The Rag Blog

It might mean fewer dead Americans, though.

This month has seen the smallest number of Americans killed in Iraq than any other month since March 2006. But the reasons may have less to do with progress in the war than with the way we’re now fighting it.

Just 29 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq in October so far—down from 65 in September, 84 in August, 78 in July, 101 in June … You get the picture: Fewer, in most cases far fewer, than half as many American soldiers have died this month than in any previous month all year.

However, some perspective is warranted. First, all told, 2007 has been a horrible year for American lives lost in this war—832 to date, more than the 822 lost in all of 2006, and, by the time the year ends, almost certainly more than the 846 killed in 2005 or the 849 in 2004.

True, this month marks the second month in a row in which fatalities have declined, and that’s noteworthy. But it doesn’t quite constitute a trend, much less an occasion for celebrating.

Second, the slight increase in American fatalities this year, up until recently, is no surprise. When Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, announced a shift to a counterinsurgency strategy—in which his troops would move more aggressively against militias and live among the Iraqi people instead of hunkering down in their massive bases—he acknowledged that the strategy carried risks and that more American casualties would be one of the consequences.

So, what accounts for the decline in American deaths since the summer? It’s hard to say for sure, but one little-reported cause is almost certainly a shift in U.S. tactics from fighting on the ground to bombing from the air.

An illustration of this shift occurred on Sunday, when U.S. soldiers were searching for a leader of a kidnapping ring in Baghdad’s Sadr City. The soldiers came under fire from a building. Rather than engage in dangerous door-to-door conflict, they called in air support. American planes flew overhead and simply bombed the building, killing several of the fighters but also at least six innocent civilians. (The bad guy got away.)

In other words, though the shift means greater safety for our ground troops, it also generates more local hostility. Bombing urban targets from the air inevitably means killing more innocent bystanders. This makes some of the bystanders’ relatives yearn for vengeance. And it makes many Iraqis—relatives, neighbors, and others watching the news of the attack on television—less trusting of the American troops who are supposedly protecting them.

In a conventional war, these consequences might be deemed unavoidable side-effects. But in a counterinsurgency campaign, where the point is to sway the hearts and minds of the population, wreaking such damage is self-defeating.

The U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, which Gen. Petraeus supervised shortly before he returned to Iraq, makes the point explicitly:

An air strike can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory. Even when justified under the law of war, bombings that result in civilian casualties can bring media coverage that works to the insurgents’ benefits. … For these reasons, commanders should consider the use of air strikes carefully during [counterinsurgency] operations, neither disregarding them outright nor employing them excessively.

Yet since the surge began and Gen. Petraeus shifted the strategy to counterinsurgency, the number of U.S. airstrikes has soared.

From January to September of this year, according to unclassified data, U.S. Air Force pilots in Iraq have flown 996 sorties that involved dropping munitions. By comparison, in all of 2006, they flew just 229 such sorties—one-quarter as many. In 2005, they flew 404; in 2004, they flew 285.

In other words, in the first nine months of 2007, Air Force planes dropped munitions on targets in Iraq more often than in the previous three years combined.

More telling still, the number of airstrikes soared most dramatically at about the same time that U.S. troop fatalities declined.

It’s not clear how many Iraqi civilians have been killed or injured as a result of these airstrikes. (Estimating civilian deaths is a difficult enterprise in any war, especially this one, where so much of the country is inaccessible.) However, it’s a fair assessment that the numbers have risen substantially this past year.

The research group Iraq Body Count estimates that 417 Iraqi civilians died from January to September of this year as a result of airstrikes. This is only a bit less than the estimated 452 deaths caused by airstrikes in the previous two years combined. (These numbers are almost certainly too low, but they probably reflect the trends. For more on the numbers and on IBC’s methodology, click here.)

It is a natural temptation to try to fight the Iraqi insurgents from the air. The fact is, the “surge”—an extra 30,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq on top of the existing 130,000—was never enough to make a decisive difference. As the troops assumed a more aggressive posture against the insurgents, it was expected that they would find themselves in difficult spots, that they would take more casualties; and one thing American soldiers are trained to do in such circumstances is to call in air support. No one can blame them for protecting themselves.

However, air support has its limits. The senior officers of the U.S. Air Force, seeing which way the winds are blowing in modern warfare and Pentagon war planning, have been trying to figure out how to adapt to the art and science of counterinsurgency. Recently, they commissioned the RAND Corp. to come up with ideas. The resulting report emphasized the role that the Air Force could play in providing mobility, logistics, and medical evacuation. However, on Page 147 of the 150-page report, the authors delivered the bad news:

Although USAF [U.S. Air Force] can deliver relatively small weapons with great precision, it still lacks options to neutralize individual adversaries in close proximity to noncombatants or friendly personnel, to control crowds, or to prevent movement of people on foot through complex urban terrain.

The old adage about warfare—that it’s easy to kill people, hard to kill a particular person—is doubly true of aerial warfare. And in counterinsurgency warfare, the consequences are counterproductive.

Our Iraqi occupation not only rejects American foreign policy since Wilson, it’s a throwback to the great power imperialism that led to World War I.

In 1882 the British occupied Egypt. Although they claimed they would withdraw their troops, the British remained, they said, at the request of the khedive, the ruler they had installed. The U.S. Army Area Handbook aptly describes the British decision to stay:

At the outset of the occupation, the British government declared its intention to withdraw its troops as soon as possible. This could not be done, however, until the authority of the khedive was restored. Eventually, the British realized that these two aims were incompatible because the military intervention, which Khedive Tawfiq supported and which prevented his overthrow, had undermined the authority of the ruler. Without the British presence, the khedival government would probably have collapsed.

The British would remain in Egypt for 70 years until Gamel Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolt tossed them out. They would grant Egypt nominal independence in 1922, but in order to maintain their hold over the Suez Canal, the gateway to British India and Asia, they would retain control over Egypt’s finances and foreign policy.

On Sept. 13, 2007, George W. Bush issued his report to the nation on the progress of “the surge” in Iraq. Echoing the British in Egypt, he promised “a reduced American presence” in Iraq, but he added ominously that “Iraqi leaders from all communities … understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency. These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship — in a way that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer American troops.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, Iraqi leaders who owe their positions to the U.S. occupation want the Americans to stay indefinitely, and Bush is ready to oblige them, albeit with a smaller force.

British Prime Minister William Gladstone insisted in 1882 that the British would not make Egypt a colony. He wanted, his private secretary recorded, “to give scope to Egypt for the Egyptians were this feasible and attainable without risk.” But that appeared too risky, and Egypt quickly became part of the British Empire. Bush, too, has insisted that the United States is not engaged in imperialism. America is not “an imperial power,” but a “liberating power,” he has declared. But Bush’s denial rings as hollow as Gladstone’s. What Bush has done in Iraq, rather than what he says he has done, is to revive an imperialist foreign policy, reminiscent of the British and French in the Middle East, and of the kind that the United States practiced briefly under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt.

Bush’s foreign policy has been variously described as unilateralist, militarist, and hyper-nationalist. But the term that fits it best is imperialist. That’s not because it is the most incendiary term, but because it is the most historically accurate. Bush’s foreign policy was framed as an alternative to the liberal internationalist policies that Woodrow Wilson espoused and that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton tried to put into effect as an alternative to the imperialist strategies that helped cause two world wars and even the Cold War. Bush’s foreign policy represents a return not to the simple unilateralism of 19th-century American foreign policy, but to the imperial strategy that the great powers of Europe — and, for a brief period, America, too — followed and that resulted in utter disaster.

There have been empires since the dawn of history, but the term “imperialism,” and its modern practice, originated in the late 19th century. During that time, Britain and the major European powers struggled to carve up the less developed world into colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. The new empires spawned during this period didn’t consist of “settler colonies” like the original American colonies or Australia, but indigenous possessions like British India or French Indochina. The United States got into the great game in 1898 when, after successfully ousting Spain from Cuba and the Pacific, the McKinley administration, prodded by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, decided to annex the Philippines.

There were two kinds of imperial rule: direct, where the colonial power assigned an administrator — a viceroy or proconsul — who ran the country directly; and indirect, where the colonial power used its financial and military power to prop up a native administration that did its bidding and to prevent the rise of governments that did not. The latter kind of imperial rule was developed by the United States in Cuba in 1901 after Roosevelt’s Secretary of War Elihu Root realized that direct rule could bring war and rebellion, as it had done, to the McKinley administration’s surprise, in the Philippines. The British later adopted this kind of imperial rule in Egypt and Iraq.

The impetus for the growth of empires in the 19th century was economic. Britain and the imperial powers sought secure access to raw materials, including rubber, cotton, and foodstuffs — oil would come later — and to outlets for capital investment in railroads and other major projects. As their colonial investments grew, they tried to erect an international system of islands and port facilities and canals that could protect their trade routes. (The U.S. originally saw the Philippines as a stepping stone to the lucrative Chinese market.) But the impetus wasn’t only economic. By the early 20th century, as the countries strove to divide up the globe, the acquisition of colonies became a source of national power and prestige, and acquired its own elaborate and malignant ideological justification. It gained a life of its own.

This growth of imperialism eventually created the conditions for its undoing. By encouraging not merely trade rivalry, but growing competition for national power — epitomized in the pre–World War I naval arms race between Britain and Germany — imperialism helped spawn wars among the great powers themselves. The rivalry between top dog England and challenger Germany, and between Germany and Austria, on the one hand, and France and Russia, on the other, contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The Second World War also represented, among other things, an attempt by the Axis powers, a subordinate group of capitalist nations, to redivide the world at the expense of the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the USSR. And the Cold War stemmed from the attempt by the Soviet Union, one of the most vocal critics of Western imperialism, to fulfill the imperial dreams of Czarist Russia by expanding westward and to the south.

In addition, the system of imperialism spawned nationalist and anti-imperialist movements in the colonies themselves. Some of these movements, particularly in the Middle East, had a religious coloration. Others took their ideology from Soviet or Chinese communism or from the Wilsonian vision of national self-determination. These movements made it difficult, and finally impossible, for the imperial powers to maintain their control.

In the United States, Woodrow Wilson came to realize the pitfalls of imperialism not only from the six-year war with the Filipino rebels and Wilson’s own unsuccessful intervention in Mexico in 1914, but also from the outbreak of World War I, which Wilson privately blamed on imperial rivalry. After World War I, Wilson set out to create new international arrangements to replace those of imperialism. Wilson sought an agreement among the great powers through the League of Nations to prevent new conquests and wars over conquests. He wanted to phase out the existing imperialism through “mandates” that would put countries, and groups of countries, that had no vested interest in acquiring colonies in charge of assisting colonies in making the transition to self-government. And Wilson favored economic agreements to ease conflicts over access to markets and raw materials.

Wilson didn’t think the United States should abandon the leadership role it acquired at the end of World War I. But he wanted the United States to exercise it through international institutions that could ensure a peaceful world in which the United States would not have to prepare perpetually for war and in which America’s vaunted economic superiority could come to the fore. Wilson failed to win over his European counterparts and the Republicans at home. But during and after World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman attempted to put Wilson’s liberal internationalism into practice. It was embodied not only in the U.N., but in the IMF, World Bank, and GATT agreements, and in America’s multilateral approach to the Cold War.

Roosevelt had planned to force Britain and France to divest themselves of their empires — the new U.N. had a “trusteeship” system for that purpose — but American resolve was blunted by the onset of the Cold War. Faced with Soviet support for anti-imperialist movements in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the United States sided with the former colonial powers. That policy came to a disastrous culmination in the Vietnam war, which was an outgrowth of American support for French colonialism. The American defeat in Vietnam dealt a fatal blow to U.S. attempts to prop up the Western imperialism. Subsequently, Portugal’s colonies in Africa gained their independence. That left only the Soviet empire. When it collapsed in the early 1990s, the age of empire was over.

There were still colonies and quasi-colonies like Chechnya or Tibet, but they were contested extensions of the larger power itself. Some political scientists in the United States and Europe claimed that America remained an imperial power because of its worldwide system of military bases and its clout in international financial institutions, but while America was capable of influencing governments, it could no longer exercise a veto over critical regimes coming to power. The invasion of Panama in 1989 appeared to be the last gasp of America’s indirect imperialism.

Indeed, the 1990s became a high water mark of liberal internationalism. George H.W. Bush’s administration built a coalition through the U.N. to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Acting through NATO, the Clinton administration built a coalition to end the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and to oversee the transition to a peaceful breakup of former Yugoslavia. The United States also took leadership in the formation of the World Trade Organization — which, whatever its imperfections, was designed to prevent the kind of rival trade blocs that could eventually lead to war. At Maastricht, Western Europe, once the center of imperial rivalry, became a model of post-imperial integration. And the world’s nations seemed on the verge of agreeing to a new set of accords, including the Kyoto Protocol, that would address problems Wilson never dreamed of — problems that could not be addressed except through international agreements.

When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, however, his foreign policy echoed not only that of neo-isolationist Republicans like former Majority Leader Dick Armey, but also that of America’s foreign policy before we decided in 1898 that we had to get involved in the struggle for empire. That was an America that not only scorned empire but was oblivious to much of the outside world. Bush disdained international organizations. He withdrew the United States from the Kyoto climate treaty and whatever other international agreements had yet to be ratified. He was a unilateralist, but he was reluctant to use America’s singular power to affect the governments of other countries. His highest defense priority was the erection of an anti-missile system, the purpose of which was not only to make the United States impregnable from foreign attack, but also to reduce the reliance of the U.S. on other countries for its security.

All that changed after September 11. Bush retained his unilateralism, but he now wedded it to an aggressive strategy for dealing with America’s enemies.

In developing a response to September 11, Bush fell under the influence of neo-conservatives in his administration and in Washington policy circles. These neo-conservatives believed that the United States should use its superior military power to intimidate and overthrow the regimes of “rogue states” like Iraq that challenged American hegemony. (One typical slogan was “rogue state rollback.”) The neocons didn’t favor colonialism, but believed that by exerting its power the United States could produce regimes that did its bidding. After September 11, they spoke openly of creating a new American empire. “People are now coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire,'” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer exulted.

The neo-conservatives found common cause with Bush officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who were concerned about protecting American access to foreign oil in a period of rising demand and stagnating supply. That made them particularly interested in ousting Saddam Hussein, whose government sat atop the third largest oil reserve in the world, and in installing a regime more friendly to the United States.

In the buildup to the war, and during the invasion and occupation, Bush officials, who were eager to advertise Iraq’s nuclear threat, were reluctant to talk about oil, but in off-the-record interviews I conducted in December 2002, neo-conservatives waxed poetic about using Iraq’s oil wealth to undermine OPEC. After he left office, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recounted National Security Council discussions about Iraqi oil. And in his recently published memoir, Alan Greenspan wrote, “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows — the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Bush and other administration officials denied that the United States was trying to create a new empire. But they were less guarded in their private communications. When the White House offered former Sen. Bob Kerrey the job of head of the Provisional Authority in Iraq — the job that eventually went to Paul Bremer — officials asked him if he were interested in being “viceroy.” Kerrey, taken aback, turned down the job.

The administration’s actions also belied its denials. In March 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that the U.S. Army was constructing what it called 14 “enduring bases” in Iraq. These would provide a continuing American military presence in Iraq. And the administration continues work on these bases, including a new one perched on the Iranian border, even as it professes to be committed to turning Iraq over to its government and army.

Though opposition to the American presence in Iraq has grown both there and in the U.S., Bush’s televised address and Gen. David Petraeus’ congressional testimony in September made clear that the administration has grown even more determined to remain there. As Spencer Ackerman points out, Bush’s promise to stay in Iraq “as long as necessary, not one day longer” has given way to the promise of an “enduring relationship.” And American projections of troop presence in Iraq now extend indefinitely into the future. If the administration’s experience in Iraq does not parallel that of the British in Egypt, it won’t be for lack of trying.

Indeed, this brand of imperialism, as practiced by the Bush administration, is remarkably similar to the older European variety. Its outward veneer is optimistic and even triumphalist, when articulated by a neo-conservative like Max Boot or William Kristol, and is usually accompanied by a vision of global moral-religious-social transformation. The British boasted of bringing Christianity and civilization to the heathens; America’s neo-conservatives trumpet the virtues of free-market capitalism and democracy. And like the older imperialism, Bush’s policy toward Iraq and the Middle East has been driven by a fear of losing out on scarce natural resources. Ultimately, his policy is as much a product of the relative decline of American power brought about by the increasingly fierce international competition for resources and markets as it is of America’s “unipolar moment.”

Bush and Cheney were hardly unique in worrying about the dwindling supply of oil. Bush’s father and Bill Clinton also worried about it. But George H.W. Bush and Clinton acted on the premise that petroleum and natural gas were international commodities to which any purchaser should have access. Oil companies, which pressed for the removal of sanctions on Iraq and Iran, shared this view. When the elder Bush and Clinton sought to prevent Iraq from monopolizing the region’s oil — and using it as a political instrument — they did so through the United Nations.

But George W. Bush has differed from his predecessors in both his concerns and his methods. Bush, prodded by Cheney, sought to win privileged access to Iraq’s oil — not necessarily for any particular company (although Cheney clearly wanted a role for Halliburton in building Iraq’s oil infrastructure), but for American producers and consumers in general. That is similar to the strategy of the older imperial powers. And the method they employed was unilateral invasion — oh yes, with the support of Britain, the former great imperial power in the region.

Bush’s imperial strategy is sparking a new phase in oil diplomacy, where oil consumers like China are trying to lock up long-term deals with countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and where the producers — notably at this point Venezuela — are beginning to use their oil wealth as a political weapon. The eventual outcome — if this rivalry is not regulated through new international agreements — could be the kind of tension that gave rise to World War I.

As the war in Iraq has turned into a quagmire, neo-conservatives who had goaded the president into action have blamed the war’s failure on the administration’s flawed strategy. They have propounded a series of “if only’s”: If only the administration had sent more troops, if only it had not disbanded the Ba’ath army, if only it had handed the leadership of Iraq over immediately to con man Ahmed Chalabi. Of these, only the addition of more troops might have quelled the insurgency, and then only temporarily. If there is any lesson from the 130-year history of imperialism, it is that the natives eventually grow restless. Since World War II, the peoples of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa have been throwing off rather than welcoming foreign control.

The Middle East, where Muslims still blanch at the Crusades and later British and French attempts to divide and rule, is particularly sensitive to outside attempts at domination. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda didn’t spring from Mecca but from the battlefield in Afghanistan, from resentment of American support for Israel and of American bases on Arab soil. Bush’s policy in the region has reflected a profound ignorance of this history. Wrote former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in January 2007, “America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating.”

What, then, should the United States be doing in Iraq and elsewhere to repair the damage wrought by Bush’s exercise in neo-imperialism? On one level, this is an enormously complicated question that is beyond my capacity to answer. But on a simple, much less specific level, the answer is obvious: A new administration has to repudiate Bush’s policy of imperialism and reaffirm America’s commitment to liberal internationalism. That will entail at least these three kinds of initiatives:

*  The new administration needs to repudiate Bush’s strategy of preemptive regime change and reaffirm the United Nations charter, which allows nations to act unilaterally only in their own immediate self-defense. That would have an immediate effect on American policy toward Iran, whose regime the United States is now officially trying to overthrow.

*  The new administration needs to reaffirm the idea behind internationally sanctioned and administered “mandates” and “trusteeship” for countries and peoples going through a difficult transition toward independence and statehood. If countries intervene to prevent war or genocide, they must do so in a manner that assures the peoples targeted that their right of self-determination will be respected. If the United States, for instance, had tried to intervene in the Balkans by itself, it might still be fighting an insurgency there.

*  The new administration needs to reaffirm the importance of international action and agreements — through the U.N. and other bodies — to aid in the prevention of wars, pandemics, and environmental catastrophe, and to ease the struggle over scarce resources, including oil and water. That means at a minimum returning to the negotiations over global warming; and attempting to revive the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the U.S. undermined in signing a nuclear deal with India.

But what about Iraq? Should the U.S. withdraw immediately? Should it leave a rump force in place to fight international terrorists? These questions — now at the forefront of the debate in Washington — are secondary to questions of diplomacy. A new administration should declare the invasion and occupation of Iraq a mistake and pledge to remove American troops from the country. It should not do so, however, with any hope of ending the civil war there, but rather of gaining international support for a “trusteeship” that would guide Iraq back toward genuine self-government and independence. The U.S. can contribute financially, but it will have to take a subordinate role in any international peace-keeping force that enters the country.

None of this will be easy. At this point, the Bush administration might have dug such a huge hole in the region that nothing the United States does will prevent more war and greater chaos. But it is certain that the Bush administration will not change course, and, equally, that a new administration will enjoy a honeymoon not only with American voters, but with the rest of the world in which it could advance a new foreign policy that breaks decisively with that of the Bush administration. If it doesn’t do this — if it equivocates and seeks half-measures, or if it tries (as some Republican candidates threaten) to reinforce the American occupation — then its actions will not lead to an enduring relationship with the Iraqis and the peoples of the Middle East, but to an enduring nightmare.

10/24/07 “ICH” — — US citizens had best rethink the “war on terror” while they still have the liberty to do so. For all of President Bush’s blah-blah talk about bringing democracy to the world, the Bush administration has proved that it is no friend of liberty at home.

The Bush administration has violated constitutional principles, US law, and the Geneva Conventions as no previous administration has done. Here is a short list of the Bush administration’s crimes:

* Spying without court warrants on Americans in violation of both the US Constitution and the FISA statute.
* The denial of habeas corpus, attorney-client privilege, due process, and Geneva Conventions protections to those, American or foreign, designated without evidence as terrorists or enemy combatants.
* The justification and use of torture to coerce confessions and the kidnapping of foreign nationals who are sent to be tortured in foreign prisons.
* The initiation of military aggression against states based on intentional deception by the Bush administration of the US public and the United Nations, and the intentional fabrication of “evidence” to justify unprovoked aggression against sovereign states, which is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard established by the US.
* Violation of the oath of office to defend the US Constitution by practically every member of the Bush administration and Congress.
* Bush has assaulted the separation of powers and the rule of law with “signing statements” and “executive orders” that President Nixon’s White House Counsel John Dean says are commands that treat the co-equal branches of government and the electorate as subservient to executive authority. In April 2006, Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage listed 750 laws “challenged” by the Bush administration. Not even the demonized president of Iran claims to be above the law.
* Genocide against the people of Iraq where one million Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s invasion and several million Iraqis are displaced persons.
* Massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan, which is a form of genocide in which military force is routinely applied to unarmed noncombatants.
* Massive corruption in which no-bid contracts are issued to Republican corporations in exchange for kickbacks to political campaigns.
* The theft of two national elections as documented in books by Mark Crispin Miller and Greg Palast.

The Bush administration has even conducted Stalinist show trials against innocent Muslim charities as part of its propaganda to make the American people fearful that they are surrounded by hostile terrorists. In December 2001 President Bush declared the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development to be a “terrorist organization” and seized the charity’s assets. Bush put the charities’ officials on trial as terrorists. Six years later on October 22, 2007, after years of investigations and two months of testimony by who but “Israeli intelligence agents” (according to the New York Times), the US government’s case fell apart in the courtroom.

One of the jurors said that the case “was strung together with macaroni noodles. There was so little evidence.”

Georgetown University professor of constitutional law David D. Cole said the case “suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going.”

While committing these unprecedented crimes, President Bush has claimed the moral high ground despite having lied to the American people and despite devastating two countries in the name of “making the world safe from terrorists.” When people in Iraq and Afghanistan are asked who are the terrorists, they answer that it is the Americans.

The Bush administration has not been held accountable for any of its crimes. By failing to hold government accountable to law, the Constitution, and the American people, the opposition party and the corporate media have abandoned their responsibility to protect freedom and democracy in the United States.

There can be no democracy where there is no government accountability, and there is no government accountability in the United States – except, of course, to the Israel Lobby.

Now the Bush administration wants to take away the American people’s freedom to travel within their own country by airplane. Not content with an 80,000 “no fly” list, a subset of a 500,000–750,000 “watch list,” the Bush administration’s Transport Security Administration has proposed new rules that will require Americans to get government permission 72 hours in advance prior to being allowed to board a domestic flight.

The TSA justifies this extraordinary violation of our constitutional rights on the grounds that 90 to 93 percent of all travel reservations are final by then.

So what?!

And what of the 7 to 10 percent of flights that the TSA estimates are not on the books 72 hours in advance? These are family emergencies and critical business deals. What does the TSA care if a member of your family dies while you await the government’s permission to fly?

Any agency of the government that can propose such a tyrannical regulation should be abolished. The TSA’s mentality shows it to be a far greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.

Even without the “permission to fly” rule, the TSA’s practices are ridiculous and unjustified. The confiscation of tooth paste and unopened bottles of perfume, the harassment of US military officers in uniform, the harassment of old people struggling with their walkers, of mothers struggling with small children – none of this makes any sense except in terms of getting Americans accustomed to harassment as a citizen’s duty to government and to train a cadre to conduct warrantless searches of fellow citizens.

The no-fly list itself is absurd. If a known terrorist were to show up at an airport, he would be arrested, not refused permission to fly. Anyone else who can clear security like other passengers has every right to fly.

Set aside the violation of the Constitution and the Soviet-style tyranny of the loss of the freedom to travel and consider merely the practical aspect of the proposal. What American wants his travel plans dependent on a government bureaucracy capable of putting US Senator Ted Kennedy on the “no fly” list and capable of issuing US visas to two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers six months after they allegedly died in the 9/11 events

If we believe the official story, 9/11 itself reveals a government totally devoid of any competence whatsoever.

The “war on terror” is fraudulent. The cruel war and the deceptive vocabulary that protects it are a cover for expanding US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and for constructing a functioning police state at home. A country in which people cannot make airline reservations without the government’s permission is not a free country.

“Everyday, under the pretext of either Al Qaeda, insurgents, militants, or whatever imaginary name you coined, you have not ceased, not even for one day, slaughtering our innocents.

For 4 years, you have not ceased for one single day. Not during holiday periods, not during religious celebrations, not even during the day your so called God was born…if you have a God that is.” Layla Anwar “A Perfect Baby Formula” An Arab Woman Blues

10/24/07 “ICH” — — Retired Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez set off a firestorm recently when he described the occupation of Iraq as “a nightmare with no end in sight”. He added that US civilian leadership was “incompetent” and “corrupt” and that the best the US could hope for, given the present circumstances, would be to “stave off defeat.”

Naturally, Sanchez’s remarks were applauded by liberals and progressives who oppose the war, but their enthusiasm is unfounded. Sanchez is neither against the war nor for withdrawal. He simply doesn’t like losing—and the United States is losing.

It is foolish to look for support where there is none. Sanchez is just an embittered old soldier whose dream of pacifying the fiercely independent Iraqi people has fallen on hard times. He even admitted as much when he said:

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism.”

He’s right. There is no plan and the occupation has been a complete flop. But, it’s the “incompetence” that bothers Sanchez, not the decimation of a country that posed no threat to US national security. This is hardly a “principled stand”. But then why would we expect principles from a man who oversaw the activities at Abu Ghraib. A new book, “Administration of Torture”, by two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys, proves that military interrogators “abused, tortured or killed” scores of prisoners rounded up since 9-11. According to the report:

“The documents show that prisoner abuse like that found at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was hardly the isolated incident that the Bush administration or US military claimed it was. By the time the prisoner abuse story broke in mid-2004 story the Army knew of at least 62 other allegations of abuse at different prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors report.”

Sanchez was in charge of Abu Ghraib in 2004 and is responsible for what took place there. He is not a man whose moral judgment on the war or anything else should be trusted. His recent comments should be dismissed as an empty tirade designed to distance himself from—what Lt Gen William Odom called—“the greatest strategic disaster in American history”.

Sanchez’s fundamental mistake is his belief that victory is possible in an immoral war. It is not; and the longevity of the occupation only amplifies the magnitude of the crime.

What’s particularly irksome about Sanchez’s remarks is that they perpetuate a myth about what is really taking place in Iraq and why the US effort has failed. It wasn’t Rumsfeld’s blundering that sunk the occupation. Nor was it the lack of soldiers, de’Bathification, lack of body-armour, or the steady rise in sectarian fighting. The US is losing in Iraq because it is locked in battle with a resourceful and tenacious adversary that has canceled out the US military’s technological advantages and superior firepower.

There’s a vast difference between incompetence and getting beaten. And, by every definition of guerilla warfare; the US is getting beaten. Is our opinion of ourselves so exaggerated that we cannot admit the truth?

Let’s stop making excuses. The war was doomed from the get-go; Falluja and Abu Ghraib just “sealed the deal”. After that, the resistance claimed the moral high-ground and won the support of the people. (Isn’t there anyone in the Pentagon who understands counterinsurgency?) A recent article by Ali al-Fadhily summed it up like this:

“The only factor the US did not calculate well was that Iraqis prefer starving to death to living under the dirty flag of occupiers.” (“Assassination of Sheikh Shakes US Claims”, Ali al-Fadhily)

No one wants to live under occupation and all of the surveys conducted since the invasion in 2003 indicate that more than 90% of the Iraqi people want to see the United States withdrawal. Given these results, it is obvious why the resistance has mushroomed. There will always be a growing pool of young nationalists eager to join the fray.

The US cannot prevail in Iraq nor can they impose a “political solution”—which is the other great myth currently in vogue. The only acceptable political solution to occupation is withdrawal—not puppet regimes, not “oil laws” not “benchmarks.” Withdrawal. Period.

But Bush will not withdrawal and apparently no one can force him to do so. So, the killing will continue unabated behind the media’s iron curtain while the overall situation on the ground continues to deteriorate. Eventually, after years of ethnic cleansing, sectarian fighting and stepped-up military operations; the position of the US will become untenable and the troops will come home. But the cost in human terms will be enormous. Already one million Iraqis have been killed in the war and four million others have become refugees. Credit the US media for concealing the real savagery of foreign occupation and its effects on Iraqi society. The country is in ruins.

There are only three problems in Iraq; occupation, occupation and occupation. Other than that, the Iraqi people are quite capable of resolving with their own problems and plotting their own future.

The US controls no ground in Iraq and has no popular base of support. Oil production is down, the Iraqi people are overwhelmingly against partition, and the Al Maliki government’s authority extends no further than the walls of the Green Zone. None of these bode well for the ongoing occupation. In fact, the US is doing everything in its power just to hang-on in Iraq. Baghdad has undergone massive campaign of ethnic cleansing which has transformed a city that was originally 70% Sunni to nearly 70% Shia. As journalist Nir Rosen stated, “The Shias own Iraq now. The Sunnis can never get it back. There’s Americans can do about this.”

“WE HAVE DESTROYED IRAQ AND AMERICANS NEED TO KNOW THAT”

In an interview with “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, Rosen also made this sobering prediction:

“You’ll find a day when there are no Sunnis left in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are of course panicking about this, and they are hoping that the US will in some way arm or support Sunni militias. It’s hard for me to imagine that Sunni nations in the region will stand by and watch Sunnis pushed out of Baghdad. ..So you’ll see greater support from Saudi Arabia, from Jordan, perhaps from Yemin, from Egypt, for Sunni militias. Funding, things like that. And the civil war will spread and become a regional one.

There is no solution. We’ve destroyed Iraq and we’ve destroyed the region, and Americans need to know this. …There was no civil war in Iraq until we got there. And there was no civil war in Iraq, until we took certain steps to pit Sunnis against Shias. Now it is just too late. But, we need to know we are responsible for what’s happening in Iraq today. I don’t think Americans are aware of this….. This is going to spread and the region won’t recover from this for decades. And Americans are responsible”

Entire cities—Samarra, Tal Afar, Ramadi—have been surrounded with razor-wire so that entry and exit are limited to the heavily-guarded checkpoints. In Falluja–where 65% of the city was flattened in a brutal reprisal for the deaths of 4 mercenaries—all car traffic has been banned, residents must carry US-authorized IDs at all times, and the city cannot be entered without full-body searches and retinal scans. It’s a prison.

All of Iraq is under de-facto martial law consistent with Bush’s promise to “democratize” the Middle East. Another lie. US troops are engaged in a 5-year long low-intensity conflict against a loosely-configured nationalist army skilled at urban warfare. We won’t prevail.

As Rosen says, “Every single American who dies in Iraq, dies for nothing. He didn’t die for freedom; he didn’t die to defend his country. He died to occupy Iraq.”

Rosen’s analysis of the Iraqi nightmare is markedly different from Sanchez’s. He understands that victory was never possible and that the knock-on effects of the invasion-occupation will destabilize the entire region and upset the present balance of world power.

Rosen:

“Iraq has been changed irrevocably. I don’t think Iraq even—you can say it exists anymore….. What you’ll see is basically Mogadishu in Iraq—various warlords controlling small neighborhoods. And those who are by major resources, such as oil installations, obviously will be foreign-sponsored warlords who will be able to cut deals with us or the Chinese. But Iraq is destroyed, and I think we’ll see that this will spread throughout the region.”

While Nir Rosen has provided the most insightful and searing analysis of the Iraq war, Iraqi poet Layla Anwar has given voice to the war’s many victims. Anwar is a prolific blogger and her writings are not for the squeamish. Her web site, “An Arab Woman Blues, Reflections in a sealed Bottle” is frequently attacked. Her candor, cynicism, humor, intelligence and sensitivity makes her the Iraq’s finest blogger as well as an outstanding writer. Her observations give us what the media has taken away—a window into the suffering of average Iraqis who are being crushed by US aggression.

Layla Anwar:

“My father (bless his soul) and my mother kept reminding me. They said:
”Layla, Iraq is the Backbone of the Arab World.”

To be honest, I did not quite understand the full implications of such a statement, then. Today, I do.

Iraq was not only the Cradle of Civilization; it was indeed the Pillar, the Column, The Spinal Vertebrae, the Backbone of the Arab world. Now that it has crumbled, now that it has broken up, the rest will follow…

One by one…the other countries will come tumbling down…one by one, a ripple effect from Baghdad…to the rest of the World.”

Anwar’s prediction is similar to Rosen’s. The destruction of Baghdad is just the beginning of a great unwinding that will topple Capitals across the Middle East creating an entirely new and unforeseeable world order. How stupid and vain our leaders are.

Anwar’s prose is frequently a mix of compassion and rage. No one is spared—particularly not Americans. She puts a face on the millions of people who’ve been either killed or displaced by the fighting:

“Come and see our overflowing morgues and find our little ones for us…
You may find them in this corner or the other, a little hand poking out, pointing out at you…
Come and search for them in the rubble of your “surgical” air raids, you may find a little leg or a little head…pleading for your attention.
Come and see them amassed in the garbage dumps, scavenging morsels of food…

Well over half of our little ones are under-nourished or dying from disease. Cholera, dysentery, infections of all sorts….
Under-nourished does not mean on a diet like your fat little kids….. It means starved.
Come and see, come….” (“Flying Kites” Layla Anwar)

Just as U.S. air operations over Iraq have reached their highest level since the destruction of Fallujah in November 2004, with as many as 70 close air support missions flown on many days since October 1, a new Human Rights Report published by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq has challenged the United States to stop killing civilians in illegal air strikes.

The Human Rights Report for the second quarter of 2007 was long overdue, and was finally published on October 11. The report explains that it was modified following discussions with U.S. and Iraqi occupation authorities, and this appears to account for the long delay in its publication.

The report makes it clear that U.S. air strikes in densely populated civilian areas are violations of international human rights law. A footnote to the section on “MNF military operations and the killing of civilians” explains, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”

UNAMI demands “that all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF (Multi National Force) forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force” and adds that, “The initiation of investigation into such incidents, as well as their findings, should be made public.”

The UNAMI report provides the following details of 88 Iraqi civilians killed by air strikes, 15 civilians killed “in the context of raid and search operations” by U.S. ground forces and several incidents of torture and extra-judicial execution by members of Iraqi auxiliary forces under overall U.S. command. UNAMI investigated these incidents because a relative, a journalist or a local official brought each one to its attention. Without doubt, the U.S. Department of Defense is aware of many more killings of civilians by air strikes and ground operations, hence UNAMI’s urgent demand for full public disclosure and investigation of all such killings.

March 11 – Nine civilians in 5 villages near Ba’quba killed by U.S. air strikes.

March 13 & 14 – Twelve Palestinians detained by the Interior Ministry at al-Baladiyat and tortured with electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, forcing metal sticks down the throat, and rape and other sexual assault with metal objects.

March 15 – Two civilians killed in Dulu’iya by a U.S. air strike.

March 29 – A 14-year-old boy and three other family members killed in Mosul by a U.S. raid on the home of Zeyour Mohamed Khalil.

March 30 – Sixteen civilians killed in Sadr City by U.S. air strikes.

April 2 – Six civilians killed in U.S. raids on the homes of Bashar Mahfoudh and Walid al-Ahmadi near Mosul.

April 3 – Twenty-seven civilians killed in Khaldiya, near Ramadi, by U.S. air strikes.

April 12 – Three civilians killed in southern Haditha in a house raid by U.S. forces.

April 26 – U.S. air strikes kill four civilians in Sadr City and four more in Taji.

April 29 – Al-Kesra, Baghdad, five men found dead after being detained by Iraqi Army in al-Sifina.

April 30 – Three civilians killed by an air strike in Basra.

May 3 – Hay al-Amel, Baghdad, 16 people detained and killed by Interior Ministry Public Order Forces.

May 4th – Al-Dubbat, Baghdad, 14 civilians arrested and then shot dead by Iraqi security forces.

May 5 – Seven civilians killed by a U.S. air strike east of Baghdad.

May 5 – Hay al-Rissala, Baghdad, men guarding a mosque detained and executed by Iraqi security forces.

May 6 – One civilian killed by a U.S. air strike in Sadr City.

May 8 – Seven children killed by a U.S. helicopter attack on an elementary school in Diyala province.

May 26 – Eight civilians in Basra killed by air strikes.

May 29 – Four prisoners executed by the Kurdistan Regional Government after testifying to the death under torture of Fahmi Ismail Abu Bakr in 2005.

June 6 – Yassin Farhan and his son Sarmad killed by U.S. troops in a house raid in Baghdad.

April-June – Seventy-three percent of KRG detainees interviewed by UNAMI reported being victims of torture.

The recent increase in U.S. air operations in Iraq has brought a spate of reports of more such incidents. On the day the UNAMI report was released, six women, nine children and 19 men were killed in air strikes near Lake Tharthar, north of Baghdad. The Centcom press office immediately declared that the 19 men were “terrorists” but similar claims regarding previous air strikes have been contradicted by local residents and officials, and they beg the question as to how you know that 19 men were “terrorists” after you’ve blown them off the face of the earth. An air strike on September 25 in Mussayyib, 30 miles south of Baghdad, killed five women and four children; and one on September 28 on the al-Saha district of Baghdad killed seven men, two women and four children. Once again, I must stress that these incidents just happen to have been reported and that they are probably only the tip of the iceberg of civilians being killed by U.S. air strikes.

Iraqi Health Ministry reports in September 2004 and January 2005 attributed 72 percent and 62 percent respectively of civilian deaths in Iraq to “coalition” forces, not “insurgents”, and attributed the high numbers killed by U.S. forces specifically to air strikes. The first of two epidemiological studies on mortality in Iraq published in the Lancet medical journal supported these findings, while the second did not attempt to break down deaths by who was responsible. The Health Ministry retracted its January 2005 figures after the BBC reported them, and has stopped attributing any proportion of Iraqi deaths to occupation forces. It is important to understand that, while “precision” weapons are more accurate today than in the past, about 15-25 percent still miss their targets by at least 40 feet, so the impression conveyed by the Centcom press office and CNN that they can be used to safely and surgically “zap” one house in an urban area is an artful blend of propaganda and science fiction.

Previous reports by Iraqi and international human rights monitors have also found that 60-80 percent of prisoners held by Iraqi forces recruited, trained and directed by the U.S. command in Iraq have been tortured, and UNAMI has documented cases in which people have been sentenced to death and executed based on confessions apparently obtained by torture. The current report also protests the indefinite detention of Iraqis without charge by U.S. forces, and states “persons who are deprived of their liberty are entitled to be informed of the reasons for their arrest; to be brought promptly before a judge if held on a criminal charge, and to challenge the lawfulness of their detention.”

The UNAMI report does not directly address torture by U.S. forces, but the International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights groups have documented extensive and systematic violations of international humanitarian law in the treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces in Iraq. The U.S. government has tortured and abused prisoners throughout its network of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, as well as in CIA-run prisons in Romania, Mauretania, Diego Garcia, and elsewhere. Human rights groups have amassed incontrovertible evidence of systematic torture, authorized at the highest levels, throughout this gulag, including death threats, mock executions, near-drowning, excruciating stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, various forms of sodomy, and endless beatings, to say nothing of more psychological forms of torture such as sexual humiliation and torture of family members.

In February 2006, Human Rights First issued “Command’s Responsibility,” a report on 98 deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, endorsed by two retired generals and an admiral. The dead included eight people confirmed tortured to death; another 37 suspected or confirmed homicides; and a tell-tale lack of information about 48 more who died of “undetermined” or “unannounced” causes.

Until we succeed in ending the U.S. occupation and restoring genuine sovereignty and independence to Iraq, preventing the torture and killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. forces has to be a top priority. Apart from the brief and localized scandal over the pictures from Abu Ghraib, this is a topic that the political debate in Congress and the corporate media have scrupulously avoided. Senator Bob Graham told his colleagues in October 2002 that “Blood is going to be on your hands”, and they are now in it up to their armpits, even as they deny both the carnage and their role in continuing and escalating it. Until this horror comes to an end, Americans must join UNAMI in publicizing, condemning and demanding accountability for every single act of illegal, indiscriminate and excessive killing by American forces in Iraq, with particular attention to the mass killing of Iraqi civilians by U.S. air strikes.

From Turkey to Iraq to Pakistan, the mounting chaos proves the White House is just winging it.

Oct. 24, 2007 | The Bush administration once imagined that its presence in Afghanistan and Iraq would be anchored by friendly neighbors, Turkey to the west and Pakistan to the east. Last week, as the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to deteriorate, the anchors themselves also came loose.

On Sunday, just days after the Turkish Parliament authorized an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish guerrillas ambushed and killed 17 Turkish soldiers inside Turkey. In Karachi, Pakistan, a massive bomb nearly killed U.S.-backed Benazir Bhutto, who was supposed to help stabilize the country. The Bush administration’s entire Middle East policy is coming undone — if it even has a policy left, other than just sticking its fingers in the multiple, and multiplying, holes in the dike.

In Iraq, the Kurds of the north are the United States’ most reliable allies. In addition to the 5.5 million Kurds in Iraq, however, persons speaking dialects of Kurdish constitute around 11 million of neighboring Turkey’s 70 million citizens. There are another 4 million Kurds next door in Iran, and up to 2 million in Syria. All three of Iraq’s northern neighbors fear that Kurdish nationalism, which has been fostered by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, could tear them apart. Opposition to that nationalism could provide a platform for an alliance of Syria, Turkey and Iran — a nightmare for the Bush administration. Washington had hoped to isolate Syria, an ally of both Iran and of Hezbollah in Lebanon. That’s not how it is turning out.

Even after Turkey declined to sign on to the Iraq war, then U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz praised it in April 2003 as a dependable ally and secularizing model for the Muslim world. Since then, however, Washington’s relationship with Ankara has turned increasingly sour over U.S. favoritism toward the Kurds.

The Turkish Parliament late last week passed a resolution permitting the military to make incursions into Iraq in order to chase down guerrillas operating on both sides of the border. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad piled on, appearing to support the Turkish move, though under pressure from Baghdad he denied he had urged an invasion. Iran also fears Kurdish terrorism and has shelled Kurdish villages in Iraq in reprisal for guerrilla attacks in Iranian Kurdistan. Perhaps as a quid pro quo for Syrian support against the Kurds, Turkey offered this weekend to broker an agreement between Syria and Lebanon. Bush’s partiality to the Kurds has provided Damascus an opening for newly warm relations with Ankara.

On Sunday, guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) ambushed a Turkish military convoy, killing 17 soldiers. The Turkish military counterattacked, killing 32 persons it said were guerrillas. In Istanbul on Sunday, a thousand demonstrators came out to denounce the PKK. In the two weeks prior to Sunday, the PKK had killed 28 Turkish soldiers. The mustachioed president of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, a member of the Islamist-leaning AK Party, vowed that his country would “pay any price” to protect itself. The new tensions have roiled the world petroleum markets, hurt the Turkish economy, and further destabilized an already violent Iraq.

The Iraqi leadership, already presiding over a failed state, agonized at being caught in the crossfire. The Iraqi president, the avuncular Kurd Jalal Talabani, hypocritically condemned al-Assad for urging a foreign military invasion of an Arab country, even though he himself had supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Massoud Barzani, the pudgy turbaned leader of the Kurdistan Regional Authority, warned that his government would defend its citizens and not sit idly by if Turkish troops rolled through Kurdish cities in Iraq. On Sunday, the Iraqi Parliament, having been unable to agree on virtually any internal issue or enact any benchmark legislation, promptly passed a resolution condemning the Turkish Parliament.

The ratcheting up of tensions between Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Authority threatens to throw the last relatively quiet and prosperous corner of Iraq into turmoil. The turmoil is likely only beginning. The Iraqi Kurds are seeking to incorporate the oil-rich province of Kirkuk into their confederacy, and there is strong popular support for seceding from Iraq altogether. Turkish officials have repeatedly said that either move would set off a Turkish invasion.

As usual, the Bush administration has reacted to these predictable problems in a purely ad hoc manner. There is no evidence that anyone in the administration has crafted a policy for dealing with tensions between Ankara and America’s Kurdish allies. The U.S. State Department has designated the PKK a terrorist group, but the PKK is given safe harbor by the Kurdistan Regional Authority of northern Iraq. What will Bush do about having wound up as the de facto protector of a radical peasant guerrilla group that is attacking the troops of a NATO ally? If the United States acts against the PKK, it risks alienating the Iraqi Kurds, whose pro-American peshmerga fighters perform security duties and enlist as troops in the new Iraqi army. If Bush does not restrain the PKK, then he is playing Mullah Omar to its al-Qaida and “harboring” terrorists, which he trumpeted six years ago as grounds for war.

10/23/04 “TruthDig” — – Don’t worry, the White House is telling us. The world’s most powerful leader was simply making a rhetorical point. At a White House press conference last week, just in case you haven’t heard, President Bush informed the American people that he had told world leaders “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.” World War III. That is certainly some rhetorical point, especially coming from the man singularly most capable of making such an event reality.

Pundits have raised their eyebrows and comics are busy writing jokes, but the president’s reference to Armageddon, no matter how cavalierly uttered and subsequently brushed away, suggests an alarming context. Some might note that the comment was simply an offhand response to a reporter’s question, the kind of free-thinking scenario that baffles Bush so. In a way, this makes what the president said even more disturbing, since we now have an insight into the vision, and related terminology, which hovers just below the horizon in the brain of George W. Bush.

When I was a weapons inspector with the United Nations, there was a jostling that took place at the end of each day, when decisions needed to be made and authorization documents needed to be signed. In an environment of competing agendas, each of us who championed a position sought to be the “last man in,” namely the person who got to imprint the executive chairman (our decision maker) with the final point of view for the day. Failure to do so could find an inspection or point of investigation sidetracked for days or weeks after the executive chairman became distracted by a competing vision. I understand the concept of “imprinting,” and have seen it in action. What is clear from the president’s remarks is that, far from an innocent rhetorical fumble, his words, and the context in which he employed them, are a clear indication of the imprinting which is taking place behind the scenes at the White House. If the president mentions World War III in the context of Iran’s nuclear program, one can be certain that this is the very sort of discussion that is taking place in the Oval Office.

A critical question, therefore, is who was the last person to “imprint” the president prior to his public allusion to World War III? During his press conference, Bush noted that he awaited the opportunity to confer with his defense secretary, Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following their recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. So clearly the president hadn’t been imprinted recently by either of the principle players in the formulation of defense and foreign policy. The suspects, then, are quickly whittled down to three: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney, and God.

Hadley is a long-established neoconservative thinker who has for the most part operated “in the shadows” when it comes to the formulation of Iran policy in the Bush administration. In 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Hadley (then the deputy national security adviser) instituted what has been referred to as the “Hadley Rules,” a corollary of which is that no move will be made which alters the ideological positioning of Iran as a mortal enemy of the United States. These “rules” shut down every effort undertaken by Iran to seek a moderation of relations between it and the United States, and prohibited American policymakers from responding favorably to Iranian offers to assist with the fight against al-Qaida; they also blocked the grand offer of May 2003 in which Iran outlined a dramatic diplomatic initiative, including a normalization of relations with Israel. The Hadley Rules are at play today, in an even more nefarious manner, with the National Security Council becoming involved in the muzzling of former Bush administration officials who are speaking out on the issue of Iran. Hadley is blocking Flynt Leverett, formerly of the National Security Council, from publishing an Op-Ed piece critical of the Bush administration on the grounds that any insight into the machinations of policymaking (or lack thereof) somehow strengthens Iran’s hand. Leverett’s article would simply underscore the fact that the Bush administration has spurned every opportunity to improve relations with Iran while deliberately exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Iranian theocracy.

The silencing of informed critics is in keeping with Hadley’s deliberate policy obfuscation. There is still no official policy in place within the administration concerning Iran. While a more sober-minded national security bureaucracy works to marginalize the hawkish posturing of the neocons, the administration has decided that the best policy is in fact no policy, which is a policy decision in its own right. Hadley has forgone the normal procedures of governance, in which decisions impacting the nation are written down, using official channels, and made subject to review and oversight by those legally and constitutionally mandated and obligated to do so. A policy of no policy results in secret policy, which means, according to Hadley himself, the Bush administration simply does whatever it wants to, regardless. In the case of Iran, this means pushing for regime change in Tehran at any cost, even if it means World War III.

But Hadley is simply a facilitator, bureaucratic “grease” to ease policy formulated elsewhere down the gullet of a national security infrastructure increasingly kept in the dark about the true intent of the Bush administration when it comes to Iran. With the Department of State and the Pentagon now considered unfriendly ground by the remaining hard-core neoconservative thinkers still in power, policy formulation is more and more concentrated in the person of Vice President Cheney and the constitutionally nebulous “Office of the Vice President.”

Cheney and his cohorts have constructed a never-never land of oversight deniability, claiming immunity from both executive and legislative checks and balances. With an unchallenged ability to classify anything and everything as secret, and then claim that there is no authority inherent in government to oversee that which has been thus classified, the Office of the Vice President has transformed itself into a free republic’s worst nightmare, assuming Caesar-like dictatorial authority over almost every aspect of American national security policy at home and abroad. From torture to illegal wiretapping, to arms control (or lack of it) to Iran, Dick Cheney is the undisputed center of policy power in America today. While there are some who will claim that in this time of post-9/11 crisis such a process of bureaucratic streamlining is essential for the common good, the reality is far different.

It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this has never been truer than in the case of Cheney. What Cheney is doing behind his shield of secrecy can be simply defined: planning and implementing a preemptive war of aggression. During the Nuremberg tribunal in the aftermath of World War II, the chief American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, stated, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Today, we have a vice president who articulates publicly about global conflict, and who speaks in not-so-veiled language about a looming Armageddon. If there is such a future for America and the world, let one thing be certain; World War III, as postulated by Dick Cheney, would be an elective war, and not a conflict of tragic necessity. This makes the crime even greater.

Sadly, Judge Jackson’s words are but an empty shell. The global community lacks a legally binding definition of what constitutes a war of aggression, or even an act of aggression. But that isn’t the point. America should never find itself in a position where it is being judged by the global community regarding the legality of its actions. Judge Jackson established a precedent of jurisprudence concerning aggression based upon American principles and values, something the international community endorsed. The fact that current American indifference to the rule of law prevents the international community from certifying a definition of criminality when it comes to aggression, whether it be parsed as “war” or simply an “act,” does not change the fact that the Bush administration, in the person of Dick Cheney, is actively engaged in the committing of the “supreme [war] crime,” which makes Cheney the supreme war criminal. If the world is not empowered to judge him as such, then let the mantle of judgment fall to the American people. Through their elected representatives in Congress, they should not only bring this reign of unrestrained abuse of power to an end, but ensure that such abuse never again is attempted by an American official by holding to account, to the full extent of the law, those who have trampled on the Constitution of the United States and the ideals and principles it enshrines.

But what use is the rule of law, even if fairly and properly implemented, if in the end he who is entrusted with executive power takes his instructions from an even higher authority? President Bush’s relationship with “God” (or that which he refers to as God) is a matter of public record. The president himself has stated that “God speaks through me” (he acknowledged this before a group of Amish in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2004). Exactly how God speaks through him, and what precisely God says, is not a matter of speculation. According to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, President Bush told him and others that “God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” As such, at least in the president’s mind, God has ordered Bush to transform himself into a modern incarnation of St. Michael, smiting all that is evil before him. “We are in a conflict between good and evil. And America will call evil by its name,” the president told West Point cadets in a speech in 2002.

The matter of how and when an individual chooses to practice his faith, or lack thereof, is a deeply personal matter, one which should be kept from public discourse. For a president to so openly impose his personal religious beliefs, as Bush has done, on American policy formulation and implementation represents a fundamental departure from not only constitutional intent concerning the separation of church and state but also constitutional mandate concerning the imposition of checks and balances required by the American system of governance. The increasing embrace by this president of the notion of a unitary executive takes on an even more sinister aspect when one realizes that not only does the Bush administration seek to nullify the will of the people through the shackling of the people’s representatives in Congress, but that the president has forgone even the appearance of constitutional constraint by evoking the word of his personal deity, as expressed through his person, as the highest form of consultation on a matter as serious as war. As such, the president has made his faith, and how he practices it, a subject not only of public curiosity but of national survival.

That George W. Bush is a born-again Christian is not a national secret. Neither is the fact that his brand of Christianity, evangelicalism, embraces the notion of the “end of days,” the coming of the Apocalypse as foretold (so they say) in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible. President Bush’s frequent reference to “the evil one” suggests that he not only believes in the Antichrist but actively proselytizes on the Antichrist’s physical presence on Earth at this time. If one takes in the writing and speeches of those in the evangelical community today concerning the “rapture,” the numerous references to the current situation in the Middle East, especially on the events unfolding around Iran and its nuclear program, make it very clear that, at least in the minds of these evangelicals, there is a clear link between the “end of days” prophesy and U.S.-Iran policy. That James Dobson, one of the most powerful and influential evangelical voices in America today, would be invited to the White House with like-minded clergy to discuss President Bush’s Iran policy is absurd unless one makes the link between Bush’s personal faith, the extreme religious beliefs of Dobson and the potential of Armageddon-like conflict (World War III). At this point, the absurd becomes unthinkable, except it is all too real.

Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation’s greatest founders, made the separation of church and state an underlying principle upon which the United States was built. This separation was all-inclusive, meaning that not only should government stay out of religion, but likewise religion should be excluded from government. “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Francis Hopkinson in 1789. “Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” If only President Bush would abide by such wisdom, avoiding the addictive narcotic of religious fervor when carrying out the people’s business. Instead, he chooses as his drug one which threatens to destroy us all in a conflagration derived not from celestial intervention but individual ignorance and arrogance. Again Jefferson, in a letter written in 1825: “It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”

Nightmares, more aptly, unless something can be done to change the direction Bush and Dobson are taking us. The problem is that far too many Americans openly espouse not only the faith of George W. Bush but also the underlying philosophy which permits this faith to be intertwined with the governance of the land. “God bless America” has become a rallying cry for this crowd, and those too ignorant and/or afraid to speak out in opposition. If this statement has merit, what does it say for the 6.8 billion others in the world today who are not Americans? That God condemns them? The American embrace of divine destiny is not unique in history (one only has to recall that the belt buckles of the German army during World War II read “God is with us”). But for a nation born of the age of reason to collectively fall victim to the most base of fear-induced theology is a clear indication that America currently fails to live up to its founding principles. Rather than turning to Dobson and his ilk for guidance in these troubled times, Americans would be well served to reflect on President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered in the middle of a horrific civil war which makes all of the conflict America finds itself in today pale in comparison:

“Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. … The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. … [T]hat He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

God is not on our side, or the side of any single nation or people. To believe such is the ultimate expression of national hubris. To invoke such, if one is a true believer, is to embrace sacrilege and heresy. This, of course, is an individual right, granted as an extension of religious freedom. But it is not a collective right, nor is it a right born of governance, especially in a land protected by the separation of church and state.

The issue of Iran is a national problem which requires a collective debate, discussion and dialogue inclusive of all the facts, and stripped of all ideology and theocracy which would seek to deny reasoned thought conducted within a framework of accepted laws and ideals. It is grossly irresponsible of an American president to invoke the imagery of World War III without first sharing with the American people the framework of thought that produced such a comparison. Such openness will not be forthcoming from this administration or president. Not in the form of Stephen Hadley’s policy of no policy, designed with intent to avoid and subvert both bureaucratic and legislative process and oversight, or Dick Cheney’s secret government within a government, operating above and beyond the law and in a manner which violates both legal and moral norms and values, and certainly not in the president’s own private conversations with “God,” either directly or through the medium of lunatic evangelicals who embrace the termination of all we stand for, and especially the future of our next generation, in a fiery holocaust born from the fraudulent writings of centuries past. The processes which compelled George W. Bush to speak of a World War III are intentionally not transparent to the American people. The president has much to explain, and it would be incumbent upon every venue of civic and public pressure to demand that such an explanation be forthcoming in the near future. The stakes regarding Iran have always been high, but never more so than when a nation’s leader invokes the end of days as a solution.

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” ­The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

It’s clear to everyone paying attention these days that the U.S. Government sanctions the use of torture, despite continued denials made by President Bush, like, “We do not torture.”

The evidence is overwhelming both here in U.S. prisons and rendition abroad at so-called Black Sites (secret prisons) that captured individuals are severely tortured. Of course the word torture is never used. Instead, tortures such as waterboarding, stress positions, and other brutalities, humiliations are said to be “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

In fact, the Department of Justice authorized the use of extreme interrogation techniques not only in 2002 and 2003, but twice more in 2005. And the infamous “torture memo” written by White House legal counsel, John Yoo, stated that no interrogation tactics were illegal unless they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or “even death.” Another memo produced at the same time detailed how such practices would be applied, how often and how long.

I’m quite sure, however, that it doesn’t take DOJ authorization for the CIA, FBI, and local police to feel confident that they’ll suffer no consequences for their torture of prisoners deemed terrorists or enemy combatants, labels applied to freedom fighters.

The exception, of course, was the court martial of low-ranking U.S. military guards for the most egregious, abhorrent tortures at Abu-Graib prison in Iraq – once there was an international outcry following widespread dissemination of explicit photographs. Yet no one in position of authority was prosecuted.

Who raised any hell about the brutal torture and interrogation of three Black Panthers in New Orleans in 1973, namely: John Bowman, Harold Taylor, and Ruben Scott? Scott is a broken man; JB suffered pain and injury until his premature death in 2006; and Harold Taylor continues to suffer from physical pain, PTSD, and nightmares to this day. Has anyone been held accountable or suffered any consequences for their torture and injuries?

Hell no! In fact, the two San Francisco detectives, McCoy and Erdelatz, who conducted the interrogations and subjected these brothers to the vicious brutal tortures in New Orleans have since become Federal agents authorized to arrest and charge these elders all over again. In 1973,they tortured them into signing confessions of guilt (which they all later recanted) in the now 36-year-old case of the shooting of police officer, Sgt. John Young at the Ingleside Station in San Francisco, August 28, 1971.

On October 10, before a packed courtroom, Judge Philip Moscone denied Harold Taylor’s motion for collateral estoppel presented by his attorney, Randy Montesano. That’s a legal term that asks the court to honor prior decisions by judges on the same issue. In this case, two courts had refused to admit confessions rendered under torture. In fact, a San Francisco judge threw these same charges out in 1975. Att. Montesano noted what a waste of resources it is to do it all over again, forcing Taylor, still suffering the ill effects of the torture, to “relive those moments.”

Judge Moscone’s decision was based on the prosecution’s assertion that the 1974 Los Angeles proceedings (involving Harold Taylor) were pre-trial hearings and not final adjudication. However, the judge did leave the door open for the defense attorneys to enter a motion to suppress (the coerced statements) at future hearings.

In an interview with Richard Brown, one of the six defendants out on bail, he said, “Based upon three rulings that we’ve had already, including the Supreme Court, those forced confessions will be suppressed…and I’m very, very happy to say that he [Moscone] seems to be a judge. He doesn’t seem to be politically motivated or intimidated by anything or anyone…it appears as though he’s going to judge the case based on the merit of the case, the evidence; and that’s what we’re all hoping for.”

The next hearing is scheduled for Monday, December 3, when issues of discovery and the sealing of prejudicial documents will be litigated.

Be sure to encourage all your friends to help us pack the courtroom, as we’re quite sure that your continued presence and support are what made it possible for Richard Brown, Richard O’Neal, Ray Boudreaux, Hank Jones, Harold Taylor, and Francisco Torres to be released on bail, and return home to their families.

Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim (Bottom) remain in solitary confinement with no-contact visits at the San Francisco County Jail. Please write to them and learn more about the frameup that has kept them incarcerated in New York State prisons for 34 and 36 years respectively. http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/profiles/ny3.html
For past articles and updates on this case, go to www.freethesf8.org or www.sfbayview.com.

Syria is a beautiful country- at least I think it is. I say “I think” because while I perceive it to be beautiful, I sometimes wonder if I mistake safety, security and normalcy for ‘beauty’. In so many ways, Damascus is like Baghdad before the war- bustling streets, occasional traffic jams, markets seemingly always full of shoppers… And in so many ways it’s different. The buildings are higher, the streets are generally narrower and there’s a mountain, Qasiyoun, that looms in the distance.

The mountain distracts me, as it does many Iraqis- especially those from Baghdad. Northern Iraq is full of mountains, but the rest of Iraq is quite flat. At night, Qasiyoun blends into the black sky and the only indication of its presence is a multitude of little, glimmering spots of light- houses and restaurants built right up there on the mountain. Every time I take a picture, I try to work Qasiyoun into it- I try to position the person so that Qasiyoun is in the background.

The first weeks here were something of a cultural shock. It has taken me these last three months to work away certain habits I’d acquired in Iraq after the war. It’s funny how you learn to act a certain way and don’t even know you’re doing strange things- like avoiding people’s eyes in the street or crazily murmuring prayers to yourself when stuck in traffic. It took me at least three weeks to teach myself to walk properly again- with head lifted, not constantly looking behind me.

It is estimated that there are at least 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria today. I believe it. Walking down the streets of Damascus, you can hear the Iraqi accent everywhere. There are areas like Geramana and Qudsiya that are packed full of Iraqi refugees. Syrians are few and far between in these areas. Even the public schools in the areas are full of Iraqi children. A cousin of mine is now attending a school in Qudsiya and his class is composed of 26 Iraqi children, and 5 Syrian children. It’s beyond belief sometimes. Most of the families have nothing to live on beyond their savings which are quickly being depleted with rent and the costs of living.

Within a month of our being here, we began hearing talk about Syria requiring visas from Iraqis, like most other countries. Apparently, our esteemed puppets in power met with Syrian and Jordanian authorities and decided they wanted to take away the last two safe havens remaining for Iraqis- Damascus and Amman. The talk began in late August and was only talk until recently- early October. Iraqis entering Syria now need a visa from the Syrian consulate or embassy in the country they are currently in. In the case of Iraqis still in Iraq, it is said that an approval from the Ministry of Interior is also required (which kind of makes it difficult for people running away from militias OF the Ministry of Interior…). Today, there’s talk of a possible fifty dollar visa at the border.

Iraqis who entered Syria before the visa was implemented were getting a one month visitation visa at the border. As soon as that month was over, you could take your passport and visit the local immigration bureau. If you were lucky, they would give you an additional month or two. When talk about visas from the Syrian embassy began, they stopped giving an extension on the initial border visa. We, as a family, had a brilliant idea. Before the commotion of visas began, and before we started needing a renewal, we decided to go to one of the border crossings, cross into Iraq, and come back into Syria- everyone was doing it. It would buy us some time- at least 2 months.

We chose a hot day in early September and drove the six hours to Kameshli, a border town in northern Syria. My aunt and her son came with us- they also needed an extension on their visa. There is a border crossing in Kameshli called Yaarubiya. It’s one of the simpler crossings because the Iraqi and Syrian borders are only a matter of several meters. You walk out of Syrian territory and then walk into Iraqi territory- simple and safe.

When we got to the Yaarubiya border patrol, it hit us that thousands of Iraqis had had our brilliant idea simultaneously- the lines to the border patrol office were endless. Hundreds of Iraqis stood in a long line waiting to have their passports stamped with an exit visa. We joined the line of people and waited. And waited. And waited…

It took four hours to leave the Syrian border after which came the lines of the Iraqi border post. Those were even longer. We joined one of the lines of weary, impatient Iraqis. “It’s looking like a gasoline line…” My younger cousin joked. That was the beginning of another four hours of waiting under the sun, taking baby steps, moving forward ever so slowly. The line kept getting longer. At one point, we could see neither the beginning of the line, where passports were being stamped to enter Iraq, nor the end. Running up and down the line were little boys selling glasses of water, chewing gum and cigarettes. My aunt caught one of them by the arm as he zipped past us, “How many people are in front of us?” He whistled and took a few steps back to assess the situation, “A hundred! A thousand!”. He was almost gleeful as he ran off to make business.

I had such mixed feelings standing in that line. I was caught between a feeling of yearning, a certain homesickness that sometimes catches me at the oddest moments, and a heavy feeling of dread. What if they didn’t agree to let us out again? It wasn’t really possible, but what if it happened? What if this was the last time I’d see the Iraqi border? What if we were no longer allowed to enter Iraq for some reason? What if we were never allowed to leave?

We spent the four hours standing, crouching, sitting and leaning in the line. The sun beat down on everyone equally- Sunnis, Shia and Kurds alike. E. tried to convince the aunt to faint so it would speed the process up for the family, but she just gave us a withering look and stood straighter. People just stood there, chatting, cursing or silent. It was yet another gathering of Iraqis – the perfect opportunity to swap sad stories and ask about distant relations or acquaintances.

We met two families we knew while waiting for our turn. We greeted each other like long lost friends and exchanged phone numbers and addresses in Damascus, promising to visit. I noticed the 23-year-old son, K., from one of the families was missing. I beat down my curiosity and refused to ask where he was. The mother was looking older than I remembered and the father looked constantly lost in thought, or maybe it was grief. I didn’t want to know if K. was dead or alive. I’d just have to believe he was alive and thriving somewhere, not worrying about borders or visas. Ignorance really is bliss sometimes…

Back at the Syrian border, we waited in a large group, tired and hungry, having handed over our passports for a stamp. The Syrian immigration man sifting through dozens of passports called out names and looked at faces as he handed over the passports patiently, “Stand back please- stand back”. There was a general cry towards the back of the crowded hall where we were standing as someone collapsed- as they lifted him I recognized an old man who was there with his family being chaperoned by his sons, leaning on a walking stick.

By the time we had reentered the Syrian border and were headed back to the cab ready to take us into Kameshli, I had resigned myself to the fact that we were refugees. I read about refugees on the Internet daily… in the newspapers… hear about them on TV. I hear about the estimated 1.5 million plus Iraqi refugees in Syria and shake my head, never really considering myself or my family as one of them. After all, refugees are people who sleep in tents and have no potable water or plumbing, right? Refugees carry their belongings in bags instead of suitcases and they don’t have cell phones or Internet access, right? Grasping my passport in my hand like my life depended on it, with two extra months in Syria stamped inside, it hit me how wrong I was. We were all refugees. I was suddenly a number. No matter how wealthy or educated or comfortable, a refugee is a refugee. A refugee is someone who isn’t really welcome in any country- including their own… especially their own.

We live in an apartment building where two other Iraqis are renting. The people in the floor above us are a Christian family from northern Iraq who got chased out of their village by Peshmerga and the family on our floor is a Kurdish family who lost their home in Baghdad to militias and were waiting for immigration to Sweden or Switzerland or some such European refugee haven.

The first evening we arrived, exhausted, dragging suitcases behind us, morale a little bit bruised, the Kurdish family sent over their representative – a 9 year old boy missing two front teeth, holding a lopsided cake, “We’re Abu Mohammed’s house- across from you- mama says if you need anything, just ask- this is our number. Abu Dalia’s family live upstairs, this is their number. We’re all Iraqi too… Welcome to the building.”

BAGHDAD, 21 October 2007 (IRIN) – Iraqis are breathing a sigh of relief as violence in their war-torn country is ebbing and the number of violence-related victims has dropped sharply since the beginning of this year, according to statistics compiled by the country’s interior, defence and health ministries.

“Violence-related deaths in September dropped remarkably to levels not seen in more than a year as the number [of violence-related deaths] stood at 290 while in September 2006 the number was about 1,400,” Adel Muhsin, the health ministry’s inspector-general, told IRIN in a phone interview.

According to the ministry’s statistics, between January and the end of September 2007, the number of violent deaths involving civilian, police and military in all of Iraq was about 7,100, against 27,000 in the same period of 2006.

According to Muhsin, the average number of dead bodies sent to Baghdad’s main morgue just over a year ago was between 100 and 150 a day. Now, it is no more than 10 bodies a day, and about 50 percent of them are dying in normal circumstances.

“There have been days this year when no dead bodies were sent to the morgue and this gave the morgue employees a chance to refurbish it, something they couldn’t do in the past,” Muhsin added.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently said that September witnessed the lowest number of Iraqi casualties in any month this year. He added that there had been a decease in violence in general due to a cessation of attacks by the Mahdi Army, led by Shia religious leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who in August ordered a temporary freeze of his followers’ activities, including attacks on US troops.

As a result, Ban said he had strengthened the UN team in Iraq by increasing staff in Baghdad and Erbil from 65 to 85 and was considering the establishment of a small UN presence in Basra.

Some time after Operation Imposing Law was launched by US and Iraqi forces on 14 February this year, the number of those thought to be victims of Shia death squads began dropping dramatically in Baghdad, and there has also been a lull in violent attacks by Sunni insurgents.

“But that doesn’t mean that their attacks have ended, but they have been reduced and have become less effective as we have managed to arrest their senior leaders and disband many vital cells,” a senior police officer said on condition of anonymity as he fears reprisals.

“And as a result of that, the number of car bomb attacks has been reduced from between eight and 15 a day to one and three and sometimes none. The same is true of roadside bomb attacks and assassinations,” he added.

Some return to normalcy

Naji Mohammed Adel (not his real name), 22, has reopened his music store in eastern Baghdad nearly two years after al-Sadr followers went to his shop and left a threatening letter asking him to shut it down because it contravened their perception of Islamic law.

”Now I can open my store for about six to eight hours a day and clients are showing up every day to buy the latest music.”
“Now I can open my store for about six to eight hours a day and clients are showing up every day to buy the latest music,” said Adel from Mashtal, which, like other parts of eastern Baghdad, was controlled by the Mahdi Army.

W.N., a 33-year-old female hairdresser who has a salon in a western neighbourhood of the capital, is now serving clients again after extremists had previously threatened to “have her head chopped off” if she stayed in this “sinful” business.

“Clients are trickling in but not like before,” she said.” We are open for about three to five hours during the day as there is a nearby Iraqi army check point.”

Deadly business

Taxi driver Ahmed Khalil Baqir used to station himself outside Baghdad’s main morgue, waiting for grieving families who went there to claim their relatives’ dead bodies.

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.

The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 – much earlier than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 (£44) a barrel.

“The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy,” said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG’s founder and the German MP behind the country’s successful support system for renewable energy.

The report’s author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now behind us.

The results are in contrast to projections from the International Energy Agency, which says there is little reason to worry about oil supplies at the moment.

However, the EWG study relies more on actual oil production data which, it says, are more reliable than estimates of reserves still in the ground. The group says official industry estimates put global reserves at about 1.255 gigabarrels – equivalent to 42 years’ supply at current consumption rates. But it thinks the figure is only about two thirds of that.

Global oil production is currently about 81m barrels a day – EWG expects that to fall to 39m by 2030. It also predicts significant falls in gas, coal and uranium production as those energy sources are used up.

Britain’s oil production peaked in 1999 and has already dropped by half to about 1.6 million barrels a day.

The report presents a bleak view of the future unless a radically different approach is adopted. It quotes the British energy economist David Fleming as saying: “Anticipated supply shortages could lead easily to disturbing scenes of mass unrest as witnessed in Burma this month. For government, industry and the wider public, just muddling through is not an option any more as this situation could spin out of control and turn into a complete meltdown of society.”

Mr Schindler comes to a similar conclusion. “The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life.”

Jeremy Leggett, one of Britain’s leading environmentalists and the author of Half Gone, a book about “peak oil” – defined as the moment when maximum production is reached, said that both the UK government and the energy industry were in “institutionalised denial” and that action should have been taken sooner.

“When I was an adviser to government, I proposed that we set up a taskforce to look at how fast the UK could mobilise alternative energy technologies in extremis, come the peak,” he said. “Other industry advisers supported that. But the government prefers to sleep on without even doing a contingency study. For those of us who know that premature peak oil is a clear and present danger, it is impossible to understand such complacency.”

Mr Fell said that the world had to move quickly towards the massive deployment of renewable energy and to a dramatic increase in energy efficiency, both as a way to combat climate change and to ensure that the lights stayed on. “If we did all this we may not have an energy crisis.”

He accused the British government of hypocrisy. “Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have talked a lot about climate change but have not brought in proper policies to drive up the use of renewables,” he said. “This is why they are left talking about nuclear and carbon capture and storage. “

Yesterday, a spokesman for the Department of Business and Enterprise said: “Over the next few years global oil production and refining capacity is expected to increase faster than demand. The world’s oil resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future. The challenge will be to bring these resources to market in a way that ensures sustainable, timely, reliable and affordable supplies of energy.”