19 people killed in attacks in Iraq:

At least 19 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, a day after bloodshed claimed 18 lives
http://tinyurl.com/d3mwn

Gunmen kill Iraqi forces, bombs shake Baghdad:

Guerrillas killed 10 Iraqi policemen and soldiers in attacks north of Baghdad
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/BAB627106.htm

U.S. Soldier Killed:

A U.S. soldier died from wounds sustained by an improvised explosive device in Baghdad Dec. 25.
http://www.centcom.mil/CENTCOMNews/Casualt...rt=20051230.txt

2 U.S. Soldiers Among 4 Killed in Iraq:

Two Iraqi servicemen and two American soldiers died and 14 people were wounded in militants’ attacks at military and police patrols in various parts of Iraq on Sunday.
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?N...51980&PageNum=0

In pictures:

The Face and Voice of Civilian Sacrifice in Iraq :

Their portraits and their stories compel attention, not because they have endured worse than others, but because their miseries are so commonplace
http://tinyurl.com/dxykr

Analysis: U.S. Preparing for Iraq Exit :

At every stop on his three-day tour of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent a similar message: The U.S. military is not rushing to get out, but it is getting out, nevertheless.
http://tinyurl.com/98ycv

Military leader says troop level could rise:

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said Sunday that the number of U.S. troops in Iraq could increase next year, not decrease, if the insurgency continues.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nati...0_troops26.html

Desperately Seeking Victory in a War Already Lost :

There is no US victory to be gained from the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The clear lesson is that if people steadfastly resist, even the might of the hyper-power can be thwarted.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec05/Petersen1225.htm

Stars turn backs on America's troops in Iraq : ·

Danger and anti-war stance keep celebrities away
http://geography.about.com/library/misc/blequator.htm

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Iraq Violence Leaves at Least 2 Dozen Dead By MARIAM FAM, Associated Press Writer
48 minutes ago



Violence increased across Iraq after a lull following the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections, with at least two dozen people including a U.S. soldier killed Monday in shootings and bombings mostly targeting the Shiite-dominated security services.

Officials blamed the surge in violence on insurgent efforts to deepen the political turmoil surrounding the contested vote. Preliminary figures — including some returns released Monday from ballots cast early by extriate Iraqis and some voters inside Iraq — have given a big lead to the religious Shiite bloc that controls the current interim government.

The violence came as three opposition groups threatened a wave of protests and civil disobedience if fraud charges are not properly investigated. The warning came from the secular Iraqi National List, headed by former Shiite Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, and two Sunni Arab groups.

Iraq's Electoral Commission said Monday that final results for the 275-seat parliament could be released in about a week.

Sunni Arab and secular Shiite factions are demanding that an international body review more than 1,500 complaints, warning they may boycott the new legislature. They also want new elections in some provinces, including Baghdad. The United Nations has rejected an outside review.

"We will resort to peaceful options, including protests, civil disobedience and a boycott of the political process until our demands are met," Hassan Zaidan al-Lahaibi, of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Front for National Dialogue, said in neighboring Jordan, where representatives of the groups have met in recent days.

Among the complaints are 35 that the election commission considers serious enough to change some local results. But, said Farid Ayar, a commission official, "I don't think there is a reason to cancel the entire elections."

He also said preliminary results from early votes by soldiers, hospital patients and prisoners and overseas Iraqis showed a coalition of Kurdish parties and the main Shiite religious bloc each taking about a third. Those nearly 500,000 votes were not expected to alter overall results significantly.

Preliminary results previously released gave the United Iraqi Alliance, the religious Shiite coalition dominating the current government, a big lead — but one unlikely to allow it to govern without forming a coalition with other groups.

Bahaa al-Araji, a member of the Shiite alliance, said the group was preparing to negotiate with other political blocs and had already met with the Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party.

Al-Araji also said likely candidates for prime minister were current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who heads the Islamic Dawa party, and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who belongs to the other main Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Every time there has been a defining event in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, there has been a period of calm. They included the June 28, 2004, transfer of power from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, the Jan. 30 elections, and the Oct. 15 constitution referendum.

The recent lull in violence ended Sunday, with the deaths of 18 people.

On Monday, a suicide car bomber slammed into a police patrol in the capital, leaving three dead, officials said, and a suicide motorcycle bomber rammed into a Shiite funeral ceremony, killing at least two, said Maj. Falah Mohamadawi of the Interior Ministry. A mortar then killed two people in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood.

Four other car bombs killed at least two people and gunmen killed five officers at a police checkpoint 30 miles north of Baghdad, officials said.

A U.S. soldier serving with Task Force Baghdad was killed when a rocket-propelled grenade hit his vehicle while on patrol in the capital, the military said. The name of the soldier was withheld pending notification of next of kin.

In Jordan, a lawyer for Saddam and a Jordanian newspaper claimed Monday that the former ruler's half brother rejected a U.S. offer of a ranking Iraqi government position in exchange for testimony against the deposed leader.

The half brother, Barzan Ibrahim, reportedly made the claim Thursday before the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Court which is hearing the cases against him, Saddam and six other co-defendants for the deaths of more than 140 Shiites after a 1982 attempt on Saddam's life in the town of Dujail.

The lawyer spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give details of the closed session.

Saddam's chief Iraqi lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, made the same allegations in Monday's editions of the independent Jordanian daily Al Arab Al Yawm. Dulaimi and U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment Monday, which was a U.S. holiday.

But chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Mousawi denied that there were attempts to cut a deal with Ibrahim during the closed session. "The defense team should respect the profession and should not make false statements," al-Mousawi said. He refused to divulge what happened during the closed session.

In other developments:

• Gunmen raided a house in southern Baghdad, killing three people, police Capt. Qassim Hussein said. Gunmen attacked the house again when police arrived to remove the bodies, wounding two officers, police said.

• A Shiite cleric in the southern city of Najaf and a man in the northern city of Mosul were gunned down. In Baghdad, a civilian driving his children to school and a professor were killed.

• A car bomb targeted the governor of Diyala province, killing a body guard, and gunmen killed a member of Diyala city council.

• Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko paid an unannounced visit to his country's troops. His country is pulling out its remaining 867 soldiers this week.

• Susanne Osthoff, a German freed after being held hostage in Iraq for more than three weeks, said in an interview aired Monday that she was treated well by her kidnappers, who told her they do not hurt women or children.

___

Associated Press reporters Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad and Shafika Mattar in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this story.



Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Chalabi Lacks Votes Needed to Win Spot in Iraqi Assembly

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Naseer Nouri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 27, 2005; A18



BAGHDAD, Dec. 26 -- Unexpectedly low support from overseas voters has left Ahmed Chalabi -- the returned Iraqi exile once backed by the United States to lead Iraq -- facing a shutout from power in this month's vote for the country's first full-term parliament since the 2003 invasion.

Rebounding violence, which included bombings, assassination attempts and other attacks, claimed at least 19 lives in Iraq on Monday, including that of an American soldier. Eight members of a single Iraqi SWAT team were wiped out in what Iraqi authorities described as an hour-long shootout with better-armed insurgents.

With 95 percent of a preliminary tally from the Dec. 15 vote now completed, Chalabi remained almost 8,000 votes short of the 40,000 minimum needed for him or his bloc to win a single seat in the 275-seat National Assembly, according to election officials. Without a seat in the assembly, Chalabi would presumably be unable to obtain a post in the resulting government.

However, Chalabi was among the politicians jockeying Monday ahead of meetings that have been scheduled in the Kurdish north this week to bring Shiite Muslims, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and others into post-election talks on forming the next government.

A spokesman for Chalabi's party, which has filed complaints of election irregularities, said he was waiting for the results of the investigation. "What I can say is Dr. Chalabi will have an important role, whether in the government or outside,'' said the spokesman, Haider Mousawi.

Chalabi is regarded as both a master deal-maker and remarkable political survivor. The longtime exile and his associates played an influential role in the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein; U.S. authorities tapped Chalabi to lead a small Iraqi force in the U.S.-led invasion. But his reputation suffered from past financial scandals, and critics have charged he was always more popular with Americans than with Iraqis.

Chalabi's supporters here had hoped he would do well among exile voters who were allowed to cast ballots overseas. But results announced Monday showed he received just 0.89 percent of the "special vote,'' from Iraqi citizens in foreign countries, hospitals, the army and prisons. Kurdish politicians received the largest share of the special vote, with the backing of millions of Iraqi Kurdish exiles and members of the security forces, while the current governing coalition of Shiite religious parties has so far won the most votes overall.

Chalabi's bloc has done poorly across the country, according to the preliminary tally, which left it statistically unlikely that the bloc could win a seat outright. Final results are expected by early next month.

Chalabi pulled out of the governing Shiite alliance ahead of the elections, opting instead to form a small party of his own, after the alliance refused to guarantee him the top job of prime minister, his aides said at the time.

Representatives of the top finishers readied for midweek meetings to be convened under the auspices of President Jalal Talabani. With no party receiving an outright majority of seats in the new National Assembly, winning control of the next government will require forming a coalition that can command such a majority.

The deal-making has led to meetings among rivals at opposite extremes of Iraqi politics to feel out any possible alliance. On Saturday, the effort brought Saleh Mutlak -- a Sunni politician previously derided by Shiites as a front for insurgents -- together with Abdul Aziz Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite religious party whose militia Sunnis accuse of running anti-Sunni death squads. Both sides confirmed the meeting Monday.

"We have agreed that we should form a government of national unity without suggesting any names," Mutlak said. "And they've agreed on the principle and were very positive about it." He said there were "no results for these talks yet, but all expectations show that we are on the right track to solve the problem."

Tariq Hashimi, secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, said his organization also was "negotiating with all factions, including representatives of the Shiite alliance."

Iraq's election commission said Monday it still had found no evidence of any fraud serious enough to change the outcome of the elections.

Violence Monday targeted government security forces and officials. About 25 insurgents attacked a checkpoint run by an Iraqi SWAT team outside Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, said Kanan Hameed, a SWAT team member whom authorities say survived only because he was elsewhere during the attack.

"The attack lasted for one hour. We were waiting for any support from the Iraqi police or the American forces, but no one came," Hameed said.

"The men fought until they ran out of ammunition,'' said Awf Rahomi, deputy governor of Diyala province.

Baqubah, the capital of Diyala, has been the scene of Sunni protests against the election results. A roadside bombing Monday, apparently targeting the governor, wounded him and killed one of his guards, spokesman Ali Khaiyam said. A separate attack killed a female member of the provincial council, police in Baqubah said.

Armed men near Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, stormed the house of a Shiite family Monday and killed four men of the family in front of the women and children, a police spokesman said. Other killings Monday included the assassination of the local deputy chief of the Supreme Council party in Najaf.

In Baghdad, an American soldier on patrol was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade. Also, at least three bombs hit the predominantly Shiite Karrada district, killing at least one person.

"The resistance is doing the right thing," Uthman Abdullah, a taxi driver, said after the Karrada bombings. "They should never let the Shiites enjoy taking control of the country. The holy warriors should show them one black day after another. This is the only language that these people will understand."

Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and K.I. Ibrahim contributed to this report.


© 2005 The Washington Post Company

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 27, 2005
Iraq Vote Shows Sunnis Are Few in New Military
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 26 - An analysis of preliminary voting results released Monday from the Dec. 15 parliamentary election suggests that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni Arab participation in the political process, the Sunnis still have comparatively little representation in the Iraqi security forces.

The indication is troubling because Sunni Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Iraq's population, came out in greater numbers largely as a response to the recent domination of the government by Shiites and Kurds. In particular, Sunni Arabs say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.

American military commanders say that it is crucial to build an Iraqi Army representative of Iraq's ethnicity, and that the alternative is to risk the consequences of Shiite and Kurdish forces' trying on their own to pacify insurgent hotbeds dominated by Sunni Arab militants.

It has been suspected that Sunni Arabs are underrepresented in the new military and police. Election officials believe that a special tally from the Dec. 15 vote helps to detail the disparity, mostly because voting in Iraq has almost completely been along ethnic and sectarian divisions.

In the special tally - which the officials said overwhelmingly consisted of most of the ballots cast by security forces, but also included votes from hospital patients and prisoners - about 7 percent of the votes were cast for the three main Sunni Arab parties. Across the whole population, though, officials have estimated, Sunni Arab candidates won about 20 percent of the seats in the new Parliament.

Along the same lines, the tally also suggested that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen seemed to have a heavily disproportionate presence in the security forces.

The figures, which are preliminary, are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces. And it is impossible to know whether Sunni Arab soldiers and police officers turned out to vote to the same high degree as the overall Sunni population.

A spokesman for the American military command that oversees training of the Iraqi forces also said that while he did not know the security forces' ethnic mix, he believed that there were more Sunni troops than the election data suggest.

Yet the results provide some clues to the composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial but elusive factor in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat the mostly Sunni Arab insurgency. And the estimation seems to be a sign of how complete the reversal of fortune has been for Sunni Arabs, who dominated security forces under Saddam Hussein.

After a respite following the election, more than 70 Iraqis have been killed in the last four days, including more than 20 killed Monday in a string of ambushes and car bombings.

At least six car bombs detonated in Baghdad, killing five Iraqis. In Baquba, north of the capital, five policeman died in an early morning ambush. And a rocket-propelled grenade also killed an American soldier on patrol in the capital.

The voting data released Monday were just one sliver of preliminary results indicating that although Sunni Arabs will play a larger role in the new Parliament than they did in the interim government, where they were almost completely shut out, Shiites will once again dominate Parliament.

The Sunni Arabs have accused the Shiite-dominated government of widespread voting fraud and have demanded a new election. Sunnis, and some secular Shiites, have threatened to boycott the new government. But any chance of a large-scale election rerun has been all but ruled out. Officials from the independent electoral commission said Monday that they saw no reason for new elections - an opinion seconded by the chief United Nations election official here.

"We do think there might have been fraud in a few isolated places, but we don't see this widespread fraud people are talking about," Craig Jenness, head of the United Nations electoral assistance team in Iraq, said in an interview Monday evening.

"It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty credible given the circumstances," he said, adding, "There's nothing we see that would suggest a rerun is warranted."

Though more attention has been focused on the ethnic makeup of the government, the American military is very sensitive to the perception that the Iraqi forces have few Sunni Arabs, especially in the north, where Kurdish officials have made plain their desire to expand their territory into Sunni Arab and Turkmen regions. To many American commanders, a proportionate representation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish soldiers is vital to the Iraq's long-term stability and cohesion.

But on that score there still appears to be a way to go, according to the numbers from the special election tally. In that category, 45 percent of votes were cast for the main Kurdish slate of candidates, compared with the combined total of just 7 percent for the three main Sunni Arab political parties. The principal Shiite political alliance received 30 percent of the votes in the category.

The heavily disproportionate votes for the Kurds and the slight showing for the Sunnis primarily reflected their relative numbers in the security forces, election officials here said.

By contrast, while final election results will not be available for another week, Iraqi news reports have estimated that Kurds and Sunni Arabs each received perhaps 20 percent of the overall national vote for seats in Parliament. The main Shiite political alliance is expected to take slightly less than 50 percent of the seats. Those estimates more closely follow Iraq's demographic makeup.

Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, a spokesman for the military command that oversees training of Iraqi forces, said some Iraqi soldiers voted near their homes on Dec. 15 and would not have been included in the special tally, though he said he did not know whether those included a disproportionate number of soldiers from any one ethnic group.

Colonel Wellman said he did not have detailed estimates of the ethnic composition of the Iraqi military, though he said Sunni Arab representation "clearly lags." He also emphasized the efforts being made to recruit Sunni soldiers, including more than 4,000 who have been signed up in the last six months.

"One of the biggest goals of this enterprise is to build an army that reflects the national makeup of Iraq and deploys those units away from their home," he said. "There are great efforts to bring Sunnis into the fold and balance out the army as much as possible."

In addition to the special tally of votes from the military, prisons and hospitals, the Iraqi election commission also released separate figures showing that Iraqis living abroad voted evenly for the main Kurdish and Shiite coalitions, with each receiving 30 percent of the overseas vote. The figures reflected the high number of expatriates who fled Mr. Hussein's rule, whose government and military was dominated by and favored Sunni Arabs.

In the overseas tally, the three main Sunni Arab parties combined received about 7.5 percent of the vote. The slate of candidates backed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baathist, received 12 percent.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Mona Mahmoud, Khalid al-Ansary and Omar al-Neami.



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http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=8311


December 27, 2005
US-Shi'ite Struggle Could Spin Out of Control

by Gareth Porter
The George W. Bush administration has embarked on a new effort to pressure Iraq's militant Shi'ite party leaders to give up their control over internal security affairs that could lead the Shi'ites to reconsider their reliance on U.S. troops.

The looming confrontation is the result of U.S. concerns about the takeover of the Interior Ministry by Shi'ites with close ties to Iran, as well as the impact of officially sanctioned sectarian violence against Sunnis who support the insurgency. The Shi'ite leaders, however, appear determined to hold onto the state's organs of repression as a guarantee against restoration of a Ba'athist regime.

The new turn in U.S. policy came in mid-November, when the administration decided to confront Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari publicly over the torture houses being run by Shi'ite officials in the Ministry of Interior at various locations in Baghdad.

The decision was not the result of a new revelation, because the U.S military command and U.S. embassy had known about such torture houses for months, from reporting by U.S. military officers.

U.S. Army doctor Maj. R. John Stukey told the Christian Science Monitor that he and U.S. military police had visited Interior Ministry detention facilities and had reported evidence of torture and other mistreatment at those facilities up through the chain of command before he left Baghdad in June. Washington had nevertheless remained silent about the issue.

However, the U.S. military raided an Interior Ministry's detention center in the Baghdad suburb of Jadriya on Nov. 13, whereupon the U.S. embassy and U.S. command issued an unusual joint statement calling the torture center "totally unacceptable."

The embassy then used the torture house revelation to issue a public demand that the militant Shi'ite parties give up their power over the key state security organs. On Nov. 17, the embassy said, "There must not be militia or sectarian control or direction of Iraqi Security Forces, facilities, or ministries."

Shi'ite leaders viewed these U.S. moves as part of an effort to reduce the majority controlled by the Shi'ite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) in the parliament and to increase the vote for former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite and former Ba'athist who has been a longtime collaborator with the Central Intelligence Agency.

As early as August, Prime Minister Jaafari and other leaders of the main Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), had passed the word to their party members that the United States was trying to paralyze the government in order to bring Allawi back to power in the December elections.

When Allawi was interim prime minister in 2004-2005, he battled with militant Shi'ite party leaders over their push for radical de-Ba'athification and secret Iranian financing of SCIRI and Dawa candidates and the Iranian-trained Badr paramilitary units. Before last January's elections, Allawi's defense minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, publicly referred to the Shi'ite United Iraqi Alliance slate as the "Iranian list."

The administration shared Allawi's views on Iranian covert involvement in Iraqi politics but chose not to comment explicitly about it in public, sparing the new Shi'ite government embarrassment. Referring to Iran-Iraq relations last May, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice deplored "undue influence in the country through means that are not transparent."

Shortly before the recent parliamentary election, however, a U.S. official raised the issue explicitly on the record for the first time. Gen. George W. Casey complained in an interview with Knight-Ridder that the Iranians were "putting millions of dollars into the South to influence elections … funded primarily through their charity organizations and also Badr and some of these political parties."

Casey also referred to members of the Badr militia, who have entered the Interior Ministry units and the military in large numbers, as "their guys."

As the ballots were being cast on Dec. 15, Khalilzad indicated clearly that the United States wanted much broader power sharing in the next government. "Since no single party will have a majority, there will be a need for a very broad-based coalition," he said.

The embassy apparently hoped that the UIA would get fewer seats and Allawi more seats in the next parliament, increasing the pressure on the Shi'ite parties to negotiate a broad coalition government including both Allawi and Sunni representatives.

On Dec. 19, Khalilzad again signaled the U.S. determination to force the SCIRI leadership to yield control over the security organs of the government. "You can't have someone who is regarded as sectarian as minister of the interior," he said.

The initial returns indicated a stronger showing for the UIA than the embassy had expected, and a weaker showing for Allawi than in the January elections. Allawi now appears to be eliminated from negotiations on high-level jobs in the administration.

Nevertheless, Khalilzad still has the Kurdish card to play. The UIA will need the support of the Kurds to form a new government, and the Kurds, whose military alliance with the United States is central to their political strategy, have now signaled that they will demand the inclusion of Sunni representatives in the government.

At a meeting with Khalilzad on Sunday, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said, "Without the Sunni parties there will be no consensus government … [and] without consensus government there will be no unity, there will be no peace." Kurdish negotiators are also likely to insist that the Shi'ites give up control over the Interior Ministry.

The last time the UIA was in the process of trying to form a government after the first parliamentary election in January, Kurdish demands played a major role in delaying the formation of the new government for three months. That Kurdish negotiating strategy dovetailed with U.S. efforts to exert pressure on Shi'ite leaders to allow former Ba'athist officers to keep leading positions in the military and Ministry of Interior.

When the SCIRI leadership refused to back down on control over the Interior Ministry, the Bush administration relented rather than create a political crisis. This time, however, the stakes are higher. If sectarian violence continues to worsen, the White House risks a collapse of political support at home. And the administration has already warned publicly that it will not accept a continuation of the status quo.

For Shi'ite party leaders, U.S. pressure to share state power with secular or Sunni representatives – especially on internal security – touches a raw nerve. They regard control over the organs of state repression as the key to maintaining a Shi'ite regime in power.

If Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and other SCIRI leaders feel they have to choose between relying on U.S. military protection and the security of their regime, they are likely to choose the latter. They could counter U.S. pressures by warning they will demand a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops if the United States continues to interfere in such politically sensitive matters.

That would not be an entirely idle threat. Last October, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was reported by associates to be considering such a demand. The implication of calling for a relatively rapid U.S. withdrawal would be that the Shi'ite leaders would turn to Iran for overt financial and even military assistance, in line with their fundamental foreign policy orientation.

The Bush administration's strategy of pressure on Shi'ite leaders over the issue of control over state security organs thus has the potential to spin out of control and cause another policy disaster in Iraq and the entire Middle East.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis8.html


Bush Promises Victory in Iraq – But for Whom?
by Eric Margolis


Victory or defeat! So proclaimed President George W. Bush in his TV speech about Iraq last night.

Those who oppose Bush’s continued, $6.5 billion monthly war in Iraq are "defeatists." Withdrawal from Iraq would "damage US credibility around the world," warned the self-proclaimed "war president."

What Bush is really worried about, of course, is his own credibility. He has repeatedly shown he cares nothing about what the rest of the world thinks about the US. Why start now?

It’s too bad George W. Bush evaded regular military service by hiding out in the Texas Air National Guard during war time. If Bush had any real military experience, he and his mentor, Dick Cheney, who was "too busy" to do his military service during Vietnam, might have learned one of the basic laws of military science: only fools and megalomaniacs say "no retreat."

Retreat is as much a part of warfare as advance, and often an even more useful tactic. No general worth his stripes embarks on a battle or campaign without leaving open a secure line of retreat behind him. War is by nature uncertain and filled with nasty surprises.

The hallmark of a good commander is being able to quickly change plans when faced by unexpected adversity and withdraw, trading space for time, when his forces are in peril.

One of history’s greatest modern generals was Erich von Manstein who conducted a brilliant series of fighting withdrawals on the Eastern Front that are a classic of military art.

Two of the most egregious recent examples of the failure to retreat when military/political conditions demand it were Stalingrad and Kuwait. After the German Sixth Army was enveloped by vastly superior Soviet forces at Stalingrad in late 1942, Hitler refused his general’s pleas to break out. He thundered "no retreat" and accused his generals who urged a retreat to the west of "defeatism."

Hitler’s refusal to allow the Sixth Army to break out of encirclement and link up with advancing German forces condemned it to total destruction. Stalingrad marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich. Hitler, who was wounded three times in World War I, was a good soldier and understood strategy. He refused to allow his Sixth Army to retreat because he feared it would undermine his authority and aura of invincibility. A dictator cannot afford to lose face by retreating.

Saddam Hussein faced the same problem in Kuwait in 1990–1991. Saddam invaded the US protectorate after its rulers had gravely insulted Iraq by demanding its war widows be sent to Kuwait’s harems in lieu of billions in loans for the Iran-Iraq War that bankrupt Baghdad owed the Kuwaitis.

Facing certain destruction from the US-led coalition, Saddam wanted to withdraw but feared doing so would fatally undermine his authority and lead to a coup. So he sat transfixed, hoping the Soviets would somehow rescue him from the jaws of disaster. In the end, Saddam’s armies in Kuwait were destroyed and Iraq submitted to siege.

Fools and megalomaniacs don’t know when to retreat. Just as the distant oil fields of the Caucasus lured Hitler ever east into the wastes of southern Russia and destruction, so Iraq’s oil treasure continues to mesmerize Bush, Cheney & Co. They clearly do not understand, or will not face the fact, that the US cannot afford to keep spending $6.5 billion a month on Iraq and $1 billion monthly in Afghanistan to prop up the little puppet regimes they have created.

The US Army and Marine Corps are being relentlessly ground down in both theaters, and now face not only a crisis of personnel replacements but the massive deterioration of their equipment, from boots to tanks, which is not being replaced.

Democracies are no good at waging long-term guerilla wars. Vietnam showed this to French and Americans, Angola to South Africans, and Lebanon to Israelis.

A majority of Americans no longer believe all the lies about Iraq being pumped out by the Bush White House. They squirm with embarrassment while watching Condoleezza Rice lie through her teeth to Europeans by claiming the US does not kidnap or torture suspects. And they look with concern at their phones, never sure these days of what anonymous federal agency or military group is bugging their calls.

Bush’s latest untruths – that the recent election in Iraq will defeat the Sunni resistance and lead to lasting democracy – are about as believable as Bill Clinton’s prevarications about his sex life.

Perhaps the most galling and persistent of Bush’s lies is the one he repeated last night: that failure to prove Saddam was a threat to world civilization was due to "wrong intelligence." Not wrong. No way. This column maintained for years Iraq had no strategic weapons and no links with al-Qaida. So did many veteran CIA officers. We looked at the available evidence and drew the only logical conclusion.

It was not "wrong intelligence." War against Iraq was the product of a farrago of lies, distortions and disinformation provided by foreign "allies" and a domestic fifth column eager for the US to destroy Iraq, both eagerly abetted by the mainstream US media. Bush’s claims Iraq was behind 9/11 or about to attack the US with germ weapons released by drones were as lurid and outrageous as Dr. Goebbel’s claims in 1939 that Poland was about to invade Germany. The president who made these ludicrous claims now asks us to believe him about Iraq.

Iraq’s US-engineered elections will more firmly entrench the Iranian-influenced Shia majority in power, marginalize the Sunnis and leave the Kurds virtually independent in all but name, and accelerate the dangerous ethnic division of Iraq.

In spite of the current election, Iraq remains a US colony. Washington controls Iraq’s police, inept sepoy army, and assorted death squads – all of whom serve for money, not out of commitment to the government. The US controls Iraq’s total finances. US firms have been given the right to pump and export Iraq’s oil – 90% of its national income.

The US controls Iraq’s secret police and all communications. American money fuels Iraq’s political parties and almost all of Iraq’s so-called media. Behind every Iraqi minister discreetly stands a group of US "advisors." Not since the Soviets occupied Afghanistan have we seen such a reversion to classical colonialism.

The real poll that counts in Iraq is a recent BBC poll that revealed that 65% of all Iraqis – Shia, Sunnis and Kurds – want the US out of Iraq.

Now, we learn in another stinging irony, that the US Army in Iraq has depleted its reserves of M-16 rifle ammo and is currently buying munitions from Israel. One may imagine the reaction in the Muslim World when it is learned that the US is using Israeli bullets to kill Iraqis.

Speaking of the Soviets, this column has been noting for a long time how much the Bush Administration has come to resemble the Soviet Union of Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. The Taoists say, "you become what you hate."

Look at Bush’s foreign wars "to advance the cause of democracy" (Brezhnev called his aggressions "the Soviet Union’s internationalist duty); the gelding of the US media into Soviet-style sycophants; the expansion of political policing in the old USSR and in the new USA; the exhortations to nationalist flag waving and anti-Islamic racism in both empires.

Bush’s speech last night declaring "defeatism" a major new sin was a final ironic touch. What could be more Soviet or Red Chinese-sounding than this piece of opprobrium.

How long will it be before "defeatism" becomes a federal crime under the sinister Patriot Act?

December 26, 2005

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website.

Poland to Keep Troops in Iraq, Dropping Pullout Plan Bloomberg
Poland's two-month-old government plans to keep soldiers in Iraq next year, countering the previous cabinet's pledge to pull out of the US-led operation by this week. The government asked Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the head of the army, to approve the plan to prolong the eastern European country's military mission in Iraq. "Our plan is determined by the United Nations prolonging its mission in Iraq and requests from the Iraqi government, which asked us to keep our forces there longer,'' Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said at a press conference in Warsaw.
Poland to keep troops in Iraq Aljazeera.net
Poland set to keep troops in Iraq MSNBC
Khaleej Times - Malaysia Star - BBC News - Forbes - all 81 related »

Violence increases after election lull Bangkok Post
Baghdad _ Violence increased across Iraq after a period of relative quiet following the Dec 15 parliamentary elections, with at least two dozen people _ including a US soldier _ killed in shootings and bombings mostly targeting the Shi'ite-dominated security services. Officials blamed the surge in violence Monday on insurgent efforts to deepen the political turmoil surrounding the contested vote. Preliminary figures _ including some returns released Monday from ballots cast early by expatriate Iraqis and some voters inside Iraq _ have given a big lead to the religious Shi'ite bloc that controls the current interim government. The violence came as three opposition groups threatened a wave of protests and civil disobedience if fraud charges are not properly investigated. The warning came from the secular Iraqi National List, headed by former Shi'ite prime minister Ayad Allawi, and two Sunni Arab groups.
Iraqi leaders to meet after vote results friction ABC News
Shi'ites, Kurds agree to open Iraqi govt Sydney Morning Herald
Detroit Free Press - Reuters - Mail & Guardian Online - Reuters AlertNet - all 166 related »

2 U.S. Soldiers Among 11 Killed In Continuing Violence:

Three dead bodies, bearing marks of torture and bullet wounds, were found in the Shu'ula district of the capital, police said. The victims were from Kalidiya, west of Falluja
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/KAM733353.htm

Sunni supporters rally in Iraq :

More than 5,000 people, supporters of Sunni and secular parties, which contested Dec 15 polls marched through Baghdad on Tuesday (December 27), denouncing the vote as fraudulent.
http://tinyurl.com/amenu


In case you missed it:

Sunnis on hit list:

A Shi'ite militia has drawn up plans to kill prominent Sunni leaders and eliminate a nascent Sunni political party, according to a document obtained by Asia Times Online from a person close to the Iraqi resistance.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GL17Ak01.html


U.S. Exit Strategy in Iraq: Hand Quagmire to Iran:

The U.S. exit strategy is similar to the one used by the French to drag the Americans into Vietnam before they left. In this way Shiite Iran will become a "partner in the occupation of Iraq" and inevitably find itself head-to-head with the Sunni-led national Iraqi resistance.
http://tinyurl.com/9tu6p


Coalition partners pull out from Iraq:

The US coalition in Iraq saw its size dwindle today as Ukraine and Bulgaria said all of their troops had left the country while Poland said it would remain, but reduce its number of troops by 600 next year.
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?...516&p=y67z4zzzz

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U.N. Official: Iraqi Elections Credible By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer
46 minutes ago



A United Nations official said Wednesday that Iraq's recent elections were credible and there was no justification for a rerun of the vote that gave a strong lead to the Shiite religious bloc dominating the current government.

In violence Wednesday, an inmate in a Baghdad prison grabbed an assault rifle from a guard and opened fire, killing eight people, police said. One American soldier was injured in the attempted prison break, the U.S. military said.

The Shiite bloc held talks with Kurdish leaders and said preparations were being made to choose a candidate for prime minister — who they have said must come from their governing United Iraqi Alliance.

"We set up the mechanism to elect the new prime minister but have not started it yet. Any member of the Alliance has the right to be nominated for that post," Alliance leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim told the Kurdish parliament.

Alliance officials have indicated likely candidates were current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who heads the Islamic Dawa party, and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who belongs to the other main Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Al-Hakim also discussed who should get the top 12 government jobs, as thousands of Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites protested what they say was a tainted vote.

Two Sunni Arab groups and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National List have threatened a wave of protests and civil disobedience if fraud charges are not properly investigated.

In another of continuing political demonstrations across the country, more than 4,000 people rallied Wednesday in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, in favor of the major Sunni Arab party, the Iraqi Accordance Front. Demonstrators carried banners say "We refuse the election forgery."

The United Nations official, Craig Jenness, said at a news conference organized by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq that the U.N.-led international election assistance team found the elections to be credible and transparent. "Turnout was high and the day was largely peaceful, all communities participated."

His statement and the negotiations between Iraqi factions come at a critical time, with the United States placing high hopes on forming a broad-based coalition government that will provide the fledgling democracy with the stability and security it needs to allow American troops to begin returning home.

Iraqi officials said they had found some instances of fraud that were enough to cancel the results in that place, but not to hold a rerun. There were more than 1,500 complaints made about the elections, with about 50 of them considered serious enough to possibly result in the cancellation of results in some places.

"After studying all the complaints, and after the manual and electronic audit of samples of ballot boxes in the provinces, the electoral commission will announce within the next few days some decisions about canceling the results in stations where fraud was found," said Abdul Hussein Hendawi, an elections official.

He said fraud had been discovered in the provinces of Baghdad, Irbil, Ninevah, Kirkuk, Anbar and Diyala.

Jenness said the number of complaints was less than one in every 7,000 voters. About 70 percent of Iraq's 15 million voters took part in the elections. He added that the U.N. saw no reason to hold a new ballot.

"Complaints must be adjudicated fairly, but we in the United Nations see no justification in calls for a rerun of any election," he said.

In Wednesday's prison escape attempt, the prisoner fired indiscriminately after grabbing an AK-47, killing four guards and four inmates, said Iraqi army Brig. Gen. Jalil al-Mehamadawi. The Interior Ministry said one guard and three prisoners were wounded.

The U.S. military's account was slightly different. A statement by Sgt. Keith Robinson said "it was reported that 16 prisoners attempted to escape the facility after first storming the armory and obtaining an undetermined number of weapons." U.S. forces are often stationed alongside Iraqis in prisons.

Robinson said in addition to the eight deaths that one U.S. soldier and five prisoners were injured, but the U.S. statement did not mention the assault rifle.

Guards overtook the gunman and restrained him, al-Mehamadawi said. The prison was a Justice Ministry facility that also housed foreigners, officials said.

Police in Karbala said 31 bodies had been unearthed in a mass grave discovered this week that is believed to date back to a 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein. Officials hoped to identify the bodies through DNA testing.

The negotiations between the majority Shiites and Kurds were seen as part of an effort to force the main Sunni Arab organizations to come to the bargaining table. All groups have begun jockeying for position in the new government, and the protests are widely considered to be part of an attempt by Sunni Arabs to maximize their position.

Sunni Arabs formed the backbone of Saddam's government, and the Bush administration hopes to pull them away from the insurgency that has ravaged the country with daily bloodshed.

Preliminary results from the Dec. 15 vote have given the United Iraqi Alliance a big lead, but one unlikely to allow it to govern without forming a coalition with other groups. Final results are expected early next month, but the Shiite religious bloc may win about 130 seats in the 275-member parliament — short of the 184 seats needed to avoid a coalition with other parties.

___

Associated Press reporters Jason Straziuso in Baghdad and Yahya Barzanji in Irbil contributed to this report.



Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

UN Rejects Sunni Challenges to Iraqi Election Results New York Times
A United Nations official today announced publicly for the first time that he believed the results of the Dec. 15 Iraqi parliamentary election appeared valid, and he said demands by some groups for a new vote were unjustified. The announcement, made at a news conference in Baghdad, is bound to disappoint some Sunni Arab political parties, which had claimed that ballot-box stuffing and other fraud distorted the election results. Although it does not have the power to overturn results of the election, the United Nations figured prominently in organizing the vote, and its public show of support bolstered Iraqi authorities' claims that the vote was legitimate. "The U.N. is of the view that these elections were transparent and credible," said the official, Craig Jenness, who led the agency's election coordination effort here. He added that although all complaints must be weighed thoroughly, "we at the U.N. see no justification in calls for a re-run of the elections." Several Sunni parties, as well as some secular groups, have called for the authorities to hold a new vote, but that demand now looks unlikely to be met. Abdul Hussein al-Hindawi, an electoral commission board member, read a statement at the conference that said the commission planned on canceling some ballots in some areas, but that it had all but ruled out holding a new vote because it had not found evidence of widespread forgery. "There are individual violations without wide, systematic forgery operations," Mr. Hindawi said. Even as the Iraqi authorities appeared to be closing the door on complaints of fraud, Sunni Arab parties continued to press their demands. Demonstrations that have been organized to protest the results of the election over the past week continued today, with a large crowd filling an area near the government building in Samarra, north of Baghdad, and protesters gathering in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. Dhafir al-Ani, the spokesman for the main Sunni alliance, the Iraqi Consensus Front, which has been vocal in its criticism of the results, said that his group rejected the conclusion put forth by Mr. Jenness, and that they would continue to ask for a new vote. "Several international workers sitting inside the Green Zone are not able to evaluate the election matter," he said by telephone today. "We still believe that huge fraud happened in the Iraqi election and it completely changed the results." Mr. Jenness said the United Nations team that assisted the election was made up of 50 international experts. The vote was also monitored by 120,000 observers, he said. Mr. Hindawi said that the commission would cancel forged ballots in polling stations in Baghdad, the northern cities of Erbil, Kirkuk, and the provinces of Anbar in the west, Nineveh in the north and Diyala in central Iraq. In addition, two teams of investigators are reviewing results in the southern cities of Babel and Basra. The results of the ballot reviews are expected to be announced within the next few days, Mr. Hindawi said. In Baghdad today, an inmate in a high-security prison in the Kadhimiya neighborhood grabbed an AK-47 from a guard during a routine morning outing, shot him dead, and began freeing other prisoners, including a citizen of Saudi Arabia, officials said. Iraqi solders eventually quelled the revolt, which began at around 6 a.m., said Brig. Gen. Jaleel Khalaf, a commander who was among the forces. About 16 prisoners were involved in the revolt, according to a statement from the American military, which participated in bringing the incident under control, and all of them were accounted for. The prison holds about 215 high-security inmates and is located within an Iraqi Army base. In all, nine people, including four prisoners, an interpreter and four prison guards, were killed. One American soldier and five prisoners were injured, the military said. The military also reported the death of an American marine, who was killed by small-arms fire in Khalidiya in the volatile western province of Anbar on Dec. 26. In Dhibai, a village about 40 miles north of Baghdad, gunmen killed two soldiers and wounded seven in an ambush on an Iraqi army patrol on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Insurgents first struck the patrol with a roadside bomb, and then fired on the soldiers. The election developments came as Shiite and Kurdish leaders met in northern Iraq to discuss forming a government that would include representatives from all of Iraq's religious and ethnic groups. Abdul Aziz Hakim, the head of the Shiite coalition that is expected to capture the largest share of votes that were cast in the election, met with Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party, and said that he had held "preliminary consultations" on the formation of a government but that talks were still in the very early stages. He indicated that the Sunnis were not yet involved. "We need to evaluate the previous alliance and study its weaknesses and strengths," Mr. Hakim said at a news conference with Mr. Barzani, The Associated Press reported from the city of Erbil in the Kurdish enclave. "Then we will try to include the others."
Eight killed in attempted Iraqi prison break International Herald Tribune
UN Official Says Iraq Vote Should Stand Forbes
Voice of America - Christian Science Monitor - San Francisco Chronicle - CBC News - all 1,762 related »

Kurds plan to invade South

By Tom Lasseter

Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11397.htm

20 killed during failed jailbreak: Twenty Iraqi detainees have been killed attempting to break out of a prison in the Baghdad district of Kadhamiyah.
http://tinyurl.com/b24sm

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16 Killed In Continuing Violence:

Four inmates and five security personnel were killed in a shootout at a Baghdad high-security jail after at least one prisoner grabbed a weapon and opened fire
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MOU851127.htm

===
U.S. Bombs Kill Three Civilians Including 12 Year Old Girl:

At midnight Tuesday, U.S. warplanes launched an air raid killing three Iraqis in Al-Dolouieya, 90 kilometres north of Baghdad, a police source said. Police captain Yassine Khalaf told dpa that an Iraqi and his two daughters, one aged 12, were killed when their house was destroyed by U.S. warplanes.
http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=75163

===
U.S. army patrol kills 2 Iraqi civilians :

In al-Khalidiya, 80 kilometres west of Baghdad, a U.S. army patrol opened fire on an approaching vehicle Wednesday killing two Iraqi civilians and critically wounding two others, a police source said.
http://tinyurl.com/duw7h

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Many Iraqi soldiers see a civil war on the horizon:

"I see Iraq gradually becoming three regions that will one day become independent," said Jafar Mustafir, a close adviser to Iraq's Kurdish interim president, Jalal Talabani, and the deputy head of Peshmerga for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two major Kurdish parties. "I see us moving toward the end of Iraq."
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgere...ld/13495252.htm

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Israel Ex-commandos Training Kurds in North Iraq:

Report: Dozens of former Israeli commandos have been training Kurdish security forces in northern Iraq, supplying them with equipment worth millions of dollars, Yedioth Aharonot newspaper reported
http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/20...article05.shtml

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In case you missed it:

SEYMOUR M. HERSH: PLAN B:

Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that America had lost in Iraq; according to an American close to Barak, he said that Israel “had learned that there’s no way to win an occupation.” The only issue, Barak told Cheney, “was choosing the size of your humiliation.”
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040628fa_fact

===
Freed German hostage says Iraq captors not criminals :

A former German hostage who spent 24 days in the hands of unknown captors in Iraq said her kidnappers were not criminals and had demanded humanitarian aid for Sunni Arab regions.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051226/wl_mi...qgermanyhostage

===
Propaganda:

Pro-War Group Takes to the Airwaves:

Newly found Iraqi documents show that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including anthrax and mustard gas, and had "extensive ties" to al Qaeda. The discoveries are being covered up by those "willing to undermine support for the war on terrorism to selfishly advance their shameless political ambitions."
http://tinyurl.com/72rm9

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1227-22.htm


Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2005 by the Boston Globe
How Will the Iraq War End?
by H.D.S. Greenway

On one level, of course, there is no comparison between America's lost war in Vietnam and the current enterprise in Iraq. After all, Vietnam is in Southeast Asia and Iraq is the Middle East. That conflict was fought in rain forests, this one in desert towns. One was fought by draftees, this one by a volunteer army. The list goes on.

Yet, although the Bush administration takes pains to deny it, the comparison keeps creeping into the national conversation, and the most obvious link is the word ''quagmire." For the dwindling band of reporters who covered the war in Vietnam, a trip to Baghdad cannot help but bring forth ghosts.

America fought in Vietnam to contain communism. In this war the reasons for fighting keep shifting, but the central idea seems to have been to create a friendly democracy in the heart of the oil-producing Middle East that could transform the region by example.

Forty years ago the ''best and the brightest," as David Halberstam called them, got us into Vietnam to prevent other neighboring countries from falling like dominoes, or so the theory went. The best and the brightest this time around believed in a domino theory in reverse -- the transformative power of democracy. Lots of talk about an ''Arab Spring" by prowar professors is beginning to sound a little hollow, however.

Both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice. Neither Saddam Hussein nor Ho Chi Minh threatened the United States directly, but in both cases our leaders in Washington took the road to intervention to further perceived American interests. In Vietnam, however, there really was a communist threat, while in Iraq, Islamic extremism was not a problem before we got there, nor did Saddam Hussein possess the means to harm us.

In Vietnam then and in Iraq now, the administration finds itself engaged in a war it is unable to win and reluctant to lose. The American people are walking away from this war, as they did in Vietnam, and the Bush administration knows that staying the course is not a long-term option. The recently announced troop drawdown is a reflection of this domestic pressure, not conditions in Iraq.

But Bush today, as did Lyndon Johnson before him, vows to fight on until victory, and some of the same ridiculous rhetoric prevails -- such as that we are fighting them there so we won't have to fight them at home. In Iraq, war is actually helping Al Qaeda to recruit terrorists to one day attack us at home.

Both Vietnam and Iraq saw monumental miscalculations on the part of our war leaders. Hubris played a big role in both. It seemed inconceivable to both Johnson's and George W. Bush's defense departments that these weak opponents could stand up to America's modern arms. In both cases it was thought that the Americans could prevail quickly and go home.

As Richard Nixon's defense secretary, Melvin Laird, recently wrote: ''Both the Vietnam War and the Iraq war were launched based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception." To deception, add willful self-deception as well. For in both wars there was a tendency to ignore those who could tell our government about what Vietnam and Iraq were about. Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, would confess years later that he didn't know anything about Vietnamese culture and history, but as far as I know he hasn't confessed that he went out of his way to ignore people who could have informed him as to the difficulties ahead.

Likewise, Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way to ignore the advice of those who knew something about Iraq. In both cases any information that would get in the way of doctrine was unsought and unheard.

America's former viceroy, Paul Bremmer, and his young ideologues ran Iraq in blissful ignorance. I am told that making sure that there was no room for abortion in Iraq's Constitution was a goal -- likewise a flat tax for Iraq. John Negroponte's team would later call Bremmer's people ''the illusionists."

Consider the author of ''The Assassins' Gate," George Packer's account of briefings in Baghdad: Daily press conferences ''about the coalition's intentions toward the rebels that were usually at odds with the facts, on occasion flatly untrue, and often in direct contradiction to statements made a day or a week earlier. . ." Packer might have been describing the ''5 o'clock follies" briefings in Saigon.

Likewise, in Saigon of old, there were bright young people working long and hard hours to have the Vietnamese do things in the American way totally removed from the reality of the country around them.

That being said, however, compared to Iraq there were quite a few Vietnamese speakers among the Americans who got themselves out and about in the countryside in Vietnam. In comparison, Americans in Iraq live in near total isolation with few Arab speakers and very little contact with Iraqis outside their fortified compounds. The civilian theorists and intellectuals that came to power with George W. Bush, and promoted this war, had almost to a man no military experience. They had ''other priorities" than to fight for their country, as Vice President Cheney so famously put it.

Although President Bush is finally admitting to some problems in Iraq, Washington's dreary drip of propaganda has the same Vietnam-era ring. The famous ''light at the end of the tunnel" of the Vietnam War is reflected in all the overly optimistic statements from the Bush White House about the Iraq insurgency's bitter-enders and last gasps.

Today the training of an Iraqi Army is being pushed at a frantic pace so that we can withdraw, much in the same way President Nixon's ''Vietnamization" was supposed to prop up Vietnam so that we could bring our armies home.

It is not that there is no progress being made in Iraq. There is. But the question is, as it was in Vietnam: What does this progress mean for our ultimate goals? In Vietnam it became all to clear that no matter how many wells we dug or schools we built, there would be Vietnamese who might drink from the wells and accept the schools, but remain adamantly opposed to Americans in their country.

The same strikes me as true in Iraq. It is perfectly logical for an Iraqi to have opposed Saddam yesterday and oppose us today. As nationalism became our adversary in Vietnam, more so than communism, so is nationalism in Iraq growing against us.

US troops, with their reliance on fire power, caused great destruction and loss of civilian life in both wars. The Nixon administration also agonized about how atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam would hurt the war effort, and how the information could be contained. The Bush administration's handling of the Abu Ghraib horrors are hauntingly similar.

Melvin Laird wrote that, in Vietnam, ''elections were choreographed by the United States to empower corrupt, selfish men who were no more than dictators in the garb of statesmen." It may be too early to make that same judgment in Iraq, but it is clear that too many Iraqi politicians are cast in the same mold as were our Saigon politicians.

And that old chimera the ''body count," which the Americans first avoided in Iraq, is creeping back into usage -- as if the number of insurgents we killed today had any bearing on whether we are actually winning the war.

Likewise the search-and-destroy missions that General William Westmoreland employed in Vietnam seem to be in vogue today in Iraq. But then as now, the insurgents melt away before our armies and come back again when we have passed on. And somehow they always seem to know when we are coming.

It was interesting for someone like me who spent years in Vietnam to meet even US generals in Iraq who are too young to have fought in Southeast Asia. But then as now, it is clear that this protracted war is putting tremendous strain on the US Army. It was something that General Creighton Abrams worried about aloud to me in Saigon, and it worries our military commanders today. It took years for the US Army to recover from Vietnam, and it will take years for it to recover from the strains put upon it in Iraq. But the most haunting parallel to me is that it will be possible to win every battle in Iraq and yet lose the war.

US involvement in Iraq will not end with American helicopters flying from the roof of the embassy. But it may end badly with Iraq split among ethnic and sectarian warlords, empowering those who wish America ill -- destabilizing the Middle East rather than transforming it.

Or Iraq could emerge united with some kind of representational government. But ultimately, all that will be up to the Iraqis, not the Americans, who do not, and cannot, control events. Once again, as in Vietnam, we are learning the limits of American power.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© 2005 The Boston Globe

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 29, 2005
Sunnis and Secular Groups Demand Review of Iraq's Election
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:32 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Sunni Arab and secular groups refused Thursday to open discussions with the Shiite religious bloc leading in Iraq's parliamentary elections until a full review of the contested results is carried out.

Their refusal could deepen the political turmoil following a U.N. observer's endorsement of Iraq's Dec. 15 elections. The official said the results were credible and that the results should stand.

''We are not taking part in discussions,'' said Nasser al-Ani, a senior official in the main Sunni Arab coalition -- the Iraqi Accordance Front.

Preliminary results from the vote have given the governing Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, a big lead -- but one which still would require forming a coalition with other groups. Al-Ani told The Associated Press that his political group favored participating in broad-based coalition government, but would not begin contacts ''until we get a clear picture about the results of the investigation.''

Mehedi al-Hafidh, a senior member of the secular Iraqi National List headed by former Shiite Premier Ayad Allawi, raised similar concerns.

''We confirm that we are not part of this process of consultations to form a new government,'' al-Hafidh told The AP.

The Bush administration and many Iraqi officials hope the elections will lead to a broad-based government that will include minority Sunni Arabs as well as secular Shiites such as Allawi, and allow for a drawdown in U.S. and coalition forces. On Thursday, Polish President Lech Kaczynski approved extending the country's military mission in Iraq for another year, the country's prime minister said.

''The issue is closed and taken care of,'' Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told all-news station TVN24.

Marcinkiewicz's government requested Tuesday that Kaczynski reverse plans by the previous government to bring home troops serving with the U.S.-led coalition in early 2006.

The U.N. endorsement came on Wednesday after opposition groups demanded international intervention and an independent review of more than 1,500 complaints about irregularities.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq renewed an invitation Thursday for international organizations and local political representatives to review the Dec. 15 poll. An official for the commission, Safwat Rashid, said they could ''evaluate what happened during the elections and what's going on now. We are highly confident that we did our job properly and we have nothing to hide.''

In violence Thursday, gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite family near Latifiyah, a Sunni Arab-dominated town about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Police Capt. Hussein Shamil said the men were taken from their homes, packed into a minivan and shot. No further details were available.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosives belt on a street near the Interior Ministry, killing one police officer and wounding four, police said. Gunmen in Baghdad assassinated an Iraqi driver working with a French company, police Capt. Qassem Hussein said, adding that a university student in northwestern Baghdad was killed in a drive-by shooting.

U.S. airstrikes launched by two F-16 fighter jets in Kirkuk province killed 10 insurgents on Tuesday, the military said Thursday.

The military said the pilots saw three men planting roadside bombs. The pilots killed the three and seven others with them after dropping two 500-pound, laser guided bombs, the military said.

Also Thursday, a spokesman for Iraq's oil ministry said the country's largest oil refinery had suspended operations after insurgents threatened to kill drivers and blow up trucks that distribute its oil products across Iraq.

The 140,000 barrel-a-day refinery in the northern town of Beiji, about 155 miles north of Baghdad, suspended production Dec. 24 ''because drivers of trucks have received death threats from terrorists,'' Assem Jihad told Dow Jones Newswires.

The United Nations official, Craig Jenness, said his U.N.-led international election assistance team found the elections to be fair, remarks that represented crucial support for Iraqi election commission officials, who refused opposition demands to step down. They have said they had found some instances of fraud that were enough to cancel the results in some places but not to hold another vote in any district.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni candidate who has joined forces with Allawi to protest what they have described as rampant fraud, said he was angered by Jenness' remarks.

He said without elaboration that the U.N. should ''check our complaints and then express its views.''

Allawi said the election commission should also take into account political violence before the vote.

''There were assassinations. We had numbers of people on my slate who had been killed, shot and killed, and supporters who have been killed. There were attempts to assassinate others, and they were badly injured,'' Allawi told CNN.

Also Thursday, gunmen kidnapped a Lebanese engineer in Iraq, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said. The ministry's statement gave no other details on the disappearance of Camile Nassif Tannous, who works for the Schneider engineering firm.

Militants have kidnapped more than 240 foreigners and killed at least 39 of them during the past two years.

On Wednesday, militants released a video of a French engineer kidnapped in Iraq three weeks ago. Insurgents are also holding four Christian humanitarian workers -- two Canadians, a Briton and an American.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called Thursday for the immediate release of the engineer, Bernard Planche, emphasizing that France has no military presence there.

Militants who released the video of Planche denounced the ''illegal French presence'' in the country, the news channel Al-Arabiya reported. The video did not include any threats, demands or deadlines.

------

Associated Press reporters Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report from Baghdad.



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December 30, 2005
U.S. to Intensify Army Oversight of Iraqi Police
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 29 - American commanders are planning to increase significantly the number of soldiers advising Iraqi police commando units, in part to curtail abuse that the units are suspected of inflicting on Sunni Arabs, a senior commander in Iraq said Thursday.

Under the plan, which the officer said he expected would be formally approved in a few weeks, the number of advisers working with the Iraqi units would be greatly expanded. The advisers themselves would be under the command of American officers.

American advisers now accompany commando units as part of the vast effort to train and equip security forces to take over the fight against the insurgency and to maintain order.

But the number of advisers is relatively small: currently, groups of about 40 American soldiers each are attached to seven of the nine special Iraqi police brigades.

Under the new plan, which would be put in force in and around Baghdad, all the Iraqi units would get American advisers, and the advisers' total number would be increased by several hundred, said the commander, who spoke to reporters in Baghdad only on condition of anonymity.

In one case, he said, an entire American battalion, typically with more than 500 soldiers, will be attached to a particular Iraqi brigade.

The increase is seen as a way to exert firmer control over the commando units, which are suspected of carrying out widespread atrocities against civilians in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. Human rights groups here say the units may be guilty of murdering and torturing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Sunni Arab men of military age.

The conduct of the commandos has become a source of intense friction between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and American officials, who say the reports of the atrocities are jeopardizing the campaign to persuade Sunnis to stop supporting the insurgency.

The plan to increase the number of American advisers is a significant departure from the overall American strategy of giving the Iraqis the lead role in fighting the insurgency. Indeed, the allegations of atrocities arose only after Americans began to give the Iraqi units more freedom to act on their own.

Even as he talked about the increase in advisers, the officer confirmed details of a shift to fewer American troops covering more Iraqi ground.

The Fourth Infantry Division, which is now preparing to deploy in Baghdad and central Iraq, is being given a substantially larger piece of Iraqi territory than the unit it is replacing, and with fewer troops. The Americans are hoping that Iraqi units can pick up the slack; Iraqi forces operating more or less independently now are in charge of securing 60 percent of the capital.

Many of the Iraqi commando units are thought to be filled by gunmen drawn from the military wings of Shiite political parties, including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or Sciri, which forms part of the Shiite coalition that is expected to lead the next government. The Mahdi Army, a militia run by the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr, is also believed to have hundreds of gunmen working in the Iraqi police and commando units.

As a result, the units, which are ostensibly under the control of the Interior Ministry, are thought to be all but indistinguishable from Sciri's militia, known as the Badr Brigade, and from the Mahdi Army.

American officials say it is unclear whom the units are taking orders from, the ministry or militia commanders. The minister of the interior, Bayan Jabr, is a senior member of the Badr Brigade.

Mr. Jabr is fighting the American plan to place more advisers in the Iraqi commando units, according to the senior American commander. "We'd know exactly what they are doing, and we'd have some more control," the commander said.

A spokesman for the American headquarters in charge of training in Iraq, Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, confirmed that preparations for an increase in advisers were under way.

A similar plan is already in place with the Iraqi Army, whose soldiers have a reputation among Iraqis as being more humane than the commandos.

The police commando units and public order brigades, which together contain about 15,000 troops, are considered to be some of the most effective Iraqi fighters against the insurgency.

In contrast to conditions in the new Iraqi Army, American supervision of the commandos has been lax; some units, which include former members of the Iraqi Army, came together and began fighting the insurgency on their own, without formal American or Iraqi approval.

"The commandos and the public order brigades sort of grew like Topsy, very quickly, without much control, and without much training, but with lots of influence from the Ministry of the Interior and the Sciri-Badr organization," the American commander said. "The exact roles and responsibilities of those units is not clear to us."

Indeed, the commander painted a troubling picture of security in Baghdad, where some armed militias appear to act with the backing of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defense.

"It is not easy to identify that some operation tonight was legitimately directed by somebody in the security organization of M.O.I. or M.O.D.," the commander said, "or whether it was some people in stolen uniforms, or somebody's posse or militia or projection cell who decided to attack someone's opposite number in some other tribe or neighborhood."

A police commando unit was thought to be responsible for running the secret underground prison raided by Americans in November. Nearly 170 Iraqis were found inside, some bearing signs of torture.

With that, the Americans vowed to clamp down on human rights abuses by the police and military and have since raided two more prisons, one in Baghdad and the other in Tal Afar. Inmates in both of those prisons showed signs of abuse, American officials said.

American commanders here say that such practices, while abhorrent in their own right, tend to provoke consequences almost precisely the opposite of what is desired. Rounding up young Sunni Arab men and killing them will only spur the growth of the insurgency, they say.

"You are making new enemies here," the American commander said. "You've got to be more moderate. You must follow the rule of law."

The commander also gave a snapshot of progress against the insurgency in and around Baghdad, and of the shifting role of American and Iraqi forces.

American soldiers in and around Baghdad are still being attacked an average of 28 times a day, and as many as 18 soldiers a month are being killed. Still, the number of suicide and car bombings has fallen sharply, from about 20 a week in April and May, to about 6 now.

The Third Infantry Division, whose 30,000 troops are deployed over 1,600 square miles around Baghdad, will soon be replaced by about 25,000 soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division, who will take over a much larger area. The Fourth Infantry, which is returning for its second tour in Iraq, will be responsible for the territory between Taji, north of Baghdad, all south to the Saudi border - a huge area including Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala.

Iraqi forces will be counted on to give more support to the Americans. Twelve Iraqi battalions are now responsible for their own territory inside Baghdad. As the Iraqi battalions take over in Baghdad, the commander said, the American units will be able to move to areas outside Baghdad.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

December 30, 2005
Monitor Group Says Team Will Review Voting Results
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 29 - An international elections monitoring group that gave a preliminary endorsement to Iraq's parliamentary vote two weeks ago has agreed to send observers back into Iraq to investigate allegations by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite parties that widespread vote-rigging tainted the results.

The International Mission for Iraqi Elections, a Jordan-based monitor, said it would dispatch two investigators from the League of Arab States and one from Canada and one from a European nation. The group previously said that based on early indications, the Dec. 15 election appeared to have "generally met international standards."

The move follows demands for new elections by two main opposition groups, the Sunni Arab coalition called the Iraqi Consensus Front and the Iraqi National List slate of candidates backed by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister. Iraqi elections officials and United Nations observers have rejected those demands, saying that while fraud occurred in some places, the ballot was generally transparent and credible.

Even though a United Nations team has backed the election, Secretary General Kofi Annan said late Thursday that sending in new monitors was important because "it is critical that those Iraqi groups who have complained about the conduct of the election are given a hearing." He said the new team "was not involved in the conduct of the elections" and could offer an "independent evaluation of these complaints."

The American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said the observers would arrive immediately, and he applauded what he called the willingness of Iraqi elections officials to "be as open as possible."

The move appeared to mollify Mr. Allawi, who urged the new monitors to investigate "acts of armed aggression against polling centers and members of the Iraqi National List and other lists, the prevention of citizens from casting their votes freely and the possibility of tampering with ballot boxes."

While the appointment of the new team was a victory for Mr. Allawi and the Sunni consensus party, both groups had signaled earlier on Thursday a new willingness to join negotiations to form a government after final vote tallies are released next week.

Both said they were not taking part in discussions with the ruling Shiite and Kurdish coalition, which continued on Thursday in Kurdistan. But each was careful to leave open the door for negotiations once the final vote is published in a few days.

Mahmoud al-Mashadani, a senior official in the Sunni slate, said his party has so far not accepted an invitation to participate in the talks but that a delegation may be dispatched soon. He said party officials planned to poll Sunni Arabs throughout Iraq about what steps to take next. The poll questions, Mr. Mashadani said, would include whether to participate in the political process, and if so, whether to do so as an opposition party or as part of the ruling coalition.

In an interview, Mr. Mashadani said Sunni leaders would support any political deal that "carried out the Consensus Front's ambitions."

Speaking on an Arab satellite television network, Mr. Allawi pointedly said that having further investigations into alleged voting fraud was not a condition for his group to participate in the political process. He said he hasn't been invited to participate in talks with Shiite and Kurdish leaders, but that, if asked, he would.

After the final tallies are released and complaints of wrongdoing are exhausted, Mr. Allawi added, "We think the time will come to talk about the formation of the government."

The political developments came amid continued heavy violence that included the massacre of a dozen family members in Latifiya, a dangerous town of mixed ethnicity south of Baghdad. The killers, dressed as Iraqi troops, took the men from their home and handcuffed and shot them in the back of the head, according to an Iraqi ministry of interior official.

In eastern Baghdad, an American soldier was killed when his vehicle was struck by a homemade bomb. And the United States military said that American warplanes used bombs to kill 10 men near Kirkuk after the men were spotted trying to plant homemade bombs.

At a briefing in the capital, Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, a military spokesman, said that total attacks now averaged roughly 75 per day, down from 90 a few months ago. But while the number of car bombings have diminished, he said, the rate of assassinations and insurgent small-arms attacks have been on the rise.

"This increase in small-arms fire attacks, the targeting of specific individuals and assassinations, those numbers have gone up," General Alston said. "This is just another attempt by the terrorists and foreign fighters to find another way to try to expose another vulnerability, another method to try to derail the Democratic process in Iraq."

A coalition of Shiites and Kurds controls the current government while largely excluding Sunni Arabs, who boycotted the last election. But the recent ballot saw huge Sunni Arab turnout, and the main Sunni parties are expected to win around one-fifth of the 275 seats in parliament. Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite closer to Sunni leaders on some issues than he is to the conservative ruling Shiite alliance, put together a slate expected to win around 10 percent of seats.

The dominant Shiite alliance is believed to have won slightly less than 50 percent of the seats, while the primary Kurdish slate won around 20 percent. It takes a two-thirds majority to select a prime minister and form a new government.


Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Khalid

al-Ansary and Omar al-Neami

contributed reporting for this article.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Pace: U.S. to Launch Phased Iraq Pullout
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

The U.S. will carry out planned withdrawals of American troops in Iraq only from regions where Iraqi forces can maintain security against the insurgents, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said Thursday.

Gen. Peter Pace said the current force of 160,000 would drop to below 138,000 by March, then U.S. commanders on the ground would work with the Iraqi government to determine the pace of future pullbacks in areas that have been secured by local security forces.

"The bottom line will be that the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police will gain in competence, that they will be able to take on more and more of the territory, whether or not there are still insurgents in that area," he said in an interview with a small group of reporters, including The Associated Press, aboard a military plane en route to the United Arab Emirates.

Amid congressional pressure and growing public opposition to the war, the Bush administration last week announced plans to reduce U.S. combat troops in Iraq to below the 138,000 level that prevailed most of this year.

The number of American forces in Iraq was raised to about 160,000 to provide extra security during the October referendum and December parliamentary elections, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said those extra troops would be leaving soon.

The exact size of the additional troops cuts has not been announced, but senior Pentagon officials have said the number of American troops in Iraq could drop to about 100,000 by next fall.

The decision where to cut troops "will be based on the Iraqi units in that area and the threat that exists in that area," Pace said earlier at a news conference in Bahrain.

The key, he stressed, "is the Iraqis' ability to control that area."

Pace has said American units will steadily hand off more security duties in the coming months to Iraqi forces and stressed the U.S. military needs to be flexible, but his comments offered a detailed glimpse of the administration's plans.

Pace's tour of the region came two weeks after Dec. 15 Iraqi parliament elections, which the United States considered a key step toward stability that could allow a drawdown of troops.

But violence has not stopped in Iraq. On Thursday, gunmen killed 12 members of an extended Shiite Family south off Baghdad and a suicide bomber killed a policeman in the capital.

Complaints by Sunni Arab and secular Shiite groups of widespread fraud and intimidation during the vote also have threatened to spark a serious crisis that could set back hopes for a broad-based government that could have the legitimacy necessary to diminish the insurgency — a key part of any U.S. military exit strategy from Iraq.

Pace said efforts were under way to recruit Sunnis into the Iraqi security forces, "especially on the officers' side."

Pace, who was making his first official visit to the region since becoming the first Marine to be named chairman of the joint chiefs of staff three months ago, said the withdrawals of two brigades in the coming months would provide a test for the decision to pull out troops.

"We are going to have to watch how these drawdowns go to see if we have judged it properly," he said.

Pace, who was traveling with his wife, Lynne, and a group of entertainers to offer holiday cheer to U.S. troops in the region, began his weeklong trip Wednesday in Qatar. He also planned stops in Iraq, Afghanistan and the East African nation of Djibouti.




Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Palestinians in Iraq Pay the Cost of Being 'Saddam's People'

By Doug Struck

BAGHDAD -- For years, Saddam Hussein harbored a small population of Palestinians in Iraq, trotting them out to cheer whenever he went to war -- which he routinely justified as essential to Arab nationalism and the Palestinian cause.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

Attacks Halt Production At Iraq's Largest Refinery

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Salih Saif Aldin

BAGHDAD, Dec. 29 -- Under a mounting insurgent offensive against Iraq's gasoline supply, the country's largest fuel refinery sat idle Thursday. Gas station owners in surrounding communities in northern Iraq hung up their dry nozzles. A police chief put out a no-patrol order to his men to conserve...

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Word Spreads in Iraq of Refinery Shutdown ABC News
A child watches Iraqi Shiites during Muslim Friday prayers at al-Sadr city in Baghdad, Preliminary results from the Dec. 15 elections have given the governing Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, a big lead, but one which still would require forming a coalition with other groups.
Review of the year: Iraq Independent
NO RE-RUN OF IRAQ ELECTION Special Broadcasting Service
Xinhua - Guardian Unlimited - BBC News - Kansas City Star - all 2,031 related »

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4A6...0FF775FDAC7.htm

Deadly explosions shake Baghdad
Friday 30 December 2005, 21:04 Makka Time, 18:04 GMT


Iraqi security personnel are a frequent target of bomb attacks
A car bomber and a mortar attack have killed five people and injured 10 others in two separate attacks in Baghdad, Aljazeera reports.


On Friday the car bomber blew himself up next to a police patrol in a commercial area on al-Kifah street, killing three Iraqi civilians and injuring two police officers, Lieutenant Ali Mitaab said.

The mortar landed in Baghdad's Shourja market and killed three Iraqi civilians and injured 21 others, police Lieutenant Thaer Mahmoud said. The market was closed because of the Friday holiday.

Also, two US soldiers have been killed in Iraq, one in the western city of Falluja and the other one in the capital, the military said on Friday.

A bomb killed one soldier on Friday in Baghdad when it struck his vehicle as it was on patrol in the southern part of the capital, an announcement said. The second soldier died on Thursday in Falluja after being wounded by small arms fire while on combat operations.

On Thursday, an international team agreed to assess Iraq's parliamentary elections, and on Friday leaders of Iraq's Sunni and secular communities gave a cautious welcome to the plan to bring foreign experts to Baghdad to review the results of this month's election, which they say was fraudulent.

They said they would cooperate with the experts and still hoped to join Shias and Kurds in a grand coalition government capable of healing Iraq's sectarian wounds and providing its people with the basic services they so badly lack.

Free and fair

"It is important that the Iraqi people have confidence in the election results and that the voting process, including the process for vote counting, is free and fair," Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador, said on Thursday.

The UN team was coming despite a UN observer's endorsement of the 15 December vote, which gave the Shia religious bloc a big lead in preliminary returns.


Initial reports have given Shia
and Kurdish parties a big lead

The observer, Craig Jenness, said on Wednesday that his team - which helped the Iraqi election commission organise and oversee the poll - found the elections to be credible and transparent.

Sunni Arabs and secular Shias rejected Jenness' findings, saying their concerns - which included political assassinations before the elections - were not addressed.

The Iraqi Accordance Front, which is the country's leading Sunni Arab group, applauded the decision, as did the secular Iraqi National List headed by Ayad Allawi, the former interim prime minister.

It was unclear if the review would further delay the release of final results, now expected in early January.

The presence of two Arab experts on the International Mission for Iraqi Elections team could go far in helping to convince Iraqis that the review of the vote will be fair.

Korean pullout

Meanwhile, South Korea's parliament has approved a government plan to bring home one-third of the country's troops in Iraq but extended the overall deployment for another year.

The plan endorsed on Friday calls for the withdrawal of about 1000 of the 3200 South Korean military personnel who are helping rebuild a Kurdish area of northern Iraq.


South Korea will withdraw about
1000 of its military personnel

In other developments, the daughter and brother of a French engineer taken hostage in Iraq pleaded for his release in an interview with an Arab TV news channel broadcast on Friday.

Bernard Planche, who worked for a non-governmental organisation called AACCESS, was kidnapped on 5 December on his way to work at a Baghdad water plant.

"He came to help the reconstruction for the Iraqi people. We have faith and are sure that you won't hurt him," his daughter Isabelle said on Al-Arabiya network.

"Please free him. He's my father and I love him," she said, sitting alongside Planche's brother, Gilles.

Excerpts of the interview aired on French TV.

Plea for release

Captors on Wednesday released a first video of Planche - shown sitting between two armed men - and denounced the "illegal French presence" in Iraq, Al-Arabiya reported.


Planche was seized on his way to
work in Baghdad on 5 December

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called on Thursday for the immediate release of Planche, stressing that France has no military presence in Iraq.

On Thursday, armed men kidnapped a Lebanese engineer in Iraq, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Camile Nassif Tannous, who works for the Schneider engineering firm, was kidnapped "in Iraq in the past few hours", the statement said, giving no further detasils.

The statement added that the Lebanese charge d'affaires in Baghdad, Hassan Hijazi, had been instructed to make "the necessary contacts" to secure Tannous' release.


Aljazeera + Agencies

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 31, 2005
In Iraq, Rich in Oil, Higher Gasoline Prices Anger Many
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 30 - A fuel crisis in Iraq deepened on Friday when the oil minister was suspended for objecting to steep government-imposed price increases for gasoline and cooking oil.

Angry drivers waited in quarter-mile lines at stations in Baghdad, brought by fears of more price increases and electricity failures, which have led them to siphon fuel for use in power generators.

There was also concern over problems with refineries, including a shutdown at a major refinery in Baiji, 130 miles north of Baghdad.

The oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, had been outspoken in his opposition to the decision earlier this month to triple the price of the most common type of gasoline while raising prices for diesel ninefold. He said that while some increases were needed, such large ones would put far too heavy a burden on Iraqis.

But upon returning from vacation outside Iraq this week, Mr. Uloum learned that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari had ordered him to give up his post for the next 30 days, according to an Oil Ministry spokesman.

"When he came back he was astonished to find that the prime minister issued a letter ordering Dr. Ibrahim to stay 30 more days on holiday because of his disagreement and his threats to resign from office," said the spokesman, Asim Jihad.

Mr. Uloum has been replaced by Ahmad Chalabi, the deputy prime minister and onetime White House favorite who served as interim oil minister earlier this year. An aide to Mr. Chalabi said it was not clear how long he would stay in the post or whether Mr. Uloum would return.

The scramble for gasoline in the capital was set off by several factors.

The ministry shut the refinery in Baiji last week after insurgents threatened to kill drivers who trucked gasoline and other products across Iraq. And the oil pipeline that feeds the Dora refinery in Baghdad was damaged recently by insurgents, Mr. Jihad said. He said he did not know when the two plants would operate at capacity again.

Drivers interviewed on Friday said they were rushing to fill up after hearing rumors of more looming price increases for gasoline. Mr. Jihad denied that any additional increase was imminent.

The drivers also said the availability of electricity had been so spotty - even by Baghdad standards - that they had been forced to hoard gasoline and siphon it from tanks for use in electricity generators.

The long lines began four days ago, said Capt. Akeel Rashid, commander of a security force guarding a large filling station in eastern Baghdad. Normally the wait is 20 minutes; now it is two hours or more, he said. "The electricity is very bad now," Captain Rashid said. "People come once for their cars and once for their generators."

In the continuing violence in Iraq, insurgents killed 5 Iraqi civilians on Friday and wounded 23 more when a bomb hidden inside a parked car detonated near a bus station used by Shiite commuters, the Iraqi police said.

Later, gunmen in an Opel sedan opened fire on Iraqis drinking alcohol and relaxing on a street in the Sunni district of Adhamiya in the capital, killing one and wounding five others.

A soldier assigned to the Second Marine Division died after being shot by insurgents in Falluja on Thursday, and another soldier was killed in Baghdad on Friday by a roadside bomb, the American military said.

News agencies also reported that Sudan would close its Baghdad embassy in an attempt to save the lives of six employees who were kidnapped by members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The kidnappers have threatened to kill the employees unless the mission is shuttered.

Though Iraq sits atop huge oil reserves, its refineries remain in poor shape, damaged by constant insurgent attacks and dilapidated from years of underinvestment.

The refineries can produce only a portion of the gasoline needed here, forcing Iraq to import more than $5 billion worth every year, a process that supports widespread smuggling. At the same time, Iraqi drivers are used to very inexpensive gasoline - roughly 6 cents a gallon under Saddam Hussein - because of heavy subsidies by the government.

Earlier this month the government raised the price of regular domestic gasoline to about 40 cents a gallon, and to about 70 cents for special imported gasoline. (By comparison, regular gasoline sells on the black market - which avoids gas lines - for almost $1 a gallon.) Diesel fuel and canisters of liquefied cooking gas also had large increases, enraging drivers and homeowners in a country where many families make less than $100 a month.

The increases were part of a deal Iraqi leaders struck with the International Monetary Fund to eventually wipe out the debts that Mr. Hussein accumulated. As much as 80 percent of $120 billion in debts could eventually be canceled, according to Western officials in Baghdad.

But for Iraqis that comes at a very steep price. The deal with the I.M.F. calls for Iraq to eventually increase fuel prices to levels in line with the rest of the Middle East, where the average price of gasoline is about 87 cents a gallon. Though that is below the true cost, Iraqis already furious over price increases this month face another doubling of prices in the next year or two.



Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=8326

December 31, 2005
Coalitions Reject Election Results

by Dahr Jamail
(With Arkan Hamed)

BAGHDAD - Many Iraqis are demanding a new poll after more than 1,500 cases of election fraud and forgery were reported in the Dec. 15 elections, at least 30 of them "extremely serious."

The results so far indicate a strong win for Shi'ite religious groups. There are widespread complaints that many of the instances of fraud favored Shi'ite religious groups that led the interim government which conducted the poll.

In Baghdad, the most important district in the poll with more than a fifth of the seats in parliament, the Iranian-backed Shi'ite alliance took a surprising 57 percent of the vote, as opposed to 19 percent for the Sunni coalition.

With final election results expected next week, the number of cases of fraud constituting the largest fraud in a new democracy to date led to at least 42 Sunni and secular Shi'ite political parties demanding a review of complaints by an independent international body.

Many complaints relate to false ballot box stuffing and intimidation of voters.

After the United Nations rejected a review, the coalition of Sunni and secular Shi'ite parties, al-Maram, issued a joint statement threatening to boycott the new legislature. Large demonstrations are continuing across Iraq.

Tens of thousands of worshippers who support al-Maram gathered at a Sunni mosque in Baghdad Tuesday this week. The Imam called for a protest demonstration after busloads of people from across the capital city arrived to attend his sermon.

"Please God remove the invaders from Iraq with the hands of the mujahideen," he said. "And honorable prayers, we call for you to deny the elections, which were a fraud."

He appealed against any domination of Iraq that would separate Sunnis from Shi'ites. "Iraqis don't support separation of their citizens," the Imam said. "My tribe (al-Jabouri) is both Sunni and Shi'ite. We are all cousins and are not separated by these elections."

Concern is rising among these groups over Iranian domination. "We ask almighty God to save us from being under the control of the Iranians," 45-year-old Baghdad resident Nadham al-Doury told IPS. Al-Douri who joined thousands of others in a march after the sermon said the election results would be forged, and that the current leaders of Iraq were "fascists."

Some banners at the rally read, "Yes to Real Nomination...No to False Nomination" and "We are Calling for Re-Elections." Demonstrators in the mile-long procession chanted slogans like "Baghdad Will Be Free...Iran Should Stay Out" and "They are Playing with a Flame Which Must Burn Them."

With the main Shi'ite coalition rejecting calls for another poll, tensions across Iraq are rising.

Many parties are asking for the Independent Higher Commission for Elections in Iraq (IHCEI) to be replaced with a new commission whose members have no ties with the parties in power. Some Sunni and secular Shi'ite political parties have renamed the IHCEI the 'Independent Higher Commission for the Islamic Revolution' that is biased towards the dominant Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Demonstrations began Dec. 22, a week after the elections. Countless mosques across Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq called for demonstrations against widespread fraud. Tens of thousands came out to protest in the days following.

"I have won my seat in the parliament, but we don't accept it," Salaeh Al-Mutlak, head of the secular National Dialogue Front told IPS. "The elections should be canceled because they were not legitimate."

Sheikh Mahmoud al-Sumaidaei, spokesman for the influential Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, told followers, "You have to be ready during these hard times, and combat forgeries and lies for the sake of Islam." The elections, he said, were "a conspiracy built on lies and forgery."

Arabs are disputing the results also in Kirkuk in Kurdistan to the north. They say Kurdish parties brought in voters from other areas to vote for them.

The United States and Britain, who wanted the election to install a secular, pro-Western democracy in Iraq, are now left with what looks more and more like a pro-Iranian, anti-Western Islamic state.

Iraq suspends oil minister as gasoline fears deepen
By Richard A. Oppel Jr. The New York Times

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2005


BAGHDAD A fuel crisis in Iraq deepened Friday as the nation's oil minister was suspended for objecting to steep government-imposed gasoline and cooking fuel price increases.

Drivers formed lines 400 meters, or a quarter of a mile, long at gasoline stations in Baghdad, spurred by fears of more price hikes, electricity outages that have forced them to siphon gas for use in power generators, and talk of refinery outages in Bayji and Baghdad.

The oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, had been outspoken in opposition to the decision to triple prices for the most common type of gasoline. He said that while some increases were needed, a change of that magnitude would put far too heavy a burden on most Iraqis.

But upon returning from a vacation abroad this week, Bahr al-Uloum found a note waiting for him in which Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari ordered him to give up his post for the next 30 days, according to an Oil Ministry spokesman.

"When he came back he was astonished to find that the prime minister issued a letter ordering Dr. Ibrahim to stay 30 more days on holiday because of his disagreement and his threats to resign from office," the spokesman, Asim Jihad, said i