posted May 25, 2005 01:00 AM              

AMMAN, Jordan -- The United Arab Emirates daily al-Bayan Monday warned Iraqis against slipping into the "abyss" of sectarian fighting between Sunnis and Shiites.

The pro-government paper said in its editorial tension between the two Muslim sects in Iraq could explode following reports of the two sides settling scores by killing each other.


It argued it was necessary for the Iraqis to defuse any sectarian tension and urged Arab countries and neighbors to support them in "preventing slipping into this horrifying abyss."

The paper warned if civil fighting erupted, it would spare no one and could leak over to neighboring countries "that are prone to being quickly infected."

It insisted this threat was not an internal Iraqi affair because the region was still paying for the repercussions of civil wars, "from Sudan, to Lebanon, to Algeria."

The Gulf daily said it was time to intervene quickly to push away the threat of civil war if the region is to be spared destruction.
http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050523-105839-2433r

posted May 25, 2005 06:28 AM              

14 U.S. Soldiers Killed in 3 Days in Iraq; Car Bomb Kills 6 Near Baghdad School for Girls

Iraqi police man a checkpoint on the road between Mosul and Tal Afar in northern Iraq Tuesday, May 24, 2005 preventing access to it as Sunni and Shiite fighters from the town's predominantly Turkmen population clashed following Monday's twin bombings. At least 20 people were killed in Monday's dual car bomb attack near the home of Hassan Baktash, a Shiite Muslim with close ties to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, in Tal Afar, a predominantly Turkmen town of 200,000 people. (AP Photo/Delovan Barwari)
By PAUL GARWOOD Associated Press Writer
The Associated PressThe Associated Press

BAGHDAD, Iraq May 24, 2005 — A car bomb exploded next to a U.S. Army convoy in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing three soldiers, while another American died in a drive-by shooting a half-hour later. Their deaths pushed the number of U.S. troops killed in three days to 14, part of a surge in attacks that have also killed about 60 Iraqis.

In the northern city of Tal Afar, there were reports that militants were in control and that Shiites and Sunnis were fighting in the streets, a day after two car bombs killed at least 20 people. Police Capt. Ahmed Hashem Taki said Tal Afar was experiencing "civil war." Journalists were blocked from entering the city of 200,000.

Eighteen U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq during the past week, raising concerns that insurgents may again be focusing their sights on American forces in addition to

The deaths come as American troops are trying to pave the way for a graceful exit from Iraq by giving more responsibility to the country's security forces. But with the Iraqis still relatively weak, U.S. troops remain in the firing line, targeted by insurgents that have shown increasing abilities to attack when and where they please.

More than 620 people, including 58 U.S. troops, have been killed since April 28, when insurgents launched a bloody campaign after Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his new Shiite-dominated government. The Associated Press count is based on reports from police, hospital and military officials.

During the same period, there have been at least 89 car bombs killing at least 355 people, according to the AP count. There were an additional five suicide bombings by individuals wearing explosives that killed at least 107 people.

The man blamed for instigating many of the attacks, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been wounded, according to a Web statement in the name of his group, al-Qaida in Iraq.

But U.S. officials cautioned they did not know if the posting was authentic, and privately said the information also may have been designed to purposely mislead.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed Tuesday in central Baghdad when a car bomb exploded next to their convoy. A U.S. soldier sitting in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle at an observation post was then killed in a drive-by shooting.

Four soldiers were killed Monday after they were attacked in Haswa, 30 miles south of Baghdad, the military said. They were assigned to the 155th Brigade Combat Team, II Marine Expeditionary Force.

The Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi has denounced Iraqi Shiites as U.S. collaborators and said killing them, including women and children, was justified.

Al-Zarqawi, who like his patron Osama bin Laden has a $25 million bounty on his head, has claimed responsibility for a relentless wave bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. They include a Feb. 28 bomb attack that killed 125 people in Hillah, south of Baghdad, in the single deadliest terror attack since Saddam Hussein's fall.

Earlier, U.S. forces announced the capture of two militants with links to al-Zarqawi: Mohammed Daham Abd Hamadi and Mullah Kamel al-Aswadi.

Hamadi's cell claimed responsibility for the kidnappings of Chinese and Turks; al-Aswadi was said to be al-Zarqawi's representative in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Also Tuesday, Sunni and Shiite clerics and politicians intensified efforts to find a way out of a sectarian crisis that threatens a civil war.

Senior officials representing Iraq's two leading Sunni Muslim organizations met with Interior Minister Bayan Jabr. The Sunni officials recently had demanded Jabr's resignation, holding his office responsible for the killings of Sunni clerics and others.

Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a prominent Shiite politician, said there will be no civil war. "The awareness of the Iraqi people and the links between them will prevent such a war, God willing," al-Hakim told the AP in an interview.

Al-Hakim, who leads both the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the governing United Iraqi Alliance, said insurgents had been trying to start a civil war between the Shiite majority and the Sunni minority since Saddam's ouster.

Sunnis opposed to the new government are thought to make up the insurgency's core, and some Sunni extremists have been attacking Shiites.

The attacks, al-Hakim said, were "the last card in order to incite sectarian war." He pointed to three against Shiites on Monday, which claimed most of the nearly 50 lives lost on that day alone.

A Marine was killed during an indirect fire attack Monday on an American base in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the military said.

As of Tuesday, at least 1,643 U.S. military personnel have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to the AP count.

A Georgian serviceman suffered serious wounds to his legs and arms Tuesday after the U.S. Army jeep he was traveling in north of Baghdad hit a land mine. There are 850 Georgian troops in the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

The U.S. military announced that a two-day operation involving more than 2,000 Iraqi soldiers and police the largest joint campaign in the Baghdad area had rounded up 428 suspected insurgents.

But insurgents continued to wreak havoc in the capital.

Residents called police about a suspicious-looking car parked opposite the Dijlah Junior High School for Girls in Alwiyah, near eastern Baghdad's Withaq Square, a Christian neighborhood. As bomb-disposal experts approached the vehicle, it exploded and killed six bystanders. No students were believed to be among the casualties.

Iraq's National Assembly convened Tuesday, during which a conservative Shiite lawmaker said he had been named to head a 55-member committee charged with drafting Iraq's constitution, which must be drawn up by mid-August and put to a referendum by October.

Cleric Hummam Hammoudi, an aide to al-Hakim, told the AP he was appointed head of the committee and a Sunni Arab and a Kurd were appointed his deputies.

Associated Press writer Bassem Mroue contributed to this report from Baghdad.

posted May 25, 2005 09:35 PM              

Little hope held for Iraq economy
By Omar Anwar
May 13, 2005

PLAGUED by relentless violence, Iraqis have little cause for hope economically and socially, having suffered a tragic plunge in living standards and high unemployment, a Planning Ministry survey has showed.

The situation in the oil power once regarded as an intellectual and economic hub of the Arab world is rapidly deteriorating, the survey showed.

"This survey shows a rather tragic situation of the quality of life in Iraq,"Minister of Planning Barham Salih told a news conference.

"These statistics reflect the contrast between the wealth of this country and the deteriorating level of all vital sectors for Iraqis."

Iraq's new government, formed two weeks ago, faces the daunting task of restoring security and public services for an economy that has been battered by wars and trade sanctions.

The survey, conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and the United Nations Development Program with funding by the Norwegian government, was taken in the second half of last year in 18 provinces. Unemployment is running at an alarming 50 per cent, the survey said, raising questions over whether a growing number of young Iraqi men will join the insurgency.

It showed 33.4 per cent of youth were unemployed while 37.2 per cent of high school and university graduates were jobless.

Thirty three per cent of Iraqis are underemployed.

In contrast, unemployment stood at 3.6 per cent in the 1980s, when Iraq was locked in a costly war with Iran, and 13.6 per cent in the 1990s, when United Nations sanctions crippled the economy after Saddam Hussein's troops invaded Kuwait.

Iraqis were hoping that the fall of Saddam in 2003 would eliminate state control over industries and deliver prosperity.

But even basic services are not available for most people.

Eighty five per cent of households suffer from erratic electricity supply, the survey revealed. Only 54 per cent of Iraqi families have access to clean water, and 37 per cent of homes are connected to a sewage network, compared to 75 per cent in the 1980s.

Two decades ago, Iraq had one of the highest medical standards in the Middle East, but hospitals now overwhelmed by bombing and shooting victims suffer from a severe lack of equipment and medicine.

The number of mothers who die during labour has reached 93 in every 100,000 births in Iraq, compared to 14 in Jordan and 32 in Saudi Arabia, the survey said.

"It clearly shows the deteriorating health services in Iraq," said the survey.

After bickering for three months after January 30 elections, Iraq's new cabinet faces the challenge of rebuilding economic and social services in a country where suicide bombings, shootings and kidnappings have kept foreign investment away.

Twenty-five per cent of Iraqi families could not generate the equivalent of $US70 ($A90) in a week to cope with an emergency, the survey said.

"Every social economic indicator is considered a tragedy especially knowing the fact that Iraq is a very wealthy country," said Salih, who called for help from the international community.

"Iraqis need schools, health services and employment opportunities ... There has been progress over the last three years but a lot still needs to be done. I hope the priority is to get it done," he said.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15272918%255E1702,00.html

posted May 25, 2005 10:06 PM            

Michael Moore likes him too. No doubt for his expertise in economics. Or perhaps because he's reliably against the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=307

Gee all that unemployment, starvation and shutdown of the economy of Iraq makes me wonder where they're getting the money to buy all those new cars and generators. A real puzzle, now isn't it?

He sounds like one of those boneheads in the American media who, in a time of the fastest growing economy in more than 20 years were pretending to their readers America is in an economic depression. With unemployment numbers at the same level or lower than the average all during the entire Clinton administration, these idiots were telling people no one could get a job...even though more people were working in America than at any time in American history.

posted May 25, 2005 11:02 PM              

apparently reuters and yahoo like anwar too...so whats your point now jwhop?
Bomb Blasts Kill 29 in Iraq; Zarqawi Threatens
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050429/ts_nm/iraq_dc

*******

Report paints grim picture of Iraqi life
Thursday, May 12, 2005 Posted: 4:56 PM EDT (2056 GMT)

Members of an Iraqi family and their sheep ride on a truck to fetch water outside the south-central city of Najaf.

Iraqis looking for jobs line up at recruiting stations.

(CNN) -- In the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country still struggles with high unemployment, inconsistent utility services and widespread poverty, a joint survey from the Iraqi government and United Nations indicates.

Released Thursday, the report from Iraq's Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation and the U.N. Development Program in Iraq surveyed nearly 22,000 households in the country's 18 provinces during 2004.

Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. program's resident representative for Iraq, said Thursday that the "Iraqi people are suffering. They are going through a very difficult time. We knew it, but now it's been proven."

While there has been progress since Saddam Hussein's fall, "these data depict a very tragic picture of the quality of life," Iraqi transitional Planning Minister Barham Salih said.

Salih said the mismanagement of Saddam's government and his regime's internal conflicts and those with its neighbors took a toll that spared no sector of the country's infrastructure.

"Saddam Hussein has left us a wasteland," Salih said. "This country could have been the economic powerhouse of the Middle East."

The survey estimated that the minimum number of war-related deaths ranges from 18,000 to 29,000 and is probably higher.

The report said the survey didn't attempt to count entire families who died and therefore underestimates the total number of people killed.

Children under 18 accounted for 12 percent of the deaths, the report said, while the information on infant mortality and malnutrition shows that "the suffering of children due to war and conflict in Iraq is not limited to those directly wounded or killed by military activities."

The information about deaths was "derived from a question posed to households concerning missing and dead persons during the two years prior to the survey. Although the date was not asked for, it is reasonable to suppose that the vast majority of deaths due to warfare occurred after the beginning of 2003."

Children also are affected by widespread malnutrition. About 43 percent of boys and girls between the ages of 6 months and 5 years suffer from some form of the condition -- chronic, general or acute malnutrition.

High unemployment
While Iraq's unemployment figures were high, the survey found that most eligible workers -- excluding the military -- were able to keep the jobs they had held since before March 2003.

Iraq's unemployment rate was 10.5 percent of a population of 27 million people, the report found. When the figure of workers who had given up looking for a job -- discouraged workers -- was included, the unemployment number increased to 18.4 percent.

Most of the unemployed were people who were looking for their first jobs, the report found.

De Mistura, the U.N. representative, said Iraqis have done well to maintain services, but he said delivery of utilities such as water, sewage, sanitation and electricity hasn't been consistent.

"Although a large percentage of the population in Iraq is connected to water, electricity and sewage networks, the supply is too unstable to make a difference to their lives," he said in a news release.

According to the survey, 98 percent of Iraqi households are connected to the national electricity grid, but only 15 percent find the supply stable.

As for water availability, the figures were 78 percent (had water) and 66 percent (had problems).

Household income falls
More than a fourth of Iraqis surveyed described themselves as being poor and 96 percent said they receive monthly food rations under the public food system set up through the oil-for-food program.

The median income in Iraq was equivalent to about $255 (366,000 dinars) in 2003 and decreased in the first half of 2004 to about $144 (207,000 dinars).

The report indicated it was difficult to come up with concrete numbers from prior years to indicate the movement of wages.

"However, most observers agree that, due to a combination of wars, sanctions and economic mismanagement, the average Iraqi household probably has lower real income today than in 1980," the report said.

The survey said the largest declines were in the central Iraqi provinces, including Baghdad.

In terms of poverty, the survey looked at subjective measures. About one in six respondents to the survey said they were unable to buy one of six items listed (new clothes, heating, etc.)

De Mistura said the survey should help the Iraqi government develop a plan to improve living conditions.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/05/12/iraq.livingsurvey/

posted May 29, 2005 10:51 PM              

By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: May 29, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 29 - The largest Iraqi-led counterinsurgency operation since the downfall of Saddam Hussein set off a violent backlash on Sunday across Baghdad. At least 20 people were killed in the capital, 14 of them in a battle lasting several hours when insurgents launched sustained attacks on several police stations and an army barracks.

Skip to next paragraph

The violence, including at least four suicide car bombings, was a bloody start to an operation that Iraq's new Shiite-majority government had presented as a new get-tough policy toward Sunni Arab insurgents, first in Baghdad and then countrywide. The government has said it will commit 40,000 uniformed Iraqis to the Baghdad operation in an effort to crush insurgents who reacted to the government's swearing-in four weeks ago with one of the war's biggest rebel upsurges.

The Baghdad toll was part of another day of bloodshed across Iraq. In total, at least 34 people were killed, including a British soldier caught by a roadside bombing near the town of Kahla that broke a protracted period of calm in the Shiite-dominated south.

A statement from the Second Marine Expeditionary Force said a marine was killed Saturday when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb near Haqlaniya, about 90 miles northwest of Baghdad.

At least initially, the crackdown in Baghdad appeared to have been met by a stiff, coordinated response that brought the toll to about 700 from the intensified rebel attacks this month. The heaviest battle raged across the districts of Abu Ghraib, Amariya and Khudra on the capital's western edge.

In the space of 30 minutes in midafternoon, the insurgents answered attempts by government forces to cordon off the districts with a sequence of attacks. They appeared to catch Iraqi forces by surprise, and prompted commanders to call for backup from American troops garrisoned nearby. Iraqi witnesses said Apache attack helicopters with loaded missile racks swooped overhead as the insurgent attacks flared into protracted gun battles below.

Even before Sunday's fighting, the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari appeared to have opened a new and potentially hazardous chapter in the war. Announcing the crackdown last week, government officials said the operation would move Iraqi troops "from the defensive to the offensive" in the war, and show Iraqis that the leaders they elected in January were capable of providing the security that just about every opinion poll in recent months has shown is their highest priority.

But the operation met with skepticism even before it started.

For one thing, few believed the government could commit the 40,000 soldiers and paramilitary police officers it had promised, since the American command's latest official count of the number in Baghdad Province, reaching deep into the countryside beyond the capital itself, totaled only slightly more than 30,000. Many Iraqis said they suspected the government was overstating its abilities in the hope of stemming rising popular anger in the face of the new insurgent offensive.

There has been another fear, one rooted in the country's shifting political landscape. Essentially, the operation begun Sunday involves a government led by two religious parties with strong ties to Iran, commanding new American-trained army and paramilitary police forces that are heavily Shiite, taking on an insurgency that is almost entirely Sunni Arab.

The potential for a further sharpening of sectarian tensions has been unavoidable, despite assurances by Dr. Jaafari that the Shiite leaders intend to govern in a way that draws Iraq's religious and ethnic communities together.

The concern appeared to be at least partly born out on Sunday, as truckloads of Iraqi soldiers and police officers in camouflage fanned out across the city, setting up checkpoints and moving in force through neighborhoods long known as insurgent strongholds, raiding homes and carrying away suspects.

One man in Amariya telephoned The New York Times to say that people in his neighborhood believed that the sweeps were inspired and led by the Badr Organization, a shadowy militia group founded in Iran that is an offshoot of one of the two governing Shiite religious parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

(Page 2 of 2)

The belief is a potentially explosive one among Sunni Arabs, especially hard-liners who remember the Badr group for its role fighting alongside Iran in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's. In interviews, some of these hard-liners have said they view the new government as an Iranian implant, open to the influence of the ayatollahs in Tehran. American officials here say that persuading Sunni Arabs that this is not so is crucial to building a democracy and avoiding a slide into civil war.

Skip to next paragraph

The reactions in Amariya suggested that even moderate Sunni Arabs were wavering in the face of the new government's sweeps. The man who telephoned The New York Times, a former officer who had fought in the war against Iran, said that he voted in January's elections, defying a Sunni Arab boycott, and that he had called a government hot line to report insurgent activities in his area. But on Sunday, he said his feelings were with the insurgents. "The general attitude out here is that all this tension is caused by the Badr Organization and Iran," the man said.

The rebel attacks included a suicide car bombing at an Iraqi-manned checkpoint in Abu Ghraib, the district best known for the prison that holds many of the 14,000 insurgency suspects held in American custody across Iraq. Another suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi paramilitary police patrol in a residential district of Amariya, northeast of the sprawling Camp Victory complex that serves as the American military headquarters in Iraq. Gunmen also attacked a police station in Khudra, a neighborhood adjoining Amariya, according to Interior Ministry officials.

The most daring assault appeared to have been a sustained attack on the detention center run by the Interior Ministry's major crimes unit in Amariya, where suspected insurgents are held before being moved to Abu Ghraib. The ministry said the assault there involved at least 50 insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and machine guns. According to an unconfirmed account by an Amariya resident who was reached by telephone, insurgent bands roaming the district after the battle claimed to have captured weapons from the detention center's armory.

An official at the Interior Ministry's operations center said 14 people had been killed in the Amariya fighting alone, including 3 insurgents, 4 policemen and 7 civilians.

Other victims of insurgent attacks in the capital on Sunday included two security guards killed when a suicide bomber tried to ram a Volkswagen sedan through the gates of the heavily fortified Oil Ministry complex in eastern Baghdad, and two policemen killed in a drive-by shooting in the Dora district in southwestern Baghdad, a notorious insurgent stronghold. Two more policemen died in a suicide bombing at dusk in the Zeiouniya district of eastern Baghdad.

Elsewhere, nine policemen were killed in an insurgent ambush near the town of Yusufiya in a restive Sunni Arab area about 10 miles south of Baghdad, according to an Iraqi doctor at a hospital nearby. A car bombing at Madaen, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, killed two police commandos, according to a police commander in the town. A police commander in the northern city of Tuz Khurmato, about 60 miles south of Kirkuk, said a suicide car bomber there killed two civilians after detonating his vehicle near the local headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a partner in the new government in Baghdad.

posted June 05, 2005 12:11 PM              

By Tom Lasseter

Inquirer Foreign Staff

BAGHDAD - Marines have discovered a series of underground bunkers used by insurgents in western Iraq showing a sophisticated organization with a vast supply of weapons and enough confidence to operate near a major Marine base.

The air-conditioned bunkers, found Thursday, were just 16 miles from Fallujah, where hundreds of Marines are stationed. Measuring 558 feet by 902 feet, the system of rooms featured four furnished living spaces, showers, and a kitchen with fresh food - suggesting insurgents had been there recently, according to the U.S. military.

An impressive array of weapons and high-tech equipment was found inside the bunker: mortars, rockets, machine guns, night-vision goggles, compasses, ski masks and cell phones. In a five-mile area around the bunkers, Marines also found at least 59 surface-to-air missiles, about 29,000 AK-47 rounds, more than 350 pounds of plastic explosives, and an unspecified amount of TNT.

"There isn't any historical data here detailing whether this is the most elaborate facility ever found in Iraq or even [the] province," Marine spokeswoman First Lt. Kate S. VandenBossche said via e-mail from a base in nearby Ramadi. "I can tell you that it is the largest underground system discovered in at least the last year."

After retaking Fallujah from insurgents in November, Marine officials called the town the safest place in Iraq. Last month, Marines staged two large-scale offensives in the region aimed at rooting out insurgents from their safe haven in Anbar province, thought to be the core of the Sunni Muslim-led insurgency.

It was not clear who built the bunkers. The entrance to the underground system was discovered by a patrol of Marines and Iraqi Army soldiers who were searching a house in the desert when they found a passageway beneath an electric freezer. A rock quarry is adjacent to the site, and the space could be an abandoned mine.

The find comes amidst mounting concern in Iraq that the insurgency has reorganized after a lull in violence following national elections in January.

The number of U.S. troops killed by hostile fire in May - 67 - was the highest since November, when Marines and soldiers stormed Fallujah.

"At times, there is not a good, reasonable explanation as to why there are more casualties one month vs. another," said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a top military spokesman in Baghdad. "The enemy gets a vote, and, unfortunately at times, they get lucky."

There were at least 143 car bombings across Iraq last month, detonated both by suicide bombers and by remote devices. More than 700 Iraqis, mostly civilians, have been killed since the nation's Shiite-dominated government took office April 28.

Yesterday, hundreds of Iraqi and U.S. troops searched fields and farms in an area south of Baghdad known as the Triangle of Death, hunting throughout a searingly hot late-spring day for other insurgent hideouts. They rounded up at least 108 Iraqis suspected of involvement in the brutal campaign by insurgents to topple the government.

The offensive in Latifiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, was part of Operation Lightning, a crackdown that started a week ago and was aimed at rooting the insurgency out of Baghdad and sapping the strength of militants nationwide.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr has said at least 700 suspected insurgents were rounded up in the sweep, which has also killed at least 28 militants.

Yesterday, insurgents shot at Iraqi soldiers from a vehicle, and another roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi patrol involved in the offensive, military spokesman Maj. Web Wright said, but no casualties were reported.

An Iraqi believed to be a top insurgent leader in northern Iraq also was captured by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Mosul. Iraqi Lt. Col. Abu Fahad Alkhasali said 19 suspected insurgents, including a Jordanian and a Syrian, were arrested in raids in Baghdad's western Abu Ghraib district.

After a brief clash in eastern Mosul, insurgency suspect Mullah Mahdi was detained along with his brother, three other Iraqis, and a non-Iraqi Arab national who was not otherwise identified, Iraqi army Maj. Gen. Khalil Ahmed al-Obeidi said.

Without elaborating, Obeidi said Mahdi was affiliated with the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, one of Iraq's most feared groups, and was linked to the Syrian intelligence service. Iraqi and U.S. officials have accused Syria of facilitating the insurgency by allowing foreign fighters to cross its borders; Damascus denies the allegation. http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/11816019.htm

posted June 13, 2005 01:16 AM              

MORE

By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Republican congressman called for a deadline to pull U.S. troops from Iraq, while some other members of President Bush's party urged on Sunday that his administration come to grips with a persistent insurgency and revamp Iraq policy.

Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina conservative, said on ABC's "This Week" that he would offer legislation this week setting a timetable for the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

"I voted for the resolution to commit the troops, and I feel that we've done about as much as we can do," said Jones, who coined the phrase "freedom fries" to lash out at the French for opposing the Iraq invasion.

Other Republicans on television talk shows joined Democrats in criticizing the administration for playing down the insurgency, while overestimating the ability of Iraq's fledgling forces to fight without U.S. soldiers in the lead and failing to plan for the post-invasion occupation.

"The insurgency is alive and well. We underestimated the viability of the insurgency," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said on CBS' Face the Nation. He said the administration has "been slow to adjust when it comes to troop strength and supporting our troops."

Graham said the Army is contending with a serious shortfall in recruiting "because this war is going sour in terms of word of mouth from parents and grandparents." He said "if we don't adjust, public opinion is going to keep slipping away."

Jones, a member of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said "primarily the neoconservatives" in the administration were to blame for flawed war planning.

"The reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that's all been proven that it was never there," he said.

Jones joins some of Congress' most liberal Democrats in demanding a deadline to withdraw troops from a conflict they said has been too costly in U.S. lives and money.

According to a new Gallup Poll, nearly six in 10 Americans say the United States should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq, up from 49 percent who held that view in February, USA Today reported in its Monday edition.

posted June 13, 2005 01:18 AM              

AP , WASHINGTON
Monday, Jun 13, 2005,Page 7

Advertising A staff paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair eight months before the invasion of Iraq concluded that US military officials were not planning adequately for a postwar occupation, the Washington Post reported.
"A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise," authorities of the briefing memo wrote, according to the Post. "As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

The eight-page memo was written in advance of a July 23, 2002, meeting at Blair's Downing Street offices, the Post reported in editions yesterday.

It said the memo and other internal British government documents were originally obtained by Michael Smith of the Sunday Times and that excerpts made available to the Post were confirmed as authentic by British sources who sought anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The Post said the introduction to the memo -- "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action" -- said US "military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," but that "little thought" has been given to, among other things, "the aftermath and how to shape it."

The July 21 memo was produced by Blair's staff in preparation for a meeting with his national security team two days later that has become controversial since last month's disclosure of official notes summarizing the session.

According to those minutes -- known as the Downing Street Memo -- British officials who had just returned from Washington said the Bush administration believed war was inevitable and was determined to use intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Blair denied at a news conference with US President George W. Bush last week that intelligence was manipulated to justify the war. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/06/13/2003259133

posted June 18, 2005 03:44 PM              

17 June 2005

American officials lied to British ministers over the use of "internationally reviled" napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.

Yesterday's disclosure led to calls by MPs for a full statement to the Commons and opened ministers to allegations that they held back the facts until after the general election.

Despite persistent rumours of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defence minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.

But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. "The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you," he told Mr Cohen. "I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position."

Mr Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003. They were used against military targets "away from civilian targets", he said. This avoids breaching the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which permits their use only against military targets.

Britain, which has no stockpiles of the weapons, ratified the convention, but the US did not.

The confirmation that US officials misled British ministers led to new questions last night about the value of the latest assurances by the US. Mr Cohen said there were rumours that the firebombs were used in the US assault on the insurgent stronghold in Fallujah last year, claims denied by the US. He is tabling more questions seeking assurances that the weapons were not used against civilians.

Mr Ingram did not explain why the US officials had misled him, but the US and British governments were accused of a cover-up. The Iraq Analysis Group, which campaigned against the war, said the US authorities only admitted the use of the weapons after the evidence from reporters had become irrefutable.

Mike Lewis, a spokesman for the group, said: "The US has used internationally reviled weapons that the UK refuses to use, and has then apparently lied to UK officials, showing how little weight the UK carries in influencing American policy."

He added: "Evidence that Mr Ingram had given false information to Parliament was publicly available months ago. He has waited until after the election to admit to it - a clear sign of the Government's embarrassment that they are doing nothing to restrain their own coalition partner in Iraq."

The US State Department website admitted in the run-up to the election that US forces had used MK77s in Iraq. Protests were made by MPs, but it was only this week that Mr Ingram confirmed the reports were true.

Mike Moore, the Liberal Democrat defence spokes-man, said: "It is very serious that this type of weapon was used in Iraq, but this shows the US has not been completely open with the UK. We are supposed to have a special relationship.

"It has also taken two months for the minister to clear this up. This is welcome candour, but it will raise fresh questions about how open the Government wished to be... before the election."

The MK77 bombs, an evolution of the napalm used in Vietnam and Korea, carry kerosene-based jet fuel and polystyrene so that, like napalm, the gel sticks to structures and to its victims. The bombs lack stabilising fins, making them far from precise.

posted June 19, 2005 08:41 AM            

quote:

---

Gee all that unemployment, starvation and shutdown of the economy of Iraq makes me wonder where they're getting the money to buy all those new cars and generators. A real puzzle, now isn't it?

---

posted June 20, 2005 09:46 AM            

Hussein Abizaid Khadum doesn't care where the cars come from. His auto-repair shop serves car thieves and crime victims alike. He and his crew paint over vehicles, patch up bullet holes and pound out the dents and dings suffered in the daily crush of Baghdad traffic.

An Iraqi man walks among scores of advertising billboards that have recently sprung up in Baghdad.
By Sabah Arar, AFP

His business is thriving, taking in about $1,000 a day. He estimates that stolen cars account for 20%. "I don't care about the source of the business," Khadum, 37, says cheerfully, his T-shirt and work pants splotched with paint, the air around him heavy with paint fumes and exhaust. A longtime renter, he's about to move his family into a brand-new house.

Anything goes these days in Baghdad's teeming streets, crowded souks and back alleys. An exhilarating but virtually lawless economy has risen from the ashes of Saddam Hussein's government. Business opportunities are everywhere, but so are corruption and crime.

"The regime is gone," says Osama al-Quraishi, an Iraqi entrepreneur who returned to Baghdad to search for business opportunities after decades in exile in Europe and the Middle East. "There are no restrictions. There are no rules." He predicts Baghdad will soon replace Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, as the Middle East's commercial center.

Besides crushing human rights, Saddam smothered the Iraqi economy. The dictator, who invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990, ran a war-based economy, diverting resources to the military and starving the rest of the country. Iraq's infrastructure deteriorated; the oil industry alone needs $10 billion to $40 billion of investment to catch up. Saddam and his cronies imposed stiff duties on imports, steered government contracts to loyalists and buried business in regulations. This encouraged a culture of kickbacks and corruption.

"It was a lawless economy governed by one principle: Saddam and the Baathist party took whatever they wanted," says Bill Block, an economist with the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.

Under Saddam, the shops were silent, the goods available were obsolete or absurdly overpriced, and the cars were clunkers dating back 15 or 20 years. Now that Saddam is gone, signs of bounty are visible everywhere in Baghdad and to a lesser extent in smaller cities such as Mosul and Basra.

The World Bank says Iraq's economy shrank by nearly a third last year after several years of smaller declines. The World Bank projects a sharp rebound in 2004 — growth ranging anywhere from 30% to 70% — and an overall economy worth $17 billion to $22 billion. That would make the Iraqi economy about the size of North Dakota's or Vermont's, which have the smallest output among the 50 states.

Bush administration officials working on Iraqi reconstruction are optimistic that Iraq's growth will approach the high end of the World Bank projection. Salaries and pensions for public employees have been increased. Repairs to the power grid, oil facilities and roads are having ripple effects throughout the economy. Farmers who could not get seed, fertilizer and animal feed in recent years are producing again.

The billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money pouring into Iraq acts as a powerful stimulus. The United States is expected to award contracts for $14 billion in reconstruction work this year and $4 billion to $5 billion next year. Much of that will go to pay Iraqis working for contractors and subcontractors and to Iraqi businesses furnishing equipment and supplies.

Cell phones and TV sets

That money then trickles down to the car-clogged streets of the capital. Television sets and washing machines are piled high in boxes outside Baghdad appliance stores. Trucks loaded with consumer goods trundle down the streets. Families line up outside shops for satellite phones and cell phones, which were banned by Saddam's government. Entrepreneurs offer truckloads of merchandise — TV sets, office equipment — obtained from who-knows-where.

In a gold-rush atmosphere, hustlers cut business deals over glasses of sugared tea or cups of thick Turkish coffee. Schemers map out grandiose plans for five-star hotels and fancy restaurants in a city where most accommodations are stuck in a 1970s time warp. Business people arrive from overseas, some from exile, eager for a piece of the reconstruction contracts.

Foreign companies are weighing whether to place a long-term bet on Iraq. Pepsi is refurbishing a bottling plant; Nestle is considering a bottled-water factory; MCI is providing cell phone service to the U.S. authorities. Companies from Merck to Motorola are studying the market, according to Tom Foley, the Coalition Provisional Authority's private-sector czar.

Baghdad families show off late-model used cars, just imported from Dubai. Police say the number of cars in the capital, a city of more than 5 million people, has doubled to 600,000 since Saddam fell. "Where are they going to find roads to drive all these cars?" wonders police Lt. Gen. Sulaiman Taha al-Shaikhli, commander of west Baghdad's car-registration center.

The new arrivals are conspicuous by their fresh paint jobs and black license plates. Saddam-era clunkers are betrayed by their age, rust and white plates. The car market is so strong that Gezar Tuma, 32, and his brothers closed their struggling Fallujah Kebab restaurant in Baghdad's posh al-Mansour neighborhood and replaced it with a car lot, their second.

"Each day today is worth 10 years under Saddam," says Abdul Reza Ougla, 48, a truck driver who cruises south Baghdad's Karada commercial district looking for merchants who need him to haul something somewhere. He earns 40,000 Iraqi dinars (about $28) a day, up from 15,000 under Saddam.

Behind the boom:

• Iraq is duty- and tax-free until Thursday, when a flat tax rate will be launched. Imports are flooding into the country partly because the stiff duties are gone. The duties once accounted for more than half the price of imported goods. A Baghdad family can now buy a Maytag refrigerator for $825, down from $1,200 a year ago. Truck driver Ougla just bought a Kia flatbed truck for $8,400; it would have cost him $12,000 under Saddam, he says. Car dealer Khadum Jurri, 40, used to sell two or three cars a month. Now, he's selling 50 a month, among them late-model Mercedes sedans.

• Spending power is up. Civil servants got huge pay raises after the coalition decided to correct Saddam-era parsimony. "Public-sector wages under Saddam were quite literally starvation wages," economist Block says. Thana Ismail, 40, has seen her monthly wages at the Ministry of Trade shoot up from 3,000 Iraqi dinars a month (barely $2 at today's exchange rates) to 300,000 (just over $200). This means she can finally afford to replace the wheezing washing machine she bought nearly two decades ago. She has her eye on a $185 jumbo Samsung model.

• Saddam's relatives and loyalists are no longer around to harass entrepreneurs and demand kickbacks or ownership stakes in profitable businesses — or to flex their muscle just for fun. (Jurri remembers when customs officials impounded one of his cars, a violet BMW, because they said the color would offend the sensibilities of Saddam's oldest son, Uday.)

Back in business

From a brick building on a quiet side street in south Baghdad's Arasat al-Hindiyah neighborhood, Omer Tabra, 37, enjoys a unique vantage point over the simmering local economy. In a country where no one trusts the banks, people have long come to the Tabra family to wire money overseas and receive remittances from abroad.

Since Saddam's fall, the volume of cash moving through the offices of his family's Nepal Trading Co. has risen from $2 million to $12 million a day. He says funds are divided about equally between incoming and outgoing. Cash leaves Iraq mainly to pay for imports and arrives to finance new projects.

"All kinds of businesses are active — cars, home appliances, ready-made clothes, tires and batteries, foodstuffs," Tabra says. All that is good news for Nepal Trading, which collects a 0.5% commission on outgoing cash and a minimum fee of $10 for each delivery of inbound money.

The firm's office is conspicuous only by the three BMWs parked on the street and the steady stream of people in and out. Tabra oversees the family empire from a room hidden behind a window with thick purple drapes. It's sparsely decorated with three purple couches and battered fiberboard furniture. A picture of his father, one of several dozen entrepreneurs executed by Saddam on trumped-up charges of hoarding food, hangs on a wall in the waiting room. Tabra often wears a traditional dishdasha robe, a gold pen slipped into the breast pocket.

He's expanding his modest quarters by a third. You can hear it through the walls: the pounding of hammers, the shrill whine of a power drill. The makeover will move his cashiers farther into the building, where they will be less vulnerable to an armed assault.

Security concerns are not theoretical in Baghdad's Wild West atmosphere. Crime is rampant, carjacking common. Tabra's couriers have been robbed three times since Saddam's fall, losing a total of $800,000 cash. In December, Tabra's brother-in-law and a cousin were ambushed in their car while carrying money through the streets of Baghdad. Four gunmen in a white Mercedes ordered them to stop. Instead, the cousin slammed his car into reverse and tried to get away. The gunmen riddled the car with bullets, wounded both men and grabbed $400,000. The two are still in the hospital; the brother-in-law is paralyzed.

Street violence and corruption are the flip side of the Baghdad boom. Under Saddam, car dealer Tuma complains, he and his brothers only had to bribe one of Saddam's relatives. In a way, it was one-stop shopping. Now, every cop on the beat seems to have his hand out, he says. Police threatened to arrest Tuma on trumped-up charges and relented only after collecting a $50 payoff. When thieves drove off with a car someone had entrusted the Tuma brothers to sell, police demanded a $100 payment on top of $2,000 compensation to the car's owner.

"The police are always trying to create trouble for you, so you have to pay them," Tuma says. They want only U.S. dollars.

On the other hand, Tuma concedes that some of his best customers are crooked cops. One cash-rich police captain recently ordered three cars, including a fully loaded '93 Mercedes for $8,000.

Underlying the boomtown atmosphere is the fear that the good times won't last or that those who don't move swiftly will be left behind. "If you don't have people on the ground, you're going to miss the boat," Foley says.

One sign of the ongoing uncertainty about what will happen once political power is restored to Iraqis: Jurri's car dealership still carries the name (al-Sakker) of a Saddam crony, now in hiding, who forced Jurri to accept him as a partner, contributed nothing and confiscated most of the profits.

posted June 20, 2005 09:57 AM              

you crack me up........

posted June 20, 2005 10:01 AM              

quote:

---

Gee all that unemployment, starvation and shutdown of the economy of Iraq makes me wonder where they're getting the money to buy all those new cars and generators. A real puzzle, now isn't it?-jwhop

---

quote:

---

The billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money pouring into Iraq acts as a powerful stimulus.

---

so thats capitalism eh?

posted June 20, 2005 10:31 AM              

By Jonathan Finer and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 20, 2005; Page A10

BAGHDAD -- On the top floor of an otherwise vacant building in a slum where flocks of sheep graze trash-strewn streets, 25 unemployed women wearing head scarves were learning to operate Chinese-made sewing machines.

Down the hall, an instructor was teaching jobless men basic word processing on computers fresh from shrink-wrapped packaging. And in another cramped room, teenage and adult students were chatting before their class in basic literacy.

The new job-training center in Baghdad's impoverished borough of Sadr City, run by the Iraqi government, is on the front lines of efforts to address one of the most pressing challenges to the country's stalled economy: unemployment.

Numbering in the millions, Iraq's unemployed have found little refuge in an economy derailed by two years of relentless insurgent attacks. Many have not had steady jobs since the United States dissolved the Iraqi army after the 2003 invasion. And U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledge that every young man without work is a potential recruit for insurgents who pay as little as $50 to people who plant explosives on a highway or shoot a policeman.

"The longer this goes on, we are asking for trouble because we are breeding more and more insurgents," said Muhammed Uthman, an Iraqi businessman and former oil ministry official who serves on a panel that advises the government on reconstruction. "Unemployment is exactly what the terrorists want."

A report published last month by the government and the United Nations put the unemployment rate at 27 percent. But many experts here say the actual number is probably closer to 50 percent or more because the survey was not conducted in some of the least stable parts of the country and because many Iraqis work unreliable part-time jobs.

The Labor Ministry has registered 656,437 unemployed people across Iraq's 18 provinces -- including more than 110,000 in Baghdad alone -- but even ministry officials acknowledge that the actual number is probably several times as large. In an April poll conducted by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-funded nonprofit organization, Iraqis ranked unemployment the country's second most pressing problem, behind security.

And the situation will likely get worse before it gets better, the government says. Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari recently announced plans to scale back Iraq's bloated public sector, which employs as many as half of Iraq's 6.5 million workers.

In Saddam Hussein's tightly controlled economy, salaries for government workers were often paltry, but the government provided work for almost anyone who needed it. Since the invasion, salaries for many public sector workers have risen, but the new government has said it is no longer practical to employ so many people.

Meanwhile, more than 150,000 Iraqis were employed on a permanent or temporary basis on U.S.-funded reconstruction projects as of June 1, according to State Department figures.

"It's things like trash cleanup, surface removal, road rehabilitation -- the kinds of jobs that maximize employment," said a U.S. reconstruction official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "If you have a choice between a backhoe and 20 guys with shovels, you use the 20 guys even if it takes longer."

In the past two months, the Iraqi government and the U.S. Agency for International Development have launched new efforts to combat unemployment through a network of training and recruitment centers in such cities as Basra, Mosul and Baghdad.

But everyone involved seems aware that the centers are only one part of fixing a giant problem in a country where many service industries simply do not exist. At a training center in Iraq's Labor Ministry, Suraa Yahya was teaching English recently to a half-dozen young men. She asked the students to read from a list of services printed in their textbooks and decide whether they were available in Iraq.

First came getting medical advice over the telephone. "Not unless if your friend is a doctor," a student said, after a long pause. Grocery shopping by telephone? No. Professional dog walkers? No. Clothes for sale in vending machines?

"No, but that is not a good idea," a man said. "The people who are selling clothes would lose their jobs."

In a nearby Labor Ministry recruitment center, dozens of applicants lined up with résumés in hand, awaiting interviews for management jobs. Most graduated from college at least a year ago and have been unemployed since.

Ali Jima Abid submitted his application to the center last August, but was only recently called for an interview. Before the invasion, he worked in Iraq's Transportation Ministry, but he lost his job soon after Baghdad fell. To make ends meet, he said, he has been selling snacks and cigarettes from a roadside stand.

"Like everyone, I am feeling desperate and don't think I will ever find a job," said Abid, 30, who was spending his second consecutive day waiting on a bench in the ministry's lobby because a blackout had caused the previous day's interviews to be canceled.

"At this point I will accept anything, even if it is not what I am qualified to do," he said.

The manager of the ministry's recruitment center, Riyadh Hassam, said a major part of the problem was the country's inability to attract private investment because of the security situation. With few if any international financial institutions operating in the country, the type of financing needed for large development projects that spur growth and provide jobs is lacking, he said.

"Sometimes when I think about the size of the problem, I think it will take five years to fix," he said. "Sometimes I think it will take more. Sometimes I think it will take forever."

Unaccustomed to competing for business after years of embargoes that limited imports, Iraq's private sector is struggling to appeal to consumers who have access to more foreign goods. "There's a flood of new products coming in that are preferred by people here," said the U.S. reconstruction official. "So Iraqi goods that did just fine before are not able to compete."

Some job seekers say they have already given up. Down on his luck and with a family of 12 to support, Ahmed Habib paid a visit to the only people in Baghdad who seemed to be hiring: Iraq's police and army.

But the man who took his application asked for a $200 bribe, Habib said. Unable to afford the payoff, he was turned away and now spends most days waiting on the side of a road with other jobless laborers, hoping someone might offer $10 for a morning's work.

posted June 20, 2005 11:55 AM            

But, Iraq is getting there and yes capitalism is the cure for communism.

posted June 20, 2005 12:03 PM            

The study says the northern city o Mosul, for example, only had 57,000 registered cars in early 2003. But the number has surged to 125,000 now at a time there has been no improvement in roads, traffic signals and lights. On the contrary, conditions on roads have deteriorated, the study adds.

Former leader Saddam Hussein restricted the flow of cars to the country and the import of vehicles was an exclusive right, which he exercised himself.

He only gave new cars to his cronies and people showing unwavering loyalty.
Cars were expensive and not everyone could afford to buy one.

But currently conditions have changed and civil servants earn meaningful wages enabling them to buy not only cars but many other commodities they could not afford in the past.

The substantial improvement in wages – from a few dollars to at an average of 300 a month – is perhaps one of the few merits of the post-Saddam era.

Moreover, the country’s financial authorities have managed to stabilize the exchange rate of the local currency – the dinar –the thing, which Saddam Hussein dismally failed to do.

posted June 25, 2005 11:07 PM              

consequences are just now becoming clear. The Bush administration was never willing to

commit the resources necessary to secure the country and did not make the most of the

resources it had. U.S. officials did get a number of things right, but they never

understood-or even listened to-the country they were seeking to rebuild. As a result, the

democratic future of Iraq now hangs in the balance.

Larry Diamond is Co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and Senior Fellow at Stanford

University's Hoover Institution. From January to April 2004, he served as a Senior

Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

BLUNDERING IN BAGHDAD

With the transfer of power to a new interim Iraqi government on June 28, the political

phase of U.S. occupation came to an abrupt end. The transfer marked an urgently needed,

and in some ways hopeful, new departure for Iraq. But it did not erase, or even much ease

at first, the most pressing problems confronting that beleaguered country: endemic

violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society. Some of

these problems may have been inevitable consequences of the war to topple Saddam Hussein.

But Iraq today falls far short of what the Bush administration promised. As a result of a

long chain of U.S. miscalculations, the coalition occupation has left Iraq in far worse

shape than it need have and has diminished the long-term prospects of democracy there.

Iraqis, Americans, and other foreigners continue to be killed. What went wrong?

Many of the original miscalculations made by the Bush administration are well known. But

the early blunders have had diffuse, profound, and lasting consequences-some of which are

only now becoming clear. The first and foremost of these errors concerned security: the

Bush administration was never willing to commit anything like the forces necessary to

ensure order in postwar Iraq. From the beginning, military experts warned Washington that

the task would require, as Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress in February

2003, "hundreds of thousands" of troops. For the United States to deploy forces in Iraq

at the same ratio to population as NATO had in Bosnia would have required half a million

troops. Yet the coalition force level never reached even a third of that figure.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior civilian deputies rejected every call

for a much larger commitment and made it very clear, despite their disingenuous promises

to give the military "everything" it asked for, that such requests would not be welcome.

No officer missed the lesson of General Shinseki, whom the Pentagon rewarded for his

public candor by announcing his replacement a year early, making him a lame-duck leader

long before his term expired. Officers and soldiers in Iraq were forced to keep their

complaints about insufficient manpower and equipment private, even as top political

officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) insisted publicly that greater

military action was necessary to secure the country.

In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq largely secure after

the war. But doing so would also have required different kinds of troops, with different

rules of engagement. The coalition should have deployed vastly more military police and

other troops trained for urban patrols, crowd control, civil reconstruction, and peace

maintenance and enforcement. Tens of thousands of soldiers with sophisticated monitoring

equipment should have been posted along the borders with Syria and Iran to intercept the

flows of foreign terrorists, Iranian intelligence agents, money, and weapons.

But Washington failed to take such steps, for the same reasons it decided to occupy Iraq

with a relatively light force: hubris and ideology. Contemptuous of the State

Department's regional experts who were seen as too "soft" to remake Iraq, a small group

of Pentagon officials ignored the elaborate postwar planning the State Department had

overseen through its "Future of Iraq" project, which had anticipated many of the problems

that emerged after the invasion. Instead of preparing for the worst, Pentagon planners

assumed that Iraqis would joyously welcome U.S. and international troops as liberators.

With Saddam's military and security apparatus destroyed, the thinking went, Washington

could capitalize on the goodwill by handing the country over to Iraqi expatriates such as

Ahmed Chalabi, who would quickly create a new democratic state. Not only would fewer U.S.

troops be needed at first, but within a year, the troop levels could drop to a few tens

of thousands.

Of course, these naive assumptions quickly collapsed, along with overall security, in the

immediate aftermath of the war. U.S. troops stood by helplessly, outnumbered and

unprepared, as much of Iraq's remaining physical, economic, and institutional

infrastructure was systematically looted and sabotaged. And even once it became obvious

that the looting was not a one-time breakdown of social order but an elaborately

organized, armed, and financed resistance to the U.S. occupation, the Bush administration

compounded its initial mistakes by stubbornly refusing to send in more troops.

Administration officials repeatedly deluded themselves into believing that the defeat of

the insurgency was just around the corner-just as soon as the long, hot summer of 2003

ended, or reconstruction dollars started flowing in and jobs were created, or the

political transition began, or Saddam Hussein was captured, or the interim government was

inaugurated. As in Vietnam, a turning point always seemed imminent, and Washington

refused to grasp the depth of popular disaffection.

Under its chief administrator, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the CPA (which ruled Iraq

from May 2003 until June 2004) worked hard and creatively to craft a transition to a

legitimate, viable, and democratic system of government while rebuilding the overall

economy and society. As I saw during my brief tenure as a senior CPA adviser on

governance earlier this year, the U.S. administration got a number of things right. But

one cannot review the political record without underscoring the pervasive security

deficit, which undermined everything else the coalition sought to achieve.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040901faessay83505/larry-diamond/what-went-wrong-in-iraq.html

posted June 27, 2005 01:02 AM            

His remarks came on another day of bloodshed on which three suicide attacks around the northern city of Mosul killed more than 30 people, many of them police officers, highlighting the task faced by Iraq's U.S.-trained forces against a Sunni Arab revolt, backed by foreign Islamists, against the new Shi'ite-led government.

"That insurgency can go on for any number of years," Rumsfeld said in a U.S. television interview. "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, 10, 12 years. Foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency.

"We're going to create an environment that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win against that insurgency."

In the space of a few hours a suicide car bomber wrecked a police headquarters, killing 12, an attack on an Iraqi army base killed at 16 people and five police officers were killed when a bomber walked into Mosul's main hospital and blew himself up.

The attack on the hospital's police post damaged the ward where casualties had been brought from the earlier incidents, responsibility for which was claimed by al Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In Baghdad, six policemen were killed by a suicide bomber as they were pulling into their base, police said. The deputy head of a city police department was also assassinated.

HANDOVER

Handing over to Iraqi forces and withdrawing the U.S. army that invaded to topple Saddam Hussein two years ago is a key policy for President Bush as opinion polls show Americans turning against a project that many believed would rapidly produce a stable, pro-Washington government in Baghdad.

The deaths of six U.S. troops, some of them women, in a suicide bomb attack in Falluja on Thursday took the death toll above 1,730. Another soldier was killed in Baghdad on Sunday.

Rumsfeld said insurgent attacks were becoming deadlier.

The U.S. Middle East commander, General John Abizaid, said: "It's clear to me that by the...early part of next spring next year to the summer of next year you'll see Iraqi security forces move into the lead in the counter-insurgency fight."

However, in a U.S. television interview, he added: "That doesn't mean that I'm saying we'll come home by then."

The insurgency appears driven partly by fears among some in Saddam's formerly dominant Sunni Arab minority that they will lose out in an Iraq run by a Shi'ite majority government. It has drawn support from foreign Arabs, most of whom are Sunnis, who want to wage holy war against the West and the Shi'ites.

U.S. commanders say Iraqi forces will need their support for a long time. The strength of Sunni rebels has raised concerns that they would sorely test troops fielded by a Shi'ite- and Kurdish-dominated government in any civil war.

HEADQUARTERS WRECKED

The Mosul car bomber drove at a police headquarters at Bab al-Toob in the city center, striking a rear wall to bring down a section of the old, two-storey building and devastate surrounding market stalls as people started the working day.

Ten police officers and two civilians were killed and eight people were wounded, the U.S. military in Mosul said in a statement.

The Defense Ministry said a suicide bomber killed 15 people and wounded 15, mostly civilians, at an army post at Kasak, near Mosul. The U.S. military put the dead at 16. Soldiers turned the bomber away from the base and he walked toward a crowd of civilians, the ministry said in a statement.

Medical staff in Mosul said most of the casualties were building workers from the base.

Bush told Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari in Washington on Friday there would be no timetable for troop withdrawal, despite pressure from opposition Democrats who accuse Bush of leading U.S. troops into a "quagmire" in Iraq.

He is due to make a keynote speech on Iraq on Tuesday.

Responding to a report in a British newspaper, quoting unnamed Iraqi sources, that U.S. officials this month met purported insurgents, U.S. and Iraqi officials repeated that there are continual consultations with tribal leaders, clerics and others who profess to represent elements of the insurgency.

However, they were adamant that these were not negotiations and any talks had not involved the most violent groups such as Ansar al-Sunna, named by the Sunday Times, or Zarqawi's group.

Rumsfeld said: "Meetings take place all the time." (Additional reporting by Randall Mikkelsen in Washington, Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul and Luke Baker, Waleed Ibrahim and Faris al-Mehdawi in Baghdad)

posted June 27, 2005 01:58 AM            

Generals in charge of the war in Iraq set troop strengths now and prior to the war the Generals specified force numbers and equipment...which were met, which were agreed to by Rumsfeld and Bush, neither of whom attempted to micromanage the war.

Give it up leftists, it isn't playing. In the meantime, tens of thousands of murderous terrorists thugs have been sent to join their 72 virgins and we didn't have to dig them out from under the rocks they usually hide under.

Kennedy, the hero of Chappaquiddick, attempted that routine on Rumsfeld in hearings Thursday and got his head handed to him by the Generals. Of course, Chappaquiddick Teddy is seldom sober enough for anything to penetrate the fog he carries around with him.

Sunday, June 26, 2005 12:44 a.m. EDT
Kennedy's 'Rummy' Attack Backfired

Sen. Ted Kennedy's attempt during Thursday's Armed Services Committee hearings to embarrass Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by calling on him to resign over the "Iraq quagmire" got major TV and radio coverage.

But what happened next wound up on the cutting room floor of most news broadcasts.

At the hearing, Rumsfeld was flanked by three four-star generals. And each one of them blew Kennedy's criticism out of the water.

According to quotes picked up by the Washington Times, Army Gen. George Casey told the Massachusetts Democrat:

"As the commander in Iraq, I would like to put myself on the record, Senator Kennedy, as saying that I also agree with the secretary that to represent the situation in Iraq as a quagmire is a misrepresentation of the facts. Senator, that is not a quagmire."

Next up was Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs chairman. He told Kennedy: "It's clearly not a quagmire. ... The term has been used loosely, and it's not accurate in my estimation."

Then the top commander in the region, Army Gen. John Abizaid, weighed in, saying the last thing he wanted to see was a Rumsfeld resignation.

posted June 27, 2005 02:54 AM              

so then is the weekly standard a lying leftist publication??

*********
Too Few Troops
From the April 26, 2004 issue: Resolve alone won't bring success. We need a military and political strategy that maximizes our odds of winning in Iraq.
by Robert Kagan and William Kristol
04/26/2004, Volume 009, Issue 31

AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE Tuesday night, President Bush eloquently made the case for staying the course in Iraq. The next day, at City College in New York, Senator Kerry agreed: "It would be unwise beyond belief for the United States of America" to cut and run, and to "leave a failed Iraq in its wake." And the American people, despite the recent bad news, show no sign of panic: In a Time/CNN poll, 57 percent of respondents agree that the United States should "intensify" its military effort in Iraq.

Unfortunately, resolve alone won't bring success. Neither will well-delivered statements by the president. The problem in Iraq is not poor public relations, or a lack of will. Rather, it is the failure of policymakers at the highest levels to fashion a military and political strategy that maximizes the odds of success. That is what has been missing ever since Saddam's statue fell a little over a year ago.

And while we certainly do not hold the administration responsible for everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, it is clear that there have been failures in planning and in execution, failures that have been evident for most of the last year. Serious errors have been made--and made, above all, by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The recent violence in Iraq has confirmed that the level of American military forces has been too low to accomplish the president's mission ever since the invasion phase of the war ended last April.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/977ovnnr.asp

********

or i suppose paul bremer is a leftist too....