Iranian Border Closure Roils Kurdistan;
Is Weapons Baiting a War Crime?
Sunni Arab guerrillas blew up an internal pipeline bringing petroleum from Baiji to the refinery at Doura in Baghdad. It is the second such act of sabotage in the past week.
A frightening spread of cholera and cholera-like symptoms up and down Iraq is now being reported, with cases in Basra in the deep south and also in the north. The outbreak is rooted in the breakdown of water purification plants and possibly in an interdiction of chlorine trucks by the US military, for fear the guerrillas will take them over and use them for truck bombings (it has happened). But at some point the US military will have to choose between the risk of chlorine truck bombs and the deaths or illness of thousands of Iraqis.
The bombing at the mosque in Baquba has ended up taking 26 lives, including that of the city's police chief, and wounding 50. Baquba has a Sunni Arab majority but is being ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).
The Iranian closure of the border with Iraqi Kurdistan has stranded whole lines of trucks on the Iranian side and raised the prospect of Iraqi Kurds being forced to buy more expensive goods from Turkey and Syria. Iran closed the border in part to protest the US military's kidnapping of an Ianian merchant and accused operative of the Revolutionary Guards.
The Washington Post's revelation of a 'baiting' operation by US snipers raises the possibility that it may have involved war crimes, according to Raw Story. The snipers put out material that could be used to make weapons, and then killed anyone who tried to pick it up. The problem is that Iraqis are extremely poor and you couldn't know why they were picking it up (most of the country's scrap metal is being sold off to China). Raw Story writes, 'The baiting program should be rigorously examined, says Eugene Fidell, the president of the National Institute of Military Justice, because it raises frightening possibilities. "In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war," he said, "if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back." '
John Fout looks at the likely impact of loose federalism (soft partition) in Iraq on the oil industry and foreign contracts.
The Iraq parliament is crafting laws regulating foreign security firms in that country. There are tens of thousands of private contractors supporting the US military there. Parliament hasn't been able to pass a petroleum bill or to make and strides toward national reconciliation, but it has been galvanized by Blackwater's recent killing of 11 Iraqis.
AP argues that the prosperity in Iraqi Kurdistan is built on shaky foundations, especially with regard to banking and finance.
Reuters reports that
' Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman said State Department officials had told the Oversight and Government Reform Committee he chairs they could not provide details of corruption in Iraq's government unless the information was treated as a "state secret" and not revealed to the public. "You are wrong to interfere with the committee's inquiry," Waxman said in a letter to Rice. "The State Department's position on this matter is ludicrous," added Waxman, a vocal opponent of the Bush administration's Iraq policies. '
So obviously they wouldn't want to classify the extent of corruption in Iraq unless it was bad news for the Bush administration.
The SF Chronicle suggests that even if the Dems win the White House in 08, the US military will be in Iraq for some time to come.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband conceded Tuesday that British involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had alienated millions of Muslims:
' He admitted that British foreign policy had alienated millions of Muslims. Speaking of a recent visit to Pakistan, he said: "I met young, educated, articulate people in their 20s and 30s who told me millions of Muslims around the world think we're not seeking to empower them, but to dominate them. So we have to stop and think. "The lesson is that it is not good enough to have good intentions. To assert shared values is not enough, We must embody them in shared institutions." He gave the example of Turkish membership of the EU, saying Europe must not be seen as a closed Christian club. '
If Tony "Lapdog" Blair were still PM, Cheney would just order him to fire Miliband for such frank and rational statements.
Reuters reports civil war violence on Tuesday; major attacks:
'DIYALA - A U.S. soldier was killed in Diyala province when an explosion hit his vehicle, U.S. forces said.
BAGHDAD - Two car bombs killed six people and wounded 20 in the Zayouna district of eastern Baghdad, police and hospital sources said. . .
BAGHDAD - Twelve bodies were found in different parts of Baghdad on Monday, police said.
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed one person and wounded four in eastern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb near a police station wounded seven people, including a policeman, in the Karrada district of central Baghdad, police said. . .
MOSUL - A suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt blew himself up near a police colonel, wounding the officer and nine others in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .
FALLUJA - A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol killed one policeman and wounded another in Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. . .
BASRA - A suicide car bomb killed three people in an attack targeting a police station in the southern Shi'ite city of Basra, police and a health official said. Up to 20 people were wounded. Basra lies 550 km (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad. . .
KIRKUK - A roadside bomb wounded two people in southern Kirkuk, police said.
HAWIJA - Hussein Ali Saleh, head of Hawija City Council, was wounded when a suicide car bomber targeted his convoy on a road near the town of Hawija, 70 km (40 miles) southwest of the city of Kirkuk, police said. Two of his guards were wounded.'
The rash of bombings in Basra may force British troops back into the city.
At the Global Affairs group blog, Manan Ahmed on the "Bhutto complex.'
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/26/2007 12:30:00 AM
|
Facebook
11 Comments:
There is a fundamental problem in the Iraqi constitution regarding federal laws: an obscene article gives the provinces the right to override any federal law. Right now, the federal oil law states that the regions have no right to sign contracts, while the Kurdish oil law, which overrides it, says they can!
This system is just unworkable. What is the purpose of federal laws then? The problem is compounded by having Barzani, who is of low IQ, dictating to the Kurdish Parliament which rubber-stamp anything the warlords say.
A possible solution is along the lines of the Biden proposal, but will make him and his AIPAC sponsors very unhappy.
The idea is to setup an Iraq Region similar to the Kurdish one, with its own Parliament and its own constitution. It can simply produce a law which allocates all the oil proceeds in Iraq to Iraq, excluding Kurdistan. Kurdistan will then turn into a poor mini Afghanistan ruled by warlords with virtually no income.
The Federal Government and the Federal Parliament will become totally irrelevant. The Iraqi Region Parliament and Government will be free from the Kurdish warlords and the peshmerga.
Basically, the Kurds will be forced into virtual independence to free Iraq from them once and for all.
I didn't see any citation by Raw Story of how this qualifies as a war crime, and more annoyingly, didn't see the phrase "war crime" anywhere but the headline.
Baited ambushes sounds like they could qualify, but why no citation?
amerikan military KIA in Iraq has reached 3800.
gd, but cheney / bush rock !!!!
Baiting
This is something that has gone on for years now, beginning (at least) in the 1990-91 GHWB Iraqi Boondoggli. Soldiers would leave crates of whatever exposed then yank them back just as some Iraqi (usually a kid) would try to make off with them. That the bait has switched is merely another dimension of the ruse.
Certainly, this is not unlike much else that the powers for freedom and democracy have used but in various different forms. Foreign aid and financial credits have been popular in efforts to seduce the recipients into submission. Even the prospects of military aid (pick your intended destination) have been employed to the final users' detriment. We recall that Saddam Hussein was one such target during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War, receiving intelligence and whatever in order to assist him in being ground down by the conflict while Iran was being bolstered by the same tactics with the same intended end. Fueling any conflict with arms and the means to inflict destruction only ensures the engaged combatants will be wounded, maimed, or killed in a proxy situation, advantageous only to those standing away from the fray.
The key is to attract people with the highest value items and then kill 'em by degrees, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. The prospects of having Hussein removed came with assurances that things would improve, not only for Iraq for the entire Arab world. The issue surrounding chlorine and water purification is much the same, depriving them pesky noncompliant folks of the simplest means of survival, using something like disease to make them enjoy squirming under the heel of the boot. Once the people get tired of having to endure the cholera and other diseases, then they will be certain to adjust to the imperialists' unjust demands.
Just as the Europeans used the ghetto and the pogrom to make the minorities compliant, just as the 'Israelites' employ almost identical tactics against the Palestinians, just as the Americans have sanctioned Cuber, just as the Myanmar militarists have suppressed their people, so will the games of empire and politics continue in efforts to oppress and suppress the otherwise unimpressed masses. This is something that the Vaticanians have employed for millennia now, ensuring that their religious adherents remain fruitful and exponentiate, causing overpopulations in various countries that are unable to sustain the populace at a comparable economic rate, forcing them into slum conditions and destitution while expecting bleeding heart organisations like the Christian Childrens' Fund to have the sympathetic send their 60 cents a day to some poor waifs for their maintenance, to be able to grow up only to perpetuate the cycle. And then there's the bait used in the other direction, usually drugs that will make the criminalised more accepting of the warlords and state-sanctioned crime bosses.
While we can point to countries with large segments of the population finding meaningful expression through sexual reproduction, we have our own sects expounding and expanding upon similar topics, prohibiting abortion and birth control, expecting their adherents to repopulate the Earth with their ilk. Those American states with the greatest numbers of these believers are also those with the least educational qualifications, making them into pick-em-up truck Third Worlders, beholdin' to they preachers and them folks who will sustain their ignorance if only through continued poverty of the brain and body, filling their souls with inflated pieces of mind.
Once more, we see these tactics being used by the Chinese, Asian Indians, Moslems, and others who are essentially Darwinians who contemplate the survival of the fittest as not only an international outlook but one that applies internally as well. The bait may change but the game is the same, regardless of level. Why support social programs when one only has to rely upon the meanest and most aggressive to rise above their contemporaries, leaving the meek to inherit the Earth (usually six feet under)? Such attitudes depend upon the easily swayed, putting trust and faith in a government that will reward the money-changers and the greedy, leaving the empowered to kill whoever, leaving gods of their imaginations to sort 'em out.
'War crimes' or 'crimes against humanity' are usually levied against the losers, they who are unable to overcome the obstacles imposed by those who are playing the game on a much larger and grander scale. Whether it's a box of MREs or an Ak-47, one only has to look at the situation in terms of scale and realise that the same baitings happen at the lower levels just as they occur at the highest. Ignorance is accentuated when pitting rivals against one another without the means to communicate beyond the lowest common denominator, violence usually employed. We only thought we got over this with the defeats of Hitler, organised crime, and STDs but the same thrills of being submissive to an authoritarian, getting the illicit goodies, and having a fling with a gaudy body remain ageless and timeless baits for the basest tastes.
On oil.
If the Iraqi oil reserves are about 150 billion barrels (optimistic estimate) and if the cost of the war in Iraq is $2 trillion (Stiglitz) and if the USA gets all Iragi oil, then the extra cost per barrel will be only $13.
Quite cheap.
Of course, Iraq would have sold it oil on open market anyway...
Is 'baiting' a war crime?
The way they are implementing it in populated areas (albeit, the war criminals who order these ops would tell you it's a free-fire zone anywhere, anytime they say so.)
Hell yeah!
Especially when they leave everyday items such as 'spools of wire', whch, unlike in American households, is probably in critically short supply (like just about everything else Americans take for granted in their daily lives) for bait.
"He and Staff Sgt Michael Hensley are accused of leaving a spool of wire in a pocket of a man who Spec Sandoval shot in April."... “It seems to me (James Ross, HRW) that there are all sorts of reasons that civilians would want to pick up ammunition that is sitting on the ground,” he said.BBC Source
Like for safety reasons perhaps?
If you had children, would you want a bunch of tracer rounds or an unexploded RP grenade laying outside your door?
I picked up on that story late yesterday and posted it with comment thusly:
"I wonder if children pick up these items as they do with cluster bomblets?
[Image]
Caption: Cluster bombs can look like toys.
They won’t inform us of even the simplest information, like “who exactly IS the enemy they’re talking about”, and “how many children are being killed by their “baiting” with items like ‘wire’.” Something that is very likely to be in short supply in the average Iraqi household, like most everyday things that Americans routinely take for granted.
The people who ordered these snipers to do this are the murderers!
In The First Degree!
…not the ’sad sacks’, patsies, on trial.
Let the War Crimes trial of those “commanding" cretins come to pass in my lifetime and I will consider myself avenged for the murder they make, and even though I’m SURE these reptiles think otherwise, I want them, and everyone reading this to know:
NOT IN MY NAME!
Have you read Bartle Bull's commentary on Iraq in Prospect, Prof. Cole? I fond it startling, to say the least.
The gist: The Americans have won in Iraq, the enterprise has been successful beyond anyone's widlest dreams, and in just a short time, Iraq will be back on its feet again, a healthy, unified democracy.
The magazine is a good one, in my opinion, if a bit prone to contrarian mischief from time to time -- in the interest of even-handedness, no doubt -- but reading Mr. Bull's piece was an exercise in cognitive dissonance for me.
I'd very much appreciate your take, if you can bear to read it.
There is nothing at the link "Sunni Arab guerrillas blew up an internal pipeline" - to indicate who did this attack.
Where do you get the information that it was Sunni Arabs?
Speaking of war crimes, The partitioning of Iraq has begun.
There is no place for Iraqi refugees to go anymore:
"The International Organization for Migration says Iraqis are running out of safe havens as more provinces within the country, as well as neighboring countries, are closing their doors to those fleeing violence. The organization says Iraq is experiencing the worst displacement crisis in its history and the worst refugee crisis the region has seen since 1948."
In full @ VOA
Basic Palmocracy Do's and Don'ts
.
My Mother often tells the story how, some 60 years ago, a local small town official, to explain politics to her said, "When it comes to politics, its like this. Spit in one hand and put money in the other and see which way their head starts tilting."
Think of the upturned palms in Washington. Think of the K Street money machinery. Think of the billions we hand out to dictators and despots worldwide wide who align with us or at least give good lip service.
The proper term for this form of government is a "Palm-ocracy."
The goal in Iraq was to form a 'palmocracy' with Chalabi as the bursar in chief. It's the American way. Why then does everybody from Rep. Waxman, the Nation magazine and its liberal sisterhood and the blogosphere go ape because a few billion $$ are missing in Iraq? It makes no sense to me. The $$ failure in Iraq is not that a truck load or two of $$$ are missing but that BushCo failed to to find a home for this moola which had any sustainable political or military weight to it. If it's ten billion a week to fight the war and accrue dead troops, what is the fuss that a few days cash flow went missing in a hemorrhaged buyout?
This thinking gives rise to the following timeless lessons encapsulated in "Palmocracies, Foreign & Domestic" the remorsefully edited edition, 'Wolfowitz Cheney Press.'
Never invade a country to promote aligning interests unless you can, with certainty, determine who you can effectively bribe.
Also, never attempt to occupy a country with two Popes.
--cognitorex--
Re: Kurdistan weak economic foundation
Kurdistan's Emerald Bank collapsed in August during the sub-prime stock market crisis and is unable to pay its creditors. Kurdistan International Bank is also experiencing problems.
Sirwan Barzani is the major shareholder of Emerald bank. He is a nephew of KDP leader Mas'oud Barzani and also has significant holdings in Korek Telecom - which is controlled by the Barzanis. A more generous rumor has it that the Barzanis forced investors to pull out of Emerald bank due to resentment that they were not investing more within Kurdistan. I am confident that this is a dodge or euphemism of one sort or anothe. Another typically Iraqi but less credible explanation is that one of the nephews "married a prostitute" and the family is taking it out on his business interests. The timing of the collapse with the sub-prime mortgage crisis and stock market downturn makes me suspect a different explanation. Perhaps they have been playing fast and loose with security futures and lost everything in a margin call. It could also simply be fraud and embezzlement.
Whatever the cause, the bank has lost tens of millions of dollars of outside investor money and the bank manager was recently arrested. He's Lebanese, and he's probably just a scapegoat. I don't know where responsibility lies, but the banking sector in Kurdistan is certainly not secure unless you have serious "wasta" with someone high in the KDP who will cover deposits as if they were gambling debts.
There are profound corruption problems in Kurdistan that threaten the basic viability of the free-trade investors paradise they embrace as a development model. KRG president Mas'oud Barzani has a poor understanding of finance and economics and simply doesn't have the educational background, experience or saavy to even know his areas of ignorance. Others in his family and some of his advisors are seriously corrupt. There's also a sense of entitlement - the Barzanis are old style aghas (tribal leaders) and feel that they have a right to extract wealth after living on the run for so many years. A certain amount of this comes with the territory - Rafsanjani in Iran and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan made themselves fortunes the old-fashioned way by exploiting land holdings, merchant holdings and monopolies. However, the increasingly unrestrained greed of the Barzanis places in jeopardy the tremendous credibility and legitimacy their family once had.
I'm writing this as a person with a certain amount of sympathy for the Iraqi Kurds, having witnessed quite a transformation of the region over the last 15 years, most of which has been positive... I feel compelled to say that there are many committed KDP and PUK leaders who actually try to govern in a reasonably progressive manner, and who are not hopelessly corrupt.
But the corruption problem in Kurdistan is profound and getting worse, and many of the KDP leaders in particular have drifted toward a mutant US-style Republican political and economic theory that embraces labor exploitation, vast income disparities, thoughtless deregulation, monopoly of economic and political power, and systematic corruption. It's very sad to see them tossing away what was once a real revolution.
I have a little more faith in the PUK these days, because they are slightly more responsive to wider social and economic needs and a little less jingoistic, but they too have their corruption problems. Public anger over corruption is growing, but at the same time, the KRG remains a relatively open society. The Barzanis do still have to answer to constituencies, even if indirectly, and bad press still stings. Regardless, the KRG is reaching a point of crisis in confidence in the basic financial and governance structures that may cause the development bubble to burst.
Post a Comment
<< Home