The Rag Blog

Patrick Cockburn has been hailed by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon as “one of the most accurate and intrepid journalists in Iraq.” And that’s hardly praise enough, given what the man has done. The Middle Eastern correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, he’s been on the spot from the moment when, in February 2003, he secretly crossed the Tigris River into Iraq just before the Bush administration launched its invasion.

Here, for instance, is a typical striking passage of his, written in May 2003, just weeks after Baghdad fell. If you read it then, you hardly needed the massive retrospective volumes like Thomas Rick’s Fiasco that took years to come out:

“[T]he civilian leadership of the Pentagon… are uniquely reckless, arrogant and ill informed about Iraq. At the end of last year [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz was happily saying that he thought the Iraqi reaction to the capture of Baghdad would be much like the entry of the U.S. Army into Paris in 1944. He also apparently believed that Ahmed Chalabi…, then as now one of the most unpopular men in Iraq, would be the Iraqi Charles de Gaulle.

“These past mistakes matter because the situation in Iraq could easily become much worse. Iraqis realize that Saddam may have gone but that the United States does not have real control of the country. Last week, just as a[n] emissary [from head of the U.S. occupation Paul Bremer] was telling academics at Mustansiriyah, the ancient university in the heart of Baghdad, who should be purged from their staff, several gunmen, never identified, drove up and calmly shot dead the deputy dean.”

How much worse it’s become can be measured by the two suicide bombs that went off at the same university a month apart early in 2007, killing not a single deputy dean but more than 100 (mostly female) students.

Or it can be measured by this telling little tidbit written in October 2003: “The most amazing achievement of six months of American occupation has been that it has even provoked nostalgia in parts of Iraq for Saddam. In Baiji, protesters were holding up his picture and chanting: ‘With our blood and with our spirit we will die for you Saddam.’ Who would have believed this when his statue was toppled just six months ago?”

Or by this description, written in the same month, which offers a vivid sense of why an insurgency really took off in that country:

“US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops… Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: ‘It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth.'”

Or by this singular detail from June 2004 that caught the essence of the lawlessness the U.S. occupation let loose: “Kidnap is now so common [that] new words have been added to Iraqi thieves’ slang. A kidnap victim is called al-tali or the sheep.”

Or this summary of the situation in May 2004, one year after Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech: “Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. After 30 years of disastrous wars, Iraqis wanted a quiet life. All the Americans really needed to do was to get the relatively efficient Iraqi administration up and running again. Instead, they let the government dissolve, and have never successfully resurrected it. It has been one of the most extraordinary failures in history.”

Last September, typically, Cockburn travelled on his own to dangerous Diyala Province just as the fighting there was heating to a boil. He summed up the situation parenthetically, as well as symbolically, when he commented that Diyala was not a place “to make a mistake in map reading.”

Cockburn should gather in awards for guts, nerve, understanding, and just plain great war reporting. Before heading back to Iraq yet again, he put his years of reporting and observation together in an already classic book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, which no political library should be without. The following essay that he just wrote in Baghdad will be the introduction to the paperback edition of that book, when released this fall — and special thanks go to his publisher, Verso, for letting this site post it. Tom

AMSTERDAM, May 9 (Reuters) – A Dutch appeals court raised the prison sentence of a Dutch businessman to 17 years after confirming on Wednesday he was guilty of complicity in war crimes for selling chemicals to Iraq used in deadly gas attacks.

Frans Van Anraat was sentenced in 2005 to 15 years in prison for complicity in war crimes for supplying raw materials that were used to make poison gas by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980-1988 war with Iran.

The poison gas was also used against Iraq’s own Kurdish population, including an attack on the town of Halabja in 1988 which killed an estimated 5,000 people.

Van Anraat had appealed against the sentence but the court turned down his appeal and increased the sentence by two years.

“The court decided to increase the jail sentence because Van Anraat committed these crimes several times, not just once, out of pure greed,” the spokeswoman for the appeals court in The Hague said.

In the appeals trial, prosecutors tried to raise charges of genocide against Van Anraat for the second time.

Van Anraat was acquitted of genocide charges in 2005, and the court acquitted him again, because it could not be proven he knew exactly how the chemicals would be used, a spokeswoman said.

An Iraqi prosecutor last December showed the court trying Saddam an internal memo from the president’s office which praised van Anraat for supplying Iraq “with rare and banned chemical weapons.”

In a magazine interview in 2003, van Anraat admitted to supplying the chemicals but denied knowing they were destined for Iraq and that they would be used to make poison gas.

On a recent trip to the hardware store I was looking over the mill files which hung right beside the display of hammers. A fellow was examining the hammers intently. I fell to musing about us moderns and our tools. Here were dozens of different types of hammers the products of modern metallurgy and manufacturing processes. Haven’t we come to a place of knowledge and sophistication in human history that would be the envy of our forebearers? After all, what would a person from 20,000 years ago make of this display of hammers? Would he not be amazed and embarrassed at our capability and knowledge compared with his own?

I most certainly doubt it.

When called upon to apply his mettle to a real and substantial endeavor, Oomog would have taken out his hammer stone. Dipping into the same tool pouch, we moderns invariably come up with the only tool we really have …. money. Our supposed skills as it turns out have nothing whatever to do with the real world, they cannot solve real problems. Instead if we are hungry, bored, in want of clothes, shelter, transport, you name it, the only tool we have with which to procure it is money.

A letter came from Et Ux’s Alma Mater. On the outside of the envelope it was stamped We need your help!!. Affecting Johnny Carson’s old routine of the Great Karnak, I held the envelope to my head and psychically read the contents. They wanted ‘help’, eh? Volunteer to teach a class, cook in the cafeteria, mow the grass, paint the dorm? No. They wanted money. Just that.

It was the summer of 2002 and I was traveling through a medium-sized town in Hungary when I looked up and saw a young woman coming toward me. Fifteen or sixteen years old, she wore a shirt that proudly proclaimed her to be a “Dirty Girl.”

Six months later, in Philadelphia, I found myself speaking at a women’s studies conference to an audience which included several young women wearing shirts with “Cunt” or “Bitch” written on their chest in an angry scrawl. Shortly after, I found myself in Panama watching a rotund 7 year old prance around in a hot pink tank top that shouted “Bling, Bling.” When I checked the web upon returning home, I discovered that “Dirty Girl” had been updated to “Stupid Dirty Girl” while another T shirt insisted “As long as I can be on top.”

Are the young women wearing such T-shirts liberated women who have taken control of their own bodies and now reap the benefits of the women’s movement or are they simply dupes? These experiences, and countless others like them, raise a broader question for me. They make me ask how the insights and goals of the Women’s Movement have been transformed and translated as they have been integrated into popular culture and daily life?

The Women’s Liberation Movement that began in the 60s was originally a radical movement seeking deep and fundamental change. It identified the ways in which male and other forms of privilege had been woven into every social, political, economic institution and cultural practice in our society and went on to challenge white supremacy, heterosexist privilege, class divisions as well as the images of gender that had been normalized and in this way rendered invisible The Women’s Liberation Movement I remember argued for the need for a radical transformation of all our institutions. It urged women to rethink every aspect of our lives, always asking us to reflect on whose interests were served by the ways in which society was organized and by the values we had been taught to embrace.

Central to this project was the distinction between sex and gender. In order to challenge the conservative view that women’s social role was determined by her nature, many feminists argued that while one is born either a man or a woman and that is a function of biology (and yes, many of us mistakenly thought that there were only two possibilities at that time), gender roles were determined by society. Women began to notice that how we were taught to define ourselves, what it meant to be a real woman, served the interests of men and capitalism. This made us suspicious of what we had been taught were our “natural” tendencies or inclinations and made us wonder about our so-called “free” choice.

A very important article of the period, a true classic, was entitled “Homogenizing the American Woman: The Power of an Unconscious Ideology” written by Sandra Bem and Daryll Bem. The authors pointed out that even if discrimination were to end tomorrow, nothing very drastic would change, because discrimination is only part of the problem. “Discrimination frustrates choices already made. Something more pernicious perverts the motivation to choose. That something is an unconscious ideology about the nature of the female sex….”… In other words, many of us began to realize that we had been socialized to want things that would replicate and reinforce the status quo.

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the Second Wave rejected prevailing standards of beauty, the Barbie doll image, (being thin and blonde), that were virtually unattainable by anyone who wasn’t white and by most of us who were white as well. The critique took the form of recognizing and challenging the ways prevailing standards of beauty and rules of dress and decorum both reflected and reinforced the existing race, class and gender hierarchy in society. Women of the Second Wave were tired of being turned into sex objects by the fashion industry and so they threw out their high heels (which were understood to be on a continuum with Chinese foot binding practices — a way of circumscribing women’s movement and keeping them dependent), took off their girdles and their bras, stopped trying to be a size 2, and focused on healthy eating healthy for them and the planet.

If we look at popular culture today what do we see? Well, Barbie is back with a vengeance. Little girls start dieting in fourth grade and never stop. This used to be more of a problem among white girls but it has spread to all ethnic groups. And dieting isn’t the half of it, anorexia and bulimia are occurring in alarming proportions.

Today many young women want to dress like, Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Mariah Carey, and L’il Kim. And it is not just women in their teens and older who are dressing this way, we have four year olds and six year olds dressed as sex objects. Cleavage is everywhere and we women can’t get enough of it so we go out and buy more. Some of us stopped buying bras in the 70’s; today women are busy buying bras and breasts to put in them.

The number of magazine stories about girls in their early and mid-teens who want breast augmentation surgery is increasing as are the number of teens who receive breast and nose jobs as birthday or high school graduation gifts. Dumb blondes are back in style: Jessica Simpson, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton. Women hack off their toes to fit into high priced, designer shoes. We are a generation awash in plastic surgery and Botox.

Speaking to a crowd of demonstrators in front of a rural Louisiana courthouse last week, Alan Bean, a Baptist minister from the Texas panhandle, inveighed against injustice. “The highest crime in the Old Testament,” he declared, “is to withhold due process from poor people, to manipulate the criminal justice system to the advantage of the powerful, against the poor and the powerless.”

Bean was speaking at a rally organized by residents of Jena, Louisiana. In the space of a few weeks, more than 150 of this small town’s residents have organized an inspiring grassroots struggle against injustice. The demonstrations began when six Black students at Jena High School were arrested after a fight at school and charged with conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder. The students now face up to 100 years in prison without parole; in a case that King Downing, National Coordinator of the ACLU’s Campaign Against Racial Profiling, has said “carries the scent of injustice.”

Local activists say that this wave of problems started last September when Black high school students asked for permission to sit under a tree at an area of the high school that had, traditionally, been used only by white students. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree.

The following week, Black students staged a protest under the tree. At a school assembly soon after, Jena district attorney Reed Walters, appearing with local police officers, warned Black students against further unrest. “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen,” he threatened.

According to many in Jena, tensions simmered in the town over the fall, occasionally exploding into fights and other incidents. No white students were charged or punished for any of these incidents, including the students found to have been responsible for hanging the nooses. Bryant Purvis, one of the Black students now facing charges, explained to me that, after the incident, “there were a lot of people aggravated about it, a lot of fights at the school after that, a lot of arguments, a lot of people getting treated differently.”

In the first weekend of December, a Black student was assaulted by a group of white students, and a white graduate of Jena High School threatened several Black students with a shotgun. The following Monday, white students taunted the Black student who was assaulted over the weekend, and one of the white students was beaten up.

Within hours, six Black students were arrested. “I think the district attorney is pinning it on us to make an example of us,” said Purvis. “In Jena, people get accused of things they didn’t do a lot.”

Soon after, their parents discovered that these students were facing attempted murder charges. “The courtroom, the whole back side, was filled with police officers,” Tina Jones, Bryant’s mother, recalls. “I guess they thought maybe when they announced what the charges were, we were gonna go berserk or something.”

At last week’s demonstration, family members and allies spoke about the issues at the center of the case. “I don’t know how the DA or the court system gets involved in a school fight,” said Jones. “But I’m not surprised–there’s a lot of racism in Jena. A white person will get probation, and a black person is liable to get 15 to 20 years for the same crime.”

There is a great hue and cry over the May Day demonstrations in Los Angeles (legitimate) that saw the LAPD in their military gear – assaulting mostly Mexican immigrants. Nobody should suffer brutalization by the police.This has been given a great deal of coverage in the media. The thing that impressed me over the media coverage that this has been given; is that this assaulting and beating of people was being treated as if it was an anomaly! Those clubbed, gassed, shot with rubber bullets, at the conventions (Democrat and Republican) and at the various protests against treaty summits, received NONE of this outrage or an apology from the police? When you militarize local police departments and equip them with better weaponry and armor than those at war – you can expect them to treat all citizens as the ENEMY. I’m confused – is this the FREEDOM that we’re trying to export to Iraq etc?

SWAT TEAMS in the United States

In recent years, American police forces called out SWAT teams 40,000 times or more annually. What were these SWAT teams doing? They were serving routine warrants to people who posed no danger to the public. SWAT teams were once rare and used only for VERY dangerous situations, often involving hostages held by armed criminals. Today SWAT teams are deployed for routine police duties. In the United States today, 75% to 80% of SWAT deployments are for warrant service.

In a HIGH percentage of the cases, the SWAT teams forcefully enter the wrong address, resulting in death, injury and trauma to perfectly innocent people. Mostly the hundreds (documented) of these killings never make the national media and are reported only locally. 75 year old Reverend Williams (Boston) was sitting in his chair (his wife had gone to the grocery store) reading the Scriptures, when the Boston, black clad SWAT team, battered down his door without warning.

Terrified Reverend Williams ran to his bedroom, where burly SWAT police tackled him to the floor and handcuffed him. Terrified beyond imagination, he vomited and died of a heart attack! For those who are indifferent over such outrages – these dozens of innocent citizens were all killed by ‘mistake’- the next wrong address could be yours. Occasionally, highly keyed up police kill one another in the confusion caused by stun grenades.

Growth of Paramilitaries in the United States

The use of paramilitary police units began in Los Angeles in the 1960s (Attorney General Ed Meese) for the ‘war on drugs’. In 1988, Congress ordered the National Guard into the domestic drug war. In 1994, the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of military equipment and technology to state and local police, and Congress created a program “ to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies”.

LONDON — The chance that a child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster in Iraq than anywhere else in the world since 1990, says a report released today.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it made the least progress toward improving survival rates.

Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by shortages of electricity, clean water and hospitals.

The publication, which used data from 1990-2005, also determined that gains in survival rates in some of the world’s poorest countries were declining, including in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland.

More than nine in 10 child deaths occur in just 60 countries, the report said. Of the 10 million children under age 5 who die every year, most could be saved with cheap solutions such as nets to protect against mosquito-borne malaria or antibiotics to treat pneumonia, according to the report.

Depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the metal’s effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU causes health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased.0508 05 1DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes, and its high density – twice that of lead – makes it useful for armor and armor piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defense was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and birth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons.

Now researchers at the University of Southern Maine have shown that DU damages DNA in human lung cells. The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.

The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily. “These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer,” the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Previous studies have shown that uranium miners are at higher risk of lung cancer, but this has often been put down to the fact that miners are also exposed to radon, another cancer-causing chemical.

Prof Wise said it is too early to say whether DU causes lung cancer in people exposed on the battlefield because the disease takes several decades to develop.

“Our data suggest that it should be monitored as the potential risk is there,” he said.

Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explosion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers and people returning after the conflict.

More than half of the members of Iraq’s parliament rejected for the first time on Tuesday the continuing occupation of their country. The U.S. media ignored the story.

On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq’s parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.

It’s a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass (there are 275 members of the Iraqi parliament, but many have fled the country’s civil conflict, and at times it’s been difficult to arrive at a quorum).

Reached by phone in Baghdad on Tuesday, Al-Rubaie said that he would present the petition, which is nonbinding, to the speaker of the Iraqi parliament and demand that a binding measure be put to a vote. Under Iraqi law, the speaker must present a resolution that’s called for by a majority of lawmakers, but there are significant loopholes and what will happen next is unclear.

What is clear is that while the U.S. Congress dickers over timelines and benchmarks, Baghdad faces a major political showdown of its own. The major schism in Iraqi politics is not between Sunni and Shia or supporters of the Iraqi government and “anti-government forces,” nor is it a clash of “moderates” against “radicals”; the defining battle for Iraq at the political level today is between nationalists trying to hold the Iraqi state together and separatists backed, so far, by the United States and Britain.

The continuing occupation of Iraq and the allocation of Iraq’s resources — especially its massive oil and natural gas deposits — are the defining issues that now separate an increasingly restless bloc of nationalists in the Iraqi parliament from the administration of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government is dominated by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatists.

By “separatists,” we mean groups who oppose a unified Iraq with a strong central government; key figures like Maliki of the Dawa party, Shia leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (“SCIRI”), Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi of the Sunni Islamic Party, President Jalal Talabani — a Kurd — and Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, favor partitioning Iraq into three autonomous regions with strong local governments and a weak central administration in Baghdad. (The partition plan is also favored by several congressional Democrats, notably Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.)

Iraq’s separatists also oppose setting a timetable for ending the U.S. occupation, preferring the addition of more American troops to secure their regime. They favor privatizing Iraq’s oil and gas and decentralizing petroleum operations and revenue distribution.