Who's Better Off?

by Representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.)
April 7th, 2005

Whenever the administration is challenged regarding the success of the Iraq war, or regarding the false information used to justify the war, the retort is: "Aren't the people of Iraq better off?" The insinuation is that anyone who expresses any reservations about supporting the war is an apologist for Saddam Hussein and every ruthless act he ever committed. The short answer to the question of whether the Iraqis are better off is that it's too early to declare, "Mission Accomplished." But more importantly, we should be asking if the mission was ever justified or legitimate. Is it legitimate to justify an action that some claim yielded good results, if the means used to achieve them are illegitimate? Do the ends justify the means?

The information Congress was given prior to the war was false. There were no weapons of mass destruction; the Iraqis did not participate in the 9/11 attacks; Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were enemies and did not conspire against the United States; our security was not threatened; we were not welcomed by cheering Iraqi crowds as we were told; and Iraqi oil has not paid any of the bills. Congress failed to declare war, but instead passed a wishy-washy resolution citing UN resolutions as justification for our invasion. After the fact, we're now told the real reason for the Iraq invasion was to spread democracy, and that the Iraqis are better off. Anyone who questions the war risks being accused of supporting Saddam Hussein, disapproving of democracy, or "supporting terrorists." It's implied that lack of enthusiasm for the war means one is not patriotic and doesn't support the troops. In other words, one must march lockstep with the consensus or be ostracized.

However, conceding that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein is a far cry from endorsing the foreign policy of our own government that led to the regime change. In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of preemptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself. The interventionist policy should be scrutinized more carefully than the purported benefits of Saddam Hussein's removal from power. The real question ought to be: "Are we better off with a foreign policy that promotes regime change while justifying war with false information?" Shifting the stated goals as events unravel should not satisfy those who believe war must be a last resort used only when our national security is threatened.

How much better off are the Iraqi people? Hundreds of thousands of former inhabitants of Fallujah are not better off with their city flattened and their homes destroyed. Hundreds of thousands are not better off living with foreign soldiers patrolling their street, curfews, and the loss of basic utilities. One hundred thousand dead Iraqis, as estimated by the Lancet medical journal, certainly are not better off. Better to be alive under Saddam Hussein than lying in some cold grave.

Praise for the recent election in Iraq has silenced many critics of the war. Yet the election was held under martial law implemented by a foreign power, mirroring conditions we rightfully condemned as a farce when carried out in the old Soviet system and more recently in Lebanon. Why is it that what is good for the goose isn't always good for the gander?

Our government fails to recognize that legitimate elections are the consequence of freedom, and that an artificial election does not create freedom. In our own history we note that freedom was achieved first and elections followed - not the other way around.

One news report claimed that the Sh'iites actually received 56 percent of the vote, but such an outcome couldn't be allowed for fear of a theocracy forming. This reminds us of the statement made months ago by Secretary Rumsfeld when asked about a Shi'ite theocracy emerging from a majority democratic vote, and he assured us that would not happen. Democracy, we know, is messy and needs tidying up a bit when we don't like the results.

Some have described Baghdad, and especially the Green Zone, as being surrounded by unmanageable territory. The highways in and out of Baghdad are not yet secured. Many anticipate a civil war will break out sometime soon in Iraq; some claim it's already underway.

We have seen none of the promised oil production that was supposed to provide grateful Iraqis with the means to repay us for the hundreds of billions that American taxpayers have spent on the war. Some have justified our continuous presence in the Persian Gulf since 1990 because of a need to protect "our" oil. Yet now that Saddam Hussein is gone, and the occupation supposedly is a great success, gasoline at the pumps is reaching record highs approaching $3 per gallon.

Though the Iraqi election has come and gone, there still is no government in place, and the next election- supposedly the real one- is not likely to take place on time. Do the American people have any idea who really won the dubious election at all?

The oil-for-food scandal under Saddam Hussein has been replaced by corruption in the distribution of U.S. funds to rebuild Iraq. Already there is an admitted $9 billion discrepancy in the accounting of these funds. The over-billing by Halliburton is no secret, but the process has not changed.

The whole process is corrupt. It just doesn't make sense to most Americans to see their tax dollars used to fight an unnecessary and unjustified war. First they see American bombs destroying a country, and then American taxpayers are required to rebuild it. Today, it's easier to get funding to rebuild infrastructure in Iraq than to build a bridge in the United States. Indeed, we cut the Army Corps of Engineers' budget and operate on the cheap with our veterans as the expenditures in Iraq skyrocket.

One question the war promoters don't want to hear asked, because they don't want to face up to the answer, is this: "Are Christian Iraqis better off today since we decided to build a new Iraq through force of arms?" The answer is plainly no.

Sure, there are only 800,000 Christians living in Iraq, but under Saddam Hussein they were free to practice their religion. Tariq Aziz, a Christian, served in Saddam Hussein's cabinet as foreign minister- something that would never happen in Saudi Arabia, Israel, or any other Middle Eastern country. Today, the Christian churches in Iraq are under attack and Christians are no longer safe. Many Christians have been forced to flee Iraq and migrate to Syria. It's strange that the human rights advocates in the U.S. Congress have expressed no concern for the persecution now going on against Christians in Iraq. Both the Sunni and the Shi'ite Muslims support the attacks on Christians. In fact, persecuting Christians is one of the few areas in which they agree - the other being the removal of all foreign forces from Iraqi soil.

Considering the death, destruction, and continual chaos in Iraq, it's difficult to accept the blanket statement that the Iraqis all feel much better off with the U.S. in control rather than Saddam Hussein. Security in the streets and criminal violence are not anywhere near being under control.

But there's another question that is equally important: "Are the American people better off because of the Iraq war?"

One thing's for sure: the 1,500-plus dead American soldiers aren't better off. The nearly 20,000 severely injured or sickened American troops are not better off. The families, the wives, the husbands, children, parents, and friends of those who lost so much are not better off.

The families and the 40,000 troops who were forced to reenlist against their will - a de facto draft - are not feeling better off. They believe they have been deceived by their enlistment agreements.

The American taxpayers are not better off having spent over $200 billion to pursue this war, with billions yet to be spent. The victims of the inflation that always accompanies a guns-and-butter policy are already getting a dose of what will become much worse.

Are our relationships with the rest of the world better off? I'd say no. Because of the war, our alliances with the Europeans are weaker than ever. The anti-American hatred among a growing number of Muslims around the world is greater than ever. This makes terrorist attacks more likely than they were before the invasion. Al-Qaeda recruiting has accelerated. Iraq is being used as a training ground for al-Qaeda terrorists, which it never was under Hussein's rule. So, as our military recruitment efforts suffer, Osama bin Laden benefits by attracting more terrorist volunteers.

Oil was approximately $27 a barrel before the war, now it's more than twice that. I wonder who benefits from this?

Because of the war, fewer dollars are available for real national security and the defense of this country. Military spending is up, but the way the money is spent distracts from true national defense and further undermines our credibility around the world.

The ongoing war's lack of success has played a key role in diminishing morale in our military services. Recruitment is sharply down, and most branches face shortages of troops. Many young Americans rightly fear a coming draft - which will be required if we do not reassess and change the unrealistic goals of our foreign policy.

The appropriations for the war are essentially off-budget and obscured, but contribute nonetheless to the runaway deficit and increase in the national debt. If these trends persist, inflation with economic stagnation will be the inevitable consequences of a misdirected policy.

One of the most significant consequences in times of war that we ought to be concerned about is the inevitable loss of personal liberty. Too often in the patriotic nationalism that accompanies armed conflict, regardless of the cause, there is a willingness to sacrifice personal freedoms in pursuit of victory. The real irony is that we are told we go hither and yon to fight for freedom and our Constitution, while carelessly sacrificing the very freedoms here at home we're supposed to be fighting for. It makes no sense.

This willingness to give up hard-fought personal liberties has been especially noticeable in the atmosphere of the post-September 11th war on terrorism. Security has replaced liberty as our main political goal, damaging the American spirit. Sadly, the whole process is done in the name of patriotism and in a spirit of growing militant nationalism.

These attitudes and fears surrounding the 9/11 tragedy, and our eagerness to go to war in the Middle East against countries not responsible for the attacks, have allowed a callousness to develop in our national psyche that justifies torture and rejects due process of law for those who are suspects and not convicted criminals.

We have come to accept preemptive war as necessary, Constitutional, and morally justifiable. Starting a war without a proper declaration is now of no concern to most Americans or the U.S. Congress. Let's hope and pray the rumors of an attack on Iran in June by U.S. Armed Forces are wrong.

A large segment of the Christian community and its leadership think nothing of rationalizing war in the name of a religion that prides itself on the teachings of the Prince of Peace, who instructed us that blessed are the peacemakers - not the warmongers.

We casually accept our role as world policeman, and believe we have a moral obligation to practice nation building in our image regardless of the number of people who die in the process.

We have lost our way by rejecting the beliefs that made our country great. We no longer trust in trade, friendship, peace, the Constitution, and the principle of neutrality while avoiding entangling alliances with the rest of the world. Spreading the message of hope and freedom by setting an example for the world has been replaced by a belief that use of armed might is the only practical tool to influence the world - and we have accepted, as the only superpower, the principle of initiating war against others.

In the process, Congress and the people have endorsed a usurpation of their own authority, generously delivered to the executive and judicial branches - not to mention international government bodies. The concept of national sovereignty is now seen as an issue that concerns only the fringe in our society.

Protection of life and liberty must once again become the issue that drives political thought in this country. If this goal is replaced by an effort to promote world government, use force to plan the economy, regulate the people, and police the world, against the voluntary desires of the people, it can be done only with the establishment of a totalitarian state. There's no need for that. It's up to Congress and the American people to decide our fate, and there is still time to correct our mistakes.

Mother of Fallen Soldier Responds to Iraq Withdrawal Debate

y Cindy Sheehan
March 11th, 2005

Cindy Sheehan is a co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace. Her son Casey was killed in action in Irak on April 4, 2004.

My son was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. I think you have already made up your mind that our troops need to remain in Iraq...which is very sad. This is in response to your blog question yesterday and your reply to anti-war.com today.

I admire your tireless efforts to get the truth out...but I seriously have to disagree with you. I think that our presence in that country is fueling the insurgency that killed my son; which has also killed many more of America's sons and daughters (many more than the official count); has maimed almost 30,000 of our kids; and has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and demolished their country.

Don't you think that the Iraqi people can rebuild their own country? Before the US invasion in March of 2003, they had a very capable work force filled with construction workers, contractors, engineers, etc. I think the 81 billion dollar appropriation's bill that this president wants Congress to pass would better be a reparation's bill.

Also, I know you know the despicable condition that the VA system and military hospital system are in right now. Are you suggesting that we create thousands of more mentally and physically wounded of our children who will be dependent on a system that is so flawed? Not to mention the even more serious implications of depleted uranium syndrome which will probably never be recognized by our government. I know some soldiers who have returned who are suffering terribly from PTSD and they have been waiting for over a year for VA approval to get treated. PTSD is rarely diagnosed, so they don't receive the help they need.

And, most importantly and devastatingly, this war is based on lies and betrayals. Not one American soldier, nor one Iraqi should have been killed. Common sense would dictate that not one more person should be killed for lies. One of the people, my son, was more than enough for me and my family. I will live in unbearable pain until I die. First of all, because my first born was killed violently, and second of all, because he was killed for a neo-con agenda that only benefits a very chosen few in this world. This agenda and their war machine will chew up and spit out as many of our children as they can unless we stop them now.

Also, your views have the effect of invalidating what I, my organization, Gold Star Families for Peace, and other peace groups are doing to bring our troops home immediately, if not sooner.

In 1967 it was recognized by our government officials that Viet Nam was unwinnable...I don't even know how many more of our troops and innocent Vietnamese were killed before we finally pulled out in 1975. Please use your forum to expose the lies and the devastation this invasion/occupation is causing. We should not stay. We should not let Israel/USA invade Syria or Iran. The consequences of this would be too shocking to even contemplate.

In addition, my family and my group are offended by hearing this administration say that our troops have to remain in Iraq and complete "the mission" to honor our loved one's sacrifices. First of all, no one can explain the mission to us and we don't want any more innocent blood spilled just because it is too late for our soldiers and our families.

Thank you for your time and your courage in speaking the truth.

Love and Peace!!!

Cindy Sheehan
Co-Founder of Gold Star Families For Peace
Mother of Hero: Spc Casey Austin Sheehan KIA 04/04/04

Getting the Purple Finger

by Naomi Klein
The Nation
February 10, 2005

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo

The Iraqi people gave America the biggest 'thank you' in the best way we could have hoped for." Reading this election analysis from Betsy Hart, a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, I found myself thinking about my late grandmother. Half blind and a menace behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, she adamantly refused to surrender her car keys. She was convinced that everywhere she drove (flattening the house pets of Philadelphia along the way) people were waving and smiling at her. "They are so friendly!" We had to break the bad news. "They aren't waving with their whole hand, Grandma--just with their middle finger."

So it is with Betsy Hart and the other near-sighted election observers: They think the Iraqi people have finally sent America those long-awaited flowers and candies, when Iraq's voters just gave them the (purple) finger.

The election results are in: Iraqis voted overwhelmingly to throw out the US-installed government of Iyad Allawi, who refused to ask the United States to leave. A decisive majority voted for the United Iraqi Alliance; the second plank in the UIA platform calls for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq."

There are more single-digit messages embedded in the winning coalition's platform. Some highlights: "Adopting a social security system under which the state guarantees a job for every fit Iraqi...and offers facilities to citizens to build homes." The UIA also pledges "to write off Iraq's debts, cancel reparations and use the oil wealth for economic development projects." In short, Iraqis voted to repudiate the radical free-market policies imposed by former chief US envoy Paul Bremer and locked in by a recent agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

So will the people who got all choked up watching Iraqis flock to the polls support these democratically chosen demands? Please. "You don't set timetables," George W. Bush said four days after Iraqis voted for exactly that. Likewise, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the elections "magnificent" but dismissed a firm timetable out of hand. The UIA's pledges to expand the public sector, keep the oil and drop the debt will likely suffer similar fates. At least if Adel Abd al-Mahdi gets his way--he's Iraq's finance minister and the man suddenly being touted as leader of Iraq's next government.

Al-Mahdi is the Bush Administration's Trojan horse in the UIA. (You didn't think they were going to put all their money on Allawi, did you?) In October he told a gathering of the American Enterprise Institute that he planned to "restructure and privatize [Iraq's] state-owned enterprises," and in December he made another trip to Washington to unveil plans for a new oil law "very promising to the American investors." It was al-Mahdi himself who oversaw the signing of a flurry of deals with Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco in the weeks before the elections, and it is he who negotiated the recent austerity deal with the IMF. On troop withdrawal, al-Mahdi sounds nothing like his party's platform and instead appears to be channeling Dick Cheney on Fox News: "When the Americans go will depend on when our own forces are ready and on how the resistance responds after the elections." But on Sharia law, we are told, he is very close to the clerics.

Iraq's elections were delayed time and time again, while the occupation and resistance grew ever more deadly. Now it seems that two years of bloodshed, bribery and backroom arm-twisting were leading up to this: a deal in which the ayatollahs get control over the family, Texaco gets the oil, and Washington gets its enduring military bases (call it the "oil for women program"). Everyone wins except the voters, who risked their lives to cast their ballots for a very different set of policies.

But never mind that. January 30, we are told, was not about what Iraqis were voting for--it was about the fact of their voting and, more important, how their plucky courage made Americans feel about their war. Apparently, the elections' true purpose was to prove to Americans that, as George Bush put it, "the Iraqi people value their own liberty." Stunningly, this appears to come as news. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown said the vote was "the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people." On The Daily Show, CNN's Anderson Cooper described it as "the first time we've sort of had a gauge of whether or not they're willing to sort of step forward and do stuff."

This is some tough crowd. The Shiite uprising against Saddam in 1991 was clearly not enough to convince them that Iraqis were willing to "do stuff" to be free. Nor was the demonstration of 100,000 people held one year ago demanding immediate elections, or the spontaneous local elections organized by Iraqis in the early months of the occupation--both summarily shot down by Bremer. It turns out that on American TV, the entire occupation has been one long episode of Fear Factor, in which Iraqis overcome ever-more-challenging obstacles to demonstrate the depths of their desire to win their country back. Having their cities leveled, being tortured in Abu Ghraib, getting shot at checkpoints, having their journalists censored and their water and electricity cut off--all of it was just a prelude to the ultimate endurance test: dodging bombs and bullets to get to the polling station. At last, Americans were persuaded that Iraqis really, really want to be free.

So what's the prize? An end to occupation, as the voters demanded? Don't be silly--the US government won't submit to any "artificial timetable." Jobs for everyone, as the UIA promised? You can't vote for socialist nonsense like that. No, they get Geraldo Rivera's tears ("I felt like such a sap"), Laura Bush's motherly pride ("It was so moving for the President and me to watch people come out with purple fingers") and Betsy Hart's sincere apology for ever doubting them ("Wow--do I stand corrected").

And that should be enough. Because if it weren't for the invasion, Iraqis would not even have the freedom to vote for their liberation, and then to have that vote completely ignored. And that's the real prize: the freedom to be occupied. Wow--do I stand corrected.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050228&s=klein

No amount of spin can conceal Iraqis' hostility to US occupation

by Sami Ramadani
The Guardian
February 01 2005

Sami Ramadani was a political refugee from Saddam Hussein's regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University

On September 4 1967 the New York Times published an upbeat story on presidential elections held by the South Vietnamese puppet regime at the height of the Vietnam war. Under the heading "US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror", the paper reported that the Americans had been "surprised and heartened" by the size of the turnout "despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting". A successful election, it went on, "has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam". The echoes of this weekend's propaganda about Iraq's elections are so close as to be uncanny.

With the past few days' avalanche of spin, you could be forgiven for thinking that on January 30 2005 the US-led occupation of Iraq ended and the people won their freedom and democratic rights. This has been a multi-layered campaign, reminiscent of the pre-war WMD frenzy and fantasies about the flowers Iraqis were collecting to throw at the invasion forces. How you could square the words democracy, free and fair with the brutal reality of occupation, martial law, a US-appointed election commission and secret candidates has rarely been allowed to get in the way of the hype.

If truth is the first casualty of war, reliable numbers must be the first casualty of an occupation-controlled election. The second layer of spin has been designed to convince us that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis participated. The initial claim of 72% having voted was quickly downgraded to 57% of those registered to vote. So what percentage of the adult population is registered to vote? The Iraqi ambassador in London was unable to enlighten me. In fact, as UN sources confirm, there has been no registration or published list of electors - all we are told is that about 14 million people were entitled to vote.

As for Iraqis abroad, the up to 4 million strong exiled community (with perhaps a little over 2 million entitled to vote) produced a 280,000 registration figure. Of those, 265,000 actually voted.

The Iraqi south, more religious than Baghdad, responded positively to Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani's position: to call the bluff of the US and vote for a list that was proclaimed to be hostile to the occupation. Sistani's supporters declared that voting on Sunday was the first step to kicking out the occupiers. The months ahead will put these declarations to a severe test. Meanwhile Moqtada al-Sadr's popular movement, which rejected the elections as a sham, is likely to make a comeback in its open resistance to the occupation.

The big vote in Kurdistan primarily reflects the Kurdish people's demand for national self-determination. The US administration has hitherto clamped down on these pressures. Henry Kissinger's recent proposal to divide Iraq into three states reflects a major shift among influential figures in the US who, led by Kissinger as secretary of state, ditched the Kurds in the 70s and brokered a deal between Saddam and the Shah of Iran.

George Bush and Tony Blair made heroic speeches on Sunday implying that Iraqis had voted to approve the occupation. Those who insist that the US is desperate for an exit strategy are misreading its intentions. The facts on the ground, including the construction of massive military bases in Iraq, indicate that the US is digging in to install and back a long-term puppet regime. For this reason, the US-led presence will continue, with all that entails in terms of bloodshed and destruction.

In the run-up to the poll, much of the western media presented it as a high-noon shootout between the terrorist Zarqawi and the Iraqi people, with the occupation forces doing their best to enable the people to defeat the fiendish, one-legged Jordanian murderer. In reality, Zarqawi-style sectarian violence is not only condemned by Iraqis across the political spectrum, including supporters of the resistance, but is widely seen as having had a blind eye turned to it by the occupation authorities. Such attitudes are dismissed by outsiders, but the record of John Negroponte, the US ambassador in Baghdad, of backing terror gangs in central America in the 80s has fuelled these fears, as has Seymour Hirsh's reports on the Pentagon's assassination squads and enthusiasm for the "Salvador option".

An honest analysis of the social and political map of Iraq reveals that Iraqis are increasingly united in their determination to end the occupation. Whether they participated in or boycotted Sunday's exercise, this political bond will soon reassert itself - just as it did in Vietnam - despite tactical differences, and despite the US-led occupation's attempts to dominate Iraqis by inflaming sectarian and ethnic divisions.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

An Election to Anoint an Occupation

by Salim Lone
The Guardian
January 31, 2005

Salim Lone was director of communications for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN special representative in Iraq, who was killed in August 2003

Tony Blair and George Bush were quick to characterise yesterday's election as a triumph of democracy over terror. Bush declared it a "resounding success", while Blair asserted that "The force of freedom was felt throughout Iraq". And yet the election fell so completely short of accepted electoral standards that had it been held in, say, Zimbabwe or Syria, Britain and America would have been the first to denounce it.

Draconian security measures left Iraq's cities looking like ghost towns. The ballot papers were so complicated that even Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader, needed a briefing on how to use one. Most candidates had been afraid to be seen in public, or to link their names to their faces in the media. The United Iraqi Alliance, identifying only 37 of their 225 candidates, explained: "We offer apologies for not mentioning the names of all the candidates ... We have to keep them alive."

The millions of Iraqis, as well as the UN electoral team and the Iraqi election commission staff, who did participate in the process despite the grave risk, deserve our respect. But it was a risk taken in vain. The election was illegitimate, and cannot resolve the rampant insecurity resulting from the occupation. The only way to stop the destruction of Iraq is to end the occupation and enfranchise the Sunnis, who are leading the resistance because they see the US as systematically excluding them from the role they deserve to play in Iraq.

Indeed, this so-called election, with its national rather than provincial voting rolls, was designed to reduce Sunni representation and to anoint US-supported groups who will allow this occupation to continue. A high turnout does not change the fact that this is an illegitimate, occupier's election.

Early in the occupation, the Bush administration recognised that a democratic Iraq would not countenance the strategic goals the war was fought for: controlling the oil reserves and establishing military bases to enable the political transformation the neocons envisage for the Middle East. Even as the US proclaimed its mission as introducing democracy to Iraq, they worked to make sure that the processes they put in place would produce leaders they had picked. The US obtained a carefully circumscribed UN involvement in order to provide the chosen leaders a measure of legitimacy.

It was clear to those of us in Baghdad right after Saddam's fall that no long-term American project there would succeed. The limited self-governance plan was a non-starter because of the transparent control the US exercised over the process. In any event, virtually no Iraqis, not even those benefiting from the US presence, see the superpower as a promoter of human rights and democracy - even before the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, Najaf and Falluja.

Each US-dictated self-governance milestone therefore backfired just like the current election undoubtably will, generating wider support for and bloodier attacks by the insurgency. The first devastating attacks on the foreign presence in Iraq, for example, came soon after the US selected the Iraqi Governing Council: first the Jordanian mission, then the UN's Baghdad headquarters, were blown up.

In its search for greater legitimacy for its preferred Iraqi leadership, the US has avoided the UN security council, since most of its members abhor what is being done to Iraq. The US has instead chosen to work with individual representatives. The first such UN involvement, when the late Sergio Vieira de Mello headed the UN mission in Iraq, was the most effective. He was able to persuade the then US proconsul, Paul Bremer, that he should appoint an Iraqi Governing Council rather than an advisory body. Even then, the anger about the individuals and groups on this council, and for UN support for it, was palpable in Iraq.

Nearly a year later, in another bid for UN support, Bush assured the world that the interim government would be picked by Lakhdar Brahimi, Kofi Annan's special representative. Brahimi spent weeks in Iraq consulting domestic groups about who they felt should lead the country. But on the day the interim government was to be appointed, a deal was struck by the Americans behind Brahimi's back, to make the CIA-linked Ayad Allawi prime minister.

The US has little popular support in the country. It has, however, won the support of the extremely influential Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who tolerates an occupation most of his followers hate, with the single-minded sectarian goal of having the majority Shia at the helm of power in Iraq. The occupation has destroyed Iraq and is destabilising the world by exacerbating the deep animosity that most Arabs and Muslims feel for the US. The Bush administration is now provoking the Muslim world by threats against Iran. The rest of the world looks on, mostly helplessly.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home

by Howard Zinn
The Miami Herald
January 22, 2005

Howard Zinn is author of the best-selling A People's History of the United States.

January 22, 2005

We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.

It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain. A recent New York Times editorial sums up the situation accurately: ``Some 21 months after the American invasion, United States military forces remain essentially alone in battling what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of decisive success any time in the foreseeable future.''

And then, in an extraordinary non sequitur: ``Given the lack of other countries willing to put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be more American troops, and not just through the spring, as currently planned. . . . Forces need to be expanded through stepped-up recruitment.''

Here is the flawed logic: We are alone in the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing. There is no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let's send more troops? The definition of fanaticism is that when you discover that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your speed.

In all of this, there is an unexamined premise: that military victory would constitute ``success.''

Conceivably, the United States, possessed of enormous weaponry, might finally crush the resistance in Iraq. The cost would be great. Already, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have lost their lives (and we must not differentiate between ''their'' casualties and ''ours'' if we believe that all human beings have an equal right to life.) Would that be a ``success''?

In 1967, the same arguments that we are hearing now were being made against withdrawal in Vietnam. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years. During that time, the war killed at least one million more Vietnamese and perhaps 30,000 U.S. military personnel.

We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn't it clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only chaos, violence and death to that country, and not any recognizable democracy?

Can democracy be nurtured by destroying cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?

There is no certainty as to what would happen in our absence. But there is absolute certainty about the result of our presence -- escalating deaths on both sides.

The loss of life among Iraqi civilians is especially startling. The British medical journal Lancet reports that 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the war, many of them children. The casualty toll on the American side includes more than 1,350 deaths and thousands of maimed soldiers, some losing limbs, others blinded. And tens of thousands more are facing psychological damage in the aftermath.

Have we learned nothing from the history of imperial occupations, all pretending to help the people being occupied?

The United States, the latest of the great empires, is perhaps the most self-deluded, having forgotten that history, including our own: our 50-year occupation of the Philippines, or our long occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) or of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), our military intervention in Southeast Asia and our repeated interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Our military presence in Iraq is making us less safe, not more so. It is inflaming people in the Middle East, and thereby magnifying the danger of terrorism. Far from fighting ''there rather than here,'' as President Bush has claimed, the occupation increases the chance that enraged infiltrators will strike us here at home.

In leaving, we can improve the odds of peace and stability by encouraging an international team of negotiators, largely Arab, to mediate among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and work out a federalist compromise to give some autonomy to each group. We must not underestimate the capacity of the Iraqis, once free of both Saddam Chasseing and the U.S. occupying army, to forge their own future.

But the first step is to support our troops in the only way that word support can have real meaning -- by saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity. By bringing them home.

© 2005 Miami Herald

Fallujah, City without a Future?

by Michael Schwartz
TomDispatch.com
14 January 2005

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His books include "Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business" (with Beth Mintz), and "Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda" (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net

In November, after three weeks of "precision" bombing, 10,000 American soldiers and 2,000 Iraqi national guards marched into Falluja. They had five goals:

First and foremost, free Falluja from the grip of the insurgents and allow its citizens to participate in the January 30 elections;

Second, kill or capture the guerrilla leadership in its "safe haven," particularly Abdul Musab al-Zarqawi, the accused mastermind of the resistance;

Third, "so damage the insurgency" that it would be reduced to "containable levels through 2005";

Fourth, teach Fallujans (and the rest of Iraq) that "harboring" the mujahedin resistance would provoke the full force of the American military. (On this point, an anonymous Pentagon official told New York Times reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt: "If there are civilians dying in connection with these attacks, and with the destruction, the locals at some point have to make a decision. Do they want to harbor the insurgents and suffer the consequences that come with that, or do they want to get rid of the insurgents and have the benefits of not having them there?");

Fifth, rebuild Falluja, now cleared of guerrillas, as a showcase for the rest of the country to admire and emulate. (As Colonel John R. Ballard, a military planner, told the New York Times "The best place to bring a model town into place is Falluja.")

Did the attack on Falluja accomplish these ambitious goals?

"Suffering the Consequences"

Unfortunately, the only success in the Fallujan campaign so far has been in demonstrating "the consequences" that would accrue to cities that harbored guerrillas. Falluja was gutted. Two months after the invasion, Erik Eckholm of the New York Times described the city as "a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees." At least a quarter of its homes were fully destroyed, and virtually all the others were severely damaged. Blown out windows, wrecked furniture, three-foot blast holes in walls, and disintegrated doors demonstrated that American troops had relentlessly applied what they jokingly called the "FISH" strategy (Fighting in Someone's House), which involved "throwing a hand grenade into each room before checking it for unfriendlies." Since (in the words of Lt. Gen. Sattler) "each and every house" was searched, very few remained livable.

The civilians who stayed during the fighting found themselves in a kill-anything-that-moves free-fire zone. When the first medical teams arrived in January they collected more than 700 unburied and rotting bodies (reputedly including those of 550 women and children) in only one-third of the city; and these obviously didn't include the dead already buried during the battle or hidden under the debris. (As Al Jazeera put it, "the smell of corpses inside charred buildings pervades the atmosphere.") If the 2,000 kills claimed by U.S. forces are accurate, that means that no fewer than 3000 people (1% of the city's estimated pre-campaign population) died; the real figure is undoubtedly far higher.

But what of those who survived? More than 200,000 residents are estimated to have fled the battle, many without even a change of clothes, just as the Iraqi winter set in. The lucky ones crowded into the homes of friends and relatives, sometimes as many as 30 people to a small apartment. The unlucky ones created ad hoc refugee camps virtually anywhere they could squat, mostly without any facilities at all to call on. One family set up a tent in the bumper-car arena of an abandoned amusement park. (At least there was a roof.) Independent journalist Dahr Jamail reported that their daily life consisted of "searching for food, medical attention, warmth and clean water." One refugee told Jamail, "We are living like dogs and the kids do not have enough clothes." Another vividly described the lack of food in terms of the normal post-Ramadan feasting this way: "We did not feel that there is Eid after Ramadan this year because of our situation being so bad. All we have is more fasting." The American occupation forces and the Iraqi Interim Government offered no help to these "invisible" victims, certainly underscoring, whether purposely or not, the "consequences" to be visited on those who harbored guerrillas.

A senior Bush administration official had predicted to a New York Times reporter that Fallujans would respond to the onslaught by saying, "O.K. No más! What do we do about this? How do we work with you, Prime Minister Allawi, to try to stop this kind of warfare."

But instead of saying "No más," the Fallujans have evidently been infuriated, with thousands demonstrating at the gates of the city, demanding that the U.S. leave. Others favored international intervention to stop the assault: "I would like to ask the whole world-why is this? I tell the presidents of the Arab and Muslim countries to wake up! Wake up please! We are being killed, we are refugees from our houses, our children have nothing - not even shoes to wear! Wake up! Wake up! Stop being traitors! Be human beings and not the dummies of the Americans!"

And the anger extended far beyond Falluja. In Ramadi, 40 year old Abdulla Rahnan concluded, "The Americans want every city in Iraq to be like Fallujah. They want to kill us all - they are freeing us of our lives!" His friend contributed his own grim observation: "Everyone here hates them because they are making mass graves faster than even Saddam!"

Were the guerrillas at least demobilized by the offensive? In mid-November, Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the Marines in Falluja, affirmed the campaign's success, telling reporters that the attack had "broken the back of the insurgency.... I personally believe, across the country, this is going to make it very hard for them to operate."

He was wrong. Abdul Musab al-Zarqawi (if he was ever in Falluja) left the city long before the attack with virtually all of the other guerrilla leaders. The vast majority of the fighters evacuated with the residents, evidently leaving behind a relatively small force of guerrillas, who used classic hit-and-run tactics to inflict as much harm on the Americans as they could. While many sacrificed their lives, others escaped through tunnels and the rubble, and then returned to attack again and again. After eight weeks of this, one leader who remained taunted the occupation by conducting a cell-phone interview with Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid from inside the city, claiming the fighting "would continue for months."

And while the Americans were tied down in Falluja, the guerrillas mounted a huge offensive throughout the Sunni areas of Iraq. They reversed American offensives in Tal Afar and Samarra; seized the initiative in Mosul and Tikrit (previously showcases for the occupation authorities); challenged American control in many neighborhoods of Baghdad; regularly shelled the American headquarters in the capital's "Green Zone;" and escalated their attacks against American bases. In November, one in four American supply convoys was ambushed, forcing the military to turn increasingly to airlifts to transport supplies.

In December, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the deputy chief of the U.S. Central command, conceded that the insurgency was "becoming more effective." In early January, the Iraqi intelligence chief announced that four predominantly Sunni provinces (including Baghdad), holding 40% of the Iraqi population, were now considered "unsafe" - that is, they were the sites of ongoing battles between mujaheddin and American soldiers.

Instead of crushing the insurgency, the attack on Falluja seems only to have increased its depth and scope, while adding to its support.

Clearing Falluja

As the U.S. military destroyed Falluja, they found they could not even fully subdue the resistance inside the city. Though the invading force advanced quickly from one end of Falluja to the other and made early declarations of victory, low-level fighting continued through December and into January.

Both sides claimed the advantage in these ongoing battles. The mujahaddin, armed with satellite telephones and internet connections (and even English-language outlets like Jihad Unspun), issued press releases claiming victory after victory, under headlines like "U.S. Pulls Back From Parts of Fallujah," The American media, in the meantime, declared that the city was quiet - except for "occasional firefights and sniping."

The underlying reality was a classic, low-level urban guerrilla war in the rubble, with the guerrillas standing and fighting only when they thought they could inflict modest damage, and the U.S. responding with overwhelming force - tanks, artillery, and bombing runs - against any building from which they received fire. Whether these encounters were occasional or frequent, whether the Americans or the insurgents regularly prevailed, the result was certainly an ongoing struggle. A January UN dispatch reported that only nine of 27 neighborhoods were safe enough for medical teams to enter; and that reporters were not being permitted in the city "for their own safety." A Los Angeles Times report referred just to "occasional firefights" in the city, but then declared that "only certain parts of Fallouja are considered safe enough for residents to return" and that temporary U.S. bases within the city bore signs with the peculiar but unambiguous warning: "STOP Or U.S. Military Will Shoot Fire."

A sense of the ongoing fighting is reflected in a report from a refugee describing his first and only night back in the city ("Report from Falluja Refugee Camp," Free Speech Radio News, Jan. 6, 2005): "The houses around mine have all been destroyed. Our house was full of smoke. It was a mess. We cleaned up the house and spent the night there. But the bombing started at seven in the evening and lasted until the morning. There were all sorts of bombs. My children could not sleep." Because there was "no real end of the fighting in sight," they chose to leave once again and focus on "day-to-day survival" as refugees.

Since the rubblized terrain that is now Falluja can probably hide guerrillas indefinitely, the fighting might only end with an American withdrawal. In the meantime, with so many front-line troops fighting in, or occupying Falluja, the American military has only been able to mount half-hearted responses to insurgent efforts elsewhere, while remaining vulnerable to IEDs planted along convoy and patrol routes, to the mortaring of bases and of the Green Zone, and to suicide attacks like the one at the army mess hall of in Mosul.

The Meaningless Election?

By January, reality had made a mockery of the pre-attack Bush administration mantra that U.S. troops would make Falluja "safe for the election." A tiny trickle of residents weathered the five-hour wait at U.S. checkpoints to return to an unlivable city still at war. And most of them left again after inspecting their destroyed neighborhoods. At least 90% of Fallujans were sure to be non-voting refugees when the election arrived.

But to say that the attack on Falluja definitively disfranchised Fallujans would be to ignore the much larger reality: that elections cannot be held in most of Sunni Iraq. It was not just that very few voters had registered in either Mosul or Anbar province; nor that the Interim Security Secretary had warned that safety concerns might preclude elections in the four majority-Sunni provinces; nor that there were few functioning voter registration centers (and those were targeted by guerrillas); nor that the whole election commission in Anbar province had resigned, claiming that it was not worth risking their lives when elections were impossible.

The most significant factor was that a large proportion - likely a majority - of Fallujans and other Sunnis believed the election to be a cruel charade in which they were being asked to choose which group of quislings would administer American policy. Riverbend, the pseudonymous young Sunni woman whose website has become required reading for those concerned with Iraq, expressed this sentiment elegantly at the beginning of January:

"Sunni Arabs are going to boycott elections. It's not about religion or fatwas or any of that so much as the principle of holding elections while you are under occupation. People don't really sense that this is the first stepping stone to democracy, as western media is implying. Many people sense that this is just the final act of a really bad play. It's the tying of the ribbon on the 'democracy parcel' we've been handed. It's being stuck with an occupation government that has been labeled 'legitimate' through elections."

Without the Sunni vote, a new regime would be visibly unrepresentative, another nail in the coffin of a government whose existence would continue to depend on 150,000 foreign troops.

The False Promise of Reconstruction

Even before the attack, the U.S. promised that a newly liberated Falluja would be spectacularly reconstructed - "a feat of social and physical engineering... intended to transform a bastion of militant anti-Americanism into a benevolent and functional metropolis." But actions always speak louder than words, and six weeks after declaring victory the only new construction in the city consisted of a series of checkpoints (where soldiers recorded the fingerprints and retina scans of returning residents), and the newly bulldozed main streets (whose use was restricted to U.S. military vehicles). This police-state approach reflected what Charles Hess, the Director of the Iraq Project and Contracting Office and the man in charge of the city's reconstruction, called a "near term...focus on operational security measures."

But the deepest tragedy lay not in the "near term," but in the near certainty that the promised reconstruction will never take place, simply because the Bush administration is unlikely ever to allocate the massive resources needed for such an undertaking. The monetary commitment cited by U.S. officials escalated from a pre-attack $50 million to an early January estimate of $230 million. But this figure, which Hess claimed to be adequate for the job, is actually a fraction of what would needed to recreate a modestly working city and a minuscule proportion of the total required to create "a benevolent and functional metropolis."

The inadequacy of allocation can be judged by considering infrastructure repairs. Based on the estimated $400 million cost of repairing the less disastrously damaged Sadr City water systems in Baghdad, the repair of Falluja's sewers and treatment plants would in itself surely exhaust the entire $230 million allocation being discussed. The electrical system, which needed to be "ripped out and rebuilt from scratch," would cost at least as much as the sewers. Rejuvenating the medical system, rebuilding the schools, and clearing and rebuilding the streets, would likely claim another $100 million or more each.

And that's without even considering housing repair. The Iraqi Interim Government promised families from $2000 to $10,000 for each damaged dwelling. With 12,000 to 20,000 of the 50,000 homes in Falluja effectively demolished, this added up to yet another $200 million promise, with another $100 million needed to meet the government's promises to shop owners.

And remember that Falluja, the "city of mosques," now has had an unknown but significant number of its 100 or so mosques more or less annihilated, and well over half damaged. Christian Parenti, a knowledgeable independent reporter, estimated that just two of the mosques would require some $80 million in repairs; the full bill might therefore exceed $1 billion.

Total this up and you discover that the promised allocation for the reconstruction of Falluja is at least $2 billion less than would reasonably be needed. And, given the record of reconstruction funds released by the Americans over the last year, even the $230 million is certainly in question.

In other words, the promise of a "benevolent and functional metropolis" could be seen, at best, as a cruel hoax, vitiated only slightly by the fact that Fallujans never believed it.

"We Destroyed Everything"

If the American occupation authorities have their way, Falluja may remain a wasteland until the resistance is subdued. The promises of freedom, elections, and a benevolent metropolis were all empty ones. Even Charles Hess, in charge of reconstruction, admitted in December that "little reconstruction has been done" in either Najaf or Samarra, the predecessor beneficiaries of a similar style of American liberation. And Falluja, seen as more hostile territory than either of the other two cities, may not even have their "luck."

Many of the recently returning refugees heard or saw battles from the checkpoints and retreated without entering the city. Others viewed their damaged or destroyed homes and then left. Still others stayed one night and then chose a homeless odyssey over residence in what was left of their city.

But a few stayed, and they will try to begin the process of rebuilding. And herein lies the greatest tragedy of all. The miracle of the human spirit can (and eventually will) redeem even so desolate a wasteland. But this redemption must wait, because the presence of the U.S. military - with its retina scans, its prohibition on all non-military vehicles inside city limits, its constant surveillance, its threats of and use of deadly force, its monopoly over all resources and, most of all, its quixotic effort to subdue the resistance - makes even the beginning of reconstruction impossible.

Derrick Anthony, a 21 year-old Navy Corpsman surveyed the desolate Falluja landscape and commented, "It's kind of bad we destroyed everything, but at least we gave them a chance for a new start."

He was wrong. Reconstruction will only begin when the Americans leave.

A global gulag to hide the war on terror's dirty secrets

by Jonathan Steele
The Guardian
January 14, 2005

Jonathan Steele is the Guardian's Senior Foreign Correspondent.

The promise of imminent release for four British detainees held at the notorious US prison at Guantánamo Bay is obviously welcome, but it is only a tiny exception in the surge of bad news from the Bush team on the human rights front. The first few days of the new year have produced two shocking exposures already.

One is the revelation that the administration sees the US not just as a self-appointed global policeman, but also as the world's prison warder. It is thinking of building jails in foreign countries, mainly ones with grim human rights records, to which it can secretly transfer detainees (unconvicted by any court) for the rest of their lives - a kind of global gulag beyond the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, or any other independent observers or lawyers.

The other horror is the light shone on the views of Alberto Gonzales, the White House nominee to be the chief law officer, the attorney general. At his Senate confirmation hearings last week he was revealed to be a man who not only refuses to rule out torture under any circumstances but also, in his capacity as White House counsel over the past few years, chaired several meetings at which specific interrogation techniques were discussed. As Edward Kennedy pointed out, and Gonzales did not deny, they included the threat of burial alive and water-boarding, under which the detainee is strapped to a board, forcibly pushed under water, wrapped in a wet towel, and made to believe he could drown.

Since its establishment after 9/11, the US camp for foreigners at Guantánamo Bay has become a beacon of unfreedom, a kind of grisly competitor to the Statue of Liberty in the shopfront of authentic American images. The trickle of releases of prisoners from its cages has brought direct testimony of the horrors which go on there. So it is no wonder that the Bush administration would like to find less visible places to hold prisoners, and keep them there for ever so that they cannot tell the world.

The Guantánamo prisoners are held by the Department of Defence, but under the new scheme most foreign detainees are expected to be in the hands of the CIA, which submits to less congressional scrutiny and offers the Red Cross no access. They include hundreds of people who have been arrested in recent weeks in Falluja and other Iraqi cities.

According to the Washington Post, which broke the story last week, one proposal is to have the US build new prisons in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Officials of those countries would run the prisons, and would have to allow the state department to "monitor human rights compliance".

It is a laughable proposition, since the whole purpose of the exercise is to minimise scrutiny. CIA agents would have the right to question the detainees, with or without the aid of foreign interrogators, as they already do at other off-limits prisons at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea, in Jordan and Egypt, and at Diego Garcia.

The US policy of lending detainees to other countries' jailers and torturers, known as "rendition", began during the "war on drugs" as a way of arresting alleged Latin American narco-barons and softening them up for trial in the US. It has expanded enormously under the "war on terror". As one CIA officer told the Washington Post, "the whole idea has become a corruption of renditions. It's not rendering to justice. It's kidnapping."

He could have added that it's kidnapping for life. A senior US official told the New York Times last week that three-quarters of the 550 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay no longer have any intelligence of value. But they will not be released out of concern that they pose a continuing threat to the US. "You're basically keeping them off the battlefield, and unfortunately in the war on terrorism, the battlefield is everywhere," he said.

Since the attack on Falluja, the US holds 325 non-Iraqis in custody, many of them Syrians and Saudis. Questioned by the Senate's judiciary committee, Gonzales said that the justice department believes that non-Iraqis captured in Iraq are not protected by the Geneva conventions, which prevent prisoners being transferred out of the country in which they are held.

It was revealed last year that Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, had approved the secret holding of "ghost detainees" in Iraq. They were kept off the registers that were shown to the Red Cross and therefore lost the chance of being visited or having other rights. Now many new prisoners will be candidates for a deeper category of invisibility by being sent for detention in secret locations abroad.

While making bland statements during his Senate appearance that he found torture abhorrent, Gonzales gave no clear assurances that its practice would stop. As White House counsel he approved an administration memorandum against torture in August 2002 which was so narrow that it appeared to define it only as treatment that led to "dying under torment". In other words, if a victim survived, he could not have been tortured.

The memo also claimed that torture only occurs when the intent is to cause pain. If pain is intentionally used to gain information or a confession, that is not torture. Thanks to this narrow definition of what is forbidden, US officials have been systematically using inhumane treatment on prisoners - far beyond the few so-called bad apples exposed by the photographs from Abu Ghraib - while saying it did not amount to torture.

A few days before Gonzales's Senate hearings, the justice department hastily rewrote the memo so that a wider category of techniques are defined as torture, and thereby prohibited. But at the hearings Gonzales refused to give a clear negative answer to the question whether, in his view, American troops or interrogators could legally engage in torture under any circumstances.

One of the glories of the hearings was the appearance of Douglas Johnson, director of the Centre for Victims of Torture. He argued that the new memo fails to give clear guidance on what the appropriate standards for interrogation and detention are. He also pointed out that torture does not yield reliable information and corrupts its perpetrators.

Psychological torture was more damaging than physical torture, he said. Interviews with victims show that depression and recurrent nightmares decades later more often relate to memories of mock executions (of the "water-boarding" type) and scenarios of humiliation than to actual physical abuse.

That these points might have impressed the man Bush wants to have as America's top law officer is not to be expected. Nor does anyone in Washington expect the Senate to refuse to confirm him for the job. Happy New War on Terror 2005.

j.steele@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Hold the elections, then get out

by Robin Cook
The Guardian
January 14, 2005

Robin Cook was a leading member of Blair's government who resigned on the eve of the attack on Iraq.

The biggest surprise of the White House announcement calling off the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is that there was anyone still out there looking for them. The rest of the planet has known for over a year that there are no WMD to be found in Iraq, and that hunting for them is just as eccentric - and even less interesting - as poring over arcane codes in the hope of unearthing the holy grail.

Nevertheless, we cannot allow the Bush administration to conduct the last rites on the weapons search without reminding Downing Street that this also buries their claim that Iraq was, in the words of the September dossier, "a current and serious threat". A two-year search by 1,000 personnel with a budget of $1bn has found zero threat: no weapons stockpiles; no chemical or biological agents; no nuclear plants; no delivery systems. When Tony Blair was obliged to admit last summer that he could find no weapons, he promised to produce weapons programmes. Now the search has been closed down by Washington without uncovering any such programmes either.

Revealingly, Washington never thought to warn the British of this week's statement. Despite Britain committing a third of its army to the invasion of Iraq, it did not occur to anyone in the White House to pick up the phone and warn the British government in advance of their unilateral decision. Perhaps this latest twist of the knife might finally cure Tony Blair of his delusion that the Bush administration will ever listen to him in return for his loyalty to them.

The immediate pressure for calling off the hunt, as US officials conceded, is the rising danger to any investigator rash enough to venture out of the fortified green zone. The security situation in large parts of Iraq is now so dire that it is the police who often choose to wear masks so that they cannot be recognised, and the insurgents who make no attempt to disguise themselves even in the capital city in broad daylight.

Deteriorating security must not be used as a pretext to delay the election of a representative Iraqi government. The big mistake of the occupying powers lies not in bringing forward elections too quickly, but in delaying them for so long. The Shia communities were furious last year when Paul Bremer pulled the plug on the elections that they had proposed before the handover to any interim government, and at a time when the security situation was not so grave. They would regard it as a betrayal of their patience if they were now again denied the opportunity to translate their popular majority into real political power.

I am mystified, though, why Tony Blair reassures us that the mere fact of elections will reduce the violence. Sunnis seeking to prevent power passing to the Shia majority are not going to abandon their violent resistance out of respect for the outcome of the democratic process.

Nor is his confidence shared by any of the other nations with intelligence-gathering capacity in Iraq. Most of our partners in it are planning to pack their bags and go home as soon as possible after the elections, which is another reason why they cannot be delayed. Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine have either left or announced their intention to do so starting this spring, puncturing Donald Rumsfeld's famous boast that he had the support of what he dubbed New Europe. The Netherlands is committed to complete withdrawal of its troops by mid-March, a source of acute neuralgia in No 10 as it will leave a big hole in the British sector and require the dispatch of over 1,000 more British troops to plug it on the eve of an election campaign.

Downing Street has made it clear to our ambassadors to each of these governments that the top priority is to persuade them to change their minds and keep their troops in Iraq. Such lobbying only reinforces in Europe resentment of the Blair government as the lonely and predictable spokesman for George Bush.

Perhaps Tony Blair should reflect that if so many countries have concluded that their presence in Iraq is not helping, they have a point. The reality is that the heavy-handed application of US firepower does not offer peace and security in Iraq, but guarantees an increasingly strong and violent resistance. The majority of the civilians killed under the occupation have died at the hands of American ordnance, not terrorist bombs, and every civilian killed breeds another 10 insurgents. Falluja has been reduced to rubble and its residents to refugees, with the predictable result that the resistance has not been weakened, but strengthened.

Tony Blair has already had to accept that he went to war on a monumental blunder over whether Iraq was a threat. He must now confront the equally hard truth that the American-led occupation is not the solution to the insecurity of Iraq but a large part of the problem.

r.cook@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

This election could plunge Iraq further into the abyss

by Seumas Milne
The Guardian
January 13, 2005

They are routinely described by the BBC as Iraq's first free and democratic elections - sometimes for half a century, sometimes in the country's history. During his lightning stopover in Baghdad last month, Tony Blair insisted that whatever you had thought of the war, no one could now avoid taking sides in what had become a simple "battle between democracy and terror" in Iraq. And even if enthusiasm for the elections scheduled for January 30 is usually tempered by an admission that they are bound in practice to prove "imperfect", there is a widespread view in the occupying countries that they offer the best chance to begin to lift the country out of its current misery.

We have, of course, been here before. Every landmark since the US and British invasion nearly two years ago has been claimed as a turning point for the occupation, the moment when support for the resistance would start to recede and a new, showcase Iraq emerge from the blood-drenched devastation. And no doubt for those who thought Iraqis would welcome their invaders with flowers, that they wouldn't resist foreign occupation, that Saddam Hussein's capture would take the wind out of the fighters' sails, that last June's handover of sovereignty would be seen as genuine and that the punitive destruction of Falluja would break the back of the insurgency - for them, this month's planned ballot will surely seem to be the crucial event that must at last deliver legitimacy to the puppet regime holed up in Baghdad's infamous green zone.

But, in reality, the elections are likely at best to be irrelevant, at worst to plunge Iraq deeper into the abyss. Both common sense and first principles dictate that no election in a country invaded and controlled by foreign troops can conceivably be regarded as free and fair. The poll due on January 30 is part of a process imposed by Bush's proconsul Paul Bremer, transparently designed to entrench US plans for Iraq and the wider Middle East; all the main politicians and parties taking part owe their position and physical survival to US protection and power; and voting will take place in a country under martial law, where a full-scale guerrilla war is raging and whose heartlands are under daily bombardment.

Falluja, a city of 350,000 people, has been razed to the ground in the past couple of months and its people expelled to refugee camps, where they have less chance to vote (even if they wanted to) than Iraqi refugees living in Britain. The US-appointed government has cracked down on the recalcitrant press and expelled the independent al-Jazeera TV station, while the hands of any future administration have been tied by a US-imposed neoliberal economic programme.

Add to that the fact that major political groups and politicians are boycotting the elections (including the popular Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr) as illegitimate under occupation - while security is so bad in four of the country's provinces (accounting for more than half the population) that both the US ground forces commander and US-installed prime minister Ayad Allawi said this week it would be too dangerous for many people to vote. And just as intimidation is expected to enforce a boycott in some Sunni-dominated areas, pro-regime militias are expected to dragoon Shia voters to the polls in parts of the south. Without election observers, the scope for fraud is clearly extensive. Most candidates' names on party lists have been withheld - giving new meaning to the term "secret ballot" - while voter registration forms are being widely traded for dollars.

But most crucially of all, whatever the turnout and relative votes for the different lists, the result cannot and will not reflect the popular will over the most important issue facing the country: the occupation. Opinion polls show most Iraqis want foreign troops to leave now. But none of those with a chance of being elected - all compromised by their links to the current administration - supports such a demand. Without foreign troops, they would fear for their own skins.

None of this should come as much of a shock. We are familiar with "managed" elections the world over. And phoney polls under foreign occupation have a long pedigree. Take the US client regime in South Vietnam, where fraudulent but contested elections were held from the 1950s to the 1970s, including at the height of the American war. Just as in Iraq, newspapers were suppressed and parties staged boycotts or were banned, while polling was often suspended in Vietcong-controlled areas - or alternatively the government won a miraculously high vote. Then there were Iraq's own rigged elections under the British-installed regime before 1958: as in Iraq today, thousands of prisoners were held without trial, newspapers and parties were banned and torture was rampant.

The credibility of Iraq's January 30 poll is so flagrantly in doubt, it is no wonder that there is pressure both from within the US administration and prominent Iraqi politicians for a postponement. The danger is that the election won't simply lack credibility, but could actually intensify Iraq's crisis by fuelling sectarian divisions. The combination of the effective truce with Sadr's Mahdi army while the US military concentrates its fire on the Sunni-based resistance, the lack of Shia support for Fallujans during November's onslaught and the commitment to the elections by the governing Shia parties has strained relations to the limit. There are increasing fears among Iraqis that the US is deliberately fostering sectarian tension to divide and rule - or even open the way to the de facto partition of the country. When the New York Times's Thomas Friedman argues that "we have to have a proper election in Iraq so we can have a proper civil war" and Charles Krauthammer suggests in the Washington Post that we should "see Iraqi factionalisation as a useful tool", it's hardly surprising such ideas flourish.

The US-British occupation has failed to deliver Iraqis' most basic needs and security, let alone their freedom. The resistance, dismissed as "dead-enders" and "remnants" after the fall of the Saddam regime, has mushroomed to the point where Iraqi intelligence puts it at 200,000-strong, a senior US military officer has told Newsweek "we are losing" and the Pentagon is reaching into the sewer of its history for the "Salvador option": the use of local paramilitary death squads to wage a dirty war against the guerrillas.

Britain's small band of occupation cheerleaders, who comprehensively lost the argument about the war, are now taking refuge in self-righteous denunciations of the Iraqi resistance, the very forces they helped bring into being by supporting the unprovoked invasion of an independent state.

They would do better to remind their friends that there can be no democracy without genuine sovereignty and self-determination. The only way to hold free and fair elections in Iraq - and draw the sting of mass resistance - is for the aggressor states to withdraw their forces and let the Iraqis run their own affairs.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Falluja: the Homecoming and the Homeless

by Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad and Kim Sengupta
The Independent
11 December, 2004

The Black Watch arrives back in Britain this morning home in time for Christmas as Tony Blair had promised.

The regiment's five-week mission - the toughest British troops have faced since the invasion of Iraq 21 months ago - made possible the US assault on Fallujah, which now lies in ruins. Five Black Watch soldiers died, and no one doubts the dedication they brought to the task, particularly as the regiment knew it was facing the axe in a forthcoming review of the Army.

As they left Camp Dogwood for the last time yesterday, one officer spoke of the frustration among the 850-strong contingent when it was ordered north to support the American forces. He said: "The whole deployment was, of course, heavily politicised from the beginning. Some soldiers criticised Tony Blair by name. There was a feeling that we were being used, and that made it difficult to focus initially on our mission."

They are delighted to be back home, and will no doubt enjoy emotional reunions with their families. But what of the mission they left behind, and the city that was its target? Yesterday, the first independent reports began to emerge from a flattened city which is facing an unprecedented, permanent security crackdown, and an uncertain future.

The assault by 10,000 US troops began on 8 November, just after the US presidential elections: its aim, to clear a city regarded by the Americans as a hotbed of insurgency.

More than 70 marines died, and 1,600 rebels. But no one knows the civilian casualty toll this in a city which once numbered 300,000. Indeed, there are no estimates of how many people are still there, or how many escaped to neighbouring towns and to Baghdad before the assault got under way.

Ahmed Rawi, a Red Cross spokesman, said yesterday: "No one knows how many families are inside the city." The Red Cross team, which entered without escort and left before curfew, met no residents, apart from engineers and technicians. The Red Cross reported that hundreds of dead bodies remain stacked inside a potato chip warehouse on the outskirts. Some of the bodies were too badly decomposed to be identified. Raw sewage runs through the streets.

All this, and there are no humanitarian workers working inside the city. When the first of Fallujah's refugees are allowed to return on Christmas Eve, they will be funnelled through five checkpoints. Each will have their fingerprints taken, along with DNA samples and retina scans. Residents will be issued with badges with their home addresses on them, and it will be an offence not to wear it at all times. No civilian vehicles will be allowed in the city in an effort to thwart suicide bombers. One idea floated by the US is for all males in Fallujah be compelled to join work battalions in which they will be paid to clear rubble and rebuild houses.

American officers say the hardline approach is legal under martial law regulations issued last month by the interim government of Iyad Allawi. But they appear a little embarrassed by the Orwellian overtones of their plan. Major Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, admitted: "Some may see this as a 'Big Brother is watching over you' experiment. But, in reality, it's a simple security measure to keep the insurgents from coming back."

Before the battle of Fallujah, the US repeatedly said that foreign fighters and Islamic zealots were orchestrating guerrilla attacks on US soldiers from the city. But the planned measures presume everybody in Fallujah to be a potential supporter of the resistance.

Fallujah will be the first community in Iraq to be subjected to such tough identification tests. So far, they have been used mainly against detainees - there are 2,000 people still held on suspicion of aiding the insurgents.

The city's capture was supposed to break the back of the insurgency and open the way for people to take part in the Iraqi elections on 30 January. Yet, so far, there is little sign that resistance to the US and the interim government is weakening in Sunni Muslim districts in central and northern Iraq.

The plan to identify and monitor all civilians is very similar to a plan implemented by Saddam Hussein to separate insurgents from civilians in Iraqi Kurdistan during the 1980s.

Against all this background, the officer from the Black Watch said as he prepared to leave: "Was it worth it? Of course, we have all got our private thoughts about this war. There was a lot of unease about being identified too much with the Americans and Fallujah ... you have to hope at the end that we did some good. Only time will tell."

| © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=591998&host=3&dir=75

In Iraq, the US eliminates those who dare to count the dead

by Naomi Klein
December 4, 2004
The Guardian

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo

David T Johnson,
Acting ambassador,
US Embassy, London

Dear Mr Johnson, On November 26, your press counsellor sent a letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read: "In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies." Of particular concern was the word "eliminating".

The letter suggested that my charge was "baseless" and asked the Guardian either to withdraw it, or provide "evidence of this extremely grave accusation". It is quite rare for US embassy officials to openly involve themselves in the free press of a foreign country, so I took the letter extremely seriously. But while I agree that the accusation is grave, I have no intention of withdrawing it. Here, instead, is the evidence you requested.

In April, US forces laid siege to Falluja in retaliation for the gruesome killings of four Blackwater employees. The operation was a failure, with US troops eventually handing the city back to resistance forces. The reason for the withdrawal was that the siege had sparked uprisings across the country, triggered by reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed. This information came from three main sources: 1) Doctors. USA Today reported on April 11 that "Statistics and names of the dead were gathered from four main clinics around the city and from Falluja general hospital". 2) Arab TV journalists. While doctors reported the numbers of dead, it was al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya that put a human face on those statistics. With unembedded camera crews in Falluja, both networks beamed footage of mutilated women and children throughout Iraq and the Arab-speaking world. 3) Clerics. The reports of high civilian casualties coming from journalists and doctors were seized upon by prominent clerics in Iraq. Many delivered fiery sermons condemning the attack, turning their congregants against US forces and igniting the uprising that forced US troops to withdraw.

US authorities have denied that hundreds of civilians were killed during last April's siege, and have lashed out at the sources of these reports. For instance, an unnamed "senior American officer", speaking to the New York Times last month, labelled Falluja general hospital "a centre of propaganda". But the strongest words were reserved for Arab TV networks. When asked about al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya's reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed in Falluja, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, replied that "what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable ... " Last month, US troops once again laid siege to Falluja - but this time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian casualties last time around.

ELIMINATING DOCTORS The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control. The New York Times reported that "the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casual ties", noting that "this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons". The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers "stole the mobile phones" at the hospital - preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world.

But this was not the worst of the attacks on health workers. Two days earlier, a crucial emergency health clinic was bombed to rubble, as well as a medical supplies dispensary next door. Dr Sami al-Jumaili, who was working in the clinic, says the bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Falluja general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical centre" before it was hit.

Whether the clinic was targeted or destroyed accidentally, the effect was the same: to eliminate many of Falluja's doctors from the war zone. As Dr Jumaili told the Independent on November 14: "There is not a single surgeon in Falluja." When fighting moved to Mosul, a similar tactic was used: on entering the city, US and Iraqi forces immediately seized control of the al-Zaharawi hospital.

ELIMINATING JOURNALISTS The images from last month's siege on Falluja came almost exclusively from reporters embedded with US troops. This is because Arab journalists who had covered April's siege from the civilian perspective had effectively been eliminated. Al-Jazeera had no cameras on the ground because it has been banned from reporting in Iraq indefinitely. Al-Arabiya did have an unembedded reporter, Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, in Falluja, but on November 11 US forces arrested him and held him for the length of the siege. Al-Saadi's detention has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists. "We cannot ignore the possibility that he is being intimidated for just trying to do his job," the IFJ stated.

It's not the first time journalists in Iraq have faced this kind of intimidation. When US forces invaded Baghdad in April 2003, US Central Command urged all unembedded journalists to leave the city. Some insisted on staying and at least three paid with their lives. On April 8, a US aircraft bombed al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Al-Jazeera has documentation proving it gave the coordinates of its location to US forces.

On the same day, a US tank fired on the Palestine hotel, killing José Couso, of the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsiuk, of Reuters. Three US soldiers are facing a criminal lawsuit from Couso's family, which alleges that US forces were well aware that journalists were in the Palestine hotel and that they committed a war crime.

ELIMINATING CLERICS Just as doctors and journalists have been targeted, so too have many of the clerics who have spoken out forcefully against the killings in Falluja. On November 11, Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, the head of the Supreme Association for Guidance and Daawa, was arrested. According to Associated Press, "Al-Sumaidaei has called on the country's Sunni minority to launch a civil disobedience campaign if the Iraqi government does not halt the attack on Falluja". On November 19, AP reported that US and Iraqi forces stormed a prominent Sunni mosque, the Abu Hanifa, in Aadhamiya, killing three people and arresting 40, including the chief cleric - another opponent of the Falluja siege. On the same day, Fox News reported that "US troops also raided a Sunni mosque in Qaim, near the Syrian border". The report described the arrests as "retaliation for opposing the Falluja offensive". Two Shia clerics associated with Moqtada al-Sadr have also been arrested in recent weeks; according to AP, "both had spoken out against the Falluja attack".

"We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks of US Central Command. The question is: what happens to the people who insist on counting the bodies - the doctors who must pronounce their patients dead, the journalists who document these losses, the clerics who denounce them? In Iraq, evidence is mounting that these voices are being systematically silenced through a variety of means, from mass arrests, to raids on hospitals, media bans, and overt and unexplained physical attacks.

Mr Ambassador, I believe that your government and its Iraqi surrogates are waging two wars in Iraq. One war is against the Iraqi people, and it has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. The other is a war on witnesses.

· Additional research by Aaron Maté

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Iraq's Silent Dead

by Jeffrey Sachs
December 02, 2004

Jeffrey D. Sachs is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

November 2004 has the dubious distinction of being tied with April as the bloodiest months in Iraq for American soldiers. In both months, at least 135 U.S. servicemen or women died. But it's anyone's guess as to which months were the bloodiest for Iraqi citizens. No one is counting their deaths - and the American media isn't reporting on it, either. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute goes where the mainstream media doesn't tread: deep into a war where civilians are targets as often as insurgents.

Evidence is mounting that America's war in Iraq has killed tens of thousands of civilian Iraqis, and perhaps more than one hundred thousand. Yet this carnage is systematically ignored in the United States, where the media and government portray a war in which there are no civilian deaths because there are no Iraqi civilians - only insurgents.

American behavior and self-perceptions reveal the ease with which a civilized country can engage in large-scale killing of civilians without public discussion. In late October, the British medical journal The Lancet published a study of civilian deaths in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion began. The sample survey documented an extra 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths compared to the death rate in the preceding year, when Saddam Hussein was still in power - and this estimate did not even count excess deaths in Fallujah, which was deemed too dangerous to include.

The study also noted that the majority of deaths resulted from violence, and that a high proportion of the violent deaths were due to U.S. aerial bombing. The epidemiologists acknowledged the uncertainties of these estimates, but presented enough data to warrant an urgent follow-up investigation and reconsideration by the Bush administration and the U.S. military of aerial bombing of Iraq's urban areas.

America's public reaction has been as remarkable as the Lancet study - for the reaction has been no reaction. The vaunted New York Times ran a single story of 770 words on page 8 of the paper (October 29). The Times reporter apparently did not interview a single Bush administration or U.S. military official. No follow-up stories or editorials appeared, and no New York Times reporters assessed the story on the ground. Coverage in other U.S. papers was similarly frivolous. The Washington Post (October 29) carried a single 758-word story on page 16.

Recent reporting on the bombing of Falluja has also been an exercise in self-denial. The New York Times (November 6) wrote that "warplanes pounded rebel positions" in Fallujah, without noting that "rebel positions" are actually in civilian neighborhoods. Another New York Times story (November 12), citing "military officials," dutifully reported that, "Since the assault began on Monday, about 600 rebels have been killed, along with 18 American and 5 Iraqi soldiers." The issue of civilian deaths was not even raised.

Violence is only one reason for the increase in civilian deaths in Iraq. Children in urban war zones die in vast numbers from diarrhoea , respiratory infections and other causes owing to unsafe drinking water, lack of refrigerated foods, and acute shortages of blood and basic medicines at clinics and hospitals (that is, if civilians even dare to leave their houses for medical care). Yet the Red Crescent and other relief agencies have been unable to relieve Fallujah's civilian population.

On November 14, the front page of The New York Times led with the following description: "Army tanks and fighting vehicles blasted their way into the last main rebel stronghold in Fallujah at sundown on Saturday after American warplanes and artillery prepared the way with a savage barrage on the district. Earlier in the afternoon, 10 separate plumes of smoke rose from Southern Fallujah, as it etched against the desert sky, and probably exclaimed catastrophe for the insurgents."

There is, once again, virtually no mention of the catastrophe for civilians etched against that desert sky. There is a hint, though, in a brief mention in the middle of the story of a father looking over his wounded sons in a hospital and declaring that, "Now Americans are shooting randomly at anything that moves."

A few days later, a U.S. television film crew was in a bombed-out mosque with U.S. troops. While the cameras were rolling, a U.S. Marine turned to an unarmed and wounded Iraqi lying on the ground and murdered the man with gunshots to the head. (Reportedly, there were other such cases of outright murder.) But the American media more or less brushed aside this shocking incident, too. The Wall Street Journal actually wrote an editorial on November 18 that criticized the critics, noting as usual that whatever the United States does, its enemies in Iraq do worse - as if this excuses American abuses.

It does not. The United States is killing massive numbers of Iraqi civilians, embittering the population and the Islamic world, and laying the ground for escalating violence and death. No number of slaughtered Iraqis will bring peace. The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril. Worse still, America's public opinion, media and election results have left the world's most powerful military without practical restraint.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/iraqs_silent_dead.php

The graves of Falluja show the reality of Iraq's occupation

by Rana Kabbani
The Guardian
November 23, 2004

Rana Kabbani is a writer and broadcaster

In an ideal world, the US-appointed interim prime minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi, would find himself answerable for his craven obeisance to his American overlords, instead of using this week's Sharm el-Sheikh conference as an excuse to condemn those who are fighting back against occupation.

A year and a half ago, CIA wings wafted him and his ilk back to long-suffering Baghdad, the ancient capital of a resilient Arab people, who had somehow survived two devastating wars, 13 years of history's most punitive sanctions, the all-consuming degradations of life under a totalitarian regime, the destruction and occupation of their country by a motley crew of US soldiers, British tag-alongs, "a coalition of the coerced and the bribed" - to use John Kerry's once radical phrase - and the harpies and carpetbaggers in the form of American private contractors, corporate swine, exiled Iraqi fraudsters, and professional torturers. Iraqis watched helplessly as their country's infrastructure was destroyed - electricity, sewerage, houses, hospitals, schools, libraries, bridges, roads - and as their national treasures were allowed to be looted, and their natural resources robbed.

Now they are bankrupt, riven with preventable disease, chafing under emergency laws and watching as respectable political figures are roughed up and arrested for their party's stance on the methods of the occupation. There has been a regression to Saddamite tactics - one Islamist politician's daughter and grandchildren were reported to have been arrested when he could not be found. Press freedom is muzzled, and directives are issued to the media to follow the interim-government line on Falluja, or else. But the graves of Falluja speak for themselves: "Ya Allawi, ya jaban. Ya 'ameel al-Amercaan. Sheel idak, sheel idak. Hatha shaabak mai reedak!"

This rousing chant, in Iraqi vernacular, which calls on Allawi to make himself scarce for being a coward and an American agent, is being chanted throughout the cities of Iraq in furious demonstrations. Al-Jazeera showed one of these last week, which may explain why Allawi scurried over to the more supine al-Arabiyya satellite station (which most Arabs sneer at, although not quite as hard as they do at al-Hurra, the Pentagon-financed and controlled propaganda station). There he denounced al-Jazeera yet again, having already closed down its offices more than three months ago, and harassed and insulted their journalists.

In this, he was merely following in the footsteps of his American taskmasters, who sought to blow al-Jazeera off the face of the earth, first in Kabul, then in Baghdad, for allowing Arabs to see what the US was up to. What with embedded journalists giving us asinine reports on all other stations, using marine-corps terms as though there were no others ever taught them, and with Tony Blair forbidding anyone to parody Bush, al-Jazeera has become more necessary than ever, simply because it lets Arabs speak their minds freely, with eye-witness reports of the most uncensored and unpackaged sort.

The fighting feminism on its For Women Only programme puts institutionalised western feminism to shame. All that manufactured outrage over the burka, which rose to a climax precisely as bombs fell on Afghanistan; where are the cries of outrage now, when Iraqi women are being incarcerated and raped in US dungeons, where tens of thousands of their menfolk are also being held; when they are being starved, denied drinking-water, bombed, buried alive in the rubble of their homes, maimed and killed? It will prove to be America's dirtiest war by far, and the one that destroys forever its sense of purpose and pride.

Three million people had to die in south-east Asia before that arrogant American imperial misadventure ended. How many now?

In this newspaper, Allawi's deputy prime minister called Falluja a necessary exercise, to root out "Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters", parroting Donald Rumsfeld's pathetic line that all the "terrorists" come from across the border, or are "dead-enders" from Ba'athist days. But the only deadly dead-ender is someone who could mendaciously argue thus.

All Iraqis watch as their homes and mosques are desecrated by soldiers who shoot injured men in the stomach in pre-emptive lunacy that mirrors that of their leader. They and a billion Muslims watched as Americans forbade families from burying their dead, and allowed stray dogs to gnaw the corpses of pregnant women and toddlers on the mean streets of what was once Falluja, during Id al-Fitr, Islam's Holy Feast. No one is taken in by the lies and arrogance and greed of this racist war.

Iraq is an occupied country, with a proud and stubborn people, who will never cease fighting till they are finally rid of their unspeakable latter-day oppressors.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Slaughter in Samarra

by Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
The Independent
03 October , 2004

US-led forces continued their offensive on the rebel stronghold of Samarra yesterday, with the death toll rising to 125. Elsewhere, 12 people were killed in clashes in Sadr City, and seven died in US "precision strikes" in Fallujah. At al-Amel in Baghdad, funerals began of the 35 children slaughtered by suicide bombers while queuing for sweets from American troops.

The attack on Samarra, by more than 5,000 US and Iraqi interim government troops, is the first on a "no-go" rebel enclave. It is seen as a dress rehearsal to wrest back other such areas, including Sadr City on the outskirts of Baghdad, and, especially, Fallujah, where the Jordanian-born militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is based.

But those who have witnessed US aircraft firing missiles into packed tenements in Sadr City, and have seen the resulting carnage, treat claims of "precision strikes" on Zarqawi-linked targets in Fallujah with deep scepticism. Yesterday the US military claimed the casualties in Samarra were all insurgents, but doctors in the city reported women, children and the elderly among the dead.

"Dead bodies and injured people are lying everywhere in the city. The Americans fired at us when we tried to evacuate them," said an ambulance driver. "Later on they told us that we can evacuate only injured women and children, but we cannot pick up injured men."

Standing over a young boy with his stomach wrapped in bandages and his arm in a cast, Sami Hashem, a neighbour, said at the hospital in nearby Tikrit: "His pregnant mother was killed in front of him." On another bed lay a young girl who had lost her left foot. Some residents complained that they could not take their wounded to the hospital, as US troops were arresting any Iraqi male over the age of 15.

Thousands of people have fled from the city, 60 miles north of Baghdad, where US-led forces cut off power and water, and American snipers on rooftops were said to be firing at anything that moved. According to doctors at Samarra general hospital, of the first 47 bodies brought in, 11 were women, five children, and seven elderly men.

Even by the violent and anarchic standards of Iraq now, the past three days have taken a heavy toll on a population living in a state of siege. With 10 new hostages having been taken by the insurgents during the past few days, foreign workers are leaving Iraq in droves, as are many of the international media. Even parts of Baghdad adjoining the centre are now deemed to be too dangerous, belying recent claims by George Bush and Tony Blair that Iraq is getting better every day.

A storm has been caused in the US by the revelation that a speech to Congress by Iraq's interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi - who said he was leading his country out of "dark ages of violence, aggression, corruption and greed" - was written for him by the Bush re-election campaign team. But the news has caused little surprise here: most Iraqis have long decided that everything he does or says is dictated by the Americans. What must be much more worrying for the US and Britain is the overwhelming belief among ordinary Iraqis that their misery is also made in America.

The three car bombs in Baghdad on Thursday which killed 46 people and injured 208, the vast majority of them children, were the work of insurgents. Within 24 hours Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group was claiming responsibility for the "heroic operations". Yet at yesterday's funerals the bereaved families put the blame on the Americans who had arrived, uninvited, at the opening of a new sewage station and then attracted the little boys and girls around them by handing out sweets.

Around 14,800 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have been killed so far, and more than 40,000 injured. Also growing are the numbers of insurgents. According to the Pentagon's own estimates, their numbers have quadrupled this year to 20,000. General Andrew Graham, British former deputy commander of the coalition forces, said the figure is more likely to be as high as 50,000.

Even when there is a respite from the violence, civilians face a daily struggle to obtain the basics of life. Mr Allawi's reference to delivering Iraq from corruption causes particular derision. Under Saddam Hussein Iraq had a reputation as the "republic of bribes". Now, say the Iraqis, the situation is much worse. Getting anything out from car number plates to passports requires baksheesh.

Ahmed Mohammed Abbas, who runs an electrical business, said: "When we are not paying off officials, we are scared to go out of doors, because of the bombs, kidnappings and murders. We are living in a society without any law or morality. This is the gift to Iraq of Bush and Blair."

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Things are worse in Iraq than the Bush Administration Tells the American People

by Farnaz Fassihi
From Baghdad A Wall Street Journal Reporter's E-Mail to Friends
CommonDreams.org
October 3, 2004

Farnaz Fassihi, a Wall Street Journal reporter sent this report as an e-mail to friends.

Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.

It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad." What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.

Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.

A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is booby-trapped. He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen landmines per every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them. Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was supposed to love America for liberating Iraq.

For journalists the significant turning point came with the wave of abduction and kidnappings. Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad because foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways between towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a journalist female friend at 11 p.m. telling me two Italian women had been abducted from their homes in broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded this week and the Brit, were abducted from their homes in a residential neighborhood. They were supplying the entire block with round the clock electricity from their generator to win friends. The abductors grabbed one of them at 6 a.m. when he came out to switch on the generator; his beheaded body was thrown back near the neighborhoods.

The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If any thing, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day. The various elements within it-baathists, criminals, nationalists and Al Qaeda-are cooperating and coordinating.

I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the military and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was determined we were missing. Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons flow the other way from Al Qaeda to the Baathisst to the criminals. My friend Georges, the French journalist snatched on the road to Najaf, has been missing for a month with no word on release or whether he is still alive.

America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date -- and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly.

As for reconstruction: firstly it's so unsafe for foreigners to operate that almost all projects have come to a halt. After two years, of the $18 billion Congress appropriated for Iraq reconstruction only about $1 billion or so has been spent and a chuck has now been reallocated for improving security, a sign of just how bad things are going here.

Oil dreams? Insurgents disrupt oil flow routinely as a result of sabotage and oil prices have hit record high of $49 a barrel. Who did this war exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up and Al Qaeda is running around in Iraq?

Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler. I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad. Then I went to see an Iraqi scholar this week to talk to him about elections here. He has been trying to educate the public on the importance of voting. He said, "President Bush wanted to turn Iraq into a democracy that would be an example for the Middle East. Forget about democracy, forget about being a model for the region, we have to salvage Iraq before all is lost."

One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle. The Iraqi government is talking about having elections in three months while half of the country remains a 'no go zone'-out of the hands of the government and the Americans and out of reach of journalists. In the other half, the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up at polling stations. The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, leaving the stage open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war.

I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"

Far graver than Vietnam

by Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian
September 16, 2004

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com

'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.

But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.

"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."

General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."

He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."

General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."

Despair in Iraq over the Forgotten Victims

by Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
The Independent
September 9, 2004

Patrick Cockburn is the author with Andrew Cockburn of Out of the Ashes, the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein. He writes regularly for The Independent of London.

Iraqi officials demanded to know yesterday why so little international attention was being given to their numerous dead as the US mourned the death of 1,000 soldiers since the invasion of Iraq.

"When I heard on television that the Americans had lost 1,000 military killed in Iraq, I asked myself, what about our side? What is the number of Iraqis who have died?" said Dr Amer al-Khuzaie, an Iraqi deputy health minister.

He admits it is impossible to know the true figure because many bodies are simply buried and the deaths never registered. "Sometimes there are as many as 200 Iraqis killed in a single day," sighed Dr Khuzaie, flicking through a file showing the casualty figures. "The Iraqi people are being eradicated. We must stop this haemorrhage, this bleeding."

The US army does not count the number of Iraqis killed since the invasion in March 2003. The most conservative figure for the number dead is 10,000 as calculated by private groups. It is rising every day. The US military claimed that on Tuesday alone it killed "100 militants" in air strikes on Fallujah on top of a further 33 people killed in fighting in Sadr City in Baghdad.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, proudly claimed on Tuesday that US forces had, last month, killed between 1,500 and 2,500 Iraqi insurgents. He did not note an ominous trend that, for the first time, more Americans were probably killed by Shia fighters than by Sunni guerrillas. For the US, it is now a war on two fronts.

Iraqis suspect that in any case many of those who died were civilians.

Dr Khuzaie admits that poor communications make it impossible to get a complete picture but he estimates that "in Najaf 400 civilians were killed and 2,500 wounded in the fighting last month."

There are many ways to die in Iraq. At the al-Khindi hospital yesterday, doctors were treating one of their own workers called Ihsan Aboud, 32, who had gone home in a taxi to Sadr City the night before. "There was a roadside bomb," explained his cousin Sabah Thigil. "It blew up as the taxi passed and two people in it were killed and Ihsan was badly burned."

Asked if the wounded man would live, a doctor gestured with his hand to show that his life was in the balance. "Even when there is nothing much happening, we get 15 to 20 people a day brought in who are victims of violence," said Dr Yassin Mustafa, an assistant manager of the hospital. "Often people do not know who shot them or blew them up."

In the close-packed heavily populated houses of Sadr City, home to two million people, the use of rockets and heavy machineguns by the US inflicts heavy casualties. The mortars of the ill-trained Mehdi Army militiamen are often misdirected. Dr Mustafa had just received seven bodies, all from a single family, hit by a mortar bomb.

He pointed out that, at this time of year, casualties were particularly severe because those in poorer neighbourhoods sleep on the roofs of their houses because it is cooler. As they lie sleeping, they are often killed or wounded by shrapnel or stray bullets.

People in Baghdad have learned caution. Often there are long traffic jams because cars do not want to go near a slowly moving American convoy, a possible target of a massive bomb buried beside the road or a rocket-propelled grenade. The Americans also have a much-feared practice of spraying fire in all directions when they come under attack.

Suicide bombers show total disregard for civilian casualties and assassins are equally careless of who they kill. On Tuesday, an attempt to kill the Governor of Baghdad Ali al-Haidri almost succeeded but a bomb hit the wrong car. A man and a women were killed by the blast. Iraq is not just a dangerous place to live because of political violence. UNICEF estimated in the 1990s that 500,000 children had died because of the collapse of health standards under the sanctions. Infant mortality rose from 40 per 1,000 in 1990, before the 1991 Gulf War, to 108 thirteen years later according to the World Health Organisation.

Public health has not improved since the invasion last year. A main reason is unclean water. Dr Bashar, a senior house surgeon at al-Kindi, said: "Look around you. Baghdad is the dirtiest city in the world."

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Of Course the White House Fears Free Elections in Iraq

Only an appointocracy can be trusted to accept US troops and corporations

Naomi Klein
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian

nologo.org <> Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

"The people of Iraq are free," declared President Bush in his state of the union address on Tuesday. The previous day, 100,000 Iraqis begged to differ. They took to Baghdad's streets, shouting: "Yes, yes to elections. No, no to selection."

According to Iraq occupation chief Paul Bremer, there really is no difference between the White House's version of freedom and the one being demanded on the street. Asked whether his plan to form an Iraqi government through appointed caucuses was heading towards a clash with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's call for direct elections, Bremer said he had no "fundamental disagreement with him".

It was, he said, a mere quibble over details. "I don't want to go into the technical details of refinements. There are - if you talk to experts in these matters - all kinds of ways to organise partial elections and caucuses. And I'm not an election expert, so I don't want to go into the details. But we've always said we're willing to consider refinements."

I'm not an election expert either, but I'm pretty sure there are differences here that cannot be refined. Al-Sistani's supporters want all Iraqis to have a vote and the people they elect to write the laws of the country - your basic, imperfect, representative democracy.

Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to appoint the members of 18 regional organising committees. These will then choose delegates to form 18 selection caucuses. These will then select representatives to a transitional national assembly. The assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers, who will form the new government. This, Bush said in the state of the union address, constitutes "a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty".

Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add the fact that Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and Bush to his by the US Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by an appointee's appointee's appointees' appointees' appointees' selectees.

The White House insists its aversion to elections is purely practical; there just isn't time to pull them off before the June 30 deadline. So why have the deadline? The favourite explanation is that Bush needs a "braggable" on the campaign trail: when his Democratic rival raises the spectre of Vietnam, Bush will reply that the occupation is over, we're on our way out.

Except that the US has no intention of actually getting out of Iraq: it wants its troops to remain, and it wants Bechtel, MCI and Halliburton to stay behind and run the water system, the phones and the oilfields. It was with this goal in mind that, on September 19, Bremer pushed through a package of economic reforms that the Economist described as a "capitalist dream".

But the dream, though still alive, is now in peril. A growing number of legal experts are challenging the legitimacy of Bremer's reforms, arguing that under the international agreements that govern occupying powers - the Hague regulations of 1907 and the Geneva conventions of 1949 - the CPA can only act as a caretaker of Iraq's economic assets, not its auctioneer. Radical changes - such as Bremer's order 39, which opened up Iraqi industry to 100% foreign ownership - violate these agreements and so could be easily overturned by a sovereign Iraqi government.

This prospect has foreign investors seriously spooked, and many are opting not to go into Iraq. The major private insurance brokers are also sitting it out. Bremer has responded by quietly cancelling his plan to privatise Iraq's 200 state firms, instead putting up 35 companies for lease (with a later option to buy). For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign government, unbound by the Hague and Geneva conventions, can legally sell off Iraq's assets.

But will it? Given the widespread perception that the US is not out to rebuild Iraq but to loot it, if Iraqis were given the chance to vote tomorrow, they could well decide to expel US troops immediately and to reverse Bremer's privatisation project, opting instead to protect local jobs. And that frightening prospect - far more than the absence of a census - explains why the White House is fighting so hard for its appointocracy.

Under the current American plan for Iraq, the transitional national assembly would hold on to power from June 30 until general elections are held "no later" than December 31 2005. That's 18 leisurely months for a non-elected government to do what the CPA could not legally do on its own: invite US troops to stay indefinitely and turn Bremer's capitalist dream into binding law. Only after these key decisions have been made will Iraqis be invited to have their say. The White House calls this "self-rule". It is, in fact, the very definition of outside-rule, occupation through outsourcing.

That means that the world is once again facing a choice about Iraq. Will its democracy emerge stillborn, with foreign troops dug in on its territory, multinationals locked into multi-year contracts controlling key resources, and an economic programme that has left 60-70% of the population unemployed? Or will its democracy be born with its heart still beating, capable of building the country Iraqis choose?

On one side are the occupation forces. On the other are growing movements demanding economic and voter rights in Iraq. Increasingly, occupying forces are responding to these forces by using fatal force to break up demonstrations, as British soldiers did in Amara earlier this month, killing six.

Yes, there are religious fundamentalists and Saddam loyalists capitalising on the rage, but the very existence of these pro-democracy movements is itself a kind of miracle; after 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions, and now occupation, it would certainly be understandable if Iraqis met further hardships with fatalism and resignation. Instead, the violence of Bremer's shock therapy appears to have jolted hundred of thousands into action.

This courage deserves our support. At the World Social Forum in Mumbai last weekend, the author and activist Arundhati Roy called on the global forces that opposed the Iraq war to "become the global resistance to the occupation". She suggested choosing "two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq" and targeting them for boycotts and civil disobedience.

In his state of the union address, Bush said: "I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again." He is being proven right in Iraq every day - and the rising voices are chanting: "No, no USA. Yes, yes elections."

We Are Facing Death in Iraq for No Reason

A serving US soldier calls for the end of an occupation based on lies

Tim Predmore
Friday September 19, 2003
The Guardian

For the past six months, I have been participating in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom.

After the horrific events of September 11 2001, and throughout the battle in Afghanistan, the groundwork was being laid for the invasion of Iraq. "Shock and awe" were the words used to describe the display of power that the world was going to view upon the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was to be an up-close, dramatic display of military strength and advanced technology from within the arsenals of the American and British military.

But as a soldier preparing to take part in the invasion of Iraq, the words "shock and awe" rang deep within my psyche. Even as we prepared to depart, it seemed that these two great superpowers were about to break the very rules that they demanded others obey. Without the consent of the United Nations, and ignoring the pleas of their own citizens, the US and Britain invaded Iraq. "Shock and awe"? Yes, the words correctly described the emotional impact I felt as we embarked on an act not of justice, but of hypocrisy.

From the moment the first shot was fired in this so-called war of liberation and freedom, hypocrisy reigned. After the broadcasting of recorded images of captured and dead US soldiers on Arab television, American and British leaders vowed revenge while verbally assaulting the networks for displaying such vivid images. Yet within hours of the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons, the US government released horrific photographs of the two dead brothers for the entire world to view. Again, a "do as we say and not as we do" scenario.

As soldiers serving in Iraq, we have been told that our purpose is to help the people of Iraq by providing them with the necessary assistance militarily, as well as in humanitarian efforts. Then tell me where the humanity is in the recent account in Stars and Stripes (the newspaper of the US military) of two young children brought to a US military camp by their mother in search of medical care.

The two children had, unknowingly, been playing with explosive ordnance they had found, and as a result they were severely burned. The account tells how, after an hour-long wait, they - two children - were denied care by two US military doctors. A soldier described the incident as one of many "atrocities" on the part of the US military he had witnessed.

Thankfully, I have not personally been a witness to atrocities - unless, of course, you consider, as I do, that this war in Iraq is the ultimate atrocity.

So what is our purpose here? Was this invasion because of weapons of mass destruction, as we have so often heard? If so, where are they? Did we invade to dispose of a leader and his regime because they were closely associated with Osama bin Laden? If so, where is the proof?

Or is it that our incursion is about our own economic advantage? Iraq's oil can be refined at the lowest cost of any in the world. This looks like a modern-day crusade not to free an oppressed people or to rid the world of a demonic dictator relentless in his pursuit of conquest and domination, but a crusade to control another nation's natural resource. Oil - at least to me - seems to be the reason for our presence.

There is only one truth, and it is that Americans are dying. There are an estimated 10 to 14 attacks every day on our servicemen and women in Iraq. As the body count continues to grow, it would appear that there is no immediate end in sight.

I once believed that I was serving for a cause - "to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States". Now I no longer believe that; I have lost my conviction, as well as my determination. I can no longer justify my service on the basis of what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies.

With age comes wisdom, and at 36 years old I am no longer so blindly led as to believe without question. From my arrival last November at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, talk of deployment was heard, and as that talk turned to actual preparation, my heart sank and my doubts grew. My doubts have never faded; instead, it has been my resolve and my commitment that have.

My time here is almost done, as well as that of many others with whom I have served. We have all faced death in Iraq without reason and without justification. How many more must die? How many more tears must be shed before Americans awake and demand the return of the men and women whose job it is to protect them, rather than their leader's interest?

·Tim Predmore is a US soldier on active duty with the 101st Airborne Division, based near Mosul in northern Iraq. A version of this article appeared in the Peoria Journal Star, Illinois

© LATWP News Service

The Boys from Bravo Company

'I just pulled the trigger'

By Bob Graham, London Evening Standard, in Baghdad

June 19, 2003

---

At first glance they appear to be the archetypal Band Of Brothers of Hollywood myth, brave and honest men united in common purpose.

But a closer look at these American GIs, sweltering in the heat of an unwelcoming Iraq, reveals the glazed eyes and limp expressions of those who have witnessed a war they do not understand and have begun to resent. By their own admission these American soldiers have killed civilians without hesitation, shot wounded fighters and left others to die in agony.

What they told me, in a series of extraordinary interviews, will make uncomfortable reading for US and British politicians and senior military staff desperate to prevent the liberation of Iraq turning into a quagmire of Vietnam proportions, where the behaviour of troops feeds the hatred of an occupied people.

Sergeant First Class John Meadows revealed the mindset that has led to hundreds of innocent Iraqi civilians being killed alongside fighters deliberately dressed in civilian clothes. "You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not," he said. "Like, the only way to get through s*** like that was to concentrate on getting through it by killing as many people as you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killing them first and getting home."

These GIs, from Bravo Company of the 3/15th US Infantry Division, are caught in an impossible situation. More than 40 of their number have been killed by hostile forces since 1 May - when President Bush declared major military operations were over - and the number of hit-and-run attacks is on the increase. They face a resentful civilian population and, hiding among it, a number of guerrilla fighters still loyal to the old regime. A lone Iraqi sniper nicknamed The Hunter is believed to have claimed his sixth American victim this week in a suburb of Baghdad.

The man, said to be a former member of the Republican Guard Special Forces, has developed a cult status among some Iraqis. One Baghdad resident, Assad al Amari, said: "He is fighting for Iraq on his own. There will be many more Americans killed because they cannot stop The Hunter. He will be given the protection of people who will let him use their homes for his shooting."

In this hostile atmosphere the men of Bravo Company are asked to maintain order, yet at the same time win hearts and minds. It is not a dilemma they feel able to resolve. They spoke to me - dressed in uniforms they have worn for the past six weeks - at their base in Fallujah. Here US troops killed 18 demonstrators at a pro-Saddam rally soon after the war and now face local fighters bent on revenge.

Their attitude to these dangers is summed up by Specialist (Corporal) Michael Richardson, 22. "There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger. It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn't a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren't."

Specialist Anthony Castillo added: "When there were civilians there we did the mission that had to be done. When they were there, they were at the wrong spot, so they were considered enemy." In one major battle - at the southern end of Baghdad at the intersection of the main highways - the soldiers estimate about 70 per cent of the enemy's 400-or-so fighters were dressed as civilians.

Sgt Meadows explained: "The fight lasted for about eight hours and they just kept on coming all day from everywhere, from all sides. They were all in plain clothes.

"We had dropped fliers a couple of days prior saying to people to get out of the area if they didn't want to fight, so basically anyone who was there was a combatant. If they were dumb enough to stand in front of tanks or drive a car towards a tank, then they were there to fight. On that day it took away the dilemma of who to fire at, anyone who was there was a combatant."

Cpl Richardson added: "That day nothing went with the training. There were females fighting; there were some that, when they saw you f****** coming, they'd just drop their s*** and try to give up; and some guys were shot and they'd play dead, and when you'd go by they'd reach for their weapons. That day it was just f****** everything. When we face women or injured who try to grab their weapons, we just finish them off. You've gotta, no choice."

Such is their level of hatred they preferred to kill rather than merely injure. Sgt Meadows, 34, said: "The worst thing is to shoot one of them, then go help him." Sergeant Adrian Pedro Quinones, 26, chipped in: "In that situation you're angry, you're raging. They'd just been shooting at my men - they were putting my guys in a casket and eight feet under, that's what they were trying to do.

"And now, they're laying there and I have to help them, I have a responsibility to ensure my men help them." Cpl Richardson said: "S***, I didn't help any of them. I wouldn't help the f******. There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped."

He held out his hand as if firing a gun and clucked his tongue twice. He said: "Once you'd reached the objective, and once you'd shot them and you're moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn't want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you're fighting, and you're so terrified, you can't really convey the feeling, but you don't want them to live."

These soldiers have faced fighters from other Arab countries. "It wasn't even Iraqis that we was killing, it was Syrians," said Sgt Meadows. "We spoke to some of the people and Saddam made a call for his Arab brothers for a holy war against us, and they said they came here to fight us. Whadda we ever do to them?"

Cpl Richardson intervened: "S***, it didn't really matter who they were. They wanted to fight us so they were the enemy. We had to take over Baghdad, period, it didn't matter who was in there."

The GIs spoke of shooting civilians at roadblocks. Sgt Meadows said: "When they used white flags we were told to stop them at 400 metres out and then strip them down naked then bring them through. Most obeyed the order. We knew about others who had problems with [Iraqis] carrying white flags and then opening up on our guys. We knew about every trick they were trying to do. Then they'd use cars to try and drive at us. They were men, women and children. That day we shot up a lot of cars.

"We'd shoot warning shots at them and they'd keep coming, so we'd kill them.

We'd fire a warning shot over the top of them or on the road. When people criticise us killing civilians they don't know that a lot of these civilians were combatants, they really were. And they still are."

The men have been traumatised by their experiences. Cpl Richardson-said: "At night time you think about all the people you killed. It just never gets off your head, none of this stuff does. There's no chance to forget it, we're still here, we've been here so long. Most people leave after combat but we haven't."

Sgt Meadows said men under his command had been seeking help for severe depression: "They've already seen psychiatrists and the chain of command has got letters back saying 'these men need to be taken out of this situation'. But nothing's happened." Cpl Richardson added: "Some soldiers don't even f****** sleep at night. They sit up all f****** night long doing s*** to keep themselves busy - to keep their minds off this f****** stuff. It's the only way they can handle it. It's not so far from being crazy but it's their way of coping. There's one guy trying to build a little pool out the back, pointless stuff but it keeps him busy."

Sgt Meadows said: "For me, it's like snap-shot photos. Like pictures of maggots on tongues, babies with their heads on the ground, men with their heads halfway off and their eyes wide open and mouths wide open. I see it every day, every single day. The smells and the torsos burning, the entire route up to Baghdad, from 20 March to 7 April, nothing but burned bodies."

Specialist Bryan Barnhart, 21, joined in: "I also got the images like snapshots in my head. There are bodies that we saw when we went back to secure a place we'd taken. The bodies were still there and they'd been baking in the sun. Their bodies were bloated three times the size."

Sgt Quinones explained: "There are psychiatrists who are trying to sort out their problems but they say it's because of long combat environment. They know we need to be taken away from that environment." But the group's tour of duty has been extended and the men have been forced to remain as peacekeepers. Cpl Richardson said: "Now we're in this peacekeeping, we're always firing off a warning shot at people that don't wanna listen to you. You make up the rules as you go along.

"Like, in Fallujah we get rocks thrown at us by kids. You wanna turn round and shoot one of the little f*****s but you know you can't do that. Their parents know if they came out and threw rocks we'd shoot them. So that's why they send the kids out." Sgt Meadows said: "Can you imagine being a soldier and being told 'you're fighting a war, then when you finish you can go home'.

"You go and fight that war, and you win decisively, but now you have to stay and stabilise the situation. We are having to go from a full warfighting mindset to a peacekeeping mindset overnight. Right after shooting at people who were trying to kill you, you now have to help them."

The anger towards their own senior officers is obvious. Cpl Richardson said: "We weren't trained for this stuff now. It makes you resentful they're holding us on here. It pisses everyone off, we were told once the war was over we'd leave when our replacements get here. Well, our replacements got here and we're still here."

Specialist Castillo said: "We're more angry at the generals who are making these decisions and who never hit the ground, and who don't get shot at or have to look at the bloody bodies and the burnt-out bodies, and the dead babies and all that kinda stuff." Sgt Quinones added: "Most of these soldiers are in their early twenties and late teens. They've seen, in less than a month, more than any man should see in a whole lifetime. It's time for us to go home."

On whether the war was one worth fighting, Sgt Meadows said: "I don't care about Iraq one way or the other. I couldn't care less. [Saddam] could still be in power and, to me, it wasn't worth leaving my family for; for getting shot at and almost dying two or three times, there's nothing worth that to me." Even though no Iraqis were involved, and there is no proof Saddam was behind it, the attack on the World Trade Center provides Cpl Richardson and many others with the justification for invading Iraq

. "There's a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar [flak jacket]. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, 'They hit us at home and, now, it's our turn.' I don't want to say payback but, you know, it's pretty much payback."

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/5402104?version=1>

©2003 Associated New Media

Bush's Vietnam

Bush's Vietnam by John Pilger

New Statesman

June 22, 2003

IRAQ

America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 are unravelling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless of showcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate. The token woman in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous physician Sima Samar, has been forced out of government and is now in constant fear of her life, with an armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate. Murder, rape and child abuse are committed with impunity by the private armies of America's "friends", the warlords whom Washington has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability.

"We are in a combat zone the moment we leave this base," an American colonel told me at Bagram airbase, near Kabul. "We are shot at every day, several times a day." When I said that surely he had come to liberate and protect the people, he belly-laughed.

American troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort US officials at high speed in armoured vans with blackened windows and military vehicles, mounted with machine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast Bagram base was considered too insecure for the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during his recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans that a few weeks ago they "accidentally" shot dead four government soldiers in the centre of Kabul, igniting the second major street protest against their presence in a week.

On the day I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport, killing four German soldiers, members of the international security force Isaf. The Germans' bus was lifted into the air; human flesh lay on the roadside. When British soldiers arrived to "seal off" the area, they were watched by a silent crowd, squinting into the heat and dust, across a divide as wide as that which separated British troops from Afghans in the 19th century, and the French from Algerians and Americans from Vietnamese.

In Iraq, scene of the second "great victory", there are two open secrets. The first is that the "terrorists" now besieging the American occupation force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly supported by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed their enforced "liberation" (see Jonathan Steele's investigation, 19 March 2003, www.guardian.co.uk). The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of the true scale of the Anglo-American killing, pointing to the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always denied.

Comparisons with Vietnam have been made so often over the years that I hesitate to draw another. However, the similarities are striking: for example, the return of expressions such as "sucked into a quagmire". This suggests, once again, that the Americans are victims, not invaders: the approved Hollywood version when a rapacious adventure goes wrong. Since Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled almost three months ago, more Americans have been killed than during the war. Ten have been killed and 25 wounded in classic guerrilla attacks on roadblocks and checkpoints which may number as many as a dozen a day.

The Americans call the guerrillas "Saddam loyalists" and "Ba'athist fighters", in the same way they used to dismiss the Vietnamese as "communists". Recently, in Falluja, in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, it was clearly not the presence of Ba'athists or Saddamists, but the brutal behaviour of the occupiers, who fired point-blank at a crowd, that inspired the resistance. The American tanks gunning down a family of shepherds is reminiscent of the gunning down of a shepherd, his family and sheep by "coalition" aircraft in a "no-fly zone" four years ago, whose aftermath I filmed and which evoked, for me, the murderous games American aircraft used to play in Vietnam, gunning down farmers in their fields, children on their buffaloes.

On 12 June, a large American force attacked a "terrorist base" north of Baghdad and left more than 100 dead, according to a US spokesman. The term "terrorist" is important, because it implies that the likes of al-Qaeda are attacking the liberators, and so the connection between Iraq and 11 September is made, which in pre-war propaganda was never made.

More than 400 prisoners were taken in this operation. The majority have reportedly joined thousands of Iraqis in a "holding facility" at Baghdad airport: a concentration camp along the lines of Bagram, from where people are shipped to Guantanamo Bay. In Afghanistan, the Americans pick up taxi drivers and send them into oblivion, via Bagram. Like Pinochet's boys in Chile, they are making their perceived enemies "disappear".

"Search and destroy", the scorched-earth tactic from Vietnam, is back. In the arid south-eastern plains of Afghanistan, the village of Niazi Qala no longer stands. American airborne troops swept down before dawn on 30 December 2001 and slaughtered, among others, a wedding party. Villagers said that women and children ran towards a dried pond, seeking protection from the gunfire, and were shot as they ran. After two hours, the aircraft and the attackers left. According to a United Nations investigation, 52 people were killed, including 25 children. "We identified it as a military target," says the Pentagon, echoing its initial response to the My Lai massacre 35 years ago.

The targeting of civilians has long been a journalistic taboo in the west. Accredited monsters did that, never "us". The civilian death toll of the 1991 Gulf war was wildly underestimated. Almost a year later, a comprehensive study by the Medical Education Trust in London estimated that more than 200,000 Iraqis had died during and immediately after the war, as a direct or indirect consequence of attacks on civilian infrastructure. The report was all but ignored. This month, Iraq Body Count, a group of American and British academics and researchers, estimated that up to 10,000 civilians may have been killed in Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the attack on Baghdad alone. And this is likely to be an extremely conservative figure.

In Afghanistan, there has been similar carnage. In May last year, Jonathan Steele extrapolated all the available field evidence of the human cost of the US bombing and concluded that as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the bombing, many of them drought victims denied relief.

This "hidden" effect is hardly new. A recent study at Columbia University in New York has found that the spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides on Vietnam was up to four times as great as previously estimated. Agent Orange contained dioxin, one of the deadliest poisons known. In what they first called Operation Hades, then changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, the Americans in Vietnam destroyed, in some 10,000 "missions" to spray Agent Orange, almost half the forests of southern Vietnam, and countless human lives. It was the most insidious and perhaps the most devastating use of a chemical weapon of mass destruction ever. Today, Vietnamese children continue to be born with a range of deformities, or they are stillborn, or the foetuses are aborted.

The use of uranium-tipped munitions evokes the catastrophe of Agent Orange. In the first Gulf war in 1991, the Americans and British used 350 tonnes of depleted uranium. According to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, quoting an international study, 50 tonnes of DU, if inhaled or ingested, would cause 500,000 deaths. Most of the victims are civilians in southern Iraq. It is estimated that 2,000 tonnes were used during the latest attack.

In a remarkable series of reports for the Christian Science Monitor, the investigative reporter Scott Peterson has described radiated bullets in the streets of Baghdad and radiation-contaminated tanks, where children play without warning. Belatedly, a few signs in Arabic have appeared: "Danger - Get away from this area". At the same time, in Afghanistan, the Uranium Medical Research Centre, based in Canada, has made two field studies, with the results described as "shocking". "Without exception," it reported, "at every bomb site investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination by uranium."

An official map distributed to non-government agencies in Iraq shows that the American and British military have plastered urban areas with cluster bombs, many of which will have failed to detonate on impact. These usually lie unnoticed until children pick them up, then they explode.

In the centre of Kabul, I found two ragged notices warning people that the rubble of their homes, and streets, contained unexploded cluster bombs "made in USA". Who reads them? Small children? The day I watched children skipping through what might have been an urban minefield, I saw Tony Blair on CNN in the lobby of my hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a child into his arms, in a school that had been painted for his visit, and where lunch had been prepared in his honour, in a city where basic services such as education, food and water remain a shambles under the British occupation.

It was in Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill and dying because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs under an embargo enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now here he was - shirt open, with that fixed grin, a man of the troops if not of the people - lifting a toddler into his arms for the cameras.

When I returned to London, I read "After Lunch", by Harold Pinter, from a new collection of his called War (Faber & Faber).

And after noon the well-dressed creatures come To sniff among the dead And have their lunch

And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck The swollen avocados from the dust And stir the minestrone with stray bones

And after lunch They loll and lounge about Decanting claret in convenient skulls

The Right to Resist

Armed opposition to the occupation of Iraq will continue until the US and Britain withdraw

Seumas Milne
Thursday June 19, 2003
The Guardian

It would have been hard to predict in advance that the US and British occupation of Iraq could go so spectacularly wrong so quickly. The words of the historian Tacitus about the Roman invasion of Scotland in the first century AD might just as well have been written about our latter-day Rome's latest imperial adventure: "They create a wasteland and they call it peace."

More than two months after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraq is sinking deeper into chaos and insecurity, as US forces lash out at the Iraqi resistance, which is now killing an average of one American soldier a day. Another was shot dead in Baghdad yesterday, while US troops killed more protesters - as they have repeatedly done since the massacres of demonstrators in Mosul and Falluja in April. The British minister in charge of reconstruction in occupied Iraq, Baroness Amos, had to admit yesterday that she is unable to visit the country because of the risk of guerilla attack, while the British commander, Major General Freddie Viggers, conceded that British troops may now be in Iraq for up to four years because of the growing insurgency.

In Britain, the unravelling of what US deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, called the "bureaucratic" pretext for war - the supposed threat from Iraqi chemical and biological weapons - has created the most serious political crisis for Tony Blair's government in six years and removed the last vestige of possible legality from the aggression. With no sign of any such weapons on the ground in Iraq, intelligence leaks and the withering accounts of former cabinet ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook have stripped bare the ultimate New Labour spin operation. Polls show most British people are now convinced the government deliberately exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to bounce public and parliament into war. Not surprisingly, attitudes to the conflict itself are also beginning to turn.

In Iraq, the mounting social and human cost of the invasion and occupation has become ever clearer. The country's first Burger King may have opened at Baghdad airport and the Queen's birthday may once again be celebrated on the banks of the Tigris, but the impact of war and regime collapse on essential services and infrastructure, on top of the havoc wreaked by the first Gulf war and 13 years of grinding sanctions, has been devastating. Add to that the rampant lawlessness, insecurity, looting of all public institutions, destruction of national treasures, epidemic of murder and robbery, and it is little wonder that most Iraqis appear to find it hard to see themselves as having been liberated. And far from being lower than expected, the number of Iraqi civilians killed is now estimated - on the basis of hospital, mortuary and media records - to have been between 5,500 and 7,200, while Iraqi military deaths are thought to run into tens of thousands.

Amidst all this misery, there have also been positive changes. The fall of the dictatorship has meant an end to the torture and execution of political prisoners, replaced by more spasmodic beatings and killings of innocents by coalition soldiers. Political parties can now organise and independent newspapers circulate. The discovery of mass graves has been a reminder of the cruelty of Saddam's rule, though ironically the largest were filled with victims of the 1991 uprising, incited and then betrayed by George Bush senior.

But the anti-democratic and flagrantly colonial nature of the new power in Iraq is undisguised. While Iraqi political parties are pressing for a broadly-based conference to elect a transitional government, the new US proconsul, Paul Bremer, is only prepared to tolerate a hand-picked Iraqi advisory council, while his occupation authority ploughs ahead with shaping the free market, pro-western order the US plans to impose on the ruins of an independent Iraq.

The senior coalition "adviser" to the Iraqi industry ministry, Tim Carney, declared this month that the occupation authorities will press ahead with the privatisation of dozens of state-owned companies within a year, pre-empting the decision of any future elected Iraqi government. And the Bush administration, fresh from handing out contracts to White House corporate cronies, has let it be known it aims to reverse the historic nationalisation of Iraqi oil before it's finished with "reconstruction". What freedoms have been allowed are now being reined in, with censorship of press and television. Bremer has even issued a decree outlawing any "gatherings, pronouncements or publications" that call for opposition to the US occupation. All of which is a clear sign that the US administration is far from confident it can control the direction of Iraqi politics. It also helps to explain the scale of civil and armed resistance, which is concentrated in the Sunni triangle to the north and west of Baghdad. Around 50 US soldiers have been killed by Iraqi fighters since the war was declared won - getting on for half the number killed in the war itself. A series of punitive counter-insurgency operations by US troops in the past week has led to the capture and deaths of hundreds of Iraqis - sweeping up many innocents in the process - but appears to have had no impact on the level of attacks. US commanders have branded the guerillas "subversives" and even "terrorists", or tried to dismiss them as "remnants" of the regime. The evidence suggests that while Ba'athists form part of the resistance, that is far from being the whole picture.

But what they cannot, by any sensible reckoning, be called are terrorists - nor does the US have any right to try guerillas who attack occupation troops as criminals, which Bremer announced it plans to do this week. It is an almost universally accepted principle that a people occupied by a foreign power has the right to use armed force to resist - though whether force will be the best tactic is another matter. It was the crudest self-delusion on the part of the invading states to imagine that because most Iraqis wanted an end to the Saddam regime they would accept the imposition of a foreign occupation to replace it.

The situation seems bound to get worse, as the resistance fights a war of attrition and the occupation forces win new recruits for the guerillas with brutal and misdirected counter-attacks. Armed resistance has yet to spread to the south, where British troops are based and rival Shi'ite Islamist groups are busy building their political strength. The longer the occupation continues, however, the more that is likely to change, with the further risk of drawing Iran into the maelstrom. Last week the pro-Iranian Shi'ite leader Ayatollah Hakim predicted that armed resistance would grow. Meanwhile, anti-occupation protests have been multiplying across the south. In Basra on Sunday, and again on Tuesday, thousands demonstrated outside British headquarters chanting slogans against Blair and Bush and demanding the right to rule themselves. As things stand, British troops are one fatwa short of the treatment being meted out to the Americans further north, while the occupation is achieving nothing for Iraqis that they could not more effectively achieve for themselves. The sooner political pressure builds to end it and negotiate an orderly withdrawal, the better for all of us.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk
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