By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2010 (IPS)

President Barack Obama will try this week to underline his progress in extricating the United States from the morass his predecessor’s “global war on terror” in the Greater Middle East.

Tuesday evening’s prime-time television address marking the withdrawal of all U.S. “combat” troops from Iraq, as well as the following day’s formal launch here of direct talks between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, will be hailed by the administration as key advances in restoring some stability to the world’s most volatile region.

But, as Obama himself will admit, the country remains deeply mired in Middle East conflicts – from the eastern Mediterranean to flood-ravaged Pakistan. The long-sought light at the end of the tunnel remains at most a very distant glimmer.

Indeed, the fact that Washington remains bogged down in Middle East and South Asia quagmires is becoming increasingly frustrating to many in the administration and within the larger foreign-policy establishment.

They believe Washington needs to focus much more on China, with which relations have in recent months become distinctly more fractious over a number of issues – ranging from its chronic bilateral trade surplus, to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan to its more assertive territorial claims and ambitions in nearby waters.

As ‘Financial Times’ writer Geoff Dyer wrote recently, “Over the last decade or so, China has stolen a march on the U.S. in Asia. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be a strategic gift for Beijing.”

The fact that Washington has reduced its troop deployment in Iraq from a high of 165,000 a couple of years ago to the 50,000 who remain today will not only permit Obama to claim compliance with a key campaign promise, but, more importantly, to also relieve pressure on what virtually all analysts agree is a military force that was badly “overstretched” during the “war on terror.”

If all goes according to plan, the remaining troops will be withdrawn over the next 17 months, although most experts believe Baghdad, depending on the composition of the government and the its army’s effectiveness and confidence, will likely request some continued U.S. military presence – in a training capacity at least – for some years after.

That assumes, however, that all will go according to plan. The fact that the Iraqis have so far been unable to put together a government more than five months after national elections – the focus of a sudden trip by Vice President Joseph Biden to Baghdad Monday – has stoked fears that the “national reconciliation” that was supposed to be achieved by Gen. David Petraeus’ vaunted “Surge” tactics in 2007 and 2008 has in fact not taken place, and that both ethnic and sectarian tensions that brought the country to the bring of all-out civil war remain to be resolved.

U.S. military officials, who note that the remaining troops will still be prepared to engage in combat operations if requested by the Iraqis, are themselves warning that violence is likely to increase. In just the last week al Qaeda in Mesopotamia pulled off more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks across the country, killing more than 50 people.

The group also now appears to have launched an intensive recruitment drive among increasingly disaffected Sunni “Awakening” groups that played a key role in ensuring the yet-to-be-fully-tested “success” of Petraeus’ Surge, according to a recent account in Britain’s ‘Guardian’ newspaper.

“Extensive research on intercommunal civil wars – wars like Iraq’s … – finds a dangerous propensity toward recidivism,” warned Kenneth Pollack, an expert and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst who supported the 2003 invasion in the ‘Washington Post’ last week. “…[T]he fear, anger, greed and desire for revenge that helped propel Iraq into civil war in the first place remain just beneath the surface.”

If those forces gain momentum, and the Iraqi security forces fail to restrain them, Obama, of course, will be confronted with very difficult – and politically costly – options: to delay the withdrawal and risk becoming mired in renewed civil conflict; or to continue disengagement and risk “losing” Iraq, as Republicans will almost surely charge.

With respect to the other major Middle East-related event this week – the commencement of direct talks between Netanyahu and Abbas aimed at reaching agreement within one year – scepticism about its prospects is running significantly higher than hope.

Obama, backed by both Biden and Petraeus among others in administration and the military, has long believed that any tangible progress in making peace between Israel and the Palestinians will pay dividends in overcoming the immense damage inflicted by Bush’s war on terror on Washington’s overall strategic position – especially vis-à-vis Iran and its regional allies – throughout the Arab world and beyond.

Even his predecessor, George W. Bush, appeared to embrace that conclusion in the last year of his term when he launched his Annapolis conference that brought Abbas together with then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and a host of Arab and European leaders who set as a deadline for agreement on a two- state solution as the end of Bush’s term.

The initiative, however, was derailed as a result of the political weakness of both Abbas and Olmert, the three-week Gaza War, and the efforts of neo- conservative spoilers in the White House to sabotage the talks.

While neo-conservatives have been expelled from the executive branch, most analysts believe the situation for progress today is no more ripe for major progress than two years ago.

Abbas remains as weak as ever; Netanyahu, whose politics and government are significantly more rightwing than Olmert’s, has ruled out a number of solutions – such as dividing Jerusalem – that are seen as minimal conditions for the agreement of Palestinians and key Arab states which, other than major U.S. aid recipients Egypt and Jordan, are avoiding this week’s summit.

Finally, the administration seems, at least until after the mid-term elections in November, unwilling to aggressively press its own “bridging proposals,” let alone a comprehensive peace plan.

The most realistic hope is that Netanyahu will quietly agree to maintain a ten- month moratorium on new settlement construction on the West Bank beyond its 26 Sep. expiration date and restrain new building in East Jerusalem in order to keep the talks alive.

But that alone falls far short of the kind of breakthrough needed to substantially improve Washington’s strategic position in the region as desired by the administration and the Pentagon. Indeed, some commentators are dismissing the new round of talks as “déjà vu.”

Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan – where Washington will soon have a record 100,000 troops deployed – does not appear to have improved, as the Taliban spreads its forces into regions previously considered secure, and new reports of corruption by the government of President Hamid Karzai surface virtually daily.

And the massive flooding in nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has displaced more than 20 million people and is believed to have caused at least seven billion dollars in damages to infrastructure and agriculture – more than Washington had planned to provide the country in aid over the next five years – has dashed whatever U.S. hopes remained that its army will focus on counter-insurgency operations along the Afghan border, particularly in North Waziristan.

If anything, according to reports from the region, the Taliban on both sides of the frontier are likely to emerge stronger from Pakistan’s worst-ever natural disaster.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, Dec 11 2009 (IPS)

With a military health care system over-stretched by two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, more soldiers are deciding to go absent without leave (AWOL) in order to find treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Eric Jasinski enlisted in the military in 2005, and deployed to Iraq in October 2006 as an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army. He collected intelligence in order to put together strike packets – where air strikes would take place.

Upon his return to the U.S. after his tour, Jasinski was suffering from severe PTSD from what he did and saw in Iraq, remorse and guilt for the work he did that he knows contributed to the loss of life in Iraq.

“What I saw and what I did in Iraq caused my PTSD,” Jasinski, 23-years-old, told IPS during a phone interview, “Also, I went through a divorce – she left right before I deployed – and my grandmother passed away when I was over there, so it was all super rough on me.”

In addition, he lost a friend in Iraq, and another of his friends lost his leg due to a roadside bomb attack.

Upon returning home in December 2007, Jasinski tried to get treatment via the military. He was self-medicating by drinking heavily, and an over- burdened military mental health counsellor sent him to see a civilian doctor, who diagnosed him with severe PTSD.

“I went to get help, but I had an 8 hour wait to see one of five doctors. But after several attempts, finally I got a periodic check up and I told that counsellor what was happening, and he said they’d help me… but I ended up getting a letter that instructed me to go see a civilian doctor, and she diagnosed me with PTSD,” Jasinski explained, “Then, I was taking the medications and they were helping, because I thought I was to get out of the Army in February 2009 when my contract expired.”

As the date approached, a problem arose.

“In late 2008 they stop-lossed me, and that pushed me over the edge,” Jasinski told IPS, “They were going to send me back to Iraq the next month.”

During his pre-deployment processessing “they gave me a 90-day supply of meds to get me over to Iraq, and I saw a counsellor during that period, and I told him “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I go back to Iraq.”

“He asked if I was suicidal,” Jasinski explained, “and I said not right now, I’m not planning on going home and blowing my brains out. He said, ‘well, you’re good to go then.’ And he sent me on my way. I knew at that moment, when they finalised my paperwork for Iraq, that there was no way I could go back with my untreated PTSD. I needed more help.”

When Jasinski went on his short pre-deployment leave break, he went AWOL, where he remained out of service until Dec. 11, when he returned to turn himself in to authorities at Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas.

“He has heavy duty PTSD and never would have gone AWOL if he’d gotten the help he needed from the military,” James Branum, Jasinski’s civilian lawyer who accompanied him to Fort Hood told IPS. “This case highlights the need of the military to provide better mental health care for its soldiers.”

Branum, who is also co-chair of the Military Law Task Force, added, “Our hope is that his unit won’t court-martial him, but puts him in a warrior transition unit where they will evaluate him to either treat him or give him a medical discharge. He’d be safe there, and eventually, they’d give him a medical discharge because his PTSD symptoms are so severe.”

He’s turning himself in “because he is not a flight risk and wants to take responsibility for what he’s done,” Branum stressed.

“It’s been a year, I want to get on with my life and go to college and become a social worker to help people,” Jasinski said of why he is turning himself in to the military at this time. “I want to get on with life, and I don’t want to hide.”

Kernan Manion is a board-certified psychiatrist, who treated Marines returning from war who suffer from PTSD and other acute mental problems born from their deployments, at Camp Lejeune – the largest Marine base on the East Coast.

While he was engaged in this work, Manion warned his superiors of the extent and complexity of the systemic problems, and he was deeply worried about the possibility of these leading to violence on the base and within surrounding communities.

“If not more Fort Hoods, Camp Liberties, soldier fratricide, spousal homicide, we’ll see it individually in suicides, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, family dysfunction, in formerly fine young men coming back and saying, as I’ve heard so many times, ‘I’m not cut out for society. I can’t stand people. I can’t tolerate commotion. I need to live in the woods,’” Manion explained to IPS. “That’s what we’re going to have. Broken, not contributing, not functional members of society. It infuriates me – what they are doing to these guys, because it’s so ineptly run by a system that values rank and power more than anything else – so we’re stuck throwing money into a fragmented system of inept clinics and the crisis goes on.”

“It’s not just that we’re going to have an immensity of people coming back, but the system itself is thwarting their effective treatment,” Manion explained.

According to the Army, every year from 2006 onwards there has been a record number of reported and confirmed suicides, including in 2009.

There has also been an escalation of soldier-on-soldier violence, as the Nov. 5 shooting spree at Fort Hood by Major Nidal Hassan indicates. In 2008 there was also a record number of suicides for the Marine Corps.

Jasinski’s case is representative of a growing number of soldiers returning from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan who are going AWOL when they are unable to get proper mental health care treatment from the military for their PTSD.

A 2008 Rand Corporation report revealed that at least 300,000 veterans returning from both wars had been diagnosed with severe depression or PTSD.

Jaskinski’s experience with the military has inspired him to offer advice for other soldiers who need PTSD treatment but are not receiving it.

“Do not, do not let a 5-10 minute review by a military doctor determine if you go to Iraq,” he told IPS. “Even if you have to pay out of pocket, go civilian to a doctor… the military mental health sector is so overwhelmed, they won’t take care of you. Go see a civilian, and hopefully that therapist will help you… even then I’m not sure that will help… but you have to take that chance.”

When asked what he feels the military needs to do in order to rectify this problem, he said: “A total overhaul of the mental health sector in the military is needed… we had nine psychiatrists at our centre, and that’s simply not enough staff, they are going to get burned out, after seeing 50 soldiers each in one day. We need an overhaul of the entire system, and more, good psychiatrists, not those just coming for a job, but good, experienced mental health professionals need to be involved.”

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
MARFA, Texas, United States, Apr 29 2009 (IPS)

Sexual assault of women serving in the U.S. military, while brought to light in recent reports, has a long tradition in that institution.

U.S. army recruiting poster from 1944. Women are no longer targeted separately. Credit: Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC

Maricela Guzman served in the Navy from 1998 to 2002 as a computer technician on the island of Diego Garcia, and later in Naples, Italy. She was raped while in boot camp, but was too scared to talk about the assault for the rest of her time in the military.

In her own words she, "survived by becoming a workaholic. Fortunately or unfortunately the military took advantage of this, and I was much awarded as a soldier for my work ethic."

Guzman decided to dissociate from the military on witnessing the way it treated the native population in Diego Garcia. Post discharge, her life became unmanageable. The effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her rape had taken a heavy toll.

After undergoing a divorce, a failed suicide attempt and homelessness, she moved in with her parents. A chance encounter with a female veteran at a political event in Los Angeles prompted her to contact the veteran’s administration (VA) for help. She began seeing a therapist there who diagnosed her with PTSD from her rape.

She told IPS that the VA denied her claim nevertheless, "Because they said I couldn’t prove it … since I had not brought it up when it happened and also because I had not shown any deviant behaviour while in the service. I was outraged and felt compelled to talk about what happened."

Two testimonies April Fitzsimmons served in the Air Force from 1985 to 1989, as an intelligence analyst and intelligence briefer for a two-star general. Early in her military career, another solider sexually assaulted her. Nineteen years old at the time of her rape, Fitzsimmons reported the assault, and named her perpetrator, who was removed from the base. However, she declined the offer of counselling “because there was a stigma attached to it,” she told IPS. “Those who seek counselling are perceived to be at risk, as being too weak and vulnerable and it would have meant forfeiting my top-secret clearance to keep military intelligence classified,” she explained. Another reason for maintaining silence on the matter was that Fitzsimmons was declared “airman (sic) of the year,” in the European command. “I didn’t want to lose that,” she says, “I wanted the whole thing to go away.” Fitzsimmons created a one-woman play, Need to Know, which has been running for six years. In the play, she addresses her own sexual assault in the military. When news of rapes and sexual assaults by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, against both other soldiers and Iraqis began to surface, Fitzsimmons became more active. “After reading about the 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, who was raped by several soldiers, and about Suzanne Swift, a soldier who after being raped by another U.S. soldier went AWOL (absent without leave) rather than redeploy with the command that was responsible for allowing the rape to occur, I was convinced that there was a cycle of sexual violence in the military that was neither being seen nor addressed,” she says. It is not difficult to ascertain the reason for so few sexual assaults being reported in the military. Jen Hogg of the New York Army National Guard told IPS, “I helped a woman report a sexual assault while she was in basic training. She was grabbed between the legs from behind while going up stairs. She was not able to pinpoint the person who did it.” Hogg explained that her friend was afraid to report the incident to her drill sergeant, and went on to explain why, which also sheds light on why so many women opt not to report being sexually assaulted. “During training, the position of authority the drill sergeant holds makes any and all reporting a daunting task, and most people are scared to even approach him or her,” Hogg told IPS, “In this case, the drill sergeant’s response was swift but caused resentment towards the female that made the report, because her identity was not hidden from males who were punished as a whole for the one.” The incident displays another tactic used in the military to suppress women’s reportage of being sexually assaulted – that of not respecting their anonymity, which opens them up to further assaults. “After this incident many of the males said harassing things to her as they passed her during training, so much so that she regretted having addressed the issue,” Hogg continued, “You can be ostracised as the woman who had dared to speak up. Women willing to speak up are trained to shut up, which results in an atmosphere of silence. After my experiences in basic and advanced individual training I never reported an incident again.” Hogg herself faced verbal sexual harassment. “When I removed my protective top in the heat I would often hear comments such as ‘where you been hiding them puppies’ in reference to my breasts.” Based on her friends’ experience, Hogg did not even consider reporting. To make matters worse, according to Department of Defense statistics, 84-85 percent of soldiers convicted of rape or sexual assault leave the military with honourable discharges. Not only are they not penalised, they are honoured.

Like countless others, Guzman learned early that the culture of the military promoted silence about sexual assault. Her experience over the years has convinced her that sexual violence is a systemic problem in the military.

"It has been happening since women were allowed into the service and will continue to happen after Iraq and Afghanistan," Guzman told IPS, "Through the gossip mill we would hear of women who had reported being raped. No confidentiality was maintained nor any protection given to them making them susceptible to fresh attacks."

"The boys’ club culture is strong and the competition exclusive," Guzman added, "To get ahead women have to be better than men. That forces many not to report rape, because it is a blemish and can ruin your career."

She is not hopeful of any radical change in policy anytime soon, but, "One good thing that has come out of this war is that people want to talk about this now."

More than 190,000 female soldiers have served thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan on the front lines, often having to confront sexual assault and harassment from their own comrades in arms.

The VA’s PTSD centre claims that the incidence of rape, assault, and harassment were higher in wartime during the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq than during peacetime. Thus far, the numbers from Iraq show a continuance, and increase, of this disturbing trend.

The military is notorious for its sexist and misogynistic culture. Drill instructors indoctrinate new recruits by routinely calling them "girl," "pussy," "bitch," and "dyke." Pornography is prevalent, and misogynistic rhymes have existed for decades.

Understandably, Department of Defense (DoD) numbers for sexual assaults in the military are far lower than numbers provided by other sources, primarily because the Pentagon only counts rapes that soldiers have officially reported. Even according to the Pentagon, 80 percent of assaults go unreported.

Pentagon spokesperson Cynthia Smith told IPS, "We understand this is very important for everyone to get involved in preventing sexual assault, and are calling on everyone to get involved, step in, and watch each others’ backs."

According to the DoD Report on Sexual Assault in the Military for Fiscal Year 2007, "There were 2,688 total reports of sexual assault involving Military Service Members," of which "The Military Services completed a total of 1,955 criminal investigations on reports made during or prior to FY07."

The criminal investigations yielded the shockingly low number of only 181 courts martial. "We understand that one sex assault is too many in the DoD," Smith told IPS, "We have an office working on prevention and response."

A 1995 study published in the Archives of Family Medicine found that 90 percent of female veterans from the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq and earlier wars had been sexually harassed. A 2003 survey of women veterans from the period encompassing Vietnam and the 1991 Iraq attack, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that 30 percent of the women soldiers said they were raped.

In 2004, a study of veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, published in the journal of Military Medicine, found that 71 percent of the women were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.

At the 2006 National Convention of Veterans for Peace in Seattle, April Fitzsimmons, who early in her career was raped by a soldier, met with 45 other female vets, and began compiling information.

"I asked for a show of hands of women veterans who had been assaulted while on duty, and half the women raised their hands," Fitzsimmons told IPS, "So I knew we had to do something."

She, along with other women veterans like Guzman, founded the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) to help military women who have been victims of sexual violence.

It is an uphill battle for women in the U.S. military to take on the system that clearly represses attempts to change it.

"When victims come forward, they are ostracised, doubted, and isolated from their communities," Fitzsimmons told IPS, "Many of the perpetrators are officers who use their ranks to coerce women to sleep with them. It’s a closely interwoven community, so the perpetrators are safe within the system and can fearlessly move free amongst their victims."

Fitzsimmons shared with IPS a view that underscores the gravity of the problem.

"The crisis is so severe that I’m telling women to simply not join the military because it’s completely unsafe and puts them at risk. Until something changes at the top, no woman should join the military."

* Dahr Jamail is an award-winning independent journalist who writes for IPS.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Apr 13 2009 (IPS)

Despite ongoing community concerns over the highly secretive Pine Gap spy station in central Australia, the nation’s parliament has moved to effectively ban protest at the joint Australia-United States base.

"The right to protest is a political act which is directly linked to freedom of association and freedom of expression. It allows citizens to take democratic action without the threat of sanctions," said Dr Hannah Middleton of the Australian Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition in a submission to a senate inquiry into changes in legislation related to Pine Gap.

Despite concerns expressed by Middleton and other Australian citizens, in addition to a dissenting report submitted to the senate committee by the Australian Greens Party, the defence legislation (miscellaneous amendments) bill 2008 was passed by parliament in mid-March.

It amends a 1952 defence act by defining the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap – the spy station’s official title – located 20 km south of the central Australian town of Alice Springs as a "special defence undertaking" and a "prohibited area" necessary for Australia’s defence.

This effectively closes a loophole in the legislation which was exploited by a group of four Christian peace activists in successfully appealing their convictions over a protest at Pine Gap in 2005.

The so-called Pine Gap Four had been facing up to seven years imprisonment for what they called a "citizens’ inspection" of the secretive base – the four had evaded security patrols to enter the facility and take photographs before being arrested – but were acquitted in 2008 after an appeals court ruled that a "miscarriage of justice" had occurred.

The four had been prevented from presenting evidence regarding the operations conducted at Pine Gap in a ruling prior to their 2007 trial. The appeals court upheld the group’s claim that they should have been entitled to challenge whether the area designated as "prohibited" was necessary for the defence of Australia.

One of the Pine Gap Four, Donna Mulhearn, says that the recently-enacted legislation is aimed at silencing further criticism of the facility.

"Now that the loophole has been closed it is a concern that any activist who decides to go to Pine Gap to make a protest may face court and seven years in prison without having the opportunity to put their case thoroughly and in its entirety," says Mulhearn, a former journalist and political adviser who volunteered as a "human shield" during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The controversial facility was established with the signing of the 1967 Pine Gap Treaty between the U.S. and Australia. Along with a similar site at the United Kingdom’s Menwith Hill air force base, Pine Gap is believed to play a key role in gathering signals intelligence for the United States, Britain and other allied nations.

But while Pine Gap’s eight radomes – the large, ball-like domes that protect the facility’s radar antennae – may be instantly recognisable to many Australians, the functions of the base remain highly secretive.

"Pine Gap is a ground receiving station for space-based intelligence gathering," said Greens senator Scott Ludlam just days before the legislation was passed.

"Its monitoring of radar, cell phone, radio and long-distance telecommunication enables it to provide targeting information for U.S. air and ground forces," added Ludlam.

But with official information regarding the spy station’s activities in short supply, Ludlam and others have relied heavily on accounts provided by professors Des Ball and Paul Dibb, renowned experts in Australian strategic and defence issues, to a 1999 parliamentary committee established to consider a further extension of the Pine Gap Treaty.

Although the base was built during the Cold War, it is believed to have played pivotal roles in targeted missile strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. According to Ludlam, information collected at Pine Gap enables U.S. forces to identify, monitor and attack targets.

"Many thousands of civilians continue to be killed as collateral damage in these campaigns," alleged the senator.

And while the facility is also suspected of being part of the United States’ proposed missile defence shield, very little of what goes on at Pine Gap has been confirmed by either of the two governments controlling its operations.

The 1999 parliamentary committee was not even allowed to visit the base, with several requests to tour the facility being rejected.

"Such access is tightly controlled for both U.S. and Australian citizens and limited strictly to personnel with a ‘need to know’," said then-defence minister Ian McLachlan in 1998.

To Donna Mulhearn, protests stem from the "need to act by our conscience." "We need to reveal the truth and draw a spotlight to what’s going on at Pine Gap", Mulhearn told IPS. She regards the protests staged at the facility, which has been widely reported in the media, as part of a "very long tradition". "Symbolic, non-violent actions have always been very powerful," she says.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Apr 10 2009 (IPS)

As the U.S. prepares to reduce its military presence in Iraq while intensifying its war effort in Afghanistan, hawks within both the Republican and Democratic parties have come increasingly to believe that counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine offers a solution to the central security challenges Washington will face in the 21st century.

Drawing on the perceived, if still uncertain, success of the U.S. “surge” in Iraq, many prominent opinion-makers – notably neoconservatives and “liberal hawks” – have joined COIN advocates within the military itself to argue that “small wars” theory should be the cornerstone of U.S. military strategy going forward, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But COIN’s current ascendancy masks several lingering points of contention.

For critics, the current enthusiasm reflects a fundamental overestimation of the efficacy of military force, and a desire for technocratic solutions to strategic problems that presume a neo-imperial nation-building role for the U.S.

Even among hawks, COIN has drawn fire from those who dispute the supposed “lessons” drawn from the surge in Iraq, and from those who argue that conventional warfare against potential rivals like China and Russia should remain a much higher priority than irregular warfare against non-state actors.

COIN is a fundamentally broad-ranging concept, encompassing all “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions” used to defeat insurgency, according to the 2006 Army Counter-Insurgency Field Manual.

It emphasises protecting and winning the “hearts and minds” of civilian populations – summed up in the mantra “clear, hold, and build” – meaning in practice COIN can often shade into “nation-building.”

A team led by Gen. David Petraeus, the most prominent COIN advocate within the military, authored the Army field manual. Now head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Petraeus has become an icon among hawks due to his perceived success in pacifying Iraq.

In the wake of Iraq, many commentators across the political spectrum have called for the principles of the COIN doctrine used in the Iraq surge to be institutionalised as the guide for future campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the hawkish independent Democrat, for example, called in January for an enhanced effort in Afghanistan built around six linked “surges” – in troop strength, strategic coherence, civilian resources, “native” support, regional integration, and political commitment.

While conventional warfare remains the centrepiece of military spending – Defence Secretary Robert Gates estimated this week that “irregular warfare” accounts for only ten percent of the new defence budget – COIN has come to dominate conversation in Washington foreign-policy circles, and many argue that “small wars” will characterise the 21st century.

“In a multipolar world where small wars proliferate, there is reason to believe that [COIN] doctrine will shape not only the next phase of the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the future of the U.S. military,” according to John Nagl, a former Army officer who contributed to the COIN manual and now heads the influential think-tank, Centre for a New American Security (CNAS).

CNAS, which was founded in 2007 and has served as something of a pipeline to senior ranks in the Obama administration, appears to embody the new bipartisan conventional wisdom in Washington. Its ‘mediagenic’ Rhodes Scholar president has become a poster boy for COIN enthusiasts, including influential neo-conservatives who two weeks ago featured Nagl at the kick- off of their newest think-tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).

COIN is especially attractive to many liberal hawks, however, because it emphasises civilian protection and knowledge of local cultures, in contrast to the “shoot-first” style that often characterised U.S. military policy in the early Bush years.

But although advocates portray COIN as a purely pragmatic and non- ideological response to the security challenges of the twenty-first century, critics charge that its focus on “small wars” and nation-building simply assumes that the main goal of the U.S. military should be subduing local populations of far-flung but strategically important countries. In that respect, they argue, COIN can serve as a smokescreen for maintaining U.S. imperial posture.

“Great powers wage ‘small wars’ not to defend themselves but to assert control over foreign populations,” wrote Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel and Boston University professor, in his 2008 book “The Limits of Power”. “Historically, that is, ‘small wars’ are imperial wars.”

“[T]o assume that wars like Iraq define the military’s future evades a larger question. Given what the pursuit of American imperial ambitions in the Greater Middle East has actually produced…why would the United States persist in such a strategy? Instead of changing the military, why not change the policy?” asked Bacevich.

The history of COIN in the U.S. is in fact intimately tied to the history of imperialism, dating back to the “Indian wars” and the suppression of insurgencies in Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century.

Many of the classics of COIN literature, such as David Galula’s “Counterinsurgency Warfare”, came out of the French colonial experience in Algeria. The heyday of COIN in the U.S. came in the 1960s, when the U.S. supplemented its military forces in Vietnam with tens of thousands of civilian advisers applying the latest social-science findings to everything from police training to land reform.

The U.S. defeat in Indochina made COIN anathema to a generation of military officers who demanded an end to murky and open-ended nation-building engagements. The “Powell doctrine”, which demanded overwhelming force in the pursuit of clearly defined goals, was emblematic of U.S. military thinking post-Vietnam.

While the immediate post-Cold War period saw the U.S. intervene in ‘small wars’ in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans, the George W. Bush administration came to office promising an end to such commitments. Former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sought to transform the military into a technology-heavy force designed to defeat rival states quickly and with as few “boots on the ground” as possible.

It was Rumsfeld’s failure to anticipate the challenges of post-invasion Iraq that sent the U.S. officer corps scrambling back to the archives in search of their predecessors’ wisdom about how to conduct counter-insurgency.

Ironically, many of the same neo-conservatives and liberal hawks who now tout the virtues of COIN were previously firm believers in the high-tech Rumsfeld military. This has led critics to charge that these new COIN enthusiasts simply aim to foster a belief in the efficacy of military force and interventionist foreign policy.

Bacevich and other critics caution against falling back into the same illusions about military efficacy that drew the U.S. into Iraq in the first place.

“U.S. leaders should… be wary of the potential moral hazard represented by the COIN [field manual]: thinking they have figured out the journey, they may be tempted to go down the road more often,” Colin Kahl, a CNAS fellow who will head Middle East affairs in the Pentagon under Obama, warned in Foreign Affairs in 2007.

Others dispute the notion that the drop in violence in Iraq was due to the surge and the use of COIN doctrine. Lt. Col. Gian Gentile, now a professor at West Point, has been foremost among these critics, arguing that success was due primarily to other factors – notably the decision to begin paying former Sunni insurgents to stop attacking U.S. forces.

Even among neo-conservatives and other hawks, it remains to be seen whether the current enthusiasm for COIN will outlast the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some, such as influential columnist Robert Kagan, have already begun to argue that state powers such as China and Russia pose a greater long-term threat than terrorism and other non-state actors, which would once again push conventional capabilities to the forefront of Washington’s military priorities.

This focus on conventional warfare would dovetail with the inclinations of many within the military itself, where the newly influential COIN advocates appear to remain in the minority.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

Excerpt:

By Daniel Luban
WASHINGTON, Apr 6 2009 (IPS)

Secretary of Defence Robert Gates unveiled the U.S.’s much-anticipated new military budget Monday, which aims to reorient the armed forces toward irregular and counterinsurgency warfare while proposing cuts in several major weapons programs.

The budget is viewed as a major step in the ongoing debate within the U.S. military about whether to focus primarily on conventional warfare against other states or on counterinsurgency operations against non-state actors.

But it is also likely to engender pushback from lawmakers and defence- industry interests who are unhappy about cutbacks in lucrative weapons programmes.

The changes proposed by the new budget – while significant – are far from marking a fundamental reshaping of the U.S. defence establishment, some defence analysts caution.

“They’re calling it a fundamental shift and that’s both true and false,” said Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s true because their budget proposes the most ambitious set of cuts to well- entrenched weapons systems since the early 1990s.”

“It’s false, though, because this budget perpetuates the upward trajectory of defence spending, it’s higher than any of the Bush budgets that preceded it, and it increases funding for some programs that I think are a mistake,” Pemberton continued.

The 534-million-dollar budget for fiscal year 2010 – which does not take into account the “emergency supplemental” appropriations that pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – marks a slight increase over the Bush administration’s budget for the previous year.

However, the breakdown of this spending will be considerably different from previous years.

“These past few years have revealed underlying flaws in the priorities, cultural preferences and reward structures of America’s defence establishment,” Gates said. “There have been enough studies, enough hand-wringing, enough rhetoric. Now is the time for action.”

Among the most notable cutbacks was the F-22 fighter programme. Gates announced that the Pentagon would end production after buying four more fighters this year.

Rumours that Gates intended to kill the F-22 – which was originally designed in the Cold War to counter Soviet air power – led to a lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and in the media to save the fighter. A highly-publicised March article in the Atlantic by best-selling author Mark Bowden, for example, warned that F-22 cutbacks would be “paid in the blood” of U.S. fighter pilots.

Other cutbacks include missile defence, which will see its budget reduced by 1.4 billion dollars, and the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) modernisation programme – the vehicle component of which will be cancelled.

However, the budget retained or even accelerated other programmes that were viewed as logical targets for cuts, such as the F-35 joint strike fighter. F-35 purchases will be more than doubled from 14 in 2009 to 30 in 2010.

“I would give the budget a B to B-minus,” said William Hartung of the New America Foundation. “They did a little less than half of what I’d hope they’d do. But under Bush they would have done nothing or gone in the other direction.”

If the budget cuts back on some high-profile conventional war programmes, it compensates by dramatically increasing funding for some irregular operations and counterinsurgency programmes.

Notably, Gates announced an additional 2 billion dollars for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance – including an additional 50 Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial drones. The budget also proposes a five percent expansion of Special Operations forces.

Defence analysts also caution that the budget is likely to face major resistance in Congress from lawmakers whose districts benefit from defence spending and who have been recipients of defence industry largesse.

“They are going to have a huge fight on their hands,” Pemberton said. “Defence secretaries have often tried to cut weapons systems to little avail, and this is just the first stage in the process.”

Already, Senators Jeff Session and Richard Shelby of Alabama have signalled their displeasure with the budget by placing a hold on the nomination of Ashton Carter, who was slated to become the administration’s undersecretary of defence for acquisition, technology, and logistics.

The debate over the budget has divided many in the military into what are sometimes called the “this-war” and “next-war” camps – that is, those focusing on the needs of the current counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those focusing on the potential needs of a future conflict against a state such as China.

Gates is widely considered to be one of the leaders of the “this-war” camp. On Tuesday, he warned against devoting resources to “over-insure against remote or diminishing risk[s]” or to “run up the score” in areas where the U.S. is already dominant at the expense of capabilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But he also argued that the new budget did not mark a radical shift away from conventional warfare, and that only about 10 percent of its spending would be devoted to irregular warfare.

“This is not about irregular warfare putting the conventional capabilities in the shade,” he said. “This is just a matter of giving the irregular-war constituency a seat at the table for the first time.”

At the moment, the “irregular-war constituency” appears to be ascendant in Washington and at the Pentagon. Prominent counterinsurgency advocates include Gen. David Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) overseeing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and Lt. Col. John Nagl, president of the influential think tank Centre for a New American Security (CNAS).

But counterinsurgency also has its critics. Some – particularly on the right – warn against focusing on non-state actors and neglecting conventional capabilities and threats from state powers.

“[Former defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld denigrated the human element of warfare to focus on high-tech innovation,” wrote Kori Schake, a Hoover Institution fellow and West Point professor, on the Foreign Policy website. “His successor is about to make the reverse mistake.”

Others charge that counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on long-term nation-building commitments is frequently used as a justification or smokescreen for maintaining a long-term U.S. imperial posture throughout the world.

“By calling for an Army configured mostly to wage stability operations, [counterinsurgency advocates are] effectively affirming the Long War as the organising principle of post-9/11 national-security strategy, with U.S. forces called upon to bring light to those dark corners of the world where terrorists flourish,” wrote Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University professor and former Army colonel, in March.

“In this sense, Nagl’s reform agenda, if implemented, will serve to validate – and perpetuate – the course set by President Bush in the aftermath of 9/11.”

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Oct 3 2008 (IPS)

Not many people want to spend time at Guantánamo Bay. But while studying law at the University of Miami in 2005, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan became outraged to learn of the lack of rights afforded detainees in the "war on terror" and was keen to get involved.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan. Credit: Scribe Publications

Her experiences of working as an interpreter at Guantánamo have now been collated in her recently-released book, titled ‘My Guantánamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me’.

Khan currently represents a Guantánamo Bay detainee. She visited Australia in September to attend the Brisbane Writers’ Festival and while there spoke to IPS correspondent Stephen de Tarczynski via telephone.

IPS: In ‘My Guantánamo Diary’ you say that "the prison camp’s very existence is a blatant affront to what America stands for." Can you tell me what you mean by that? Mahvish Rukhsana Khan: There were detainees who were denied basic constitutional rights that America was founded upon. They were never charged and held indefinitely, for sometimes up to seven years. They were denied attorneys, held without being charged, not given an impartial trial and denied the basic rights that every alleged rapist and murderer in America has.

IPS: Is that sense of injustice what inspired you to offer your services to assist lawyers? MRK: That is what inspired me. I felt outraged. I was a law student at the time studying Guantánamo Bay and the concepts that I was studying in law school were not being applied in this case. I felt that the institution of Guantánamo was created to weasel around these cornerstone legal principles imbedded in our constitution. That is initially why I wanted to get involved. I was also just baffled at how Washington policy makers were debating the legality of these medieval torture techniques – once-upon-a-time it was [called] Chinese water torture and today in America it’s water-boarding. But it’s all the same.

IPS: Were you shocked by what you saw the first time you visited Guantánamo Bay? MRK: The first time I went I was nervous and scared. I was expecting to meet somebody who was Taliban or al-Qaeda or somebody who wouldn’t necessarily want to sit down with me because I was a woman. [I was] fully expecting to meet the worst of the worst or a bomb-making terrorist. I was scared.

On the first trip, I met a paediatrician who [now] works for the U.N. to help the new democracy in Afghanistan. His wife was an economist and he was a Shiite Muslim, which are a persecuted minority under the Taliban. He fled the Taliban to neighbouring Iran and yet there he was being accused of working for the Taliban. It made no sense.

Dr. Ali Shah [Mousovi] was accused of fighting against the Soviets several decades before. It was backed by the U.S. and he was awed that he was being accused of that while he was at Guantánamo.

And the second guy I met on that trip was an eighty-year-old paraplegic who was brought to Guantánamo Bay on a stretcher. Neither of these men had been charged with any criminal activities.

IPS: Your book reveals both mental and physical abuse that detainees were subjected to. Was this something that you were prepared for? Was the situation different to what you had imagined it would be? MRK: I had heard a lot about torture, but it was different in the sense that when you hear an eighty-year-old paraplegic who can’t walk and can't see very well, who is shackled to the floor by his slow and immobile leg, talking very uncomfortably about being beaten and having his arm broken and being stripped naked in front of women, it takes on another meaning.

IPS: You also say in your book that while you "understood the need to invade Afghanistan" after the 9/11 attacks, you "also felt the suffering of the Afghans as their country was bombed." Your heritage is Afghani – although you were born in the U.S. – so was this a conflicting time for you? MRK: It was a conflicting time in the sense that I was born and raised in America. I am American, America is my home, and after 9/11 I feared for the safety of America. But at the same time I feared for the safety of the Muslim community living in America and what that would mean. You know, individuals living in Afghanistan are a lot like my own family and so I felt for them too as they were being bombed.

IPS: Do you think that your Afghan heritage and ability to speak Pashto enabled the detainees to be more open with you? MRK: Absolutely, because I understood the cultural nuances and there wasn’t an interpreter while I was communicating with these people. We could freely understand one another. But beyond that I understood their culture and where they came from and there was this instant connection – with some of the detainees anyway – and many of them familiarised themselves quickly with me. I think there was a desire to just be associated with something that reminded them of home and I often came into those meetings wearing a shawl. I covered my hair as I didn’t know how conservative the men that I would be meeting would be and that shawl was often embroidered the way things are in their home country.

IPS: And you’ve also met one of the detainees after he was released. That must have been a very different experience from knowing him at Guantánamo Bay. MRK: It was. I met Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, who was the first detainee that I met at Guantánamo, and I promised him that once he was released I would visit him at home. And visiting him in Gardez, Afghanistan was a surreal experience because I’d only known him as this very frail, vulnerable man shackled to the floor and speaking about his desire to just open up health clinics in his country and service people after the Taliban had fallen. He was only 43 years old but he’d gone completely white – his beard – and when I saw him in Afghanistan his brothers had apparently persuaded him to cut his beard short and dye it black for his wife and kids. It was great to be able to see him with his family and safe. And he was exactly what he said he was. He was released without ever having been charged and is today working as a physician in Afghanistan.

IPS: Do you think we can learn any lessons from the use of Guantánamo Bay in the "war on terror?" I mean, the prison is still functioning and people are still detained there, but does this have to be the way it works? MRK: It doesn’t have to be the way it works because the U.S. has a system of justice and we don’t need these secret institutions. We’ve tried terrorists on U.S. soil in the past. In world trade centre bombing number one we were able to successfully try terrorists and then lock them up. Guantánamo at its peak has had almost 800 detainees – today there are about 240 – and of those, over 500 have been released, mostly without ever having been charged, with the exception of a few who died at Guantánamo. If there are hundreds and hundreds being released without charge there are obviously a lot of mistakes being made.

The other thing that a lot of people are unaware of and that I was unaware of going into Guantanamo was the bounty system. The U.S. military air-dropped thousands of leaflets across Afghanistan, offering up to 25,000 dollars per member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. That’s like hitting the super-lotto jackpot in Afghanistan because the average Afghan makes eighty cents a day, about 300 dollars a year. And added to that there are these complex tribal and ethnic, political and geographic animosities between people that go back generations and the military failed to investigate what locals were alleging about one another for a huge some of money. So, I think the lesson to be learned is that we need a better system of intelligence for one, and two, that so many mistakes will continue to happen when there isn’t transparency and a system of process.

Excerpt:

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 2008 (IPS)

U.S. officials privately admit being concerned that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki has become "overconfident" about his government’s ability to manage without U.S. combat troops, according to an Iraq analyst who just returned from a trip to Iraq arranged by U.S. commander General David Petraeus.

Colin Kahl, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) – which has supported a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq – told the press this week that there was "a certain degree of grudging respect for al- Maliki" among officials with whom we met, "but more often concern about his emerging overconfidence which is making it difficult to interact with him."

That assessment contrasts with statements of George W. Bush administration officials implying that al-Maliki’s public demands for a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal are merely negotiating ploys or political grandstanding.

U.S. officials admitted that al-Maliki’s overconfidence has influenced the status of forces negotiations, according to Kahl. None of the U.S. officials in Baghdad would "lead off with badmouthing the prime minister," Kahl said in an interview with IPS, but upon probing further, "you get a sense they are concerned that the al-Maliki regime has an inflated sense of his power."

The Bush administration hoped negotiations with al-Maliki on a status of forces agreement would legitimise a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq and control over a number of military bases, but the Iraqi leader refused to go along with an agreement that lacked a timetable for withdrawal of all U.S. troops.

Al-Maliki’s new sense of confidence has been accompanied by a new political identity as a nationalist foe of the occupation, according to Kahl. "He is successfully fashioning himself as an Iraqi hero who kicked the Americans out. That makes him difficult to negotiate with."

One of the consequences of al-Maliki’s perception of the new power relations in Iraq is that he is even less inclined than before to make accommodations with former Sunni insurgents now on the U.S. payroll in the militias called ‘Sons of Iraq’.

Kahl said in the briefing that, of the 103,000 Sunnis belonging to those militias, the Iraqi government had promised to take into the security forces only about 16,000. But in fact, it has approved only 600 applicants thus far, according to Kahl, and most of those have turned out to be Shi’a rather than Sunni militiamen.

"There’s even some evidence that [al-Maliki] wants to start a fight with the Sons of Iraq," said Kahl. "Al-Maliki doesn’t believe he has to accommodate these people. He will only do it if we twist his arm to the breaking point."

Kahl said al-Maliki has made a series of moves that have consolidated his personal power position within the state apparatus as well as in relation to various armed groups in the country. He has put intelligence agencies directly under his control and has set up major military operation centres around the country which report directly to the prime minister’s office.

Even more important, however, Al-Maliki’s power position has also been bolstered by the decisions by nationalist Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr not to launch a concerted military resistance to U.S. and Iraqi government campaigns to weaken his Mahdi Army in 2007 and then to give up his political-military power positions in Basra, Sadr City and Amarah in 2008 without having been militarily defeated.

Petraeus and the U.S. military command in Iraq have asserted that al-Sadr’s decisions reflected the fact that the Mahdi Army had been weakened by U.S. military pressures. However, the broader set of developments over the past year suggests that the primary reason for Sadr’s willingness to give up military resistance was a strategic understanding with Iran to shift to political and diplomatic resistance to the U.S. military presence.

High officials in the al-Maliki regime asserted repeatedly last fall that it was Iran’s intervention with al-Sadr that brought about the unilateral ceasefire of Aug. 27, 2007. Sadr’s decisions to give up military control of Basra and Sadr City before his forces were defeated were taken in the context of Iranian mediation between al-Sadr and the al-Maliki regime.

Iran’s strategic relationship with al-Sadr accomplished what the U.S. military never believed would be possible even in its most optimistic scenario – the neutralisation of the most potent political-military threat to the regime’s stability. The ability of Iran to deliver that benefit to al-Maliki – as part of a broader shift to an anti-occupation regime policy – almost certainly strengthened the case that Iran made to al-Maliki for a demand for a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal in the status of forces negotiations.

Kahl is sympathetic to the official U.S. concerns about al-Maliki. Both Kahl and CNAS have called for negotiation of a U.S. military presence in Iraq going well beyond the 2010 deadline for complete U.S. withdrawal that al-Maliki has put forward publicly.

In an unpublished paper for CNAS last April, Kahl advocated that the U.S. should keep 60,000 to 80,000 troops in Iraq into late 2010 in what he called a "sustainable over-watch posture".

Despite the change in the power situation, Kahl and CNAS still takes the position that Iraq needs long-term U.S. support so badly that the Bush administration should use its leverage to get the al-Maliki regime to make the political accommodations necessary to achieve longer-term stability in the country. For example, the Iraq government’s need for U.S. help in recovering illegally exported funds and properties, which were included in the statement of principles governing the negotiations last November at Iraqi insistence.

Then there is the threat of immediate troop withdrawal if al-Maliki does not toe the line. Kahl said he was told in Iraq that, in one of the regular videoconferences Bush holds with al-Maliki, he said, "If the negotiations crash and burn, I will be forced to pull out all U.S. troops by Jan. 1."

That Bush threat "got al-Maliki's attention," Kahl believes. He advocates the use of such threats to force al-Maliki to accommodate the interests of the Sunnis as well as those of the Sadrists, in order to bring them fully into the political system. Otherwise, Kahl argues, the security gains of 2007 and 2008 will ultimately be reversed.

Al-Maliki is no longer dependent on Washington as he was a year or two ago. That major shift in power relations – now reluctantly acknowledged by the Bush administration – has brought into sharper relief the contradictions between the interests of the Iraqi government and those of the administration.

The al-Maliki regime is a Shiite-dominated government that views its Sunni Arab neighbours – who have generally opposed Shiite rule in Iraq – with intense distrust and looks to Iran for support against them. The Bush administration, on the other hand, has forged closer relations with Sunni regimes against Iran. The short-term Shiite dependence on the U.S. occupation to establish Shiite control of the state apparatus is giving way to a more fundamental distrust toward U.S. power in Iraq and the region.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
NEW YORK, Aug 14 2008 (IPS)

As a new report forecasts that the 190,000 private contractors in Iraq and neighbouring countries will cost U.S. taxpayers more than 100 billion dollars by the end of 2008, an under-the-radar Florida court case suggests that U.S. President George W. Bush – a staunch contractor supporter – is preparing to throw security contractors such as Blackwater under the political bus.

In the Florida case, relatives of three American servicemen killed in the 2004 crash of an aircraft owned by Blackwater Aviation in Afghanistan are suing the company for damages, based in part on U.S. government reviews that concluded that errors committed by Blackwater staff were responsible for the deaths. This week, despite Bush’s support for what he has called the critical roles played by overseas contractors, his administration failed to meet a deadline for presenting the court with any defence of Blackwater.

The administration’s silence has caused consternation for Blackwater and its supporters. Erik Prince, Blackwater’s chairman, told TIME magazine, "After the president has said that, as commander-in-chief, he is ultimately responsible for contractors on the battlefield it is disappointing that his administration has been unwilling to make that interest clear before the courts."

Some observers have speculated that the Administration’s silence can be attributed to the controversial nature of the contractor issue and a reluctance to address it during a hotly contested presidential election year.

The Florida battle, which could eventually find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, turns on the question of whether Blackwater and other overseas contractors are subject to U.S. law. That question arises because of a decree issued in 2005 by the then U.S. Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer, granting contractors legal immunity.

The Iraqi government claims that Blackwater and other contractors have been responsible for the deaths of Iraqi civilians and wants to make them subject to Iraqi law. The U.S. has resisted this move, which is thought to be part of the ongoing stalemate in negotiations with Iraq over the future status of U.S. forces in that country.

The White House has also attacked a bill recently passed by the House of Representatives that would place combat-zone contractors under the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. It called the measure an unacceptable extension of federal jurisdiction overseas, and said it would place additional burdens on the military.

Blackwater’s argument is that the company should be covered by the same "sovereign immunity" that protects the U.S. military from lawsuits because the downed flight in question in the Florida case was under the command and control of the U.S. military.

Last month, this argument was rejected by three federal judges, who cited the U.S. government’s failure to take a position in defence of Blackwater as one of their reasons. In their decision to allow the lawsuit to proceed, the judges ruled, "The apparent lack of interest from the United States… fortifies our conclusion that the case does not yet present a political question."

Lawyers for many major contractors including DynCorp, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), Blackwater and others, say a dangerous precedent would be established if this and similar cases are allowed to go forward. Such a decision, they say, would open contractors to large money damages and greatly higher risk insurance costs that could adversely affect their ability to carry out the jobs the U.S. government has hired them to do.

As the Florida case made its way through the U.S. legal system, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) contends that the cost of having military personnel provide security services in Iraq might be little different from the prices charged by private security contactors.

The report said that 6-10 billion dollars has been spent on security contactors thus far in 2008 and estimated that about 25,000-30,000 employees of security firms were in Iraq as of early this year. It estimates that, if spending for contractors continues at about the current rate, 100 billion dollars will have been paid to military contractors for operations in Iraq.

The CBO report revealed that about 20 percent of funding for operations in Iraq has gone to contractors. Currently, it said, there are at least 190,000 contractors in Iraq and neighbouring countries – a ratio of about one contractor per U.S. service member. It noted that the U.S. has relied more heavily on contractors in Iraq than in any other war for functions ranging from food service to guarding diplomats.

The report also noted that the legal status of contractor personnel is a grey area of U.S. law, particularly for those who are armed. It said that military commanders have less direct authority over contractors because a government contracting officer rather than a military commander manages their contracts.

The CBO review was requested by Senator Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. In a statement, Conrad said the Bush administration’s reliance on military contractors has set a dangerous precedent. The use of contractors "restricts accountability and oversight; opens the door to corruption and abuse; and, in some instances, may significantly increase the cost to American taxpayers," he said.

The report comes at a time when the actions of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming under increased scrutiny. Contractors – including Blackwater and KBR – have been investigated in connection with shooting deaths of Iraqis and the accidental electrocutions of U.S. troops. The Senate Democratic Policy Committee heard testimony a few weeks ago from a former Defence Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) contract overseer who was effectively fired because he refused to authorise 1 billion dollars in unsubstantiated charges from KBR. The Government Accountability Office released a report that confirmed whistleblower complaints of DCAA supervisors issuing unsupported findings that were favourable to contractors. And last week, Government Executive magazine reported that nearly a dozen former DCAA employees see DCAA as a very troubled agency that is more concerned with performance goals than actually overseeing contracts.

The death of a U.S. soldier, who was electrocuted in January while showering in Iraq, prompted a House committee oversight hearing last month into whether KBR has properly handled the electrical work at bases it maintains. The military has also said that five other deaths were due to improperly installed or maintained electrical devices, according to a congressional report.

Contractors’ activities have drawn sharp criticism from private non- governmental watchdog groups, such as OMB Watch. OMB stands for the Office of Management and Budget, which prepares and presents the president’s budget to congress.

Craig Jennings, OMB’s Federal Fiscal Policy Analyst, told IPS, "100 billion dollars is a very large amount of money – in fact, Iraq’s GDP was just over 100 billion dollars in 2007. But what staggers my imagination is how sober adults would be willing to divert such vast sums of America’s financial resources to the bank accounts of private firms whose dealings are opaque to taxpayers and, for the most part, held unaccountable."

Jennings added, "I think advocates of unaccountable privatisation are beginning to reap what they have sown: defending privatisation of war- making on such an enormous scale is becoming tenuous. It’s hard to paint a picture of contractors providing taxpayers value when so many instances of contractor misconduct have found their way into the public’s consciousness."

Jennings also called attention to the shortcomings of the military auditing process. He told IPS, "This magnitude of expenditures on private contractors is especially striking in light of recent government and media reports of dysfunction in the DCAA. The protection of the interests of American taxpayers is apparently suffering a number of impediments."

Excerpt:

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Aug 8 2008 (IPS)

Journalist Ron Suskind’s revelation that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief was a prewar intelligence source reporting to the British that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) adds yet another dimension to the systematic effort by then Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet to quash any evidence – no matter how credible – that conflicted with the George W. Bush administration’s propaganda line that Saddam was actively pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.

According to Suskind’s new book, ‘The Way of the World’, Iraqi Director of Intelligence Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti had been passing on sensitive intelligence to the UK’s MI6 intelligence service for more than a year before the U.S invasion. In early 2003, Suskind writes, Habbush told MI6 official Michael Shipster in Jordan that Saddam had ended his nuclear programme in 1991 and his biological weapons programme in 1996. Habbush explained to the British official that Saddam tried to maintain the impression that he did have such weapons in order to impress Iran.

Suskind writes that the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, flew to Washington to present details of the Habbush report to Tenet, who then briefed National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Soon after that, the CIA informed the British that the Bush administration was not interested in keeping the Habbush channel open, according to Suskind’s account.

Tenet has called the story of the Habbush prewar intelligence a “complete fabrication”, claiming Habbush had “failed to persuade” the British that he had “anything new to offer by way of intelligence”. His statement actually reinforces Suskind’s account, however, by indicating that he had simply chosen not to believe Habbush. “There were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD,” said the statement, “but our foreign intelligence colleagues and we assessed that these individuals were parroting the Baath party line and trying to delay any coalition attack.”

Contradicting Tenet’s claim that the British did not take the Habbush report seriously, MI6 director Dearlove told Suskind he had asked Prime Minister Tony Blair why he had not acted on the intelligence from Habbush.

Another high-level U.S. source in the last months of the Saddam regime was Saddam’s foreign minister Naji Sabri. Tyler Drumheller, the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations for Europe from 2001 until 2005, recounts in his book ‘On the Brink’ that Sadri was passing on information to an official of a European government in early autumn 2002 indicating that hints of a WMD programme were essentially a “Potemkin village” used to impress foreign enemies.

Sidney Blumenthal wrote in Sep. 2007 that two former CIA officers who had worked on the Sabri case identified the foreign intermediary as being France and said he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the CIA and French intelligence to provide documents on Saddam’s WMDs.

Drumheller told ‘60 Minutes’ that Sabri “told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program.”

On Sep. 17, 2002, the CIA officer who had debriefed Sabri in New York, briefed CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, according to Blumenthal’s account. McLaughlin responded that Sabri’s information was at odds with “our best source”. That was a reference to ‘Curveball’, the Iraqi who claimed knowledge of an Iraqi mobile bio-weapons lab programme but was later found to be a professional liar.

The next day, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri’s intelligence, but Bush rejected it out of hand as “what Saddam wanted him to think”.

French intelligence agents later tapped Sabri’s telephone conversations and determined that he was telling the truth. But it was too late. One of Tenet’s deputies told the CIA officers, “This isn’t about intelligence. It’s about regime change.”

Yet another highly credible U.S. source on the WMD issue in Sep. 2002 was Saad Tawfik, an electrical engineer who had been identified by the CIA as a “key figure in Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme”. The story of the CIA’s handling of his testimony is told in James Risen’s ‘State of War’.

In early Sep. 2002, Tawfik’s sister, who lived in Cleveland, flew to Baghdad with a mission from the CIA to obtain details about Saddam’s nuclear weapons from her brother. But when she returned in mid-September, the CIA didn’t like the report from her conversations with the source.

Tawfik told his sister that Saddam’s nuclear programme had been abandoned in 1991. When she told him the CIA wanted her to ask such questions as “how advanced is the centrifuge” and “where are the weapons factories”, Tawfik was incredulous that the CIA didn’t understand that there was no such programme.

Tawfik’s was only one of thirty cases of former Iraqi WMD experts who reported through relatives that Saddam had long since abandoned his dreams of WMD, according to Risen.

Both the Sabri evidence and the evidence from Tawfik and other former Iraqi experts was available to the CIA during the work on the Oct. 2002 National Intelligence Estimates (NIE). But the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence kept all of that evidence out of the NIE process.

No report based on any of that evidence was ever circulated to State, Defence or the White House, according to Risen and Blumenthal.

The disappearance of all that credible evidence reflected a deliberate decision by Tenet. The White House Iraq Group had just rolled out its new campaign to create a political climate supporting war in early September, and Tenet knew what was expected of him. As an analyst who worked on the NIE told Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, “The going-in assumption was that we were going to war, so this NIE was to be written with that in mind.” That means Tenet’s account of the CIA’s role in the WMD issue in his 2007 memoirs completely ignored the credible evidence from Habbush, Sabri and the former Iraqi specialists that there was no active program, as well as his own role in suppressing it.

Tenet even brazenly claimed that a “very sensitive, highly placed source in Iraq” about whom “little has been publicly said” had “reported that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place”. The reporting from the source, continuing through the NIE and beyond, “gave those of us at the most senior level further confidence that our information about Saddam’s WMD programmes was correct.”

Tenet was clearly referring to the reporting coming from the Sabri debriefings, but his description of them was a prevarication. As Blumenthal reported, they had written a report on Sabri’s intelligence spelling out his view that there was no active WMD programme, but they later discovered that it had been rewritten and given an entirely new preamble asserting that Saddam already possessed chemical and biological weapons and was “aggressively and covertly developing” nuclear weapons.

Tenet – who was a political operator rather than an intelligence professional – had betrayed the CIA’s mission of providing objective analysis, instead choosing to serve the interests of the Bush administration in preparing the way for war. It is not difficult to imagine how he would have meekly carried out whatever was asked of him by the White House – even forging a document and leaking it to the media, to buttress the administration’s case for war.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist. The paperback edition of his latest book, ‘Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam’ was published in 2006.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 2008 (IPS)

More than five years after invading Iraq as a first step towards "transforming" the Middle East, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush seems to have lost its footing – let alone its unquestioned domination – throughout the region.

The talk of "democratising" the region has almost entirely disappeared from the administration’s rhetoric. Washington has had to sacrifice whatever pressure it had been willing to exert on "friendly authoritarians" to bolster their rule against popular sentiment, which has become considerably more hostile toward the U.S. than before the invasion.

Similarly, its plan after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war to forge a de facto coalition between the Jewish state and those same "moderate" authoritarians against the threat posed by Iran, Syria and their allies in the Levant has also failed.

Not only has the administration repeatedly refused to pay the Arabs’ price for such an arrangement – putting serious pressure on Israel to reach a peace accord with a unified Palestinian government based largely on a return to the 1967 borders – but the assumption that the Arab Gulf states, in particular, would welcome and support an eventual military confrontation between Washington and Tehran has also proved illusory.

The one area in which Washington has made some progress has been in Iraq where sectarian violence has fallen sharply over the past 18 months, in good part as a result of more-successful counter-insurgency tactics pursued by General David Petraeus during the "Surge" of some 30,000 additional troops.

But the Surge’s strategic goal – national reconciliation between the key sectarian and ethnic groups in Iraq – remains elusive, as evidenced by the latest impasse between Arabs and Kurds over Kirkuk and the certainty that long-promised regional elections will be delayed until next year.

Even Petraeus continues to warn that the security gains made since the Surge got underway in February 2007 remain fragile and could be reversed in the absence of significant political progress.

Washington’s continuing pre-occupation with Iraq – as well as its growing concern about Afghanistan and Pakistan – has effectively undermined its larger transformational ambitions in the Arab world, in particular, leaving local powers to work out their own arrangements with each other, even in ways that make the administration uneasy or even angry.

"The hard-line, confrontational policy the United States has embraced under the Bush administration has inadvertently demonstrated the limits of U.S. power," according to a recent paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The rejection of diplomacy has reduced the United States to a condition of self-inflicted powerlessness regarding many problems."

"The vacuum is being filled in part by U.S. adversaries – Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizbollah – and in part by friendly Arab regimes, which seek to find a way forward in situations where U.S. policy has contributed to stalemate," according to the report, entitled ‘The New Arab Diplomacy: Not With the U.S. and Not Against the U.S.’, by Carnegie fellows Marina Ottaway and Mohammed Herzallah.

This is particularly notable with respect to the gradual détente between Iran – Washington’s main regional nemesis since the Iraq war – and Saudi Arabia, traditionally Washington’s most important Gulf ally.

That process, which has included two visits to Saudi Arabia by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as his unprecedented participation at a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit, is credited in major part to Saudi King Abdullah, who has made little secret of his aim – contrary to that of the administration’s hawks – to reduce Sunni-Shia tensions, that came to the fore after the Israel-Hezbollah war.

Abdullah, who shocked the U.S. when he negotiated the ill-fated unity government between Hamas and Fatah in early 2007, also worked with Iran to calm sectarian tensions in Lebanon that year despite his steadfast backing for Washington’s efforts to isolate Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.

Similarly, Qatar, which hosts a huge U.S. air base, has played a leading role in reducing tensions in the region, most notably by negotiating a political settlement to the long-running stand-off in Lebanon in May that resulted in the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

While U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice endorsed the accord during a visit to Beirut in June, most analysts here and in the region depicted the result as a serious blow to Washington’s regional position.

"Many essentially friendly countries are openly willing to pursue policies the United States disapproves of, presenting Washington with a fait accompli and the choice of either openly criticising the action of its so-called allies or grudgingly tolerating it," according to the Carnegie report. "[T]he United States has little leverage over the policies of even friendly countries."

While the new report focuses primarily on Arab diplomacy, it does mention that even Washington’s closest ally in the region, Israel, has declared at least partial independence from the Bush administration, notably by using third parties in the region to engage adversaries whom Washington persists in trying to isolate.

Thus, through Egypt, it has negotiated what appears to be an increasingly effective cease-fire with Hamas and may soon conclude a prisoner exchange with the Islamist group, just as it did – again in the face of Washington’s clear disapproval – with Hezbollah last month.

The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has also been pursuing increasingly intensive, Turkish-mediated negotiations with Syria that have, according to the Israeli press, acquired the backing of the Jewish state’s entire security establishment.

Damascus has been the target of unceasing efforts by the White House, in particular, to isolate and punish neo-conservative hawk Elliott Abrams who assumed the top Middle East post in the National Security Council on the eve of the Iraq invasion. Indeed, it was only two years ago, during the opening days of the Israel-Hezbollah war, that Abrams suggested that Israel carry the fight into Syrian territory.

Now, according to Israeli press reports, the two countries are within reach of a final peace accord, which could come as early as the next round of proximity talks in September.

Damascus, however, is insisting that Washington give its explicit blessing to the agreement, a blessing that, given Abrams’ enduring influence – despite the wishes of the State Department and the Pentagon – most analysts believe will likely await the arrival of a new administration next year.

While such "negative power" remains a very real factor as Bush’s tenure winds down, it appears increasingly detached both from any practicable strategic vision and from the wishes and desires of key U.S. allies in the region.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
PESHAWAR, Jun 19 2008 (IPS)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s threat to send troops across the border to crush pro-Taliban forces, which sparked angry protests in Pakistan’s border areas this week, has led to calls for restraint from moderate politicians in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

"Pakhtun blood is being shed on both sides of the border," observed Afrasiab Khattak, president of the NWFP’s ruling Awami National Party (ANP).

Describing the situation as "extremely alarming", Khattak blamed "foreign powers" for turning the region into a battlefield. Violence has escalated in Pakistan’s tribal areas along its border with Afghanistan since the U.S. unleashed its so-called war on terror in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombings in September 2001.

Remnants of Afghanistan’s Taliban, which were ousted from Kabul by U.S.- led foreign troops, are believed to have taken shelter in remote tribal villages across the porous border with Pakistan.

On Monday, restive Bajaur and Mohamand agencies were brought to a halt by anti-Karzai protests. Shops were shut down and hundreds of people blocked the roads. Nisar Ahmed Mohmand, chief of the Mohmand Resistance Movement who led the protests warned that in case of a war, Pakhtuns (or Pashtuns) in both countries would die.

Khattak, who is a former chairman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), has appealed for peace and said bloodshed was no option. Other means of curbing militancy and violence have to be found, he said in an interview with IPS.

Khattak’s party, which swept to power this year in the NWFP, ousting an alliance of Islamic parties, has been holding peace talks with pro-Taliban fighters. On May 21, after several rounds of negotiations, the provincial government brokered a peace deal in Swat and Malakand, NWFP, with a radical Taliban faction.

Karzai had attacked Pakistan for failing to take military action against the Taliban who last week audaciously blew up the main gate of a jail in Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar. More than 900 prisoners – including hundreds of militants – are thought to have escaped.

"Karzai’s statement has the support of the United States, which has often said the cross-border raids from Pakistan were a growing problem. Secondly, he is desperate to please the U.S., and secure the presidency of his war-battered country for a second term," observed Ashraf Ali, a Peshawar University researcher who is an authority on the Taliban.

Public reaction in Pakistan has generally been one of annoyance. The Afghan president who has often accused Islamabad of not doing enough to flush out militants from its border areas, has never threatened military action before.

"We have been hosting millions of Afghans on our soil. They have been using our resources for three decades now. Karzai himself had lived in Pakistan for over 25 years," said Israrullah, a trader in the Peshawar Cantonment area.

The ruling nationalist ANP has offered to help reduce tensions between the two countries.

Kamran Arif, member of the executive committee of the HRCP, said a negotiated settlement could prevent further loss of blood. "There are international laws that should be applied to resolve problems," he added.

"I am amazed at Islamabad’s reluctance to arrest Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud, which it accused of assassinating Benazir Bhutto," Karzai told a group of visiting Pakistani journalists in Kabul on Jun. 16. "More ironic, were the peace deals between the Baitullah-led Pakistani Taliban and the government," he added.

Reaction from Mahsud’s Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) was swift. Spokesman Maulvi Umar condemned Karzai’s threat and warned that if foreign forces entered the tribal area, the Taliban would increase the attacks against NATO and Afghan National Army.

"President Karzai had created more difficulties for himself by threatening to send allied troops after militants in the tribal areas. We don’t care for the threats," Umar told IPS over the phone from an undisclosed location.

He said the Afghan president should first figure out how much of Afghanistan he controls before he issues threats of this kind. According to him, the Karzai government was running scared of the growing clout of the Taliban. The U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan were facing a shameful defeat, Umar warned.

"Thousands of followers of the Taliban movement would defend the country’s frontiers if the Afghan National Army indulged in any misadventure in [Pakistan’s] tribal region," he warned.

Both Kabul and Islamabad have amassed troops on either side of the 2,500 km border but neither has been able to check militancy.

"The situation is very strange. Previously, the attacks were carried out clandestinely, but now Taliban leaders have come out in the open. Baitullah Mahsud has chapters in every troubled area of Pakistan," researcher Ali commented.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 7 2008 (IPS)

Growing impatience in Congress over the enormous costs being racked up by the Iraq war, as well as the Pentagon’s belief that it needs more troops in Afghanistan to fight insurgents there, is putting the vaunted success of the George W. Bush administration’s “surge” strategy to the test.

Two U.S. Army soldiers search a building for weapons caches in Baghdad on Apr. 16, 2008. Credit: US Defence Dept/Spc. Lester Colley

The argument that Baghdad must bear more of the burden gained momentum last week when the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction reported that Iraq’s oil revenue in 2008 should exceed 70 billion dollars, twice as much as had been forecast just a few months before.

That report, which comes amid growing concern here over the weak domestic economy, has fueled efforts by a bipartisan group of senators to halt virtually all U.S. funding for major reconstruction and infrastructure projects in Iraq.

Indeed, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted unanimously last week to approve a bill that would ban the Pentagon from funding any reconstruction or infrastructure project in Iraq that costs more than two million dollars. Similar legislation is expected to be taken up by the House.

“This is the first significant bipartisan change in our policy toward Iraq,” declared Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the sponsors of the legislation after last week’s vote, while the committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin said Iraq’s failure to pay reconstruction costs was “unconscionable (and) inexcusable” given the windfall it has received from the stunning rise in world oil prices.

Another provision of the same bill would require Iraq’s government to pay the salaries and training costs of the predominantly Sunni militias, or so-called “sahwa” or “Awakening” councils, on which the U.S. has been spending roughly 27 million dollars a month.

Despite U.S. pressure, the al-Maliki government has strongly resisted integrating the vast majority of the estimated 90,000 members of these militias – most of which were previously part of the Sunni insurgency – into the army or police for fear that they will eventually turn their guns on the regime.

The result has been growing frustration on the part of the militias, frustration that reportedly was significantly enhanced last month after al-Maliki enlisted thousands of members of the Badr Organisation into the government’s security forces during fighting with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Basra and Sadr City in Baghdad. The Badr Organisation is the armed wing of the Shi’a Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), the strongest party in the coalition.

Both the intra-Shi’a conflict between the Sadrists and the government and the growing anger of the sahwa militias – most recently dramatised by a series of strikes and public protests and by an increasing number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in al-Anbar province and other Sunni strongholds where the militias have kept the peace for most of the past year – have resulted in a sharp rise in both Iraqi and U.S. casualties over the past two months, threatening the security gains made by the surge.

The surge, which was initiated in February 2007, was aimed at pacifying both al-Anbar province and the capital by adding some 30,000 U.S. troops to the 140,000 already deployed to Iraq to stop and reverse the drift to sectarian civil war between Sunnis and the various Shi’a militias. Its strategic aim was to foster a climate of peace and stability that would encourage all factions to make the political compromises necessary for national reconciliation.

While the surge made substantial headway in achieving its tactical goals of improving security – with the critical help of the sahwa militias which had mostly broken with al Qaeda in Iraq and allied themselves with the U.S. even before the surge got underway – its strategic goal of political reconciliation has been far more elusive.

Moreover, the surge’s tactical success has failed to translate into additional popular or Congressional support for the war at home. As a result, the Bush administration, which promised months ago to withdraw the 30,000 surge troops by the end of July, is adhering to its pledge, leaving fewer troops to ensure that a new round of violence does not break out.

At the same time, the Pentagon leadership is pressing the White House to continue the drawdown from Iraq beyond July so that it can deploy the three brigades – between 10,000 and 12,000 troops – it says it needs to cope with the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan. While Bush has announced that there will be at least a 45-day pause to assess the impact of the surge withdrawal after July, the pressure on him to resume the process – not only from the Pentagon, but from Republican candidates in the November elections – is expected to be intense.

Republican backing for the Armed Services Committee bill banning additional spending on major reconstruction projects and support for the sahwa militias is clearly seen by both the administration and the promoters of the surge as a worrisome portent, and not only for maintaining the relative – albeit fragile – peace that has prevailed for much of the past year.

One of the surge’s architects, Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said that legislation would “do catastrophic damage to our image in the world, particularly the Muslim world…The argument that Iraq should use its oil revenues to pay the United States sounds like the ultimate proof that we invaded Iraq for mercenary reasons.”

Ending U.S. funding for the sahwa militias, in particular, will pose a critical – and long overdue – test of the surge strategy, according to a number of observers, who see Maliki’s failure to integrate them as a critical stumbling block to national reconciliation.

“If the Awakenings are not integrated into the national security forces, then there is little hope for political accommodation or for lasting security and the U.S. is effectively trapped,” according to Marc Lynch, an expert at George Washington University whose blog, abuaardvark.com, is widely read here. “Since all other forms of persuasion seem to have failed, it’s time to give Maliki an ultimatum…If he gives in, then there may finally be some hope for political accommodation…”

“The downside is that if Maliki doesn’t go along…then things may well get ugly. But all signs suggests that they will get ugly anyway – and better that they get ugly while the U.S. is at the highest troop levels it will ever have,” Lynch wrote.

“If Maliki won’t do this now, when U.S. troop levels are high and security is relatively better, with the shadow of a new president who likely will not continue to offer an open-ended commitment, then he never will…and everyone should know this.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Excerpt:

By Dahr Jamail
BAGHDAD, Feb 22 2008 (IPS)

What the U.S. has been calling the success of a "surge", many Iraqis see as evidence of catastrophe. Where U.S. forces point to peace and calm, local Iraqis find an eerie silence.

And when U.S. forces speak of a reduction in violence, many Iraqis simply do not know what they are talking about.

Hundreds died in a series of explosions in Baghdad last month. This was despite the strongest ever security measures taken by the U.S. military, riding the "surge" in security forces and their activities.

The death toll is high, according to the website icasualties.org, which provides reliable numbers of Iraqi civilian and security deaths.

In January this year 485 civilians were killed, according to the website. It says the number is based on news reports, and that "actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site."

The average month in 2005, before the "surge" was launched, saw 568 civilian deaths. In January 2006, the month before the "surge" began, 590 civilians died.

Many of the killings have taken place in the most well guarded areas of Baghdad. And they have continued this month.

"Two car bombs exploded in Jadriya, killing so many people, the day the American Secretary of Defence (Robert Gates) was visiting Baghdad last week," a captain from the Karrada district police in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.

"Another car bomb killed eight people and injured 20 Thursday (last week) in the Muraidy market of Sadr City, east of Baghdad, although the Mehdi army (the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr) provides strict protection to the city," the officer said. "There is no security in this country any more."

Unidentified bodies of Iraqis killed by militias continue to appear in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The Iraqi government has issued instructions to all security and health offices not to give out the body count to the media. Dozens of bodies are found every day across Baghdad, residents say. Morgue officials confirm this.

"We are not authorised to issue any numbers, but I can tell you that we are still receiving human bodies every day; the men have no identity on them," a doctor at the Baghdad morgue told IPS. "The bodies that have signs of torture are the Sunnis killed by Shia militias; those with a bullet in the head are usually policemen, translators or contractors who worked for the Americans."

The "surge" of 30,000 additional troops came to Iraq, mostly Baghdad, in February of last year. The total current number of U.S. troops in Iraq is approximately 157,000. They were sent to end violence, and with a declared aim of helping political reconciliation.

But where peace of sorts has descended in Baghdad, Iraq&#39s capital city of six million (in a population of 25 million), it comes from a partitioning of people along sectarian lines. The Iraqi Red Crescent reports that one in four residents has been driven out of their homes by death squads, or by the "surge".

According to an Iraqi Red Crescent report titled &#39The Internally Displaced People in Iraq&#39 released Jan. 27, 1,364,978 residents of Baghdad have been displaced.

The Environment News Service reported Jan. 7 that "many of the capital&#39s once mixed areas have become either purely Sunni or Shia after militias forced families out for belonging to the other religious branch of Islam."

Some of the eerie calm in areas of Baghdad comes because togetherness has ended. Sunnis and Shias who lived together for generations are now partitioned. This is not the peace many Iraqis were looking for, surge or no surge.

On Jan. 8, UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond announced that there were at least 2.2 million Iraqis internally displaced within the country, and that at least another two million had fled the country altogether. This, no doubt, would make many areas quieter.

The U.S. military has erected three to four metre high concrete walls around several neighbourhoods, forcing residents to choose either Sunni or Shia areas in which to live. Such separation has brought large-scale displacement, and protests.

Sunni Muslims seem to have the worst of it. Many Iraqis are outraged by the number of Sunni detainees the "surge" has taken.

Residents of Amiriya district of western Baghdad demonstrated Feb. 11 against mistreatment by U.S. and Iraqi forces involved in the "surge". The "surge" aims to eradicate al-Qaeda from Iraq, but this has meant that most military operations have been carried out in Sunni areas like Amiriya.

"We are here to protest against the unfair arrests and raids conducted against the innocent people of Amiriya," Salih al-Mutlag, chief of the Arab Dialogue Council in the Iraqi government told IPS at the demonstration. "This has gone too far under the flag of fighting terror."

Al-Mutlag said they were also demonstrating against arrests in the western parts of Baghdad, despite an apparently peaceful situation there as a result of residents&#39 cooperation with Iraqi army units. Large numbers of residents came out in the Dora region of southwest Baghdad to protest against the U.S. military for arresting 18 people, including an 80-year-old man.

"We are the ones who improved the situation in western parts of Baghdad without any interference from the Americans and their puppet Iraqi government," former Iraqi Army Major Abu Wussam told IPS in Amiriya. "We negotiated with our brothers in the Iraqi national resistance who agreed to conduct their activities in a different way from the traditional way they used to work.

"It seems Americans did not like it, and so they are punishing us for it, instead of releasing our detainees as they promised."

Some of the apparent peace on the street is a consequence of rising detentions. In November last year Karl Matley, head of the Iraqi branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, declared that more than 60,000 prisoners and detainees are held in prisons and other detention centres. A large number of these were taken during the "surge".

By August 2007, half a year into the "surge", the number of detainees held by the U.S.-led military forces in Iraq had swelled by 50 percent, with the inmate population growing to 24,500, from 16,000 in February, according to U.S. military officers in Iraq.

The officers reported that nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody were Sunni Arabs.

Given that the majority of the detained are Sunnis, the "surge", rather than bridging political differences and aiding reconciliation between Sunni and Shia groups, appears to have had the opposite effect.

And yet, there could be more dangerous reasons to doubt such success of the "surge" that is claimed.

Among the recent arrests in Baghdad, the U.S. military counted six members of the Sahwa (Awakening) forces. This is a force of resistance fighters now ostensibly working with the U.S. military. The U.S. pays each member 300 dollars monthly. More than 80 percent of about 70,000 Sahwa members are Sunni.

The arrest of some Sahwa members is indication of U.S. military doubts about the loyalties of some of these Sahwa fighters. Shia political parties and militias already accuse them of being resistance fighters in disguise. Many believe that large numbers of Sahwa forces are resistance fighters simply riding the "surge".

"How come Sunni parts of Baghdad became so quiet all of a sudden," says Jawad Salman, a former resident of Amiriya who fled his house in 2006 after Iraqi resistance members accused him of being a government spy. "It is a game well played by terrorists to divert the fight against Shia groups. I lived there and I know that all residents fully support what the U.S. calls the terrorists."

The Sahwa strategy has brought down the number of U.S. casualties – for now. But the U.S. strategy seems to have done less for Iraq than for its own forces.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Feb 19 2008 (IPS)

The U.S. military is "severely strained" by two large-scale occupations in the Middle East, other troop deployments, and problems recruiting, according to a new survey of military officers published by Foreign Policy magazine and the centrist think-tank Centre for a New American Strategy.

"They see a force stretched dangerously thin and a country ill-prepared for the next fight," said the report, ‘The U.S. Military Index,’ which polled 3,400 current and former high-level military officers.

Sixty percent of the officers surveyed said that the military is weaker now than it was five years ago, often citing the number of troops deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We ought to pay more attention to quality," said retired Lt. General Gregory Newbold, who retired from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in part over objections to the invasion of Iraq, at a panel during a conference to release the data.

From Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain to President George W. Bush, politicians regularly speak on the military from a position of authority. They know, they contend, that despite the two ongoing wars, the U.S is ready to deal with new threats militarily if need be.

"I&#39m sorry to tell you, there&#39s going to be other wars," said McCain at a campaign stop last month. "We will never surrender but there will be other wars."

But the officers surveyed implied that military options against future threats may not be – as politicians from across the spectrum have intimated – "on the table."

"Asked whether it was reasonable or unreasonable to expect the U.S. military to successfully wage another war at this time," said the report, "80 percent of the officers say that it is unreasonable."

When asked to grade the preparedness of the military to deal with the threat of Iran – on which McCain’s rhetoric has been especially hawkish – respondents gave an average score of 4.5 on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 representing fully prepared.

The difference in which civilian and military leadership are viewed also made its way into the survey results. The level of confidence in the presidency among officers averaged just 5.5 out of 10, with 16 percent having "no confidence at all in the president."

The U.S. Congress scored lowest of the institutions that the survey referred with an average score of just 2.7.

The low regard for politicians could arise from the officers’ notion that elected officials know little about the workings of military – 66 percent of officers responded that elected leaders are "either somewhat or very uninformed about the U.S. military."

Those views are likely informed by survey respondents’ opinions about the way the civilian leadership handled the war in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein. Nearly three quarters of the officers said that the goals of the civilian leadership for the military were "unreasonable".

Furthermore, it appears that many officers find that the efforts of U.S. forces have sometimes been counterproductive. Asked what country had gained the "greatest strategic advantage" from the war in Iraq, 37 percent said Iran while 22 percent answered China. Just one in five of the officers answered that the U.S. had gained the most.

Though many of the results of the survey were negative, the officers were not pessimistic about the forces themselves. 64 percent of the officers said that they believe morale is high in the military, and nearly 9 in 10 believe that the ‘surge’ escalation was having a positive effect on the war effort.

"The Army is not broken," said Major Robert Scales. Fifty-six percent of those polled agreed, though nearly 90 percent said that the war in Iraq has "stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin," with just over half agreeing strongly.

A problem for the military, said Scales, could arise if the forces become "hollowed out" as they were after the Vietnam War. Degraded equipment and a loss of some of the fighting force – particularly mid-level officers – could adversely affect the future health of the military.

Thirty-eight percent of the officers advocated increasing the total number of U.S. ground forces to face future challenges, and the same percentage called for the reinstatement of the draft.

By far the most common answer to the question of how to best win the ‘Global War on Terror’ was to improve intelligence – which nearly three quarters of the officers supported. Thirty-eight percent said that the size of Special Operations Forces should be increased.

One of the most interesting splits in survey came on the question of what constitutes torture and whether torture is acceptable as an interrogation method. Prompted with the statement "torture is never acceptable," 53 percent of the officers agreed and 44 disagreed.

On the subject of ‘waterboarding’ – a harsh interrogation technique that simulates drowning – there was also an even split with 46 percent saying ‘waterboarding’ is torture and 43 disagreeing.

The report – a rare public look into the thoughts of the military higher-ups – is one of "the few comprehensive surveys of the U.S. military community to be conducted in the past 50 years.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Feb 14 2008 (IPS)

Despite assertions by the George W. Bush Administration that the escalation strategy in Iraq – known as the “surge” – has been a rousing success, many of the problems of pre-surge Iraq still exist and, along with new issues, are exacerbating a tenuous political situation there.

With the five-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion looming, two Washington think-tanks released reports today on the subject of increasing multi-lateral sectarian tensions in Iraq.

“The conventional wisdom among most conservatives and Washington policy elites is that the surge has ‘worked’,” starts the Centre for American Progress report, titled ‘Awakening to the New Danger in Iraq’. “This conventional wisdom ignores the fact that the fundamental objectives of the surge – to create a more sustainable security framework for Iraq and advance Iraq’s political transition – have not been met,” according to the report.

The surge period has, in fact, quelled violence across Iraq to some degree, but critics argue that the drop in violent attacks has less to do with the increased number of U.S. troops and more to do with the newfound cooperation of Sunni groups who used to align themselves with the violent insurgency.

“Rather than facilitating reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis,” said Brian Katulis, lead author of the Centre for American Progress report, “the main concern we raise in the paper is that these efforts are undermining the overall effort of getting to a political reconciliation among Iraq’s leaders.”

“I think that there’s a very real risk that one aspect of the surge – supporting these Sunni militias – could amount to a U.S. policy of supporting different sides in an Iraqi civil war,” Katulis said.

The so-called ‘Sunni Awakening’ (or Sahwa), saw Sunni militias – both rural tribal groups and more urban neighbourhood militias – cease their attacks on Americans and the central Iraqi government in favour of working to diminish the influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Numbering over 73,000 soldiers, these militias – about ninety percent of whose ranks are paid 300 dollars a month by U.S. forces – have little central structure save a loosely federated group of tribes called the Anbar Awakening in the troubled Iraqi province of the same name.

Having lessened some of the violence, the groups are now clamouring for the further political involvement that their new U.S. allies promised them. But at least in Anbar, they expect these political gains to come at the expense of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, which participated in the last round of elections in 2005.

The Awakening groups had expected that provincial elections would be held in the spring. When the central government announced elections for the fall, the Anbar Awakening groups angrily said that the current officials had thirty days to give up their seats or the groups would take up arms against them.

But even with the political empowerment of the Awakening groups, some critics of the “surge” strategy fear that the tensions being exposed between the Sunni groups are likely to work against the goal of political reconciliation.

“It’s really a long-shot strategy,” said Ilan Goldenberg, policy director of the National Security Network. “And there’s a real danger associated with it. It’s a low probability of at least trying to bring some of these guys in. But I think the much higher probability is that when you introduce a competitive electoral process into this type of situation, things tend to go worse not better.”

The National Security Network also released a report today – titled ‘Sunni infighting Threatens Iraqi Stability’ – which criticized the overall “surge” strategy with regard to the Awakening. The report cites recent violence and the possibility of further impending turmoil.

“America’s ‘Awakening Strategy’ in Western and Central Iraq,” said the National Security Network report, “rests atop a complex and unresolved set of conflicts. A policy that focuses on temporarily reducing violence while not addressing the underlying political crisis is risky and unstable.”

One of the goals of political empowerment for the Awakening movement is to gain control of Iraqi central government resources flowing into various provinces, in addition to the vast amounts of U.S. material support they are already receiving.

The groups claim that the Shia-led national government has been too slow to incorporate the militia members and leadership into Iraqi police jobs – often blaming Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki by name.

The groups claim that the Shia dominated Iraqi security forces are abusive in their territories in a way that they are not in rural and urban Shia territories, and hope to replace them and police their own turf. The power-struggle has already yielded several minor but deadly spats.

“[The U.S.] efforts in a sense have helped make the process of achieving a sustainable political agreement among Iraq’s political factions much more difficult by heightening tensions between Iraqi security forces and these independent militias,” said Katulis.

“Sahwa leaders calculate that the prospect of Iraq sliding further into chaos if they dissolve or turn back to insurgency will force Maliki to accept them,” said the National Security Network report.

This approach of threatening violence – or at least ceasing to help abate it – – has done little to endear the Awakening movements to either the Sunni parties they hope to replace, or Shia parties controlling the government in Baghdad.

All of this – concluded both reports – continues to show that despite the Bush Administration’s trumpeting of the successes of the “surge” strategy, the strategy could actually be causing the very tensions it hopes to subdue to boil beneath the surface. In a worst-case scenario, these sectarian differences could explode into a civil war.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 30 2007 (IPS)

If the last days of 2007 are any indication, U.S. President George W. Bush’s last year in office is shaping up as grim and lonely.

Grim, because Bush’s signature “war on terror” is nowhere near the kind of “victory” on which he had placed so much hope. Hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury have been spent, but the democratic transformation of the Middle East and the wider Islamic world has not materialised.

Indeed, while Bush’s Surge strategy has helped reduce violence in Iraq over the past year, his top military commanders stress that the relative peace that has been achieved to date is fragile and that prospects for national reconciliation – the Surge’s political goal – remain dim.

Meanwhile, victory in the larger terror effort is nowhere in sight, as this week’s assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, helped illustrate.

Grim, because the economic news – which has generally remained upbeat over Bush’s tenure – has turned decidedly negative in recent months. The chances that his successor may inherit a recession, as well as the many foreign-policy fiascos created by the disastrous combination of the administration’s ideological rigidity and incompetence, are growing steadily.

Lonely, not only because of the departure during the past year of virtually all of his closest and most long-standing loyalists – Dan Barlett, Karen Hughes, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, and Karl Rove – but also because he is seen increasingly as both a lame duck and an albatross around the necks of his party’s candidates.

Indeed, the focus of national and international attention – so far as the U.S. is concerned – appears to have shifted to the race to succeed him in next November’s elections. Remarkably, the mainstream U.S. media this week devoted as much space to the reactions of the main presidential candidates to Bhutto’s assassination as to the administration’s.

The fact that all of the major Republican candidates not only rarely evoke his name, but often suggest that his performance in office has been less than stellar, serves only to underline his marginalisation.

As for the Democrats, Bush, whose public-approval ratings have hovered around 32 percent for more than a year (the worst sustained ratings of any president in more than 50 years), is the rhetorical target against whom they find it easiest to rally the party faithful. According to recent surveys, the Democratic party has grown substantially over the past four years, largely as a result of what Bush’s defenders have called “Bush hatred”.

Bush, of course, is still hoping that 2008 may yet deliver his presidency from the fate of being judged as one of the very worst – if not the worst – in history.

A number of eminent historians have in fact already reached that judgement, based, among other things, on the strategic disaster of the Iraq war; the squandering of Washington’s overseas image as a champion of international law and human rights; the defiance of constitutional safeguards at home; the politicisation of the system of justice; and the distortion of scientific research regarding global warming and other critical issues.

His hopes of escaping that assessment rest primarily in the area of foreign policy, on which, as a “war-time president”, he has staked his reputation.

Possible achievements that could help to redeem Bush’s overall record before the end of his term would be the continued reduction of violence – if not reconciliation among the three main communal groups – in Iraq; a major breakthrough in the Israel-Palestinian negotiations leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state; or the de-nuclearisation of North Korea.

But even the most likely of these three – North Korean de-nuclearisation – remains highly uncertain. Most analysts here believe that Pyongyang has not yet made a strategic decision to give up its nuclear programme as demanded by Washington.

Similarly, the initial indications after last month’s Israeli-Palestinian Summit in Annapolis do not look particularly favourable. Israel has spurned a cease- fire offer by Hamas – which, in any event, retains the ability to spoil any accord reached by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas – and, despite U.S. pressure, is playing coy about settlement activity in the contested Jerusalem area. Just how hard Bush is prepared to press Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remains unknown.

As for Iraq, a big question mark is whether the planned withdrawal of 30,000 U.S. troops by July and 60,000 by the end of next year will spark a new round in the Sunni-Shi’a civil war, which the Surge has helped to tamp down but not resolve. Another big question as 2007 draws to a close is whether Kurdistan – – until now the most peaceful and pro-U.S. part of Iraq – will find its stability at risk due to U.S.-backed Turkish attacks on Kurdish guerrillas or by the approach of the newly-scheduled referendum on the status of Kirkuk.

While these three areas may offer the brightest prospects for redemption, new crises – particularly those arising from the “war on terror” – could divert the administration’s attention and further damage Bush’s record.

Bhutto’s assassination, for example, offered yet another example that Bush’s war has been at best incompetently pursued, if not misconceived from the very beginning.

Not only did Bush’s diversion of both money and troops from Afghanistan to Iraq immediately after the defeat of the Taliban permit both Taliban and al Qaeda to regroup and eventually extend their influence in the rugged tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border, but his virtually unconditional backing – including more than 10 billion dollars in mostly military aid – for the regime of General Pervez Musharraf served mainly to strengthen the Islamist parties at the expense of the secular, “moderate” forces to which his administration has given mainly rhetorical support.

When it became clear last summer that Pakistan’s Taliban was making major advances and that Musharraf’s popular base had dried up, the administration sought to forge an agreement between the military commander and the exiled Bhutto, whom it had long ignored.

The agreement, which included free elections that would likely result in Bhutto’s election as prime minister, was designed, in the words of Bruce Reidel – a former senior CIA analyst now with the Brookings Institution – to give the Musharraf government “a democratic façade”, bolster the moderates, and encourage the army to co-operate with U.S. counter-terror efforts.

The cynicism of the manoeuvre, combined with Washington’s enduring support for Musharraf – even when he declared a state of emergency earlier this fall – forced Bhutto to back away, leaving the accord unconsummated. Now that she has been eliminated, a number of experts here have noted, Bush, predictably, lacks a “Plan B”.

The prospect of a failed, nuclear-armed Pakistan makes even Iraq – not to mention a uranium-enrichment programme in Iran – look benign. It could be a rough final year.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 27 2007 (IPS)

2007 will likely go down in U.S. history as the year in which the balance of power in the long-running struggle between hawks and realists in the administration of President George W. Bush shifted decisively in favour of the latter.

That shift, which could still be reversed by events or actors not subject to Washington’s direct control, can be credited in part to the manifest failures of policies – particularly in Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in North Korea – promoted by the coalition of aggressive nationalists, neo- conservatives, and Christian Zionists who were empowered by the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The realist resurgence can also be traced to the rise of specific individuals, who took the place of their discredited predecessors in posts between the beginning of Bush’s second term and the end of 2006 when the most important realist of all – Defence Secretary Robert Gates – replaced Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon.

With Gates heading Washington’s most-powerful foreign-policy bureaucracy, the return to realism, which was already underway – albeit tentatively – as early as 2004, accelerated sharply. By the end of 2007, the administration’s top hawk, Vice President Dick Cheney, looks more isolated than ever.

Gates – a protégé and deputy of former President George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser, neo-con nemesis Brent Scowcroft – effectively cleaned out key Pentagon officials who had either actively supported or excessively deferred to Rumsfeld and Cheney. He replaced them with far more independent-minded and sceptical officers, most importantly the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and the head of the U.S. Central Command, Admiral William Fallon.

To the great frustration of neo-conservatives, in particular, both men have spoken out publicly during the past year against the possibility of war with Iran in what sometimes appeared to be a deliberate, Gates-backed effort against the over-heated rhetoric of the hawks.

In late September, Fallon denounced what he called “this constant drumbeat of conflict” as “not helpful and not useful.” Several weeks later, after Cheney charged that Tehran was directly responsible for the attacks by Shi’a militias on U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq, the top brass were the first to suggest that Iran was abiding by a pledge to Baghdad to rein in the militias.

Gates’ influence has not been confined only to the Pentagon. He has also quietly encouraged professionals in other bureaucracies, notably in the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – where he served as an analyst, and eventually director from 1991 to 1993 – to stand up to perceived pressure from White House hawks.

He played a key role in recommending like-minded policymakers for critical posts, such as Admiral Mike McConnell with whom Gates had worked closely under the elder Bush when McConnell served as chief intelligence officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. McConnell was chosen by Bush to serve as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) last January – shortly after Gates took office.

It was McConnell and Gates who reportedly pushed hardest at the White House for last month’s public release of the unclassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programme.

A consensus judgement of the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community – all but a handful of which are based at the Pentagon – the NIE concluded that Tehran had suspended its alleged nuclear-weapons programme in 2003. The NIE findings appear to have greatly diminished – if not dashed – the hawks’ hopes for a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the end of Bush’s term if Tehran did not given in to U.N. demands to freeze its uranium-enrichment programme.

Until Gates’ confirmation, realist hopes for a major comeback rested primarily with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who, despite a rhetorical embrace of the democratic messianism promoted by Bush himself, began gingerly pushing the president back toward a more-realist course shortly after succeeding the hapless Colin Powell in early 2005.

Rice prevailed over Cheney in aligning Washington’s position on Iran more closely with its European allies that same year – a move that made her a target for neo-conservative commentators who had hoped her leadership would force the State Department bureaucracy to toe the hawks’ line.

She soon found herself blocked – and, at times overwhelmed – by the still- powerful Cheney-Rumsfeld “cabal,” as former Powell chief-of-staff Lawrence Wilkerson has called it. During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, the White House rejected her concerns about the diplomatic costs of prolonging the conflict out-of-hand.

When it became clear within the administration that Bush himself had become disillusioned with Rumsfeld, Rice – backed by a phalanx of other veterans of the elder Bush’s administration, including his secretary of state, James Baker – urged the president to choose Gates, who had been her boss in Scowcroft’s National Security Council (NSC) almost 20 years ago.

With Rumsfeld out and Gates in, Rice appeared to gain confidence. In February, she bypassed Cheney’s office and the hawkish NSC staff to win Bush’s personal approval for a nuclear deal with North Korea. While hawks – both in and out of the administration – howled about the bargain, the generally leak-prone Pentagon raised no objection, giving rise to suggestions that Gates had been consulted in advance.

Gates’ hand was evident even more strikingly in the Middle East where, within eight months of his confirmation, Rice was able to launch two of the most controversial recommendations made by the Iraq Study Group (ISG) – a Congressionally-mandated, bipartisan task force co-chaired by Baker, on which Gates had served as one of ten members until his nomination in November.

The ISG called on the administration to open direct talks with Iran on stabilising Iraq and to launch a major new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative to help rehabilitate Washington’s image in the Arab world. Both recommendations constituted direct challenges to the hawks who, even before the group’s report was released, mounted a major media campaign against it.

In spite of Bush’s initial discomfort with both initiatives, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad began talks with his Iranian counterpart in May and is expected to resume them early next month. And in July, Bush announced a new peace process that he said he hoped would create a Palestinian state by the end of his term, a goal that he re-affirmed at the Annapolis summit just one month ago.

A third ISG recommendation – that the U.S. withdraw its combat forces from Iraq by the spring of 2008 – was rejected by Bush in favour of the “Surge” strategy that added approximately 30,000 troops to the 140,000 who were already there at the beginning of this year.

But even in that case, Gates – with considerable help from Pentagon brass increasingly concerned about the impact of the Iraqi deployments on the long-term health of U.S. ground forces – appears to be bending the administration towards his view.

When General David Petraeus – the military’s top commander in Iraq who has become a neo-con icon over the past year – said he wanted to maintain troop levels in Iraq after an initial troop reduction to pre-Surge levels by July 2008, Gates insisted that he wanted to continue the drawdown at a rate of roughly 5,000 troops a month through the end of the year. The plan, which he reiterated just last week, would leave a relatively small contingent of combat troops in Iraq by the time a new president is inaugurated in January 2009.

Echoing a July NIE that was also ‘pooh-poohed’ by the hawks, Gates argued recently that al Qaeda’s operations in Pakistan warrant much more attention than they have received.

While Iraq and Iran have clearly been a major focus of his concerns, Gates has also played a key role in recent months in easing growing tensions with Moscow over Washington’s missile-defence plans in Eastern Europe.

Despite rising concerns within the Pentagon itself over China’s military intentions – notably, its testing of an anti-satellite weapon earlier this year and, more recently, its refusal to permit U.S. naval vessels to dock in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving – Gates has been diplomatic and low-key, in contrast to Rumsfeld who made little secret of his distrust of Beijing.

In both areas, Gates has worked closely with Rice’s State Department on whose behalf he called last month for a sharp increase in funding. In the war on terror, he said “soft power” has to be given much greater priority than it has to date.

If that was not heretical enough for Cheney and his ilk, Gates went further in an interview last week, asserting a perspective that the hawks have long denounced as anathema. “We are in a multipolar world now,” he told the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 20 2007 (IPS)

Although the image of the United States appears to have improved in Saudi Arabia over the past year, the Saudi public’s view of Washington remains largely negative, according to major new poll released here this week by Terror Free Tomorrow (TFT), a Washington, D.C.-based bipartisan group.

Indeed, less than 40 percent of some 1,000 Saudi respondents interviewed by telephone during the first week of December, said they have either a “very” or “somewhat favourable” opinion of the U.S., while nearly 52 percent said their view was either very or somewhat unfavourable, according to the survey results.

By contrast, Iran – which Saudi leaders reportedly consider a dangerous rival for influence in the oil-rich Gulf region – is seen more positively by the Saudi public in general, the poll found.

A plurality of 47 percent said they regarded Tehran either very or somewhat favourably, compared to 44 percent who expressed unfavourable views.

Strong majorities of Saudi respondents, on the other hand, said they held favourable views of Turkey (71 percent) – whose secular traditions would appear to be at odds with Saudi Arabia’s staunchly Islamist orientation – and China (61 percent). Somewhat weaker majorities said they had positive views of France and Britain.

The TFT survey, the latest in a series by the organisation of key countries in the Islamic world – including Iran and Pakistan – suggests that Saudi public opinion, especially toward the outside world, is considerably more complex than depicted by the western mass media which has portrayed it as a stronghold of “Wahabi” fanaticism.

Fewer than one in ten Saudis said they had a favourable opinion of al Qaeda. Eighty-eight percent said they approved of their government’s crackdown against the group and 15 percent said they had a positive impression of the group’s chief and fellow-Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

But strong majorities of those who expressed a favourable opinion of bin Laden and al Qaeda also said they favoured closer ties between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia and insisted that their views of the U.S. would change for the better if Washington changed a number of its policies in the region.

More than two thirds (69 percent) of respondents said they favoured better relations with the U.S.

Asked what policy changes would improve their opinion of the U.S., 85 percent cited the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq. Seventy-four percent cited increasing student and work visas for Saudis in the U.S. and 71 percent suggested striking a free trade deal between the two countries.

Fifty-two percent of respondents said their view of Washington would improve if it brokered a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Palestinians, while only 36 percent cited Washington’s efforts at promoting democracy in the Middle East.

Nearly two thirds (63 percent) said their view would improve if Washington provided more military assistance to Saudi Arabia, although only 49 percent said they favoured the pending sale of billions of dollars in advanced U.S. weaponry to the kingdom, while 32 percent said they opposed it.

While 52 percent of Saudi respondents said they retained a negative opinion of the U.S., that marked a considerable improvement over the results of a smaller TFT poll taken in May 2006 when 89 percent of Saudi respondents said they held an unfavourable view.

Still, TFT’s director, Ken Ballen, said the 40 percent favourable view suggested that the Saudi public was one of the most pro-U.S. countries in the region. He noted that only around 20 percent of respondents in surveys taken over the past year in Pakistan and Egypt said they had favourable views, while only nine percent of Turks shared that opinion in a May 2007 poll sponsored by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

“From our surveys and others,” he wrote in a summary analysis of the Saudi poll, “there are only two major Muslim majority countries with a higher favourable opinion of the United States: Bangladesh and Iran.”

As heartening as that conclusion appeared to be, the U.S. and Americans ranked were still seen least favourably among seven nations and their citizens on whom respondents were asked to give their opinions.

Only four in ten Saudis said they felt positively about Americans. Favourable opinions of the British were voiced by 48 percent of respondents. Fifty-two percent said they had favourable views of Iranians, while the French, at 57 percent, were viewed somewhat more favourably. Nearly three out of four respondents said they had a positive view of Turks.

“It’s not like they’re locked into an anti-western framework,” noted Steve Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), citing the statistics for Britain and France.

Kull, whose organisation has done extensive polling in the Middle East, also noted that the relatively favourable views towards Iran suggested that the Saudi public does not share the same fears about Tehran as the royal family.

Nearly one third of Saudi respondents said they had a favourable opinion of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – nearly three times the percentage of those who had positive views of Bush.

Still, 57 percent of respondents said they opposed the development by Iran of nuclear weapons. Thirty-eight percent said they would favour the U.S. and other countries taking military action to prevent the Iranians from obtaining such a weapon, compared to 27 percent who said the U.S. should accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

Saudis were particularly sympathetic toward Iraqis for whom more than four in five respondents expressed favourable views. Iraq also appeared to be the dominant source of unhappiness with the U.S.

Despite their strong antipathy toward al Qaeda, 36 percent of respondents said they supported Saudi citizens going to Iraq to fight U.S. forces there. Only 17 percent said they supported Saudis fighting Shia militias in Iraq.

Saudi respondents expressed an almost uniform antipathy toward Jews. Only six percent said they held favourable views of Jews. Nearly nine of ten said their views were unfavourable (81 percent “very unfavourable”).

A slight majority of 51 percent said they would oppose any peace treaty recognising Israel, while 30 percent said they would favour such a treaty on the condition that Palestinians establish a state of their own.

Attitudes towards Christians were more divided. Forty-four percent expressed favourable views, while 54 percent said they had unfavourable opinions (40 percent “very unfavourable”).

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 20 2007 (IPS)

Racing to adjourn for the year, the U.S. Congress this week approved a 560- billion-dollar omnibus 2008 appropriation that includes 70 billion dollars more for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and sizable increases in development, refugee, and disaster assistance.

The bill, which President George W. Bush is expected to sign into law later this week, provides for a nearly 50 percent increase – to 4.66 billion dollars – in spending on fighting diseases, such as AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, that particularly afflict developing countries.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a multilateral facility to which the administration has been reluctant to contribute, will get a record 845 million dollars, 120 million dollars more than last year’s appropriation.

At the same time, Congress approved 1.7 billion dollars for U.N. peacekeeping operations (PKOs) next year. While that was 600 million dollars more than Bush had requested, it still fell far short of the 2.3 billion dollars that Washington is supposed to pay as its share of the world body’s 10- billion-dollar regular and PKO budget.

As a result, U.S. outstanding arrears to the U.N. will rise more than 1.5 billion dollars, according to the Washington-based U.N. Foundation (UNF) whose president, former senator Timothy Wirth, noted that Washington’s failure to honour its treaty obligations “undermines the U.N., short-changes key allies, and does not help advance America’s reputation in the world.”

Both the administration and the opposition Democrats compromised in order to finish work on the 2008 appropriations bill before breaking for the Christmas holidays.

While Democrats prevailed on a number of key domestic priorities – such as funding for health care and heating subsidies for poor people, repairing transportation infrastructure, and strengthening the Freedom of Information Act – Bush did much better on foreign policy. His top agenda item was the 70 billion dollars in unrestricted funding for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Because that amount fell short of the 200 billion dollars the administration has said it needs to finance the two wars through next September when the fiscal year ends, Bush will have to get supplemental funding from Congress some time next spring.

The fact that the majority Democrats failed to muster enough support to impose tough conditions on the aid, let alone a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq as they tried unsuccessfully to do several times over the last ten months, marked a major political victory for Bush. The administration’s position was boosted by the widespread impression that their controversial “Surge” strategy has succeeded in substantially reducing sectarian violence.

On less controversial foreign-aid issues, however, Democrats made headway in moving policy into line with their priorities. The 2008 appropriation was their first opportunity to re-shape the foreign-aid budget since they reclaimed control of both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections of Nov. 2006.

As a result, Congress not only sharply increased funding for Washington’s global health initiatives, but also provided about 1.8 billion dollars for child- survival and maternal-health programmes – a boost of nearly seven percent over the 2007 appropriation and almost 300 million dollars more than what Bush had requested.

At the same time, however, a veto threat by Bush succeeded in persuading the Democratic leadership to drop language that had been approved by both houses that would have eased the so-called Mexico City policy that bans any U.S. health-related aid from going to family-planning groups overseas that provide or promote abortion.

On bilateral development assistance, the 2008 appropriation provides 1.6 billion dollars, nearly an eight percent increase over the 2007 level and 600 million dollars more than what Bush had requested.

The biggest winner within the development assistance account was basic education programmes for which 400 million dollars of the total was earmarked. For all foreign-aid accounts, basic education in developing countries netted 700 million dollars.

For international disaster assistance, Congress approved a total of some 430 million dollars – nearly a 20 percent increase over the level approved for 2007 and more than 30 percent above what Bush had requested.

Congress also increased the migration and refugee account by a similar percentage – to just over 1.0 billion dollars – or almost 200 million dollars more than the 2007 level, in part as a result of growing concern about the plight of refugees from Iraq.

Much of the additional money for health, development, and humanitarian relief came at the expense of one of Bush’s signature programmes, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), which is designed to reward countries that are committed to U.S.-favoured political and economic reforms with higher aid levels.

Bush had requested 3.0 billion dollars for the MCA in 2008, but Congress, which has expressed disappointment with lengthy delays in the programme’s disbursement of past funding, approved barely half that amount – 200 million dollars less than it had appropriated for the MCA last year.

As for specific countries, Israel (2.4 billion dollars) and Egypt (1.3 billion dollars), will once again receive the bulk of the 4.6 billion dollars appropriated for military aid overseen by the State Department. The Pentagon has its own aid accounts.

The appropriation calls on Bush to withhold 100 million dollars of 412 million dollars in economic aid earmarked for Egypt until it improves its human- rights performance and proves that it is not aiding Islamist militants in Gaza.

Congress also imposed new restrictions on U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan, which has received some 10 billion dollars in official U.S. aid since 2001 as an incentive for co-operation with Washington’s “war on terror.” Of the 650 million dollars earmarked for military and security assistance, 50 million dollars would be withheld until the administration certified that Islamabad had restored democratic rule and was co-operating fully in counter-terrorism efforts.

In addition, none of the 350 million dollars in economic aid authorised for Pakistan next year could take the form of cash transfers which lawmakers worried were being used as a slush fund for President Pervez Musharraf and the army. The aid instead will have to be allocated to specific projects monitored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The bill provides nearly 540 million dollars in emergency economic aid for Afghanistan, but requires the administration to first certify that the government of President Hamid Karzai is co-operating in efforts to eradicate poppy fields.

Darfur will also be a major beneficiary of U.S. aid in 2008. One third – or 550 million dollars – of Washington’s contribution to U.N. PKOs is earmarked for UNAMID, the U.N.-African Union force that is supposed to begin operations in Darfur January. Another 209 million dollars is earmarked for humanitarian programmes in the violence-torn Sudanese region.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BAGHDAD, Dec 2 2007 (IPS)

As sectarian tensions escalate politically, a new fissure is appearing within the already fragmented Iraqi government.

Adnan Al Dulaimi, head of the Sunni political bloc the Accordance Front in the Iraqi Parliament, has been placed under house arrest by Iraqi and U.S. security forces in the Adil neighbourhood west of Baghdad.

Iraqi security forces also detained his son -Makki – and 45 of his guards. They were accused of manufacturing car bombs and killing Sunni militia members in the neighbourhood who have been working with the U.S. military.

"Two car bombs were found at Dulaimi’s office area ready to be blasted and we believe they were going to be used against the Awakening Forces [men the U.S. military is paying to work with them] in the Adil Quarter," Kassim Ata, spokesman for the Baghdad Crackdown Force – which is part of the Awakening Forces – told IPS. "Dulaimi’s office guards testified against his house guards and so we arrested all of them as well as Al Dulaimy’s son Makki," Ata said.

Abdul Karim al-Samarraie of the Accordance Front told reporters that the group would not return to parliament until Dulaimi was allowed to leave his home. On Saturday al-Samarraie stated, "When I went to meet him I was stopped and told that he is under house arrest. This is a violation of the rights of an MP who wants to come to the parliament."

The Accordance Front warned that the crackdown against them could derail Iraq’s already struggling political process, and the Front said in a statement before walking out of parliament, "It will increase political tension at a time when Baghdad is relatively peaceful."

"Al-Dulaimi is a terrorist just like other Sunnis who pretended to be participating in politics and peaceful efforts of reconciliation," Haydar Kathum, a follower of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) – a Shia political and religious group led by Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim – told IPS in the Karrada area of Baghdad. "Sunnis are all terrorists, but they pushed some of their leaders to the parliament so that they can fight the new Iraq project from the inside."

Similar accusations toward members of the Sunni political group – which holds 44 seats of the 275 seats in parliament – were heard throughout 2007 from Shi’ite groups in the Iraqi Parliament, especially the Shi’ite Coalition led by the SIIC and the Dawa Party, led by Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki.

"This man [Al-Dulaimi] should be held responsible for the terrorist acts that he conducted without any consideration for the possible political consequences," Jalal Al-Sagheer, one of the Shi’ite leaders of SIIC in Baghdad told IPS.

But, "what happened in the Adil neighbourhood must be dealt with away from politics," Al-Sagheer stressed.

Al-Sagheer also referred to the new SIIC’s policy to eliminate yesterday’s allies as they are no longer necessary given the completion of sectarian cleansing of Baghdad and other mixed areas of Iraq.

The other side of the story comes from Dulaimy’s supporters.

"Doctor Adnan Al-Dulaimi is a well known academic in Iraq and the whole Islamic world," his nephew Laurance Al-Dulaimi told IPS, "He worked hard to establish peace in Iraq and he exposed himself to threats by al-Qaeda by joining the political operation in Iraq."

"It is unfair that he is rewarded with such cheap accusations by those cheap corrupt officials and politicians," the nephew added.

Dulaimi has been targeted many times by Iraqi resistance fighters, but they failed to assassinate him. He has insisted upon keeping his house and office in the Sunni neighbourhood that was controlled by resistance fighters rather than moving to the Green Zone where he would have had better protection.

Sunni observers talked to IPS about the arrests, and expressed other opinions.

"This man was one of the reasons that the Shi’ite Coalition controlled the situation in Iraq the way they do now and he deserves what is happening to him," Omar Mahmood, a lawyer who is close to the Iraqi Association of Muslim Scholars led by Harith Al Dhari, told IPS in Baghdad, "He drew Sunnis to be cheap cover for the faked political operation that helped American occupation have routes in Sunni areas."

An Iraqi resistance fighter spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity.

"The poor old guy sacrificed his faith and reputation for a cheap chair in the parliament and now they are throwing him into the garbage can like used Kleenex tissue," the man told IPS in Baghdad, "We always advised him that the Islamic Party and the Shi’ite Coalition would definitely get rid of him as soon as he is no more needed, but he listened to his pocket more than listening to the voice of reason."

Maliki has ordered the fifth brigade of the Iraqi Army to "guard" Al-Dulaimy’s house.

"My father is detained in our house and my brother Makki is being tortured so that he gives any information that could lead to convicting my father," one of Al-Dulaimi’s several sons, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS, "My father’s life is threatened and so is my brother’s life and the other guards. These army people hate us and they might do anything. We find Maliki and the Americans responsible for anything that might happen to our father."

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
RAMADI, Iraq, Nov 29 2007 (IPS)

A semblance of calm belies an undercurrent of violence, detentions and fear across Iraq’s volatile al-Anbar province.

The province – which occupies one-third of Iraq’s geographic area – has been a bane to authorities since the beginning of the occupation.

"The Americans talked about our province as the deadliest enemy, and suddenly they are marketing us as their best friends," Sa’doon Khalifa, an independent politician in the capital city of al-Anbar Province, Ramadi – 110 km west of Baghdad – told IPS. "They were lying to their people and to the world in both cases as we were never terrorists nor their friends now," he stressed.

Khalifa explained that resistance fighters in al-Anbar did fight occupation forces, but now they are standing down from launching new attacks against U.S. forces.

This is due in large part to U.S. military payments to collaborating tribal sheikhs – already totalling over 17 million dollars. The money funds tribal fighters who are paid 300 dollars per month to patrol their areas, particularly against foreign fighters.

The military refers to these men as "Concerned Local Citizens," "Awakening Force," or simply "volunteers," even though it is well known that most of them used to carry out attacks against the occupation forces.

"Those Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes," a 32-year-old man from Ramadi – speaking on terms of anonymity – told IPS, "They know they are going deeper into the moving sand, but the collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy against them."

As of Wednesday, the U.S. military counts 77,000 of these fighters. It plans to add another 10,000. Eighty-two percent of the fighters are Sunni.

In spite of this mass recruitment, sporadic attacks are continuing against U.S. forces in the province.

"It is true that hundreds of fighters were killed or detained by the so-called Awakening Forces, but there are thousands who will never quit fighting until this occupation is ended," Ali Khamees, a former major of the Iraqi army told IPS in Ramadi.

Khamees believes that the de-escalation is a "new technique by the resistance to reduce the suffering of people in al-Anbar and move somewhere else to fight."

Attacks against U.S. forces have increased in other Iraqi provinces – like Diyala, Saladin and Mosul.

The U.S. army reported dozens of soldiers killed throughout November while local reports insisted that the U.S. casualties are much higher than declared.

A female suicide bomber wounded seven U.S. soldiers Wednesday in Baquba – – the capital city of the volatile Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad – when she detonated her explosive vest near the troops.

On Tuesday in the same city, another suicide bomber detonated his explosives-filled vest in front of the police headquarters – killing six people and wounding seven, according to Iraqi police.

Underscoring how tenuous the peace in al-Anbar is, on Nov. 22 a car bomb exploded in Ramadi, killing at least six people in what was one of the deadliest attacks there in recent months.

Ramadi police officials said the bomb exploded near the city’s courthouse in the late morning detonated by a suicide bomber. At least 30 civilians were injured, Iraqi police officials said.

"I was just leaving the bank 80 metres away from the explosion the moment it took place," Doctor Ahmed Al- Aani told IPS in Ramadi, "I did not notice any car coming to the spot, so I think it was parked there. The strange thing was that an American Army convoy passed exactly thirty seconds after the blast. The thing I found even stranger was that they passed without any action like closing the area or trying to help the wounded."

Another two eyewitnesses told the same story with slight differences in details like the number of casualties and how many seconds later the U.S. military convoy passed.

Iraqis across the province are complaining about harsh tactics being meted out by the new "Awakening Forces" supported by the U.S.

"We will behead anyone who carries a gun in this province," Wussam Hardan, a senior leader of the Awakening Forces in Ramadi told sources very close to IPS in the city. "No court, no lawyers, no nothing. We have our own ways to get those criminals to confess," Hardan said.

The people of the province fear the recent developments, despite the relative improvement in the security situation.

"It is quieter because the Americans stopped many of their activities in al- Anbar," Shakir Mahmood, a human rights activist in Ramadi told IPS – on condition that his false name be used. "There were so many arrests by U.S. forces, police and the Awakening during the past month and we cannot even talk about it because we feel threatened by all three of them," he said.

"So many of the detainees are well known to be innocent people taken into custody according to false information by others who have a personal feud with them or their families," Mahmood added, "It is the same old story being repeated and God knows what is going to happen next."

Arrests are being made after individuals are accused of being al-Qaeda members or of having links with Iran. Thousands have been detained for a year or more without any court procedures, while the police and the Awakening militias have executed many others.

On Nov. 13 the International Committee for the Red Cross estimated that there are around 60,000 people detained in U.S. and Iraqi prisons in the country.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
DIWANIYAH, Iraq, Nov 27 2007 (IPS)

Detentions have become commonplace in Iraq, but now more than ever before people are being detained after being accused of membership in "militias supported by Iran."

"Hundreds of our men were detained and accused of being militiamen supported by Iran," Mahmood Allawi, a 50-year-old lawyer from Diwaniyah, 160-kilomtres south of Baghdad, told IPS.

"We are Arab Shiite and Iran is as much an enemy to us as America! It is Iran that we fear most after our leaders were killed by the so-called &#39Iranian supported&#39 militias," Allawi said.

There has been a spike in abductions being carried out by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Diwaniyah, capital of Iraq’s Al-Qadisiyah province and home to a population of roughly 400,000.

On Nov. 13, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that 60,000 people are currently detained in Iraq.

U.S. officials claim that the military has been actively fighting against members of the Mehdi Army militia of anti-occupation cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

People here told a different story to IPS.

"If they mean the Mehdi Army then they know them well because they worked together for about two years now," Abdul Kazem Hussein, a former Iraqi officer who fled to Baghdad from Diwaniyah recently told IPS.

Hussein claimed that the U.S. military had been using members of the Mehdi Army to carry out attacks on Sunnis in Baghdad, as well as areas south of Baghdad, like Diwaniyah.

"But they are detaining hundreds of people who have always been afraid of being drilled to death by Mehdi Army murderers," Hussein explained, alluding to a practice used by Mehdi Army members of using electric drills to torture Sunni men they capture.

"They are detaining those who have not accepted the influence of Iran in the city," Hussein said.

Bassam Al-Shareef, a spokesman for the Shiite party – Al-Fadhila – criticized the campaign and warned the Iraqi government of the consequences if the campaign against the Mehdi Army continues this way.

"We believe the government should take slower actions to contain the militias rather than lead such a harsh campaign," Shareef told IPS in Baghdad.

The leaders of the Iraqi Army unit in charge of the crackdown – the Al-Baqir Brigade – said they are determined to conduct their offensive to the end.

"We will detain all suspects in Diwaniyah and chase those who fled to hide in the surrounding villages," Colonel Othman of the brigade’s staff told journalists in Baghdad recently, "Our intelligence will lead us to all those who are wanted for questioning."

The question of whether the offensive is targeting the Mehdi Army or the Arab Shiites in Diwaniyah was best answered by local politician Hassan Al-Mayali who recently fled to Baghdad.

"This offensive is targeting all those who do not follow Iranian Cleric [Grand Ayatollah] Ali Al-Sistani," Mayali told IPS, "Americans, Iranians and the so-called Iraqi government felt the danger of those Shiites who rejected the influence of what they call the peaceful clerics and they are pressing hard to make them accept their leadership. Any Iraqi who does not keep his mouth shut will be detained or assassinated so that the separation plan and the ever lasting occupation will succeed."

Many Iraqis interviewed felt sure that after the bombing of the Golden Shrines in Samarra in February 2006, the armed wing of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) – the Badr Organization – worked with the Mehdi Army to kill thousands of Sunnis.

Millions were also displaced from their homes in cities of southern Iraq – including Baghdad.

"Muqtada sold us to Iran," a former member of the Mehdi Army, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS in Diwaniyah.

"We are Arabs and the wave of killings conducted by us was committed for money paid by the Badr Organization and Iran. Now the Badr Organization is getting the American Army to help detain and kill us because we did not follow the orders given to us to kill our Sunni brothers," the former Mehdi Army member said.

"We are still obeying the orders given by our leader Muqtada Al Sadr to maintain peace, but that will not be forever," a member of the movement, speaking on condition of anonymity, in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad told IPS, "They [SIIC] are trying our patience and there will be a strong reaction if they do not stop their organized campaign against us."

On Nov. 25, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim – the powerful Shia cleric who leads the SIIC – defended Iran against U.S. accusations that the country is involved in anti-U.S. attacks in Iraq.

"These are only accusations raised by the multinational forces and I think these accusations need more proof," al-Hakim, the head of the largest Shiite party in Iraq, told reporters.

Al-Hakim has established ties with Iran and is one of its staunchest supporters in Iraq, but he also has been a major partner in U.S. efforts during the occupation.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
ATHENS, Nov 23 2007 (IPS)

"As long as the U.S. troops stay in Iraq there will be violence," warns Gilbert Achcar, professor of development studies and international relations at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Achcar – a vehement critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Sep. 11, 2001 – was born in Senegal and lived in Lebanon until moving to France in 1983.

He has served as professor of politics and international relations at the University of Paris VIII, and has written many books about the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East during the post Sep. 11 era.

Achcar spoke with IPS correspondent Apostolis Fotiadis about the current state of the war and what the future might hold.

IPS: Would the absence of U.S. forces in Iraq result in an interethnic conflict of total annihilation?

GA: There are many signs to the contrary. Civil conflict has been going on anyway. It peaked some months ago and has subsided recently, but still the U.S. politics of turning the communities against each other has sharpened tensions between ethnic and sectarian groups. The only undisputable fact is the correlation between the occupation and the level of violence.

As long as the U.S. troops stay in Iraq there will be violence in this country. The announcement of a date of departure would exert pressure on the various factions in Iraq to reach a consensus. In that case people will know they are facing a deadline for finding a way to co-exist or lose control.

IPS: What would a withdrawal without first establishing effective control in the country mean for the U.S.?

GA: To withdraw from Iraq without securing control over the country and the area would result in a loss of credibility. The credibility of U.S. deterrence and power has already suffered a lot. Look at Iran now – it is clear that they are not intimidated by the U.S. threats. Iraq has paralysed them to such an extent that they are unable to turn against other threats. It has also exposed the Achilles heel of the U.S. – which is the Vietnam syndrome. The population does not want the country to be involved in dirty wars and this creates a serious human resource shortage for the military.

IPS: Could the increasing scale of militarisation and violence in the region be connected with the declining hegemony of the U.S.?

GA: We do not deal here with some kind of a beast that instinctively produces aggression. The war drive that has been going on since 9/11 is obviously motivated by U.S. strategic interests and it is designed according to two main concerns. One is to control the major world oil reserves. We have entered into the last few decades of cheap oil . . . the strategic importance of oil is increasing. The second is that the U.S. military presence in the heart of Eurasia – especially in areas of interest for Russia and China – is important because they fear an alliance of both at the expense of U.S. hegemony in the region.

IPS: What is the extent of the failure of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy?

GA: It is a disaster. It is a total mess for U.S. foreign policy. Apart from Iraq – – where they also face a contradiction between their Turkish and Kurdish partners, which could cost them a lot politically – it is becoming clear that the operation in Afghanistan is a total disaster and the Taliban are back and are quite strong. You take Pakistan, the situation is destabilising. Washington fears [President Pervez] Musharraf and their fears are compounded by the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear power. I hope for some compromise in Lebanon but that might turn very serious there as well. And there are efforts of the Bush administration to do something about the Israel-Palestinian conflict in order to say they are achieving something. But there are no real conditions for a compromise or any concessions made by the Israelis.

When this administration leaves the scene the political and strategic capital acquired from the U.S. after the collapse of the Soviet Union will have been completely wasted and it will only be left with a very bad imperial reputation.

IPS: Is there a downplayed aspect of the U.S. foreign policy relationship with Islamic Fundamentalism throughout the last 20 years that this administration has made use of as well?

GA: People see all the time that Iran is some kind of ‘Evil’ to put in Bush’s terms . . . However, the fact is that the most fundamentalist state in the world, the Saudi kingdom, is the closest ally of the U.S. This state is much more reactionary in terms of religion, women rights, and politics. This is pure hypocrisy. One should not forget that from the 1950s the U.S. has nurtured and used Islamic fundamentalism against the Soviet Union. After the defeat of nationalism and the collapse of the Soviet Union the popular protest against corrupted despotic regimes backed by the U.S. shifted to Islamic fundamentalism.

This is like a Frankenstein tale – they produced a monster, used it for a while, and now it has turned against them. But, not all of it – they still have a lot of fundamentalism on their side. Even inside the same factions. Take the Islamic Brotherhood – Hamas is a wing of it against the U.S., but its Jordanian wing backs the U.S. supported monarchy, and the Syrian wing is part of an opposition coalition backed by the U.S.

Reality is much more complicated than it is reflected in any of the media.

IPS: What do you think the future will be like?

GA: To be frank I have been pessimistic about this area for over a quarter of the century. Unfortunately reality has always been worse than my pessimism. In my heart I will try to remain optimistic and hopeful because the suffering of the populations concerned is absolutely terrible. We talk about the part of the world with the highest unemployment, disastrous economic conditions, and huge inequalities, facing a prospect of explosion. Still, there is potential for positive social movement, the question is if a political force able to build upon this potential will appear.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BAGHDAD, Nov 22 2007 (IPS)

The executions of former regime officials are creating greater division, rather than reconciliation, among Iraqis.

Special courts formed by the American occupation authorities in Iraq are issuing death sentences – like that carried out on former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, on 30 December 2006 – on what many Iraqis are interpreting as a political basis.

“Executing Saddam cost Iraqis a lot of hatred and more division between the sects, ” Walid Al-Ubaidi, post-graduate law student at Baghdad University told IPS.

“Now they [U.S.-backed Iraqi Government] are executing the Ex-Minister of Defense, Sultan Hashim Ahmed, who was very well known for being a professional general who led the Iraqi army against Iran,” Al-Ubaidi said, stressing that, “This man represents a symbol for the Iraqi army that defended Iraq.”

On 24 June 2007 the Iraqi High Tribunal found Ahmed guilty of presiding over the killing of thousands of Kurds during the Anfal campaign in the 1980s.

Several legal delays, and more recently a delay for a religious holiday, have postponed the execution.

A clerk in the court where Ahmed and a number of his generals were sentenced spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity. He asked to be referred to as Hassan.

“We were surprised by the sentence,” Hassan told IPS in Baghdad, “This general was no more than a government official who carried out orders with notable skill and proficiency.”

“What makes us better than any of those we called dictators and war criminals?” Hassan asked.

“These generals were the ones who defeated Iran in the war and so [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] Al-Maliki and his American masters want to punish them in order to please the Iranian Ayatollahs,” former Iraqi army colonel Saad Abbas told IPS in Baghdad.

Anger against the U.S. occupation for the sentences has also been aroused because of the promise for asylum the general was given before he surrendered to U.S. military forces.

“They promised him asylum and that was why he surrendered to them in peace,” a relative of the general, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.

“They even asked him to take a post in the new system, but he refused, and maybe that is why they sold him to his enemies,” the relative said.

An Iraqi resistance fighter spoke with IPS on condition of strict anonymity.

“We are not happy for this man’s execution, but we believe it was his fault to trust the Americans,” he said. “He should have known, as a general who negotiated with them more than once, how bad they were. Moreover, he should have joined the resistance against occupation rather than surrender to his dirty enemies.”

“This man and his colleagues represent the army that terrified those Arab tyrants in an Arab neighboring country,” Thuraya Shamil, an engineer from Baghdad Municipality told IPS.

“They cannot forget the day that they ran out of their palaces like rats,” Shamil emphasised.

Others view the situation differently, but still agree that the generals do not deserve to be sentenced to death.

“At the moment we are looking for solutions to the dilemma of internal divisions, comes these sentences to widen the gaps between sects and groups,” Malik Nazar, a member of the Iraqi Dialogue Front that has nine MPs in the Iraqi Parliament, told IPS.

“We must stop sacrificing our men for the sake of sending messages of compassion to Iran and others who have feuds with our heroic army men,” Nazar stressed.

“They are killing any Sunni Arab who might one day lead Iraqis, or at least a group of Iraqis, when this dirty occupation leaves the country,” Ali Salman, a teacher in Baghdad, told IPS, “As long as Iranians and Kurds are our real rulers, all our good men will always be targeted.”

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BAGHDAD, Nov 21 2007 (IPS)

Increasing conflict and finger pointing between leading Shi&#39ite political blocs are heightening instability in war-torn Iraq.

"It is said in the Arab world that if thieves were not seen while stealing, they would be seen while dividing the loot," Wayil Hikmet, an Iraqi historian in Baghdad told IPS.

"That is what goes for the accelerating collapse of the Iraqi political system that was made in the USA. The thieves of the Green Zone are now giving me and my colleagues good material to write down for the coming generations," Hikmet said, referring to new scandals floating to the surface of the political scene in recent days.

The Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq (SICI) led by Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, and The Sadr Movement led by anti-occupation cleric Muqtada Al- Sadr are accusing each other of committing serious crimes against humanity in the southern parts of Iraq.

In early September, clashes between Sadr&#39s Mehdi Army militia and the Badr Organisation militia of SIIC erupted in the holy city of Kerbala, 100 kilometres southwest of Baghdad.

Kerbala, with a population of about half a million, is a holy city, particularly for the Shias, as it is home to the tomb of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

The shrine of Imam Hussein is a place of pilgrimage for many Shia Muslims.

The clashes between the two powerful militias left at least 52 people dead and over 200 wounded.

"Hakim and Muqtada were brought to the scene by the Americans who employed the two ambitious clerics in order to fight side by side against any Iraqi resistance," Lukman Jassim, a former Baath Party member, told IPS in Baghdad.

"But it is well known in Iraq that the two groups cannot put up with each other because of the historic disputes between their fathers and grandfathers and the conflict between them over power in Iraq. It was another American mistake," Jassim explained.

Jassim overlooks the fact that there have thus far been two anti-occupation uprisings led by al-Sadr, but his comments nevertheless underscore the rising tensions between the two groups.

Bahaa Al-A&#39raji, an MP with the Sadr movement, told journalists in Baghdad this week that his movement is being targeted by the SICI that dominates the Ministry of Interior. Many Sadr followers have been arrested and tortured by police loyal to the SICI in different parts of Iraq, Al-A&#39raji said.

SICI operates militarily via the Badr Organization militia, which was created in Tehran in 1982 and has been armed, trained and advised by Iranian intelligence since then.

Recently in Baghdad, footage was displayed on many local TV stations showing a woman with cut lips accusing police of having tortured her and her two baby girls in Kerbala.

"It is a crime against humanity committed by police for political reasons," Liwa&#39 Smaissim, the spokesman for the Sadr Movement in Kerbala, told IPS via telephone.

"The SICI is trying to eliminate our movement so that it controls the scene on its own," Smaissim said.

Accusations regarding the woman and her babies were aimed at a Major Ali of the Iraqi Police third Battalion in Kerbala.

"This man and his battalion have committed hundreds of crimes under the flag of maintaining peace in the city," Smaissim told IPS, "our followers and other citizens were exposed to torture and many others were assassinated."

Al-A&#39raji told IPS that he contacted the Ministers of Interior and Defense to complain, but the two ministers told him that the third Battalion does not take orders from them.

"We are an official unit of the Iraqi police and naturally we take orders from the Minister of Interior," Major Ali, who was accused of the torture and other crimes against civilians, told IPS via telephone.

"The CD distributed of a woman and her babies been tortured is a fake and was made up by a &#39certain group&#39 for political reasons. I was off sick during the period of the presumed arrest of that family," Major Ali claimed.

"The third battalion is an official force of the Ministry of the Interior and Major Ali is targeted by a &#39certain group&#39 because he risked his life in order to reveal the hundreds of crimes they committed here and else where," an Iraqi police general, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS, stressing that, "This particular group has committed the ugliest crimes in the Iraqi history and we are determined to put them all to court."

Iraqi police general&#39s references to the Sadr movement show the now deep divisions between those who were allies not long ago.

"I believe what is being said by both sides," a general at the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad, speaking under terms of anonymity, told IPS.

"It is true that the Badr militia and the Mehdi Army have committed thousands of political crimes against civilians as well as looting the economy of the country all along the years of the U.S. occupation to Iraq," he said.

The general added, "Evidence at the ministry show how terrible their behaviour was, but it was a political will of all the Iraqi prime ministers, from Iyad Allawi, to Ibrahim Jaafari, to the current Prime Minister [Nouri al-] Maliki to conceal the facts for personal and political reasons. The Americans definitely knew what was going on, but they had their reasons to keep quiet about them too. It is the Iraqis who will pay their blood at the end of the day."

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 2007 (IPS)

While the vast majority of analysts here agree that sectarian violence in Iraq has declined sharply from pre-“surge” levels one year ago, a major debate has broken out as to whether the achievement of the Surge’s strategic objective – national reconciliation – is closer or more distant than ever.

On one side, advocates of the surge – the deployment beginning last February of some 30,000 additional troops to Iraq to help pacify Baghdad and al-Anbar province – claim that the counter-insurgency strategy overseen by Gen. David Petraeus has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

On the other side, surge sceptics argue that the strategy’s “ground-up” approach to pacification – buying off local insurgent and tribal groups with money and other support – may have set the stage for a much bigger and more violent civil war or partition, particularly as U.S. forces begin drawing down from their current high of about 175,000 beginning as early as next month.

One prominent analyst, George Washington University Prof. Marc Lynch, believes that Petraeus’ strategy of reducing violence by making deals with dominant local powers is leading to the creation in Iraq of a “warlord state” with “power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state.”

Even the surge’s proponents admit that the outcome remains unclear. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute, a Clinton administration official who angered many of his former colleagues by supporting the surge when Pres. George W. Bush first announced it last January and loudly praising its results on the eve of a major Congressional debate in September, told the New York Times this week that “in military terms…the trends (in reducing violence) are stunning.”

At the same time, he added, “nobody knows if the trends are durable in the absence of national reconciliation and in the face of major U.S. troop drawdowns in 2008.”

President Bush has said he hopes to reduce U.S. troop strength in Iraq by next July to its pre-surge level of 130,000, while Pentagon chief Robert Gates has indicated his preference for a reduction to 100,000 by the end of next year.

That violence has declined sharply in recent months is no longer a source of much debate here.

According to the latest figures released by the U.S. command in Baghdad Sunday, the number of reported attacks – defined as car bombs, roadside bombs, mines, mortar, rocket, and small-arms fire – directed against U.S. and Iraqi security forces and civilians fell to less than 600 a week during the last month. That was less than half the weekly number of attacks recorded in June and the lowest level overall in nearly two years.

In addition to helping reduce the violence, Petraeus’ forces have also dealt major setbacks to al Qaeda in Iraq, particularly in al-Anbar and Baghdad, although most analysts believe that U.S. success on that front is due at least as much to Sunni insurgent groups that broke with al Qaeda several months before the surge got underway and subsequently allied themselves with U.S. forces to defeat their common enemy.

But alliance with U.S. forces against al Qaeda has not translated into a new relationship with the Shi’a-dominated central government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad, which has long been nervous about Petraeus’ courtship of the Sunni insurgents and tribal militias – renamed “Concerned Local Citizen” (CLC) groups – that have helped in the anti-al Qaeda fight.

“The Maliki government tends to see the CLC movement as a potential threat to (it),” according to Stephen Biddle, a defence expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who just returned from his second trip this year to Iraq where he met with top U.S. commanders.

“As a result, they’ve been dragging their feet,” added Biddle during a teleconference with reporters Tuesday, both at absorbing the 72,000 CLC members, who are currently each being paid 300 dollars a month by the U.S. military, into the Iraqi security force and in pushing key legislation through parliament that, in Washington’s view, would greatly enhance prospects for national reconciliation, most importantly between the Sunni and Shi’a communities.

Indeed, the government’s reluctance to act on the legislation – which covers such issues as equitable sharing of oil revenue, reversing de-Baathification, and holding regional elections – has become a source of growing frustration to U.S. officials here and in Baghdad.

In remarks to the Washington Post late last week, Petraeus’ second-in-command, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, stressed that the current reduction in violence offered a window of opportunity for the government to reach out to the Sunnis, but that it was “unclear how long that window is going to be open”.

Odierno, who has also urged the central government to step up delivery of long neglected essential services to Sunni communities to help build confidence, added that if the regime failed to follow through by next summer, when U.S. forces return to pre-surge strength, “we’re going to have to review our strategy”.

That is also the view of ret. Col. Pat Lang, the former top Middle East analyst for the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) who has praised Petraeus’ tactics but has also been sceptical of the outcome.

“There is a chance now of restoring national unity on the basis of bargaining and power sharing across ethno-sectarian and regional lines,” he wrote recently on his weblog. “If the Baghdad government seizes that chance then a new Iraq can emerge. If…not, then the stage is set for a long drama of internal and external conflict.”

Lynch believes that the surge was doomed from the start and may actually have made things worse in the long run. “My sense has always been that the military strategy that’s been carried out has been successful, but the fatal flaw is that (it’s) not linked up to a general national reconciliation strategy,” he said.

“There is absolutely no evidence of any reconciliation between Shi’a and Sunni,” he added, noting a recent escalation of statements by some Sunni CLC leaders currently allied with the U.S. that, once al Qaeda is defeated and U.S. troops begin withdrawing, they will turn their guns against the government.

As threatening in his view is the likelihood that local CLC chiefs, whom Biddle himself described as “brutal, cruel leaders”, could well turn on each other. Lynch pointed to recent assassinations as indicative of growing rivalries for territory, resources, and status of the kind that has already has made oil-rich, predominantly Shi’a Basra a battleground for various Mafia-like factions.

“I see more fragmentation than consolidation,” he added – hence, his concern about the possible emergence of a “warlord state”.

Biddle is more optimistic, although he admits that what gains have been made could easily be reversed, particularly if the U.S. troop drawdown is too fast or too deep. “The central strategic issue (is) if someone’s not there to enforce these (local) deals, there’s a very serious risk that spoiler violence could play a catalytic role and cause all this to come tumbling down again.”

For now, U.S. forces should focus on achieving a “national ceasefire” that will transform their role from “war-fighting” to “peace-keeping”, according to Biddle, who stressed that Washington should try to keep as many troops in Iraq “as we can sustain…without breaking the U.S. military.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 2007 (IPS)

More than seven weeks ago, U.S. media attention on Iraq peaked as Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ray Crocker delivered their much anticipated evaluation of the George W. Bush administration’s “surge strategy” before Congress.

By most official and media accounts, security in Baghdad and in surrounding provinces has improved markedly since then, with U.S. commanders attributing much of the decline in violence to successes in driving al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni extremist groups from Baghdad. Iraqis are said to be experiencing some sense of normalcy after being victimised by the kidnappings, bombings, and wholesale slaughter that marked the last few years.

Then, armed bands of Shiite and Sunni gunmen roamed the streets, seizing people at illegal checkpoints and dumping bodies by the dozens. But the picture that is emerging today is one of improved security and slight hints of optimism, unimaginable more than a year ago.

The recent developments out of Iraq give some credibility to the oft-fictional “good news” diet fed by the White House to U.S. citizens. The muscular argot of neoconservative idealism has crumbled under the weight of reality – Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, Vice President Dick Cheney’s pronouncement that the insurgency was in its “last throes”, Rumsfeld’s “pocket of dead-enders” – so it should come as no surprise that the newest “good news” out of Iraq is falling, for the moment, on incredulous ears.

While there may be a reduction in violence in Iraq, opposition to the war in the U.S. public is at an all-time high, with 68 percent of those polled in opposition, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released last week.

“Forget the briefings from generals, the intelligence evaluations and the Pentagon status reports. There is a handy indicator for whether the war in Iraq is going well – its relative absence from the front pages,” wrote Richard Lowry, editor of the conservative biweekly National Review.

The drop in deaths relating to violence is indisputable. Last December, 2,172 Iraqi civilians died violently, according to figures compiled by the Associated Press (the U.S. military does not “do body counts” of Iraqis, General Tommy Franks, who directed the Iraq invasion, has said).

Following a spike in June, AP reports, violence in the capital has ebbed. Nationwide civilian deaths dropped from 1,791 in August to 878 in September and 750 in October. As of Sunday, 189 Iraqi civilians had died violently in November.

U.S. military deaths have also fallen significantly, although the 852 U.S. servicemen killed thus far makes 2007 the deadliest year of the war for U.S. troops. In addition, the U.S. military says rocket and mortar attacks nationwide have fallen to their lowest level since February 2006. In Baghdad, such attacks rose from 139 in January to 224 in June – before falling to 53 last month.

Last week, the commander of U.S. troops in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, said bombings and killings had been declining steadily since a spike last June and “it continues to come down every month”.

And there are hints of optimism coming from the Iraqi government, following a tense month that included the scandal concerning the U.S. security contractor Blackwater and the impending Turkish invasion of the Kurdish north.

On Sunday, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said terrorist acts in Baghdad had declined by 77 percent this year. “We are all realising now that what Baghdad was seeing every day – dead bodies in the streets and morgues – is ebbing remarkably,” he told reporters. Recent developments suggest “that sectarianism intended as a gate of evil and fire in Iraq is now closed,” the prime minister said.

But some analysts question the rush to make declarative statements about perceived “surge” successes, in large part because the U.S.-led strategy is seen as a way to generate political breathing room to promote reconciliation among Iraq’s disparate political factions.

“So much of the Iraq debate has now turned into exactly what we once promised to avoid: political arguments about body counts, while completely ignoring the political dimension which the Petraeus counter-insurgency manual recognised as so crucial,” wrote Marc Lynch, a Middle East specialist at George Washington University, on his widely read blog, abuaardvark.com.

“Even worse, it seems like the U.S. is committing the cardinal sin of once again falling victim to our own propaganda, believing our own spin, and substituting domestic public opinion management for hard thought about where we’re heading. The relatively uncritical approach to the good news narratives now coming out of Iraq is eerily reminiscent of so many earlier periods of ‘good news from Iraq’.”

During an Oct. 30 House Appropriations Committee hearing regarding a recent Government Accountability Office study that found that overall attacks in Iraq have declined, director of international affairs and trade, Joseph A. Christoff told the committee that the GAO’s figures do “not tak[e] into consideration the fact that there might be fewer attacks [on civilians] because you have ethnically cleansed neighbourhoods.”

The U.S. successes have not come through pure military force alone. Part of the Patreaus strategy involves reaching out to the disenfranchised political actors who have fought the U.S. as part of the insurgency.

It wasn’t too long ago that U.S. forces viewed cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army as one of the main obstacles to Iraqi security. Since declaring a cease-fire with U.S. troops in August, Sadr’s fighters lave lain low, and Newsweek reports that U.S. commanders, who have publicly “applauded” the move, have made attempts to reach out to Sadr’s deputies, some of whom have met with Petreaus.

In the provinces, the U.S. is encouraging tribal and other Sunnis to form regional associations, such as al-Sahwa (the Awakening) to counter al Qaeda and ostensibly build support for the Maliki government. Tribesmen and former insurgents who join are paid 600 dollars a month to fight al Qaeda, and U.S. forces have recruited thousands of men, who are given uniforms and paid 300 dollars a month to act as guards in the neighbourhood, according to the BBC. These are referred to as Concerned Local Citizens.

While the strategy has played out well on paper, the tactics of reconciliation are not without their consequences. The new alliances are comprised of political actors who, until fairly recently, fought U.S. troops, and there remains the concern that, by allying with Sunni insurgent groups to fight al Qaeda, the U.S. is unwittingly arming groups for possible sectarian conflicts in the future.

A recent Guardian newspaper profile on one of the U.S.-sponsored “Ameriya Knights”, Abu Abed, is illuminating. Abed is one of a new breed of Sunni warlords who are being paid by the U.S. to fight al Qaeda in Iraq. While he is crucial to the U.S. strategy, his methods – summary beatings and imprisonments – exhibit all the signs of petty criminality.

“The Americans lost hope with an Iraqi government that is both sectarian and dominated by militias, so they are paying for locals to fight al Qaeda. It will create a series of warlords,” said a senior Sunni sheikh, according to the report.

“It’s like someone who brought cats to fight rats, found himself with too many cats and brought dogs to fight the cats. Now they need elephants.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BAQUBA, Nov 2 2007 (IPS)

The much touted "surge" of U.S. troops in Baquba has caused more problems than it has solved, residents say.

Baquba, capital city of Iraq&#39s Diyala province located 65 km northeast of Baghdad, has long been a volatile city plagued by rampant violence and administrative chaos.

In January this year, the Bush administration announced a "surge" of 20,000 additional U.S. troops to be sent into Baghdad, Diyala and al-Anbar province (to the west of Baghdad) to increase security.

The total number of U.S. troops in Iraq is now 169,000, the highest through the occupation. This is augmented by at least 180,000 private personnel through contracts paid for by the U.S. government. Estimates of the total number of mercenaries in Iraq vary between 50,000 and 70,000.

But despite such numbers, Diyala is controlled by criminal gangs, militias, al-Qaeda like forces, and only on occasion – as at present – by U.S. forces. Between all of these, normal life has come to a halt.

Amidst the fear and violence, streets remain empty, even of Iraqi army or police.

"All of my neighbours initially hailed the U.S. surge in the city," Jabbar Kadhim, a local grocer told IPS. "We see no hope in the (Iraqi) government." U.S. forces took over the entire city and blocked all roads."

Given the high presence of the U.S. military, security seems better for now. But facing restrictions of movement, in the middle of high unemployment, people also fear the greater violence that could return once the troops withdraw.

"We felt safer seeing the U.S. army, but we know, and the Americans know that militants come back to the city once the U.S. army retreats," said a resident who would not give his name. Others say that the U.S. &#39surge&#39 has brought its own problems – and is motivated.

Residents have become suspicious of all moves. "In order to create a reason for the coalition forces to stay in Iraq, they create an enemy and fight him," said Mudhafer Razaq, who has lost his trading business. "They direct the militants to destroy the city, and then they come to fight the militants. This way, people will ask for the help of the coalition forces."

Such suspicion is common. One resident said he saw a group of militants kill a taxi driver at a fake checkpoint they had set up "while a U.S. helicopter was flying right over them."

Mohammed Jabur, a lorry driver, told IPS a similar story. "I passed by a false checkpoint set up by militants; all of them had covered their faces and were carrying weapons. I saw a helicopter flying over them; is it difficult for the pilot to see them? Everybody knows that militants are supported by the coalition forces one way or another."

Not even the relative improvement in security is reassuring. "People are still worried that the militants may return, and second, there is no normal life with this huge surge of the U.S. army," Bashir Mutasher, a political analyst in the city told IPS. "People are allowed to move only in the main street in the city, which is full of checkpoints. All other streets are closed."

Mutasher added, "Every car is inspected at each checkpoint. It is not practical to inspect thousands of cars a day. For this reason, people are obliged to walk to their jobs or homes."

"We are unable to move, or get to our jobs," Tariq Bidaa, a local electrician, told IPS. "We were forced to keep to our homes for more than a month. My family was in need to so many things, but there was no money."

Such difficulties continue. "In Baquba, there are three small bridges which connect the two sides of the city; two of them are used by the U.S. army and all the other people are obliged to use the third, so one may have to spend an hour to cross the bridge," Sadeq Hazber, a 44-year-old primary school teacher told IPS. "The one bridge has a large number of checkpoints; there is one every 500 metres or less."

All this is bad enough; but it could get worse if the militants return.

(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq&#39s Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 2007 (IPS)

In the harshest speech against Iran given by a top George W. Bush administration official to date, Vice President Dick Cheney Sunday warned the Islamic Republic of “serious consequences” if it did not freeze its nuclear programme and accused it of “direct involvement in the killings of Americans”.

“Given the nature of Iran’s rulers, the declarations of the Iranian president, and the trouble the regime is causing throughout the region – including the direct involvement in the killing of Americans – our country and the entire international community cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions,” Cheney warned in a major policy address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).

“The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences,” he added. “The Untied States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

In his nearly 30-minute speech, an uncompromising defence of the Bush administration’s record in the Middle East, Cheney also claimed that, with Washington’s “surge” strategy working well against al Qaeda in Iraq, the “greatest strategic threat that Iraq’s Shiites face today in consolidating their rightful role in Iraq’s new democracy is the subversive activities of the Iranian regime.”

And he accused “Syria and its agents” of using “bribery and intimidation …to prevent the democratic majority in Lebanon from electing a truly independent president.”

“Lebanon has the right to conduct the upcoming elections free of any foreign interference,” he declared, adding, “the United States will work with Free Lebanon’s other friends and allies to preserve Lebanon’s hard-won independence, and to defeat the forces of extremism and terror that threaten not only that region, but U.S. countries (sic) across the wider region.”

Cheney’s speech comes at a moment of rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Just last week, Cheney’s boss, George W. Bush, warned during a brief press appearance that Tehran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon – or even the expertise needed to make one – could lead to a new world war.

“I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing (Iran) from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters, although the White House later insisted that the president was merely making a “rhetorical point” and still believed that the nuclear issue could be resolved diplomatically.

Two days later, Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, had resigned and would be replaced by a less prominent diplomat Saeed Jalili. Although the government later announced that both Larijani and Jalili will attend talks Tuesday in Rome with European Union (EU) foreign-affairs chief, Javier Solana, the move was widely interpreted here as a major victory for the hard-line anti-western faction behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against more pragmatic elements in the regime.

While Jalili lacks experience, noted Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the University of Hawaii, “(w)hat Jalili does have is a very close relationship with Ahmadinejad. As such, the move, if it is confirmed, reflects yet another enhancement of Ahmadinejad’s fortunes in Iranian politics.”

Like Ahmadinejad, Cheney has long been seen as the leader of hard-line forces within the administration, and the mere fact that his speech – which must have been cleared at the highest levels – was as belligerent as it was, especially in accusing Iran of “direct involvement in the killings of Americans”, suggests that the hawks are trying to take the offensive.

Neither Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice nor Pentagon chief Robert Gates has made such an unequivocal accusation; indeed, Gates has tried to downplay such charges when they have been voiced by military commanders in Iraq.

The forum chosen by Cheney to deliver his speech was in many ways as significant as its timing and context. WINEP, a generally hawkish think tank, was founded some 20 years ago by the research director of the highly influential lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and is funded by many of the same donors.

AIPAC, in turn, has led a high-powered effort to persuade Congress to impose tough new sanctions against Iran and foreign companies that do business with it, and, more recently, to have Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard declared a “terrorist” organisation.

As Cheney himself noted Sunday, his own national security adviser, John Hannah, once served as WINEP’s deputy director. While WINEP does not take specific positions on pending legislation or policies, it is generally regarded as at least sympathetic to AIPAC’s efforts and often provides the research AIPAC uses in its lobbying activities.

Cheney’s speech was remarkable on several counts, beginning with the fact that it came less than a week after Gates gave a much more restrained presentation on U.S. Middle East policy and the threat posed by Iran to a yet more-hawkish pro-Israel group, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).

While Gates called Tehran’s government “an ambitious and fanatical theocracy,” he also stressed the importance of diplomatic pressure and, in marked contrast to Cheney, dwelt much more heavily on the threats posed by al Qaeda and other Sunni “jihadist” movements.

Indeed, the rhetorical differences – including Gates’ effort to distinguish between Sunni jihadism and Iran and Cheney’s attempts to blur the two – could not be more pronounced.

Cheney’s speech was also notable for its aggressive and unapologetic defence of the Bush administration’s conduct of its war on terrorism; its insistence that the surge has turned the tide of the war in Iraq; and its repetition of neo-conservative notions about the importance of reacting with “swift and dire” punishment against challenges to U.S. power in the region and the possibility that Tehran is deeply threatened by the emergence of “a strong, independent, Arab Shia community” in Iraq.

He charged that Iran is a “growing obstacle to peace in the Middle East,” and he recited a long litany of grievances against it. “This same regime that approved of hostage-taking in 1979, that attacked Saudi and Kuwaiti shipping in the 1980s, that incited suicide bombings and jihadism in the 1990s and beyond, is now the world’s most active state sponsor of terror,” he declared, quoting the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus for the proposition that it is fighting a “proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.”

“Fearful of a strong, independent, Arab Shia community emerging in Iraq, one that seeks guidance not in Qom, Iran, but from traditional sources of Shia authority in Najaf and Karbala, the Iranian regime also aims to keep Iraq in a state of weakness that prevents Baghdad from presenting a threat to Tehran,” he added, blaming the Quds Force, an elite branch of the Revolutionary Guard, for providing “weapons, money and training to terrorists and Islamic militant groups abroad, including Hamas; Palestinian Islamic Jihad; militants in the Balkans, the Taliban and other anti-Afghanistan militants; and Hezbollah terrorists trying to destabilize Lebanon’s democratic government.”

He also strongly implied that Washington continues to seek “regime change” in Tehran, noting that “the irresponsible conduct of the ruling elite in Tehran is a tragedy for all Iranians” and insisting that “the spirit of freedom is stirring Iran…America looks forward to the day when Iranians reclaim their destiny; the day that our two countries, as free and democratic nations, can be the closest of friends.”

Iran, indeed, dominated the last 10 minutes of the speech. By contrast, Lebanon received only two paragraphs while the administration’s efforts to renew U.S.-Palestinian peace talks drew only the briefest of mentions.

Bush, he said, has “announced a meeting to be held in Annapolis later this year to review the progress towards building Palestinian institutions, to seek innovative ways to support further reform, to provide diplomatic support to the parties, so that we can move forward on the path to a Palestinian state.”

Excerpt:

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON, Oct 8 2007 (IPS)

Although the U.S. military command&#39s frequent assertions that the primary threat to U.S. forces in Iraq comes from Iranian meddling, its real problem is that Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr&#39s Mahdi army is determined to end the occupation and is simply too big and too well entrenched to be weakened by military force.

The U.S. command began trying to enter into a political dialogue with Sadr&#39s followers in early 2006 and now claims that such a dialogue has begun, according to a Sep. 12 article by Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times.

And Gen. David Petraeus hinted in his Congressional testimony last month at the need to negotiate a deal with the Sadrists. Petraeus said it is impossible to "kill or capture" all the "Sadr militia" and likened the problem to that of dealing with the Sunni insurgents who have now been allowed to become local security forces in Sunni neighbourhoods.

But the George W. Bush administration is not prepared to make peace with the Mahdi army. Instead it believes it can somehow divide it if it applies military pressure while wooing what it calls "moderates" in the Sadr camp. Parker quoted an anonymous administration official last month as suggesting that there were Sadrists "who we think we might be able to work with".

A U.S. commander in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Patrick Frank, told Parker last month that Sadrist representatives initiated indirect talks in late July, which were followed by Sadr&#39s announcement at the end of August of a six-month hiatus in fighting.

But the proposal Frank made to the Mahdi army at a meeting Sep. 3 with both Sunni and Shiite community leaders suggests that Petraeus is on a short leash in negotiating local peace agreements. Frank proposed that the Mahdi army cease attacks for two weeks, and that the U.S. military would "consider reducing their raids in the district".

That was an offer that might have been expected from a newly installed occupation army rather than from one that has already admitted that it cannot prevail by using force and is bound to become weaker in the near future.

The U.S. command intends to increase the military pressure on the Mahdi army. Last week, Odierno announced that more military resources were being shifted from fighting against al Qaeda to operations against Shiite militiamen.

The idea of managing the Mahdi army problem by dividing it between "extremist" and "moderate" elements was integrated into the original "surge" strategy. Even before Petraeus took command in Baghdad last January, he and his second in command, Gen. Ray Odierno, had already decided to avoid a full-fledged military campaign against the Mahdi army.

Instead they adopted a strategy of trying to reach agreement with some of Sadr&#39s followers – perhaps including Sadr himself – while targeting selected elements in the Mahdi army.

"There are some extreme elements, and we will go after them," Odierno said at a Jan. 7, 2007 news conference.

The strategy of making deals with "moderates" while attacking the "extreme elements" seemed to be given credibility when Sadr signaled in early 2007 that he was ordering the Madhi army to lie low and even to cooperate with the new U.S. Baghdad security plan.

As Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post reported last May, the U.S. command even released one of Sadr&#39s aides, Salah al-Obaidi, from Camp Cropper after five months in detention, in the belief that he was a "moderate" who could help shift the balance within the Madhi army against those determined to carry out military resistance against U.S. forces.

But contrary to the self-serving assumptions of Petraeus and Odierno, Sadr was avoiding a confrontation with U.S. forces because he believed that the occupation had entered its final phase, in which the Bush administration would be forced to negotiate a settlement prior to military withdrawal, and that he had only to keep the Madhi army intact to emerge victorious over his Shiite rivals associated with the al-Hakim family.

Sadr aides told Raghavan that the Shiite cleric viewed the Democratic takeover of Congress and the struggle over Iraq policy as evidence that the final phase of the war had begun. His expression of willingness to cooperate with U.S. forces was aimed at positioning himself to be the main Iraqi interlocutor for the United States in the transition period.

Significantly, however, Sadr refused to deal with the Bush administration, believing that the Democrats would take a less bellicose posture toward his movement.

In any case, Sadr&#39s hopes that the U.S. command might leave the Madhi army alone were dashed by the aggressiveness of U.S. sweeps in Sadr City and other Sadr strongholds in Baghdad, which began in January even before the arrival of additional troops. By mid- March, Sadr had already begun to backtrack on cooperation with the U.S. occupation troops.

Even as Sadr was returning to open opposition to the U.S. military, the U.S. command was pushing the line that the Mahdi army was "splintering" and that attacks on U.S. troops were coming only from "rogue" Mahdi army elements.

A U.S. military official in Washington told the Associated Press in late March that some Madhi army figures were "breaking away to attempt a more conciliatory approach to the Americans and the Iraqi government", while others were "moving in a more extremist direction".

The key individual in the alleged "extremist" breakaway faction was said to be Qais al- Khazali, who was Sadr&#39s main spokesman in 2003 and 2004. Khazali and his brother, who had just been captured a few days before, were leaders of an Iraqi network which had apparently procured armour-piercing bombs and other weapons for the Madhi army.

In July, the U.S. military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, cited Khazali&#39s alleged testimony under interrogation as supporting the command&#39s argument that the Iranian Quds Force was creating a "Hezbollah-like" Shiite pro-Iranian force to do its bidding in Iraq.

But Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, deputy director for Regional Operations at the Joint Staff in Washington, had obviously not been consulted about the Khazali breakaway ploy. In a press briefing on Mar. 30, Barbero said, "[W]e assess that there are links between these brothers and Sadr&#39s organisation."

Bergner&#39s portrayal of the Khazali organisation as detached from Sadr&#39s movement was an example of how the U.S. command embraces interpretations that serve its political- military objectives, even when they don&#39t reflect its own intelligence judgments.

When the U.S. command carried out arrests of Mahdi army commanders or cell leaders last spring and summer, they invariably referred to the targets as "rogue" Mahdi army. In one such operation, U.S. and Iraqi troops captured the commander of what were called a "high-level rogue Jaysh al-Mahdi commander" of an "assassination cell" of more than 100 members.

But according to a New York Times report Jul. 28, both the head of the Sadr office in Baghdad and a Sadrist cleric preaching in nearby Kufa condemned the raid and called for the release of the detainees, indicating that they are still part of the Madhi army.

The "rogue" designation apparently referred to their resistance to the occupation, not to their relationship to the Mahdi army command.

The U.S. command&#39s line that Iran is using Hezbollah operatives to train Shiite militias that had broken away from Sadr was further discredited when Sadr admitted in an interview with The Independent in August that his organisation has "formal links" with Hezbollah, has sent fighters to Lebanon for training and would continue to do so.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
OAKLAND, California, Sep 21 2007 (IPS)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, then U.S. President Richard Nixon appealed to the country&#39s "Silent Majority" to oppose growing anti-Vietnam War sentiment in the United States.

A decade later, President Ronald Reagan had the Rev. Jerry Falwell&#39s "Moral Majority" working by his side in support of Reagan&#39s low-intensity warfare in Central America, and contra movements in Africa.

During the run-up to, and period following the 1994 Republican revolution that gave that conservative party control of Congress for the first time in decades, the high-profile Georgia legislator Newt Gingrich&#39s band had the Rev. Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed&#39s Christian Coalition stirring the conservative grassroots into action against the Bill Clinton administration.

Now, in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, Gary Bauer, a former Reagan administration official and longtime conservative activist, is heading up a new organisation aimed at countering liberal groups like MoveOn.org, and supporting President Bush&#39s global "war on terror".

The "Forgotten Americans Coalition" is composed of a number of veteran conservative leaders, including the American Family Association&#39s Dr. Don Wildmon, Christian Broadcasting Network&#39s Robertson, the Free Congress Foundation&#39s Paul Weyrich, and Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the wildly popular "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic novels, and his wife, Beverly, the founder of Concerned Women for America.

Just prior to their testimony before Congress of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on the situation in Iraq, the Forgotten Americans Coalition (FAC) issued a Declaration "warning Americans of the catastrophic consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq."

"Many of the [44] signers – who lead organisations with millions of members – are usually associated with issues like abortion, marriage and the family. Still, they feel compelled to speak out against a cut-and-run strategy being pushed by isolationists inside and beyond the confines of Congress," Bauer said in a FAC press release.

Don Feder, a conservative columnist and a member of the FAC steering committee observed: "By signing this declaration, religious conservatives are saying: &#39Yes, we care about marriage, the family and the unborn. But we also care about national security, the morale of our servicemen and women and the war on terrorism.&#39 The left, which thinks neo-cons are the only ones on the right opposing an Iraq withdrawal, had better think again."

But critics like Fred Clarkson, co-founder of the blog TalkToAction, says the coalition appears to be "a classic inside the beltway paper tiger".

"It doesn&#39t exist except to issue &#39messages&#39 to true believers and to make it appear in the media that there is more support for a failed foreign policy than really exists," he told IPS. "It smacks of a desperation move to shore up support even among religious conservatives, whose support for the war seems to be melting faster than the polar ice cap."

Rob Boston, the assistant director of communications for the civil liberties watchdog group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, agreed that the Forgotten Americans Coalition could be "just another Astroturf [rather than grassroots]organisation."

"But if we assume this is a serious effort," Boston told IPS, "it appears to be an attempt to create a &#39public relations surge&#39 among the far right to match the military one."

Although support for the Iraq war has pretty much disintegrated among the general population, "many religious right leaders have not wavered," Boston pointed out.

"Bauer, for example, was among a coterie of religious right leaders who met with Bush at the White House Feb. 1 for an update on the war. Bauer and his allies tend to view the war through a sectarian lens with the U.S. leading the way against &#39islamo-fascism.&#39 It&#39s a type of new crusade," Boston added.

The declaration, entitled, "The Tragic Consequences of a U.S. Withdrawal From Iraq", is FAC&#39s first public project. It says in part that "The Iraq war must be seen in the broader context of Islamo-fascism&#39s war on America and Western Civilization… If we pull out now, or announce a timetable for withdrawal, the region will be destabilised and Israel further endangered. Iran and Syria, two legs of the axis of evil, will become far more powerful…"

"It took 20 years to recover from the demoralising experience of our failure in Vietnam," the document reads. "How will we convince young Americans to enlist in the next effort to combat terrorism, if – by withdrawing now – we tacitly admit that more than 3,600 of our service men and women died in vain?"

"The coalition&#39s declaration shows us how closely top religious right leaders have hitched their wagon to the star of neoconservative militarism," Clarkson observed. "These leaders have made it clear, like Bush, that there is no going back. They are also at considerable pains to try to show that the religious right&#39s concern about domestic culture has anything to do with an unjustifiable war on the other side of the world."

In a column dated Sep. 14, Bauer wrote that "what&#39s most striking" about FAC "is the involvement of dozens of religious and family values leaders. Historically, values organisations have been reluctant to engage in foreign policy. But six years into a struggle that has reshaped understandings of the relationship between war and duty, our unique coalition reaffirms a fundamental insight: Victory is a values issue. We believe defeat at the hands of an ideology that worships death would be immoral."

Reading straight out of the Bush administration playbook, Bauer added: "Values voters also recognise that the battle against Islamic extremism, with Iraq as its central front, and their decades-long battle against materialism and cultural relativism are in fact two fronts in the same war for our survival…In a very real sense, victory in Iraq is inextricably linked not only with victory in the larger war on terror but also with our ability to protect our cherished values at home."

But in Clarkson&#39s view, "The cold war conservatives had an identity crisis when the cold war ended. But thanks to the neoconservative programme, framed by Samuel Huntington&#39s clash of civilisations thesis, cold war ideology is being revived in the form of anti-Islamism, and these leaders of the religious right are completely on board."

Americans United&#39s Rob Boston also connected the founding of FAC to the 2008 U.S. presidential election. "Gary Bauer undoubtedly also wants to use the war on terror to energise the far-right base in advance of the 2008 election. They need some new issues. You can only pass so many constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in the states, and the immigrant-bashing is getting a little tiresome," he noted.

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His column "Conservative Watch" documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 13 2007 (IPS)

In what was at least a symbolic blow to George W. Bush, a prominent Iraqi tribal sheikh and self-styled leader of the "Sunni Awakening" movement against al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was assassinated just hours before the U.S. president was to make his latest appeal for public support for his Iraq strategy.

The death in an apparent bombing outside his home of Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, whose rallying of local tribes against AQI has been cited by top U.S. officials as a turning point in Washington&#39s efforts to pacify Sunni-dominated al Anbar province, also came just 10 days after his high-profile meeting with Bush at a U.S. military base in Anbar.

The White House praised Abu Risha, who claimed to be 36 years old, in a statement released shortly after news of his murder reached here. "His efforts, and those of his fellow tribal sheikhs, to take the fight to al Qaeda and bring peace and security to Anbar and other regions of Iraq exemplify the courage and determination of the Iraqi people," it said.

"This is a sheikh who was one of the first to come forward to want to work with the United States to repel al Qaeda from al Anbar province," said Bush&#39s new spokeswoman, Dana Perino, while her Pentagon counterpart, Geoff Morrell, described Abu Risha as "a brave warrior" and expressed "our hope and belief that the has spawned a movement that will outlive him."

U.S. officials blamed the assassination on AQI. "It shows al Qaeda in Iraq remains a very dangerous and barbaric enemy," said Gen. David Petraeus, Washington&#39s top commander in Iraq who, in testimony before Congress and numerous interviews here this week, stressed that the Sunni Awakening was the most positive development in Iraq in the past year.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Petraeus also called Abu Risha "a very important, unifying figure and a really inspirational leader… [who helped] forge alliances and… keep different tribes up and down the Euphrates River valley together."

But independent experts noted that the sheikh had made many enemies among the Sunni leadership in Anbar.

"Although al Qaeda in Iraq is the leading suspect in this assassination," said Wayne White, a former senior State Department intelligence analyst on the Middle East, "Iraq&#39s diverse Sunni Arab community is rife with various tribal and other conflicts, rivalries and score-settling dating back many decades."

Marc Lynch, an expert on Arab media and the Sunni politics at George Washington University here, called Petraeus&#39s remarks "a leap to judgment emblematic of all which is wrong with America&#39s current views of the Sunnis of Iraq."

"In reality, there are a plethora of likely suspects, reflecting the reality of an intensely factionalised and divided community which little resembles the picture offered by the administration&#39s defenders," Lynch, whose blog, www.abuaardvark.org is widely read here, wrote in The American Prospect Online.

"Leaders of other tribes deeply resented Abu Risha&#39s prominence. Leaders of the major insurgency factions had for weeks been warning against allowing people such as Abu Risha to illegitimately reap the fruits of their jihad against the occupation," he noted.

Abu Risha, whose father and two three brothers were reportedly killed by AQI, first came to prominence late last year as a leader of the "Anbar Salvation Council", a group that was founded by various sheikhs last September to fight AQI&#39s efforts to impose an "Islamic State of Iraq" in the province.

"Al Qaeda made many enemies with its grandiose rhetoric, attacks on local political figures, attempts to enforce Islamic morality, and decisions to muscle in on tribal smuggling routes," according to Lynch, who has long stressed the tension within the Sunni insurgency between Sunni factions associated with AQI and its Islamist ideology and those that were more nationalist in orientation.

The much larger, nationalist factions turned against AQI, with the result that the group and its allies have suffered major political and military setbacks in Anbar, particularly in Abu Risha&#39s hometown of Ramadi, where violence has fallen sharply in recent months.

Some of the nationalist factions, like Abu Risha&#39s, have solicited and received aid and funding from U.S. forces and even the Shia-dominated central government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and, in return, have enrolled thousands of tribal militia in the police. Others, however, have refused to accept such assistance and have kept their distance from both Abu Risha and his movement, even while they actively fought AQI and its allies.

Last April, Abu Risha announced the creation of a new political party, called Iraq Awakening, a movement that has been cited repeatedly by Petraeus, administration officials and their hawkish supporters in the media as the most encouraging development in Iraq this year and one that Petraeus has been trying – with some success – to replicate in other Sunni-dominated areas in the country and even in Baghdad itself.

With his moustache, elegant goatee and aristocratic bearing, Abu Risha quickly became a fixture in Pentagon-escorted Congressional and media tours of Anbar. Earlier this week, neo-conservative pundit and Johns Hopkins University Professor Fouad Ajami described him in a lengthy Wall Street Journal column as "the dashing tribal leader who has emerged as the face of the new Sunni accommodation with American power."

It was not surprising then, that, at Bush&#39s meeting with tribal sheikhs during his lightning visit to the region last week, Abu Risha was seated right next to him, and photographs of the two shaking hands and consulting together appeared in dozens of Arab newspapers.

But Washington&#39s support for Abu Risha and other former Sunni insurgents-turned-allies has been seen as something of a devil&#39s bargain by many analysts. Abu Risha himself was largely regarded as a high-living opportunist who, in recent months, had been accused by other Sunni leaders of embezzling millions of dollars in U.S. assistance and betraying the Sunni cause.

More important are fears that Sunni cooperation with U.S. forces is simply a temporary marriage of convenience and that, contrary to the Ajami&#39s and the administration&#39s views, it does not signal any accommodation, or "bottom-up reconciliation," as some U.S. officials have described it, with the post-invasion, Shia-dominated regime or the U.S. military occupation.

"The danger is that once they run Al Qaeda out, they may turn on you, the Iraqi government, or both," Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at London&#39s International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), told the Christian Science Monitor in July.

Indeed, Lynch sees the nationalist Sunni insurgency as believing it has already defeated the U.S. occupation and is using U.S. support to prepare for the civil war that they believe will follow Washington&#39s withdrawal.

In his view, the administration has deluded itself into thinking that Abu Risha represented Sunnis&#39 willingness to engage in "bottom-up reconciliation" with the Shia regime when in fact, the Sunni community remains as unreconciled as ever.

"Abu Risha&#39s murder demonstrates the strategic naivete of [the administration&#39s] arguments," according to Lynch.

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By IPS Correspondents
BAGHDAD, Sep 13 2007 (IPS)

U.S. occupation authorities and successive U.S.-backed Iraqi governments have done little to stem the flow of Iraqis fleeing their war-torn country since the beginning of the occupation.

Syria, Jordan and Egypt have accepted millions of Iraqis to stay under state controlled regulations that have varied between loose and strict in accordance with whatever situation rules the moment.

"I took my family to Syria when the situation in Fallujah and other Sunni areas became complicated in 2004," Salim Saed from Fallujah, now a resident of Baghdad told IPS. "I thought the Americans, the UN and the whole world would definitely find a solution and so one year abroad would be enough to keep my family safe, then we would return home. I was simply wrong."

Countless other Iraqis have had the same experience.

"Over 1.5 million Iraqi citizens are in Syria now waiting for the situation to improve in their country so that they could return home," Mustafa Ahmad, an Iraqi expert on refugee affairs in Baghdad explained to IPS. "Iraqis are well known for their deep roots and the majority of them are thinking of home more than immigration and resettlement, but the situation in Iraq is making them search for other solutions than returning."

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are at least 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, but many experts believe the number is now closer to two million. The number streaming across Iraq’s border is now as high as 50,000 every month.

Their influx has strained the education, health and housing systems in Syria, and pushed the government to call for international assistance and tighten visa requirements.

During the end of August, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made a three-day visit to Damascus where he pledged his government would increase support to Syria for his people living in that country, but most refugees don’t expect their plight to improve.

Syria provides Iraqis with free health-care and education facilities, but Damascus recently said the annual cost of the massive Iraqi influx was 1 billion dollars.

In a statement which did not instill hope for Iraqis in Syria, during his visit Maliki told Syrian officials, "We must guarantee stability in order to ensure (the refugees) return to their country."

The Syrian and Jordanian governments are, between them, dealing with an estimated 2.75 million refugees. Both governments have been complaining for a long time that Iraq has not taken adequate responsibility for the refugee situation.

"Syrian authorities always opened the boarders to fleeing Iraqis," Numan Jamil, a retired teacher from Baghdad who has just returned from Syria told IPS. "But every time a senior Iraqi official visited Syria, there were more restrictions on Iraqis. I decided to come home and face my fate with dignity rather than the humiliation of living like beggars abroad."

Iraqi officials have long since insisted that Syria and Jordan begin to issue visas to Iraqis who enter the two countries, but both governments always refused to do so until recently.

This week, the two countries announced that Iraqis would soon be asked for visas when entering, a move which greatly complicates the situation for fleeing Iraqis, many who are doing so under the threat of death.

"This means the exile of more than half of the Iraqis from Syria," Abbas Jawad, an unemployed lawyer from Baghdad told IPS. "Iraqis have to cross the Syrian border every month in order to obtain one more month of residence permit on their entry. Now that they have to get a visa, it means that they cannot go back into Syria, meaning they are exiled back to Iraq against their will."

"This is the bullet in the head for us," Othman Majid told IPS in Baghdad, "We will be hunted by the militias near the embassies and so those who could leave the country are only those who are close to the government and the militias. I was supposed to be in Syria in November to complete my medical check ups, but the new regulations mean I must forget about it."

Countless families are now separated across Syria, Jordan, Egypt and home. Iraqis now find it more difficult than ever to leave their country, as Syria was the only country which did not require a visa. For those who have fled, the only way for them to return home is to be met with arrest, assassination, death threats and instability.

The Iraqi Red Crescent reported recently that that since the U.S. military troop "surge" began in February 2007, the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has nearly doubled, from 499,000 to over 1.1 million. A UNHCR survey released in July put the figure at 2 million.

Twenty four hours after President George W. Bush’s recent surprise visit to Iraq, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a damning report that claimed little political progress had been made in Iraq, and concluded that "violence remains high" in the country.

Bush praised the U.S. military for it’s "progress" in Iraq.

The GAO report said the Bush administration had failed to meet the vast majority of military and political benchmarks set by Congress this year. Only three of the 18 benchmarks have been met, it said.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

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By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Sep 12 2007 (IPS)

After two days of Congressional testimony by Washington&#39s top two officials in Iraq, prospects for a substantial withdrawal of U.S. military forces there before the end of President George W. Bush&#39s tenure at the White House look as remote as ever.

President Bush meets with Gen. Petraeus at the White House in January. Credit: White House photo/Eric Draper

That would leave at least 135,000 U.S. soldiers and marines in place – roughly the same number of troops deployed to Iraq before Bush&#39s "surge" strategy was initiated last February – thus passing along to his successor, who will take office in January 2009, the problem of extricating the U.S. from its bloodiest and most costly overseas adventure since the Vietnam War.

Democratic leaders say such a reduction is not nearly enough, particularly in light of the inability of either Petraeus or his civilian counterpart in Baghdad, Amb. Ryan Crocker, to point to any serious progress over the past eight months in achieving the kind of national reconciliation among the warring factions in Iraq that the surge was designed to promote.

"Are we any closer to a lasting political settlement in Iraq…today than we were when the surge began eight months ago, and if we continue to surge for another six months, the Sunnis, the Shias and the Kurds will stop killing each other and start governing together?" asked Sen. Joseph Biden, who chaired Tuesday&#39s Foreign Relations Committee hearings at which Crocker and Petraeus testified. "The answer to both those questions is &#39no&#39."

Some Republicans appeared to agree, including two of the war&#39s most steadfast backers – Rep. James Walsh and Sen. Elizabeth Dole – who said they had changed their minds.

"The continued failure of the (Nouri al-) Maliki government to achieve reconciliation, and the fact that current U.S. force levels are not sustainable beyond next spring, compels me to support what some have called &#39action-forcing measures&#39," Dole said, suggesting that she would support Democratic efforts to at least change the current mission of U.S. forces from counter-insurgency to intensified training of Iraqi forces.

But even with the two most recent defectors&#39 support, Democrats are still unlikely to come within hailing distance of the two-thirds majority they need to overcome a veto by Bush of any legislation that would force him to change the military mission in Iraq, let alone withdraw more troops more quickly.

"Unless we get 67 votes to override a veto, there is nothing we can do to end this war," said Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joseph Biden. At this point, most analysts believe that the 50 Senate Democrats will be fortunate to muster the more than 60 votes they need to cut off a Republican filibuster on any war-ending or mission-changing legislation they introduce.

While breaching the 60-vote threshold in the Senate would be seen as a serious political blow to Bush, most analysts believe that the president is not prepared to compromise and still believes that Washington can prevail in Iraq. This attitude was expressed most directly, if crassly, by him during a conversation with a senior Australian officials at last week&#39s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Sydney last week.

"We&#39re kicking ass in Iraq," he reportedly told Deputy Premier Mark Vaile.

Petraeus was indeed able to cite statistics that showed a substantial decline in sectarian violence in Baghdad – the surge&#39s main tactical goal – if not the rest of Iraq. However, both he and Crocker conceded that progress on the political front – that is, national reconciliation, the surge&#39s overall strategic objective – was negligible, at best.

Petraeus also admitted that the one clear achievement of the past seven months, the eviction of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) by Sunni tribal militias in much of al Anbar province, had taken place spontaneously and was unrelated to the surge, although he stressed that U.S. military forces were actively recruiting and supporting Sunni militias elsewhere in hopes of replicating the relative pacification of Anbar in other Sunni-dominated regions.

He and Crocker, as well as other administration officials and supporters, depicted developments in Anbar as part of a "bottoms-up strategy" for national reconciliation by which former Sunni insurgents had become de facto allies of U.S. forces and even the Shia-dominated Maliki government against AQI.

But that notion has been questioned by a number of lawmakers and independent analysts who have argued that, while the militias now consider AQI the greater enemy, they may very well end up turning their guns on the government and on U.S. forces that support it.

"If (the bottoms-up strategy) is not successful in bringing all forces into some kind of reconciliation, it will simply provide the fuel for a much more violent civil war," said James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defence Policy Center of the Rand Corporation, who served as Washington&#39s Special Envoy to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, and Afghanistan after civil conflicts in those countries.

In his testimony, Petraeus recommended that Washington withdraw 2,000 marines by the end of this month and another 4,000 soldiers before the end of the year. Some 24,000 more troops would be gradually withdrawn over the first seven months of 2008, according to Petraeus&#39 plan, which also called for Congress to review the situation again next March.

But critics pointed out that under the military&#39s current regulations – whereby tours of duty in combat zones are limited to 15 months – 30,000 troops would have to be withdrawn from Iraq by late next spring in any event and that the early withdrawal of 6,000 troops appeared designed to earn the goodwill, and continued loyalty, of increasingly uneasy Republicans.

"It seems to me that this is throwing a sop to a very influential Republican," said ret. Gen. Robert Gard. He noted that Sen. John Warner, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has become increasingly outspoken about his doubts about the surge and U.S. strategy, had called earlier this month for Bush to bring home a brigade before Christmas.

"It&#39s a political move," said Jon Alterman, director of Middle East programmes at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, of the plan. "It may be enough to buy the president enough time and get the appropriations he seeks to (continue) fund(ing) the war."

The administration is pressing Congress to approve 200 billion dollars to finance military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2008, which begins Oct. 1.

Still, Democrats are working with as many as a dozen worried Republicans on drafting legislation that would make it much harder for Bush to "stay the course" through the end of his term.

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