Iraq, lost in the fog of war. War, we are told, is a rational instrument of policy. States go to war to achieve specific objectives. On such a view, determining the outcome of a war is a kind of bookkeeping exercise. One need only measure the results against the original purposes. But war is far too wily a beast to be made sense of by such simple calculations. War has a tendency to generate uncertainties and ambiguities of the most fundamental kind, about who is winning, about what has happened, and about just who we are. At a moment of supreme - if relative - world power, the US invaded Iraq in March 2003 to prevent Saddam Hussein from rising from the ashes of the sanctions regime of the 1990s. For political consumption, and for gullible idealists, these goals were packaged as the threat of WMD and the spread of democracy. A mere three years later, the most powerful armed forces in human history were facing defeat at the hands of a many-sided ragtag insurgency.
The goals shifted. Is the Iraq War actually over? New York, New York - Launched with so much bluster and zeal as a campaign - no, make that a crusade to save the world from invented WMDs - the Iraq War, we are told, is winding down. US soldiers are being shown the door amid claims that the only winner is Iraq itself. In a formal photo printed in the New York Times, President Obama, with hand over heart, poses with Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at the Arlington National Ceremony and boasts of a "successful outcome''. "What we have now," he says, "is an Iraq that is self-governing, that is inclusive, and that has enormous potential". Wreaths were laid at a cemetery as the remaining US troops that rolled across the desert with so much ardour back in 2003 are now ready themselves to roll out.
Unmentioned in the article were the futile negotiations and pressure by a US government desperate to stay in the country by any means possible. Power does that. Apparently, the US has expressed "concerns" about this behaviour. Iraq fatigue. 'You got rid of one Saddam and you left us with 50' | World news. The image chosen by Charles Tripp to replace Saddam Hussein firing his gun into the air on the cover of the edition of his history of Iraq. It shows flags flying at a cemetery in Najaf in November last year, the day after more than 200 people were killed in a series of coordinated attacks in the city.
Photograph: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images Updating contemporary history is always a race against time and deadlines, and although there was a lot of catching up to do when Charles Tripp came to write a new edition of his acclaimed history of Iraq, it was easy to decide on one change. Out went the cover showing Saddam Hussein firing a rifle in the air. In came a photograph of a graveyard packed with the victims of sectarian suicide bombings and festooned with flags and posters showing the bearded and turbaned features of some of the country's new movers and shakers - who were virtually unknown in 2002, the cut off point for the last edition. · Ian Black is the Guardian's Middle East editor. Refugee Chess | iraq refugee syria | Wunderkammer.
They lived well in Baghdad; their eldest daughter had two cars. Six years later, the Iraqi couple moves their mattresses out of the bedroom each night to sleep on the living room floor. The only bedroom is left for their daughters while they live in this concrete refugee suburb of Damascus. It was Friday and quiet on the balcony above the street. The fried fish lunch was over and the mother was reading fortunes in the bottom of coffee cups. The father skulked past the couch and flashed his pack of cigarettes.
The father talked of his construction company in Baghdad. A few weeks later in their living room, the table was cleared for a gorging of rice, grilled fish, kibbeh stuffed with egg, and salad eaten by plucking the cheese-draped lettuce from the bowl by hand. A wealthy Christian family, they became refugees when Shia militias began enforcing a fanaticism of piety in Baghdad’s streets and thieves started roaming their neighborhood. The last joke they told involved the church. “No!”
Rashid Khalidi on Iraq and America in the Middle East. Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima' - Middle East - World. Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents. Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait. Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects.
In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. LRB · Anatol Lieven · The Push for War. The most surprising thing about the Bush Administration’s plan to invade Iraq is not that it is destructive of international order; or wicked, when we consider the role the US (and Britain) have played, and continue to play, in the Middle East; or opposed by the great majority of the international community; or seemingly contrary to some of the basic needs of the war against terrorism. It is all of these things, but they are of no great concern to the hardline nationalists in the Administration.
This group has suffered at least a temporary check as a result of the British insistence on UN involvement, and Saddam Hussein’s agreement to weapons inspections. They are, however, still determined on war – and their power within the Administration and in the US security policy world means that they are very likely to get their way. Even the Washington Post has joined the radical rightist media in supporting war. The Administration has therefore been warned of the dangers.
Beyond lies China. Asia Times - Asia's most trusted news source for the Middle East. THE ROVING EYEThe real fury of FallujahBy Pepe Escobar "The Romans create a desolation and call it peace. "- Tacitus "The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him. " - Colonel Gary Brandl, US Marines President George W Bush is "reaching out" to Fallujah - the first major foreign policy initiative of the second Bush administration.
Former US intelligence asset turned prime minister without a parliament Iyad Allawi - widely known in Baghdad as "Saddam without a moustache" - has got himself another title: the Butcher of Fallujah. To add insult to injury, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld is saying that Allawi is responsible for all major military decisions regarding Fallujah: only the Bible Belt may be gullible enough to believe that an Iraqi civilian without an army rules over the Pentagon.
The code name betrays it all: the real motive for turning Fallujah into Grozny is revenge. There's no soundtrack to this war. What will the world say? What is the US up to in Iraq? Imagine Dick Cheney's reaction when confronted with this bit of information. Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a certified Iraqi nationalist leader and the country's de facto kingmaker, has just called for the end of any "armed resistance" against US "invader" forces before a full US withdrawal in December 2011 - as established by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed by the Iraqi parliament and the Bush administration in late 2008. There's an important "but": If the US does not completely withdraw, and if what is widely regarded by a majority of Iraqis as "the occupation" continues, armed operations will resume "with new means". Muqtada has always stressed the Sadrists wouldn't tolerate US troops after December 21; what's new is the "wait and see" attitude.
To make things clear, the Sadrists unleashed a huge demonstration in Baghdad on Friday, pressing three demands: SovereigntyNo US troops whatsoever in Iraqi soil after December 31. The Sadrists hold 40 seats in the Iraqi parliament. The Death Squads. The torture and slaughter of Iraqi civilians is reaching unprecedented heights with estimates of up to 655,000 dead. Night after night death squads rampage through Iraq's main cities. In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets. Often they've been tortured with electric drills. Yet those doing the killing have little to do with al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents.
The majority of the killings are carried out by Shia death squads who want to turn Iraq into a Shia state aligned to Iran. This shocking film investigates the links between the death squads and high-ranking Shia politicians. It reveals how the Shia militia that these politicians control have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and even entire government ministeries. Watch the full documentary now. Carne Ross explodes the Chilcot inquiry's cosy consensus | Chris Ames. Carne Ross is a man with too much to say to mince his words. Britain's erstwhile first secretary at the UN saw a lot of how Britain got into the Iraq war, but his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry went much further, with some very harsh words for the inquiry itself. The classic establishment inquiry, especially one with "lessons learned" as its highest aim, finds that mistakes have been made but that everyone did their best and no one lied.
Previous Chilcot witnesses have played this game and, while it remains to be seen whether the inquiry will play along, they have rarely been challenged. Ross (not Sir Carne, you will note) is now saying pretty bluntly that people lied before the war and are still lying and that Chilcot is not equipped to deal with it. That's what happens when you let a known whistleblower in. Ross said it was "inaccurate to claim, as some earlier witnesses have done, that containment was failing and that sanctions were collapsing". Ah, the documents. Diplomat's suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war - UK Politics, UK. A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.
In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests. " Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been "effectively contained". He also reveals that British officials warned US diplomats that bringing down the Iraqi dictator would lead to the chaos the world has since witnessed.
Colin Powell regrets Iraq war intelligence - Americas. Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, has said he regrets providing misleading intelligence that led the US to invade Iraq, believing it had weapons of mass destruction. Powell, the first secretary of state in the administration of George W. Bush, the former US president, which declared war on Iraq in 2003, told Al Jazeera on the 10th anniversary of the worst terror attacks on US soil that the information was a "blot on my record". "It turned out, as we discovered later, that a lot of sources that had been attested to by the intelligence community were wrong," Powell said in Washington, DC. "I understood the consequences of that failure and, as I said, I deeply regret that the information - some of the information, not all of it - was wrong," said the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It has blotted my record, but - you know - there's nothing I can do to change that blot.
"There is nothing that I made up; there's nothing that I stuck in there," he said. Oil-Soaked Politics: Secret U.K. Docs on Iraq » New Deal 2.0. This just in: big oil companies and government ministers had discussions one year before invasion. Revolution in the Middle East, nuclear meltdown in Japan, war in Libya, the U.S. budget crisis, the looming problems of the Eurozone -- some days it's all just too much.
But today there's something no one can afford to ignore: The Independent, one of Britain's leading newspapers, broke a must-read story. In a nutshell, the story buries forever all claims that the US, the UK, and other governments did not have oil on their minds as they prepared to invade Iraq. The story reports on a forthcoming book that draws on more than a thousand secret government documents. The excerpts the paper prints detailing meetings between the UK government and British oil companies in the run up to the war are devastating. It’s free! It's time the rest of the story came out -- not because it is history, but because it is not.
NY Fed's $40 Billion Iraqi Money Trail. Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. Nir Rosen on the "Aftermath" of America's wars - Glenn Greenwald. (updated below w/transcript – Update II) Nir Rosen, currently with NYU’s Center on Law and Security, is one of the best war journalists in the world. Since 2003, he has spent substantial time — always unembedded — in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other nations in the region directly affected by American wars (Syria, Egypt, Jordan).
Few people have as effectively given voice in the Western World to the impact which these wars have on those who live there. Rosen has now written an amazingly good and moving book, which I read this month, that narrates — from both a geopolitical and very personal perspective — the havoc, misery, chaos, instability and pure evil these wars have unleashed: Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World.
Rosen is my guest today on Salon Radio to discuss the book and recent developments in Iraq and Afghanistan. [audio src=' UPDATE: The transcript of this discussion is here.