US Department of Justice - Part Of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfled Employment To Plan And Launch War On Iraq

So now we know, in those very, very familiar words - "We was just doing our jobs."

From here:

In court papers filed today (PDF), the United States Department of Justice requested that George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz be granted procedural immunity in a case alleging that they planned and waged the Iraq War in violation of international law.

Plaintiff Sundus Shaker Saleh, an Iraqi single mother and refugee now living in Jordan, filed a complaint in March 2013 in San Francisco federal court alleging that the planning and waging of the war constituted a “crime of aggression” against Iraq, a legal theory that was used by the Nuremberg Tribunal to convict Nazi war criminals after World War II.

"The DOJ claims that in planning and waging the Iraq War, ex-President Bush and key members of his Administration were acting within the legitimate scope of their employment and are thus immune from suit,” chief counsel Inder Comar of Comar Law said.

The “Westfall Act certification,” submitted pursuant to the Westfall Act of 1988, permits the Attorney General, at his or her discretion, to substitute the United States as the defendant and essentially grant absolute immunity to government employees for actions taken within the scope of their employment.

In her lawsuit, Saleh alleges that:

-- Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz began planning the Iraq War in 1998 through their involvement with the “Project for the New American Century,” a Washington DC non-profit that advocated for the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

-- Once they came to power, Saleh alleges that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz convinced other Bush officials to invade Iraq by using 9/11 as an excuse to mislead and scare the American public into supporting a war.

-- Finally, she claims that the United States failed to obtain United Nations approval prior to the invasion, rendering the invasion illegal and an act of impermissible aggression.

“The good news is that while we were disappointed with the certification, we were prepared for it,” Comar stated. “We do not see how a Westfall Act certification is appropriate given that Ms. Saleh alleges that the conduct at issue began prior to these defendants even entering into office. I think the Nuremberg prosecutors, particularly American Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, would be surprised to learn that planning a war of aggression at a private non-profit, misleading a fearful public, and foregoing proper legal authorization somehow constitute lawful employment duties for the American president and his or her cabinet.”

(source)

How Murdoch Sold The World The War On Iraq

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

Article 20

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.

Robin Beste: 

"Rupert Murdoch's newspapers and TV channels have supported all the US-UK wars over the past 30 years, from Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands war in 1982, through George Bush Senior and the first Gulf War in 1990-91, Bill Clinton's war in Yugoslavia in 1999 and his undeclared war on Iraq in 1998, George W. Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Tony Blair on his coat tails, and up to the present, with Barack Obama continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now adding Libya to his tally of seven wars."

 "The week before the world's largest anti-war protests ever and the United Nation's rejection of the Iraq War in mid-February 2003, Murdoch told a reporter that in launching a war Bush was acting "morally" and "correctly" while Blair was "full of guts" and "extraordinarily courageous." Murdoch promoted the looming war as a path to cheap oil and a healthy economy. He said he had no doubt that Bush would be "reelected" if he "won" the war and the U.S. economy stayed healthy. That's not an idle statement from the owner of the television network responsible for baselessly prompting all of the other networks to call the 2000 election in Bush's favor during a tight race in Florida that Bush actually lost."


John Nichols:

"When the war in Iraq began, the three international leaders who were most ardently committed to the project were US President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard. On paper, they seemed like three very different political players: Bush was a bumbling and inexperienced son of a former president who mixed unwarranted bravado with born-again moralizing to hold together an increasingly conservative Republican Party; Blair was the urbane 'modernizer' who had transformed a once proudly socialist party into the centrist 'New Labour' project; Howard was the veteran political fixer who came up through the ranks of a coalition that mingled traditional conservatives and swashbuckling corporatists.

"But they had one thing in common. They were all favorites of Rupert Murdoch and his sprawling media empire, which began in Australia, extended to the 'mother country' of Britain and finally conquered the United States. Murdoch's media outlets had helped all three secure electoral victories. And the Murdoch empire gave the Bush-Blair-Howard troika courage and coverage as preparations were made for the Iraq invasion.

"Murdoch-owned media outlets in the United States, Britain and Australia enthusiastically cheered on the rush to war and the news that it was a 'Mission Accomplished.'"

And so it was.

The Iraq War Is Over....For The Pentagon

The New York Times, the newspaper that helped start the War On Iraq, announces it has come to an end on its online front page :




There is no mention on the front page of the New York Times, at all, of the estimated half-million or more Iraqis who lost their lives during nine years of American Occupation.

That's got to please the Pentagon.

Considering the amount of coverage the Iraq War has been given here, on and off, over the years, I should have a lot to say about this historic day.

But I don't.

We saw what happened when a strand of the American war industry elite decided Iraq had to be destroyed, nothing could stop them, and nothing didn't. They got nine years of war and destruction and world-poverty lifting military budgets.

Do you think it will be any different next time?

Is it, when it comes to War On Iran?

Of course not.

They get the wars they want.

And it's always been this way.

Victorious Iraq Resistance Fighters To US : 'Get Out'

So here we are almost eight years after the illegal War On Iraq began and the Iraqi government wants to make sure the United States under Obama will stick to its deal :

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ruled out the presence of any U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of 2011, saying his new government and the country's security forces were capable of confronting any remaining threats to Iraq's security, sovereignty and unity.

A majority of Iraqis—and some Iraqi and U.S. officials—have assumed the U.S. troop presence would eventually be extended, especially after the long government limbo. But Mr. Maliki was eager to draw a line in his most definitive remarks on the subject. "The last American soldier will leave Iraq" as agreed, he said, speaking at his office in a leafy section of Baghdad's protected Green Zone.

And the man who helped deliver Maliki his new power to turf out US troops, if it is decided they will try and stay beyond 2011, is the very same man the Bush administration spent years trying to destroy :

"This agreement is not subject to extension, not subject to alteration. It is sealed." Mr. Maliki's new majority depends partly on followers of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

And the Iraqi resistance fighters, known in the Western media as terrorists and insurgents, are
now a solid part of the Maliki government's power base :

"The militias are now part of the government and have entered the political process," said Mr. Maliki. The Sadr contingent, he added, "is moving in a satisfactory direction of taking part in the government, renouncing violence and abandoning military activity, and that's why we welcome it."

And :

(Maliki) said full withdrawal of U.S. troops also will remove a prime motivator of insurgents—both the Shiite fighters tied to militia groups and Iran, and Sunnis linked to Mr. Hussein's ousted Baath party.

The Full Story Is Here

Iraqis resisted, primarily, United States and British forces for seven years, and it's hard not see that their resistance, in the end, resulted in a victory, voices in the government, real government power, the kind of victory President Bush promised would never be allowed to happen.

In the end, Iraq's resistance fighters beat back and beat down the most powerful military in the world, ground them down in fact, until the United States were forced to pay them tens of millions of dollars not to kill American soldiers, until the United States stepped back and allowed them to have a say in the democratic future of their country.

That, of course, is the truth of the end of the War On Iraq.

The United States lost.

Iraqis won.

The resistance, as brutal, deadly, inhuman as it was, worked.

Deputy British PM : "The Iraq War Was Illegal"

By Darryl Mason

So here we are, seven years later, trillions of dollars gone, more than 5200 coalition soldiers dead, more than 300,000 wounded and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or disabled.

From the UK Independent :

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg today restated his view that the Iraq War was illegal, saying: "I don't think the legality of that invasion has been proven."

Apart from questions over the legality of the conflict, Mr Clegg said the wisdom of the 2003 invasion "certainly hasn't been proven at all".

"You can turn it on its head - I don't think the legality of that invasion has been proven. The wisdom of it certainly hasn't been proven at all."

What will they say about this age of senseless war on some of the world's poorest people 300 years from now?

"In the second year of the 21st century, the dying meganation of the United States launched an illegal war on Iraq, in a desperate attempt to stop the Iraqi dictator Sadddam Hussein selling oil in Euros instead of US dollars. The war claimed more than one million American lives, in the warzone, and back home. The War On Iraq, and the decades of rehabilitation for the millions of Americans who were recruited by war corporations, finally bankrupted the United States, economically and spiritually, leading to its break up."

In early 2003, 10 million people around the world, at tens of thousands of protests, chanted that the Iraq War was illegal, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the war was wrong and would bring death and suffering to the people of Iraq.

And they were right.

But our leaders, at least in most Western nations, pretended they knew nothing of what the protesters shouted, and they did as they always do, and started another war against the will of the people.

That's it. No country will ever fight another Trillion Dollar War.

The next time they will probably just for nukes instead.

It's so much cheaper.

And quicker.

For now, the three biggest chearleaders of the War On Iraq - US President Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard - walk free, write books and refuse to deny the war was illegal, they say instead, in perfect imitation of each other, "it was the right thing to do."

But the truth is, in the end, the Iraq insurgency won. They fought the world's most powerful war machine to a standstill, with machine guns and improvised bombs. The insurgency only stopped killing dozens of soldiers a month when they were paid cash to lay down their arms.

The greatest lesson of the Iraq War was learned decades ago, but the myth of Military Victory has kept the truth hidden, behind million dollar recruitment ads, and hundred million dollar movies promoting the military and war. Insurgencies are hard to defeat. All but impossible to defeat in a city of millions, like Baghdad, unless you are willing to sacrifice vast numbers of your own troops.

Or, by 2020, vast numbers of your expensive war robots.

The $100 Billion Privatised War On Iraq

Incredible. The numbers are in and reveal that BushCo. has spent an extraordinary $100 billion since the 2003 invasion of Iraq on corporate soldiers, mercenaries and military contractors. The private American armies of Iraq now outnumber US Army numbers on the ground. Without the privitisation of the Iraq War, BushCo. would have had to unleash a draft on the American people.
More here :

The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, according to people with knowledge of its contents, will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies, in a war zone where employees of private contractors now outnumber American troops.

The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield.

The budget office’s report found that from 2003 to 2007, the government awarded contracts in Iraq worth about $85 billion, and that the administration was now awarding contracts at a rate of $15 billion to $20 billion a year. At that pace, contracting costs will surge past the $100 billion mark before the end of the year. Through 2007, spending on outside contractors accounted for 20 percent of the total costs of the war, the budget office found, according to the people with knowledge of the report.

Several outside experts on contracting said the report’s numbers seemed to provide the first official price tag on contracting in Iraq and raised troubling questions about the degree to which the war had been privatized.

Contractors in Iraq now employ at least 180,000 people in the country, forming what amounts to a second, private, army, larger than the United States military force, and one whose roles and missions and even casualties among its work force have largely been hidden from public view. The widespread use of these employees as bodyguards, translators, drivers, construction workers and cooks and bottle washers has allowed the administration to hold down the number of military personnel sent to Iraq, helping to avoid a draft.

Dina L. Rasor, an author and independent expert on contracting fraud, said she believed that the $100 billion cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office might be low, since there were virtually no reliable audits of or controls on spending during the first years of the war. “It is a shocking number, but I still don’t think it is the full cost,” Ms. Rasor said. “I don’t think there have been any credible cost numbers for the Iraq war. There was so much money spent at the beginning of the war, and nobody knows where it went.”

Iraq Government Demands "Very Clear Timeline" For When US Troops Will Go Home

Iraq Improves Regional Ties

US Accused Of Using Cash As A Weapon Of War In Iraq

Monday In Iraq : 16 Iraqis Killed, More Than 30 Wounded

Another Female Suicide Bomber Strikes In Iraq, Killing Four

Is The Iraq War Really Coming To An End?

It's not the first time signs of a real end to the War On Iraq have hit the headlines this year, only to fade quickly as new clashes between the various ranks of Iraqi and western forces, and Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents have broken out.

For the people of Iraq, and the families of all Western forces who are fighting in Iraq, you can only hope the following story from Associated Press is true, and the start of more good news to come :

The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace - a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Shiite militias, notably the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, have lost their power bases in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities. An important step was the routing of Shiite extremists in the Sadr City slums of eastern Baghdad this spring - now a quiet though not fully secure district.

Al-Sadr and top lieutenants are now in Iran. Still talking of a comeback, they are facing major obstacles, including a loss of support among a Shiite population weary of war and no longer as terrified of Sunni extremists as they were two years ago.

The premature declaration by the Bush administration of "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003 convinced commanders that the best public relations strategy is to promise little, and couple all good news with the warning that "security is fragile" and that the improvements, while encouraging, are "not irreversible."

Iraq still faces a mountain of problems: sectarian rivalries, power struggles within the Sunni and Shiite communities, Kurdish-Arab tensions, corruption. Any one of those could rekindle widespread fighting.

But the underlying dynamics in Iraqi society that blew up the U.S. military's hopes for an early exit, shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, have changed in important ways in recent months.

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

Statistics show violence at a four-year low. The monthly American death toll appears to be at its lowest of the war - four killed in action so far this month as of Friday, compared with 66 in July a year ago. From a daily average of 160 insurgent attacks in July 2007, the average has plummeted to about two dozen a day this month. On Wednesday the nationwide total was 13.

The questions facing both Americans and Iraqis are: What kinds of help will the country need from the U.S. military, and for how long? The questions will take on greater importance as the U.S. presidential election nears, with one candidate pledging a troop withdrawal and the other insisting on staying.

Although Sunni and Shiite extremists are still around, they have surrendered the initiative and have lost the support of many ordinary Iraqis. That can be traced to an altered U.S. approach to countering the insurgency - a Petraeus-driven move to take more U.S. troops off their big bases and put them in Baghdad neighborhoods where they mixed with ordinary Iraqis and built a new level of trust.

It's not the end of fighting. It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

Of course, all this good news will be rendered all but obsolete should the US and Israel go to War On Iran.

Iraqi Suicide Bombers Kill 50, Wound 250

Of Course BushCo. Lied Its Way Into War On Iraq

A US Senate report provides further proof that not only did the Bush White House purposely exaggerate the the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq through 2002, but the administration's officials, including President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, ignored intelligence assessments that told them truths they didn't want to hear.

The New York Times is as complicit as most mainstream media in allowing BushCo. to lie the United States into a stunningly expensive and utterly deadly war, but even as they shred the Bush White House for fabrication the publication still pretends as though it has no case to answer for.

And why does the mainstream media continue to portray the Bush White House, at worst, as getting a few things wrong about Iraqi WMDs instead of stating the undeniable truth that Bush and Cheney were planning War On Iraq from the earliest days of the administration?

They did not accidentally spread misinformation about the threat from Saddam Hussein in 2002, they lied, again and again, and they did not care. War On Iraq was a possibility in 2000, the 9/11 attacks gave the Bush White House the excuse they needed to smash the country into pieces.

Here's the New York Times lead editorial from yesterday :

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

“They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, adding that “we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

On Oct. 7, 2002, Mr. Bush told an audience in Cincinnati that Iraq “is seeking nuclear weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” Saddam Hussein, he said, “is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.”

Later, both men talked about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa and about the purchase of aluminum tubes that they said could only be used for a nuclear weapons program. They talked about Iraq having such a weapon in five years, then in three years, then in one.

If they had wanted to give an honest accounting of the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney would have said it indicated that Mr. Hussein’s nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes.

As for Iraq’s supposed efforts to “reconstitute” that program, they would have had to say that reports about the uranium shopping and the aluminum tubes were the extent of the evidence — and those claims were already in serious doubt when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney told the public about them. That would not have been nearly as persuasive, of course, as Mr. Bush’s infamous “mushroom cloud” warning.

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 29, 2002.

Actually, there was plenty of doubt — at the time — about that second point. According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

...Mr. Bush declare that “Saddam Hussein would like nothing more than to use a terrorist network to attack and to kill and leave no fingerprints behind.”

...he said: “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.”

The Senate report shows that the intelligence Mr. Bush had did not support those statements — or Mr. Rumsfeld’s that “every month that goes by, his W.M.D. programs are progressing, and he moves closer to his goal of possessing the capability to strike our population, and our allies, and hold them hostage to blackmail.”

Claims by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld that Iraq had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups also were false, and the Senate committee’s report shows that the two men knew it, or should have.

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

Of course the New York Times can say "with certainty" that Bush lied about Iraq. The question is why they won't.

Blackwater Has Iraq Contracts Renewed By US Government

It's the corporate military team that slaughtered 17 people at a Baghdad intersection, but they've just had their security-providing services renewed for another few hundred million dollars. Why? US officials say they have no choice :

Guards for the security company were involved in a shooting in September that left at least 17 Iraqis dead at a Baghdad intersection. Outrage over the killings prompted the Iraqi government to demand Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and led to a criminal investigation by the F.B.I., a series of internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings.

But after an intense public and private lobbying campaign, Blackwater appears to be back to business as usual.

The State Department has just renewed its contract to provide security for American diplomats in Iraq for at least another year. Threats by the Iraqi government to strip Western contractors of their immunity from Iraqi law have gone nowhere. No charges have been brought in the United States against any Blackwater guard in the September shooting, either, and the F.B.I. agents in Baghdad charged with investigating whether Blackwater guards have committed any crimes under United States law are sometimes protected as they travel through Baghdad by Blackwater guards.

The chief reason for the company’s survival? State Department officials said Friday that they did not believe they had any alternative to Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats in Baghdad. Officials say only three companies in the world meet their requirements for protective services in Iraq, and the other two do not have the capability to take on Blackwater’s role in Baghdad. After the shooting in September, the State Department did not even open talks with the other two companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, to see if they could take over from Blackwater, which is based in North Carolina.

“We cannot operate without private security firms in Iraq,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management. “If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq.”

And they're not planning on doing that, any time soon.

It's Blackwater, or a draft.

The Costs Of War : Billions And Trillions

A Nobel prize winning economist has crunched the numbers on the Iraq War, and comes up with a total war cost bill to future generations of Americans of more than $3 trillion.

But that $3 trillion figure is just the cost of the Iraq War to Americans. For the rest of the world, the final tally is likely to be even higher (excerpts from this story) :

Next month America will have been in Iraq for five years - longer than it spent in either world war. Daily military operations (not counting, for example, future care of wounded) have already cost more than 12 years in Vietnam, and twice as much as the Korean war. America is spending $16bn a month on running costs alone (ie on top of the regular expenses of the Department of Defence) in Iraq and Afghanistan; that is the entire annual budget of the UN. Large amounts of cash go missing - the well-publicised $8.8bn Development Fund for Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, for example; and the less-publicised millions that fall between the cracks at the Department of Defence, which has failed every official audit of the past 10 years.

Whatever the much argued reasons for bombing Baghdad, cheap oil has not been the result. In fact, the price of oil has climbed from $25 a barrel to $100 in the past five years - great for oil companies, and oil-producing countries, who, along with the contractors, are the only beneficiaries of this war, but not for anyone else. After calculations based on futures markets, Stiglitz and Bilmes conclude that a significant proportion of this rise is directly due to the disruptions and instabilities caused by Iraq. This price rise alone has cost the US, which imports about 5bn barrels a year, an extra $25bn per year; projecting to 2015 brings that number to an extra $1.6 trillion on oil alone (against which the recent $125bn stimulus package is simply, as Stiglitz puts it, "a drop in the bucket").

Economist Stiglitz also puts to death the long persuasive myth that the United States going to war is good news for its economy :

....in specific cases, such as world war two, one that has seemed to be true - but in 1939, America and Europe were in a depression; there was all sorts of possible supply in the market, but people didn't have the cash to buy anything. Making armaments meant jobs, more people with more disposable income, and so on - but peacetime western economies these days operate near full employment. As Stiglitz and Bilmes put it, "Money spent on armaments is money poured down the drain"; far better to invest in education, infrastructure, research, health, and reap the rewards in the long term.

Perhaps worst of all, the United States isn't even paying for its War On Iraq :

...the borrowed trillions have to come from somewhere. Because "the saving rate [in America] is zero," says Stiglitz, "that means that you have to finance [the war] by borrowing abroad. So China is financing America's war." The US is now operating at such a deficit, in fact, that it doesn't have the money to bail out its own banks. "When Merrill Lynch and Citibank had a problem, it was sovereign funds from abroad that bailed them out. And we had to give up a lot of shares of our ownership. So the largest shareowners in Citibank now are in the Middle East. It should be called the MidEast bank, not the Citibank." This creates a precedent of dependence, "and whether we become dependent on Middle East oil money, or Chinese reserves - it's that dependency that people ought to worry about. That is a big change. The amount of borrowing in the last eight years, on top of the borrowing that began with Reagan - that has all changed the US's economic position in the world."

The full story is here, but here's some of the numbers :

$16bn
The amount the US spends on the monthly running costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - on top of regular defence spending

$138
The amount paid by every US household every month towards the current operating costs of the war

$19.3bn
The amount Halliburton has received in single-source contracts for work in Iraq

$25bn
The annual cost to the US of the rising price of oil, itself a consequence of the war

$3 trillion
A conservative estimate of the true cost - to America alone - of Bush's Iraq adventure. The rest of the world, including Britain, will shoulder about the same amount again

$5bn
Cost of 10 days' fighting in Iraq

$1 trillion
The interest America will have paid by 2017 on the money borrowed to finance the war

3%
The average drop in income of 13 African countries - a direct result of the rise in oil prices.

The NeoCons are fire-selling, through further borrowing, what remains of America's assets and businesses to China, and other Asian lenders, to keep fighting a war they cannot win.

The NeoCons officially have the world's most expensive egos.

How Iran Won The American-Led War On Iraq

The Asia Times' formidable Pepe Escobar floats the theory, first raised by Iranian conservatives, that Iran has already proved itself to be the ultimate victor in the US/UK/Australian-led War On Iraq :

Hanif Ghaffari, writing in the Farsi-language, conservative Iranian daily Resalat, has pointed out how the recent, very successful Ahmadinejad trip to Iraq had to be considered in the context of "Iran after the Iraq war" and "Iraq after occupation by America". The message could not be more graphic. When Bush went to Iraq he saw an ultra-fortified military base, and that was it. Ahmadinejad went everywhere in broad daylight, welcomed like a brother.

This is how Tehran sees itself - as the ultimate victor of the US war on Iraq. And no "surge" or spin - not to mention Israeli paranoia - can or will make it go away.

The rest of Escobar's very interesting report can be read here.

Iraq Oil Flows, Western Energy Corps Lick Their Lips

News that Iraq's oil is now beginning to flow again at pre-war levels is good news for Iraqis. Whether or not it is really good news depends on how much of the profits from a new boom in Iraqi oil stay within Iraq and are poured into rebuilding the country and the economy :

Buried beneath the surface are the pipelines that carry Iraq’s liquid gold – crude oil – from Kirkuk’s giant oil-fields 50 miles (80km) down to Baiji, and then up to Turkey for export to the energy-hungry West.

The US Army Corps of Engineers began building this $30 million (£15 million) Pipeline Exclusion Zone (PEZ) between Kirkuk and Baiji last July, and will finish it next month. It has already reduced dramatically the number of attacks by those Sunni insurgents who have been waging a second, less-noticed war over the past four years – not against US troops or Shias but against the oil industry on which Iraq’s entire economy depends.

As a result, that industry is displaying unmistakable signs of recovery for the first time since the US invasion of 2003. Exports have risen almost to prewar levels, and with Iraq sitting on 113 billion barrels of proven reserves – the third largest in the world – that is welcome news not just for Baghdad but for a world reeling from record oil prices.

The PEZ is only one measure taken by the US and Iraqi authorities to secure the Kirkuk to Baiji pipelines. They have also replaced Sunni and Shia soldiers with more aggressive, trustworthy Kurds such as Private Mustafa, and removed the 3rd Strategic Infantry Battalion which was, say US army officers, “deeply corrupt”. Its locally recruited members were almost certainly working with the insurgents – telling them when the oil was flowing, helping them to steal it, even staging fake assaults on their own positions to conceal their duplicity.

The huge 46-inch wide pipeline that carries the crude 180 miles north from Baiji to the Turkish border is too long for a PEZ and a little less secure – 14 guards have been killed since September. But even there attacks have been greatly reduced, largely through coopting local tribes by giving their young men jobs in the Oil Police, the revamped, 31,000-strong mini-army that protects Iraq’s oil infrastructure.

The results of this improved security are startling. The pipeline to Turkey was operational just 17 days in the first seven months of last year, and every day but five in the last quarter. Two-thirds of the 48 million barrels of oil exported from Kirkuk last year were exported in those last three months alone. A second $100 million PEZ will be constructed this year to protect the 130-mile line from Baiji to Baghdad.

Kirkuk accounts for roughly a third of Iraq’s oil production. Fuelled by its recovery, Iraq is producing an average of 2.4 million barrels a day – just below its prewar level of 2.6 million – with the Oil Ministry confidently predicting an output of 3.5 million by next year. That would match the level Iraq last achieved in 1979, just before the Iran-Iraq War. “It’s an ambitious goal, but it’s possible,” said a US official closely involved with the industry.

Thanks to rising oil production, the International Monetary Fund believes that Iraq’s battered economy will grow 7 per cent this year. And with oil prices near record highs, the US Special Inspector for Iraq this week forecast a $15 billion windfall for a country whose $48 billion budget for 2008 was calculated when oil, which accounts for 90 per cent of its revenues, fetched a mere $55 a barrel.

US officials say the Iraqi Government now has far more money than it has the capacity to spend. In 2006, for example, the Oil Ministry spent just 3 per cent of the $3.5 billion it was allocated for oil reconstruction projects.

The tragedy is that the recovery has taken so long. At the time of the US invasion, Vice-President Dick Cheney and other senior US officials boldly predicted that production would exceed three million barrels a day within eight months, generating more than enough money to rebuild Iraq.

The Bush Administration also failed to foresee the virulence of the insurgency. The website Iraq Pipeline Watch records 466 attacks on oil infrastructure or employees since 2003, and that is probably a fraction of the real total. US officials reckon as many as half the industry’s most skilled workers fled Iraq, or were killed, as Iraq descended into mayhem. The insurgents have used the oil that was supposed to finance the country’s reconstruction to fund their efforts to destroy it.

Stats from the London Times on Iraq's oil :

113bn Barrels of proven oil reserves in Iraq, the third highest after Saudi Arabia and Iran. Experts say the real figure may be nearly double that as so little of the country has been properly explored

2.4m Barrels of oil a day now being produced, below the record of 3.5 million in 1979, the year before the Iran-Iraq war began, but nearly back to the 2.6 million before the US invasion of 2003

$39bn Amount earned by Iraq’s oil exports last year, up 31 per cent. The daily average exported was 1.6 million barrels, up 9 per cent

90% Oil accounts for 90 per cent of the country’s revenues

60% Despite its sea of oil, Iraq imports nearly 60 per cent of its petrol and other oil products because its refineries cannot produce enough

The Three Wars Of Iraq

US Loses Sight Of 'Enemy' As Confusion Reigns About Alliances And Tribal Loyalties

Patrick Cockburn provides yet another insightful, detailed portrait of Baghdad almost five years after the US occupation of Iraq began :

Iraq is less violent than a year ago, but the country is still the most dangerous in the world. So it was no surprise to anyone in Baghdad, where people have long dreaded a renewal of al-Qa'ida's savage bombing campaign directed at Shia civilians, that there should be suicide attacks on two bird markets, killing 92 people on Friday.

For all President George Bush's claims of progress, cited in his final State of the Union address last week, Baghdad looks like a city out of the Middle Ages, divided into hostile townships. Districts have been turned into fortresses, encircled by walls made out of concrete slabs. Police and soldiers check all identities at the entrances and exits.

"People say things are better than they were," says Zainab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman, "but what they mean is that they are better than the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

There are checkpoints everywhere. I counted 27 on the road from central Baghdad to Fallujah, 30 miles west of the capital. These guard posts provide protection, but they are also a threat because there are so many of them that it is easy for kidnappers, criminals and militiamen to set up their own checkpoints in order to select likely victims.

Meanwhile, US troops are trying to cope with widespread confusion about which Iraqis, and Iraqi police and army personnel, are their allies and which are their enemies. Some of this confusion is due to American recruitment of Sunni insurgents to their side, where they are paid, armed and trained to not only patrol their neighbourhoods and keep track of who comes and goes, but also how to fight Al Qaeda. Many former Sunni insurgents have allied themselves to the Americans because of the brutality and horror of Al Qaeda attacks on civilians, and growing fears that the Shiites have taken almost total control of the Iraq government and parliament.

From the Washington Post :

Three separate but related wars are being waged in this country now, and the third one, against Shiite extremists, is the most worrisome, according to the commander and senior staff of the U.S. Army division patrolling Baghdad.

The first, against al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group that U.S. officials believe is foreign-led, is going well despite occasional spikes in violence, such as Friday's dual bombings of Baghdad marketplaces. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is "frustrated" but "not defeated," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey W. Hammond, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said in an interview last week.

The second fight, against the domestic Sunni insurgency, has become dormant in many places in the past year, as about 80,000 armed men, many of them former insurgents, switched sides and came onto the U.S. payroll with groups that officers here call "Concerned Local Citizens."

The third conflict, and perhaps the most vexing for U.S. commanders, is with Shiite extremist militias. More than two-thirds of U.S. casualties are caused by roadside bombs, particularly by high-tech anti-armor devices, planted by those groups.

Overall, senior U.S. officers find the state of the wars unexpectedly good, and are allowing themselves to begin speaking optimistically. "A year ago, I didn't see any way it was going to work out to our advantage," said Col. James Rainey, the 4th Infantry Division's director of operations, who is on his third tour of duty in Iraq. The difference now, he said, is "remarkable."

A major reason for the change, he said, is the increased effectiveness of the Iraqi army and police, to which the U.S. military refers collectively as Iraqi security forces, or ISF. "The ISF, when I was over here last time, couldn't do anything," Rainey said. Now, he continued, they frequently show tactical competence. That's crucial for future security here, because as U.S. troop numbers drop by about 25,000 between now and midsummer, to roughly 130,000, Iraqi forces will be handed a greater share of the burden.

At the same time, the officers are conscious that the fighting here has morphed several times over the past five years, as adversaries have adjusted to changes in U.S. tactics. Some officers worry that various factions, taken aback by how effective U.S. operations proved in the past year after several years of frequent counterproductive effect, are lying low as they try to devise new ways to attack.

For example, as measures such as checkpoints outside marketplaces have made car bombs less effective in inflicting mass casualties, said Maj. Jeff Jones, the division's deputy chief of intelligence, al-Qaeda in Iraq has begun to turn more to suicide bombers.

Lately, Jones said, al-Qaeda in Iraq has begun to attack local armed groups who are cooperating with U.S. forces. The majority of those groups are Sunni, and the attacks now mean that al-Qaeda in Iraq is "the single largest killer of Sunnis in Iraq," he said.

The most challenging part of the war in early 2008 appears to be roadside bombs planted by Shiite extremist groups.

The U.S. military calls those organizations "special groups," to distinguish them from other Islamic fighters under the sway of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. U.S. officials hope Sadr will give up violence as a political tool altogether, rather than declare a six-month cease-fire, as he did in August.

Report Claims One Million Iraqis Killed Since US Invasion Of Iraq Began In March 2003

Saddam's Victims Left To Suffer As His Henchmen Prosper In Iraq Under US Occupation

Iraqis Claim 300 Insurgents Killed In Battle Near Najaf

US Troops Accused Of "Off The Scale" Abuse In Iraq

One Terrible Week In Iraq - Some Say It's Getting Better, Others Say It's Worse Than Ever

There Are Now More Military Contracts And Corporate Soldiers In Iraq Than American Troops

British Iraq Veterans Denied Help To Cope With Post-War Trauma

Iraqis Unite, On Demands For Americans To Go Home

Asia Times' reporter Pepe Escobar can usually be relied on to supply a brutally honest portrait of the state of Iraq as a nation, and the Iraqis as a people. His reporting throughout the Iraq War has been revelatory, and his predictions of what was to come (the rise of the resistance movement through 2004, for example) have been stunningly accurate, though it took mainstream news organs like the New York Times and the London Times three to six months to report what Escobar detailed in the Asia Times.

Escobar now supplies an overall portrait of Iraq as the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion and occupation approaches. It's not pretty :

The George W Bush-sponsored Iraqi "surge" is now one year old. The US$11 billion-a-month (and counting) Iraqi/Afghan joint quagmire keeps adding to the US government's staggering over $9 trillion debt (it was "only" $5.6 trillion when Bush took power iearly 2001).

On the ground in Iraq, the state of the union - Bush's legacy - translates into a completely shattered nation with up to 70% unemployment, a 70% inflation rate, less than six hours of electricity a day and virtually no reconstruction, although White House-connected multinationals have bagged more than $50 billion in competition-free contracts so far. The gleaming reconstruction success stories of course are the Vatican-sized US Embassy in Baghdad - the largest in the world - and the scores of US military bases.

Facts on the ground also attest the "surge" achieved no "political reconciliation" whatsoever in Iraq - regardless of a relentless US corporate media propaganda drive, fed by the Pentagon, to proclaim it a success. The new law to reverse de-Ba'athification - approved by a half-empty Parliament and immediately condemned by Sunni and secular parties as well as former Ba'athists themselves - will only exacerbate sectarian hatred.

What the "surge" has facilitated instead is the total balkanization of Baghdad – as well as the whole of Iraq. There are now at least 5 million Iraqis among refugees and the internally displaced - apart from competing statistics numbering what certainly amounts to hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. So of course there is less violence; there's hardly any people left to be ethnically cleansed.

Everywhere in Iraq there are myriad signs of balkanization - not only in blast wall/partitioned Baghdad. In the Shi'ite south, the big prize is Basra, disputed by at least three militias. The Sadrists - the voice of the streets - are against regional autonomy; the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC)- which controls security - wants Basra as the key node of a southern Shi'iteistan; and the Fadhila party - which control the governorate - wants an autonomous Basra.

In the north, the big prize is oil-rich Kirkuk province, disputed by Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen; the referendum on Kirkuk has been postponed indefinitely, as everyone knows it will unleash a bloodbath. In al-Anbar province, Sunni Arab tribes bide their time collaborating with the US and controlling the exits to Syria and Jordan while preparing for the inevitable settling of scores with Shi'ites in Baghdad.

...what really matters is what Iraqis themselves think. According to Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad, apart from the three provinces in Iraqi Kurdistan, more than 75% of Sunnis and Shi'ites alike are certain Washington wants to set up permanent military bases; this roughly equals the bulk of the population in favor of continued attacks against US troops.

Furthermore, Sunni Arabs as a whole as well as the Sadrists are united in infinite suspicion of the key Bush-mandated "benchmark": the eventual approval by the Iraqi Parliament of a new oil law which would in fact de-nationalize the Iraqi oil industry and open it to Big Oil. Iraqi public opinion as a whole is also suspicious of what the Bush administration wants to extract from the cornered, battered Nuri al-Maliki government: full immunity from Iraqi law not only for US troops but for US civilian contractors as well. The empire seems to be oblivious to history: that was exactly one of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's most popular reasons to dethrone the Shah of Iran in 1979.

It's impossible to overestimate the widespread anger in Baghdad, among Sunnis and Shi'ites alike, for what has essentially been the balkanization of the city as negotiated by US commanders with a rash of militias; the occupiers after all are only one more militia among many, although better equipped. Now there are insistent rumors - again - in Baghdad that the occupation, allied with the government-sanctioned Badr Organization - is preparing an anti-Sadrist blitzkrieg in oil-rich Basra.

The daily horror in Iraq has all but been erased from US corporate media narrative. But in Baghdad, now virtually a Shi'ite city like Shiraz, Salafi-jihadi suicide bombers continue to attack Shi'ite markets or funerals - especially in mixed neighborhoods, even those only across the Tigris from the Green Zone. Sectarian militias - although theoretical allies of the occupation, paid in US dollars in cash - continue to pursue their own ethnic cleansing agenda. And the "surge" continues to privilege air strikes which inevitably produce scores of civilian "collateral damage".

The Sunni Arab resistance continues to be the "fish" offered protection by the "sea" of the civilian population. All during the "surge", the Sunni Arab guerrillas always kept moving - from west Baghdad to Diyala, Salahuddin, Nineveh and Kirkuk provinces and even to the northern part of Babil province. After the collapse of fuel imports from Turkey used to drive the Iraqi power grid, Baghdad and other Iraqi major cities are most of the time mired in darkness. Fuel shortages are the norm. In addition, the Sunni Arab resistance makes sure sabotage of electricity towers and stations remains endemic.

Contrary to Iraqi government propaganda, only very few among the at least 1 million Iraqis exiled in Syria since the beginning of the "surge" - mostly white-collar middle class - have come back. They are Sunni and Shi'ite alike. People - mostly Sunni - are still fleeing the country. The Shi'ite urban middle class fears there will inevitably be a push by the Sunni Arab resistance - supported and financed by the ultra-wealthy Sunni Gulf monarchies - to "recapture" Baghdad. This includes of course the hundreds of thousands of Baghdad Sunnis forced to abandon their city because of the "surge".

As for the Sadrists, they are convinced the 80,000-strong Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils" - al-Sahwah, in Arabic - gathered in Anbar province are de facto militias biding their time and practicing for the big push. It's fair to assume thousands still keep tight connections with the Salafi-jihadis (including most of all al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers) they are now supposedly fighting.

Considering the sectarian record of the US-backed Maliki government - which, as well as the Sadrists, considers the Awakening Councils as US-financed Sunni militias - there's no chance they will be incorporated into the Iraqi army or police.

As the occupation/quagmire slouches towards its fifth year, it's obvious the US cannot possibly "win" the Iraqi war - either on a military or political level - as Republican presidential pre-candidate John McCain insists. Sources in Baghdad tell Asia Times Online if not in 2008, by 2009 the post-"surge" Sunni Arab resistance is set to unleash a new national, anti-sectarian, anti-religion-linked-to-politics offensive bound to seal what an overwhelming majority of Iraqis consider the "ideological and cultural" US defeat.

Already now a crucial Sunni-Shi'ite nationalist 12-party coalition is emerging - oblivious to US designs and divorced from the US-backed parties in power (the Shi'ite SIIC and Da'wa and the two main Kurdish parties - the Kurdish Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party ). They have already established a consensus in three key themes: no privatization of the Iraqi oil industry, either via the new oil law or via dodgy deals signed by the Kurds; no breakup of Iraq via a Kurdish state (which implies no Kurdish takeover of Kirkuk); and an end to the civil war.

The ultimate success of this coalition in great measure should be attributed to negotiations led by Muqtada al-Sadr. The Sadrists are betting on parliamentary elections in 2009, when they sense they may reach a non-sectarian, nationalist-based majority to form a government. This would definitely bury Iraq's Defense Minister Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim's recent estimate that a "significant" number of US troops would have to remain in Iraq at least for another 10 years, until 2018.

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Claim : US Oil Firm Offered Iraqi MPs $5 Million Each To Vote For New Oil Laws That Favour Western Energy Corporations

Survey Reveals Iraq War Has Killed One Million Iraqis

Iraqi Arab Anger Rises Against Kurds As They Push For More Territory And Control Of Oil-Rich Kirkuk

US Military Drops 45,000 Kilograms On Explosives On Iraq In Air Strikes, Mainstream Doesn't Notice, Or Care

Pentagon Confirms US Arms For Iraqi Army End Up In Hands Of Terrorists

Iraq : 2007 Saw A Storm Of Myth-Making Of War Successes

Depending on which mainstream media reports you choose to believe, 2007 was the year that the US alliance 'won' the war on Iraq or at the very least it saw great progress being made in bringing stability and peace to Iraqi towns and cities and the political process.

Middle East expert Juan Cole disagrees. He has compiled a Top Ten Myths On Iraq. Here's some excerpts :

Myth: The US troop surge stopped the civil war that had been raging between Sunni Arabs and Shiites in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Fact: The civil war in Baghdad escalated during the US troop escalation. Between January, 2007, and July, 2007, Baghdad went from 65% Shiite to 75% Shiite. UN polling among Iraqi refugees in Syria suggests that 78% are from Baghdad and that nearly a million refugees relocated to Syria from Iraq in 2007 alone. This data suggests that over 700,000 residents of Baghdad have fled this city of 6 million during the US 'surge,' or more than 10 percent of the capital's population. Among the primary effects of the 'surge' has been to turn Baghdad into an overwhelmingly Shiite city and to displace hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from the capital.

Myth: The US overthrow of the Baath regime and military occupation of Iraq has helped liberate Iraqi women.

Fact: Iraqi women have suffered significant reversals of status, ability to circulate freely, and economic situation under the Bush administration.


Myth: Iraq has been "calm" in fall of 2007 and the Iraqi public, despite some grumbling, is not eager for the US to depart.

Fact: in the past 6 weeks, there have been an average of 600 attacks a month, or 20 a day, which has held steady since the beginning of November. About 600 civilians are being killed in direct political violence per month, but that number excludes deaths of soldiers and police. Across the board, Iraqis believe that their conflicts are mainly caused by the US military presence and they are eager for it to end.

Go Here For The Full List From Juan Cole

Turkey Claims 150 Kurd Rebels Killed, 200 Targets Hit In Air Strikes In Northern Iraq

Suicide Bombers Hit Sunnis Allied To US, Dozens Killed

Despite Violence, Iraqi Christians Crowd Churches For Christmas

The Staggering Corruption In Iraq

"Everybody Is Stealing From The State"

Americans Arm, Train Former Sunni Insurgents Into Forces Shiites Fear Could One Day Be Capable Of Taking On Government


Kidnappings, roadside bombings, executions, beheadings and civilian massacres are down in Iraq. To a point. Depending on which month of 2006 or 2004 you choose to compare September or October's figures to, you can claim that violence has dropped substantially.

But an average day still sees 40 Iraqis murdered or blown apart, and dozens more wounded and kidnapped.

The Iraqi government is still rife with disputes and crippling walkouts by party members, the most recent by an Sunni bloc. Oil laws have still not been signed, holding back foreign investment to bring Iraq's oil production up to even pre-war levels.

And, as this New York Times story reveals, the levels of corruption in Iraq, where unemployment is believed to be as high as 40%, is staggering in its depth, and reach :

Jobless men pay $500 bribes to join the police. Families build houses illegally on government land, carwashes steal water from public pipes, and nearly everything the government buys or sells can now be found on the black market.

Painkillers for cancer (from the Ministry of Health) cost $80 for a few capsules; electricity meters (from the Ministry of Electricity) go for $200 each, and even third-grade textbooks (stolen from the Ministry of Education) must be bought at bookstores for three times what schools once charged.

“Everyone is stealing from the state,” said Adel Adel al-Subihawi, a prominent Shiite tribal leader in Sadr City, throwing up his hands in disgust. “It’s a very large meal, and everyone wants to eat.”

Corruption and theft are not new to Iraq, and government officials have promised to address the problem. But as Iraqis and American officials assess the effects of this year’s American troop increase, there is a growing sense that, even as security has improved, Iraq has slipped to new depths of lawlessness.

One recent independent analysis ranked Iraq the third most corrupt country in the world. Of 180 countries surveyed, only Somalia and Myanmar were worse, according to Transparency International, a Berlin-based group that publishes the index annually.

And the extent of the theft is staggering. Some American officials estimate that as much as a third of what they spend on Iraqi contracts and grants ends up unaccounted for or stolen, with a portion going to Shiite or Sunni militias. In addition, Iraq’s top anticorruption official estimated this fall — before resigning and fleeing the country after 31 of his agency’s employees were killed over a three-year period — that $18 billion in Iraqi government money had been lost to various stealing schemes since 2004.

The collective filching undermines Iraq’s ability to provide essential services, a key to sustaining recent security gains, according to American military commanders. It also sows a corrosive distrust of democracy and hinders reconciliation as entrenched groups in the Shiite-led government resist reforms that would cut into reliable cash flows.

Of growing concern to the Iraqi government, is the Americans program of training and arming former Sunni insurgents to fight 'Al Qaeda'. The Shiites are worried, and probably rightly so, that the Americans are raising a new army that could won day take on the government forces who had killed so many Sunnis in their peak of their death squad days of 2004-2006 :

The United States, which credits much of the drop in violence to the campaign, is enrolling hundreds of people daily in "concerned local citizens" groups. More than 5,000 have been sworn in in the last eight days, for a total of 77,542 as of Tuesday. As many as 10 groups were created in the past week, bringing the total number to 192, according to the American military.

U.S. officials said they were screening new members — who generally are paid $300 a month to patrol their neighborhoods — and were subjecting them to tough security measures. More than 60,000 have had fingerprints and DNA taken and had retinal scans, American officials said, steps that will allow them to be identified later, should they turn against the government. The officials said they planned to cap membership in the groups at 100,000.

But that hasn't calmed mounting concerns among aides to Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who charge that some of the groups include "terrorists" who attack Shiite residents in their neighborhoods. Some of the new "concerned citizens" are occupying houses that terrified Shiite families abandoned, they said.

It also hasn't quieted criticism that the program is trading long-term Iraqi stability for short-term security gains.

"There is a danger here that we are going to have armed all three sides: the Kurds in the north, the Shiite and now the Sunni militias," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst who's now at The Brookings Institution, a center-left policy organization in Washington, D.C.

Underscoring the division, Sunni politicians said the creation of the groups was justified because it made up for the U.S. decision to disband Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led army shortly after Baghdad fell in 2003. They also said the groups helped balance the infiltration of Iraq's security forces by Shiite militias during the rapid U.S.-sponsored expansion of those forces in 2004 and 2005.

"Those who fear are the ones who have militias blatantly operating from within the official institutions and law enforcement agencies and outside them," said Omar Abdul Sattar, a leading member of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni group in parliament.

The thirst for revenge can last for generations.


Football Returns To Baghdad, Crowds Jubilant

'Only' 500 Iraqis Were Slaughtered In October, 2007

One Day In Iraq : 40 Iraqis Killed, Dozens Wounded, Dozens More Kidnapped

Iraq's Rainy Season Approaches, Baghdad's Ancient Decaying Sewers Not Expected To Cope, Cholera Crisis Looms

Training All Sides Could Lead To Viable Forces To Fight Prolonged Civil War

Americans Not Interested In Hollywood's Version Of The Iraq War

Most Iraqis Joined Insurgency For Money, Not For Jihad

This is probably one of the oldest and most mainstream media under-reported stories of the entire War On Iraq. Better late than never that it shows up in the pages of the Washington Post.

The story does, however, give the impression that Iraqis joining the insurgency for cash is a new development. Rubbish. From the day the Coalition of the Willing invaded and disbanded the Iraqi Army and de-Ba'athed the government agencies, Iraqis have been employed to kill or maim Americans.

Let your family starve or take $500 (enough to feed the family for months) to fight those who have invaded your country and are killing your friends and neighbours? It would appear for many unemployed and hungry Iraqis, the choice was easy :

Abu Nawall, a captured al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, said he didn't join the Sunni insurgent group here to kill Americans or to form a Muslim caliphate. He signed up for the cash.

"I was out of work and needed the money," said Abu Nawall, the nom de guerre of an unemployed metal worker who was paid as much as $1,300 a month as an insurgent. He spoke in a phone interview from an Iraqi military base where he is being detained. "How else could I support my family?"

U.S. military commanders say that insurgents across the country are increasingly motivated more by money than ideology and that a growing number of insurgent cells, struggling to pay recruits, are turning to gangster-style racketeering operations.

U.S. military officials have responded by launching a major campaign to disrupt al-Qaeda in Iraq's financial networks and spread propaganda that portrays its leaders as greedy thugs, an effort the officials describe as a key factor in their recent success beating down the insurgency.

"I tell a lot of my soldiers: A good way to prepare for operations in Iraq is to watch the sixth season of 'The Sopranos,' " said Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of U.S. forces in central Iraq, referring to the hit HBO series about the mob. "You're seeing a lot of Mafioso kind of activity."

In Mosul, a northern city of 2 million people that straddles the Tigris River, U.S. officials are also spending money to buoy the Iraqi economy -- including handing out microgrants sometimes as small as several hundred dollars -- to reduce the soaring unemployment that can turn young Iraqi men into insurgents-for-hire.

Col. Stephen Twitty, commander of U.S. forces in Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province, said the dismantling of insurgent financing networks is the primary reason that violent attacks here have dropped from about 18 a day last year to about eight a day now.

"We're starting to hear a lot of chatter about the insurgents running out of money," said Twitty, of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. "They are not able to get money to pay people for operations."

Abu Nawall said he joined the group over the summer because his metalworking business had dried up. The 28-year-old said he was responsible for running the bureaucracy and arranging payments to the 500 or so fighters for the group in the city, who he said try to carry out as many as 30 attacks a day.

"Most of our money comes from payments we receive from places like Syria and from kidnappings," Abu Nawall said, adding that ransoms can reach $50,000 a person. But he denied U.S. claims that attacks in the city had dropped or that the group's funding had stopped. "We still have money," he said.

Much of Abu Nawall's account could not be independently verified, though he said he was speaking freely and without coercion by his detainers. His description of the insurgency's viability was in some cases significantly more upbeat than the one offered by Iraqi and U.S. officials.

But Abu Nawall and his captors agreed that Iraqis were joining the insurgency out of economic necessity. "Of course we hate the Americans and want them gone immediately," Abu Nawall said. "But the reason I and many others joined the Islamic State of Iraq is to support our families."

Abu Nawall described himself as a middle-management accountant for the insurgency, but he acknowledged killing four Iraqi police officers because he viewed them as collaborators with the U.S. military. He said he was not primarily involved in ordering violent attacks.

The Full Story Is Here

Baghdad's Security Improves - Some Days Are Completely Car Bomb Free - Some Families Returning Home To Once Deadly Neighbourhoods

Sunnis, Shiites Unite To Protect Their Neighbourhoods From Insurgents, Militias

Assassinations, Car Bombings, Insurgent Attacks Move To Northern Iraq

One Day In Iraq : A 'Quiet' Day Sees 62 Killed, 21 Wounded In Fighting, Attacks

2007 Now Deadliest Year For US Troops In Iraq And Afghanistan

From AFP :

Militants ambushed and killed six U.S. troops walking in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan — the most lethal attack in a year that has been the deadliest for the U.S. military here since the 2001 invasion.

The number of U.S. deaths in Afghanistan this year mirror the record toll in Iraq. Both conflicts have seen an increase in troop levels this year that has put more soldiers in harm's way, including those killed Friday while returning from a meeting with village elders in Nuristan province. Militants wielding rocket propelled grenades killed the six Americans and three Afghan soldiers. Eight U.S. troops were wounded.

"They were attacked from several enemy positions at the same time," Lt. Col. David Accetta, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force and the U.S. military, said Saturday. "It was a complex ambush."

The six deaths brings the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year to at least 101, according to an Associated Press count, surpassing the 93 troops killed in 2005. About 87 died last year. The toll echoes the situation in Iraq, where U.S. military deaths this year surpassed 850, also a record.

Launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the war in Afghanistan quickly ousted al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and his Taliban protectors and appeared to have been a swift military victory.

But insurgent attacks — advanced ambushes and suicide and roadside bombs — have risen sharply the last two years, and analysts say the counterinsurgency battle U.S. and NATO forces now face will take a decade or more to win.

Critics of the Bush administration say the Pentagon turned its attention away from Afghanistan during the build-up to the invasion in Iraq, leaving the military with too few resources here to back up that initial victory with an adequate security presence.

Though attacks in Iraq have dropped in recent months, U.S. troops there have also faced a rising number of suicide and roadside bombs since the 2003 invasion, known as asymmetric attacks in military circles.

U.S. forces have two combat brigades — more than 8,000 troops — in eastern Afghanistan this year, up from one last year. The U.S. has about 25,000 forces in Afghanistan today — 15,000 under NATO and 10,000 under the U.S.-led coalition.

Insurgents have launched more than 130 suicide attacks, a record number, and Afghanistan last week saw its deadliest attack since 2001, a suicide bombing in Baghlan province that killed about 75 people, including 59 students and six members of parliament.

More than 5,800 people, mostly militants, have died due to insurgency-related violence this year, also a record, according to an AP count based on figures from Western and Afghan officials.

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The War That Just Won't End

Bush Reveals Iraq Exit Plan : "Based On Conditions Of Progress"

Americans Don't Trust BushCo. To Tell The Truth About The Iraq War

It's the Iraq Exit Plan that isn't.

On Thursday, President Bush is expected to announce that by mid-2008 the United States will have substantially cut the number of troops it has in Iraq, from 160,000 to 130,000. Or back to pre-"surge" numbers. But it's conditions-based, progress-based of course. So it's meaningless. BushCo. decides if the conditions are right, or if enough progress has been made to warrant troop withdrawals. There can be little doubt that General Petraeus is now firmly in the ranks of BushCo.

If BushCo. decides early next year that Iraq still needs American troops to stay, then the troops will stay. The only cut in troop numbers will come from the fact that the US is running out of fresh troops to send into the war zone, and that shortfall is expected to really start to bite by mid-2008 :

In a 15-minute address from the White House, Bush will endorse the recommendations of his top general and top diplomat in Iraq, following their appearance at two days of hearings in Congress, administration officials said. The White House plans to issue a written status report on the troop buildup on Friday, they said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Bush's speech is not yet final. Bush was rehearsing and polishing his remarks even as the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker were presenting their arguments for a second day on Capitol Hill.

In the speech, the president will say he understands Americans' deep concerns about U.S. involvement in Iraq and their desire to bring the troops home, they said. Bush will say that, after hearing from Petraeus and Crocker, he has decided on a way forward that will reduce the U.S. military presence but not abandon Iraq to chaos, according to the officials.

Both Democrat and Republican senators subjected General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker to hours of withering questions during two days of House and Senate hearings, but the pair stuck firmly to the BushCo. script, almost without falter :

The two top American military and diplomatic officials in Iraq conceded today that the Bush administration’s overall strategy in Iraq would remain largely unchanged after the surge in American forces is over next summer, and they made clear their view that the United States would need a major troop presence in Iraq for years to come.

Facing a day of withering questions from two Senate committees, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker were unable to argue that the heightened troop levels had made more than fragile and transitory progress. Nor could they reassure senators that American efforts could help forge political compromise among battling sectarian groups.

The clashes over war strategy were more intense and emotional than had unfolded the previous days in the House, reflecting the powerful passions and ambitions of a Senate that includes five presidential aspirants. Some exchanges in the Hart Senate Office Building today struck a tone not heard on Capitol Hill in 40 years, since Gen. William C. Westmoreland defended the American approach to defeating North Vietnam.

In responding to General Petraeus’ recommendations, the White House said President Bush would address the nation at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. Mr. Bush is expected to endorse the call for no more than a gradual troop drawdown in coming months, one that would leave some 130,000 American troops in Iraq by next summer.

But Democratic leaders issued a pre-emptive attack on that approach this afternoon, with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, emerging from a White House meeting to denounce the president’s approach as “an insult to the intelligence of the American people.”

As General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker wound up two days of grueling testimony to the House and Senate, Mrs. Pelosi said everything she had heard S “sounds to me like a 10-year, at least, commitment to an open-ended presence and war.”

Democrats who were briefed on the White House meeting said Mrs. Pelosi had told Mr. Bush that much of the public would be shocked at the prospect of an undefined, long-term presence in Iraq. They said the president acknowledged that he foresaw an extended involvement in Iraq and was backed by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who said the nation had made a commitment to the region.

The recommendation by General Petraeus calls for the step-by-step withdrawal between now and next July of the 30,000 additional forces that Mr. Bush has sent to Iraq as part of a increase in forces that he announced in January. But that leaves open the question that permeated the heated discussions in the Senate today about whether keeping the remaining 130,000 troops would serve a purpose.

“Buy time?” asked an angry Senator Chuck Hagel, the Republican from Nebraska who announced Monday he would retire from the Senate next year. “For what?”

General Petraeus, pressed first by Senator Susan M. Collins, a Maine Republican who is under tremendous pressure to abandon her lukewarm support for Mr. Bush’s war strategy, and then by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, conceded that he would be “hard-pressed” to justify America’s presence in Iraq if there is no political progress in Iraq over the next year.

Senator John W. Warner, the Republican of Virginia who is one of the party’s leading voices on foreign policy, asked whether the current strategy in Iraq is “making America safer.” General Petraeus first retreated to an explanation that he is doing his best “to achieve our objectives in Iraq.”

But when pressed again, he said: “Sir, I don’t know, actually.”

Both the general and the ambassador, who in the past have talked expansively about the regional and global effects of the Iraq war, stayed narrowly in their lanes of expertise today and stepped around repeated questions about whether a series of tactical victories in Anbar Province or some neighborhoods of Baghdad could be transferred into a broader agreement that would end a state of civil war.

Nor would they be drawn into any estimates of how many more years a major American troop presence would be required — or even when the oft-promised training of Iraqi troops would be complete enough to allow Americans to step into the background.

On just how many gains have really been made through the more than half year long troop "surge", the picture may be slightly less bleak in Baghdad, but across Iraq, not much has changed, according to the New York Times.

But many of the Petraeus claims that 'mixed' neighbourhoods in Baghdad are suffering less violence on the whole become even less impressive when you realise that many Sunni families have been driven out, literally, hundreds of thousands of people in the past three years, which leaves less targets for Shia militias :

Seven months after the American-led troop “surge” began, Baghdad has experienced modest security gains that have neither reversed the city’s underlying sectarian dynamic nor created a unified and trusted national government.

Improvements have been made. American military figures show that sectarian killings in Baghdad have decreased substantially. In many of Baghdad’s most battle-scarred areas, including Mansour in the west and Ur in the east, markets and parks that were practically abandoned last year have begun to revive.

The surge has also coincided with and benefited from a dramatic turnaround in many Sunni areas where former insurgents and tribes have defected from supporting violent extremism, delivering reliable tips and helping the Americans find and eliminate car bomb factories. An average of 23 car bombs a month struck Baghdad in June, July and August, down from an average of 42 over the same period a year earlier.

But the overall impact of those developments, so far, has been limited. And in some cases the good news is a consequence of bad news: people in neighborhoods have been “takhalasu” — an Iraqi word for purged, meaning killed or driven away. More than 35,000 Iraqis have left their homes in Baghdad since the American troop buildup began, aid groups reported.

The hulking blast walls that the Americans have set up around many neighborhoods have only intensified the city’s sense of balkanization. Merchants must now hire a different driver for individual areas, lest gunmen kill a stranger from another sect to steal a truckload of T-shirts.

To study the full effects of the troop increase at ground level, reporters for The New York Times repeatedly visited at least 20 neighborhoods in Baghdad and its surrounding belts, interviewing more than 150 residents, in addition to members of sectarian militias, Americans patrolling the city and Iraqi officials.

They found that the additional troops had slowed, but far from stopped, Iraq’s still-burning civil war. Baghdad remains a city where sectarian violence can flare at any moment, and where the central government is becoming less reliable and relevant as Shiite or Sunni vigilantes demand submission to their own brand of law.

The troop increase was meant to create conditions that could lead from improved security in Baghdad to national reconciliation to a strong central government to American military withdrawal. In recent weeks, President Bush and his commanders have shifted their emphasis to new alliances with tribal leaders that have improved security in Diyala Province, the Sunni Triangle and other Sunni areas, most notably Anbar Province.

That area, not Baghdad, was the one Mr. Bush conspicuously chose to visit this week.

But when he announced on Jan. 10 his plan to add 20,000 to 30,000 troops to Iraq, Mr. Bush emphasized that Baghdad was the linchpin for creating a stable Iraq. With less fear of death in the capital, “Iraqis will gain confidence in their leaders and the government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas,” he said.

That has not happened. More than 160,000 American troops are now in Iraq to help secure 25 million people. Across Baghdad — which undoubtedly remains a crucial barometer — American and Iraqi forces have moved closer to the population, out of giant bases and into 29 joint security stations. But even as some neighborhoods have improved, others have worsened as fighters moved to areas with fewer American troops.

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