TANK CREW KILLED, CIVILIANS KILLED WHEN MUNITIONS CACHE DETONATED

Al-Jazeera reports tank crew killed and scores of civilians when a found cache of munitions was detonated:

Many Iraqi civilians and a US tank crew died today when a huge explosion destroyed around 20 houses in Baghdad, Al Jazeera channel reported.

The explosion was the result of US marines attempting to decommission Iraqi munitions and rockets left by Saddam Hussein’s army in the Atayfiyya residential quarter of the capital.


Iraqi arsenal destruction kills US tank crew and many Iraqi residents

Our correspondent reports that a US tank was completely burned out with its two crew members still inside, suggesting that when the munitions were detonated, missiles launched in all directions, one slamming into the tank.

A local journalist, Aasim Jihad, who owns one of the houses destroyed by the huge explosion says that the Marines came across a sizeable arsenal of weapons in the Atayfiyya quarter and decided to destroy it immediately. Many local residents of Atafiyya pleaded with the US troops to remove the munitions far away from the district, fearing for their safety. However, these calls fell on deaf ears and the US soldiers fired a shell on the arsenal which exploded at once.

Jihad also explained to Al Jazeera that part of the arsenal contained over 200 missiles – Austrian in origin – and that the resulting explosion was like an inferno, emitting a terrifying explosion. The number of dead was increased by the fact that many other rockets flew off in all directions, some landing on houses of local residents.

The number of dead and wounded cannot be estimated at this time due to the severity of the wreckage. There are no emergency teams available, nor can ambulances and fire engines make their way to the fierce fires now raging. Looting and general lawlessness have prevented any organized responses to severe security and life threatening emergencies.

The explosion has also cut water to the residential quarter, adding to the already numerous concerns of those living near the scene. Their electricity had failed over a week ago.

WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE PEACE MOVEMENT

NathanNewman.org talks about what went wrong with the peace movement:

Progressives have usually supported non-violent means as a way to do so, usually arguing that it was misguided support for such regimes early on that get them to the point of becoming so dangerous that war is the only answer. This point is obvious in the case of US support for both Bin Laden and Hussein in the 1980s.

But to merely point out past US complicity is not enough. If we oppose war, we need a far clearer roadmap for the public on how we would support those who resist oppression. Mouthing lines about national sovereignty in cases like Iraq is as stupid as the Bull Connors or Pat Buchanans who cited states rights rhetoric to justify national abstention from challenging racism in the South.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with humanitarian interventionism in principle-- the left has believed in it for centuries. What is opposed is its use on behalf of corporate interests in a violent form, when non-violent solidarity is both more likely to lead to a just result and imposes less costs on the population.

But in the case of Iraq, the lack of organizing of that global solidarity and plan on how to help those resisting Hussein is exactly what strengthened the warhawks in arguing that their method was the only way to "liberate Iraq." In practice and in message, there was little or no message by the antiwar movement on how they were acting in solidarity with the oppressed folks within Iraq.

OUR MORALLY BANKRUPT LEADERS

The Daily Kos does it again folks for an excellent editorial on this war:http://www.dailykos.com/

As I listen to yet another excuse from Donald Rumsfeld, I realize that Bush and his advisors will go to any length, bear any burden to avoid responsibility for their actions.

What astounds me, as Iraqis die in looted hospitals, a tragedy we created, is the way Rumsfeld and the PNAC cabal ran to embrace victory even as the mobs were looting the streets of most Iraqi cities. They sought to portray a crowd of 100 as a massive outpouring of liberation as a US tank pulled down a statue of Saddam. More people are gathered around a fountain in Washington Square Park on a warm spring day when class is in session at NYU.

The way the Bushies have tried to play off the chaos resulting from their actions is astounding. Not surprising, but astounding all the same. Because it is undermining their moral standing, not only in the wider world, but in Iraq. They are losing the middle class, what there is of it, as field commanders embrace militia leaders and expect people to work for free.

It is a morally bankrupt leadership which plunges another nation into chaos with no plan for its reconstitution. Bush and his aides were all about the fun part, the war planning, but as CSIS analyst and ABC consultant Anthony Cordesman said in December, 2002, the peace starts at the same time the war does. You have to plan for the peace or we will fail.

Victory in this, the most political of wars, is not about the surrender of an army. It is about establishing a just political order. Maybe they can accomplish it. But the chances look grimmer by the day.

While Bush was eagerly using wounded GI's as a photo op yesterday, Rumsfeld was whining about the media. The same media which misled people into thinking a statue was being pulled down by a mob when it was by a crowd of around 100 is now showing scenes of disorder not seen on most TV's since the collapse of the Mobutu government in what was then Zaire.

What also amazes me is that people think the anti-war movement was trying to defend Saddam or didn't want the Iraqi people to be free. I think Tom Friedman summed it up: was Iraq like Switzerland or Yugoslavia. Well, it's turning out to be like the Congo, but he asked the right question: what was under Saddam's rule? The anti-war movement, from my perspective saw two things: one, the immense human suffering war would bring, and two: the consequences of the war.

That was the problem. Not the actual war or Saddam, who could be disposed of easily enough, since he was hated by everyone. But what lay under his rule, why he ruled the way he did. Not three days after he's gone, civil war lies frighteningly close to the surface as Shia form militias and rob the Sunni rich and Arabs and Kurds square off in Mosul. They even looted the museums.

As we seek to restore power, we will rehire the police which enforced Saddam's law. As we have armed militias around. If you were a Shia from Saddam City, would you let a Sunni cop push you around when you have a couple of AK's, a few cases of hand grenades and a spare RPG around. The first time you get into a beef, an RPG round is going into the door of the police station.

The pandora's box of war seems to have opened and what we have under it is frightening.

More importantly, even if we restore basic order, clearly, the guns and militias may be with us for a while. Once a man tastes the power of a gun, putting it down isn't easy. Hundreds of thousands Iraqi teenagers are learning a simple lesson: a gun equals power.

Our leadership could have forseen that and then done things to prevent it. Instead, we mess around with Ahmed "Kerensky" Chalebi as other actors, some with various interests, plot to make things far more difficulf for us.

Instead of admitting our rush to Baghdad created these conditions, Rumsfeld, between threats against Syria, denies what any sighted person can see on their TV. It is a morally bankrupt argument.

I hope they can make it work, and quickly. But if not...the consequences of the war could make Saddam's rule look like a golden era.

Steve Gilliard

LOOTERS SHOT IN BASRA

The Guardian Unlimited reports 5 looters shot in Basra:

Five Iraqi bank robbers were shot and killed by British forces during looting in Basra, military officials said yesterday, as the row over how the coalition forces are dealing with increasing unrest in Iraq escalated.
Lance-Sergeant Robert Giles, who was shot in the stomach after the robbers opened fire, was taken to a field hospital following the incident.

The patrol from the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards initially thought the bank robbers were looters until the soldiers were fired at with what were believed to be Kalashnikovs during the incident on Thursday.

A British military source said: "They came across what they thought were looters, then they were fired on. This group were trying to rob a bank.

"The soldiers returned fire, killing five of the robbers, and one soldier was shot. This was not British soldiers being gung-ho, they were fired on. If you let this sort of thing happen there would be bedlam out there."

The source said Saddam Hussein's regime was believed to have let prisoners out of jails. "We think they emptied the prisons and this is a danger we face."

The international development secretary Clare Short yesterday raised the issue of unrest in Iraq at cabinet and called on the US and British forces to step in to prevent disorder.

THE MURDER OF A SHIA CLERIC

The Guardian Unlimited has this report on yesterday's murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei:

Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who has been murdered in Najaf aged 40, was a leading figure in the exiled Iraqi community. He belonged to one of the country's great clerical families, being the son of Grand Ayatollah Abdul-Qasim al-Khoei (obituary, August 13 1992), a great jurist and scholar, and spiritual head of the worldwide Shia community until his death in Saddam Hussein's custody.
Sayyid (a descendant of the Prophet) Majid was born and educated in Najaf, training as a cleric and undertaking advanced studies under his father, by then in his 80s. His adult life was spent under the shadow of Saddam and the persecution of his faith, as shrines were destroyed, libraries ransacked and more than 200 clerics vanished, some of them executed with barbaric cruelty.

In 1991, after the then US President George Bush called on Iraqis to rise up, 14 of 18 provinces did so. In the power vacuum, Khoei's father issued a fatwa calling on the people to act humanely and not to pursue vendettas. At the time, Khoei himself was one of the committee of the local great and good who attempted to maintain order and stop looting and revenge killings.

After the US and their allies left the rebels to their fate, he fled to London, where he devoted himself to the charitable work of his father's al-Khoei Foundation, especially concerned with the many families in southern Iraq who had lost husbands and fathers in the aftermath of the rising, when tens of thousands were killed by the Saddam regime.

After his brother Taghi was assassinated (obituary, July 28 1994), Khoei became the foundation's secretary general, involving himself in its charity work - sinking wells and opening schools and hospitals in India and Africa, and channeling charity to southern Iraq, which became increasingly impoverished after the imposition of western sanctions in the 1990s.

Khoei was also concerned to put the Shia faith in a better light in the west, after its shameful misrepresentation, especially in the US press during the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, when to be a Shia was virtually equated with being a fanatic - a time, when, as he recalled, there were those in the US who were "scared to shake hands with a man in a black turban".

The result of his efforts was that the al-Khoei Foundation became a UN-affiliated consultative body, and the voice of the worldwide Shia community was heard at last in the halls of power, both east and west.

Khoei was a charming person. Never losing the attractive hint of natural reticence he brought with him, he rapidly became comfortable in the English language, after hesitant beginnings. Though still a young man, he was dignified beyond his years. On public occasions, he always wore the garb of a Shiite scholar - the black turban of a sayyid, the immaculately starched black cotton gown - yet he was very approachable, and always retained something of the openness of youth, shunning the velvet authority of clergymen the world over.

His interests lay not in the theological quiddities in which Shia scholars excel, but in practical action, and especially in organising charity, so characteristic of the Shiite faith. He took the greatest delight in his wife and young family, and in his large community, which was such a presence in London. His face always lit up at the time of great celebrations, such as Ashura, when the exiles "cooked for Hussein" in great tureens in the open air, and when, for a moment, a corner of west London became the lost streets of old Kerbala.

But Khoei's great hope was to return to Najaf, and to the home and burial ground of his family. After the present conflict began, and the humanitarian situation worsened, he was approached by the allies, and decided to go. Close friends and family begged him not to, but he felt his duty lay in Iraq.

CHOICE OF NEW LEADER IN BASRA CREATES VIOLENCE

The Guardian Unlimited reports violence broke out in Basra over the choice of a new leader by the British in Basra:

Violence broke out in Basra after a sheikh asked by British commanders to become the new leader of the province was revealed to be a former brigadier-general in Saddam Hussein's army and a one-time member of the Ba'ath party.
Several hundred protesters hurled stones at the house of Sheikh Muzahim Mustafa Kanan Tamimi as he met other local dignitaries to discuss how to restore order.

The crowd accused Mr Tamimi and his tribe of collaborating with Saddam. The sheikh's supporters armed themselves and accused the protesters, members of a rival clan, of being Ba'ath party sympathisers themselves. Eventually the protesters were dispersed by British troops.

ONE MARINE KILLED IN FIGHTING IN BAGHDAD

According to the BBC, one marine was killed today in fighting:

1617: US troops in Baghdad fight off an attack by about 15 gunmen on the west bank of the Tigris in a 20-minute battle, an officer tells Reuters. One marine is killed by a gunman on the east bank, at a hospital near the Palestine Hotel.

IRANIAN REBELS KILLED IN NORTHERN IRAQ

The BBC has this report:

1642: The main Iranian rebel group, the People's Mujahedin, says 18 of its fighters have been killed and 43 wounded in fighting near its camps in north-eastern Iraq. It accuses Tehran of sending agents into Iraq to mount attacks on its bases and says Iranian-backed forces have seized the border town of Khanaqin.

PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL RANSACKED

The BBC reports a psychiatric hospital was ransacked in northern Baghdad, and two patients died and four were raped:

1645: A mob ransacked a psychiatric hospital in northern Baghdad for 36 hours this week, AFP reports. Two patients unable to swallow water without assistance died of thirst and four women patients were raped, medical staff told the agency.

CASUALTY NUMBERS FROM MOSUL

This report from the Tribune In India says 200 were wounded and 20 were killed in fighting in Mosul:

MOSUL: Twenty persons were killed and more than 200 wounded in fighting between Arabs and Kurds in the key northern Iraqi city of Mosul, hospital sources said.
“There are more than 200 wounded, besides 15 to 20 dead Arabs and Kurds since yesterday,” said Muzahim Kawat, chief surgeon at the city’s emergency hospital. An AFP journalist here saw a number of Arabs and Kurds with gunshot wounds at the hospital early today.

Sporadic small-arms fire seemed to intensify today in the city, which has a majority Arab population loyal to deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

15,000 IRAQI TROOPS SURRENDER IN MOSUL

No casualties yet reported in this battle for Mosul, according to CNN.com:

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, together with U.S. troops, moved into the city intending to crush any remaining resistance and stop the looting that has swept through the city.

Hoshyar Zebari, spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), said the 15,000-strong Iraqi 5th Corps laid down its weapons, and many of the fighters were being held in Mosul. Some were seen walking out of the city, carrying nothing.

The 5th Corps offered to surrender Thursday, and U.S. and Kurdish forces officially accepted it Friday, reported CNN's James Martone in Mosul.

The 5th Corps began the war with somewhere between 20,000 to 30,000 men, according to coalition sources.

But looting has marred the relief produced by the surrender, as residents in the city center have been seen hauling away chairs and furniture.

Zebari complained that if U.S. officials had acted on the surrender offer more quickly, "These terrible scenes of looting could have been prevented." He added, however, that Kurdish and U.S. forces are now bringing the city under control.

At one point Friday, Kurdish civilians dressed as Peshmerga and tried to stop the looting.

U.S. officials say swift action was being taken to crack down on lawlessness and restore order.

The coalition was prepared for looting, knowing it was likely and in some cases understandable, given the oppression Iraqis have been living under, top U.S. officials said Friday.

Additional Kurdish and U.S. troops moved into Mosul late Friday afternoon, and engaged in a firefight with Iraqi paramilitary Fedayeen in downtown Mosul near government buildings.

No U.S. or Kurdish casualties were reported, and with senior officials of Saddam's regime out of sight, no official numbers of Iraqi casualties are being provided.

FACES OF CHILDREN IN IRAQ

Click here to see some faces of children in Iraq, words and pictures by Dan Chung in the Guardian Unlimited.

FOREIGNERS DETAINED IN IRAQ WITH LARGE SUMS OF MONEY

Foreigners detained in Iraq carrying large sums of money, thought to be for rewards for killing Americans:

"US Central Command announced yesterday that special forces had detained 59 men "of military age" as they travelled towards Iraq's western border with Syria. Gen Brooks said the men had been carrying $630,000 in cash, and letters offering rewards for killing American soldiers.

He declined to fuel speculation that they could be foreign Arab fighters engaged to fight for the regime by giving details of their nationalities.

"We've found people who were not Iraqis in a variety of places...We certainly know they were leaving Iraq to the west," Gen Brooks said. The deputy director of operations also said that special forces had discovered two unmanned drones with the "capability" to deliver chemical weapons during a raid on a phosphate plant at Al Qaim, a town close to the Syrian border where there has been fierce fighting over the past fortnight."

A WAR CASUALTY: THE HERITAGE OF IRAQ

Robert Fisk with the Independent.co.uk tells the sad story of the destruction of the heritage of Iraq:

They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them down on to the concrete.

Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history – only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.

Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul – perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier – have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.

"This is what our own people did to their history," the man in the grey gown said as we flicked our torches yesterday across the piles of once perfect Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of Iraq's National Archaeological Museum. "We need the American soldiers to guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen." But all that the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced yesterday was gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighbouring apartment blocks. "Look at this," he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where the jar – perhaps 2ft high in its original form – had been smashed into four pieces. "This was Assyrian." The Assyrians ruled almost 2,000 years before Christ.

And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, yesterday morning they were recruiting Saddam Hussein's hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. The last army to do anything like this was Mountbatten's force in South-east Asia, which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Saigon – with their bayonets fixed – after the recapture of Indo-China in 1945.

A queue of respectably dressed Baghdad ex-cops formed a queue outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad after they heard a radio broadcast calling for them to resume their "duties" on the streets. In the late afternoon, at least eight former and very portly senior police officers, all wearing green uniforms – the same colour as the uniforms of the Iraqi Baath party – turned up to offer their services to the Americans, accompanied by a US Marine. But there was no sign that any of them would be sent down to the Museum of Antiquity.

But "liberation" has already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Firdos Square demanding a new Iraqi government "for our protection and security and peace", US Marines, who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at the ready. The reality, which the Americans – and, of course, Mr Rumsfeld – fail to understand is that under Saddam Hussein, the poor and deprived were always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis, just as Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it is the Sunnis who are now suffering plunder at the hands of the Shia.

And so the gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property owners and looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. By failing to end this violence – by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity – the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad.

Yesterday evening, I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds of streets are now barricaded off with breeze blocks, burnt cars and tree trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who threaten their homes or shops. Which is just how the civil war began in Beirut in 1975.

A few US Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday – positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted – but fires burned across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The municipality building was blazing away last night, and on the horizon other great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air.

Too little, too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water purification workers turned up at the US Marine headquarters, pleading for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves.

There is no electricity in Baghdad – as there is no water and no law and no order – and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar – "3,500 BC" it said on one shelf corner – had been bashed to pieces.

Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose – and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base – did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad.

For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this centre of early civilisation from palaces, ziggurats and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files – often in English and in graceful 19th-century handwriting – now lie strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. "Late 2nd century, no. 1680" was written in pencil on the inside.

To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures to cars and trucks.

The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one – not even the museum guard in the grey gown – had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewellery glinting amid the piles of smashed pots.

The mobs who came here – Shia Muslims, for the most part, from the hovels of Saddam City – probably had no idea of the value of the pots or statues. Their destruction appears to have been the result of ignorance as much as fury. In the vast museum library, only a few books – mostly mid-19th-century archaeological works – appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set little value in books.

I found a complete set of the Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still intact – lying next to them was a paperback entitled Baghdad, The City of Peace – but thousands of card index sheets had been flung from their boxes over stairwells and banisters.

British, French and German archaeologists played a leading role in the discovery of some of Iraq's finest treasures. The great British Arabist, diplomatic schemer and spy Gertrude Bell, the "uncrowned queen of Iraq" whose tomb lies not far away from the museum, was an enthusiastic supporter of their work. The Germans built the modern-day museum beside the Tigris river and only in 2000 was it reopened to the public after nine years of closure following the first Gulf War.

Even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam's soldiers showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions are still clearly visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull.

Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq's State Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum's contents as "the heritage of the nation". They were, he said, "not just things to see and enjoy – we get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq".

Mr Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the country's history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. "We don't want to have guns, but everyone must have them now," he told me. "We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man – so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?"

Half an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the US Marines in Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that "we're probably going to get down there". Too late. Iraq's history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their "liberation".

"You are American!" a woman shouted at me in English yesterday morning, wrongly assuming I was from the US. "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city." It was a mercy she could not visit the Museum of Antiquity to see for herself that the very heritage of her country – as well as her city – has been destroyed.
12 April 2003 18:45

PLEASE DON'T STEP IN THE... QUAGMIRE

Ronk from Seattle, writing for the Daily Kos, wants to know if you can see the quagmire glistening in the moonlight (scroll down through other fun stuff):

Quagmire? Yes, Quagmire
RonK, Seattle, here with my opening guest shot across the coffee table.

Itinerant hawks have been flapping by, cackling "QUAGMIRE? HA!", as if the question answers itself. Not so fast! [Hawks don't cackle, you say? One subspecies does ... but I digress.]

How do you know you've walked into a quagmire? And when? The first few steps give you no clue. Later, if your boot seams are poorly sealed, you'll notice a wet sock or two. You pick up the pace, eager to get to the other side, but the going gets heavier.

At some point your left boot is stuck in the muck ... you plant your right boot on the firmest spot you can find and push as hard as possible extract the left ... and now the right one is stuck deeper. You twist around looking for a way out, and every direction looks the same. Desolate ground. Quagmire.


Vietnam wasn't "quagmire" in 1945 when US opened the regime management shop, double-crossed everybody and his uncle Ho, sabotaged unification, and pressured France to stay in the colonial game (in exchange for other valuable considerations in the emerging New World Order) ... or was it?

Not "quagmire" in 1954 when France was defeated at Dienbienphu, and our ventriloquist's dummy (Diem) beat up France's marionette (Bao Dai) in a rigged election ... or was it? [IIRC, this was the year Eisenhower introduced the "domino" analogy ... not yet a full-fledged "domino theory".]

Not "quagmire" in 1960 when Nixon proudly declared "taking the strong stand that we did, the civil war there was ended ... the Communists have moved out and we do have a strong, free bastion" ... or was it?

Not "quagmire" in 1963 when we terminated the Diem brothers (with extreme prefudice), and rescripted the whole "free bastion" puppet show around series of corrupt warlords and their comical gangster sidekicks (9 cast changes in 19 months) ... or was it? [That same year, CIA's Kuwait station used a promising young fellow on their indirect payroll to eliminate hundreds -- probably thousands -- of inconvenient Iraqi political activists. What ever became of him, anyway?]

Vietnam wasn't officially "quagmire" twenty years into the regime-management era, in 1965 when Clark Clifford wrote his now-famous cautionary note to LBJ, and Air Marshal Ky solidified control of the puppet theater, but the Q-word had caught on by 1967 when Ky's longtime tag-team partner (and nemesis) General Thieu was "elected".

Vietnam was unquestionably "quagmire" in 1968 when LBJ elected not to seek re-election, and Nixon told us he saw a way out ... but each step took us deeper in, and most of the dying had not been done yet.

Vietnam was still "quagmire" in 1971 when Thieu won unanimous re-election (rivals Ky and Minh having withdrawn when they saw how the dice were loaded) ... and in 1973 when the last regular US combat troops pulled out. It remained so until 1975 when the last helicopter lifted the last puppet off the roof of the last US compound. Some of our reputation and national self-esteem is still stuck in the muck back there.


"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." The history of imposed liberation is not promising, and Reverse Darwinism governs the marketplace of puppets. The less fit a puppet is, the faster he floats to the top of the short list.

The candidates most available and attractive to puppet-masters are hustlers, schemers, faith-healers, toadies, profiteers, freeloaders, con artists, men who can be bought, bullies too disorganized to hold turf of their own. Tested leaders, realists, men of integrity well-grounded in their own communities ... these get crowded out.

So among other complications, there's a turnover problem. Sic semper doofus. Remember America's first Afghan Messiah, the hapless Abd al-Haq?


What -- and who -- comes next in New Iraq?

More clearly now than 30 days ago, I look at Iraq and think "quagmire" ... a national security debacle. Maybe you see the same picture and think "this is what democracy looks like" (despite early exit polls from the Najaf and Basra primaries). Or there's that old American standby, the Afghan solution -- "flip the channel and see what else is on". I'd enjoy a detailed exposition of the "win and GFO" model ... is New Iraq a train wreck we can turn our backs on and walk away whistling a happy tune?

As it stands now -- to paraphrase a great thinker -- "It's a bastion, but it's our bastion".

Is there something special about the way moonlight glistens on quagmire? Can we recognize it and know where to step? And after 24 days in-country, can anyone credibly assert "QUAGMIRE? HA!"?

RonK, Seattle

TURKEY IS QUEASY

This article highlights the danger unleashed when the Kurds marched into Kirkuk yesterday, making Turkey queasy:

"Gaining control of Kirkuk has long been a dream of the Kurds, who suffered massacres, mass deportations and a chemical weapons attack under Saddam Hussein's rule. But for the United States, Kirkuk is a tricky landscape steeped in centuries of conflict.

By entering the city, which is home to Iraq's oldest and largest oil fields, Kurdish militias broke a promise to the United States and Turkey that they would stay out of the biggest prize in northern Iraq. Turkey had threatened to send thousands of its troops into northern Iraq if the Kurdish parties moved into Kirkuk.

U.S. officials moved quickly yesterday to assure Turkey that the city would not remain in Kurdish hands for long. Secretary of State Colin Powell said he reached an agreement with Turkish leaders to have Kurdish forces pull back from Kirkuk soon, and to allow Turkey to send a small group of monitors into the city.

Kirkuk "will be under American control," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

About 200 U.S. Special Forces troops entered the city with Kurdish fighters yesterday morning, and they were joined later by several hundred members of the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade. But the Pentagon would need many more troops to unilaterally control the city of 1 million people."

MEDIA MANIPULATION USING PHOTOGRAPHS

Folks, you have to tune into this site, and judge for yourselves on the manipulation of the media by our government.

IS SYRIA NEXT?

Is Richard Perle warning where the snake will strike next?:

"Richard Perle, one of the chief U.S. ideologists behind the war to oust Saddam Hussein, warned Friday that the United States would be compelled to act if it discovered that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been concealed in Syria.
.
Perle said that if the Bush administration were to learn that Syria had taken possession of such Iraqi weapons, "I'm quite sure that we would have to respond to that."

"It would be an act of such foolishness on Syria's part," he continued, "that it would raise the question of whether Syria could be reasoned with. But I suppose our first approach would be to demand that the Syrians terminate that threat by turning over anything they have come to possess, and failing that I don't think anyone would rule out the use of any of our full range of capabilities."
.
In an interview with editors of the International Herald Tribune, Perle said that the threat posed by terrorists he described as "feverishly" looking for weapons to kill as many Americans as possible obliged the United States to follow a strategy of preemptive war in its own defense.
.
Asked if this meant it would go after other countries after Iraq, he replied: "If next means who will next experience the 3d Army Division or the 82d Airborne, that's the wrong question. If the question is who poses a threat that the United States deal with, then that list is well known. It's Iran. It's North Korea. It's Syria. It's Libya, and I could go on."
.
Perle, a Pentagon adviser as a member of the Defense Policy Board, said the point about Afghanistan and now Iraq was that the United States had been put in a position of having to use force to deal with a threat that could not be managed in any other way.
.
The message to other countries on the list is "give us another way to manage the threat," he said, adding, "Obviously, our strong preference is always going to be to manage threats by peaceful means, and every one of the countries on the 'who's next?' list is in a position to end the threat by peaceful means."
.
"So the message to Syria, to Iran, to North Korea, to Libya should be clear. if we have no alternative, we are prepared to do what is necessary to defend Americans and others. But that doesn't mean that we are readying the troops for a next military engagement. We are not."
.
The former official in Republican administrations said the United States also has "a serious problem" with Saudi Arabia, where he said both private individuals and the government had poured money into extremist organizations.
.
"This poses such an obvious threat to the United States that it is intolerable that they continue to do this," he warned.
.
He said he had no doubt that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
.
"We will not find them unless we stumble across them," he said, "until we are able to interview those Iraqis who know where they are. The prospect of inspections may have had the effect of causing the relocation of the weapons and their hiding in a manner that would minimize their discovery, which I believe will turn out to mean burying things underground in inaccessible places."
.
He added that the speed of the coalition advance, "may have precluded retrieving and using those weapons in a timely fashion."
.
Asked if the United States was doomed to follow a policy of preemption alone, Perle replied that it is necessary to restructure the United Nations to take account of security threats that arise within borders rather than are directed across borders.
.
"There is no doubt that if some of the organizations that are determined to destroy this country could lay their hands on a nuclear weapon they would detonate it, and they would detonate in the most densely populated cities in this country, with a view to killing as many Americans as possible, " he said. Yet there was nothing in the UN charter authorizing collective preemption to avoid such threats.
.
"I think the charter could say that the terrorist threat is a threat to all mankind," Perle said.
.
Perle said resentment over France's opposition to the war ran so deep in the United States that he doubted there could ever be a basis for constructive relations between the two governments.
.
"When you have both the government and the opposition agreed on one thing, which is that they are not sure whether they want Saddam Hussein to win, that is a shocking development and Americans have been shocked. The freedom fries and all the rest is a pretty deeply held sentiment. I am afraid this is not something that is easily patched and cannot be dealt with simply in the normal diplomatic way. because the feeling runs too deep. it's gone way beyond the diplomats."
.
Perle said he had no doubt the world is safer than it was a month ago. "The idea that liberating Iraq would spawn terrorists all over the Muslim world I think will be proven to be wrong, and it will be proven to be wrong by the Iraqis themselves . We are about to learn what life has been like under Saddam Hussein. Even in the tough world we are living in, people are going to be shocked about the depravity and sadism of the Saddam regime."
.
Perle said there were good reasons to support the Middle East peace process, but not in a way that suggests the United States has caused damage by the war in Iraq.
.
"The sense that we somehow owe this to the Arab world only diminishes the essential truth about what we've done in Iraq," he said. "We have not damaged Arab interests. We have advanced them by freeing 25 million people from this brutal dictatorship." Perle, a Pentagon adviser, sees more preemption in future

PARIS Richard Perle, one of the chief U.S. ideologists behind the war to oust Saddam Hussein, warned Friday that the United States would be compelled to act if it discovered that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been concealed in Syria.
.
Perle said that if the Bush administration were to learn that Syria had taken possession of such Iraqi weapons, "I'm quite sure that we would have to respond to that."
.
"It would be an act of such foolishness on Syria's part," he continued, "that it would raise the question of whether Syria could be reasoned with. But I suppose our first approach would be to demand that the Syrians terminate that threat by turning over anything they have come to possess, and failing that I don't think anyone would rule out the use of any of our full range of capabilities."
.
In an interview with editors of the International Herald Tribune, Perle said that the threat posed by terrorists he described as "feverishly" looking for weapons to kill as many Americans as possible obliged the United States to follow a strategy of preemptive war in its own defense.
.
Asked if this meant it would go after other countries after Iraq, he replied: "If next means who will next experience the 3d Army Division or the 82d Airborne, that's the wrong question. If the question is who poses a threat that the United States deal with, then that list is well known. It's Iran. It's North Korea. It's Syria. It's Libya, and I could go on."
.
Perle, a Pentagon adviser as a member of the Defense Policy Board, said the point about Afghanistan and now Iraq was that the United States had been put in a position of having to use force to deal with a threat that could not be managed in any other way.
.
The message to other countries on the list is "give us another way to manage the threat," he said, adding, "Obviously, our strong preference is always going to be to manage threats by peaceful means, and every one of the countries on the 'who's next?' list is in a position to end the threat by peaceful means."
.
"So the message to Syria, to Iran, to North Korea, to Libya should be clear. if we have no alternative, we are prepared to do what is necessary to defend Americans and others. But that doesn't mean that we are readying the troops for a next military engagement. We are not."
.
The former official in Republican administrations said the United States also has "a serious problem" with Saudi Arabia, where he said both private individuals and the government had poured money into extremist organizations.
.
"This poses such an obvious threat to the United States that it is intolerable that they continue to do this," he warned.
.
He said he had no doubt that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
.
"We will not find them unless we stumble across them," he said, "until we are able to interview those Iraqis who know where they are. The prospect of inspections may have had the effect of causing the relocation of the weapons and their hiding in a manner that would minimize their discovery, which I believe will turn out to mean burying things underground in inaccessible places."
.
He added that the speed of the coalition advance, "may have precluded retrieving and using those weapons in a timely fashion."
.
Asked if the United States was doomed to follow a policy of preemption alone, Perle replied that it is necessary to restructure the United Nations to take account of security threats that arise within borders rather than are directed across borders.
.
"There is no doubt that if some of the organizations that are determined to destroy this country could lay their hands on a nuclear weapon they would detonate it, and they would detonate in the most densely populated cities in this country, with a view to killing as many Americans as possible, " he said. Yet there was nothing in the UN charter authorizing collective preemption to avoid such threats.
.
"I think the charter could say that the terrorist threat is a threat to all mankind," Perle said.
.
Perle said resentment over France's opposition to the war ran so deep in the United States that he doubted there could ever be a basis for constructive relations between the two governments.
.
"When you have both the government and the opposition agreed on one thing, which is that they are not sure whether they want Saddam Hussein to win, that is a shocking development and Americans have been shocked. The freedom fries and all the rest is a pretty deeply held sentiment. I am afraid this is not something that is easily patched and cannot be dealt with simply in the normal diplomatic way. because the feeling runs too deep. it's gone way beyond the diplomats."
.
Perle said he had no doubt the world is safer than it was a month ago. "The idea that liberating Iraq would spawn terrorists all over the Muslim world I think will be proven to be wrong, and it will be proven to be wrong by the Iraqis themselves . We are about to learn what life has been like under Saddam Hussein. Even in the tough world we are living in, people are going to be shocked about the depravity and sadism of the Saddam regime."
.
Perle said there were good reasons to support the Middle East peace process, but not in a way that suggests the United States has caused damage by the war in Iraq.
.
"The sense that we somehow owe this to the Arab world only diminishes the essential truth about what we've done in Iraq," he said. "We have not damaged Arab interests. We have advanced them by freeing 25 million people from this brutal dictatorship." Perle, a Pentagon adviser, sees more preemption in future

PARIS Richard Perle, one of the chief U.S. ideologists behind the war to oust Saddam Hussein, warned Friday that the United States would be compelled to act if it discovered that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been concealed in Syria.
.
Perle said that if the Bush administration were to learn that Syria had taken possession of such Iraqi weapons, "I'm quite sure that we would have to respond to that."
.
"It would be an act of such foolishness on Syria's part," he continued, "that it would raise the question of whether Syria could be reasoned with. But I suppose our first approach would be to demand that the Syrians terminate that threat by turning over anything they have come to possess, and failing that I don't think anyone would rule out the use of any of our full range of capabilities."
.


< < Back to Start of Article Perle, a Pentagon adviser, sees more preemption in future

PARIS

MORE ON THE KILLING OF THE PROMINENT SHIA MUSLIM CLERIC

The Guardian Unlimited has this report on the killing of the Shia Muslim Cleric:

"Fear of chaos and internecine bloodshed in post-Saddam Iraq were quickly realised yesterday when a prominent Shia Muslim cleric was murdered in the holy city of Najaf.
Abdul Majid al-Khoei and another cleric were stabbed and hacked to death in the Imam Ali mosque, apparently while trying to make an agreement with a governmentappointe official for control of the shrine.

Supporters claimed that Mr Khoei had been killed by Saddam loyalists, but accounts of the attack were confused.

"We should not assume Saddam and his Ba'ath party are finished," a dissident cleric, Sheikh Fazel al-Haida, said. "These Fedayeen fighters worship Saddam like an idol, he is their preacher."

Mr Khoei, whose name has an enormous resonance in Iraq and far beyond, was the son of Ayatollah Sayed Abdul Qasim al-Khoei, leader of much of the Shia world until his death under house arrest in Najaf in 1992. He fled Iraq after the abortive 1991 Shia uprising and returned only last week from exile in London.

In an apparent gesture of reconciliation, he accompanied Haider al-Kadar, an appointee of the ministry of religion, into the goldendomed mosque in Najaf when supporters of another group accosted them.

"The people were shouting they hate him, he should not be here," a witness said.

Mr Khoei pulled a gun and fired one or two shots. It was unclear last night whether he had fired into the air or the crowd. But both men were then rushed and hacked to death with swords and knives.

US officials had hoped he would be able to handle delicate negotiations with local clergy in Najaf, as well as assist in the creation of a local government to replace the Ba'athist administration. "

ONE MARINE DIES IN THE SUICIDE BOMBING REPORTED EARLIER

The Guardian Unlimited is reporting one U.S. marine has died from the suicide bombing last night:

"A suicide bomber struck at a US military checkpoint in Baghdad last night, killing at least one marine only metres from where crowds had celebrated the collapse of the Iraqi regime.
Three marines were seriously injured. The sudden change in mood on the capital's streets came after a senior American general warned that Baghdad was still an "ugly" fighting zone.

The suicide bomber, wearing a vest laden with explosives, walked up to the checkpoint in Saddam City, the Shia suburb in eastern Baghdad. After he detonated the bomb marines ran from the checkpoint shouting, "Suicide bomber. Suicide bomber. Get all civilians away," according to an NBC television reporter who arrived at the checkpoint seconds after the blast.

One marine officer told his troops: "If you see anybody moving suspiciously, open fire." It was the second suicide bomb to hit an American checkpoint since the war began 22 days ago."

JULIAN BARNES SAYS: "THIS WAR WAS NOT WORTH A CHILD'S FINGER"

Julian Barnes of The Guardian Unlimited says, war not worth it:

"So, warnik, you think you've won? Please consider this. On Monday afternoon your guys thought they had found Saddam in a restaurant. A US plane dropped four very clever 2,000lb bombs on it. The next night, BBC News showed an enormous crater and its correspondent said that no one who might have been there could have got out alive. According to Peter Arnett, the sacked NBC correspondent, the targeted restaurant was still intact, but three neighbouring houses were reduced to rubble instead. According to most people, Saddam escaped. When asked about this, Torie Clarke, the US defence spokeswoman, said crisply: "I don't think that matters very much. I'm not losing sleep trying to figure out if he was in there."

I don't know how much of the above paragraph - apart from Clarke's words, which I saw coming out of her mouth - is true. It probably approximates to some sort of truth, and it's possible that years down the line an accurate version might emerge: how good was the tip-off, how accurate was the bombing, how many were killed, and how many of those were civilians? But I know this: if I were Clarke, I would think I ought to lose a little sleep. If I were Clarke, I might wonder about my American home town, and how secure it might be from terrorist attack. Because if her words, in their brutal flippancy, seemed shocking to me, then imagine their effect on someone whose father, brother, sister, friend, acquaintance was killed in that raid. Would they say, "It was a sacrifice we are happy to accept, because after all, you were trying to kill Saddam Hussein"? No, I doubt they would react like that.

As the war began, like others I tried to imagine what the best result might be. A quick war with single-figure casualties and Saddam ousted painlessly? But that might mean Rumsfeld and co merely forcing their troops to Damascus and Tehran, centres of acknowledged recalcitrance and listed evil. A slow, horrible war with so many Anglo-American dead that leaders in both countries would realise that go-it-alone invasions, which look to neutrals like neo-imperialism, were simply not practicable. But that would mean wishing for the extinction of hundreds, maybe thousands of troops, and even more civilians. An unanswerable either-or. So, something in-between? Well, something in-between is what we're getting. Enough for some to call it a stunning professional victory, others a vile and unnecessary bloodbath.

But there's another tacit calculation going on. The war depends on domestic public support. Public support depends in part on disguising the reality of war (hence the hypocritical hoo-ha about the "parading" of prisoners) and on calculating the acceptability of death. So what would be the best way of scoring the game? Someone, somewhere, some Machiavellian focus-grouper or damage statistician, is probably doing just this. Let's start with the basic unit: one dead Iraqi soldier, score one point. Two for a dead Republican Guard, three for Special Republican Guard or fedayeen. And so on up to the top of the regime: 5,000, let's say, for Chemical Ali; 7,500 for each of Saddam's sons; 10,000 for the tyrant himself.

Now for the potentially demoralising downside. One Iraqi civilian killed: if male, lose five points, female 10, a child 20. One coalition soldier killed: deduct 50 points. And then, worst of all (as it underlines the futility and hazard of war), one coalition soldier killed by friendly fire: deduct 100 points. On the other hand, gain 1,000 for each incident which a couple of years down the line can give rise to a feel-good Hollywood movie: witness "Saving Private Lynch".

By this count, the war is a success. And television has more or less reflected the weighting of the above scoresheet: film a swaddled, bleeding, terrified child in hospital and airtime is guaranteed. With what blithe unconcern, too, it has disregarded the one-pointers. How have the Iraqi military been presented? a) as massively outgunned; b) as foolishly sallying forth in columns and making themselves easy meat for aerial attack (though the words "turkey shoot" have doubtless been sensitively banned); c) as experimental subjects for live testing of daisycutter bombs; d) as "fanatically loyal", ie still fighting when massively outgunned; e) as running away in their underpants.

The return of British bodies has been given full-scale TV coverage: the Union-Jacked coffin, the saluting Prince Andrew, the waggling kilts of soldiers escorting the hearse of their fallen comrades. Then each dead soldier's face comes up on screen, sometimes in a blurry home colour print, with listing of wife, fiancee, children: it thuds on the emotions. But Iraqi soldiers? They're just dead. The Guardian told us in useful detail how the British Army breaks bad news to families. What happens in Iraq? Who tells whom? Does news even get through? Do you just wait for your 18-year-old conscript son to come home or not to come home? Do you get the few bits that remain after he has been pulverised by our bold new armaments? There aren't many equivalences around in this war, but you can be sure that the equivalence of grief exists. Here come the widow-makers, goes the cry as our tanks advance. Here too come the unwitting recruiters for al-Qaida.

For all the coverage, I don't know what I've seen. Embedding journalists has certainly worked from the military point of view. This is not to disparage them, and they have taken proportionally much greater casualties than the military. But they can at best provide footage, which is not the same as telling us what is actually happening; for that they, and we, depend on official spokesmen. And journalists have to be approved. French television ran a documentary about journalists who had been refused approval, and thus access. British television lets us assume we are getting as much, and as pure, information as it is possible to give in the circumstances.

But in wartime we are even less able, and willing, than usual to see ourselves as others see us. For us, the war consists of coalition troops, Saddam, Iraqi troops, and Iraqi civilians; with bit-parts for the Kurds and Turkey. In the first days of the war I saw a report on French television news which told me - I think - that the US had closed down its embassy and cultural centre in Pakistan; I say "I think" because I never saw it confirmed here. Reaction from the wider Arab world has been sketchily covered, as if to say: let's pretend this is a localised struggle with no wider repercussions, and then it might be. A friend of mine, who works in television, quickly realised he wasn't getting the full picture and signed his household up for six months of al-Jazeera. Only when his wife asked where he'd been learning Arabic did he realise the flaw in his thinking. But his instinct was absolutely right.

As Baghdad falls to conventional warfare, I keep remembering that mantra in Jack Straw's mouth: "nuclear, chemical and biological." He repeated it again and again while trying to round up support. Then the "nuclear" had to go, after the UN inspection report. So it was down to the other two villains. Like some, I believed (no, "very much wanted to believe" is as close as you get in this world of claim and counterclaim) Scott Ritter's judgment that if the Iraqis still had some bad stuff, it was past its use-by date and turning into hair-gel. Even so, it seemed a grotesque gamble on Bush and Blair's part to seek to prove that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons by provoking Saddam to use them against coalition troops. Now we're told that the wily bastard has moved them to Syria. (Hey, let's invade Syria! Then he might move them to Iran. We could look there afterwards!)

The peacenik question before the war went like this: suppose Saddam destroys all his weapons tomorrow, do we still invade on humanitarian grounds? I can't imagine there would have been too many cries of, Yes please. But that, in retrospect, may be what we've done, or shall endeavour to claim we have done and therefore had been intending. Does it look like a humanitarian war to you? Are "shock and awe" compatible with "hearts and minds"? Early on, a US infantryman was seen grimly returning fire over a sand dune, then turning to camera and complaining: "They don't seem to realise we're here to help them." How odd that they didn't.

In the past three weeks, I've had emails from friends in different parts of the world. Almost without fail, they have expressed incredulity at our prime minister's position. "We can understand Bush, we see exactly where he's coming from, we aren't surprised by his gross limitations and gross ambitions. But what is your Blair up to? He seems a civilised, intelligent man. What does he think he's doing? And what on earth does he think he's getting out of it?" Oil? Reconstruction contracts? Hardly. As for what he thinks he's doing: it seems, I explain, to be a mixture of deluded idealism (finding a moral case for war where neither the Anglican bishops nor the Pope - moral experts he might acknowledge - can see one) and deluded pragmatism: he really does believe the military conquest of Iraq will reduce the likelihood of terrorism.

This is Blair's War; and as he reminded us, history will be his judge. But since we'll all be dead by the time history comes along, three key Blair moments should be pondered. The first came long before the war was mooted. The prime minister was asked in the House of Commons about Iraq and replied with a satisfied gleam: "Saddam is in his cage." At the time I merely noted the crudeness of the diction, which is why the phrase has stuck. What few of us realised at the time was that the self-appointed zookeepers were abrogating to themselves the right to shoot the beast.

Then the question of the second UN resolution. Do you remember being told that we wouldn't go to war without a second resolution? How quickly came the slippage. On the February 15 anti-war march, one of the talking-points was how Blair seemed to have shafted himself: if he didn't get a second resolution, he would have to choose between going back on his promise to the British people or going back on his friendship with Bush. Soon, we knew his choice, which led to a third key moment. When accused once too often of being Bush's poodle, Blair responded that, on the contrary, if Bush had proved timorous over Iraq, he, Blair, would have been pressing him harder to take action. Not a typical example of our "restraining influence".

Well, peacenik, are you happy now that peace is coming? No, because I don't think this war, as conceived and justified, was worth a child's finger. At least, are you happy that Saddam's rule is effectively over? Yes, of course, like everyone else. So, do you see some incompatibility here? Yes, but less than the incompatibilities in your position.

And in return, warnik, I have two questions for you. Do you honestly believe that the staggering bombardment of Iraq, televised live throughout the Arab world, has made Britain, America, and the home town of Torie Clarke, safer from the threat of terrorism? And if so, let me remind you of another statement by your war leader, Mr Blair. He told us, in full seriousness, that once Saddam was eliminated, it would be necessary to "deal with" North Korea. Are you getting hot for the next one - the humanitarian attack on Pyongyang?
©Julian Barnes"

THE SUNNIS AND THE SHIAS AND LOOTING

This is a worthwhile article to read on the present distinction between Sunnis and Shias, and the origin of class politics in Iraq:

The two distinct mainstream paths of Islam, Sunni and Shia, divide Iraqi society. As Sunnis and Shias emerged into the scurrying, burning, breaking madness of Baghdad yesterday, a city sacking itself, the Sunni-Shia divide was meaningless. The true gulf was economic. The have-nots were taking from the haves.
Smoke rose from burning ministries, and documents which a few days ago still meant something snowed on to the road, and Baghdad residents were confused. Yes, let Saddam be removed from power, but why did the Americans have to unleash such chaos on the capital, or at least fail to leash it?

A young Iraqi architect, and self-proclaimed atheist, Ghaith Abdul Ahad, said there was Sunni-Shia tension, but western perceptions of it as tension between pro- and anti- Saddam forces were exaggerated.

"Mostly the Sunnis are terrified at the prospect of the Shia governing them," he said. "Most of the bourgeoisie are Sunni because of the long history of Sunni political dominance. The Shia are the oppressed, the underprivileged. Most of the looters are Shias.

"But then you can't have a line dividing the Sunni and Shia in Iraq. You could have lots of Shia whose point of view is that the Americans are infidels and invaders. And you can have some Sunnis against Saddam because he is an oppressor."

A walk through part of Baghdad's old quarter yesterday, through areas traditionally inhabited by both Shias and Sunnis, bore out Ahad's words. The religious divide was, for the time being at least, less important than the fact that the city was being plundered, and the invaders who had caused the police to flee were doing nothing to stop it.

On the Tigris embankment road of Abu Muwas, where bright green spring leaves hung in the sun, shading tarmac scorched and pitted by fighting, Hassan al-Musawi, an elderly, unemployed driver, offered sweet biscuits. He brought out a vial of perfume and ran a trace over the heels of his guests' hands, an Iraqi Shia practice.

"Most of the people accept the Americans for one reason: history has not yet produced anyone like Saddam. Even Hitler did not persecute his own people like Saddam," he said. "The Americans' aim is not colonisation or occupation. They have companies and want to invest in our resources, and give us a share. I don't look on this as an occupation. It's pure business."

Further along Abu Muwas, beyond one of the isolated protective cordons of US marines, whose overwhelming concern is protecting themselves against suicide bombers, the ransacked offices of the United Nations development programme were a burning husk.

"The Shias, they don't hate Saddam Hussein because he's a Sunni," said Eyad Hamid, a young looter hauling off a truck battery on a trolley. "We're all one people, and we were all being persecuted by the same guy."

His partner in disorder was manhandling an enormous wreath of paper flowers. He plucked two off and handed them to the Guardian as a gift. "Every single item that we take is the blood of the people," said Hamid.

A little further on, where the blackened detritus of war and plunder was thicker on the road, Iraqis squatted in the thirsty heat, waiting for the US military to reopen the bridges across the Tigris to civilians. The chief obstacle to opening them seemed to be a divide in its way more profound than that between Sunni and Shia - the divide between the US army, which controls the western end of the bridges, and the US marines, who control the eastern. The two services did not appear to be talking to each other.

"This is the change of regime, and look what's happening," complained Haider Abu Jabr, a factory foreman in his late forties, surveying the looters and the stuck bridgecrossers. "This is supposed to make it more stable. I prefer the security, the order, that was there under the old regime.

"Fuck Saddam Hussein. We don't care for him, but we care for the country. Every single building is burning. There's no official building that's not been looted."

U.S. MARINES KILL TWO CHILDREN; 5 SERVICEMEN WOUNDED IN ATTEMPTED SUICIDE BOMBING

The Guardian Unlimited is reporting that two children were killed yesterday by U.S. Marines, at a checkpoint; Thursday night, 5 servicemen were seriously injured in an attempted suicide bombing:

US marines said they killed two children at a checkpoint in Iraq yesterday when the driver of the vehicle in which the youngsters were travelling ignored warnings to stop, creating fears of a suicide attack. Captain Jay Delarosa, spokesman for the 15th US Marine Expeditionary Unit in Nassiriya, said nine other people in the vehicle were wounded in the incident.

"Our marines took action to protect themselves against what they thought was a suicide attack," he said, claiming the driver ignored repeated warnings to stop.

"We are providing the best available medical assistance to those injured," he added. No weapons had been found in the vehicle. "It was a regrettable mistake."

American forces manning checkpoints across Iraq are on edge following suicide attacks that have killed or wounded soldiers checking vehicles.

Capt Delarosa said a vehicle that he described as a minivan had approached a checkpoint in Nassiriya at high speed. "The vehicle was told numerous times to stop, not only by the signs but by motions by the marines," he said.

"The vehicle picked up speed and moved through the protecting obstacles in front of the checkpoint. The marines suspected, because of the actions, that it was a suicide bomber. The marines opened fire. Our command regrets this incident."

On March 29, four soldiers were killed in a suspected suicide attack near Najaf. On April 4, three US special forces soldiers and two Iraqis were killed when a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint in central Iraq.

On Thursday night, five servicemen were injured in a suicide attack at a checkpoint in Baghdad.

COALITION FORCES: FAILURE TO PLAN FOR LAWLESSNESS

Folks, you might as well go to the Independent.co.uk, for any given date of this war, and read all of the indexed articles, and feel yourselves thoroughly informed, as they offer some of the best reporting I have seen of this war. Here is an article acknowledging a failure of coalition forces to plan for lawlessness, and calling for them to do something about it:

Equally, however, no one could fail to be alarmed by the speed of the country's descent into lawlessness that has followed the overthrow of the Saddam's dictatorship.

Any sense of relief that the war was over so quickly should have nothing to do with the arguments about the wisdom of this war in the first place. Those arguments will continue to rage. The images of human suffering and civilian casualties will continue to haunt us: the video of the barrel of the Abrams tank as it fired at the Hotel Palestine, killing two journalists; the footage and stills of Ali Ismail Abbas, the 12-year-old boy who lost his family and his arms. And there are hundreds of other stories of loss and injury as poignant as his, even in the same hospital.

Of course, we should acknowledge, too, that the Iraqis suffered grievously under Saddam as we try to weigh all the factors in the balance. For many, the civilian deaths can never be justified, no matter how pleased the survivors are at their freedom. Nor have we even begun to count the number of Iraqi conscripts who died, and who might be counted almost as much innocent victims as the civilians.

For others, including, we suspect, many readers of this newspaper, much will turn on whether or not stocks of chemical or biological weapons are found, and whether credible witnesses come forward to say that Saddam was working on ways to use them. In the meantime, however, we accept that there are more urgent priorities for Allied troops than trying to find those infamous litres of anthrax.

Return to order

No matter how we balance the suffering caused by this war against the potential benefits of post-war Iraq, we should be grateful that it did not last longer, and that the American bombing was not heavier or more arbitrary.

The Allies tried to preserve the infrastructure, and largely succeeded in doing so, which means that as soon as law and order can be established it should be much easier to restore a functioning society and economy than if the cities of Iraq had been flattened.

The immediate priority for the American and British forces is to establish control and order in Iraq. Yesterday it was the turn of Mosul to experience the mixed blessing of freedom – for looters as much as everyone else. It is not in an attempt to prove a point that we observe that there has been a failure of the American and British planning for the immediate transition from a state of war to a state of military administration.

CHARITIES FOR IRAQ

I wanted to highlight the charities listed in the previous entry.I hope to gather more information on this subject, and please, if you know of any charities, please contact me (see my email link to the left). I will make permanent links to charities helping Iraq.

The three charities at work in Iraq already are Cafod (0500 858885), the Red Cross (08705 125 125) and Islamic Relief (0870 444 3132)
11 April 2003 18:30"

THE SAD STORY OF ALI, THE BOY WITH NO ARMS

Paul Vallely, of the Independent.co.uk, offers this story of the boy named Ali, whose arms were blown off by coalition bombing:

"Faith & Reason: The truth behind the sad story of the boy with no arms
When we respond to a symbol of suffering we must learn to distinguish between true compassion and a token salving of our conscience
By Paul Vallely
12 April 2003


A woman rang me this week from Hamburg to say that she ran a foundation to help disadvantaged children. She wanted to know how she could contact the 12-year-old boy whose photograph appeared in this newspaper this week. It appeared in almost every other paper too. She did not know his name. But he was the boy who had had his arms blown off by a missile which also killed his mother and father. She wanted to try to do something to help.

She, and the rest of the world. The photograph showed him lying in a Baghdad hospital bed, with stumps where his arms should be, and burns across his torso. The expression on his face, depending on which caption-writer you encountered, was a grimace of pain or an uncomprehending stare – though, to me, it seemed all too clear that the poor child had bearing down upon him as much of the enormity of what had happened to him as it was possible for him to comprehend. Behind him, you knew if you'd seen it on television, sat his aunt bathing his head and repeatedly telling him that his parents had gone to heaven. His name, by the way, was Ali Ismaeel Abbas.

Newspapers were inundated with donations and enquiries as to how people could help. One paper raised £20,000 in one day. Another pointed readers in the direction of the Limbless Association. The Maharanee of Jaipur offered to pay his medical fees, anywhere in the world. The Dorset clinic which makes prosthetic limbs for Heather Mills McCartney said it would provide Ali with two artificial arms. Red Cross officials debated whether the boy's interests would be best served by bringing him to Britain.

Something interesting is going on here. We live within overlapping circles of special bonds: family, friends, community, class, co-religionists, party, tribe, race, nation and so on. Our level of compassion is usually in some kind of proportion to these loyalties, as is shown by the cold apophthegm "charity begins at home". The response to this distraught Iraqi child shows we can transcend this. In part this is from the sense we call sympathy. "I immediately thought of my own grandchildren of the same age," one woman wrote to one newspaper.

Yet there is more to compassion than emotion; unlike pity it implies beneficent action: the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us that, and it has its equivalents in most faiths. But it also requires imagination. The war offers another example. Razzaq Kazem al-Khafaj is the man whose wife, six children, mother, father and two brothers were all killed when missiles from US helicopters hit their car near Hilla as they fled their home town of Nasiriyah, in a vain attempt to escape the fighting. Pictures of Razzaq were in most papers too, howling inconsolably and flailing his arms over the rough open coffins which contained the wreckage of his life.

There was no physical symbol of what lay ahead for Razzaq. There would be no struggle with prosthetic limbs, only the loneliness of long, dark, despairing nights. Had he been a Westerner perhaps someone would have written about the psychological scars of multiple bereavement or about the process of counselling which might help him find a way through his dispossession. But to do that we need the moral imagination to see him as a subject, as a master of his own actions. And Razzaq, like Ali, and the countless others like them, are rather treated as objects – objects of our aggression, of our pity, of our compassion, but never really seen as equals. They are people we cannot remember the names of: the boy with no arms, the man with the coffins. There was something of commodification in the well-intentioned judgement on poor little Ali that his was "the most moving image of the war so far". So far.

The religious impulse, by contrast, is to see these people as uniquely valuable individuals, each made in the image of God. Or if we want to take our ethics from Kant we might talk of the moral imperative being to "act so as to treat humanity never only as a means but always also as an end". Or in humanist vocabulary we might talk about basic human dignity. But all lead us to the same place, and the need to distinguish between symbolism and tokenism.

The temptation when we send money to buy new arms for Ali is that psychologically we feel assuaged, as if our compassion blots out some offence. That applies to both those who were anti-war and pro-war at the outset, because both share a complicity in a world which brought us to this point. For the offence is far greater than what has been inflicted on this one child. "I feel ashamed to be an adult," as another correspondent put it in the letter which accompanied his newspaper donation. Whether or not we think the war has been waged for Ali's own good, we know there is no way of communicating that notion to an innocent child whose parents have been taken from him, and with them his limbs and hands. Nor all the other victims.

In all this response there is sympathy, beneficence, and there is also this sense of justice. But in true compassion there is also love – that restless longing for God in the human heart – and the sure knowledge that whatever we offer to Ali must be offered to those who suffer in all those tragedies and outrages that are not thrust before our eyes.

The three charities at work in Iraq already are Cafod (0500 858885), the Red Cross (08705 125 125) and Islamic Relief (0870 444 3132)
11 April 2003 18:30"

Robert Fisk provides his observations to the looting and anarchy in Baghdad, in the Independent.co.uk:

"Baghdad is burning. You could count 16 columns of smoke rising over the city yesterday afternoon. At the beginning, there was the Ministry of Trade. I watched the looters throw petrol through the smashed windows of the ground floor and the fire burst from them within two seconds.

Then there was a clutch of offices at the bottom of the Jumhuriyah Bridge, which emitted clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. By mid- afternoon, I was standing outside the Central Bank of Iraq as each window flamed like a candle, a mile-long curtain of ash and burning papers drifting over the Tigris.

As the pickings got smaller, the looters grew tired and – the history of Baghdad insists that anarchy takes this form – the symbols of government power were cremated. The Americans talked of a "new posture" but did nothing. They pushed armoured patrols through the east of the city, Abrams tanks and Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, but their soldiers did no more than wave at the arsonists. I found a woman weeping beside her husband in the old Arab market. "We are destroying what we now have for ourselves," she said to him. "We are destroying our own future."

The flames spread. By mid-afternoon, the al-Sadeer hotel was burning – the army of child thieves sent into the building had already stolen the bed-linen and the mattresses and the beds and tables and even the reception desk and its massof iron keys. Then from the towering Ministry of Industry, came trails of black smoke. Every central street was strewn with papers, discarded furniture, stolen, wrecked cars and the contents of the small shops whose owners had not invested in armoured doors.

When I tried to reach the old Saddam hospital opposite the Ministry of Defence, American rifle-fire was hissing through the trees opposite the administrative block; they were, two nurses trying to flee the building said, shooting at any moving car because they believed Iraqi soldiers were hiding there. I saw none.

At last, the banks were looted. The Iraqi dinar has collapsed and no one had bothered to bash their way into the banks before.

But in the morning, I saw a mob storming the Rafidain Bank near the Baghdad governorate, dragging a massive iron safe to the door and crow-barring it open. Given the worth of the dinar, they would have done better to leave the cash inside and steal the safe.

And so it was by early evening that Baghdad was a place of gunfire as well as smoke. Stall-owners turned up with guns to protect their property because the Americans obviously declined to do so. Two looters were wounded.

Then mobs broke into the Kindi hospital. By the time I reached the compound – where only five days ago lives were being saved – armed men were at the gates. Most were in blue medical gowns, although they did not look to me to be doctors. They appeared to be Shia Muslims and this raised an immediate question. Was the Shia population of Baghdad trying – if only by protecting the insistutions of the place – to take over from the Sunnis?

At the Kindi hospital, they ordered journalists away from the premises but, briefly obtaining access to the emergency ward, I found a Shia Muslim cleric inside, a man who had studied in southern Lebanon, lecturing the gunmen on the need to restore order in the city. Of course, that was the Americans' job. But they weren't doing it.

After the West German and Slovak embassies and the Unicef offices, it was the turn of the French cultural centre to be looted.

I briefly mentioned the extent of the anarchy to a US Marine officer who promised to tell his colonel about it. When I saw him later, he said he'd seen the colonel – but hadn't had time to mention the looting and burning.

Just a week ago, it was the Iraqi army's oil fires that covered the city in darkness. Now it is the newly "liberated" Iraqi people who are cloaking their city in ash.
11 April 2003 18:25"

IRAQ IN CHAOS

The Independent.co.uk has this report on the chaos in Iraq:

Chaos threatened to engulf Iraq yesterday, with American-led forces apparently unwilling or unable to deal with a storm of arson, looting, car-jacking, drunkenness and factional fighting that swept Baghdad, Mosul and other big cities.

The Red Cross, aid charities and Iraqi citizens pleaded with the US to honour its obligations under the Geneva Convention and protect the civilian population. But a senior commander said: "At no time do we really see [ourselves] becoming a police force."

After the capitulation of the northern city of Mosul – scene of some of the most frantic looting and destruction yesterday – a reported 2,000 US troops were deployed to secure the northern oilfields, bringing all of Iraq's oil reserves, the second largest in the world, under American and British protection. But US commanders in the field said they did not have the manpower, or the orders from above, to control the scenes on the streets of Baghdad and other cities.

The violence in the capital worsened from the looting seen on Thursday to the torching of dozens of government buildings, armed robberies and battles between Shia gunmen and Fedayeen paramilitary troops loyal to Saddam Hussein. In Nasiriyah, two children were shot dead by US Marines after the van in which they were travelling ignored an order to stop. In Basra, British troops killed five men who fired at them while trying to rob a bank. In Mosul, near the Turkish border, where the entire Iraqi V Corps capitulated overnight, mobs rampaged through the streets, stripping public buildings, invading the central bank, tearing up banknotes and burning a market.

Mosul's university library, celebrated for its ancient manuscripts, was sacked, despite appeals from the minarets of the city's mosques for people to stop destroying their own town. "Mosul is facing a barbaric assault," said Huthaif al-Dewaji, a professor of medicine at the university. "We urge Mr Bush, Mr Blair ... the commanders of the peshmerga [Kurdish guerrillas] to help us establish some control."

"Where are the Americans?" a man clutching a hand-grenade shouted as he and dozens of other angry Arab residents advanced on a television team in the main square. "You are shooting pictures but you have no way of stopping people from looting. Where are the Americans? Get out! Get out!"

In Najaf, where a Shia religious leader was hacked to death on Thursday, days after returning from exile in London, the rival Shia faction that murdered him was reported to have taken control of the city.

In Kirkuk, Kurdish forces withdrew but a supermarket and Baath party offices were set alight amid growing tension between the Arab and Kurdish communities.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, dismissed the chaos as a "transitional" phase, born of "pent-up frustration" after 24 years of oppression. He accused newspapers of exaggerating the unrest and said television stations were showing the same footage over and over again "of some person walking out of a building with a vase.

"It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Mr Rumsfeld said.

"They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned that Baghdad's medical system had "virtually collapsed" from a combination of combat damage, looting and fear.

Few medical staff had reported for work after mobs invaded some hospitals on Thursday and stripped them of vital equipment. An ICRC spokeswoman, Nada Doumani, said: "The ICRC is profoundly alarmed by the chaos ... Under the Geneva Conventions, it is up to the occupying forces to impose law and order."

The spokesman for US Central Command, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, suggested that there was little the 120,000 American and British troops inside Iraq could do until a new civilian administration was formed. The first talks between potential Iraqi leaders, from inside and outside the country, will be convened in Nasiriyah on Tuesday.

"What we see [ourselves doing] is taking actions that are necessary to create stability," Brig Gen Brooks said. British officials indicated that their troops in the southern city of Basra would soon take direct action to stamp out lawlessness.

In Baghdad, food was said to be running low last night, water reduced to a trickle and the electricity still off. Although some looters concentrated on government buildings, others were attacking shops and even robbing people at gunpoint.

Arkan Daoud Boutros, 24, said: "Americans entered the city with the slogan of helping us, but we haven't seen anything from them. We have seen only robbery."
11 April 2003 18:19

RUSSIAN JOURNALISTS QUIT WAR COVERAGE

Sadly, I've discovered this Russian coverage of the war that is now ending, due to the killing of journalists in the last couple of days. The original documents can be found on this web site, iraqwar.ru, but they have been translated by Necroman, on the above link that I have provided. They have this parting message, and a vast collection of war coverage indexed:

"April 8, 2003, 1846hrs MSK (GMT +4 DST), Moscow - Events of the last 2 days have made further work of Ramzaj group in its current format impossible.

With the embassy personnel and journalists having left Iraq and most of Iraqi information services evacuated from Baghdad, analysis of the situation in Baghdad and Iraq as a whole becomes ineffective.

The quickly changing course of street fights leaves any informational updates far behind. Direct TV broadcasts are far more evident than any analytics. At the same time, we do not have the right to reveal classified, “top secret” information.

Apart from that, our actions meet increasing opposition from the official quarts and in fact are turning into confrontation the outcome of which is not difficult to forecast.

Therefore we have to discontinue our work and thank everybody for taking part in the project.

In conclusion we would like to say:

All the “updates” came out from a compact group formed a few years ago in the framework of a special service. The group used to work for the government for a long time but all its members have left the service and now act as an independent analytical group that has kept some capabilities. This gives an answer to the most common question – about the sources of our information.

We participated in the ongoing events on a “non-profit” basis and had no object other than to stand the US-British informational blockade of the war in Iraq.

Our updates were not genuine materials from any of Russian or other special services, but rather an “intellectual product” of the group itself, product of its operative, informational and analytical abilities. But compiling the updates we used materials available from our friends from special information structures. The very form “operativnaya informatsiya” never claimed to be “military information updates” but served as additional data for self-dependent analysis.

The main goal of the project was to present intelligible military analytics on the war in Iraq, which is currently missing, to the informational space. We had both success and obvious fails along the way.

We are grateful to the iraqwar.ru and forum.vif2.ru administration that took the risk and burden of working with us and we understand how many problems they have to endure because of that.

With all responsibility we state that no messages, letters, appeals and other materials, apart from the daily “updates” on iraqwar.ru and forum.vif2.ru were made by Ramzaj group and any other statement in our name is nothing but mystification.

The author with the nickname “Kondor” is the only authorized source of information about the group and its “official contact person”. In cases of uncertainty or “nickname cloning” authentication is possible using his personal photo that supplements one of images published on iraqwar.ru and comes as its logical continuation.

With unfailing respect to all of you,

Ramzaj

(source: iraqwar.ru, 04-08-03, translated by Necroman)"

"IT WOULD BE A CRIME TO DIVERT IRAQI OIL REVENUES TO RECONSTRUCTION", Max B. Sawicky

MaxSpeak, You Listen wants info on the privatization on Iraq for a new blog:

"As I noted here recently, it would be a crime to divert Iraqi oil revenues to reconstruction. Like party-goers who split before the host starts cleaning up the mess, that is the responsibility of the "coalition of the imminently unwilling." By rights, the Iraqi people deserve to be made whole since a major justification for this war was to enhance U.S. security (WMDs, Al Queda, etc.). The entire proceeds of oil exploitation is theirs by any notion of right.

One device for plunder will lie in the arcane details of oil development deals. The fact that the new Iraq will own the mineral rights leaves to the imagination the extent to which they sign over some share of this wealth to companies that in principle are doing nothing more than supplying capital. The only just reward for the companies is some competitive rental rate on their capital. Of course, there is no fun in that. The companies will be aiming for what economists call the economic rents, or "extra-normal returns." (In bygone days in the U.S., we used to tax "excess profits" of oil companies. Now we're moving to apply negative tax rates to capital.)...

Send me all the clips, links, and other dirt you care to about U.S. contracting with regard to Iraq. I'll be setting up a separate page on my otherwise moribund web site. In the process I hope we can learn more about how privatization actually works, and for whom."

"WAR INTSELF IS...PERHAPS THE MOST POTENT NARCOTIC INVENTED BY HUMANKIND"

The Nation offers this view of war, written by a veteran war journalist, Chris Hedges:

"War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind. Modern industrial warfare means that most of those who are killed never see their attackers. There is nothing glorious or gallant about it. If we saw what wounds did to bodies, how killing is far more like butchering an animal than the clean and neat Hollywood deaths on the screen, it would turn our stomachs. If we saw how war turns young people into intoxicated killers, how it gives soldiers a license to destroy not only things but other human beings, and if we saw the perverse thrill such destruction brings, we would be horrified and frightened. If we understood that combat is often a constant battle with a consuming fear we have perhaps never known, a battle that we often lose, we would find the abstract words of war--glory, honor and patriotism--not only hollow but obscene. If we saw the deep psychological scars of slaughter, the way it maims and stunts those who participate in war for the rest of their lives, we would keep our children away. Indeed, it would be hard to wage war.

For war, when we confront it truthfully, exposes the darkness within all of us. This darkness shatters the illusions many of us hold not only about the human race but about ourselves. Few of us confront our own capacity for evil, but this is especially true in wartime. And even those who engage in combat are afterward given cups from the River Lethe to forget. And with each swallow they imbibe the myth of war. For the myth makes war palatable. It gives war a logic and sanctity it does not possess. It saves us from peering into the darkest recesses of our own hearts. And this is why we like it. It is why we clamor for myth. The myth is enjoyable, and the press, as is true in every nation that goes to war, is only too happy to oblige. They dish it up and we ask for more.

War as myth begins with blind patriotism, which is always thinly veiled self-glorification. We exalt ourselves, our goodness, our decency, our humanity, and in that self-exaltation we denigrate the other. The flip side of nationalism is racism--look at the jokes we tell about the French. It feels great. War as myth allows us to suspend judgment and personal morality for the contagion of the crowd. War means we do not face death alone. We face it as a group. And death is easier to bear because of this. We jettison all the moral precepts we have about the murder of innocent civilians, including children, and dismiss atrocities of war as the regrettable cost of battle. As I write this article, hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including children and the elderly, are trapped inside the city of Basra in southern Iraq--a city I know well--without clean drinking water. Many will die. But we seem, because we imbibe the myth of war, unconcerned with the suffering of others.

Yet, at the same time, we hold up our own victims. These crowds of silent dead--our soldiers who made "the supreme sacrifice" and our innocents who were killed in the crimes against humanity that took place on 9/11--are trotted out to sanctify the cause and our employment of indiscriminate violence. To question the cause is to defile the dead. Our dead count. Their dead do not. We endow our victims, like our cause, with righteousness. And this righteousness gives us the moral justification to commit murder. It is an old story."

"PITY THE NATION THAT WELCOMES ITS TYRANTS WITH TRUMPETINGS AND DISMISSES THEM WITH HOOTINGS OF DERISION"

Robert Fisk, with the Independent.co.uk, offers his view of the "fall" of Baghdad, and the chaos that followed. Folks, this is an amazing article. Robert Fisk has proven himself to be the kind of journalist that describes what he sees, not what he wants to see:

"The Americans "liberated" Baghdad yesterday, destroyed the centre of Saddam Hussein's quarter-century of brutal dictatorial power but brought behind them an army of looters who unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy. It was a day that began with shellfire and air strikes and blood-bloated hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator's statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for 25 years, had grovellingly obeyed Saddam's most humble secret policeman turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground.

"It is the beginning of our new freedom," an Iraqi shopkeeper shouted at me. Then he paused, and asked: "What do the Americans want from us now?' The great Lebanese poet Kalil Gibran once wrote that he pitied the nation that welcomed its tyrants with trumpetings and dismissed them with hootings of derision. And the people of Baghdad performed this same deadly ritual yesterday, forgetting that they – or their parents – had behaved in identical fashion when the Arab Socialist Baath Party destroyed the previous dictatorship of Iraq's generals and princes. Forgetting, too, that the "liberators" were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq.

As tens of thousands of Shia Muslim poor from the vast slums of Saddam City poured into the centre of Baghdad to smash their way into shops, offices and government ministries – an epic version of the same orgy of theft and mass destruction that the British did so little to prevent in Basra – US Marines watched from only a few hundred yards away as looters made off with cars, rugs, hoards of money, computers, desks, sofas, even door-frames.

In Al-Fardus (Paradise) Square, US Marines helped a crowd of youths pull down the gaunt and massive statue of Saddam by roping it to an armoured personnel carrier. It toppled menacingly forward from its plinth to hang lengthways above the ground, right arm still raised in fraternal greetings to the Iraqi people...

Not that the nightmare is entirely over. For though the Americans will mark yesterday as their first day of occupation – they, of course, will call it liberation – vast areas of Baghdad remained outside the control of the United States last night. And at dusk, just before darkness curled over the land, I crossed through the American lines, back to the little bit of Saddam's regime that remained intact within the vast, flat city of Baghdad. Down grey, carless streets, I drove to the great bridges over the Tigris which the Americans had still not crossed from the west. And there, on the corner of Bab al-Moazzam Street, were a small group of mujahedin fighters, firing Kalashnikov rifles at the American tanks on the other side of the waterway. It was brave and utterly pathetic and painfully instructive.

For the men turned out to be Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Not an Iraqi was among them. The Baathist militiamen, the Republican Guard, the greasy Iraqi intelligence men, the so-called Saddam Fedayeen had all left their posts and crept home. Only the foreign Arabs, like the Frenchmen of the Nazi Charlemagne Division in 1945 Berlin, fought on. At the end, many Iraqis had shunned these men and a group of them had turned up to sit outside the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, pleading to journalists for help in returning home.

"We left our wives and children and came here to die for these people and then they told us to go," one of them said. But at the end of the Bab al-Moazzam Bridge they fought on last night and when I left them I could hear the American jets flying in from the west. Hurtling back through those empty streets, I could hear, too, the American tank fire as it smashed into their building.

But tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the "liberating" kind from which smart young soldiers with tanned faces look down with smiles at Iraqis who are obliging enough to wave at them, tanks with cute names stencilled on their gun barrels, names like "Kitten Rescue" and "Nightmare Witness" (this with a human skull painted underneath) and "Pearl". And there has to be a first soldier – of the occupying or liberating kind – who stands at the very front of the first column of every vast and powerful army.

So I walked up to Corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, from Michigan. He hadn't spoken to his parents for two months so I called his mother on my satellite phone and from the other side of the world, Mrs Breeze came on the line and I handed the phone to her son.

And so this is what the very first soldier to enter the centre of Baghdad told his family yesterday evening. "Hi you guys. I'm in Baghdad.

"I'm ringing to say 'Hi! I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys. The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon.''

Yes, they all say the war will be over soon. There will be a homecoming no doubt for Corporal Breeze and I suppose I admired his innocence despite the deadly realities that await America in this dangerous, cruel land. For even as the marine tanks thrashed and ground down the highway, there were men and women who saw them and stood, the women scarved, the men observing the soldiers with the most acute attention, who spoke of their fear for the future, who talked of how Iraq could never be ruled by foreigners.

"You'll see the celebrations and we will be happy Saddam has gone," one of them said to me. "But we will then want to rid ourselves of the Americans and we will want to keep our oil and there will be resistance and then they will call us "terrorists". Nor did the Americans look happy "liberators". They pointed their rifles at the pavements and screamed at motorists to stop – one who did not, an old man in an old car, was shot in the head in front of two French journalists.

Of course, the Americans knew they would get a good press by "liberating" the foreign journalists at the Palestine Hotel. They lay in the long grass of the nearest square and pretended to aim their rifles at the rooftops as cameras hissed at them, and they flew a huge American flag from one of their tanks and grinned at the journalists, not one of whom reminded them that just 24 hours earlier, their army had killed two Western journalists with tank fire in that same hotel and then lied about it.

But it was the looters who marked the day as something sinister rather than joyful. In Saddam City, they had welcomed the Americans with "V" signs and cries of "Up America" and the usual trumpetings, but then they had set off downtown for a more important appointment. At the Ministry of Economy, they stole the entire records of Iraq's exports and imports on computer discs, with desk-top computers, with armchairs and fridges and paintings. When I tried to enter the building, the looters swore at me. A French reporter had his money and camera seized by the mob."