http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GG07Ak02.html

Zarqawi: Everywhere and nowhere
Dahr Jamail

AMMAN, Jordan - A remarkable proportion of the violence taking place in Iraq is regularly credited to the Jordanian Ahmad al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and his al-Qaeda-linked organization in Iraq. Sometimes it seems no car bomb goes off, no ambush occurs that isn't claimed in his name or attributed to him by the Bush administration. Bush and his top officials have, in fact, made good use of him, lifting his reputed feats of terrorism to epic, even mythic, proportions (much aided by various mainstream media outlets). Given that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based on administration lies and manipulations, I begun to wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed.

In Amman, random interviews with Jordanians only generated more questions and no answers about Zarqawi. As it happens, though, the Jordanian capital is just a short cab ride from Zarqa, the city Zarqawi is said to be from. So I decided to slake my curiosity about him by traveling there and nosing around his old neighborhood.

"Zarqawi, I don't even know if he exists," said a scruffy taxi driver in Amman, and his was a typical comment. "He's like [Osama] bin Laden, we don't even know if he exists; but if he does, I support that he fights the US occupation of Iraq."

Chatting with a man sipping tea in a small stall in downtown Amman, I asked what he thought of Zarqawi. He was convinced that Zarqawi was perfectly real, but the idea that he was responsible for such a wide range of attacks in Iraq had to be "nonsense".

"The Americans are using him for their propaganda," he insisted. "Think about it - with all of their power and intelligence capabilities - they cannot find one man?"

Like so many others in neighboring Jordan, he, too, offered verbal support for the armed resistance in Iraq, adding, "Besides, it is any person's right to defend himself if his country is invaded. The American occupation of Iraq has destabilized the entire region."

The Bush administration has regularly claimed that Zarqawi was in - and then had just barely escaped from - whatever city or area they were next intent on attacking or cordoning off or launching a campaign against. Last year, he and his organization were reputed to be headquartered in Fallujah, prior to the American assault that flattened the city. At one point, American officials even alleged that he was commanding the defense of Fallujah from elsewhere by telephone. Yet he also allegedly slipped out of Fallujah, either just before or just after the beginning of the assault, depending on which media outlet or military press release you read.

He has since turned up, according to American intelligence reports and the US press, in Ramadi, Baghdad, Samarra and Mosul among other places, along with side trips to Jordan, Iran, Pakistan and/or Syria. His closest "lieutenants" have been captured by the busload, according to American military reports, and yet he always seems to have a bottomless supply of them. In May, a news report on the BBC even called Zarqawi "the leader of the insurgency in Iraq", though more sober analysts of the chaotic Iraqi situation say his group, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal Jihad, while probably modest in size and reach, is linked to a global network of jihadis. However, finding any figures as to the exact size of the group remains an elusive task.

Former US secretary of state Colin Powell offered photos before the United Nations in February, 2003 of Zarqawi's "headquarters" in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, also claiming that Zarqawi had links to al-Qaeda. The collection of small huts was bombed to the ground by US forces in March of that year, prompting one news source to claim that Zarqawi had been killed. Yet seemingly contradicting Powell's claims for Zarqawi's importance was a statement made in October, 2004 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who conceded that Zarqawi's ties to al-Qaeda may have been far more ambiguous, that he may have been more of a rival than a lieutenant to bin Laden. "Someone could legitimately say he's not al-Qaeda," added Rumsfeld.

The eternal netherworld of Zarqawi
For anyone trying to assess the Zarqawi phenomenon from neighboring Jordan, complicating matters are the contradictory statements Jordanians regularly offer up about almost any aspect of Zarqawi's life, history, present activities, or even his very existence.

"I've met him here in Jordan," claimed Abdulla Hamiz, a 29 year-old merchant in Amman, "Two years ago." However, Hajam Yousef, shining shoes under a date palm in central Amman, insists, "He doesn't exist except in the minds of American policy-makers."

In fact, what little is actually known about Zarqawi sounds like the biography of a troubled but normal man from the industrial section of Zarqa. Thirty-eight years old now, according to the BBC, Zarqawi reportedly grew up a rebellious child who ran with the wrong crowd. He liked to play soccer in the streets as a young boy and dropped out of school when he was 17. According to some reports, his friends claimed that in his teens he started drinking heavily, getting tattoos, and picking fights he could not win. According to Jordanian intelligence reports provided to the Associated Press in Amman, Zarqawi was jailed in the 1980s for sexual assault, though no additional details are available. By the time he was 20 he evidently began looking for direction, and ended up making his way to Afghanistan in the last years of the jihadi war against the Soviets in that country. While some media outlets, such as the New York Times, claim that he did not actually fight in Afghanistan, there are people in Jordan who believe he did.

He is reported to have returned to Jordan in 1992, where he was arrested after Jordanian authorities found weapons in his home. On his release in 1999, he left once again for Pakistan. When his Pakistani visa expired, expecting to be arrested as a suspect in a terror plot if he returned to Jordan, he entered Afghanistan instead.

After supposedly running a weapons camp there, he was next sighted by Jordanian authorities crossing back into Jordan from Syria in September of 2002. Some time between then and May 11, 2004, when he was reported to have beheaded the kidnapped American, Nick Berg, in Baghdad, Zarqawi entered Iraq. Many news outlets have reported that his goal in Iraq is to generate a sectarian civil war between the Sunni and Shi'ites.

In September, 2004, the BBC, among others, reported, "US officials suspect that Zarqawi ... is holed up with followers in the rebellious Iraqi city of Fallujah," though their sources, as is true of more or less all sources in every report on Zarqawi, were nebulous. During the second siege of Fallujah, last November, Newsweek reported that "some US officials say that Zarqawi may actually be directing or instigating events in the town by telephone from elsewhere in Iraq".

Though they, too, cited no specific sources and provided no evidence for this, Newsweek then summed Zarqawi's importance up in this way: "His crucial role in the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, however, cannot be underestimated." Meanwhile, the BBC was reporting that his "network is considered the main source of kidnappings, bomb attacks and assassination attempts in Iraq" - another statement made without much, if any, solid evidence.

In the end, the vast mass of reportage on Zarqawi amounts to countless statements based on anonymous sources hardly less shadowy - to ordinary readers - than him. He exists, then, in a kind of eternal netherworld of reportage, rumor and attribution. It could almost be said that never has a figure been more regularly written about based on less hard information. While we have a rough outline of who he is, where he is from, and where he went until he entered Iraq, evidence that might stand up in a court of law is consistently absent. The question that remains to be answered in this glaring void of hard information is: who benefits from the ongoing tales of the mysterious Zarqawi?

The search for Zarqawi's past
My own little journey only seemed to repeat this larger phenomenon on a more modest scale. It was the sort of story where, from beginning to end, no one I met ever seemed willing to offer his or her real name (or certainly let a real name be used in an article). From second one, Zarqawi and an urge for anonymity were tightly - and perhaps appropriately - bound together. Abdulla (not his real name, of course), the man who agreed to drive my translator Aisha and me to al-Zarqa for this excursion, was a Jordanian, by the look of things about 30 years old, who chain-smoked nervously throughout the trip. We decided to go with him after running into him while I was conducting my own informal Zarqawi reality poll in Amman.

"I know him personally because we fought together in Afghanistan in the early '90's," insisted Abdulla. "If you like, I can show you where he is from."

When he picked us up on the late afternoon of the next day in his beat-up, rusting taxi, he agreed to a modest fee that was to be paid at the end of our excursion. As we puttered up a hillside on our venture to Zarqawi's hometown of al-Zarqa, he promptly pulled out a small stack of photos. I flipped through them as we drove towards Zarqawi's neighborhood and noted Abdulla standing in front of the huge Faisal mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan, a giant beard (no longer present) dominating his flowing dishdasha (robe).
Another picture had him in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city near the Afghan border known as a recruiting and staging area for the Taliban. Others seemed to have him in the Philippines standing amid dense forest with a gun slung over his shoulder. In none of them - why should I have been surprised - did he have a companion with the now so globally recognizable Zarqawi sneer.

A little while into our journey, out of nowhere Abdulla suddenly said, "Anyone collaborating with the Americans in Iraq should be killed!"

I took this as a sign that he felt like talking, and asked him what he knew of Zarqawi. According to him, he met the mythic terrorist in Peshawar before being sent with him to a training camp on the border of Afghanistan in 1990. "There are several well-known training camps in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan," he explained, "And we were in one of those, along with freedom fighters from Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon."

Only fighters for "jihad" were allowed into the camps, he continued proudly. Only fighters who were identified by other well-known mujahideen were granted permission to enter, in an effort to safeguard those camps against spies. After three months of training with machine guns and rocket launchers, Abdulla claims that he and Zarqawi headed for Afghanistan to fight the Russians who remained there.

When I looked at him quizzically - since the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in February of 1989 - he replied, "Many of them stayed after their government announced they had withdrawn - so we were pushing the rest of them out."

This was already a questionable tale, but he went right on. They were given the choice, he claimed, of where to go in Afghanistan, and Abdulla proudly stated that most of the mujahideen went to the "hot" areas where they expected to find fighting. Our discussion was then interrupted because we had completed the hop to Zarqa and arrived in the neighborhood, so rumor has it, where Zarqawi's brother-in-law lives. We were dropped off near a small mosque where Zarqawi supposedly used to pray.

Abdulla says it isn't safe for him to linger here - though he doesn't bother to explain why - and we agree instead that he will call us on my cell phone in an hour to see if we need more time or not.

So Aisha and I begin to walk around the quiet, middle-class neighborhood asking people if they know where the brother-in-law lived. Small children play in the streets. Behind them young men and parents sit eyeing us suspiciously. The wind whips plastic bags along the roads between the usual stone houses of Jordan. Finally, we find an old man with a white, flowing beard and tired eyes sitting in a worn chair at the front of a small grocery stall. He admits to being the imam of the mosque, but when asked if he remembers Zarqawi he dodges the question artfully.

"It is probably true that he used to pray in my mosque," he responds tiredly, "but I can't say for sure, as my back is to the people whom I lead in prayers."

After this he looks away, down the road. I assume he's wishing we were gone - undoubtedly like so many Zarqawi seekers before us. So we thank him and walk on.

Next we find a woman - no names given - who assures us that Zarqawi is from the Beni Hassan tribe, the largest tribe in Jordan, before pointing to a two-storey white house with a black satellite dish on top.

"That is Ahmed Zarqawi's home," she says softly, referring to one of his brothers before warning, "But don't go there because they will throw rocks on your head. They are sick of the media."

After being sidetracked by being shown his brother's home, we keep doggedly asking for his brother-in-law, but everyone insists that they simply don't know where he lives, which seems odd. Just up the hill from his brother's home, we stumble on a middle-aged man who is willing to be interviewed. He's a rare find in this village that has certainly been inundated with media, not to speak of far more threatening visits from the intelligence and police personnel of various countries.

Like our taxi driver, this man agrees to be interviewed on condition of anonymity. These are, it seems, a reasonably media-savvy group of villagers. He tells us that Zarqawi's brother doesn't know much about the mythic legend of the Jordanian jihadi outlaw, due to the fact that he keeps his distance from all the hoopla. He then laughs and adds, "But all the media went to his brother's house anyway to film it, because they thought it was Zarqawi's home!"

He then points across a shallow valley where lines of homes sit bathed in the setting sun. "He [Zarqawi] is from that village, lives near a cemetery, and his father is mayor of that district, which is called al-Ma'assoum quarter."

He claims to have known Abu Musab since he was seven years old, as they went to Prince Talal primary school together. "He was a trouble-maker ever since he was a kid," he explains, "What the media is saying about him is not true, though. Abu Musab is a normal guy. What the Americans are saying is not true. Most of us who know him here and in his neighborhood don't believe any of this media."

He tells us that Zarqawi left the neighborhood in the early 1990s to go to Afghanistan, but that he doesn't believe he is in Iraq. Along with others in the neighborhood, he is convinced that Zarqawi was killed in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan during the US bombings that resulted from the attacks of September 11.

"His wife and their three children still live over there," he adds. "But don't go talk to them. They won't allow it." He believes Zarqawi was killed, "100%," and then says emphatically, "If he is still alive, why not show a recent photo of him? All of these they show in the media are quite old."

Like so many Jordanians, he supports the Iraqi resistance, "All Muslims should fight this occupation because every day the Americans are slaughtering innocent Iraqis." Zarqawi, he tells us, wasn't a fighter until he went to Afghanistan. "Then his wife covered herself in black and has worn it ever since." According to this man, Zarqawi has two brothers named Ahmed and Sail. He says with a smile, "Most of the media coming here are Westerners because I think most of the Arab media know this is all a myth."

He holds up his hands when one of his sons brings us coffee and asks, "When they show hostages in Iraq, why doesn't he put himself in the film? There is simply no proof he is alive offered by the Americans or the media."

We engage in some small talk while drinking our strong Arabic coffee as we sit under grape vines lacing the terrace over our heads. As the sun begins to set, we thank him for the talk and the coffee, and head off as our taxi driver phones.

I am walking quickly through the streets to meet him when Aisha, whom I've worked with often in Baghdad, reassures me: "You can slow down, Dahr, we are not in danger here. This isn't like Baghdad where we'll be killed after dark."

Shortly thereafter we meet our driver. "They didn't tell you where his brother-in-law is because his home has been raided so many times," he states as a matter of fact. "By both Jordanian and US intelligence."

Our driver insists that Zarqawi is alive and well in Iraq. "I'm certain of it, because if he was dead they would show his picture and make the announcement. He has always been so strong. When we were in Afghanistan, any time we got a new machine to learn or French missiles, he was the first to learn them."

He drives us by another mosque Zarqawi is also supposed to have attended. We are in the al-Ma'assoum quarter now and our driver tells us that a sister of Abu Musab is the head of the Islamic Center of the district. He then adds, somewhat randomly, that he himself has been in different prisons for a total of seven years - one of those statements you can't decide whether you wished you had never heard or are simply relieved you didn't hear hours earlier just as you were beginning.

"In Afghanistan when we beheaded people it was to show the enemy what their fate was to be. It was to frighten them."

I think to myself grimly: well, it works.

He adds, "The jihad in Iraq is not just Zarqawi. It is up to Allah if we prevail, not dependent on the hand of Zarqawi. If he is killed, the jihad will continue there."

I ask him about civilian casualties. Does he think Zarqawi cares about the killing of innocent people?

"I have had so many discussions with Iraqis to tell them that Zarqawi doesn't instruct his followers in the killing of innocent people. If he did this, I would be the first to turn against him. He only targets the Americans and collaborators."

He's still chain smoking as we drive through the darkness back to Amman. I pay him as we thank him for taking us to Zarqa, and then his beat up taxi rolls off down the busy street.

The eerie blankness of Zarqawi
After discussions with our driver and other Jordanians, the only thing I feel I can say for sure is that Zarqawi is a real person. Whether or not he is alive and fighting in Iraq or not, or what acts he is actually responsible for there, is open to debate. On one point, I'm quite certain, however: reported American claims that Zarqawi has affiliations with the secular government of Syria make no sense. Just as Saddam Hussein opposed the religious fundamentalism of Bin Laden, the Syrian government would not be likely to team up with a fundamentalist like Zarqawi.

As Bush administration officials have falsely claimed Saddam had links to bin Laden and to Zarqawi, they have also conveniently linked Zarqawi to a Syrian government they would certainly like to take out. Similarly, Bush officials continue to link Zarqawi to the Iraqi resistance - undoubtedly another bogus claim in that the resistance in Iraq is primarily composed of Iraqi nationalists and Ba'athist elements who are fighting to expel the occupiers from their country, not to create a global Islamic jihad.

Thus, even if Zarqawi is involved in carrying out attacks inside Iraq and is killed at some future moment, the effect this would have on the Iraqi resistance would surely be negligible. It would be but another American "turning point" where nothing much turned.

Right now, when you try to track down Zarqawi, a man with a $25 million American bounty on his head, or simply try to track him back to the beginnings of his life's journey, whether you look for him in the tunnels of Tora Bora, the ruined city of Fallujah, the Syrian borderlands, or Ramadi, you're likely to run up against a kind of eerie blankness. Whatever the real Zarqawi may or may not be capable of doing today in Iraq or elsewhere, he is dwarfed by the Zarqawi of legend.

He may be the Bush administration's terrorist of terrorists (now that bin Laden has been dropped into the void), the Iraqi insurgency's unwelcome guest, the fantasy figure in some jihadi dreamscape, or all of the above. Whatever the case, Zarqawi the man has disappeared into an epic tale that may or may not be of his own partial creation. Even dead, he is unlikely to die; even alive, he is unlikely to be able to live up to anybody's Zarqawi myth.

Whoever he actually may be, the "he" of jihadi websites and American pronouncements is now linked inextricably with the devolving occupation of Iraq and a Bush administration that, even as it has built him up as a satanic bogeyman, is itself beginning to lose its own mythic qualities, to grow smaller.

I'm sure we'll continue to hear of "him" in Iraq, in Jordan, or elsewhere as his myth, perhaps now beyond anyone's control, continues to transform itself as an inextricable part of the brutal, bloody occupation of Iraq where the Bush administration finds itself fighting not primarily Zarqawi (or his imitators) but the Iraqis they allegedly came to liberate.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist from Anchorage, Alaska. He has spent eight months reporting from occupied Iraq, and recently has reported from Jordan and Turkey. He regularly reports for Inter Press Service, as well as contributing to The Nation, The Sunday Herald and Asia Times Online among others. He maintains a website at: www.dahrjamailiraq.com

(Copyright 2005 Dahr Jamail )

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...55E1702,00.html

We Stay in Iraq: Howard

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=6580

The Smash of Civilizations
by Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt

Tom Dispatch
Another successful landmark has been reached in our occupation of Iraq: The World Monuments Fund has just placed the country on its list of the Earth's 100 most endangered sites. ("Widespread looting, military occupation, artillery fire, vandalism, and other acts of violence are devastating Iraq, long considered the cradle of human civilization.") This is the first time that the Fund has ever put a whole nation on its list and so represents a singular accomplishment for the Bush administration, which knew not – and cared less – what it wrought.

The destruction began as Baghdad fell. Words disappeared instantly. They simply blinked off the screen of Iraqi history, many of them forever. First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans, religious manuscripts, stretching back centuries – all those things not pressed into clay, or etched on stone, or engraved on metal, just words on that most precious and perishable of all commonplaces, paper – vanished forever. What we're talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. And it was no less a victim of the American invasion – of the Bush administration's lack of attention to, its lack of any sense of the value of what Iraq held (other than oil) – than the Iraqi people. All of this has been, in that grim phrase created by the Pentagon, "collateral damage."

Worse yet, the looting of antiquity, words, and objects, not only never ended but seems to have accelerated. From well-organized gangs of grave robbers to American engineers building bases to American soldiers taking souvenirs, the ancient inheritance not just of Iraqis but of all of us has simply headed south. According to Reuters, more than 1,000 Iraqi objects of antiquity have been confiscated at American airports; priceless cylinder seals are evidently selling online at eBay for a few hundred dollars apiece; and this represents just the tiniest fraction of what's gone. The process is not only unending, but in the chaos that is America's Iraq beyond counting or assessing accurately.

Though less attended to than the human costs of the war (which, in turn, have been poorly attended to), such crimes against history are no small matter, as Chalmers Johnson indicates below. Johnson, who produced Blowback, a now classic account of how we got to Sept. 11, 2001 (though published well before those attacks occurred), and a singular study of American militarism, The Sorrows of Empire, is now working on the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy, Nemesis: The Crisis of the American Republic. The piece that follows offers an early glimpse into that book (not due to be published until late 2006). ~ Tom

The Smash of Civilizations

by Chalmers Johnson


In the months before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and his senior officials spoke of preserving Iraq's "patrimony" for the Iraqi people. At a time when talking about Iraqi oil was taboo, what he meant by patrimony was exactly that – Iraqi oil. In their "joint statement on Iraq's future" of April 8, 2003, George Bush and Tony Blair declared, "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."1 In this, they were true to their word. Among the few places American soldiers actually did guard during and in the wake of their invasion were oil fields and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. But the real Iraqi patrimony, that invaluable human inheritance of thousands of years, was another matter. At a time when American pundits were warning of a future "clash of civilizations," our occupation forces were letting perhaps the greatest of all human patrimonies be looted and smashed.

There have been many dispiriting sights on TV since George Bush launched his ill-starred war on Iraq – the pictures from Abu Ghraib, Fallujah laid waste, American soldiers kicking down the doors of private homes and pointing assault rifles at women and children. But few have reverberated historically like the looting of Baghdad's museum – or been forgotten more quickly in this country.

Teaching the Iraqis About the Untidiness of History

In archaeological circles, Iraq is known as "the cradle of civilization," with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, "It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it today began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and, above all developed the skill of writing."2 No other places in the Bible except for Israel have more history and prophecy associated with them than Babylonia, Shinar (Sumer), and Mesopotamia – different names for the territory that the British around the time of World War I began to call "Iraq," using the old Arab term for the lands of the former Turkish enclave of Mesopotamia (in Greek: "between the [Tigris and Eurphrates] rivers").3 Most of the early books of Genesis are set in Iraq (see, for instance, Genesis 10:10, 11:31; also Daniel 1-4; II Kings 24).

The best-known of the civilizations that make up Iraq's cultural heritage are the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sassanids, and Muslims. On April 10, 2003, in a television address, President Bush acknowledged that the Iraqi people are "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity."4 Only two days later, under the complacent eyes of the U.S. Army, the Iraqis would begin to lose that heritage in a swirl of looting and burning.

In September 2004, in one of the few self-critical reports to come out of Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense, the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication wrote: "The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended."5 Nowhere was this failure more apparent than in the indifference – even the glee – shown by Rumsfeld and his generals toward the looting on April 11 and 12, 2003, of the National Museum in Baghdad and the burning on April 14, 2003, of the National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments. These events were, according to Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, "the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years." Eleanor Robson of All Souls College, Oxford, said, "You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale."6 Yet Secretary Rumsfeld compared the looting to the aftermath of a soccer game and shrugged it off with the comment that "Freedom's untidy. … Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes."7

The Baghdad archaeological museum has long been regarded as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East. It is difficult to say with precision what was lost there in those catastrophic April days in 2003 because up-to-date inventories of its holdings, many never even described in archaeological journals, were also destroyed by the looters or were incomplete thanks to conditions in Baghdad after the Gulf War of 1991. One of the best records, however partial, of its holdings is the catalog of items the museum lent in 1988 to an exhibition held in Japan's ancient capital of Nara entitled Silk Road Civilizations. But, as one museum official said to John Burns of the New York Times after the looting, "All gone, all gone. All gone in two days."8

A single, beautifully illustrated, indispensable book edited by Milbry Park and Angela M.H. Schuster, The Looting of the Iraq Museum, Baghdad: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), represents the heartbreaking attempt of over a dozen archaeological specialists on ancient Iraq to specify what was in the museum before the catastrophe, where those objects had been excavated, and the condition of those few thousand items that have been recovered. The editors and authors have dedicated a portion of the royalties from this book to the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

At a conference on art crimes held in London a year after the disaster, the British Museum's John Curtis reported that at least half of the 40 most important stolen objects had not been retrieved and that of some 15,000 items looted from the museum's showcases and storerooms about 8,000 had yet to be traced. Its entire collection of 5,800 cylinder seals and clay tablets, many containing cuneiform writing and other inscriptions some of which go back to the earliest discoveries of writing itself, was stolen.9 Since then, as a result of an amnesty for looters, about 4,000 of the artifacts have been recovered in Iraq, and over a thousand have been confiscated in the United States.10 Curtis noted that random checks of Western soldiers leaving Iraq had led to the discovery of several in illegal possession of ancient objects. Customs agents in the U.S. then found more. Officials in Jordan have impounded about 2,000 pieces smuggled in from Iraq; in France, 500 pieces; in Italy, 300; in Syria, 300; and in Switzerland, 250. Lesser numbers have been seized in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. None of these objects has as yet been sent back to Baghdad.

The 616 pieces that form the famous collection of "Nimrud gold," excavated by the Iraqis in the late 1980s from the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud, a few miles southeast of Mosul, were saved, but only because the museum had secretly moved them to the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq at the time of the first Gulf War. By the time the Americans got around to protecting the bank in 2003, its building was a burnt-out shell filled with twisted metal beams from the collapse of the roof and all nine floors under it. Nonetheless, the underground compartments and their contents survived undamaged. On July 3, 2003, a small portion of the Nimrud holdings was put on display for a few hours, allowing a handful of Iraqi officials to see them for the first time since 1990.11

The torching of books and manuscripts in the Library of Korans and the National Library was in itself a historical disaster of the first order. Most of the Ottoman imperial documents and the old royal archives concerning the creation of Iraq were reduced to ashes. According to Humberto Márquez, the Venezuelan writer and author of Historia Universal de La Destrucción de Los Libros (2004), about a million books and ten million documents were destroyed by the fires of April 14, 2003.12 Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent of the Independent of London, was in Baghdad the day of the fires. He rushed to the offices of the U.S. Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau and gave the officer on duty precise map locations for the two archives and their names in Arabic and English, and pointed out that the smoke could be seen from three miles away. The officer shouted to a colleague, "This guy says some biblical library is on fire," but the Americans did nothing to try to put out the flames.13

The Burger King of Ur

Given the black market value of ancient art objects, U.S. military leaders had been warned that the looting of all 13 national museums throughout the country would be a particularly grave danger in the days after they captured Baghdad and took control of Iraq. In the chaos that followed the Gulf War of 1991, vandals had stolen about 4,000 objects from nine different regional museums. In monetary terms, the illegal trade in antiquities is the third most lucrative form of international trade globally, exceeded only by drug smuggling and arms sales.14 Given the richness of Iraq's past, there are also over 10,000 significant archaeological sites scattered across the country, only some 1,500 of which have been studied. Following the Gulf War, a number of them were illegally excavated and their artifacts sold to unscrupulous international collectors in Western countries and Japan. All this was known to American commanders.

In January 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, an American delegation of scholars, museum directors, art collectors, and antiquities dealers met with officials at the Pentagon to discuss the forthcoming invasion. They specifically warned that Baghdad's National Museum was the single most important site in the country. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute said, "I thought I was given assurances that sites and museums would be protected."15 Gibson went back to the Pentagon twice to discuss the dangers, and he and his colleagues sent several e-mail reminders to military officers in the weeks before the war began. However, a more ominous indicator of things to come was reported in the April 14, 2003, London Guardian: Rich American collectors with connections to the White House were busy "persuading the Pentagon to relax legislation that protects Iraq's heritage by prevention of sales abroad." On January 24, 2003, some 60 New York-based collectors and dealers organized themselves into a new group called the American Council for Cultural Policy and met with Bush administration and Pentagon officials to argue that a post-Saddam Iraq should have relaxed antiquities laws.16 Opening up private trade in Iraqi artifacts, they suggested, would offer such items better security than they could receive in Iraq.

The main international legal safeguard for historically and humanistically important institutions and sites is the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, signed on May 14, 1954. The U.S. is not a party to that convention, primarily because, during the Cold War, it feared that the treaty might restrict its freedom to engage in nuclear war; but during the 1991 Gulf War the elder Bush's administration accepted the convention's rules and abided by a "no-fire target list" of places where valuable cultural items were known to exist.17 UNESCO and other guardians of cultural artifacts expected the younger Bush's administration to follow the same procedures in the 2003 war.

Moreover, on March 26, 2003, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), headed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) Jay Garner – the civil authority the U.S. had set up for the moment hostilities ceased – sent to all senior U.S. commanders a list of 16 institutions that "merit securing as soon as possible to prevent further damage, destruction, and/or pilferage of records and assets." The five-page memo dispatched two weeks before the fall of Baghdad also said, "Coalition forces must secure these facilities in order to prevent looting and the resulting irreparable loss of cultural treasures" and that "looters should be arrested/detained." First on Gen. Garner's list of places to protect was the Iraqi Central Bank, which is now a ruin; second was the Museum of Antiquities. Sixteenth was the Oil Ministry, the only place that U.S. forces occupying Baghdad actually defended. Martin Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for the previous eight years, and Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and a member of the committee, both resigned to protest the failure of CENTCOM to obey orders. Sullivan said it was "inexcusable" that the museum should not have had the same priority as the Oil Ministry.18

As we now know, the American forces made no effort to prevent the looting of the great cultural institutions of Iraq, its soldiers simply watching vandals enter and torch the buildings. Said Arjomand, an editor of the journal Studies on Persianate Societies and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote, "Our troops, who have been proudly guarding the Oil Ministry, where no window is broken, deliberately condoned these horrendous events."19 American commanders claim that, to the contrary, they were too busy fighting and had too few troops to protect the museum and libraries. However, this seems to be an unlikely explanation. During the battle for Baghdad, the U.S. military was perfectly willing to dispatch some 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's oilfields, and their record on antiquities did not improve when the fighting subsided. At the 6,000-year-old Sumerian city of Ur with its massive ziggurat, or stepped temple-tower (built in the period 2112–2095 B.C. and restored by Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century B.C.), the Marines spray-painted their motto, "Semper Fi" (semper fidelis, always faithful) onto its walls.20 The military then made the monument "off limits" to everyone in order to disguise the desecration that had occurred there, including the looting by U.S. soldiers of clay bricks used in the construction of the ancient buildings.

Until April 2003, the area around Ur, in the environs of Nasiriyah, was remote and sacrosanct. However, the U.S. military chose the land immediately adjacent to the ziggurat to build its huge Tallil Air Base with two runways measuring 12,000 and 9,700 feet respectively and four satellite camps. In the process, military engineers moved more than 9,500 truckloads of dirt in order to build 350,000 square feet of hangars and other facilities for aircraft and Predator unmanned drones. They completely ruined the area, the literal heartland of human civilization, for any further archaeological research or future tourism. On Oct. 24, 2003, according to the Global Security Organization, the Army and Air Force built its own modern ziggurat. It "opened its second Burger King at Tallil. The new facility, co-located with [a] … Pizza Hut, provides another Burger King restaurant so that more service men and women serving in Iraq can, if only for a moment, forget about the task at hand in the desert and get a whiff of that familiar scent that takes them back home."21

The great British archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie), who pioneered the excavations at Ur, Nineveh, and Nimrud, quotes some classical advice that the Americans might have been wise to heed: "There was danger in disturbing ancient monuments. … It was both wise and historically important to reverence the legacies of ancient times. Ur was a city infested with ghosts of the past and it was prudent to appease them."22

The American record elsewhere in Iraq is no better. At Babylon, American and Polish forces built a military depot, despite objections from archaeologists. John Curtis, the British Museum's authority on Iraq's many archaeological sites, reported on a visit in December 2004 that he saw "cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate" and a "2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles."23 Other observers say that the dust stirred up by U.S. helicopters has sandblasted the fragile brick façade of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon from 605 to 562 B.C.24 The archaeologist Zainab Bahrani reports, "Between May and August 2004, the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the Temple of Ninmah, both of the 6h century B.C., collapsed as a result of the movement of helicopters. Nearby, heavy machines and vehicles stand parked on the remains of a Greek theater from the era of Alexander of Macedon [Alexander the Great]."25

And none of this even begins to deal with the massive, ongoing looting of historical sites across Iraq by freelance grave and antiquities robbers, preparing to stock the living rooms of Western collectors. The unceasing chaos and lack of security brought to Iraq in the wake of our invasion have meant that a future peaceful Iraq may hardly have a patrimony to display. It is no small accomplishment of the Bush administration to have plunged the cradle of the human past into the same sort of chaos and lack of security as the Iraqi present. If amnesia is bliss, then the fate of Iraq's antiquities represents a kind of modern paradise.

President Bush's supporters have talked endlessly about his global war on terrorism as a "clash of civilizations." But the civilization we are in the process of destroying in Iraq is part of our own heritage. It is also part of the world's patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their dynamiting of the monumental 3rd century A.D. Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March, 2001. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value, and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.

NOTES

American Embassy, London, "Visit of President Bush to Northern Ireland, April 7–8, 2003."
William R. Polk, "Introduction," Milbry Polk and Angela M. H. Schuster, eds., The Looting of the Iraq Museum: The Lost Legacy of Ancient Mesopotamia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005), p. 5. Also see Suzanne Muchnic, "Spotlight on Iraq's Plundered Past," Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2005.
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989, 2001), p. 450.
George Bush's address to the Iraqi people, broadcast on "toward Freedom TV," April 10, 2003.
Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, D.C.: September 2004), pp. 39-40.
See Frank Rich, "And Now: 'Operation Iraqi Looting,'" New York Times, April 27, 2003.
Robert Scheer, "It's U.S. Policy that's 'Untidy,'" Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2003; reprinted in "Books in Flames," TomDispatch, April 15, 2003.
John F. Burns, "Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its Treasures," New York Times, April 13, 2003; Piotr Michalowski (University of Michigan), "The Ransacking of the Baghdad Museum is a Disgrace," History News Network, April 14, 2003.
Polk and Schuster, op. cit, pp. 209–210.
Mark Wilkinson, "Looting of Ancient Sites Threatens Iraqi Heritage," Reuters, June 29, 2005.
Polk and Schuster, op. cit., pp. 23, 212–13; Louise Jury, "At Least 8,000 Treasures Looted from Iraq Museum Still Untraced," Independent, May 24, 2005; Stephen Fidler, "'The Looters Knew What They Wanted. It Looks Like Vandalism, but Organized Crime May Be Behind It,'" Financial Times, May 23, 2003; Rod Liddle, "The Day of the Jackals," Spectator, April 19, 2003.
Humberto Márquez, "Iraq Invasion the 'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 1258,'"Antiwar.com, Feb. 16, 2005.
Robert Fisk, "Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad," Independent, April 15, 2003.
Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 10.
Guy Gugliotta, "Pentagon Was Told of Risk to Museums; U.S. Urged to Save Iraq's Historic Artifacts," Washington Post, April 14, 2003; McGuire Gibson, "Cultural Tragedy In Iraq: A Report on the Looting of Museums, Archives, and Sites," International Foundation for Art Research.
Rod Little, op. cit..; Oliver Burkeman, "Ancient Archive Lost in Baghdad Blaze," Guardian, April 15, 2003.
See James A. R. Nafziger, Art Loss in Iraq: Protection of Cultural Heritage in Time of War and Its Aftermath, International Foundation for Art Research.
Paul Martin, Ed Vulliamy, and Gaby Hinsliff, "U.S. Army Was Told to Protect Looted Museum," Observer, April 20, 2003; Frank Rich, op. cit.; Paul Martin, "Troops Were Told to Guard Treasures," Washington Times, April 20, 2003.
Said Arjomand, "Under the Eyes of U.S. Forces and This Happened?," History News Network, April 14, 2003.
Ed Vulliamy, "Troops 'Vandalize' Ancient City of Ur," Observer, May 18, 2003; Paul Johnson, Art: A New History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 18, 35; Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 99, fig. 25.
Tallil Air Base, GlobalSecurity.org,.
Max Mallowan, Mallowan's Memoirs (London: Collins, 1977), p. 61.
Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy, "Babylon Wrecked by War," Guardian, January 15, 2005.
Owen Bowcott, "Archaeologists Fight to Save Iraqi Sites," June 20, 2005.
Zainab Bahrani, "The Fall of Babylon," in Polk and Schuster, op. cit., p. 214.
This essay is extracted from Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Crisis of the American Republic, forthcoming from Metropolitan Books in late 2006, the final volume in the Blowback Trilogy. The first two volumes are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004).


Copyright 2005 Chalmers Johnson

Iraq links London attacks to insurgency
By Bassem Mroue

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2005/07/08/...s/index_np.html

US, other foreign troops may protect Baghdad diplomats Reuters AlertNet
The US military and Iraqi government are discussing plans under which American and other troops could help protect diplomats in Baghdad, a US general said on Friday in a tacit admission that Iraqi security forces were not yet up to the task. The American military in the past has been reluctant to commit its troops to protect foreign envoys, leaving that to Iraqi security forces and hired guards. But Army Maj. Gen. William Webster, commander of multinational forces in the Baghdad area, told Pentagon reporters in a teleconference that something needed to be done "very quickly" to counter attacks and threats against foreign diplomats in the Iraqi capital. In recent incidents, al Qaeda kidnappers snatched Egyptian envoy Ihab el-Sherif from a Baghdad street last Saturday and killed him. Two other envoys were fired on this week, and one was injured. "In meetings recently with senior Iraqi leaders, we've been putting together plans for the future. And we recognize that all of our forces must be available to help protect our international diplomats who are helping to begin relations with this new democratic government," the general said from Baghdad. "I'm not sure that, in the end, it will result in U.S. forces directly guarding some of those diplomats," Webster told reporters. "We have not finalized our plan yet. But we certainly recognize we've got to do something very quickly."

IRAQ PRESSES NEIGHBORING STATES
In Baghdad, the government on Friday urged fellow Arab and Muslim states to send ambassadors to Baghdad despite attacks by al Qaeda insurgents, who have threatened other diplomats since killing the Egyptian envoy. Iraq's President Jalal Talabani promised top security for diplomats. Interior Minister Bayan Jabor has chided envoys for traveling without protection and said Iraqi armed escorts were always available. The Iraqi government has described the abduction and killing of Sherif, as well as at least two other attacks on senior diplomats in the capital this week, as part of attempts by insurgents to isolate the new, U.S.-backed government. Pakistan's ambassador left the country after his motorcade was shot up on Tuesday. The same day, the envoy from the Gulf Arab state of Bahrain was shot in the hand as he drove to work. Iraq had said last week that Egypt was planning to become the first Arab state with a full ambassador in Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 -- something Cairo never confirmed. Opposition figures in Egypt said plans to upgrade Sherif's job had led to his death. Webster, who commands about 30,000 mostly-American troops in the Baghdad area, said that recent raids had disrupted bombing attacks by insurgents in the past month and he questioned the ability of insurgents to mount sustained attacks in the capital this summer. "Before we began operations on the 22nd of May, there were 14 car bombs in a single day. There was an average of 14 to 21 per week just prior to the 22nd of May," he said. "And since we began operations, we have cut those car bombs in Baghdad, again, in half to roughly seven or eight per week."
News Analysis: Insurgents target Arab-Iraq ties International Herald Tribune
Diplomats shaken by Baghdad attacks Financial Times
Globe and Mail - FOX News - Khaleej Times - Edmonton Sun - all 1,737 related »

Americans deserve the unspun truth about Iraq:

No more excuses. No more using the unrelated terrorist attacks of 9/11 or terrorism in general as a crutch to explain Iraq. No more pap about taking the fight to the terrorists so we won't have to fight them at home. No more canned speeches about spreading liberty and justice for all when Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo beg to differ.
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a...IST13/507080312

http://snipurl.com/g4hv



Italy to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq in September, Berlusconi says
http://snipurl.com/g4hw



Egypt closes Baghdad diplomatic mission:

Egypt will temporarily shut its diplomatic mission in Iraq and has recalled its staff to Cairo, an official said Thursday, after a militant group claimed to have killed Egypt's top envoy in Baghdad.
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/...ws/12077771.htm

http://snipurl.com/g4hx

Iraq: 11 Southern Oil Fields To Go Up For Tender:

"Iraq needs capital investments to develop its petroleum industry, he said, adding that the government had estimated that some 25 billion dollars in investments were required to boost oil production to 5-6 million barrels a day.
http://snipurl.com/g4i0

The price of occupation

The "war against terror" is immoral and counterproductive.

Tariq Ali

Most Londoners (as the rest of the country) were opposed to the Iraq war. Tragically, they have suffered the blow and paid the price for the re-election of Blair and a continuation of the war.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9421.htm

http://snipurl.com/g4hn

Militants mortar police station killing four, gunmen kill professor in Basra:

Militants fired mortar shells on a police station in western sector of the northern city of Mosul on Friday killing four people and wounding 17 others, the Multi-National Forces said in a statement.
http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Lan...=en&DSNO=749998

http://snipurl.com/g4hq



Iraqi professor found dead in Basra :

Gunmen kidnapped and killed a university professor in southern Iraq and a physician in a central city in separate incidents, police said on Friday.
http://snipurl.com/g4hr



U.S Soldier Killed By Bomb:

A 29th Brigade Combat Team Soldier was killed and three were wounded when an improvised explosive device detonated near their vehicle at about 1:00 p.m. July 8 near Balad, Iraq.
http://snipurl.com/g4hs



103 Iraqi Parliamentarians Demand Withdrawal of US Troops:

103 members of the National Assembly (the Parliament) have demanded the adoption of a resolution cancelling the request made by the Government to the UN Security Council to extend the presence of multinational forces, and urging the Government to put “a clear plan for army building and a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops” from Iraq.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9414.htm

http://snipurl.com/g4ht

http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?Stor...08-042919-7465r

Benchmarks: Iraq quieter, but not by much
Martin Sieff

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a...ritain_bombings

Iraq Links London Attacks to Insurgency

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?p..._9-7-2005_pg4_7

Iraqis blame US and UK for rise in extremism

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a...raq_us_military

US Says Iraq Militants Dealt Sharp Blow

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes000C.html

Fallouja's Role in Insurgency Sets Back Native Sons
Young Iraqis who leave for Baghdad to work or study but retain ties to their hometown find themselves branded as suspected terrorists

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4663313.stm

No evidence Iraq led to attacks

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a...ideast_afp/iraq

Iraq rebels attack key infrastructure

http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/commo...255E912,00.html

Al-Zarqawi rejects call for peace

Italy to begin troop withdrawal from Iraq Aljazeera.net
Italy plans to begin withdrawing 300 troops from Iraq in September as Iraqi security forces have become increasingly capable of securing the territory, Premier Silvio Berlusconi said. Iraq "must come to a point where it must guarantee its own security," the Italian leader told reporters on Friday at the end of the G8 summit in Scotland. Berlusconi has come under increasing pressure in Italy over his support for the US-led coalition in Iraq. However, Berlusconi, added that any withdrawal plans would depend on security conditions on the ground and could change. He said the partial pullout would not compromise security for the remaining Italian troops or the zone of southern Iraq under their control. He denied a withdrawal was linked to any terrorist threats against Italy, although he said he was not underestimating the potential danger.

Withdrawal schedule
In Rome, Defence Minister Antonio Martino said in a statement that the reduction of the Italian contingent would occur "on the basis of a precise schedule that will always be agreed upon with our allies and the Iraqi government."
Berlusconi is criticised for his support for the US-led coalition
Berlusconi, a staunch ally of US President George Bush, sent 3000 troops to Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. The contingent is based in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. In recent months, Italian officials have gone back and forth on when a withdrawal might begin. Berlusconi had said September was a possibility, but Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini then talked of early 2006. On Friday, Berlusconi said he has spoken "several times" to Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair about starting to withdraw Italy's contingent.

Strained relations
Relations between Washington and Rome have been strained in recent months - first by the killing of an Italian intelligence agent by American soldiers in Iraq and then arrest warrants issued by an Italian court that is accusing 13 purported CIA operatives of kidnapping a militant Egyptian cleric from Italy and sending him to Egypt, where he was reportedly tortured. A State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said in Washington that "we very much appreciate the firm and steadfast support that the Italians and Italian government has provided to the operation in Iraq." "I am sure that whatever the Italians do in terms of future movements or changes in terms of their fullest force posture will be done fully in coordination with the multinational force," he said.

Pressure mounting
Pressure on Berlusconi has been mounting, even from within his own conservative coalition. Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli of the right-wing Northern League party said on Friday the time had come for the United Nations to begin discussing "the progressive withdrawal of troops, beginning with our contingent, perhaps by September." "It's evident that after New York, Madrid and London, Italy represents the most probable next objective of the terrorists," he said. "The time has come to begin to think also about our house, and to use the same resources currently committed in Iraq to prevent and combat possible attacks on our territory."

Potential target
Berlusconi said Italy is a potential target, but added, "It could happen to us as it could happen to another country." "I think that to the terrorists the enemy is our way of life, our philosophy of life, our civilization," he said. Berlusconi indicated that the intention to start pulling the troops out was not the consequence of threats against Italy or himself that appeared recently on the Web, saying that he had "grown used to them, even though I do not underestimate these threats." A group calling itself The Secret Organisation of al-Qaida in Europe - which claimed responsibility for Thursday's bombings in London - said the attacks were a punishment for British involvement in the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The statement also said Italy and Denmark would be attacked for their support of the US-led coalitions in both countries.
Italy to go ahead with Iraq pullout plans Aljazeera.com
Italy sets date to pull troops out of Iraq Mail & Guardian Online
Guardian Unlimited - Newsday - DeHavilland - Globe and Mail - all 220 related »

Secret Plan To Quit Iraq - EXCLUSIVE By Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday 08:48am 10th July 2005

Britain And America are secretly preparing to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq - despite warnings of the grave consequences for the region, The Mail on Sunday has learned. A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six months later. The leaked document, marked Secret: UK Eyes Only, appears to fly in the face of Mr Blair and President Bush's pledges that Allied forces will not quit until Iraq's own forces are strong enough to take control of security. If British troops pull out, other members of the Alliance are likely to follow. The memo says other international forces in Southern Iraq currently under British control will have to be handled carefully if Britain withdraws. It says they will not feel safe and may also leave. Embarrassingly, the document says the Americans are split over the plan - and it suggests one of the reasons for getting British troops out is to save money. Mr Reid says cutting UK troop numbers to 3,000 by the middle of next year will save £500 million a year, though it will be 18 months before the cash comes through. The document, Options For Future UK Force Posture In Iraq, is the first conclusive proof that preparations for a major withdrawal from Iraq are well advanced. The British Government's public position is that UK troops will stay until newly trained Iraqi forces are ready to take control of security. Less than a fortnight ago, Mr Blair said it was "vital" the US-led coalition stayed until Iraq stabilised, and Mr Bush endorsed his comments.

'Military drawdown'
Mr Reid's memo, prepared for Mr Blair in the past few weeks, shows that in reality, plans to get them out - "military drawdown," as he puts it - are well advanced. It says: "We have a commitment to hand over to Iraqi control in Al Muthanna and Maysan provinces [two of the four provinces under British control in Southern Iraq] in October 2005 and in the other two, Dhi Qar and Basra, in April 2006. "This in turn should lead to a reduction in the total level of UK commitment in Iraq to around 3,000 personnel by mid 2006. "This should lead to an estimated halving in the costs of around £1 billion per annum. Though it is not exactly clear when this reduction might manifest itself, it would not be before around the end of 2006." Mr Reid states that his proposal is not yet a "ministerially endorsed position" - or Government policy - though he clearly believes it should be. Significantly, he underlines the serious impact on other Allied troops in the area now under British control, including 550 Japanese engineers rebuilding the infrastructure and 1,400 Australian soldiers: "The Japanese will be reluctant to stay if protection is solely provided by the Iraqis. The Australian position may also be uncertain." Mr Reid says he will produce "further and more specific proposals" for the Cabinet's Defence and Overseas Policy (Iraq) Committee, which is chaired by Mr Blair. But some British Army chiefs are opposed to Mr Reid's plans. One senior officer claimed the Minister had no option but to recall 3,000 British troops in October as Britain has already promised to send an extra 3,000 personnel to southern Afghanistan to replace US soldiers. "The momentum for this is more to do with pressure from America and the woefully overstretched British Army than whether Iraq is ready to look after itself," said the source. "The timing seems very convenient.

British wait for American lead
"The view of most of our military people in Iraq is that we must not leave until the Iraqis are ready to cope, and it is by no reckoning certain that they are." The memo leaves little doubt that the British plan to take their lead from the White House, where an increasingly unpopular Mr Bush is under huge pressure from the US public to bring American troops home fast. The paper says it "sets out what we know of US planning and possible expectations on the UK contribution, and the impact on UK decision making". It says Mr Bush's allies in the Pentagon and Centcom, or Central Command, are at odds with Army chiefs in Iraq, who fear it is too soon to withdraw in such large numbers. The document states: "There is a strong US military desire for significant force reductions. "Emerging US plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in [Allied troops] from 176,000 down to 66,000. There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom, who favour a relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and the multinational force in Iraq, whose approach is more cautious." A Downing Street source said: "We have always said we will scale down our presence in Iraq when the Iraqis are capable of providing security. But we will not do it before then." The Ministry of Defence last night confirmed the leaked document was genuine. Mr Reid said: "This is but one of a number of papers produced over recent months covering various scenarios. We have made it plain we will stay in Iraq for as long as is needed. No decisions on the future of UK forces have been taken. "But we have always said it is our intention to hand over the lead in fighting terrorists to Iraqi security forces as their capability increases. We therefore continually produce papers outlining possible options. This is prudent planning." According to a BPIX survey for The Mail on Sunday, 52% of Britons think UK troops should return home only when Iraq is a peaceful democracy, which could take years. Eighteen per cent said our soldiers should return immediately and 23% said they should withdraw in six months.

US, Britain planning to withdraw troops from Iraq: report Xinhua
The United States and Britain are considering the withdrawal of more than half of the coalition troops from Iraq by mid-2006, a leaked memo from Britain's Defense Ministry was quoted as saying on Sunday. The memo, reportedly written by British Defense Minister John Reid, was quoted by The Mail on Sunday newspaper as saying Britain will reduce its troops in Iraq from 8,500 to 3,000 by mid-2006. Britain, which heads a foreign force in south Iraq, wants to hand over to Iraqi control of Al-Muthanna and Maysan provinces in October 2005 and the other two provinces, Dhi Qar and Basra, in April 2006, the memo was reported to have said. "This should lead to a reduction in the total level of UK commitment in Iraq to around 3,000 personnel," the document said. It said the planned withdrawal of British troops would save about 1 billion pounds (1.74 billion US dollars) a year. The memo also said Washington plans to hand over control of security to Iraqi forces in 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces by early 2006. This means that US troops in the country will be slashed to 66,000 from about 140,000. But a British Defense Ministry spokeswoman said Sunday that the two countries' military withdrawal from Iraq is only under consideration as one of many options and that no decision has been made. Reid, in response to the Mail on Sunday report, said in a statement, "We have made it absolutely plain we will stay in Iraq for as long as is needed. No decision on the future force posture of UK forces has been taken." "We have always said that it is our intention to hand over the lead in fighting terrorists to the Iraqi security forces as their capacity increases," the statement said. "We therefore continually produce papers outlining possible options and contingencies. This is but one of a number of such papers produced over recent months covering various scenarios. This is prudent planning," it said.
US, Britain planning to withdraw troops from Iraq: report:- Webindia123
UK memo says US, UK readying Iraqi withdrawal-report Reuters AlertNet
UK draws up Iraq 'pull-out plan' BBC News
Jerusalem Post - all 40 related »

Secret Plan To Quit Iraq Mail on Sunday

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?nav=hcmodule

British Memo: US Hopes to Cut Force in Iraq in Half by Early 2006

After execution of diplomat, Egyptians eye future in Iraq San Francisco Chronicle
"A Black Day of Terrorism" was the banner headline on Friday's state- owned Al Ahram newspaper, atop stories of both the terrorist bombings in London and the news that Egypt's envoy to Iraq had been executed by insurgents. The state-owned weekly Akhbar Al Youm came out Saturday with both stories on the front page under a single headline that read: "Terrorism has no country and no religion." Yet the beheading of Egyptian diplomat Ihab al-Sherif was of far greater concern here, even if much of the rest of the world focused on London. Beneath the shared revulsion at the brutal assassination, there were considerable differences of opinion about who was ultimately to blame for putting al-Sherif in harm's way: the Iraqis, the United States or the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian government confirmed the assassination soon after a Web site linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq organization announced the kidnappers had executed al-Sherif, who was slated to become Egypt's ambassador to Iraq, the first envoy of any Arab country to hold the top diplomatic rank in Baghdad. The United States had been urging Arab countries to elevate their diplomatic ties to the new Iraqi government as it struggles with a violent insurgency. "This terrorist act will not undermine Egypt from its supportive role for Iraq and its people," a statement from Mubarak's office asserted. Yet there were reports from Iraq that the Egyptian Embassy has closed and its team of six diplomats and six employees are leaving the country. Ahmed Ezzat, the spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, said in an interview that the embassy remains open, with Egyptian personnel present. "It is just to reduce the number of personnel," he said. "It is not a closure." The reduction suggests a shift in a once-active Egyptian policy toward Iraq, according to Abdel Moneim Said, the director of the Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, a government-funded think tank. He noted that in the past eight months, Egypt had been expanding its role in Iraq, first by acting as host to a conference on the country's future in November, and then building ties to both the Iraqi government and various sectarian groups. "This latest event (reduction of embassy staff) suggests a contraction of this role," he said, "almost as if it is an admission that it has all been a mistake." Ordinary Egyptians express bafflement that their envoy was singled out by al-Zarqawi's group and rising disgust with the continuing violence. "How can you call them resistance when they just kill each other?" asked Mosaad Hussein, a university student who had just finished exams. "Iraqis kill Iraqis, so it is no wonder they kill us, too." Muhammad Qurashi, the 28-year-old owner of an Internet cafe in the middle- class suburb of Nasr City, decried attacks against nonmilitary targets, saying, "The Iraqi resistance is directed against Arabs and every single nationality and mostly civilians." In a news conference Friday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the government continues to distinguish between what it considers the resistance in Iraq and terrorists. "We can distinguish them because one attacks Muslims, Arabs and diplomats working for mutual Arab understanding, the ones who would attack such diplomats are terrorists." The religious language used in the Web announcement that al-Sherif had been killed riled a number of religious experts, who said that what the group had done had nothing to do with Islam. Grand Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, issued a statement lamenting the "tragic event" and calling the perpetrators the "corrupt of the earth." He also condemned the London bombings. Many, however, are looking elsewhere in assigning responsibility for the assassination. The editor of the leftist weekly Al Arabi and spokesman for the opposition Kifaya (Enough) movement, Abdel Halim Qandil, said Mubarak was indirectly to blame. The journalist cited a number of moves the government had taken that were unpopular in the Arab world that made Egypt's representative a target for extremists, such as signing new trade agreements with Israel and upgrading Egypt's diplomatic delegation to Iraq in order, he said, to curry favor with the United States. "The Egyptian ambassador was sent to hell for the sake of personal gain for President Mubarak himself," he said. That view was echoed by the liberal opposition daily Al Wafd, which declared on Saturday that "sending al-Sherif to a country living under occupation was a wrong decision." The debate over the assassination is dividing along partisan lines as Egypt moved toward hotly contested presidential and parliamentary elections in the fall. According to Said of the Ahram Center, people are using the death of the diplomat to score political points for their own positions. "Like many events, " he said, "it gets internalized into the Egyptian internal debate."
Egypt wants answers from Iraq News24
WEEK IN REVIEW The State
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21 Die in Suicide Bombing in Baghdad Washington Post
At least 29 people were killed Sunday in the Iraqi capital in two dissimilar but deadly attacks -- one a spectacular suicide bombing at a military recruiting center, the other a clandestine massacre of a sleeping family in a residential neighborhood. The bombing occurred just before 9 a.m. at Baghdad's Muthanna airport, a former government airstrip near the city center that has been converted into a facility for processing army recruits. According to witnesses and police, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt near a crowd of men waiting to enter the recruiting center. According to the Defense Ministry, the explosion killed 21 people and wounded at least 34, which would make it Baghdad's deadliest bombing since June 19, when a suicide bomber killed 23 people in a restaurant popular with Iraqi police. Medical workers quoted by news services put the death toll at between 16 and 25 people. The entrance to the base, on busy Damascus Street across from Baghdad's Thawra Park Zoological Gardens, has been the target of frequent attacks. Authorities erected blast walls along the sidewalk outside the gate to protect would-be recruits waiting to pass through the main gate, and police said Sunday that applicants are only allowed to go behind the blast walls -- usually in groups of 10 at a time -- after they have been thoroughly searched. But witnesses said the bomber who struck Sunday evaded the extra security by slipping between the barriers. "He used a small gap between the concrete blocks to infiltrate in," said Hussein Nasir, an Iraqi soldier who was keeping onlookers away by firing warning shots into the air. Nasir said a soldier in a guard tower had spotted the bomber slipping through the barrier and shot at him, wounding him but not preventing him from detonating his charge. Police said they had no information indicating the attacker had been shot. Amir Ibrahim, a park policeman who was working across the street at Thawra Park at the time of the attack, said that the bomber apparently had not been among the crowds of men waiting to be searched and suggested he may have been driven to the recruiting center and dropped off at the gap in the blast walls. Both Ibrahim and Nasir said the recruiting center has been attacked eight times. The army's move to add blast walls and conduct searches made the facility safer, Ibrahim said, "but it is hard to stop these suicide bombers like this. The insurgents can't use car bombs anymore because of the security procedures, so they start using this new strategy." Though insurgents have made Iraq's fledgling security forces a principal target in their campaign of violence against the Iraqi government and its foreign supporters, the army and police continue to attract recruits in a country where jobs are scarce. "We did not do anything wrong," complained Ali Salim, 22, who said he had come looking for a way to support his family and had been in the park across the street when the bomb detonated. "I was going to become a soldier to defend my country. I will not become a spy for the Americans, so why do they want to kill me?" Also in Baghdad, unidentified gunmen killed nine members of a Shiite Muslim family Sunday morning in a neighborhood on the capital's east side. Though sectarian violence has been rife since a Shiite-led government took office in late April, the motive for the killings was not immediately clear. Police said an investigation was underway. Meanwhile, in the northern city of Tikrit, four people were killed and 14 wounded when a suicide car bomber attacked a convoy carrying the head of the city council, Jamal Shakoor. Police said Shakoor survived the explosion, which damaged surrounding buildings and shook a nearby hospital.
Special correspondents Bassam Sebti in Baghdad and Marwan Ani in Kirkuk contributed to this report.
Baghdad Suicide Blast Kills 21 at Iraqi Army Recruiting Center Los Angeles Times
Suicide bomber blows himself up in Baghdad Seattle Post Intelligencer
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http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/World/GG11Wd02.html

Iraq bomb blasts kill at least 33

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9440.htm

Options for future UK force posture in IraqOptions for future UK force posture in Iraq

07/09/05 "The Mail" - -

Paper by Secretary of State

SECRET - UK EYES ONLY

1. ISSUE

We will need to reach decisions later this year on likely future UK force structure and disposition in Iraq into 2006.

This paper sets out some of the key contextual considerations; identifies areas of uncertainty; sets out what we know of US planning and possible expectations on the UK contribution; and assesses the potential impact on UK decision making.

2. Decisions on coalition, and within that, UK force levels will be governed by four factors, all of which are subject to a greater or lesser degree of uncertainty:
* Internal Iraqi pressure for further force posture changes.
* Successful progress in the potential process and extension/renewal of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1546. (Mail on Sunday footnote 1)
* The continued development of the capability of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF).
* The security situation.

3. None of this, however, undermines the Multinational Force Iraq (MNF-I) (Mail on Sunday footnote 2)broad security strategy of:
a) Working with the Iraqis to contain and restrain the insurgency.
Assisting and encouraging the development of Iraqi security forces and structures which can progressively assume responsibility for all aspects of security including dealing with the insurgency, and thereby:
c) Enable MNF-I force reductions and eventual withdrawal.

4. US POSITION

US political military thinking is still evolving. But there is a strong US military desire for significant force reductions to bring relief to overall US commitment levels.

Emerging US plans assume that 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in overall MNF-I from 176,000 down to 66,000.

There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom (Mail on Sunday footnote 3) who favour a relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and MNF-I whose approach is more cautious.

The next MNF-I review of campaign progress due in late June may help clarify thinking and provide an agreed framework for the way ahead.

5. (Technical details)

6. UK POLICY CONSIDERATIONS

The current ministerially endorsed policy position is that the UK should not:
a) Agree to any changes to the UK area of responsibility.
Agree to any specific deployments outside Multinational Division South East. (Mail on Sunday footnote 4)
c) Agree to any specific increases in the roughly 8,500 UK service personnel currently deployed in Iraq.

7. Looking further ahead, we have a clear UK military aspiration to hand over to Iraqi control in Al Muthanna and Maysan provinces (Mail on Sunday footnote 5) in October 2005 and in the other two Multinational Division South East provinces, Dhi Qar and Basra (Mail on Sunday footnote 6) in April 2006.

This in turn should lead to a reduction in the total level of UK commitment in Iraq to around 3,000 personnel, ie small scale, by mid 2006.

This should lead to an estimated halving in the costs which fall to the reserve, (Mail on Sunday footnote 7) around £1 billion per annum currently. Though it is not clear exactly when this reduction might manifest itself, it would not be before around the end of 2006.

8. None of this however, represents a ministerially endorsed plan. There is a good deal more military analysis to do which is under way. We will need to consider handling of other MND SE allies.

The Japanese reconstruction battalion (Mail on Sunday footnote 8)will for example be reluctant to stay in Al Muthanna if force protection is solely provided by the Iraqis. The Australian position, which is highly influenced by the Japanese presence, may also be uncertain. (Mail on Sunday footnote 9)

NOTE

I will bring further and more specific proposals to DOP-I (Mail on Sunday footnote 10) for the future UK force posture in Iraq, including handover to Iraqi control and subsequent UK military drawdown.

John Reid.

Mail on Sunday footnotes

Footnote 1:(UN resolution authorising allied troops presence in Iraq)
Footnote 2: (The Multinational Force of Allied troops in Iraq)
Footnote 3: (Centcom is the US military command centre in the US)
Footnote 4: (Not get involved in operations outside area around Basra under UK control)
Footnote 5: (two of the four provinces around Basra in UK control)
Footnote 6: (the other two UK run provinces)
Footnote 7: (The UK Treasury Reserve)
Footnote 8: (Japan has 550 engineers in UK area of Iraq)
Footnote 9: (Australia has 1,400 troops in Iraq ,whose main job is to protect the Japanese)
Footnote 10: (The Defence and Overseas Policy, Iraq sub committee of the Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9441.htm

Secret Plan to Quit Iraq

By Simon Walters

07/10/05 "Mail on Sunday" - - Britain And America are secretly preparing to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq - despite warnings of the grave consequences for the region, The Mail on Sunday has learned.

A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six months later.

The leaked document, marked Secret: UK Eyes Only, appears to fly in the face of Mr Blair and President Bush's pledges that Allied forces will not quit until Iraq's own forces are strong enough to take control of security.

If British troops pull out, other members of the Alliance are likely to follow. The memo says other international forces in Southern Iraq currently under British control will have to be handled carefully if Britain withdraws. It says they will not feel safe and may also leave.

Embarrassingly, the document says the Americans are split over the plan - and it suggests one of the reasons for getting British troops out is to save money. Mr Reid says cutting UK troop numbers to 3,000 by the middle of next year will save £500 million a year, though it will be 18 months before the cash comes through.

The document, Options For Future UK Force Posture In Iraq, is the first conclusive proof that preparations for a major withdrawal from Iraq are well advanced.

The British Government's public position is that UK troops will stay until newly trained Iraqi forces are ready to take control of security. Less than a fortnight ago, Mr Blair said it was "vital" the US-led coalition stayed until Iraq stabilised, and Mr Bush endorsed his comments.

'Military drawdown'

Mr Reid's memo, prepared for Mr Blair in the past few weeks, shows that in reality, plans to get them out - "military drawdown," as he puts it - are well advanced.

It says: "We have a commitment to hand over to Iraqi control in Al Muthanna and Maysan provinces [two of the four provinces under British control in Southern Iraq] in October 2005 and in the other two, Dhi Qar and Basra, in April 2006.

"This in turn should lead to a reduction in the total level of UK commitment in Iraq to around 3,000 personnel by mid 2006.

"This should lead to an estimated halving in the costs of around £1 billion per annum. Though it is not exactly clear when this reduction might manifest itself, it would not be before around the end of 2006."

Mr Reid states that his proposal is not yet a "ministerially endorsed position" - or Government policy - though he clearly believes it should be.

Significantly, he underlines the serious impact on other Allied troops in the area now under British control, including 550 Japanese engineers rebuilding the infrastructure and 1,400 Australian soldiers: "The Japanese will be reluctant to stay if protection is solely provided by the Iraqis. The Australian position may also be uncertain."

Mr Reid says he will produce "further and more specific proposals" for the Cabinet's Defence and Overseas Policy (Iraq) Committee, which is chaired by Mr Blair.

But some British Army chiefs are opposed to Mr Reid's plans. One senior officer claimed the Minister had no option but to recall 3,000 British troops in October as Britain has already promised to send an extra 3,000 personnel to southern Afghanistan to replace US soldiers.

"The momentum for this is more to do with pressure from America and the woefully overstretched British Army than whether Iraq is ready to look after itself," said the source. "The timing seems very convenient.

British wait for American lead

"The view of most of our military people in Iraq is that we must not leave until the Iraqis are ready to cope, and it is by no reckoning certain that they are."

The memo leaves little doubt that the British plan to take their lead from the White House, where an increasingly unpopular Mr Bush is under huge pressure from the US public to bring American troops home fast.

The paper says it "sets out what we know of US planning and possible expectations on the UK contribution, and the impact on UK decision making".

It says Mr Bush's allies in the Pentagon and Centcom, or Central Command, are at odds with Army chiefs in Iraq, who fear it is too soon to withdraw in such large numbers.

The document states: "There is a strong US military desire for significant force reductions.

"Emerging US plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in [Allied troops] from 176,000 down to 66,000. There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom, who favour a relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and the multinational force in Iraq, whose approach is more cautious."

A Downing Street source said: "We have always said we will scale down our presence in Iraq when the Iraqis are capable of providing security. But we will not do it before then."

The Ministry of Defence last night confirmed the leaked document was genuine. Mr Reid said: "This is but one of a number of papers produced over recent months covering various scenarios. We have made it plain we will stay in Iraq for as long as is needed. No decisions on the future of UK forces have been taken.

"But we have always said it is our intention to hand over the lead in fighting terrorists to Iraqi security forces as their capability increases. We therefore continually produce papers outlining possible options. This is prudent planning."

According to a BPIX survey for The Mail on Sunday, 52 per cent of Britons think UK troops should return home only when Iraq is a peaceful democracy, which could take years. Eighteen per cent said our soldiers should return immediately and 23 per cent said they should withdraw in six months.

See also: Memo in full: Options for future UK force posture in Iraq

©2005 Associated Newspapers Ltd

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9435.htm

Allawi: this is the start of civil war
Hala Jaber, Amman

07/10/05 "The Times" - - IRAQ’S former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.
“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.

In an interview with The Sunday Times last week as he visited Amman, the Jordanian capital, he said: “The policy should be of building national unity in Iraq. Without this we will most certainly slip into a civil war. We are practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.”

Allawi, a secular Shi’ite, said that Iraq had collapsed as a state and needed to be rebuilt. The only way forward, he said, was through “national unity, the building of institutions, the economy and a firm but peaceful foreign relation policy”. Unless these criteria were satisfied, “the country will deteriorate”.

Allawi’s concern comes amid signs of growing violence between Shi’ites, who make up 60% of Iraq’s estimated 26m people, and the Sunni minority who dominated the upper reaches of the civilian bureaucracy and officer corps under Saddam Hussein.

The Shi’ites, who endured decades of oppression, are threatening to purge members of Saddam’s former Ba’ath party from the army and the intelligence services, a move that would provoke fierce retaliation from the Sunnis.

Since the execution-style killings of 34 men whose bound and blindfolded bodies were found in three predominantly Shi’ite areas of Baghdad in May, other tit-for-tat murders have followed, with clerics among the targets.

Tension has increased in the past two weeks following the return of Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi left the country in May to seek medical treatment for a chest wound suffered in an American airstrike, but has now recovered sufficiently to resume his activities.

Earlier this month he claimed that his supporters had killed Sheikh Kamaleddin al-Ghuraifi, a senior aide to Iraq’s most influential Shi’ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Zarqawi has now released an audiotape in which he announces the formation of a new militant unit, the Omar Corps. Its avowed aim is to “eradicate” the Badr brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country’s largest Shi’ite political party, which has targeted Sunnis.

Allawi, who became head of the interim government council created after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, said it was imperative that the security services and military be rebuilt. He has been a staunch critic of the policy followed by Paul Bremer, the American former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, of removing former Ba’athists from positions of power and disbanding Saddam’s army without putting anything else in place.

Allawi said that he had discussed the urgency of rebuilding Iraq’s military with President George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, last year. “Bush earmarked $5.7 billion (£3.2 billion) . . . but I did not receive the money,” Allawi said.

His experience as prime minister had taught him that “force alone will not solve the problems in Iraq”. It needed to be combined with dialogue and money to ensure stability.

However, Allawi insisted the Americans’ presence in Iraq was still required and rejected suggestions that a schedule should be drawn up for their withdrawal. “I cannot see withdrawal based on timing, but based on conditions,” he said. These would be satisfied only once Iraq “develops the capability to deal with threats”.

During his term Allawi lost the support of Iraq’s secular middle class through failing to fulfil his promise of restoring security and because of alleged corruption.

However, he is preparing for a comeback in elections scheduled for December. His supporters believe he will be helped in part by the increasing impact of Iraqi gunmen and suicide bombers since Ibrahim Jaafari became prime minister in April.

More than 1,400 people have since been killed, and many Iraqis who regarded Allawi as a ruthless leader now speak wistfully of the relative calm enjoyed under his rule.

Allawi is in intense negotiations to create a new multi-ethnic secular coalition before the general election.

“If we don’t build a state we will lose,” Allawi warned. “Not just as Iraq, but the region as a whole and Europe should say goodbye to stability and so should the United States. Iraq will become a breeding ground for terrorists.

“My philosophy in fighting is to isolate the hardcore Islamists. If you isolate them, it will become very easy to smash them or bring them to justice.”

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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Brits report plans to pull UK, US troops from Iraq BTC News
London’s Daily Mail reports that yet another leaked British government document, this one from the office of British defense minister John Reid, says both the UK and the US plan to reduce their respective troop numbers in Iraq by at least half within the next year. According to the Mail, the number of British troops in Iraq would fall from more than 8,000 now to about 3,000 by mid-2006. The country has, however, promised the US to deploy 3,000 troops to southern Afghanistan to free up US troops in that country. Although Reid says that the memo represents only contigency planning, the language in it suggests that the British government has already made arrangements with Iraq’s government to turn over control of security in four southern Iraq provinces. The Mail is less specific with respect to US plans, but quotes the memo as saying that “Emerging US plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in [Allied troops] from 176,000 down to 66,000. There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom, who favour a relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and the multinational force in Iraq, whose approach is more cautious.” If accurate, the British take on US plans suggests that the Bush administration is set to continue their policy of simply pretending the situation is under control while drawing down the US force to numbers approaching what they had hoped would be the size of the permanent US troop presence in the utopian Iraq of their pre-invasion expectations. The remaining troops would presumably withdraw from an active combat role and set about securing the bases the US has under construction in the country, while the troops withdrawn from the country could be set other tasks. The administration have demonstrated an occasional ability to bow to the inevitable in Iraq. The original plan for the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer called for the body to administer Iraq for several years, acting through the Iraqi Governing Council, while transforming Iraq’s laws and economy on a western-style free market, Israel-friendly model. US troops were expected to withdraw rapidly, leaving only about two divisions in the country within six months. The outbreak of the insurgency and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s insistence on direct elections put an end to those plans, leading to the much-ballyhooed “transfer of sovereignty” a year ago. The administration still hoped to control events through its factotums leading the new government, and the new government was forbidden from altering any of the new laws and regulations that Paul Bremer, in violation of international law, had put into effect during his tenure as Viceroy. We were treated to a number of promises of troop reductions throughout 2004 and on into this year, and there’s no doubt that the administration still wished to get to the point where only the permanent US force would be left in place. But the al-Sadr uprising, the first assault on Fallujah, the subsequent swelling of the insurgency and its return in force after a brief post-election breather put paid to those plans. When the January elections were first scheduled, the administration still apparently believed that conditions in January of this year would be such that enough Iraqis from every segment of the population would vote to create a government more or less representative of the country. As year’s end neared and events such as the second assault on Falluja highlighted the deteriorating security in the country, the administration began to lower its expectations for the elections, settling on the mere fact of them as a triumph. (And in fact they were probably surprised and delighted that the turnout was what it was.) Since that time, the administration have clearly absorbed the fact that their most favored allies among the elected government are operating from a position of weakness, that the permanent Constitution will not be written by the August deadline, and that whatever government eventually emerges will be an Islamic-leaning one. And they must know now that Iraq’s relationship with Iran, as demonstrated by the new military cooperation pact between the two countries, will be somewhat more cordial than the administration would have wished. So it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that at least some in the administration have decided to focus on consolidating the permanent US military presence in Iraq while letting the Iraqis themselves sort out the rest of the mess. The presence of two or three divisions of US troops would likely prevent any truly catastrophic blows to US energy interests in the region and discourage any heavy-handed meddling from Iraq’s neighbors, but would eliminate the lead role of the US in the fighting between the government and the insurgents. It would probably also prolong the insurgency beyond what would be the case were the US to withdraw entirely, but there is no chance whatsoever that the Bush administration will abandon the foothold it went to such great lengths to create. The administration face a great deal of pressure to bring a substantial number of troops out of Iraq — one should probably avoid saying “to bring the troops home,” as one somehow doubts that’s where they’ll be headed, at least in the long term — not only from the increasing disenchantment of the public but from the military leadership as well, who are not at all happy with the state of the Army. So it makes perfect sense that they will be considering ways to reduce the number of troops in Iraq while at the same time trying to prevent the lid from blowing entirely off, and that they would like to accomplish something along those lines in time for the 2006 Congressional elections. If that is in fact what’s happening, it’ll be interesting to see how the administration spin it. Even more interesting will be the question of what’s intended for those other 80,000 troops. Will they head to Afghanistan to help o