Tag: us

That’s it for now

So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which ones I’d been in.

It was a sick and tawdry story and I didn’t want to tell it anymore. I walked into a bad situation one year ago and actually watched it get worse, with the fairly certain belief that it will continue to do so.
Continue reading That’s it for now

The plot thickens…

Two must-reads if you’re following the al-Turki / Obaid story, from the WSJ and the Washington Times.

From the first:

Despite the continuing high oil prices, for once U.S. difficulties with Saudi Arabia do not appear to be dominated by immediate energy concerns. The main challenge appears to be to steer Riyadh between a near holy confrontation with Shia Iran and an equally destabilizing alliance with radical Sunnis. As an experienced and well-liked envoy, Prince Turki will be hard to replace.

One early danger is that the kingdom is close to acquiring nuclear weapons rather than continuing to rely on the longstanding security guarantees and understanding of successive administrations in Washington. Last month a Saudi official privately warned the kingdom would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Pakistan (for bombs) and perhaps North Korea (for rockets) are potential allies. There are already credible reports of facilities in the desert that the Saudis claim are oil-related, although there are no pipelines in sight. Also, North Korean personnel have been spotted at military facilities.

And the second:

Of the 77,000 active members of the insurgency, the “jihadis” number about 17,000, of which some 5,000 are from North Africa, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The remaining 60,000 are members of the former military or Saddam’s paramilitary Fedayeen forces. The officer corps of the insurgency has “command and control facilities in Syria as well as bases in strategic locations, where Sunnis constitute the majority of the urban population.”
Given the centuries-old tribal, familial and religious ties between Iraq’s Sunnis and Saudi Arabia, the assessment concludes that “Saudi Arabia has a special responsibility to ensure the continued welfare and security of Sunnis in Iraq.”
Its recommendations to the Saudi government included a comprehensive strategy that would include overt and covert components to deal with the worst-case scenario of full-blown civil war.
It also calls on the government to communicate the assessment to the United States; make it clear to Iran that if its covert activities did not stop the Saudi leadership would counter them; and extend an invitation to the highest Iraqi Shi’ite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to reassure the Shi’ite community.

But it’s really worth reading both fully — there are some fun anecdotes in there too.

Is the US/Israel arming Dahlan against Hamas?

From Debka File, so take it with a grain of salt because it might just be provocation:

DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal that last week, US and Israel transferred a quantity of automatic rifles to Abu Mazen’s Fatah forces
December 17, 2006, 8:14 AM (GMT+02:00)
The guns reached Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan who handed them over to the faction’s suicide wing, al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Abbas’ only reliable strike force. Dahlan is now in command of the armed campaign against Hamas from presidential headquarters in Ramallah. Israeli officials are turning a blind eye to transfer of the arms into the hands of the most badly-wanted masterminds of Fatah suicide killings, such as Jemal Tirawi from Nablus.

Wouldn’t exactly be surprising, though.

New info on rendition from Italian trial

If you’ve been following the renditions story at all, this is a must-read with tons of new details from testimony to an Italian court by intelligence officers. It combines the worst tradition of shadow government among Italian intelligence and security agencies with the worst you can expect from the CIA, as well as highlight the complicity of several EU governments in the rendition program, against their own citizens. Remember that there has already been at least one case of mistaken identity, not to mention that while I’m not surprised that Morocco or Egypt (or for that matter Italy) don’t care about rule of law it’d be nice to see that at least some European countries do. And spare me the mock surprise, European politicians.

Most frightening, though, is this:

Arman Ahmed al-Hissini, imam of the Viale Jenner mosque in Milan and an acquaintance of Menshawi and Nasr, said both have been silenced by the Egyptian security services.

“The Arab secret services, they give names to the CIA of people who they want, people who are on the outside, such as Europe,” said Hissini, an Egyptian native known locally as Abu Imad. “They give the names to the CIA, because the CIA can go to work in these countries.”

I am quite willing to believe that some of the people targeted by the CIA rendition program are really nasty al-Qaeda types, although I still think it is the wrong way to go about neutralizing them, especially if there is little evidence that they are up to anything serious (indeed, surveillance might allow the uncovering of a bigger network.) But if the CIA just accepts a shopping list from the Egyptian and other services without questions — what, are they trying to meet quotas? — then we can all start worrying.

Bad cops, good cops

The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an American air strike somewhere to the south according to local government official Amr something-or-other and he was heading towards the site, then the line went dead.

We tried to call him back later, because you can’t give a story based on the word of Amr something-or-other, certainly not an Americans-killed-dozens-of-people kind of story, but he’d either moved out of coverage area or the appalling Iraqi mobile networks were having another miserable day.

Then the press release came. “20 Al-Qaeda terrorists killed� in a midnight airstrike about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. The wording in these things are key. As US ground forces approached a target site, they were suddenly fired upon, forcing them to return fire – killing two “terrorists�. “Coalition Forces continued to be threatened by enemy fire, causing forces to call in close air support.�

They really had no choice, it seems.

Eighteen more armed terrorists were killed, and a subsequent search revealed that two of them were women. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq has both men and women supporting and facilitating their operations, unfortunately,� said the statement.

So it was back to the telephones, talked to the official US military spokesman, “um, how did you know the women were terrorists?� Apparently in the post-air strike “battlefield assessment� done at 1 am in the rubble of the building revealed this fact.

“If there is a weapon with or near to the person or they are holding it, they are a terrorist,� he replied. Continue reading Bad cops, good cops

Better late than never?

I read the recommendations and descriptions of the Iraq Study Group report wit a mixture of elation and rage. Elation because this was the final nail in the coffin of the whole incredibly destructive US neo-con mission to remake the Middle East. It was the reassertion of traditional realpolitik over US policy — not necessarily the best and most constructive approach, but certainly less destructive that Bush Jr. and his psychopaths. I’m sure many would say it’s not even the lesser of two evils, but under the cold calculating approach by people like Baker and the others, Iraq would not have been so horrifically destabilized. As the cartoon in the Guardian said, it was time for the adults to get back into politics. God save us from the visionaries.

Steve

But if the price for Bush’s humiliation was the wholesale dismantling of Iraq’s social fiber, was it really worth it? And that’s where the rage comes in. It’s a good report, it’s familiar reading because all of us – media, Iraqis, international organizations – have been saying this for years. Where the hell was this panel a year and a half ago before got quite so awful?

Why do these old fogies say it and everyone, including the president, nod sagaciously and accept it, while everyone else was ignored before. The upbeat military weekly military press conferences, the blog attacks on the “liberal media�, the Bush administration’s defense of the situation … suddenly it’s all gone, as though it never was, and everyone seems to have no problem acknowledging that the situation in Iraq has become beyond awful.

Better late than never. I guess.

Unless of course it’s too late.

The Iraq Study Group Report

Reading commentary on the release of the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq, you get the impression that some people expected a report to end the civil war and are disappointed that it didn’t.

One interesting thing in the report is that apparently the US embassy in Baghdad has only six fluent Arabic speakers. Another is that the Iraq war is costing eight billion US dollars a month, with an eventual total cost of some two trillion dollars. At the risk of sounding completely insensitive to the plight of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein (I am not) I think I would rather have Saddam untoppled and that money would have been better spent on virtually any global problem such as global warming, food security, human, drugs, and arms traffic control, economic development in the Third World, AIDS, etc. Of course that might not have been as good for the bottom line of big business.

Stubborn stability

Carnegie has a new paper on how Jordan, er, should be more democratic. I have an idea: get rid of the Hashemites. Perhaps they should rule Saudi Arabia instead, it’s bound to be an improvement and anyway it’s the Hegazis’ turn again. More seriously, it’s nice to see an establishment think tank like Carnegie take the US to task for enabling puppet Jordan’s authoritarian drift.