The Rag Blog

The president’s decision to use force against Iranian “agents” inside Iraq could snare innocent pilgrims, and raises the risk of open warfare.

Jan. 30, 2007 | George W. Bush last week announced that American troops in Iraq were henceforth authorized to “kill or capture” any Iranian intelligence agents they discovered in Iraq. The announcement came on the heels of his pledge in the State of the Union address to bring another aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, a move that clearly targeted Iran. A prominent Iranian parliamentarian responded to Bush’s threat by saying, “Such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms.” Iraq’s deputy prime minister, meanwhile, put a pox on both Iran and the U.S. for conducting their geopolitical battle on Iraqi soil.

The danger of Bush’s approach may be realized in short order. Tuesday, Jan. 30, marks the 10th day of Muharram, and is the Islamic holy day known as Ashura. Iraq is the Shiite holy land, the site of the passion and martyrdom of revered figures such as Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and al-Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson. Thousands of Iranians come on pilgrimage to the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq every year, and the flow of pilgrims peaks at Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of al-Husayn. Ashura is an especially important holiday to Shiites, drawing up to 1 million pilgrims to Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad. In 2004 Sunni insurgents exploited the presence of so many Shiite pilgrims by setting off massive explosions that killed more than 100 people.

Given Bush’s new directive, how will U.S. troops distinguish between innocent Iranian devotees and spies? What if U.S. troops kill pilgrims in a mistaken belief that they are covert operatives? Leaving aside whether U.S. law authorizes such a broad, vague use of deadly force against foreign nationals, which is unclear, Shiite religious sensibilities would be inflamed in both Iraq and Iran, furthering the potential for a widening conflict.

Or maybe the spark for a wider conflict is just what the increasingly desperate President Bush seeks. His fixation on Iranian activities in Iraq cannot be explained by his cover story, which is that Tehran is supplying weapons to forces that kill U.S. troops. To date, no hard evidence that the Iranian government is sending high-powered weaponry into Iraq has been made public, and no credible proof may be forthcoming. In general, one should take such claims with a large grain of salt, much like the skepticism with which one should greet the official U.S. story about the firefight in Najaf on the weekend that supposedly claimed the lives of 250 insurgents.

To begin with, some 99 percent of all attacks on U.S. troops occur in Sunni Arab areas and are carried out by Baathist or Sunni fundamentalist (Salafi) guerrilla groups. Most of the outside help these groups get comes from the Sunni Arab public in countries allied with the United States, notably Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. Washington has yet to denounce Saudi aid to the Sunni insurgents who are killing U.S. troops.

Meanwhile, the most virulent terror network in Iraq, which styles itself “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia,” has openly announced that its policy is to kill as many Shiites as possible. That the ayatollahs of Shiite Iran are passing sophisticated weapons to these, their sworn enemies, is not plausible.

Left parties and organizations from all over Latin America and the Caribbean and their allies converged in San Salvador Jan. 12-15 for the Sao Paulo Forum XIII, an ongoing meeting whose first session was in Brazil in 1990.

They called this forum “A New Stage of the Struggle for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean.” Over 500 delegates from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Guatemala, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Curacao, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico (including Oaxaca), Peru, Chile, and Colombia discussed the need to combat U.S. imperialism and neoliberalism, the “globalization” policies ravaging the Third World.

Outside the forum one could observe the impact of neoliberal policies. Salvadorans who work in factories called “maquilas,” owned by capitalists in the imperialist countries (the U.S. and Western Europe) are paid $4 a day. The rest survive on $2 a day. People in the countryside have no running water, no clean water, no medical care or free schools.

Although the delegates had political differences, the theme of the four-day forum was unity and support for all the left parties and formations in the region.

The forum delegates were ebullient as Raphael Correa was about to be inaugurated as Ecuador’s president, and Daniel Ortega, who had led Nicaragua during the Sandinista period, had just been inaugurated Jan. 11. Ortega had announced then that Nicaragua was leaving the neoliberal Central American Free Trade Agreement and had signed the ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) accords as Cuban Vice-President José Ramón Machado, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez embraced him.

At the Sao Paulo Forum, the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front of El Salvador (FMLN) General Coordinator Medardo González, said, “Today we are in position to affect the defeat of neoliberalism, and not just to defeat it, but to overcome it and to construct a new model for Latin America and the Caribbean.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House urged Congress on Monday to renew key trade negotiating authority that expires in just a few months and said time was running short for countries to reach a new world trade deal.

“We certainly think it is important that Congress renew it,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said, referring to fast-track trade legislation that requires lawmakers to vote “yes” or “no” on agreements negotiated by the White House without making any changes.

“It is an important device in extending free trade, and also allowing negotiators to operate effectively,” Snow said.

The White House’s current fast-track trade promotion authority expires on July 1. Bush is expected to need an extension to complete the Doha round of world trade talks and possible trade deals with
South Korea and Malaysia.

Bush planned to talk about it this week in remarks either in Illinois or New York, Snow said. Many business groups were disappointed when Bush did not call for renewal of fast-track authority in his State of the Union speech last week.

The outlook for world trade talks, suspended six months ago because of disagreements over how far to cut farm subsidies and tariffs, has brightened in recent weeks, raising hopes for a possible breakthrough in coming months.

“We are in a very important part of negotiations. We have a small window to get a lot of things done. I know all sides are working very hard on this. The president is deeply committed to working with all our allies and they’ve assured us that they’re committed also to working with us,” Snow said.

The inexorable peoples’ movement in the U.S. against the government’s war on the people of Iraq has begun. And it is not a movement of the anti-war leaders. It is a movement of the people. Saturday, January 27 was a beautiful day that will be remembered by a quarter million people who came in Washington DC. to take a stand against the U.S. war on the people of Iraq. The Mall was packed shoulder-to-shoulder all the way to the National Monument and people were angry. It was without doubt, the largest anti-war march we have seen since the 1970s and we’ve seen them all on the East Coast since 9/11/01. I interviewed many who were present and our dialogue followed these lines:

“Why are you here today?

This is the first protest I’ve been to. I’m just angry. I can’t watch the news on television anymore. We voted against the war and the government has escalated the war.

“Where are you from?

“Here in Washington … New York … Florida … Arkansas … Cleveland … Minnesota … Maine … Texas … California … Washington State … Colorado … Germany … England … France … etc., etc.”

They poured in on buses from all over the United States and some even came from foreign countries to demand an end to the war. This was not a light-hearted “feel-good” anti-war demonstration. The mood of the people was as somber as it was angry – and deadly serious. They know that the immovable object of the government has met the irresistable force of the people. There was a strong sense that the more the object obfuscates, deceives and refuses to yield to the demands of the force – the more angry and rebellious the people will become. Cries of “We will not stop” could be heard throughout the day. This inveterate rebellion of the people has come to the implacable shove of the RDR (Republican-Democrat-Regime) in Washington. In the interviews I conducted there was as much rage expressed to the Democrats as there was to the Republicans … and that rage is clearly growing. People are refusing to accept the Democrats’ “Non-binding Resolution” against the war as enough. They want funds for the war to be cut off and they want them cut off now.

Staying in Washington on the 4th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq – March 17, 2007

Our mission in going to Washington on Saturday was three-fold:

* To support the March.

* To cover and report the March on Axis of Logic

* To promote the upcoming March 17 March on Washington with a new tactic in the anti-war movement – not seen since the Vietnam War.

President Bush claimed in his State of the Union speech to have prevented four terrorist plots. Phew! It’s a good thing to know that we tossed out our Bill of Rights for some actual REASON – I mean other than turning Iraq into a training ground for terrorism.

Except that we didn’t.

1.-“We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.”

An October 8, 2005, LA Times story, headlined “Scope of Plots Bush Says Were Foiled Is Questioned,” cited “several counter-terrorism officials” as saying that “the plot never progressed past the planning stages…. ‘To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,’ said one senior FBI official….At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities.”

On Feb. 10, 2006, the LA Times quoted a “US official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism,” who said that “the Library Tower plot was one of many Al Qaeda operations that had not gone much past the conceptual stage….The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that those familiar with the plot feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan that that of the president.”

Michael Scheuer, an al Qaeda expert in the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, told the Voice of America: “This doesn’t sound like anything that I would recall as a major threat, or as a major success in stopping it….My impression [was that the National Security Council] culled through information to look for something that resembled a serious threat in 2002. It doesn’t strike me, either as someone who was there or as someone who has followed al Qaeda pretty closely, that this was really a serious sort of effort.”

A February 10, 2006 Washington Post story cited “several U.S. intelligence officials” who “said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk.”

Making a renewed appearance in the State of the Union address this year was Iran. Bush set out an agenda that puts the U.S. on a path of confrontation with Iran—the latest installment in the haphazard collection of ideological fads that passes as Middle East policy in Washington these days.

Having made a mess of Iraq, continuing to refuse to play a constructive and even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and having gotten bored with democracy promotion, the Bush administration now appears to be fanning the flames of sectarian strife region-wide. Since September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have made trips to the Middle East to rally the support of what Rice has described as the “moderate mainstream” Arab states against Iran. This group has now been formalized as the “GCC + 2,” meaning the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman) as well as Egypt and Jordan.

I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical precedent. In the 1980s, some of you may remember, there was another Saddam who proved rather useful against Iran. Saddam invaded Iran without provocation, sparking an eight-year-long war that was one of the 20th century’s deadliest. Along the way, the U.S. and the Arab states listed above provided much in funding, weapons and turning a blind eye when Saddam got carried away and used chemical weapons against Kurds (it did not raise that much of a fuss when he used them against Iranians, either).

Fadhel is a slim, well-muscled 26-year-old Mahdi Army commander with a thin goatee beard and smoothed down hair that looks like a flat cap. One day last month he described how he and his men seized a group of three Sunni men suspected of killing his fellow Shia. “I followed the group for weeks and then one of them crossed the bridge to Karrada [a Shia district]. We first informed a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint that we were arresting terrorists then we attacked them and put them in the boots of the cars. We only have six to seven minutes when we grab someone – we have to act quickly, if he resists we shoot him.”

In this case, he said, the men were taken to Sadr City, the Shia slum to the north-east of Baghdad, where they were interrogated by a “committee” which ordered their execution. “We ask the families of the terrorists for ransom money,” said Fadhel. “And after they pay the ransom we kill them anyway.”

Kidnapping in Baghdad these days is as much about economics as retribution or sectarian hatred. Another Shia man close to the Mahdi Army told me: “They kidnap 10 Sunnis, they get ransom on five, and kill them all, in each big kidnap operation they make at least $50 000, it’s the best business in Baghdad.”

One day as we chatted in a small squatters’ community to the east of Baghdad, Fadhel showed me his badge – a square laminated card that identified him as a “Amer Faseel” or “platoon commander” in charge of a unit of around 35 fighters. He is particularly valuable to the Shia militia because he grew up in a predominantly Sunni area south of Baghdad and still has an ID card registered in the Sunni town of Yossufiya. “I can speak in their accent, so I can come and go to Sunni areas without anyone knowing that I am a Shia.”

This was published by Aswat al-Iraq yesterday, and it speaks for itself.

A Sunni-Shiite fraternal council, organized by [an institution commemorating Moqtada’s father] and the Islamic Party of Iraq, wound up two days of activities in Basra today. Abdulkarim Jarrad, head of the Islamic Party in Basra, told Voices of Iraq that attendees, in addition to representatives of the two sides, included also other religious and social leaders, and he said these meetings “differ from earlier meetings we have had together with [the Sadr group] in that it included legal and political studies and [the creation of] working groups that will continue efforts to make sure the recommendations are translated into action”.

Jarrad added that the council issued a final statement that included disavowing takfiiris and Saddamists, agreeing on rejection of the occupation, and declaring that it [the occupation] is the first and the last cause of sectarian fitna.

He said the final statement also stressed the need to work to spare the blood of Muslims, Shiia and Sunni alike; to end the practice of forced migrations on both sides; and to invite the return of those who have been subjected to that; and to set up a council to implement that.

The final statement also urged the following: that other religious, tribal and political leaders organize similar fraternal meetings; that there be a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq; and that security in Basra be turned over to the Iraqi government once there has been established a sound security force based on national loyalty.

Actor Sean Penn summed up the new energy — and the new focus — of the anti-war movement Saturday, when he turned George Bush’s own words against the president.

Just hours after the president had again reasserted his false claim to authority to pursue a war that is not wanted by the American people or the Congress, Penn told anti-war demonstrators gathered in Washington that Bush would be wise to review the Constitution.

“In a democracy,” the actor told the cheering crowd, which organizers said numbered in the hundreds of thousands, “we are the deciders.”

Saturday’s anti-war demostrations, which filled the streets of cities from San Francisco to Washington, marked a return to form for an anti-war movement that had trouble building momentum during the three years that followed Bush’s decision to launch a preemptive war against a country that posed no serious threat to the United States or its allies. During the period from 2OO3 to 2OO6, Bush’s Republican Party had complete control of the machinery of government, and his allies were successful in assuring that Congress would not serve as any kind of check or balance on the presidency.

Though polls showed that most Americans thought Bush had been wrong to take the country to war, and that they disapproved of his handling of the conflict, demonstrations seemed fruitless because the president held all the cards. Many opponents of the war poured their energies into electoral politics, hoping to restore at least a measure of balance to the federal government by putting opposition Democrats in charge of at least one house of Congress. On November 7, the work paid off, with the election of Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

So it was that one of the most popular signs at Saturday’s rally in Washington read: “I Voted for Peace.”

An equally popular sign, distributed by United for Peace and Justice, the group that played a central role in organizing the demonstrations, read: “Congress: Stand Up to Bush!”

Both signs were necessary messages on Saturday because, while there is no question that Americans voted November 7 for peace, there is still a great deal of uncertainty about whether the Congress that was elected will, in fact, tell the president that it is time to bring the troops home.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President George W. Bush will reject any effort in Congress to limit the number of US forces in Iraq because it would hamstring American efforts to stabilize the wartorn country, national security adviser Stephen Hadley has said in an article.

“Any plan that limits our ability to reinforce our troops in the field is a plan for failure — and could hand Baghdad to terrorists and extremists before legitimate Iraqi forces are ready to take over the fight,” Hadley said in an opinion piece written for the Washington Post.

“That is an outcome the president simply could not accept,” Hadley wrote in the administration’s latest defense of the president’s plan to deploy an additional 21,500 troops in Iraq.

Congress is due to vote in early February on a non-binding motion criticizing Bush’s plan to introduce a troop “surge” to help quell sectarian violence in Iraq, with lawmakers from both parties readying resolutions ranging from broad support the president’s program to outright repudiation of it.