The Rag Blog

BAGHDAD – American officials scrambled to head off a potential crisis Monday after irate Iraqi authorities canceled the license of the controversial American security company Blackwater USA, whose guards were accused of shooting to death eight civilians while guarding a U.S. State Department motorcade.

The swift response to Sunday’s deaths marked Iraq’s boldest step against foreign security contractors who have long been accused of racing through Baghdad’s streets and firing without restraint at anyone they see as a threat.

It also cast a focus on the continued lack of control by American officials over heavily armed private security contractors, at least 20,000 of whom supplement the U.S.-led military forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The ouster of all Blackwater guards could cripple security arrangements for U.S. diplomats and other workers who rely on private guards for protection.

But several contractors predicted Monday that it was doubtful the Iraqi government would carry through on the threat to expel Blackwater.

“For all intents and purposes they belong to the [U.S.] Department of State,” one contractor said of Blackwater, whose employees have often been the victims of violence, including a gruesome 2004 incident in Fallujah when four guards were killed and mutilated.

While many details of Sunday’s incident remain in dispute, the gravity of the situation was apparent in the reaction of officials in Washington and Baghdad.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday night to express regret over the shootings involving the North Carolina-based company, which provides most of the security for U.S. Embassy personnel traveling in Iraq. Al-Maliki on Sunday condemned the shooting as a “crime.”

‘A full investigation’

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman stressed that officials wanted to get to the bottom of the incident. “We take this very seriously and we are launching a full investigation in cooperation with the Iraqi authorities,” spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo said.

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, said the Iraqi government should use the incident to look into overhauling private security guards’ immunity from Iraqi courts that was granted by Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer in 2003 and later extended ahead of Iraq’s return to sovereignty.

“This is a golden opportunity for the government of Iraq to radically review the CPA Order 17 and make the review part of the investigation process,” al-Rubaie said.

Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, accused Blackwater of breaking the law.

“They committed a crime,” Khalaf said. “The judicial system will take action.” It was not immediately clear, however, how Blackwater employees could be prosecuted due to the immunity provisions enacted.

Private security companies expert Peter Singer said the case posed a sticky dilemma for the Americans.

“If [al-Maliki] is already describing this as a crime … we have a very interesting bridge to cross,” said Singer, an analyst with the Brookings Institution. “Do we turn over American citizens to an Iraqi judicial system that is inept, corrupt and now politicized?”

The incident Sunday was the latest of many in which private security contractors employed by U.S.-led forces have shot and killed Iraqi civilians.

No U.S. security contractor has been prosecuted in the U.S. or Iraq. The latest incident is the first in which the Iraqi government has challenged the blanket immunity for foreign private security contractors, who number 20,000 to 30,000.

Khalaf said eight people were killed and 13 wounded when the security convoy sped by Nisoor Square at the edge of the Mansour district in western Baghdad. Two Iraqi witnesses said no one had attacked the convoy.

“It is my right to study an honorable career,to choose my partner, to build our life. It is my right to work any job. We must protect women’s rights. The rights of the women and the rights of the children are hidden in the shadow of the law”.

(From the lead song, “Ala Dal’ona,” on the CD, “Needle in the Groove.”

“It’s very important to be here, because where there is darkness it’s nice to make light.” – Fatima Khaldi, co-founder, Women for Life, northern Palestine.

In Salfit district in the northern West Bank, the women’s educational organization Women for Life with its girls’ spin-off, Flowers Against the Occupation, in 2005 conceived the idea of a girls’ summer music camp. Music camps for girls were unheard of in this rural, deeply-Muslim area where girls don’t usually learn musical instruments. Getting to concerts in Ramallah is made impossible by Israel’s curfews and sieges; its maze of checkpoints; its draconian internal closures (sealing off villages from each other) and external closures (sealing off the West Bank and Gaza from Israel.) Despite such obstacles Women for Life co-founder Fatima Khaldi, the girls from “Flowers” and Boston-based Hannah Mermelstein pushed on with the camp. (See The Boston Globe Magazine, 7-22-2007, “Counter Tourism,” an article about Mermelstein and fellow Bostonian Dunya Alwan’s “Birthright Unplugged” tours of the occupied West Bank for American Jews.) They produced “Needle in the Groove,” a sixteen-song CD whose lead, a traditional Palestinian folk tune rewritten by Khaldi as a women’s liberation song, is sung a cappella by two of her daughters, Shams and Mayisa. The rest of the pieces are freedom songs by American women folk-singers. The CD’s liner notes include photographs of quilt patches designed by the girls and the musicians. Proceeds from “Needle in the Groove” sales helped fund the camp. (For more detail about the CD and photographs of girls in “Flowers Against the Occupation,” see Needleinthegroove.org.) Mermelstein recruited five American women musician-activists to teach at the camp – DC-based Pat Humphries and Sandy O of the folk duo “Emma’s Revolution;” Andrea Prichett, a guitarist from Oakland, California, of the band “Rebecca Riots;” Sarah Allen Pella, a Seattle-based rock drummer of the band “supermodelumberjack,” and the Boston-based writer of this article, a pianist. They raised money for the trip and donated instruments to the summer camp and Women for Life. The camp’s pilot session took place this past August.

I know the girls will love the keyboard, a “Roland Oriental.” I’ve found it in a Ramallah music store owned by musician-teacher Omar who tells me he’s also “Palestine’s first stand-up comedian.” “It’s professional quality!” he assures me as I lose myself in its Arabic drum patches, organ and oud sounds. I phone Fatima Khaldi who’s in Ramallah on business, announce I’m buying the keyboard, and that Omar’s driver will take it north to Bidya, seat of “Women for Life.” Fatima arrives within the hour, wrapped in hijab and jilbaab – the long, straight Muslim cover-up coat most adult women wear in rural Palestine even in the sweltering August heat. She has a deeply-lined, warm, mobile face, and almost immediately we’re in conversation about her life (divorced, a social worker, raising five children by herself – heroic in rural Palestine), and the music camp. It will be a strike against the occupation, she says. “I know that one day Palestine will be free. You agree, don’t you?” Her eyes rivet mine. I hesitate a second and then: “Yes, it will be free.” Does she know about our Civil Rights movement? Martin Luther King? She nods. I begin singing “We Shall Overcome,” and she chimes in, eyes shining.

It used to take less than half an hour to drive from Ramallah to Bidya. Now, because of the checkpoints and other hazards of the occupation, it can take upwards of an hour. Omar’s driver hurtles up the narrow road at 60 miles an hour circumventing Huwara checkpoint, notorious for Israeli soldiers’ abuses. The West Bank in summer rises around us, its austere Mediterranean beauty reminiscent of parts of the former Yugoslavia. Twenty years ago and more, I used to drive the length and breadth of the region, feasting my eyes on these steep, stony hills lined with their unbroken traceries of dry-wall terracing and olive trees billowing green and silver in the breeze. Israel’s colonization of the area was well underway then (the region’s rich land and abundant aquifers made it coveted territory for the occupier) but you could still travel all around and view an unspoiled loveliness. No more. The names of settlements come up with dizzying regularity – Elon Moreh; Ariel; Tappuach; Revava. At one point as we drive north, a gigantic menorah rises like a fist in the middle of the road, announcing Israel’s messianic dominion.

The settlements sprawl throughout the district like so many California red-roofed suburbs, encircling all the Palestinian villages and towns. In the late 1960s the Allon Plan and World Zionist Organization’s Drobles Plan stipulated that Israeli settlements should ensnare and divide all Palestinian living centers from each other. To annex the settlements to itself Israel has slashed the region with its separation wall. The World Court declared the wall illegal in 2004 but Israel bludgeons on with construction to date, separating hundreds of thousands from their land. This is as true in Salfit as elsewhere; to Salfit’s north the wall has encircled all of Qalqilya, obliterating the economy of a city once famous for its peaceful commerce with its Israeli neighbors. A million olive trees, which formed a large part of Palestinian agricultural sustenance, have been destroyed since 1967 (many have been uprooted and resold in Israel.) Half a million have been destroyed since 2000, many for the wall. Gashed by the staggeringly ugly, 25-foot-high concrete barrier, criss-crossed by wide, Jewish-only highways that enable the settlers to access their colonies without having to come in contact with Arabs, pockmarked with hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints, the region’s ecology has been devastated, its beauty defaced, and the agricultural sustenance that used to be the backbone of its economy crushed.

It takes us 45 minutes to reach Bidya, a hot, dusty little place, its main drag flanked by homely shops. The back of the building housing Women for Life’s offices gives onto a lot reminiscent of poorer sections of Bedford Stuyvesant in New York City — two small battered-looking grocery stores flank the building. Centuries-old traditional Palestinian architecture was low, made of regional stone. It had lovely features among which, gothic-arched living quarters. You can still see it in Jerusalem’s Old City, in East and West Jerusalem, but it has all but vanished from most of the West Bank. Because Israel has confiscated so much Palestinian land, new Palestinian construction is often vertical, adding third, fourth and even fifth floors to already-existing structures. The effect is ugly and out of harmony with the surrounding landscape. Exhausted with the heat, we cart keyboard, amplifier, keyboard stand and mike to Women for Life’s suite of offices on the fifth story. Fatima’s 17-year-old daughter Mayisa, one of the two a cappella singers on “Needle in the Groove,” bounds up to me. “So,” she says in perfect English, grinning, “you are going to teach us?”

“SIR, I don’t know, actually”: The fact that America’s surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week’s festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.

Not that many Americans were watching. The country knew going in that the White House would win its latest campaign to stay its course of indefinitely shoveling our troops and treasure into the bottomless pit of Iraq. The only troops coming home alive or with their limbs intact in President Bush’s troop “reduction” are those who were scheduled to be withdrawn by April anyway. Otherwise the president would have had to extend combat tours yet again, mobilize more reserves or bring back the draft.

On the sixth anniversary of the day that did not change everything, General Petraeus couldn’t say we are safer because he knows we are not. Last Sunday, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the C.I.A.’s Osama bin Laden unit, explained why. He wrote in The Daily News that Al Qaeda, under the de facto protection of Pervez Musharraf, is “on balance” more threatening today that it was on 9/11. And as goes Pakistan, so goes Afghanistan. On Tuesday, just as the Senate hearings began, Lisa Myers of NBC News reported on a Taliban camp near Kabul in an area nominally controlled by the Afghan government we installed. It is training bomb makers to attack America.

Little of this registered in or beyond the Beltway. New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we’re back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, “is virtually impotent.” Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America’s P.R. in the jihadists’ world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international “special sports envoy.” We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn.

This is why the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including those more accurate than Mr. Bush’s recent false analogies, can take us only so far. Our situation is graver than it was during Vietnam.

Certainly there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus’s sales pitch last week and its often-noted historical antecedent: Gen. William Westmoreland’s similar mission for L.B.J. before Congress on April 28, 1967. Westmoreland, too, refused to acknowledge that our troops were caught in a civil war. He spoke as well of the “repeated successes” of the American-trained South Vietnamese military and ticked off its growing number of combat-ready battalions. “The strategy we’re following at this time is the proper one,” the general assured America, and “is producing results.”

Those fabulous results delayed our final departure from Vietnam for another eight years — just short of the nine to 10 years General Petraeus has said may be needed for a counterinsurgency in Iraq. But there’s a crucial difference between the Westmoreland show of 1967 and the 2007 revival by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Westmoreland played to a full and largely enthusiastic house. Most Americans still supported the war in Vietnam and trusted him; so did all but a few members of Congress, regardless of party. All three networks pre-empted their midday programming for Westmoreland’s Congressional appearance.

Our Iraq commander, by contrast, appeared before a divided and stalemated Congress just as an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that most Americans believed he would overhype progress in Iraq. No network interrupted a soap opera for his testimony. On cable the hearings fought for coverage with Britney Spears’s latest self-immolation and the fate of Madeleine McCann, our latest JonBenet Ramsey stand-in.

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers. Their “Briefing for America,” as Fox titled it, was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction.

Even if military “victory” were achievable in Iraq, America could not win a war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that support was ratified by voters last November. For that, they were rewarded with the “surge.” Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely abandoned the war; they don’t want to hear anything that might remind them of it, or of war in general. Katie Couric’s much-promoted weeklong visit to the front produced ratings matching the CBS newscast’s all-time low. Angelina Jolie’s movie about Daniel Pearl sank without a trace. Even Clint Eastwood’s wildly acclaimed movies about World War II went begging. Over its latest season, “24” lost a third of its viewers, just as Mr. Bush did between January’s prime-time address and last week’s.

You can’t blame the public for changing the channel. People realize that the president’s real “plan for victory” is to let his successor clean up the mess. They don’t want to see American troops dying for that cause, but what can be done? Americans voted the G.O.P. out of power in Congress; a clear majority consistently tell pollsters they want out of Iraq. And still every day is Groundhog Day. Our America, unlike Vietnam-era America, is more often resigned than angry. Though the latest New York Times-CBS News poll finds that only 5 percent trust the president to wrap up the war, the figure for the (barely) Democratic-controlled Congress, 21 percent, is an almost-as-resounding vote of no confidence.

Last week Democrats often earned that rating, especially those running for president. It is true that they do not have the votes to overcome a Bush veto of any war legislation. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats have to go on holiday. Few used their time to cross-examine General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on their disingenuous talking points, choosing instead to regurgitate stump sentiments or ask uncoordinated, redundant questions. It’s telling that the one question that drew blood — are we safer? — was asked by a Republican, John Warner, who is retiring from the Senate.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the “General Betray-Us” headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the “Defeatocrats” and “cut and run” McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war’s cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. “General Betray-Us” gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America’s doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

It’s also past time for the Democratic presidential candidates to stop getting bogged down in bickering about who has the faster timeline for withdrawal or the more enforceable deadline. Every one of these plans is academic anyway as long as Mr. Bush has a veto pen. The security of America is more important — dare one say it? — than trying to outpander one another in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate need all the unity and focus they can muster to move this story forward, and that starts with the two marquee draws, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s essential to turn up the heat full time in Washington for any and every legislative roadblock to administration policy that they and their peers can induce principled or frightened Republicans to endorse.

They should summon the new chief of central command (and General Petraeus’s boss), Adm. William Fallon, for tough questioning; he is reportedly concerned about our lapsed military readiness should trouble strike beyond Iraq. And why not grill the Joint Chiefs and those half-dozen or so generals who turned down the White House post of “war czar” last fall? The war should be front and center in Congress every day.

Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan (“Return on Success”) Thursday night, is counting on the public’s continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality. We can’t afford to punt until Inauguration Day in a war that each day drains America of resources and will. Our national security can’t be held hostage indefinitely to a president’s narcissistic need to compound his errors rather than admit them.

WASHINGTON (Sept. 16) – Several thousand anti-war demonstrators marched through downtown Washington on Saturday, clashing with police at the foot of the Capitol steps where more than 190 protesters were arrested.

The group marched from the White House to the Capitol to demand an end to the Iraq war. Their numbers stretched for blocks along Pennsylvania Avenue, and they held banners and signs and chanted, “What do we want? Troops out. When do we want it? Now.”

Army veteran Justin Cliburn, 25, of Lawton, Okla., was among a contingent of Iraq veterans in attendance.

“We’re occupying a people who do not want us there,” Cliburn said of Iraq. “We’re here to show that it isn’t just a bunch of old hippies from the 60s who are against this war.”

Counterprotesters lined the sidewalks behind metal barricades. There were some heated shouting matches between the two sides.

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
Related Links

At midnight on Thursday, I lay on my back in the Colosseum and looked at a pageant of stars above Rome. Where the lions tore into gladiators, and only a few metres from the cross marking the place of Saint Paul’s crucifixion – “martyrdom”, of course, has become an uneasy word in this age of the suicide bomber – I could only reflect on how a centre of cruelty could become one of the greatest tourist attractions of our time. An Italian television station had asked me to talk about capital punishment in the Middle East for a series on American executions and death row prisoners. Two generators had melted down in an attempt to flood the ancient arena with light. Hence, the moment of reflection.

Readers with serious money may also like to know that it costs £75,000 to hire the Colosseum for 24 hours, a cool £10,500 just for our little night under the stars. Yet who could not think of capital punishment in the Colosseum?

Watching the first episode of the Italian television series – which recounted the visits of an Italian man and woman to two Americans who had spent years on death row in Texas – I was struck by how both prisoners, who may or may not have remembered amid their drug-induced comas whether or not they murdered anyone, had clearly “reformed”. Both deeply regretted their crimes, both prayed that one day they could return to live good lives, to care for their children, to go shopping, walk the dog. In other words, they were no longer the criminals they were when they were sentenced.

Given their predicament, I guess anyone would reform. But I suspect that guilt or innocence is not what the death sentence is about. My Dad was perfectly aware that the young Australian soldier he was ordered to execute in the First World War had killed a British military policeman in Paris, but the Australian promised to live “an upright and straightforward life” if pardoned. My father refused to kill the Australian. Someone else shot him instead. Capital punishment, for those who believe in it, is almost a passion. I rather think it is close to an addiction, something – like smoking or alcohol – which can be cured only by total abstinence. And no excuses for secret Japanese executions or lethal injections in Texas or head-chopping outside Saudi Arabian mosques. But how do you reach this stage when humanity is so obsessed with death in so barbaric a form?

Whenever the Iranians string up drug-dealers or rapists – and who knows their guilt or innocence – the cranes which hoist these unfortunates into the sky like dead thrushes are always surrounded by thousands of men and women, often chanting “God is Great”. They did this even when a young woman was hanged.

Surely some of these people are against such terrible punishment. But there is, it seems, something primal in our desire for judicial killings. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that if Christians were thrown to the lions in the Royal Albert Hall, there would be a packed house every night. I’m sure he was right. Did not those thousands of Romans pack this very same, sinister Colosseum in which I was lying to watch just such carnage? Was not Saddam Hussein’s execution part of our own attempt to distract the Iraqis with bread and circuses, the shrieking executioners on the mobile phone video the Baghdad equivalent of the gladiators putting their enemies to the sword? Nor, let us remember, is execution only the prerogative of states and presidents. The IRA practised capital punishment. The Taliban practises execution and so does al-Qa’ida. Osama bin Laden – and I heard this from him in person – believes in the “Islamic” punishment of head chopping.

I remember the crowds who lynched three Palestinian collaborators in Hebron in 2001, their near-naked bodies later swinging from electric pylons while small children threw stones at their torsos, the thousands who cheered when their carcasses were tossed with a roar of laughter into a garbage truck. I was so appalled that I could not write in my notebook and instead drew pictures of this obscenity. They are still in the pages of my notebook today, hanging upside down like Saint Paul, legs askew above their heads, their bodies punctured by cigarette burns.

The leading antagonists in the preposterous “war on terror” which we are all supposed to be fighting – Messrs Bush and bin Laden – are always talking about death and sacrifice although, in his latest videotape, the latter showed a touching faith in American democracy when he claimed the American people had voted for Bush’s first presidency.

For bin Laden, 11 September 2001 was “punishment” for America’s bloodshed in the Muslim world; indeed, more and more attacks by both guerrillas and orthodox soldiers are turning into revenge operations. Was not the first siege of Fallujah revenge for the killing and desecration of the bodies of American mercenaries? Wasn’t Abu Ghraib part of “our” revenge for 11 September and for our failures in Iraq?

Many of the suicide attacks in the Middle East – in “Palestine”, in Afghanistan, in Iraq – are specifically named after “martyrs” killed in previous operations. Al-Qa’ida in Iraq stated quite explicitly that it had “executed” US troops in retaliation for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl south of Baghdad.

Yet I fear the real problem goes beyond the individual act of killing, judicial or otherwise. In a weird, frightening way, we believe in violent death. We regard it as a policy option, as much to do with self-preservation on a national scale as punishment for named and individual wrongdoers. We believe in war. For what is aggression – the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example – except capital punishment on a mass scale? We “civilised” nations – like the dark armies we believe we are fighting – are convinced that the infliction of death on an awesome scale can be morally justified.

After the elaborate theatrics just performed in the house of mirrors of Washington, US President George W Bush is now recommending to the nation what he told top Iraq commander General David Petraeus to recommend to him. Only those paying more attention to the botched comeback of the “fat” lip-synching Britney Spears will be fooled by Petraeus, the iPod general – a player of what is fed by his master’s voice, the White House.

The facts are stark: by next summer, and even next September (two months before the presidential election), Washington will have the same number of boots on the ground (130,000) in Iraq’s US$3-billion-a-week war that it had before the “surge”, compounding – indeed amplifying – the existing ethical, political and strategic disaster.

Petraeus’ key argument this week to prove his steering of the Bush-devised “surge” was a “success” was to spin the close collaboration between the occupation and the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad on the one side with Sunni tribal leaders in al-Anbar province on the other. Petraeus framed it as if this “sustainable” solution was a huge counterinsurgency success of his own making. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The success story in Anbar is not due to the general’s wily ways, but to an Iraqi sheikh: Abdul Satter Abu Risha, the leader of a coalition of tribes, including 200 sheikhs, formed in the autumn of 2006 under the name Anbar Sovereignty Council (now it’s called Iraq Awakening).

Asia Times Online talked to Abu Risha this past spring in Iraq. He explained, crucially, that he had set up the council after his father and two brothers were killed by al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers. Yes, it was personal. Petraeus then joined the bandwagon. Abu Risha is not, and never was, a Salafi-jihadi. He considers himself an Iraqi nationalist. He’s not in favor of a caliphate. But he’s definitely in favor of restored power to Sunni Iraqis.

Petraeus was indeed smart enough to marvel at the possibilities of a marriage of convenience between the occupation and Sunni tribes. Al-Qaeda for its part was clumsy enough to force “Talibanization” down Anbar people’s throats. But this does not mean that Abu Risha and his 200 tribal leaders are pro-occupation, or even pro-Iraqi government. Eighty percent of these tribes are sub-clans of the very powerful Dulaimi tribe. Al-Qaeda’s close relationship is with the Mashadani tribe, which used to be very close to Saddam Hussein. What matters is that with varying degrees of disgust, both big tribes detest the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad.

Way beyond any “success” claimed by Petraeus, what’s happening in Anbar is once again a replay of what happened in eastern Afghanistan in 2001. Local tribes profit from US largesse – and weapons – and then proceed with their own tribal and/or nationalist agenda. What matters for all these players, most of all, is restoration of Sunni power. The Dulaimi tribe and sub-clans, armed by the Americans, as soon as they have a chance, will try to topple the US-sponsored puppet government in Baghdad.

Petraeus has not been able to seduce or bribe Sunni guerrillas. Far from it: leading groups such as the Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance make it very clear their enemies remain the US occupation, the Maliki government and al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers.

This summer, three of these groups – the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Ansar al-Sunna and Iraqi Hamas – formed the Political Office for the Iraqi Resistance, a public political alliance basically to throw out all of Petraeus’s troops, block any collaboration with occupation-endorsed political institutions, and declare null and void any agreement between the US and the Iraqi government.

By this time, way into the “surge”, Petraeus had certainly figured out that Anbar was not a relevant war theater anymore. He can use it to spin the “success” of his counterinsurgency methods, but he knows the three really relevant, internal wars in Iraq, for the near future, will be in Baghdad (between Sunnis and Shi’ites), in Basra (between Shi’ite militias, to see who gets to control the oil) and in Kirkuk (between Kurds and Arabs/Turkomans, for the same reason).

So why not spice it all up with some extra divide and rule – to justify an eternal US presence? Arming Sunni tribals in Anbar, under these circumstances, makes sense. The occupation does not need to fight Sunnis in oil-deprived Anbar. The Bush administration is now full steam ahead on fighting Shi’ites – both in Iran (the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) and in Iraq (from the Maliki government to Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army). Shi’ites in both Iran and southern Iraq are sitting over a wealth of oil. The Sunnis are needed to advance this agenda.

A (minor) problem is what Iraqi Sunnis think of all this. According to the latest BBC/ABC News poll, no less than 97% of Iraqi Sunnis want a unified, centralized Iraq with Baghdad as capital. Only 56% of Shi’ites want it, not to mention only 9% of Kurds. No less than 98% of Sunnis are against the Maliki government. And no less than 92% of Sunnis are in favor of attacks against occupation troops, including, of course, all those Dulaimis now supported by the Americans.

Petraeus knows this: virtually no Iraqi Sunni wants to hug him and kiss him. They want the US out. But he also knows the US simply cannot go – what with the new mega-embassy, the secluded military bases, and all that oil.

The magic word “oil” mysteriously vanished from the whole drama performed this week in front of Congress. To get it, the answer is once again divide and rule – let’s have those Sunnis and Shi’ites tear each other to bits while we “stay the course” pretending to protect them from themselves while trying to protect “our” oil. Bush’s “surge” may indeed be a success – but for all the reasons the general would not dare tell the world.

PARIS (Sept. 15) – Arctic ice coverage has receded this week to record lows, the European Space Agency said, raising the prospect of greater maritime traffic through a long-sought waterway known as the Northwest Passage.

Until now, the passage has been expected to remain closed even during reduced ice cover by multiyear ice pack – sea ice that remains through one or more summers, ESA said.

Satellite images this week showed Arctic ice cover fell to the lowest level since scientists started collecting such information in 1978, according to a statement on Paris-based ESA’s Web site Saturday.

Many experts believe that global warming is to blame for melting the passage. The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia compared with the current routes through the Panama Canal.

Ice has retreated to about 1 million square miles, Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said in the statement. ESA said the previous low was 1.5 million square miles, back in 2005.

Ice levels in the Arctic ebb and flow with the seasons, allowing for intermittent traffic between Europe and Asia across northern Canada – a route explorers and traders have long dreamt could open fully.

Environmentalists fear increased maritime traffic and efforts to tap natural resources in the area could one day lead to oil spills and harm regional wildlife.

Pedersen said the extreme retreat this year suggested the passage could fully open sooner than expected – but ESA did not say when that might be. Efforts to contact ESA officials in Paris and Noordwik, the Netherlands, were unsuccessful.

09/14/07 “OneWorld US ” — – – PROVIDENCE – Observers of the situation in Iraq lashed out at the Bush administration Thursday ahead of the president’s prime time address to the nation.

They contend that General David Petraeus gave a misleading report to Congress this week when he said “significant progress” was being made in Iraq, including a sharp drop in the number of attacks on American forces and a lessening of sectarian violence.

“What people came away with from the report is that the situation is better for people living in Iraq and that’s just not true,” said Yifat Susskind of the women’s rights organization MADRE. “That’s refuted both by the fact that statistics don’t bear it out and in the experiences of the regular Iraqis we speak to on a daily basis.”

A joint ABC/BBC poll released this week shows 70 percent of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated since the Bush administration increased the number of troops in Iraq this Spring. Some 60 percent believe attacks on U.S. forces are justified, a number that includes 93 percent of Sunnis.

According to the poll, only 29 percent of Iraqis now think the situation will get better, compared to 64 percent who shared that optimism before the so-called “surge” of troops began.

“One of the most cynical things General Petraeus did was celebrate the fact that there’s a decline in sectarian violence,” Susskind said. “But that drop reflects the success of ethnic cleansing rather than anything the U.S. military has done. The reality is that there are places where killing is down because there’s nobody left to kill.”

According to the group Refugees International, nearly 5 million Iraqis have been forced from their homes since the fall of Saddam Hussein. More than 2 million people are now displaced inside the country, the group says, and an additional 2.5 million have fled to neighboring countries.

The numbers continue to grow with as many as 100,000 per month newly displaced within the country and another 40,000 to 60,000 fleeing to Syria.

The Bush administration has allowed only a few thousand Iraqis to enter the United States.

In addition, two retired Generals — Lt. General Robert Gard (U.S. Army, Retired), who now works at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, and Brigadier General John Johns (U.S. Army, Retired), a board member at the non-profit Council for a Livable World — released a statement arguing the continued American occupation of Iraq is destroying the U.S. military.

“Continued engagement in Iraq’s civil war distracts the United States from our more urgent missions in Afghanistan and enhanced homeland security, stretches the U.S. military to the breaking point, inflicts psychological scars on returning veterans and breaks up their families, causes mounting American casualties, increases the drain on the U.S. treasury, and erodes our stature in the world,” the Generals wrote in a statement.

Gard, who served in combat during both the Korean and Vietnam wars, said Petraeus’ report and Bush’s speech tonight remind him of 1967, when then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Lyndon Johnson that he thought the Vietnam war was lost.

“Lyndon Johnson privately agreed, but no president wants to lose a war,” Gard told OneWorld. “So we surged. In 1968, we had lost 24,000 young men. Five years later we had lost 58,000 and nothing was accomplished.”

“Now we’re going down the same path,” he said. “We didn’t alter the outcome by that surge and now you’ve got Bush in office and he isn’t going to be changed unless he’s forced to do so.”