken part, to magnanimously reach out to Paris to join in reconstruction — it might have softened French attitudes. But even that I have doubts about.

What I have no doubts about, though, is that there is no coherent, legitimate Iraqi authority able to assume power in the near term, and trying to force one now would lead to a dangerous internal struggle and delay the building of the democratic institutions Iraq so badly needs. Iraqis know this. France knows this, which is why its original proposal (which it now seems to be backtracking on a bit) could only be malicious.

What Friedman does not understand here is that the clock is ticking, and I would say sometime around Thanksgiving the Shia’s are going to very politely order us out of their country, for the simple reason that there is no coherent, legitimate American authority able to assume power in the near term, and trying to force one now would lead to a dangerous internal struggle and delay the building of the democratic institutions Iraq so badly needs.

What is so amazing to me about the French campaign — "Operation America Must Fail" — is that France seems to have given no thought as to how this would affect France. Let me spell it out in simple English: if America is defeated in Iraq by a coalition of Saddamists and Islamists, radical Muslim groups — from Baghdad to the Muslim slums of Paris — will all be energized, and the forces of modernism and tolerance within these Muslim communities will be on the run. To think that France, with its large Muslim minority, where radicals are already gaining strength, would not see its own social fabric affected by this is fanciful.

Friedman uses Israeli-style racist thinking to come to his usual wrong conclusions. First of all, America is well on its way to being beaten by Iraqis, full stop. The coming withdrawal will only serve to unite the Muslim and Christian communities in France as both groups will be out in the streets, hand in hand, celebrating America’s humiliation.

If France were serious, it would be using its influence within the European Union to assemble an army of 25,000 Eurotroops, and a $5 billion reconstruction package, and then saying to the Bush team: Here, we're sincere about helping to rebuild Iraq, but now we want a real seat at the management table. Instead, the French have put out an ill-conceived proposal, just to show that they can be different, without any promise that even if America said yes Paris would make a meaningful contribution.

“Mommy, if you really loved me, you would buy me a hundred Bic lighters.”

But then France has never been interested in promoting democracy in the modern Arab world, which is why its pose as the new protector of Iraqi representative government — after being so content with Saddam's one-man rule — is so patently cynical.

Actually if Friedman had any historic perspective, he would have commented here about how France supported Algeria when it called off legislative elections in 1992. I have read a number of embarrassing (for France, that is) quotes about how democracy is a slow process.

Clearly, not all E.U. countries are comfortable with this French mischief, yet many are going along for the ride. It's stunning to me that the E.U., misled by France, could let itself be written out of the most important political development project in modern Middle East history. The whole tone and direction of the Arab-Muslim world, which is right on Europe's doorstep, will be affected by the outcome in Iraq. It would be as if America said it did not care what happened in Mexico because it was mad at Spain.

This sounds like some cheesy power-point, dot-com era, pitch for re-capitalization. “This is one of the most important e-commerce marketing projects in modern Bay Area history, please contribute $20,000 and work sixteen hours a day for the next two years for free“

Says John Chipman, director of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies: "What the Europeans are saying about Iraq is that this is our backyard, we're not going to let you meddle in it, but we're not going to tend it ourselves."

Look, the French and British “tended” that backyard for a number of years after the fall of the Ottoman empire. Most of the current problems can now be directly linked to various military dictatorships that were “tended” into place by a number of different American administrations.

But what's most sad is that France is right — America will not be as effective or legitimate in its efforts to rebuild Iraq without French help. Having France working with us in Iraq, rather than against us in the world, would be so beneficial for both nations and for the Arabs' future. Too bad this French government has other priorities.

“Oh come on Mommy, lets just light up the whole house!”

A hail of bullets, a trail of dead, and a mystery the US is in no hurry to resolve

By Robert Fisk
13 September 2003

A human brain lay beside the highway. It was scattered in the sand, blasted from its owner's head when the Americans ambushed their own Iraqi policemen.

A few inches away were a policeman's teeth, broken but clean dentures, the teeth of a young man. "I don't know if they are the teeth of my brother - I don't even know if my brother is alive or dead," Ahmed Mohamed shouted at me. "The Americans took the dead and the wounded away - they won't tell us anything."

Ahmed Mohamed was telling the truth. He is also, I should add, an Iraqi policeman working for the Americans. United States forces in Iraq officially stated - incredibly - that they had "no information" about the killing of the 10 cops and the wounding of five others early yesterday morning. Unfortunately, the Americans are not telling the truth.

Soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division fired thousands of bullets in the ambush, hundreds of them smashing into the wall of a building in the neighbouring Jordanian Hospital compound, setting several rooms on fire.

And if they really need "information", they have only to look at the 40mm grenade cartridges scattered in the sand near the brains and teeth.

On each is printed the coding "AMM LOT MA-92A170-024". This is a US code for grenades belt-fired from an American M-19 gun.

And out in Fallujah, where infuriated Iraqi civilians roamed the streets after morning prayers looking for US patrols to stone, it wasn't difficult to put the story together. The local American-trained and American-paid police chief, Qahtan Adnan Hamad - who confirmed that 10 died - described how, not long after midnight yesterday morning, gunmen in a BMW car had opened fire on the Mayor's office in Fallujah.

Two squads of the American-trained and American-paid police force - from the local Fallujah constabulary established by US forces last month and the newly constituted Iraqi national police - set off in pursuit.

Since the Americans will not reveal the truth, let Ahmed Mohamed, whose 28-year-old brother, Walid, was one of the policemen who gave chase, tell his story.

"We have been told that the BMW opened fire on the mayor's office at 12.30 am. The police chased them in two vehicles, a Nissan pick-up and a Honda car and they set off down the old Kandar roads towards Baghdad.

"But the Americans were there in the darkness, outside the Jordanian Hospital, to ambush cars on the road. They let the BMW through, then fired at the police cars."

One of the policemen who was wounded in the second vehicle said the Americans suddenly appeared on the darkened road. "When they shouted at us, we stopped immediately," he said. "We tried to tell them we were police. They just kept on shooting."

The latter is true. I found thousands of brass cartridge cases at the scene, piles of them like autumn leaves glimmering in the sun, along with the dark green grenade cartridges. There were several hundred unfired bullets but - far more disturbing - was the evidence on the walls of a building at the Jordanian Hospital. At least 150 rounds had hit the breeze- block wall and two rooms had burned out, the flames blackening the outside of the building.

And therein lies another mystery that the Americans were yesterday in no hurry to resolve. Several Iraqis said that a Jordanian doctor in the hospital had been killed and five nurses wounded. Yet when I approached the hospital gate, I was confronted by three armed men who said they were Jordanian. To enter hospitals here now, you must obtain permission from the occupation authorities in Baghdad - which is rarely, if ever, forthcoming.

No-one wants journalists prowling round dismal mortuaries in "liberated" Iraq. Who knows what they might find?

"The doctors have gone to prayer so you cannot come in," an unsmiling Jordanian gunman at the gate told me. On the roof of the shattered hospital building, two armed and helmeted guards watched us. They looked to me very like Jordanian troops. And their hospital is opposite a US 3rd Infantry Division base. Are the Jordanians here for the Americans? Or are the Americans guarding the Jordanian Hospital? When I asked if the bodies of the dead policemen were here, the armed man at the gate shrugged his shoulders.

So what happened? Did the Americans shoot down their Iraqi policemen under the mistaken impression that they were "terrorists" - Saddamite or al-Qa'ida, depending on their faith in President George Bush - and then, once their bullets had smashed into the hospital, come under attack from the Jordanian guards on the roof?

In any other land, the Americans would surely have acknowledged some of the truth.

But all they would speak of yesterday were their own casualties. Two US soldiers were killed and seven wounded in a raid in the neighbouring town of Ramadi when the occupants of a house fired back at them.

It gave the impression, of course, that American lives were infinitely more valuable than Iraqi lives. And had the brains and teeth beside the road outside Fallujah been American brains and teeth, of course, they would have been removed. There were other things beside the highway yesterday. A torn, blood-stained fragment of an American- supplied Iraqi policeman's shirt, a primitive tourniquet and medical gauze and lots and lots of dried, blackened blood. The 3rd Infantry Division are tired, so the story goes here. They invaded Iraq in March and haven't been home since. Their morale is low. Or so they say in Fallujah and Baghdad. But already the cancer of rumour is beginning to turn this massacre into something far more dangerous. Here are the words of Ahmed, whose brother Sabah was a policeman caught in the ambush and taken away by the Americans - alive or dead, he doesn't know - and who turned up to examine the blood and cartridge cases yesterday. "The Americans were forced to leave Fallujah after much fighting following their killing of 16 demonstrators in April. They were forced to hire a Fallujah police force. But they wanted to return to Fallujah so they arranged the ambush. The BMW gunmen' were Americans who were supposed to show there was no security in Fallujah - so the Americans could return. Our police kept crying out: We are the police - we are the police'. And the Americans went on shooting." In vain did I try to explain that the last thing Americans wanted to do was return to the Sunni Muslim Saddamite town of Fallujah. Already they have paid "blood money" to the families of local, innocent Iraqis shot down at their checkpoints. They will have to do the same to the tribal leader whose two sons they also killed at another checkpoint near Fallujah on Thursday night. But why did the Americans kill so many of their own Iraqi policemen? Had they not heard the radio appeals of the dying men? Why - and here the story of the Jordanian Hospital guards and the policemen's relatives were the same - did the Americans go on shooting for an hour and a half? And why did the Americans say that they had "no information" about the slaughter 18 hours after they had gunned down 10 of the very men whom President Bush needs most if he wishes to extricate his army from the Iraqi death trap?

Wounded troops shouldn't be billed for hospital meals

By Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Friday, September 12, 2003

ARLINGTON, Va. — Talk about adding insult to injury, said one U.S. Congressman. Troops wounded in combat in the nation’s war on terrorism are being handed more than just discharge papers when they leave military hospitals — some also are getting a bill. At a daily rate of $8.10, hospitalized troops, including those wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, are being charged for their meals. “I was amazed. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it,” said Rep. C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, who has introduced a bill to repeal what he calls an “offensive” law. “Some things don’t meet the common-sense test, and this is one of them,” said a soldier injured in Iraq in June, and who has received two meal bills, one for $24.30 from the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and a second for more than $300 from the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. “It’s not a good precedent to have when a servicemember, having received wounds in Iraq, to see the first correspondence from his government after he gets out is a bill to pay for the hospital stay,” said the 16-year Army veteran, who asked his name not be used for fear of reprisal. The law now in effect was set in place to prevent troops from double- dipping, said Lt. Col. Rose-Ann Lynch, a Pentagon spokeswoman. “Deployments aside, if any servicemember is in a military hospital, they are getting meals paid for by the military. If they were regularly collecting BAS, Basic Allowance for Subsistence — the monies received monthly for personal subsistence — they are obligated to pay for the hospital meals. If the servicemember is not receiving BAS, they will not be charged for the meals. “In a nutshell, a servicemember cannot receive the meal and the money, too,” Lynch said. Enlisted troops have the fee automatically deducted from their paychecks, while officers have to visit hospital cashiers and pay their meal ticket out of pocket, said Bill Swisher, a spokesman at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where approximately 1,250 patients from Operation Iraqi Freedom have been treated since the war began. To make a point about their objection, Young and his wife, Beverly, recently paid the $210.60 hospital from the National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for a Marine Corps reservist who lost part of his foot during a recent deployment in which, according to Young, a 10-year-old Iraqi dropped a grenade in the staff sergeant’s Humvee. “We paid the bill, and when we did, we reminded the hospital commander we did it. “But I have to tell you … they don’t like to have to do it. In fact, they’re almost embarrassed to present a bill to the wounded troops,” Young said during an interview. Young’s proposed legislation, which he said he hopes to tack on to the 2004 Defense spending bill now in conference as the House and Senate work out differences, would amend the current law to prohibit charging servicemembers who are hospitalized as a result of being injured or wounded while in combat or training for combat, Young said. Military hospitals have been charging officers for their food since 1958. Enlisted members have had to pay the tab since 1981. “No one wants to see these men and women have to write a check for their hospital stay, least of all the staff of our nation’s military hospitals,” Young said. “We should be honoring and thanking those in uniform for their service to the cause of peace and freedom, not billing them for their food. “And we should be doing all we can to help them recover from their injuries, not ask them to write a check to the U.S. Government.

On a recent trip to California, I was astounded by some of my more intellectually challenged relative’s obsession with illegal immigration. Apparently they had become hooked on some rightwing radio and televison stations and were hopping mad about the fact that children of illegal immigrants are allowed to attend “schools” in California. With all the problems in America at the moment, I was a little taken aback that immigration was seen to be a major concern. Barely mentioned was the fact that “schools” there close at 1:30pm now because of budget cuts.

In response, I say we need to support our troops, so be nice to our illegal immigrant friends:

Pentagon targets Latinos and Mexicans to man the front lines in war on terror

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
The Independent

10 September 2003

With the casualty rate in Iraq growing by the day and President George Bush's worldwide "war on terrorism" showing no signs of abating, a stretched United States military is turning increasingly to Latinos - including tens of thousands of non-citizen immigrants - to do the fighting and dying on its behalf.

Senior Pentagon officials have identified Latinos as by far the most promising ethnic group for recruitment, because their numbers are growing rapidly in the US and they include a plentiful supply of low-income men of military age with few other job or educational prospects.

Recruitment efforts have also extended to non- citizens, who have been told by the Bush administration that they can apply for citizenship the day they join up, rather than waiting the standard five years after receiving their green card. More than 37,000 non-citizens, almost all Latino, are currently enlisted. Recruiters have even crossed the border into Mexico - to the fury of the Mexican authorities - to look for school- leavers who may have US residency papers.

The aim, according to Pentagon officials, is to boost the Latino numbers in the military from roughly 10 per cent to as much as 22 per cent. That was the figure cited recently by John McLaurin, a deputy assistant secretary of the army, as the size of the "Hispanic ... recruiting market", and it has also been bandied about in the pages of the Army Times.

But while officials praise the willingness of Mexican Americans and other Latinos, the strategy has been denounced by anti-war groups as a cynical exploitation of impoverished young men who are lined up to be little more than cannon fodder.

Rick Jahnkow, of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft, said: "They are vulnerable economically. That's why they are targeting them. [These people are] going to provide them with the means to carry out future wars."

Recent statistics from the Pew Hispanic Centre, a non-partisan think-tank, show that Latinos are already doing the most dangerous combat jobs in disproportionate numbers. While they are still under- represented in the armed forces as a whole - they made up 9.4 per cent of enlisted men in 2001, compared with 13.4 per cent of the general population - they are over- represented in jobs that involve handling weapons (17.7 per cent).

In Iraq, the first US casualty was a Latino non- citizen, a Guatemalan orphan raised in Los Angeles called Jose Gutierrez. Although a precise breakdown of ethnic numbers is not available, the Pentagon's list of dead and wounded has included dozens of Spanish names. At least 10 out of almost 300 dead have been non-citizens.

An ethnic group has never before been the target of such a recruitment drive.

In the Vietnam war, when the US military was still conscripting soldiers for compulsory service, the de facto characteristic of the men who did the fighting and dying was class. Poor people - whether black, white or Mexican - were much more likely to be drafted, and more likely to find themselves in the front lines.

Now the military operates what Mr Jahnkow calls a "poverty draft" - selling itself as an attractive career option or stepping stone to further education in communities that have few other options. In the poorer parts of the country, army recruiters talk to children as early as primary school. At a predominantly Latino high school in east Los Angeles, students became so exasperated by the presence of army recruiters at careers fairs that they began a campaign to get rid of them with the slogan "students not soldiers".

Such activities are apparently common even across the border. A recruiter in San Diego told an Army radio show: "It's more or less common practice that some recruiters go to Tijuana to distribute pamphlets, or in some cases they look for someone to help distribute the information on the Mexican side." A recruiter who visited a technical high school in Tijuana in May triggered a diplomatic incident after the headmaster threw him out and the Mexican government protested vehemently to Washington. The army subsequently sought to deny that this was standard practice.

A generation of Americans, after the first Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, is getting its first experience of what losing a war feels like.

From today’s Independent

Britain and US will back down over WMDs

By Andy McSmith, Raymond Whitaker and Geoffrey Lean

07 September 2003

Britain and the US have combined to come up with entirely new explanations of why they went to war in Iraq as inspectors on the ground prepare to report that there are no weapons of mass destruction there.

The "current and serious" threat of Iraq's WMD was the reason Tony Blair gave for going to war, but last week the Prime Minister delivered a justification which did not mention the weapons at all. On the same day John Bolton, US Under- Secretary of State for arms control, said that whether Saddam Hussein's regime actually possessed WMD "isn't really the issue".

The 1,400-strong Iraq Survey Group, sent out in May to begin an intensive hunt for the elusive weapons, is expected to report this week that it has found no WMD hardware, nor even any sign of active programmes. The inspectors, headed by David Kay, a close associate of President George Bush, are likely to say the only evidence it has found is that the Iraqi government had retained a group of scientists who had the expertise to restart the weapons programme at any time.

Foreshadowing the report, Mr Bolton said the issue was not weapons, or actual programmes, but "the capability that Iraq sought to have ... WMD programmes". Saddam, he claimed, kept "a coterie" of scientists he was preserving for the day when he could build nuclear weapons unhindered by international constraints. "Whether he possessed them today or four years ago isn't really the issue," he said. "As long as that regime was in power, it was determined to get nuclear, chemical and biological weapons one way or another. Until that regime was removed from power, that threat remained - that was the purpose of the military action."

Last week Mr Blair declared at his Downing Street press conference: "Let me say why I still believe Iraq was the right thing to do and why it is essential that we see it through. If we succeed in putting Iraq on its feet as a stable, prosperous and democratic country, then what a huge advertisement that is for the values of democracy and human rights, and what a huge defeat it is for these terrorists who want to establish extremist states."

He added that if anyone were to ask the average Iraqi whether they would prefer to be still living under the old regime, "they would look at as if you were completely crazy".

This contrasts starkly with what the Prime Minister said in his speech to the Commons on 18 March, the day when MPs voted to endorse the decision to go to war. Then Mr Blair asserted, "I have never put the justification for action as regime change."

Just as Britain and the US send more troops to Iraq and seek international help to restore stability, it has emerged that Mr Blair, almost alone among leaders of major nations, is to stay away from the opening of the UN General Assembly later this month. The development is bound to increase the Prime Minister's isolation following his decision to join the US in going to war without a UN resolution, and has led to speculation that he is reluctant to leave the country at a time when his conduct is under examination in the Hutton inquiry.

Downing Street yesterday refused to comment on the grounds that it does not disclose the Prime Minister's movements in advance. But this has not applied to other international summits, where his attendance has been announced well in advance.

From the Observer:

Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career

Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff

Sunday September 7, 2003

George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.

Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.

The President has been left with little practical choice. Concern among the American public has reached such a pitch that, with his approval ratings plummeting, he will deliver a televised address to the nation tonight to reassure them that they do not face another Vietnam. With their sons and daughters dying daily in guerrilla attacks, Americans may now be becoming more frightened of being bogged down in a hostile country than of the terrorist threat against which Bush has pledged to defend them.

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The question now being asked on both sides of the Atlantic is how the allies could find themselves in such trouble. One key mistake both Washington and London made was to assume that, once Baghdad fell, countries such as France and Germany, which had stood on the sidelines, would relent and offer peacekeeping troops. They underestimated the unexpected domestic popularity of anti-war leaders.

'That was the diplomatic advice. That was what we believed would happen, and it didn't,' said one Whitehall source. 'What we were unable to read was how popular the decision [to stay out of Iraq] would be in the long run for the leaders who took it.'

In New York, diplomats were upbeat last night about the chances of securing a UN resolution allowing troops to operate under a UN mandate but with the US retaining operational command. One source in the office of the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said such an agreement could 'transform the occupation'.

Complications remain, however. The French and, to a lesser extent, the Germans are playing it tough, aware that they have Bush over a barrel, British sources say. 'They can squeeze more concessions out of Bush at the moment and they know it,' one source said.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who flew to Lake Garda in Italy for an informal meeting with his European Union counterparts late last week, is attempting to mediate between EU governments and the White House, but have want a fundamental shift in US policy on Iraq. Sticking points include a firm timetable for handing over power to Iraqi authorities, drawing up a constitution and holding elections.

Other anti-war nations, such as Russia, China and Germany, have signalled that they expect a deal. 'It is a remarkable change for the better,' Chile's UN ambassador and Security Council member Heraldo Munoz told The Observer.

After being sidelined in the build-up to the war the UN is now moving centre stage, but it the risks of becoming embroiled in a dangerous, unpredictable mission means few nations will be willing to take casualties without securing serious concessions. 'The US has come seeking assistance and there will be a price for it,' said one senior UN diplomat.

But Bush has now accepted the warnings of his Secretary of State Colin Powell and the more hawkish Under Secretary John Bolton that there will be a worse price if he doesn't back down. Bush's approval ratings have sunk to around 55 per cent - around 20 points lower than those of his father after the 1991 Gulf War.

Bush Senior still went on to lose the next election: and the American economy is more fragile now than it was then. The nation can ill afford the extra $60 billion the White House is expected to ask Congress to occupy and rebuild Iraq next year, and sabotage to Iraqi oil pipelines and infrastructure means oil revenues will not rescue them.

Although the polls show Bush would still beat any likely Democrat contender, Bolton argues that approval ratings are a better guide. Voters feel it is unpatriotic to threaten to vote against a President during a war, so the polls could underestimate Bush's plight.

The Democrats, who once saw Iraq as their weakness, now scent blood: last week's live televised debate between eight Democratic candidates echoed to easy potshots at the President, with front-runner Howard Dean saying it was time for troops to come home.


Yet more than Bush's political survival resting on the outcome of the talks: with less domestic support than Bush for the war to start with, Blair is even more vulnerable to public anger if British casualties go rising. A leaked memo from Straw, published in the Daily Telegraph last week, warned that up to 5,000 extra British troops might be necessary or the Iraqi mission risked failure.

Its emergence has, however, only fuelled suspicions at Westminster about the skill with which Straw is now positioning himself over Iraq. He has managed to escape being summoned before the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly, even though his department originally employed the scientist, or embroiled in the wider row about intelligence in the run-up to the war.

With the departure of key Blairites such as former Health Secretary Alan Milburn from the Cabinet, Straw is now considered a possible contender as the 'anyone but Gordon' candidate to succeed Tony Blair, and MPs report he has been cosying up to the Parliamentary Labour Party since the early summer. With Blair facing another three weeks of minute scrutiny by Lord Hutton over every twist and turn of the run-up to the Iraq war, nerves are taut.

Similarly in Washington, a rapid revision of the pecking order in the White House is going on, with the hawks wrongfooted by the unravelling of their thesis on Iraq. 'They were true believers, and are stunned by the fact that its not worked out,' said the University of San Francisco political scientist Richard Stoll.

A classified report drawn up by the US US Joint Chiefs of Staff and leaked last week blamed hurried and inadequate planning for the crisis, with too great a focus on an invasion and not enough on organising the peace. As the leading dove, Powell's stock is now rising in the White House, while that of the President's hawkish National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is judged to be falling.

'Condi Rice is in trouble,' said one Whitehall source.

'She has been consistently wrong since this thing started, wrong about what would happen, and Colin Powell has been consistently right.' The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's insistence during a trip to Iraq last week that the situation was 'getting better every day' is also ringing increasingly hollow.

Rumbling in the background in America, meanwhile, is the same debate that is at the foreground of Westminster politics: question marks over intelligence. Although the official line in Washington is that weapons of mass destruction are still being looked for, there is no sign of the 38,000 litres of deadly botulintoxin or the 25,000 litres of anthrax or the 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent claimed by Bush in his State of the Union speech last January as a justification for going to war.

The President has much to explain to the American people when he takes to the airwaves tonight.

This war on terrorism is bogus

Michael Meacher
Saturday September 6, 2003
The Guardian

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al- Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".


The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre- empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al- Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so- called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

From the Guardian:

The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America's air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.

The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America's air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.

Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US environmental protection agency next week say they amount to a death knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US regulation.

The rules could represent the biggest defeat for American environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired power stations.

The regulations are being challenged by 13 states including New York. If adopted, they would represent a multi-million dollar victory for energy corporations, most of whom are significant Republican contributors, and who were consulted in the drafting of the administration's energy plan by vice-president Dick Cheney in 2001.

The US accounts for a quarter of the world's carbon emissions, 10% more than all of western Europe combined. Environmentalists fear that, by relaxing its controls even further, America could undermine attempts to persuade other countries to stick to the targets laid out by Kyoto.

From the Independent:

The Bush administration is planning to overturn a key provision of the Clean Air Act, in effect giving industrial companies a green light to update their facilities without regard for pollution controls, according to a White House document leaked yesterday.

The measure would save firms hundreds of millions of dollars while significantly increasing industrial emissions and almost certainly contributing to global warming.

At some point the continued survival of the planet and the continued pursuit of the American lifestyle are going to become mutually exclusive. Americans make up only 4% of the world’s population. Are the other 96% just going to sit back and allow such a tiny minority to destroy the world?

Round 2 of the Yellowcake Presidential lies scandal involves the famous claim that it would take Iraq 45 minutes after the order was given to launch a holocaust of chemical and biological weapons towards its neighbors and as far away as the island of Cyprus. Yesterdays Washington Post started this new round of charges that have already been burning hot across the pond in England for the past month:


The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.

The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide on Friday of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government's use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain's public "dossier" on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair -- and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable. [….}

The 45-minute accusation is particularly noteworthy because of the furor it has caused in Britain, where the charge originated. A parliamentary inquiry determined earlier this month that the claim "did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier, because it was based on intelligence from a single, uncorroborated source." The inquiry also concluded that "allegations of politically inspired meddling cannot credibly be established."

As it turns out, the 45-minute charge was not true; though forbidden weapons may yet be found in Iraq, an adviser to the Bush administration on arms issues said last week that such weapons were not ready to be used on short notice.

The 45-minute allegation did not appear in the major speeches Bush made about Iraq in Cincinnati in October or in his State of the Union address, both of which were made after consultation with the CIA. But the White House considered the 45-minute claim significant and drew attention to it the day the British dossier was released. Asked if there was a "smoking gun" in the British report, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on Sept. 24 highlighted that charge and the charge that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.

"I think there was new information in there, particularly about the 45-minute threshold by which Saddam Hussein has got his biological and chemical weapons triggered to be launched," Fleischer said. "There was new information in there about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium from African nations. That was new information."

The White House use of the 45-minute charge is another indication of its determination to build a case against Hussein even without the participation of U.S. intelligence services. The controversy over the administration's use of intelligence has largely focused on claims made about the Iraqi nuclear program, particularly attempts to buy uranium in Africa. But the accusation that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack on a moment's notice was significant because it added urgency to the administration's argument that Hussein had to be dealt with quickly.

In today’s Independent we get a little bit closer to the truth on this matter:

The raw material behind the 45-minute claim in the Government's Iraq dossier applied not to the time it would take for weapons of mass destruction to be deployed but to how long the Iraqis would need to communicate with each other about them.

Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Tom Mangold - a veteran BBC Panorama reporter and friend of the late David Kelly - disclosed that intelligence sources had told him the original information had come from an MI6 agent in Baghdad.

The source was a senior Iraqi officer who had stayed in place after the war started and was re-located by the British afterwards, Mr Mangold said. He said he believed the officer was a Brigadier, a rank sufficiently high for his information to be taken seriously.

"In essence what he said was not that biological and chemical weapons could be deployed, i.e. fired within 45 minutes. That's nonsense - and Dave Kelly and I laughed about it," Mr Mangold said. "What the agent said was that the Iraqis had created a Command, Control and Communications system (C3) that would enable Saddam ... to communicate with regional military commanders within 45 minutes, authorising the use of WMD. And this is not the same things as deployment."

This exaggeration/outright lie has even more potential to damage the political futures of the Bush/Blair tandem than the Niger claims. What we have here is an intelligence report that it would take Saddam Hussein 45 minutes to communicate with his commanders, which is not exactly an impressive achievement. Of course, had Saddam actually had any WMD’s he would have been able to order his commanders to start deploying them. Also, had he possessed the largest army in the history of the world, he could have, in 45 minutes, also ordered his commanders to launch a devastating attack, marching through Europe on his way to conquer the United States. Had he possessed a rocket ship ready to go to Mars he could have ordered its launching in 45 minutes. However, he did not possess any of these things so that, in it of itself, it was not really that noteworthy that Mr. Hussein possessed this 45 minute ability, in fact it was a sign of how pathetic his military capabilities actually were.

But Bush/Blair had problems, the stories of Saddam’s model airplanes destroying the western world just were not resonating with the general public. Blair decided that in order to please his master he would “sex up” the 45 minute report and claim it was the time between Saddam giving the order to fire and a missile full of anthrax beginning its flight towards some innocent British victims. David Kelly laughingly described it to a BBC reporter and the rest is history.

The only problem for Blair is that surely the original intelligence report, exists and the exaggeration will be easy to identif

There is very troubling news on Juan Cole’s blog today:

A Sunni group in Basra (pop. 1.3 million) is calling for massive Sunni demonstrations after Friday prayers today, in protest of the occupation on Wednesday by the Sadr Movement of a building housing the headquarters of the Sunni Pious Endowments administration (-al-Hayat). In a telephone call from Kuwait to al-Hayat, the Sunni activist warned of a big sectarian disturbance in Basra if the situation was not rectified. Haqqi Ismail Abd al-Rahman, the Sunni Endowment administrator, told the paper that hundreds of Sadr Movement members invaded the building and occupied the offices, which contain the files for 90% of the Sunni endowment property in Basra.

He expressed the fear that their long-term goal was to usurp the mosques and properties of the Sunni community and to add them to their Hawzah (Shiite religious establishment). A meeting of three hundred men at the Sunni Grand Mosque in Basra on Thursday morning to consider the situation was harassed by Sadr Movement hecklers, who shouted sectarian slurs, with one sermonizing at them that they were infidels. Haqqi Ismail said his group had complained to the city council and to the British authorities, so far without effect. They had also contacted the office of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf but had heard back nothing. Thus, the plans for a big demonstration, which will draw on the congregations of the city's 150 Sunni mosques.

Shiites have reportedly usurped large numbers of Sunni mosques in South Iraq, seeing them as attempts by the Baath regime to plant Sunnism in Shiite soil, a plot that can now be safely reversed. These usurpations have been condemned by Grand Ayatollah `Ali Sistani, but the radical Sadr Movement clearly feels differently about the matter. Especially in Basra, some minority Sunnis loyal to Saddam brutalized and terrorized the Shiite population, and for some Sadrists this move may be the beginning of payback.


Just to explain the "endowments." It is a custom in Muslim societies to dedicate the proceeds of land or other forms of wealth to religious purposes, such as the building and upkeep of a mosque. Property dedicated to a pious endowment is theoretically alienated for this purpose in perpetuity. Families often retain oversight rights, and fees, from the endowments, or give these to clerics. Many Sunni clergymen in Basra may depend for their livelihood on endowment income, especially given the collapse of the Sunni state, so that usurping it would bankrupt the Basra Sunni religious establishment. Usurping mosques leaves believers with nowhere to gather and pray publicly, which is a way of denying them a place in the public sphere.

There is, of course, a grave danger that Sunnis and Shiites in other parts of Iraq will hear about this dispute and become polarized over such issues, so that the fighting could spread. The British authorities should move quickly to resolve this problem. The problem, of course, is that if they come into armed conflict with Sadrist militias, that could also be destabilizing.

My biggest fear is that we are heading towards a civil war in Iraq between the Sunnis and Shiites. The Sunnis are accustomed to having power that is completely disproportionate to their percentage of the population. They will only lose if a “democracy” is created in Iraq so they are already fighting a guerilla war against the US to retain their special privileges. This is not directly the result of any American mistakes, any form of government short of a Sunni military dictatorship is unacceptable to them.

The Shiites have, in general, not been fighting the US in Iraq, since they are the oppressed majority and have much more to gain from the American presence. They will be willing to tolerate the Americans as long as it looks like things are progressing towards a Shiites state. The Shiites have now tasted freedom and are not likely to go back to being second-class citizens under the Sunnis. The Sunnis have tasted power as long as they can remember and are not likely to accept a second–class status. Therefore we have a major problem, as both communities are going to be willing to fight for what they want.

This situation is not exactly surprising, surely some of the pre-war planning took this into account. Col. Dan Smith has an excellent piece in Counterpunch where he goes through the process of figuring out how many troops are necessary to occupy a country:

Traditional military doctrine estimates that a conventional army requires roughly a 10-to-1 size advantage if it is to defeat a well-equipped, well-executed, persistent insurgency. But where insurgents, while less centrally organized, are still too powerful for standard police (or where standard police do not exist), responding to and measuring against armed insurgent strength may not be the best gauge. In 1995, James Quinlivan, writing in the Army War College's quarterly, Parameters, suggested that force requirements should be based on the need for population control (to cut off support to the insurgents) and local security--that is, the need to "win hearts and minds" and therefore requires a force proportional to the population.

Quinlivan describes three historical force ratio levels. The first, one to four security personnel per 1,000 population, is essentially the ratio for ordinary policing. In a military setting, the U.S. Constabulary force in post-World War II Germany was staffed at 2.2 per thousand for "enforcing public order, controlling black market transactions, and related police functions." The same ratio existed in the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (1992-1993), whose duties included "supervision of the cease-fire and voluntary disarmament of combatants, supervision of about 60,000 indigenous police to provide law and order, and administration of a free and fair election." But the UN had little real presence outside the main urban areas.

The second force ratio is from four to ten security personnel per 1,000 population. India's campaign against militants in Punjab, viewed as quite punitive by many, was implemented at a ratio of almost 6 per 1,000 population. At the high point of the 1965 U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, whose purpose was preventing civil war and restoring "stability," Army and Marine personnel operated at a ratio of 6.6 per 1,000 population.

Quinlivan's third ratio level is above ten per 1,000 population. Military examples of this level are the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s when foreign and full-time indigenous security forces operated at a ratio of 20 per 1,000 population. The same ratio pertained to the combination of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British troops in Northern Ireland for much of the period 1969- 1994. Here, multiple small groups advocating separation from or continued union with Great Britain waged war on each other, and one side fought "occupying" security forces with a goal of forcing them out--conditions that are unfolding in Iraq today.

Applying the average of 2.2 per 1,000 of level one to Iraq would require 52, 800 individuals. But Iraq is not a defeated, broken, devastated country like Germany. Nor is it at peace or semi- peace, where the main task is maintaining public order. It is still a country at war, a country saturated with weapons, a country that is becoming more and more restless under its "liberator."

Level two ratios of 6 and 6.6 yield 144,000 and 158,400, respectively. These are comparable strength totals to what the U.S. and its allies have in Iraq today. Yet these forces seem unable to isolate Iraqi and foreign militants who have come into Iraq to fight "the Authority" and to provide both the perception and reality of public safety. Perhaps even more important is the need to avoid any hint of punitive measures that inevitably would lead to a precipitous decline in general Iraqi tolerance of foreign forces.

At 10 per 1,000 population, the point of intersection between levels two and three, Quinlivan's numbers skyrocket to 240,000. (Interestingly, just in Baghdad, where the population is roughly five million, there are 55,000 troops, producing a ratio of 11 per 1,000.) Matching the British experience in Malaysia and Northern Ireland at 20 per 1,000 doubles this total to 480,000, which is the total authorized strength of the active U.S. Army. Clearly, any of these levels are impossible to sustain given the demands for and on people. Even level two ratios may be impossible, given that 5 of the Army's 10 active divisions currently are engaged in Iraq.

In Iraq, as one phase of the "global war on terror," the Bush administration chose war and occupation, and must now face the consequences of its choices. Having dislodged the previous regime by force, the U.S. increasingly is caught in the quagmire of depending on force to control the Iraqi people in the name of national and regional "peace." But "peace through war" or the threat of war is a costly chimera, both for the "victor" and the loser. This truth was well understood by the 19th Century British statesman Edmund Burke, who noted that "War never leaves where it found a nation."

There is always an impulse to compare current problems with the past. Among the historic models that are possible analogies for the occupation of Iraq are: the Algerian War, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and Northern Ireland to name a few. For me the best analogy for the US position would be that of a policeman on “Cops” when they are called to domestic dispute. They show up (the man is always shirtless) and the couple alternate between beating each other and beating the cops. Just as one of the couple is pinned down the other comes and attacks the police and all hell breaks loose. From the look on the policeman’s face you can see that he wants to be anywhere but there. Turn up the heat to over 50 degrees Celsius (110 F) and replace the slapping and punches with AK 47’s and mortar shells and you will know what Iraq must feel like to the soldiers there now. Oh and by the way, their families are 8000 miles away from them.

As moral continues to decline among American service people in Iraq, there is open talk among the soldiers of creating their own deck of cards of “Most Wanted to Resign”, featuring politicians who are responsible for their predicament. From yesterday’s Toronto Star:

On the ABC report, one member of the 2nd Battle Combat Team in Falluja, Iraq, talked about his "Most Wanted" list, a response to the deck of cards the U.S. administration had distributed in a bid to capture Saddam Hussein's loyalists. "The aces in my deck are (U.S. civilian administrator) Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and (deputy defence secretary) Paul Wolfowitz," the sergeant told a reporter.

Although one could argue about this soldier's selections for aces, a sure candidate for a high king position would be Tony Blair. The reports from England suggest that he may be one of the first really high cards to fall. From today’s Independent:

Supporters of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, have launched an extraordinary attack on Tony Blair, portraying him as a "psychopath" and "psychotic".

Blair loyalists are furious about a string of hostile articles about the Prime Minister in the current edition of New Statesman magazine, which is owned by Geoffrey Robinson, a former Treasury minister and a close ally of Mr Brown.

The strong language was seen in the Blair camp as a "revenge attack" for a previous sideswipe at Mr Brown by a Blair aide who described the Chancellor as having "psychological flaws".

(….edit….)

The magazine says that "Mr Brown, like Margaret Thatcher but unlike Mr Blair, has a focus". A Brown government would constantly ask how to reduce poverty and promote equality. "Mr Blair lacks such clarity of purpose, with the result that all sorts of fancy ideas get an airing, without rhyme or reason and usually without result."

It says the Chancellor would be a bigger vote-winner than the Prime Minister because Mr Blair "has lost so much public trust over the Iraq war".

Another article in the magazine is headed "What is the point of Tony Blair?", while a third declares: "The question of Tony Blair's sanity can no longer be avoided."

It quotes Sidney Crown, a former consultant psychotherapist at the Royal London Hospital, as saying that Mr Blair "does not exist" and compares him with an actor. He adds that Alastair Campbell, Downing Street's director of communications and strategy, is "very much represented in Mr Blair's dark side, which is why they like each other ... the psychopathic personality is very quick to pick things up and shift and move about".

Dr Crown suggests that Mr Blair did not decide to lie about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but had been "highly selective" over intelligence material, seeing the material that appealed to him. "With all forms of psychotics, if you ask people about the consequences of what they've done they can't tell you, because they've no ability to see the future."

The Guardian goes further:

In perhaps the most damaging part of its attack, the New Statesman cited psychiatrists who described Mr Blair as a "plausible psychopath".

One passage said: "The question of Tony Blair's sanity can no longer be avoided ... technically, he is diagnosed as a psychopath capable of reinventing himself with remarkable dexterity like an actor."

Why is this significant? In fact, this is the opening salvo of an impending leadership battle within the Labour Party. To be sure, this is not a tentative, probing assault, this is a frontal attack, the political equivalent of shock and awe, which is attempting to figuratively decapitate Tony Blair right from the outset. Gordon Brown is a careful operator and would not have launched this attack if he were not confident of prevailing. Anger within the Labour Party has been building all year, and the lack of any WMD’s in Iraq is leaving Blair totally exposed.

In the US, the race to be the first “face card” to go down has heated up with CIA Director George Tenet (or his staff) beginning to name names: From the San Jose Mercury News:


A senior White House adviser emerged Thursday as a key player in the mention of disputed intelligence on Iraq in President Bush's State of the Union speech, prompting a partisan tug-of-war over Bush's responsibility for the misleading claim.

The revelation moves the spotlight back to the White House and away from the CIA, where President Bush and CIA Director George S. Tenet had placed it last Friday.

Senior CIA officials told a closed Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday that, before Bush gave the speech, they discussed the reliability of intelligence about Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium in Africa with National Security Council aide Robert Joseph, according to two senior U.S. officials. Joseph, a top aide to Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, coordinates policies to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

The two U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the hearing was classified.

This Robert Joseph would probably not be a face card but Condoleezza Rice surely would be, along with George Tenet. Someone is going to have to bite the dust here, and for purely political reasons, I am rooting for Bush to fire Tenet, because this would cause such a wave of disgust among America’s political elite, not to mention really piss off the CIA, who surely have a media connection of two they could use to get back at Bush.

I have finally added comments to this blog so please fire away with any of your thoughts.

I found this interesting list on Dwight Meredith’s blog P.L.A. The list shows the average percentage of economic growth (or decline in W’s and Hoover's cases) during the terms of the last 13 Presidents. Each of the last six Democratic Presidents out-performed each of the last seven Republicans, sometiomes by huge margins.


1) Roosevelt (1933-45): +5.3%

2) Johnson (1963-69): +3.8%

3) Carter (1977-81): +3.1%

4) Truman: (1945-53): +2.5%

5) Kennedy (1961-63): +2.5%

6) Clinton (1993-2001): +2.4%

7) Nixon (1969-75): +2.2%

8) Reagan (1981-89): +2.1%

9) Ford (1975-77): +1.1%

10) Eisenhower (1953-61): +0.9%

11) Bush (1989-93): +0.6%

12) Bush (2001-present): -0.7%

13) Hoover (1929-33): -9.0%

Tony Blair is now calling on the world’s democracies to invade the United States of America. From today’s Independent:

Tony Blair is appealing to the heads of Western governments to agree a new world order that would justify the war in Iraq even if Saddam Hussein's elusive weapons of mass destruction are never found.

It would also give Western powers the authority to attack any other sovereign country whose ruler is judged to be inflicting unnecessary suffering on his own people.

(….edit….)

Mr Blair has involved British troops in five conflicts overseas in his six years in office, and appears to be willing to take part in many more.

The document echoes his well-known views on "rights and responsibilities" by saying that even for self-governing nation states "the right to sovereignty brings associated responsibilities to protect citizens".

This phrase is immediately followed by a paragraph which appears to give the world's democracies carte blanche to send troops anywhere there is civil unrest or a tyrant who refuses to mend his ways. It says: "Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non- intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect."

George W Bush has already sent 200 American soldiers to die and 1000 others to be seriously injured in an illegal war in Iraq, not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, among them many children, who have been slaughtered. This would certainly qualify as serious harm and, by the Bush Adminisrtation’s own admissions, they are unable to halt the misery they are causing since even the most optimistic predictions call for American soldiers to remain in Iraq for four more years. The Blair Doctrine then clearly allows any "democracy" or "alliance of democracies" to take military action against the US to stop this madness.

The Blair “Presidency” is starting to take on water as his intelligence agencies turn on him. From today’s Guardian:

A former head of Downing Street's in-house intelligence panel last night accused ministers of "overselling" the threat of global terrorism before the Iraq war by bombarding voters with repeated warnings of "imminent terrorist attacks on London" and Heathrow airport.

The charge - made by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, former head of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), on Channel 4 News - is separate from the row over two intelligence dossiers which has led to deadlock between No 10 and the BBC over its claims that they were "sexed up".

The 71-year-old former diplomat, who ran the JIC in 1992-3, said: "I think the overselling came not so much at that [dossier] stage but in the spring when it looked as though the British people were not actually going to sign up to this project.

"And then the real overselling were the continual assessments of an imminent terrorist attack in London, advising housewives to lay in stocks of water and food, I mean all that stuff... tanks at Heathrow. I mean that, I call that overselling."

The prime minister has denied that the widely reported tank exercise at Heathrow was calculated to rally public opinion at a time when anti-war sentiment was strong and rising.

In a letter to the Financial Times Sir Rodric said: "Fishmongers sell fish, warmongers sell war, both may sincerely believe in their product."

The sight of the Whitehall establishment turning on the government will alarm and anger ministers who have watched MI6 deflect attention from its own performance.

It was clear back in the early spring that Blair was desperate and out of control to get the British public to back his war. The tanks in Heathrow ploy fooled nobody. In the end, when it was obvious that the war was going ahead, the British people decided to back it, more for the sake of the troops fighting it than for Tony Blair’s salesmanship.

This quote: "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.", from Ralph Waldo Emerson is being used to describe Britain’s reaction to Blair’s recent repeated justifications for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. His days may very well be numbered as Prime Minister.


In America, the first reports of the CIA turning on Bush may have been premature as the story in Capital Hill Blue that I discussed in my previous post has been discredited. It may have been a warning shot or just some reporter’s fantasy. However, The Washington Post reported today:(via Daily Kos)

The CIA tried unsuccessfully in early September 2002 to persuade the British government to drop from an official intelligence paper a reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa that President Bush included in his State of the Union address four months later, senior Bush administration officials said yesterday.

"We consulted about the paper and recommended against using that material," a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence program said. The British government rejected the U.S. suggestion, saying it had separate intelligence unavailable to the United States.

At that time, the CIA was completing its own classified national intelligence estimate on Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Although the CIA paper mentioned alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from three African countries, it warned that State Department analysts were questioning its accuracy when it came to Niger and that CIA personnel considered reports on other African countries to be "sketchy," the official said. The CIA paper's summary conclusions about whether Iraq was restarting its nuclear weapons program did not include references to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Africa.

The latest disclosures further illustrate the lack of confidence expressed by the U.S. intelligence community in the months leading up to Bush's speech about allegations of Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Africa. Even so, Bush used the charge - - citing British intelligence -- in the Jan. 28 address as part of his effort to convince Congress and the American people that Iraq had a program to build weapons of mass destruction and posed a serious threat.

The White House on Monday acknowledged that Bush's uranium claim was based on faulty intelligence and should not have been included in the speech, further stoking a controversy over the administration's handling of prewar intelligence. Democratic lawmakers yesterday called for public hearings, while the Democratic National Committee opened an advertising campaign to encourage people to sign petitions calling for an independent commission.

At a news conference in Botswana, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell defended the president's use of the intelligence. "There was no effort or attempt on the part of the president or anyone else in the administration to mislead or to deceive the American people," Powell said. "There was sufficient evidence floating around at that time that such a statement was not totally outrageous or not to be believed or not to be appropriately used."

Colin Powell’s seems to have uttered the first truthful words that this Administration has used for a long time. Look at the standard he refers to, “not totally outrageous”. Bill Clinton’s denials of having sexual relations with “that woman” were not totally outrageous either although I don’t remember that being the standard the Republicans refered to at the time for Presidential truthfulness. Lies can still be lies even if they are not "totally outrageous" lies. Powell then actually admits they were lies: “There was sufficient evidence floating around at that time that such a statement was … not to be believed or not to be appropriately used ” We are expected to think that he made a grammatical error here and that his first not extended to these last two statements, creating a double negative which becomes a positive: “not not to be believed or not not to be appropriately used.” With all the word parsing that goes on at these levels in times of Presidential scandals, I am not willing to accept that this is what Powell meant until he actually says it. As it stands, his statement is true, that while Bush’s statements were not totally outrageous, they were not to be believed and not to be appropriately used, in other words, Bush's statements were lies.

We will see if the lapdog American press jumps on this one, or if we will just have to wait for the British press to do their job for them.

It looks like the CIA has decided not to sacrifice itself to smother the political hand grenade that is starting to threaten the Bush Presidency. From the BBC:


The CIA warned the US Government that claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were not true months before President Bush used them to make his case for war, the BBC has learned.

Doubts about a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African state of Niger were aired 10 months before Mr. Bush included the allegation in his key State of the Union address this year, the CIA has told the BBC.

On Tuesday, the White House for the first time officially acknowledged that the Niger claim was wrong and should not have been used in the president's State of the Union speech in January.

But the CIA has said that a former US diplomat had already established the claim was false in March 2002 - and that the information had been passed on to government departments, including the White House, well before Mr. Bush mentioned it in the speech.

This is trouble for Mr. Bush as he does not want to get into a pissing match with the CIA, given that there are surely other lies that they can expose. The news is even worse for him in the less-well-known Capital Hill Blue:

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

"The report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."

Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said.

"He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

To date, American troops have found no proof of the existence of nuclear weapons in Iraq.

Here we actually have a name and a quote from the President himself. This story will have to move up the media food chain a bit before it starts getting taken seriously, but this could very well be Bush’s “stained blue dress”.

One of the advantages of living in Europe is that I get to discover lots of very interesting American writers and political commentators who, outside of their universities, are virtually unknown of in the United States. I came across Juan Cole while reading the latest “Le Monde Diplomatic” where he had written an interesting article on the different Iraqi Shiite groups and their attitudes towards the American occupation/liberation. I did a quick Google search and found his website. He is an Arabist and an expert on both Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian Islamic thought. He regularly updates about the situation in Iraq. Here is a posting from yesterday:

As you all know, President Bush replied to the attackers in Iraq, saying "Bring it on!" Senator Carl Levin commented on Meet the Press Sunday, "I think that it's perfectly proper for the president to say that he has confidence in our troops. But it seems to me unwise to engage in this kind of cocky rhetoric, because it's not going to be helpful ... either with our troops or in bringing in other countries into this issue." {Truth in advertising: Levin is my senator and I always vote for him.} As most of you know, I'm from a military family and still have a lot of friends and contacts in the US military, and most of them are much more pissed off at Bush for that piece of bravado than Levin is, though they can't say so publicly. It didn't help that the Sunni insurgents "brought it on" and shot that poor US soldier who was buying a soft drink at Baghdad U, right after Bush's remark. Bush was never in the real military and never lived in a war zone, and can't stop talking like a rich spoiled drunk frat kid at Yale instead of like a commander in chief of living breathing men and women who are putting their lives on the line for this country.

PUBLIC SPIRIT IN THE UNITED STATES. (continued, please start with the previous post)

How does it happen that in the United States, where the inhabitants have only recently immigrated to the land which they now occupy, and brought neither customs nor traditions with them there; where they met one another for the first time with no previous acquaintance; where, in short, the instinctive love of country can scarcely exist; how does it happen that everyone takes as zealous an interest in the affairs of his township, his county, and the whole state as if they were his own? It is because everyone, in his sphere, takes an active part in the government of society.

The lower orders in the United States understand the influence exercised by the general prosperity upon their own welfare; simple as this observation is, it is too rarely made by the people. Besides, they are accustomed to regard this prosperity as the fruit of their own exertions. The citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his own, and he labors for the good of the state, not merely from a sense of pride or duty, but from what I venture to term cupidity.

It is unnecessary to study the institutions and the history of the Americans in order to know the truth of this remark, for their manners render it sufficiently evident. As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured in it; for it is not only his country that is then attacked, it is himself. The consequence is that his national pride resorts to a thousand artifices and descends to all the petty tricks of personal vanity.

Nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A stranger may be well inclined to praise many of the institutions of their country, but he begs permission to blame some things in it, a permission that is inexorably refused. America is therefore a free country in which, lest anybody should be hurt by your remarks, you are not allowed to speak freely of private individuals or of the state, of the citizens or of the authorities, of public or of private undertakings, or, in short, of anything at all except, perhaps, the climate and the soil; and even then Americans will be found ready to defend both as if they had co-operated in producing them.

In our times we must choose between the patriotism of all and the government of a few; for the social force and activity which the first confers are irreconcilable with the pledges of tranquillity which are given by the second.

Here is an extract of Alexis de Tocqueville’s, Democracy in America, in honor of America’s Independence Day. These words were written over 150 years ago. Throughout the book, de Tocqueville contrasts between the totalitarian, aristocratic governments of Europe and the new American democracy. Unfortunately, reading this book today shows just how far America has gone towards resembling the aristocratic model. It is the job of the Left to resist this tendency and to push America back to its broad based democratic traditions.

PUBLIC SPIRIT IN THE UNITED STATES.

THERE is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace. This natural fondness is united with a taste for ancient customs and a reverence for traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansion of their fathers. They love the tranquillity that it affords them; they cling to the peaceful habits that they have contracted within its bosom; they are attached to the reminiscences that it awakens; and they are even pleased by living there in a state of obedience. This patriotism is sometimes stimulated by religious enthusiasm, and then it is capable of making prodigious efforts. It is in itself a kind of religion: it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and sentiment. In some nations the monarch is regarded as a personification of the country; and, the fervor of patriotism being converted into the fervor of loyalty, they take a sympathetic pride in his conquests, and glory in his power. power was a time under the ancient monarchy when the French felt a sort of satisfaction in the sense of their dependence upon the arbitrary will of their king; and they were wont to say with pride: "We live under the most powerful king in the world."

But, like all instinctive passions, this kind of patriotism incites great transient exertions, but no continuity of effort. It may save the state in critical circumstances, but often allows it to decline in times of peace. While the manners of a people are simple and its faith unshaken, while society is steadily based upon traditional institutions whose legitimacy has never been contested, this instinctive patriotism is wont to endure.

But there is another species of attachment to country which is more rational than the one I have been describing. It is perhaps less generous and less ardent, but it is more fruitful and more lasting: it springs from knowledge; it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil rights; and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal interests of the citizen. A man comprehends the influence which the well-being of his country has upon his own; he is aware that the laws permit him to contribute to that prosperity, and he labors to promote it, first because it benefits him, and secondly because it is in part his own work.

But epochs sometimes occur in the life of a nation when the old customs of a people are changed, public morality is destroyed, religious belief shaken, and the spell of tradition broken, while the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect and the civil rights of the community are ill secured or confined within narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them an inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have learned to regard as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. The country is lost to their senses; they can discover it neither under its own nor under borrowed features, and they retire into a narrow and unenlightened selfishness. They are emancipated from prejudice without having acknowledged the empire of reason; they have neither the instinctive patriotism of a monarchy nor the reflecting patriotism of a republic; but they have stopped between the two in the midst of confusion and distress.
In this predicament to retreat is impossible, for a people cannot recover the sentiments of their youth any more than a man can return to the innocent tastes of childhood; such things may be regretted, but they cannot be renewed. They must go forward and accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever.

I am certainly far from affirming that in order to obtain this result the exercise of political rights should be immediately granted to all men. But I maintain that the most powerful and perhaps the only means that we still possess of interesting men in the welfare of their country is to make them partakers in the government. At the present time civic zeal seems to me to be inseparable from the exercise of political rights; and I think that the number of citizens will be found to augment or decrease in Europe in proportion as those rights are extended.

(continued)

The one blog that I read every day is the Daily Kos. They have a great team of writers who almost always hit the nail on the head. Steve Gilliard today discusses some of the long term problems that the US faces in Iraq.

Every US unit is under daily observation. They cannot move, cannot buy a DVD, without people noticing and recording it. The Iraqis are passing information to the guerrillas without pause. Foreign volunteers are flooding into Iraq as they did in Spain in 1936. They have over 135,000 American targets and a friendly population to work with. Unlike Afghanistan where Arab volunteers were pointed out by the locals to the Americans.

The request for troops is a political minefield and one which places the Army at it's limits. The war was supposed to be over, 50,000 men getting their Iraqi visas puts that to the lie once and for all. It would awaken opposition to the war and not solve the problem.

Keep in mind that the Sunnis and the limited guerrilla war has already taxed the US Army to it's limits. A Shia rebellion would make the country ungovernable without using much greater levels of force and that presents a political conundrum. While some on the left expect the worst out of the Bush Administration, the reality is this: killing Shias, be they civilians or guerrillas, would delegitimize our occupation beyond redemption. To fill new graves with Shias would be beyond explaination. To vicitimize Saddam's vicitims would be politically unacceptable.

Yet, to flee from Iraq, would be such a significant defeat, that there is no way that Bush could expect to be reelected and probably would join Lyndon Johnson in not running for a second term during wartime. All talk, from Dean to Hegel, about staying in Iraq "until the job is done" relies on one factor: Shia cooperation. With it, no Sunni rebellion can last for long. Without it, no Sunni rebellion can be repressed for long. Unless we make a deal with the Shias to offer them political power, they will eventually have to join the Sunnis in guerrilla war. As it stands, the resistance to the US is spreading in the Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad.

To do so, however, would create a Shia fundamentalist state in some form. That is also unacceptable. It would place pro- Iranian clerics, Sadr, Hakim and Sistani, in charge of Iraq. Which might or might not result in a subsequent civil war. But it would clearly not be the pro-Western democracy pushed by the PNAC crowd. Israel would not be getting their cheap Iraqi oil and US bases would be out of the question.

It is an ugly series of choices, easily predicted but ignored. The Shia will determine what happens in Iraq regardless of our desires and will. The Army is stretched to the limits with no clear source of more troops. And there are no simple answers to any of this. Bring it on? We have brought it on, more than we can handle without grim choices.

It appears that the US military is looking in the wrong places for WMD’s and mobile labs. In fact, they are looking on the wrong continent. From yesterday’s New York Times:


Three years ago, the United States began a secret project to train Special Operations units to detect and disarm mobile germ factories of the sort that Iraq and some other countries were suspected of building, according to administration officials and experts in germ weaponry.
The heart of the effort, these officials said, was a covert plan to construct a mobile germ plant, real in all its parts but never actually "plugged in" to make weapons. In the months before the war against Iraq, American commandos trained on this factory.


It was not Saddam Hussein who possessed the mobile biological labs, but instead one George W. Bush. But not to worry:


The heart of the effort, these officials said, was a covert plan to construct a mobile germ plant, real in all its parts but never actually "plugged in" to make weapons. In the months before the war against Iraq, American commandos trained on this factory.


There is a global treaty banning the production of biological weapons. The US has just set a precedent that it is OK to build factories, mobile or not, that are able to produce weapons, as long as they are not “plugged in”. Can you imagine the Iraqi ambassador to the UN using this lame-ass excuse if the inspectors had actually found a mobile lab? We can thank the Bush Administration for making us all that much safer.

Lest anyone forget, letters were sent containing anthrax on Sept. 18th 2001. While the FBI was investigating the five resulting murders it seems as if they were not totally convinced by the not ”plugged in” reassurances:


The trainer's equipment includes a fermenter, a centrifuge and a mill for grinding clumps of anthrax into the best size for penetrating human lungs, these experts said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, suspecting that components from the Delta trainer might have been used to make the anthrax mailed in late 2001, examined the unit, officials and experts said. But investigators found no spores or other evidence linking it to the crime, they said.

The mobile unit is part of the government's secretive effort to develop germ defenses.

Critics say such biodefense projects often test the limits of the 1975 global ban on germ weapons, which the United States championed.

But the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax letters only weeks later prompted the Bush administration to greatly expand the number of such clandestine projects.


While letters were being sent across America full of anthrax, instead of stopping the insanity of building biological labs until the source of the anthrax was found, the Bush Administration took the opposite approach and decided to “greatly expand the number of such clandestine projects”. It is as if after a space shuttle crash NASA decided to start launching a shuttle once a week. I guess this kind of recklessness is not surprising given that this is the same “corporate culture” that back in the late 80’s decided to give sophisticated weaponry, loads of money, and organizational training to any radical Islamic fundamentalist that they could get their hands on in and around Afghanistan

Should we have more problems with anthrax or other biological attacks, at least we will know whom to hold responsible since undoubtedly this expansion of the US biological warfare arsenal would require George W. Bush’s approval.

One also has to wonder about the location of these lab(s). Surely it is expensive for the special forces to travel all the way from Iraq to the US to train on these units. Surely it would be more cost effective to just ship these labs to Iraq for training. Perhaps they could hide them in the desert in order to let the Special Forces try to find them. Who knows, maybe they have sent a ton or two of anthrax over there while they were at it so that the Special Forces could practice on “live” ammo.

In any case, it looks as if George Bush’s WMD problem in Iraq may soon be coming to an end.

We have finally decided on names for our children. The little girl will be known as Francisca and the little boy Christian. The children are doing really well, they are six weeks old now. It is quite a lot of work, but we are managing.

I am desperate to start blogging again, so in the next day or two I will relaunch the blog and attempt to regularly update it.