Veterans for Common Sense

Safia Taleb al-Souhail has ambitions to be Iraq’s first woman president one day. A month before a poll in which she hopes to win a parliamentary seat, the former exile is upbeat about women’s rights and democracy.

She says the only reason a new Iraqi constitution approved in a referendum last month did not do as much for women as she hoped was a lack of time to negotiate the details, and she is sure changes can be made in the new parliament.

“I believe our situation as women is going to be much better in the near future,” says Souhail, a leading anti-Saddam Hussein activist who was invited to U.S. President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech in February where she made headlines by hugging the mother of a U.S. marine killed in Iraq.

“I’m very serious,” says Souhail, 40, assessing her political chances. “I will run for election for Iraqi president. Of course not this time, but maybe next time.”

Bidour al-Yassri, who runs a women’s organization in the southern Shi’ite city of Samawa, has a very different outlook.

A center to train women as seamstresses that she helped set up with United Nations backing has been attacked with mortars, and her efforts to bring women into the police force under a British training program have angered some local men.

“The men were threatening me, they gathered in front of our office shouting that there are no jobs for men, let alone women,” Yassri said.

Under a quota system introduced before last January’s election for a transitional assembly, at least a quarter of the seats in Iraq’s parliament are reserved for women. But Yassri said politicians in Samawa paid only lip service to women’s interests at election time.

“We tried to encourage women to run for parliament but they refused because they know how the tribes see women — they consider women inferior,” Yassri said.

RELIGION IN THE CONSTITUTION

Despite the fact women ended up with 31 percent of seats after the January poll, a new post-Saddam constitution drafted by the interim parliament was a disappointment to some because it assigns a primary role to Islam as a source for legislation.

Women’s campaigners have denounced wording that grants each religious sect the right to run its own family courts — apparently doing away with previous civil codes — as an open door to give Islam further influence in the legal system.

“It was a mistake,” says Hanaa Edwar, a Christian who is secretary of the Iraqi Women’s Network. “Now it’s religious, and it’s not only religious, it’s also sectarian.”

She and others are pinning their hopes on amendments to the constitution, which will be the first item on the agenda of the new parliament in the first four months after the election.

“We have the chance, especially at the beginning, to re-discuss it, to push for some clarifying articles,” Souhail said. Family law is one area that needs to be standardized so that different religious sects cannot trump Iraqi national law in the area of marriage or inheritance, she said.

“What we’re asking for is not against our tradition or our religion or views in society, but maybe we needed more time to explain it,” Souhail said, playing down the strength of opposition. “I don’t know who’s going to resist it,” she said.

Ethnic and sectarian tensions have dominated the run-up to the December 15 parliamentary election, exacerbated by violence that has touched every community in Iraq, from Shi’ites to Sunni Arabs, Kurds to Turkmens and other minority groups.

At the last election in January, a Shi’ite Islamist bloc took the majority of seats after Sunni Arabs boycotted the vote, raising concerns among secular Iraqis about the influence of powerful Iranian-backed clerics and religious militias.

Zainab Fou’ad, 24, who is studying French at Baghdad University, said parliament had done nothing for women since then. “I believe women’s rights can’t be achieved under a religious government,” she said.

This time, Sunni Arabs are expected to vote in large numbers, offering the possibility of a more representative parliament.

More than 200 parties and coalitions have registered for the ballot, including secular parties and small local groups that have a better chance of winning seats under a new system of proportional representation for Iraq’s 18 provinces.

PUPPETS AND STRONG WOMEN

Every third name on each list must be a woman, a provision Edwar said put some religious parties in a difficult situation.

“Some of them are still saying ‘Why should we put a woman on the list?'” she said.

“The result of the (last) election brought very weak women into the national assembly,” she said. “They were women from the political parties who always said yes to the political parties.”

Edwar, whose organization runs a range of small-scale projects in health, education and women’s rights around the country, says in recent months she has become disillusioned.

She says Iraq should not turn its back on its long history of education among women dating back long before Saddam’s days.

“We need the parties to include strong women. We don’t need a puppet or a tool in your hands, to be used only for your own interest,” she said. “But they don’t like to have strong women.”

Souhail, the first woman on a list headed by secular Shi’ite former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, said the next parliament should be less dominated by big blocs, with more secular voices.

“People at the beginning were angry from Saddam Hussein’s time so everybody wanted to vote for their identity,” she said, explaining the attraction of the Shi’ite and Kurdish blocs. This time, she says, issues will be more important.

In the provinces, women like Souhail, who lived abroad for most of her life until Saddam was toppled, may face another kind of resistance.

Nisreen Youssif, a 41-year-old lawyer, is running for parliament in the southern city of Kerbala, another Shi’ite stronghold. “Many of the women in parliament have come from abroad,” she said. “They haven’t suffered and they don’t know the nature of women in Iraq.”

(Additional reporting by Aseel Kami and Hiba Moussa in Baghdad, Sami al-Jumeili in Kerbala and Hamid Fadhil in Samawa)

A consensus is slowly building in the United States among both congressional Republicans and Democrats that a phased withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq will begin next year.

Whether euphemized as “redeployment” or described frankly as withdrawal, the new strategy has moved into the mainstream. In this new context, the positions still being defended by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are beginning to look increasingly marginalized.

The various phased withdrawal plans proposed by Congress and the Pentagon would permit a steady withdrawal of US troops over time as Iraqi government forces increase their fighting abilities.

According to this approach, a strengthened Iraqi government force would suppress and contain the Sunni insurgency as American troops come home.

The pressure is rapidly building for the White House to embrace phased withdrawal as its own policy. Perhaps the Iraqi parliamentary elections scheduled for December 15 will afford this opportunity.

If implemented as conceived, a successful phased withdrawal would leave behind a secure Iraq that would not become a breeding ground for al-Qaeda, nor permit a resurgence of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party.

Withdrawing over time in phases would prevent the insurgency from overwhelming the Iraqi government as US troops draw down. After enough time, Iraqi government forces could stand on their own.

Iraqi government ground forces are indeed becoming more robust, but in order to suppress the jihadis and resurgent Ba’athists after a phased withdrawal, the Iraqi government will also need to possess a capable air force.

Air power has proven to be essential in Iraq. US forces themselves are dependant on massive modern air power and complex ground and sea-based control systems – both to protect US troops and to carry out offensive military operations. For example, during the November 2004 reconquest of Fallujah, US carrier-based aircraft alone flew more than 21,000 hours of combat missions and dropped at least 54,000 pounds of bombs over that city.

Modern warfare as practiced in Iraq is complex “net-centric warfare” in which complex air-ground systems play an essential role. For example, at Fallujah, 25 American warplanes at a time were perilously stacked up over the nine square mile city. American forces at Fallujah depended on hundreds of precision-guided bombs guided by satellite-based global positioning systems. Battlefield commanders on the ground used unmanned drones such as Predator to beam down real time video pictures taken from over their enemy’s heads.

Some of these networked air-ground systems comprise a part of a vast “reachback” infrastructure that is controlled by operators based at communications centers in the US and integrated into the Global Information Grid (GIG).

To carry out future offensive operations against strongholds such as Fallujah, a credible Iraqi military force will require at least modern combat aircraft, if not a sophisticated air-ground communication capacity.

However, there are no plans to assist the Iraqi government in establishing a fighting air force. The “Iraqi Air Force”, such as it is, consists of fewer than 40 aircraft – two Vietnam-era Huey helicopters, a handful of Bell traffic helicopters, some Piper Cub-like propeller-driven observation planes and three troop transports. According to an assessment by an American Air Force general, only six of the Iraqi aircraft can actually fly.

A complete phased withdrawal of all US forces would leave the Iraqi government with its air force of traffic helicopters at the mercy of, and playing on a level playing field with, all the other sectarian paramilitary militias vying for power in the country.

The Iraqi Air Force is not now a fighting air force. If the Bush administration has any plans for such a force, it is a very well kept secret.

It is hard not to conclude that withdrawal would leave Iraq with a ground-only military completely dependent on US air power for its survival. Indeed, there are signs that the Pentagon is prepared for this contingency.

New military communication systems are now being deployed that point to a permanent US presence in Iraq – after an ostensible phased withdrawal.

The semi-permanent communications systems deployed prior to the battle for Fallujah are now being augmented with a permanent enduring communications infrastructure. This new permanent communication infrastructure will provide commanders with secure video, voice and data communications via satellite, microwave and fiber throughout the Iraq-Kuwait theater of operations.

The system, which will crisscross Iraq and connect more than 100 bases, is projected to cost $4 billion – although the Pentagon has been leaking the story that just four stay-behind US bases will remain in Iraq after withdrawal.

From the foregoing, it is hard not to conclude that phased withdrawal is being utilized as a slogan under which military operations will continue – and that thousands of American combat troops may still be in Iraq for many years to come.

Those Democratic members of Congress who think well of themselves for now advocating phased withdrawal are either deluding themselves, or they are continuing to play the same double game many of them began playing when they originally voted to authorize the use of force – and then sniped at the Bush administration over the subsequent conduct of the war.

Phased withdrawal is an empty slogan that can only result in prolonging the war. It is knowingly advocated by those who wish to prolong the war, and naively advocated by some who earnestly oppose the war.

To the limited extent that a phased withdrawal does result in a draw-down of the number of American combat troops, the pernicious policy will place those troops remaining in ever-greater danger and thereby increase the number of dead and maimed American soldiers.

This is because under a phased withdrawal, Iraq would become progressively more dangerous for American troops, more lawless, and then eventually fall under the sway of the most ruthless and violent of the insurgent and paramilitary forces.

A strategy of phased withdrawal, if actually implemented, might leave Iraq in the hands of America’s most avowed enemies and become a secure base from which dangerous terrorist forces could lash out at the US. An Iraq after phased withdrawal could become in reality the looming danger that Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Iraq was mistakenly held out to be before the war.

The road ahead
From a military-political point of view, the Iraq war is unsustainable. It will not change the facts to point out that the US could defeat the insurgency over time. There is no more time.

The American people will not abide Iraq for 10 more years. In fact, the longer American forces are in Iraq, the more impatient Americans have become. As the months go by without visible progress, it becomes more and more clear that time is not the problem – nor the solution.

There is no military problem on Earth that the US armed forces cannot resolve, but Iraq is not a military problem – it is a political problem, and the root political problem of Iraq is the widespread perception among Iraqis that its government is politically illegitimate.

The perception that the Iraqi government is illegitimate does not stem from the government’s inability to establish basic civilized living conditions for it citizens; rather, its illegitimacy stems from the government’s origins in invasion and occupation – and from its continued dependency on the US.

Nor is the violence – as has been said – the inevitable result of the presence of thousands of American troops. American troops peacefully occupied Germany and Japan after World War II, and are quietly based in many countries around the world.

Illegitimacy is the problem, and a dependent Iraqi state will always be deemed by insurgent Iraqi nationalists as illegitimate.

It does no good to simply blame the Bush administration’s policies for creating this conundrum. There is plenty of blame to be shared, and in time, those responsible for the worst misfeasance will no doubt have their accounting.

How can Iraq remain a unitary state, protect the rights of its various communities, establish political legitimacy in the eyes of its people, establish security for its citizens, eradicate the allies of al-Qaeda inside its borders, empower the Shi’ite majority and prevent Iranian influence from overwhelming the country?

Countries, like eggs, are easier to scramble than unscramble, but there is a way forward. To see the solution we need to step back and look at a slightly larger picture – and also a potentially explosive problem.

Historically, the main conflict in the greater Persian Gulf region has been the clash between competing Arab and Persian nationalisms. This competition is complicated by the fact that while virtually all Persians are Shi’ite and the vast majority of Arabs are Sunni, there are in the Gulf region significant geographical concentrations of Shi’ite Arabs. As is well-known, one of these concentrations is in southern Iraq, where Arab Shi’ites are the majority. Other Shi’ite Arab communities live as oppressed or restive minorities in contagious neighboring Saudi Arabia and Iran.

These intercommunal issues are not new – they have been building up tensions for centuries. Pressures for a Shi’ite-dominated Iraq to protect nearby Shi’ite populations and even absorb them into a Shi’ite superstate could become irresistible. This may lead to intercommunal violence across the region and even the disintegration and reconstitution of existing states along sectarian lines.

To the limited extent that a phased withdrawal is implemented, it will serve to embolden Shi’ite Arabs wishing for a Shi’ite Arab state, and will tend to destabilize existing states in the wider region.

A stable Iraq must reestablish a stable national identity that supersedes explosive sectarian divisions. A stable Iraq must also not be viewed as an American protectorate – it must be viewed within the wider Arab world as a legitimate and independent sovereign state. If not, it will continue to be a target for destabilization.

Only a shared national identity that protects all citizens under the rule of law can facilitate a stable Iraq.

What common denominator can serve to unite the majority of Iraqis? What group in Iraq shares either religion or language with the vast majority of the rest of the population? What group in Iraq has the closest and best relations with the wider Arab world? The answer to all these questions is Sunni Arabs.

Sunni Arabs are the common denominator of Iraqi society. They are Arab like the Shi’ite Arabs and Sunni like the vast majority of Kurds. Sunni Arabs, notwithstanding their small percentage of the population, are the keystone that held Iraq together under the Ba’ath, and until Sunni Arabs are again made central to the political process, Iraq will continue to disintegrate.

The Arab nationalism of the Ba’ath Party was held out to be secular, and by downplaying Sunni parochialism, it attempted (at least in theory) to be inclusive toward the Shi’ite Arab community – which together with the Sunni Arabs, constitute about 80{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Iraq’s population.

Arab nationalism in the form of the Ba’ath Party was the great common denominator that held together Saddam’s criminal Ba’athist regime. Ba’athism under Saddam was implemented by notoriously corrupt and evil people –there is no denying any of that.

Indeed, the Bush administration did not want Ba’athism to survive the war, and accordingly no offer of surrender was proffered to the former Iraqi regime. The predictable result was the disintegration of the Iraqi state, as the Ba’athist bureaucracy went underground or fled the country.

What happened to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad was not the orderly surrender of a modern state – it was more like a Medieval conquest. In the looting and chaos that followed that conquest, all state institutions disintegrated, and those Iraqis wealthy enough flee Iraq did so. The freely allowed export of scrap metal encouraged the wholesale looting of entire state-owned factories, which were dismantled, hauled out of the country by truck and shipped off to be melted down.

The looting and devastation of Iraq left a shattered country without a political class, bureaucracy or functional infrastructure. Without modern institutions to protect them, citizens fell back on ties of family, clan and denomination. The result, as we see it today, is a country in chaos on the verge of a sectarian civil war – a civil war that because of its sectarian aspect has the potential to spread beyond the borders of Iraq and ignite a wider Sunni versus Shi’ite conflict.

The present sorry situation was the result of a conscious decision to place the destruction of the Ba’ath Party infrastructure ahead of all other considerations.

With hindsight, it is easy to see that there should have been an orderly surrender and transfer of power after the invasion. The Ba’ath Party should not have been driven underground and persecuted after the invasion, but rather purged of miscreant elements and those members who were very close to Saddam.

If elements of the Ba’ath leadership had been permitted to surrender to American forces either conditionally or unconditionally, then the chaos that followed the invasion would not have occurred. After an orderly surrender, the Ba’ath Party should have been purged, reformed and finally rehabilitated.

The instability in the current Iraqi political system is the unavoidable result of destroying the Ba’ath Party and its state infrastructure.

But that is all just history now. On December 15, much-anticipated Iraqi parliamentary elections will be held under the recently approved constitution. This election is being eagerly heralded as a milestone by the US government, but what some Sunnis call the “American constitution” is a dead-end for Iraq’s problems because it does not address the core issue – illegitimacy and the perceived loss of national sovereignty.

An Iraq in which all political parties may contest elections can attract the support of excluded elements and end the present impasse of illegitimacy. A reformed Ba’ath Party would have to first disarm and purge itself of its criminal and totalitarian elements. Afterward it should be free to organize like any other political party.

An Iraq governed in coalition with a reconstituted, reformed and inclusive Ba’ath Party can end the present impasse of illegitimacy. The reformed Ba’ath Party, like all other Iraqi political parties, should be demilitarized. There is no place in a functioning parliamentary democracy for armed militias.

After the Ba’ath Party has been permitted to organize and operate freely, it will be able to contest parliamentary elections. This process will take time. Therefore, the December Iraqi parliamentary election must be postponed until all political parties have time to organize for that vote.

The main goal now for the US is to get out without leaving Iraq to become a jihadi time bomb. An Iraq that becomes a secure base for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is a worst-case scenario before which the return to predominance in Iraq of the Ba’ath pales in comparison.

The US can simply do now what it should have done from the very beginning – allow all groups in Iraq to become part of the democratic process.

Blinded by hatred of an anti-American regime and their ignorance of an exotic culture, US decision-makers have plunged the American people into a quagmire.

Americans can take the first step out of this quagmire by drawing on their rich democratic heritage. The Americans people are inherently honest and would lose nothing by admitting that outlawing the Ba’ath was a mistake. All political parties in Iraq must now be legalized, and the elections must be postponed.

Mark Rothschild writes on international relations from Los Angeles, California.

Shake and Bake

Let us pause and count the ways the conduct of the war in Iraq has damaged America’s image and needlessly endangered the lives of those in the military. First, multilateralism was tossed aside. Then the post-invasion fiasco muddied the reputation of military planners and caused unnecessary casualties. The W.M.D. myth undermined the credibility of United States intelligence and President Bush himself, and the abuse of prisoners stole America’s moral high ground.

Now the use of a ghastly weapon called white phosphorus has raised questions about how careful the military has been in avoiding civilian casualties. It has also further tarnished America’s credibility on international treaties and the rules of warfare.

White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago. Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy’s positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body.

The United States restricted the use of incendiaries like white phosphorus after Vietnam, and in 1983, an international convention banned its use against civilians. In fact, one of the many crimes ascribed to Saddam Hussein was dropping white phosphorus on Kurdish rebels and civilians in 1991.

But white phosphorus has made an ugly comeback. Italian television reported that American forces used it in Falluja last year against insurgents. At first, the Pentagon said the chemical had been used only to illuminate the battlefield, but had to backpedal when it turned out that one of the Army’s own publications talked about using white phosphorus against insurgent positions, a practice well known enough to have one of those unsettling military nicknames: “shake and bake.”

The Pentagon says white phosphorus was never aimed at civilians, but there are lingering reports of civilian victims. The military can’t say whether the reports are true and does not intend to investigate them, a decision we find difficult to comprehend. Pentagon spokesmen say the Army took “extraordinary measures” to reduce civilian casualties, but they cannot say what those measures were.

They also say that using white phosphorus against military targets is legal. That’s true, but the 1983 convention bans its use against “civilians or civilian objects,” which would make white phosphorus attacks in urban settings like Falluja highly inappropriate at best. The United States signed that convention, but the portion dealing with incendiary weapons has been awaiting ratification in the Senate.

These are technicalities, in any case. Iraq, where winning over wary civilians is as critical as defeating armed insurgents, is no place to be using a weapon like this. More broadly, American demands for counterproliferation efforts and international arms control ring a bit hollow when the United States refuses to give up white phosphorus, not to mention cluster bombs and land mines.

The United States should be leading the world, not dragging its feet, when it comes to this sort of issue – because it’s right and because all of us, including Americans, are safer in a world in which certain forms of conduct are regarded as too inhumane even for war. That is why torture should be banned in American prisons. And it is why the United States should stop using white phosphorus.

Bush’s fascist Valhalla

The strategy to militarize the country is moving forward as planned despite apparent setbacks in Iraq. As the Washington Post reported on Nov. 27 the Dept of Defense is expanding its domestic surveillance activity to allow Pentagon spies to track down and “investigate crimes within the United States.”

An alarmed Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore) said, “We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without a congressional hearing.”  Is this the first time that the naive Wyden realized that the war on terror is actually directed at the American people?

The expanded powers of the Pentagon were presented in a proposal by a presidential commission headed by Lawrence Silberman and former Senator Charles Robb, two members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the 9-11 “whitewash” commission. The CFR, a 4,000 member amalgam of elites from the military, industry and media, was the driving force behind the Iraq war, as well as, enthusiastic advocates of the national security state. Their recommendations will allow the military to assume the traditional role of law enforcement and by giving it the authority to “carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United States.”

Oh, yeah; and the Pentagon will be involved in the “apprehension, or detention of individuals suspected” of criminal offenses.

This is a giant step for removing dissidents and political enemies while further militarizing the country.

The Patriot Act is also up for renewal and will remove the last nettlesome parts of the 4th amendment and any conceivable notion of personal privacy. “Lone wolf” provisions in the new bill allow law enforcement to investigate any American citizen, whether he is connected to an “alleged” terrorist organization or not, seizing whatever records they want, without having to show “probable cause”. The same is true of the Act’s NSS (National Security Letters) which permits government agents to sort through all of one’s private records without judicial oversight.

The “due process” provisions of the Bill of Rights has been summarily removed by the 4th Circuit Court in its recent Jose Padilla ruling which allows the president to arbitrarily imprison an American citizen “indefinitely” without charging him with a crime. The long-standing “presumption of innocence”, habeas corpus, and inalienable rights were quietly rescinded without as much as a whimper from the American people.

At the same time Bush has put “a broad swath of the FBI” under his direct control by creating the National Security Service (aka; the “New SS”)? This is the first time we’ve had a “secret police” in our 200 year history. It will be run exclusively by the president and beyond the range of congressional oversight.

On October 27, 2005 Bush created the National Clandestine Service, which will be headed by CIA Director Porter Goss and will “expand reporting of information and intelligence value from state, local and tribal law enforcement entities and private sector stakeholders”? This executive order gives the CIA the power to carry out covert operations, spying, propaganda, and “dirty tricks” within the United States and on the American public. (“The New National Intelligence Strategy of the US” by Larry Chin, Global Research)

Also, within 2 years every American license and passport will be made according to federal uniform standards including microchips (with biometric information) that will allow the government to trace every movement of its citizens?

All of these changes in the law have taken place below the radar of public attention and all of them correspond to a “nutcase” conspiracy by the CFR to transform Canada, Mexico and the US into one, integrated “free trade” nation in 5 years time. (I’m not making this up) See: Trilateral Task Force Recommendations.

The only thing that makes this bizarre specter of a “capitalist police state” seem believable is that Bush has already carried out most of the basic recommendations of that other wacky conspiracy theory; The Project for the New American Century. The US has extended its military presence throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, curtailed civil liberties at home, greatly enhanced the power of the president, militarized space, passed legislation for Missile Defense “Star Wars”, and reinvigorated the bio-chemical weapons industry. All of these were outlined in the PNAC.

Sometimes “conspiracy theories” come to fruition despite our unwillingness to give them credence.

So, let me make a prediction, however groundless and far-fetched as it may seem.

The 5 years of work that went into creating the Bush National Security State will not be passed on to some anemic Democrat, like Hillary Clinton, according to the normal protocols. The “capitalist police state” represents the concerted efforts of myriad elites from all walks of life; particularly banking, big energy, military and media. The last obstacle to realizing their macabre vision is Congress; the final hurdle to absolute power.

If some unforeseen tragedy befalls congress, like another anthrax attack, what should we expect from the Bush administration?

Well, we have a pretty good idea, since the American Enterprise Institute, to which the Bush team is closely aligned, has already “issued proposals for the operation of Congress following a catastrophic terrorist attack”. They advocate the “APPOINTING” of individuals to the House of Representatives “to fill the seats of dead or incapacitated members, a first in American history”… “The Continuity of Government Commission is ‘self-commissioned’, its members being neither elected nor appointed by any government body…and mostly made up of professional lobbyists”. (Read the whole article http://www.conservativeusa.org/cog-ronpaul.htm)

So, lobbyists and industry representatives will replace duly-elected congressman?

This gives us some idea of the seething contempt that right-wing elites have for democracy and how they plan to dismantle Congress when given half a chance.

Presently, Bush’s fortunes are inextricably tied to an “unwinnable” war in Iraq. As his popularity has dwindled, Congress has become more reluctant to promote his far-right agenda and make further cuts to popular social programs. This situation will only get worse as we approach the 2006 mid-term elections.

Could it be time to “look the other way” while terrorists enter the country?

According to Sean Hannity, right-wing shiatsu for the FOX News channel, terrorists have already snuck in through our “porous borders”.

A preemptive strike on congress would lift the battered Bush from the political ash-heap and put the finishing touches on the imperial presidency.

It may be time for another galvanizing “Pearl Harbor-type event”; one that will strike at the legislative nerve-center of American democracy. With Congress out of the picture, the path is clear for one man rule and Bush’s fascist Valhalla.

UP IN THE AIR: Where is the Iraq war headed next?

by Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker, Posted November 28, 2005 (for December 5, 2005 edition)

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration’s best-case scenario is that the parliamentary election scheduled for December 15th will produce a coalition government that will join the Administration in calling for a withdrawal to begin in the spring. By then, the White House hopes, the new government will be capable of handling the insurgency. In a speech on November 19th, Bush repeated the latest Administration catchphrase: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” He added, “When our commanders on the ground tell me that Iraqi forces can defend their freedom, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.” One sign of the political pressure on the Administration to prepare for a withdrawal came last week, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News that the current level of American troops would not have to be maintained “for very much longer,” because the Iraqis were getting better at fighting the insurgency.

A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he has seen scant indication that the President would authorize a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that it would impede the war against the insurgency. There are several proposals currently under review by the White House and the Pentagon; the most ambitious calls for American combat forces to be reduced from a hundred and fifty-five thousand troops to fewer than eighty thousand by next fall, with all American forces officially designated “combat” to be pulled out of the area by the summer of 2008. In terms of implementation, the planner said, “the drawdown plans that I’m familiar with are condition-based, event-driven, and not in a specific time frame”—that is, they depend on the ability of a new Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency. (A Pentagon spokesman said that the Administration had not made any decisions and had “no plan to leave, only a plan to complete the mission.”)

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield.”

He continued, “We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004.” The war against the insurgency “may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win,” he said. “As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we’re set to go. There’s no sense that the world is caving in. We’re in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message.”

One Pentagon adviser told me, “There are always contingency plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I don’t think the President will go for it”—until the insurgency is broken. “He’s not going to back off. This is bigger than domestic politics.”

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

There are grave concerns within the military about the capability of the U.S. Army to sustain two or three more years of combat in Iraq. Michael O’Hanlon, a specialist on military issues at the Brookings Institution, told me, “The people in the institutional Army feel they don’t have the luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating in the debate. They’re planning on staying the course until 2009. I can’t believe the Army thinks that it will happen, because there’s no sustained drive to increase the size of the regular Army.” O’Hanlon noted that “if the President decides to stay the present course in Iraq some troops would be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours of combat by 2007 and 2008, which could have serious consequences for morale and competency levels.”

Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public,” a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that “things were fucked up.” But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.

One person with whom the Pentagon’s top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer “from what I call battle fatigue” in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as “the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the White House’s claims—that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers “haven’t captured any in this latest activity”—the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. “So this idea that they’re coming in from outside, we still think there’s only seven per cent.”

Murtha’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy—both on substance and politically,” the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan Air Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha’s speech, Bush said, “The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. . . . If they’re not stopped, the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our government into isolation. I’m going to make you this commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.”

“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”

“It’s a serious business,” retired Air Force General Charles Horner, who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991 Gulf War, said. “The Air Force has always had concerns about people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force forward air controllers. We need people on active duty to think it out, and they will. There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else.” (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said there were plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to rely on the United States for some time.)

The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant—and underreported—aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. “With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way,” a Marine press release said, “Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line.” Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. “This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations,” Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.

In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief”—the instructions provided before takeoff—a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a ‘hot-read’ ”—from a military unit on the ground—“and you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”

The second senior military planner told me that there are essentially two types of targeting now being used in Iraq: a deliberate site-selection process that works out of air-operations centers in the region, and “adaptive targeting”—supportive bombing by prepositioned or loitering warplanes that are suddenly alerted to firefights or targets of opportunity by military units on the ground. “The bulk of what we do today is adaptive,” the officer said, “and it’s divorced from any operational air planning. Airpower can be used as a tool of internal political coercion, and my attitude is that I can’t imagine that we will give that power to the Iraqis.”

This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the targeting, “there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets—it’s a reversion to the Stone Age. There’s no operational art. That’s what happens when you give targeting to the Army—they hit what the local commander wants to hit.”

One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that “American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better.” But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. “We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now,” the consultant said. “But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going to have authority to call in air strikes? There’s got to be a behavior-based rule.”

General John Jumper, who retired last month after serving four years as the Air Force chief of staff, was “in favor of certification of those Iraqis who will be allowed to call in strikes,” the Pentagon consultant told me. “I don’t know if it will be approved. The regular Army generals were resisting it to the last breath, despite the fact that they would benefit the most from it.”

A Pentagon consultant with close ties to the officials in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon who advocated the war said that the Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal and personal enemies with artillery and mortar fire had created “impatience and resentment” inside the military. He believed that the Air Force’s problems with Iraqi targeting might be addressed by the formation of U.S.-Iraqi transition teams, whose American members would be drawn largely from Special Forces troops. This consultant said that there were plans to integrate between two hundred and three hundred Special Forces members into Iraqi units, which was seen as a compromise aimed at meeting the Air Force’s demand to vet Iraqis who were involved in targeting. But in practice, the consultant added, it meant that “the Special Ops people will soon allow Iraqis to begin calling in the targets.”

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war “will get very ugly” if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have done—plowing through Sunni strongholds on search-and-destroy missions. “If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful,” Pape said. “The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpower—and the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created.”

Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the insurgency. “It’s not going to work,” said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London. “Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?” Brookes said. “No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town.” The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops’ targeting would also create conflicts. “I don’t see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else,” Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts “don’t believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?”

The Air Force’s worries have been subordinated, so far, to the political needs of the White House. The Administration’s immediate political goal after the December elections is to show that the day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned over to the newly trained and equipped Iraqi military. It has already planned heavily scripted change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.

Some officials in the State Department, the C.I.A., and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government have settled on their candidate of choice for the December elections—Iyad Allawi, the secular Shiite who served until this spring as Iraq’s interim Prime Minister. They believe that Allawi can gather enough votes in the election to emerge, after a round of political bargaining, as Prime Minister. A former senior British adviser told me that Blair was convinced that Allawi “is the best hope.” The fear is that a government dominated by religious Shiites, many of whom are close to Iran, would give Iran greater political and military influence inside Iraq. Allawi could counter Iran’s influence; also, he would be far more supportive and coöperative if the Bush Administration began a drawdown of American combat forces in the coming year.

Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide political help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He also said that there was talk late this fall, with American concurrence, of urging Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to join forces in a coalition with Allawi during the post-election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi, who is notorious for his role in promoting flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the war, is now a deputy Prime Minister. He and Allawi were bitter rivals while in exile.

A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was puzzled by the high American and British hopes for Allawi. “I know a lot of people want Allawi, but I think he’s been a terrific disappointment,” the diplomat said. “He doesn’t seem to be building a strong alliance, and at the moment it doesn’t look like he will do very well in the election.”

The second Pentagon consultant told me, “If Allawi becomes Prime Minister, we can say, ‘There’s a moderate, urban, educated leader now in power who does not want to deprive women of their rights.’ He would ask us to leave, but he would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside Iraq—to keep an American presence the right way. Mission accomplished. A coup for Bush.”

A former high-level intelligence official cautioned that it was probably “too late” for any American withdrawal plan to work without further bloodshed. The constitution approved by Iraqi voters in October “will be interpreted by the Kurds and the Shiites to proceed with their plans for autonomy,” he said. “The Sunnis will continue to believe that if they can get rid of the Americans they can still win. And there still is no credible way to establish security for American troops.”

The fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would inevitably trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas, that war has, in a sense, already begun, and the United States military is being drawn into the sectarian violence. An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were “rounding up any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them.” The officer went on, “They were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shiites,” with the active participation of a militia unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier. “People like me have gotten so downhearted,” the officer added.

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.”

Reporter’s Notebook: In Baghdad, Capital Vistas Gradually Shrink With Insecurity

By Robin Wright, Washington Post, Friday, November 25, 2005

BAGHDAD — Five months after the fall of Baghdad, I went to Iraq with Colin Powell. It was the first visit by a secretary of state in half a century, and although he moved under heavy security, there was an optimistic, forward-looking feel to the trip.

Much has changed about Iraq in the intervening two years. And visits by America’s secretary of state — first Powell, then Condoleezza Rice — have proved to be a microcosm of America’s intervention here.

On our first trip, in mid-September 2003, the State Department entourage and diplomatic press corps stayed for two full nights at the legendary al Rashid Hotel, the high-rise once heavily bugged by Saddam Hussein’s security goons. Iraqi vendors in the hotel arcade sold military paraphernalia and souvenirs from the old regime. Medals that Hussein once bestowed on his troops went for 10 bucks — or less, if you bargained enough.

Back then, we could tool around the Iraqi capital. With a New York Times colleague, I walked through the concrete barriers down the lonely lane that linked the protected Green Zone to the rest of Baghdad. U.S. troops stationed along the route didn’t stop us.

Much of the downtown commercial area was shuttered. We stopped by the national museum, looted and closed. We drove by the infamous Information Ministry, a bombed-out shell. We saw government buildings stripped in the postwar chaos, leaving not a chair or telephone or filing cabinet, much less government records.

We also wandered freely around Hussein’s favorite Republican Palace, the headquarters for the new U.S.-led occupation government. We marveled at the marble halls. We stopped to gawk at Hussein’s gilded throne in a hall festooned with frescoes of giant missiles blasting into the sky.

Back then, Powell would leave the Green Zone — surrounded by a security “bubble” — for meetings with Shiite, Kurd and Sunni government officials, and then dinner with a prominent Shiite cleric.

At a news conference in the Green Zone’s convention center, Powell was upbeat, citing a city council meeting he had just attended where a new generation of Iraqi leaders debated everything from the environment to the role of women in the city’s life.

I asked Powell if he had seen a fair representation of what was happening since he had not left the security bubble in Baghdad or met with anyone unhappy with the U.S. presence.

“There is just a great deal that is happening in this country, whether it’s the formation of PTAs in local schools, whether it’s our brigade commanders giving $500 to each school in their district as long as that school comes up with a PTA, something unheard of here before. . . . That’s grass-roots democracy in action.”

* * *

My second trip to Baghdad, on July 30, 2004, some 15 months after the fall of the city, was a secret. This time, the press corps traveling with Powell couldn’t report it until after we’d landed.

We traveled from the airport to the Green Zone in Black Hawk helicopters, with U.S. troops perched in open windows on both sides manning machine guns that fire as many as 4,000 rounds per minute.

The route was so dangerous that we were all given flak jackets and helmets for the short trip.

This time, we didn’t stay even one night. The al Rashid had come under rocket fire in October 2003, when then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was visiting. The attack had killed one American soldier and wounded 15 other people.

The hotel was off-limits even for journalists traveling with Powell. When I pressed the case, a diplomat offered to escort me through a new barricade between the convention center and the hotel, which was just across the street. Unfortunately, she didn’t have clearance for the hotel. I didn’t get in.

This time, Powell’s bubble — and ours — was much smaller. America’s top diplomat didn’t leave the Green Zone and U.S. security wouldn’t let the press out, either. I did manage to travel inside the four-square-mile zone with then-Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih to his residence.

We drove down palm-fringed boulevards with ornate villas once home to Hussein’s aides, generals and family, and now inhabited by Iraq’s new leaders, U.S. contractors and Iraqi squatters. We passed a busy open-air bazaar where gregarious Iraqi vendors hawked trinkets, carpets, T-shirts and techno-gadgets. Complete with parkland, monuments and ministries, the Green Zone is a city within a city. It was only a brief outing, but when I got back, the State Department’s security team still read me the riot act for breaking out of the bubble.

Most of the time, the news media waited at the domed and well-guarded convention center as Powell met with Iraqi leaders who had assumed power from the U.S.-led occupation government a month earlier. But there was no connection with ordinary Iraqis or the real Baghdad.

This time, the focus and tone of the secretary of state’s news conference at the convention center were notably different.

“We have to make sure that these insurgents understand that we will not be deterred,” Powell said. “There can be no other option. The Iraqi people deserve freedom; they deserve democracy. . . . We must not let outsiders or insiders of any kind deny the Iraqi people that which they richly deserve and that which they want.”

* * *

My latest trip to Iraq, on Nov. 11, 31 months after the fall of the capital, was kept secret even from some of the people on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s plane. The dozen members of the traveling press were summoned to the State Department the day before we left on a trip to the Middle East and sworn to secrecy after a briefing about the additional stop.

We could tell an editor and a family member, but we were asked not to mention it to anyone else, particularly our bureaus in the Iraqi capital — and not on the phone or by e-mail to anyone, at all, anywhere. If word got out, the trip would be canceled. A leak had forced the postponement of a similar trip in the spring.

The road between the airport and the Green Zone was officially considered safer, but we still flew in armed Black Hawks moving in diversionary patterns through the sky.

On this latest trip to Baghdad, the bubble shrank even more. No roaming the Green Zone. Not even a stop at the convention center. The press corps, including veteran war correspondents, was sequestered in Hussein’s old palace for most of the seven-hour stay. We were discouraged from wandering the palace and were provided escorts to go to the bathroom.

Our one venture out was a short hop to the nearby prime minister’s office, also in the Green Zone. All we saw were new barricades trimmed with razor wire, concrete blast walls, roadblocks and time-consuming identity checks. No Iraqis. No vendors. In October 2004, the bazaar had been attacked, one of two almost simultaneous suicide bombings inside the Green Zone that together killed 10, including four Americans.

On this latest trip, Rice’s biggest task was to talk to Sunnis — five leaders who represented groups ranging from Islamist to former Saddamists — still unhappy with the new Iraq.

At a news conference with the prime minister, America’s top diplomat emphasized Iraq’s responsibility for its future.

“Any people coming out of a period of tyranny, as the Iraqis have, and now out of a period of violence, have to find a balance between inclusion and reconciliation and justice,” Rice said. “And that is a process that I’m sure the Iraqis themselves will lead.”

For the first time, we pulled out after dark. As we flew from the Green Zone, the Black Hawk gunners wore night vision scopes, which look like little binoculars on eyeglasses, so they could spot suspicious activity through the night. The pilot of the C-17 military transport that flew us out of Iraq did not turn on the interior lights until we had reached a safe altitude — and were well out of Baghdad airspace.

A War Crime Within a War Crime Within a War Crime

The revelations from Falluja are piling up

By George Monbiot, The Guardian, November 22, 2005

The media couldn’t have made a bigger pig’s ear of the white phosphorus story. So before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones.

There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called “Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre”. It claimed the corpses in the pictures it ran “showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh … The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact.” These assertions were supported by a human rights advocate whom, it said, possessed “a biology degree”.(1)

I too possess a biology degree, and I am as well-qualified to determine someone’s cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that “nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt.” They had turned black and lost their skin “through decomposition”. We don’t yet know how these people died.

But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon against combatants in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. On Tuesday afternoon, a Pentagon spokesman admitted to the BBC that white phosphorus “was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants.”(2) He went on to claim that “It is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal.” This denial was accepted by almost all the mainstream media. UN conventions, the Times asserted, “ban its use on civilian but not military targets.”(3) But the word “civilian” does not occur in the Chemical Weapons Convention. The use of the toxic properties of a chemical as a weapon is illegal, whoever the target is.

The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people, rather than poisoning them, and is therefore covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the US has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic. The gas it produces attacks the mucous membranes, the eyes and the lungs. As Peter Kaiser of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told the BBC last week, “If … the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because … any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons.”(4)

The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book published by US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence. “It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets.”(5)

Last night the blogger Gabriele Zamparini found a declassified document from the US Department of Defense, dated April 1991, and titled “Possible use of phosphorous chemical”. “During the brutal crackdown that followed the Kurdish uprising,” it alleges, “Iraqi forces loyal to President Saddam ((Hussein)) may have possibly used white phosphorous (WP) chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels and the populace in Erbil … and Dohuk provinces, Iraq. The WP chemical was delivered by artillery rounds and helicopter gunships. … These reports of possible WP chemical weapon attacks spread quickly … hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled from these two areas”(6). The Pentagon is in no doubt, in other words, that white phosphorus is a chemical weapon.

The insurgents would be just as dead today if they were killed by other means. So does it matter if chemical weapons were mixed with other munitions? It does. Anyone who has seen those photos of the lines of blind veterans at the remembrance services for the first world war will surely understand the point of international law, and the dangers of undermining it.

But we shouldn’t forget that the use of chemical weapons was a war crime within a war crime within a war crime. Both the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Falluja were illegal acts of aggression. Before attacking the city in November last year, the Marines stopped the men “of fighting age” from leaving(7). Many women and children stayed as well: the Observer’s correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left in the city(8). The Marines then treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent, and, according to the UN’s special rapporteur, used “hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population”(9).

Over the past week, I have been reading accounts of the assault published in the Marines’ journal, the Marine Corps Gazette. The soldiers appear to have believed everything the US government told them. One article claims that “the absence of civilians meant the Marines could employ blast weapons prior to entering houses that had become pillboxes, not homes.”(10) Another maintained that “there were less than 500 civilians remaining in the city”. It continued: “the heroics [of the Marines] will be the subject of many articles and books in the years to come. The real key to this tactical victory rested in the spirit of the warriors who courageously fought the battle. They deserve all of the credit for liberating Fallujah.”(11)

But buried in this hogwash is a revelation of the utmost gravity. An assault weapon the Marines were using had been armed with warheads containing “about 35 percent thermobaric novel explosive (NE) and 65 percent standard high explosive.” They deployed it “to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms.” It was used repeatedly: “the expenditure of explosives clearing houses was enormous.”(12)

The Marines can scarcely deny that they know what these weapons do. An article published in the Gazette in 2000 details the effects of their use by the Russians in Grozny. Thermobaric, or “fuel-air” weapons, it says, form a cloud of volatile gases or finely powdered explosives. “This cloud is then ignited and the subsequent fireball sears the surrounding area while consuming the oxygen in this area. The lack of oxygen creates an enormous overpressure. … Personnel under the cloud are literally crushed to death. Outside the cloud area, the blast wave travels at some 3,000 meters per second. … As a result, a fuel-air explosive can have the effect of a tactical nuclear weapon without residual radiation. … Those personnel caught directly under the aerosol cloud will die from the flame or overpressure. For those on the periphery of the strike, the injuries can be severe. Burns, broken bones, contusions from flying debris and blindness may result. Further, the crushing injuries from the overpressure can create air embolism within blood vessels, concussions, multiple internal hemorrhages in the liver and spleen, collapsed lungs, rupture of the eardrums and displacement of the eyes from their sockets.”(13) It is hard to see how you could use these weapons in Falluja without killing civilians.

This looks to me like a convincing explanation of the damage done to Falluja, a city in which between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians might have been taking refuge. It could also explain the civilian casualties shown in the film. So the question has now widened: is there any crime the coalition forces have not committed in Iraq?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. The film can be watched at http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchiesta/video.asp

2. BBC News Online, 16th November 2005. US used white phosphorus in Iraq. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4440664.stm

3. David Charter, 16th November 2005. ‘Chemical’ rounds used against rebel fighters. The Times.

4. Quoted by Paul Reynolds, 16th November 2005. White phosphorus: weapon on the edge. BBC News Online.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4442988.stm

5. Chapter 5, Section III. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/army/docs/st100-3/c5/5sect3.htm

6. http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/declassdocs/dia/19950901/950901_22431050_91r.html

7. Eg Mike Marqusee, 10th November 2005. A name that lives in infamy. The Guardian.

8. Rory McCarthy and Peter Beaumont, 14th November 2004. Civilian cost of battle for Falluja emerges. The Observer.

9. Cited by Mike Marqusee, ibid.

10. F J “Bing” West, July 2005. The Fall of Fallujah. Marine Corps Gazette.

11. John F Sattler, Daniel H Wilson, July 2005. Operation AL FAJR: The Battle of Fallujah-Part II. Marine Corps Gazette.

12. F J “Bing” West, ibid.

13. Lester W. Grau and Timothy Smith, August 2000. A ‘Crushing’ Victory: Fuel-Air Explosives and Grozny 2000. The Marine Corps Gazette.

The devastating accusations have been made by Admiral Stansfield Turner who labelled Dick Cheney “a vice president for torture”.

He said: “We have crossed the line into dangerous territory”.

The American Senate says torture should be banned – whatever the justification. But President Bush has threatened to veto their ruling.

The former spymaster claims President Bush is not telling the truth when he says that torture is not a method used by the US.

Speaking of Bush’s claims that the US does not use torture, Admiral Turner, who ran the CIA from 1977 to 1981, said: “I do not believe him”.

On Dick Cheney he said “I’m embarrassed the United States has a vice president for torture.

“He condones torture, what else is he?”.

Admiral Turner claims the secret CIA prisons used for torture are known as ‘black sites’, terror suspects are picked up in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They are flown by CIA-controlled private aircraft to countries where there are secret interrogation centres, operating outside any country’s jurisdiction.

No one will confirm their locations, but there are several possibilities: The Mihail-Kogalniceanu military airbase in Romania is believed by many to be one such facility.

Admiral Turner’s remarks were echoed by Republican Senator John McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnam.

He said torturing to get information was immoral, was not effective and encouraged potential enemies to do the same to Americans.

Both Mr Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have repeatedly stated that torture by US forces is not condoned.