RIP Harrys Place

Despite Harry dropping his pledge to give us all a break cease blogging, the decline and fall of Little Green Soccerballs continues.

Aaronovitch watch nails why (referring to Nick Cohen)

It seems to me that while Nick may be up for a fight, the people he’s accusing of spilling his pint aren’t. Rather than engage in a great intellectual struggle with Nick, Dave and the decents, mainstream left opinion (inasmuch as the Guardian op ed pages represent it) seems to be routing around it. On the one hand you have Seumas Milne’s usual repertory company, sticking it to the septics and sticking up for the Allah-besotted. On the other you have all these genteel Tories, preaching realism from a comfortable distance above the fray. The parameters here seem to relate to the majority consensus in Britain over the London bombings, namely that the Iraq conflict made them more likely to happen. Within that there's plenty of room for a chat about the who and the what and the why. Outside it...well, where's your audience?

Something similar seems to be going on over in Blogistan. The pro-war left went into a spasm of self-righteousness after July 7, de-linking here and there; condemning this, insisting on that, stagily revealing collaborators, sternly sorting sheep from goats. The result seems to be that they’ve now shrunk into a circular network, constantly cross linking, boosting their favourite columnists, uninterested in events that don’t immediately fit in with their preconceptions and increasingly adrift from the general bloggy conversation. The United Against Terror project seems to have gone splat and Harry’s Place is reduced to trolling for attention. Even their old antagonists at the movement antiwar sites don’t seem to bother too much with what they have to say. The only outward channel they have leads them directly to the hard right in the USA. And so a tendency hardens into a sect, which in turn boils down into something that’s starting to resemble a cult.

When this happens, you have to shout louder for attention. You have to say that you’re involved, for instance, in the greatest intellectual struggle of your time. You have to promise apocalyptic smash ups. Those who disagree with you have been driven mad by the course of history. It’s all a bit sad.

Like the drummer in Spinal Tap

Via Sadly No

Seems that a certain someone's supply of deputies is pretty much unlimited

February 25, 2004:
He was confirming a report in the Baghdad daily newspaper that a Zarqawi deputy it named as Nidal Arabiyat Agha Hamza was killed in an operation conducted last Thursday north of Baghdad.

January 8, 2005:
U.S. occupation forces announced the arrest of a key leader in al-Zarqawi’s network in Iraq.

January 29, 2005:
Authorities in Iraq have arrested three close associates of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, officials said Friday, claiming to be close to capturing the Al Qaeda-linked terror mastermind himself[.] [...] Friday's announcement brings to six the number of purported al-Zarqawi lieutenants arrested recently — including a deputy[.]

June 4, 2005:
Six suspected terrorists, including a suspected deputy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi linked to al-Quida, have been captured in Iraq, officials said Saturday.

June 27, 2005:
A senior member of Iraq’s Al Qaeda branch was killed recently in a US crackdown on insurgents in the Iraqi town of Qaim near the Syrian border, a Jordanian newspaper reported yesterday. [...] Abu Alghadiya, a Syrian dentist married to a Jordanian woman, was described by Arab media as the ‘number two’ in Iraq’s Al Qaeda network and tipped to succeed its leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.
September 27, 2005:
U.S. Special Forces killed Al Qaeda's No. 2 terror mastermind in Iraq, Defense Department officials said.

Lenin has more here

The Nature of the Iraqi resistance

Nature of the Iraqi Resistance
Interview with a Member of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress

by Imad Khadduri

September 11, 2005
abutamam.blogspot.com

The following is from an interview with Saad Naji Jawad who is a professor of political science at the University of Baghdad. He is a member of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress.

Iraqi National Resistance

Whenever there is occupation there is resistance. All nations have experienced this. Resistance to occupation is legal, legitimate and acceptable. On top of this are some people who hate the US and found Iraq a suitable place to fight their war. They came to the country after the occupation, and the Americans are now paying the price.

Al Qaida and Musab al-Zarqawi are separate from the rest of the resistance. There is no coordination between the resistance and these groups, whom we consider to be terrorists.

There are also groups dedicated to political and peaceful resistance, civilians who try to resist in a positive way. Demonstrations, writing, objecting and criticising are also part of the resistance.

Inside the armed resistance there are different groups and trends. You have Baathists, Islamists, Sunnis, Shias, sometimes you also have Kurds. The main characteristic is Arab nationalist.

Even from the beginning you had many people inside the resistance who were happy to see the end of Saddam Hussein because they felt he had driven the country to disaster. Some had some faith in US promises, and felt that the Americans were going to make Iraq an example of democracy in the region, but then became disillusioned.

The Iraqi National Foundation Congress was founded in May 2004. It was originally established by two different bodies—the Arab nationalists, who are a mix of Sunnis and Shias, and the al?Khalisi school, headed by Sheikh Jawad Khalisi from the Shia Khadamiya mosque in Baghdad.

Then other organisations joined, including the Association of Muslim Scholars, some personalities, smaller parties and groups. There are differences on certain issues—some are Islamists others are secular—but all agree on national liberation and the need for real democracy.

The Congress has support among a wide layer of people, but because we boycotted the elections we are unable to measure exactly the depth of this support. We called for a boycott of last January’s US sponsored elections, and more than half of Iraq joined the boycott. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia leader, also called for boycott. We said we would participate in the elections on the following conditions—an end to military attacks, all people must have a vote (the election body could strike your name from the register) and an international body must supervise the elections.Our demands were rejected, so we called for a boycott.

Liberation

The Iraqi National Foundation Congress is similar to organisations such as the African National Congress and the PLO. It is an alliance of forces united around one main demand—national liberation.

In our opinion Iraq’s draft constitution does not solve any problems. The political situation is so complicated that the only way forward is through dialogue, a lot of forgiveness and openness.

The new constitution could lead to the division of the country.

We do not necessarily object to federalism, but what sort of federalism is on offer? If we listen to the main Kurdish parties we find they are talking about independence, not federalism. Similarly there are those who would like a federal state in the south, who claim the south suffered more than the rest of the country, that the south creates most of the wealth through oil.
We reject the draft because it deepens sectarianism and does not reflect the Arab nature of the Iraq. The Arabs are more than 80 percent of the population.

The US would rather have one state that they control, rather than a divided Iraq. But colonialism always keeps its options open. The Americans use the threat of federalism. They say, “If you do not support us and follow our policies, you could end up destroying your country”.

Iraq will have to spend many years repairing the damage done by the Americans. We have to clear out the corrupt exile politicians who have grown rich from the occupation. We have to build a national army—and above all we have to convince people that without unity we have no future."

The view from one Iraqi

The gates of hell

By Jamal Mudhafar

Azzaman, August 7, 2005

The headline of this article is not a title of a science fiction film. It truthfully translates what is currently taking place in Iraq.

The gates of hell are now wide open – thanks to U.S. invasion – and their fires have enveloped almost everything in our country.

There is no electricity, no water, no fuel, no food rations, no security, no sewage …

There is terror everywhere and there is fear of everything – fear of the present and of what lies ahead in the future.

All indications tell that our future is bleak as there is nothing left in this country that makes you feel secure about your own future and that of your children.

What is happening is not a war, rebellion or insurgency. It is mass killing and annihilation coupled with torture and brutal and barbaric dismembering of innocent people.

Bombing and shelling of towns goes ahead and no one gives a damn for the lives lost and property damaged.

Politicians have not honored any of the promises they made during elections. There is a dangerous decline in the public services and government performance.

The shock we have received since U.S. troops landed in our midst and the new is beyond description.

Fear and terror have gripped the nation. Wherever you are at any time of the day you are liable to be killed by a stray bullet.

Stray bullets are no longer the prerogative of U.S. troops and their tormentors – the insurgents.

Almost everyone in Iraq now use their guns to shoot in order to scare, wound or kill.

If the bodyguards of a senior official want to reach a destination on time and are delayed by traffic jam, they fire in the air to scare other drivers to give way.

If someone is injured or killed as a result it is his or her problem.

Killing by mistake is now perhaps one of the main causes of death in Iraq.

Trust between the people and the government has collapsed. And now we are at the mercy of the stars because neither U.S. troops nor the government have the slightest idea of who is blowing up whom and why?

"No one wants to talk about Falluja,"

It seems so long ago that the destruction of Falluja was hailed as the turning point that would lead to peace in Iraq.

Of course that was about three turning points ago.

But it is important that we on the anti-war left remember what was done to the city, and now, at last an independent journalist has managed to gain entry into the cirt and report what it is like now.

"We Regard Falluja As a Large Prison"

Eight months after the second invasion of Falluja, there is hardly a street that does not still feature a building pulverized during the assault. I had not been in the city since last July, when I was escorted out by three cars of mujahedeen — that's when things were still relatively nice — and though I had expected it, the destruction was still shocking.

The dome of one mosque I had previously used as a landmark was completely missing, large holes had been blown in others. Houses have been pancaked, it is hard to find a façade without the mark of at least small arms fire. As many as 80 percent of the city's 300,000-plus residents have returned, but the city has by no means returned to normal. On Sunday, the police were hard at work adding razor wire and new concrete blast barriers to the already sprawling fortifications around their main station in the center of town while US and Iraqi army patrols traversed the main street, the Iraqis firing their rifles in the air to clear traffic. Small arms chattered in the distance, followed by a response from a larger gun. The tension is palpable. Curfew begins at 10 p.m. but low-level fighting continues.

"They are killing one or two of us everyday," says an Iraqi soldier at one of the checkpoints into the city, a claim confirmed by local doctors.
.......

Back at the hospital, Ahmed says he expects the fighting to continue. "Even civilian people will change to be fighters," he says. "We regard Falluja as a large prison." (People in Falluja will not talk directly about fighting, though all indications are that the new attacks are homegrown.)

The Iraqi army in Falluja, who don't mind telling a journalist that they are all from cities in the south, don't seem particularly thrilled to be here. (When the USA tried recruiting Fallujis to fight in Falluja, they turned their guns on the US or turned them over to the guerillas.)

"Falluja — death," says one of them, drawing a finger across his throat, a motion that I would like to go one day in Iraq without seeing someone make.
.......

I approach some of the Marines on a base inside the city, to try and find out what life is like for them. They say there is no one at the base who can speak on the record, but I pause for a minute and chat, not terribly excited about walking back outside into the thick dust and, potentially, a line of fire. They ask why I have come, I am the first journalist they have seen in four months.

"No one wants to talk about Falluja," says one of the Marines.

The next time you hear or read one of pro-war chums witter on about libertating Iraq, remind them of Falluja, remind them of what continues to be done in their name.

The Day Satire Died

Things going wrong? just change the brand

Tom Lehrer famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger won a Nobel peace prize, but today may have topped it.

The press today is full of articles such as this one about the Bush administration's decision to change the name of the global War on Terror to the "the global struggle against violent extremism"

Much ink is shed over what a smart move this is,

"The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday."

or

"Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks."

Now that all sounds fine and dandy, here it is, the new strategy (and god knows they need one) and who can disagree that violent extremism is a bad thing (especially when compared to it's polar opposite peaceful moderation)

However there appears to be one little point thet the gentlemen of the press to missed, except for Fred Kaplan in Slate

Fred points out that the original acronym for the Global War on terror (GWOT or G-WOT) is a bit of a mouthful, a bit negative a bit you know, out of date, yesterdays news. However the super-duper new acronym you get with a simple name change to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism is GSAVE or even better G-SAVE! Don't you just feel better about it already, G-SAVE!, who could argue with that?

This great new branding, as national security adviser Stephen Hadley puts it is caused by a "need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative." Save the world, not go to war with it.

So it comes to this, Iraq is a disaster area, the Taliban are back in Afghanistan and the world is less safe from terrorist attacks than it has ever been. but we have a snappy new acronym (SNA) so all is well.

Pass the sick bag Doris.

What a bloody waste

If have any doubts about the social class of the American troops who are being killed over in Iraq this story gives us an idea.

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 20, 2005; C01

Under the glare of a midmorning sun, Staff Sgt. Jody Hayes stands sweating in the hatch of his M-113 armored vehicle, scanning for insurgents. Hayes and his Iowa National Guard crew have been stalled for nearly 30 minutes on a risky, slow-moving mission to clear road bombs, and he's getting nervous.

Suddenly he hears the snap of a sniper's bullet flying past his head. The round pierces the neck of the soldier next to him, Spec. John Miller, entering the two-inch gap between his Kevlar vest collar and helmet.

"Get down!" Hayes yells. Miller falls heavily against Hayes's leg, and at first Hayes believes his friend is taking cover. "Man, he got down pretty quick," he recalls thinking. Then he glances down and sees Miller bleeding at his feet.

Sgt. Ty Dermer, who is manning a .50-caliber machine gun within arm's reach of Miller, radios for help: "We got a man down! We need a medic, ASAP!"

Hayes drops down and cradles Miller's head in his lap, while Dermer rips open a pressure dressing and places it on the neck wound. Each man grabs one of Miller's hands and feels for a pulse. They still haven't found one when medic Spec. Jaymie Holschlag pulls open the back door of the M-113 and rushes, breathless, to Miller's side.

"Doc," Hayes says, looking up at her. "He's gone."

Holschlag begins checking Miller's pulse herself, as if she hasn't heard.
"Doc," Hayes repeats, louder. "He's gone!"

It is 10:18 a.m. on April 12, and John Wayne Miller is no more.

In the frenzy to save Miller, no one was thinking about why the war had snatched away the gangly 21-year-old Wal-Mart stocker from West Burlington, Iowa. Only later, as darkness falls and details of the day's horrors ricochet through their camp, do that question and others begin to haunt Hayes and his tightknit Iowa platoon. With a fifth of its soldiers killed or wounded, the platoon is reeling from the trauma of repeated loss, facing a constant threat from bombs and gunfire on Ramadi's streets, or mortar strikes on their base. They are angry, anxious, wracked by guilt -- one soldier suffers from combat stress so acute that he is unable to go on missions, and stays behind camp walls.
..........................

Holschlag runs to Miller. When the platoon medic sees that insurgents have taken out another of her "boys," she swears, grabs her medic's bag and walks back to her Humvee, slamming the side of it with her fist. Then she pulls out the gray body bag she has learned to carry at all times, and waits for a vehicle to evacuate Miller's body.
........................................
To Holschlag and many in the unit, Miller was their "boy," their "kid," and in his sudden death, the good-hearted but awkward young man was mourned as a family member. "You live on top of each other. You get used to working together . . . then you go out one day and -- boom -- he's gone," she says.

"In 2 1/2 seconds, for no particular reason, because we found their weapons cache, they took him out," she says. "And never again will John Wayne Miller steal my Pepsi"

"J-Dub," as platoon mates called Miller, was an unlikely hero. His mother died when he was a teen, and his father was in and out of jail, they said. After high school he found a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart on the graveyard shift, which he liked because it let him devote his days to his real passion -- video games. Miller had a one-bedroom apartment on Prairie Street in West Burlington and a mean pet ferret. Other than that, they said, the lanky young man didn't have much going on in his life. So one day in March 2002, more for friendship than anything else, Miller signed up for the Iowa National Guard.

This is the war the chickenhawks support, but won't fight in. As long as Wal Mart employees do the dying, it's fine.

Fighting for Women's rights in Iraq

Amongst the ever shifting rationales for the ongoing disaster in Iraq one theme that keeps cropping up is that by blowing the hell out of the country we are somehow involved in freeing the women of Iraq from tyranny.

Some of those very women have been out demonstrating in Mosul this week, as pictured below.



For those who do not read arabic (myself included) here is the reason for the march.

US Frees Iraqi Woman Detainees After Protests

MOSUL, June 19, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – US occupation forces completed on Sunday, June 19, the release of twenty one Iraqi women held as a bargain chip in the northern city of Mosul.

"The release came after massive protests organized by the Islamic Party and the Islamic organization for human rights over the past three days," Nour Al-Din Al-Hayalli, the Islamic Party's media officer in Mosul, told IslamOnline.net.

The Islamic party championed a massive demonstration following the Friday prayers on June 17 to press for the immediate release of all Iraqi women in the US custody.

Assembling outside the Sedek Rashan mosque, protestors denounced the American occupation for dishonoring the Iraqi people by detaining women.

They carried photos of detained women, demanding the government of Ibrahim Jaafari to live up to its responsibilities toward the Iraqi people.

The demonstrators also issued a statement calling for an immediate release of all Iraqi women detainees across the occupied country.

There is no available figures on Iraqi women in the custody of American occupation forces

And why are they arrested?

In a demonstration staged on Thursday, June 16, an Iraqi woman said her daughter-in-law was detained by US soldiers after they failed to find her husband.

"They stormed the house on May 24, searching for my son. When they failed to find him they detained his wife and threw his six-month-old child to the ground," she recalled

Now I'm not an expert in military tactics (I just play one on the internet), but could one of the pro-war people who regularly pop in here tell me how they justify this?

update

For those who may be ready to dismiss these reports as propaganda due to the source, a further article from the WP reveals that it was standard practice as far back as 2003.

"It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members,"

Guest Column, Christopher Snitchens

Stop Accusing Me of Intellectual Dishonesty
Christopher Snitchens

March 30, 2004

Christopher Snitchens takes to task the anti-war Left for its short-sighted demands for scholarly and political consistency.

More than a decade ago now, with the no-fly zones firmly in place over northern and southern Iraq, and with the Iraqi Kurds in the north finally beginning to carve out, after many years of brutal oppression, some degree of autonomy, I found myself, thanks to a few embassy friends who will remain unnamed, in an airy sublet in the Village, not far from Lower Manahattan, which, though not war-torn, ought to have been.

Flashing forward. The anti-war Left, unencumbered by memories of the horror of 9-11 (“9 what?” several former colleagues of the Left have asked me on more than one occasion), and apparently unconcerned that the Ivory Tower would, if the Islamofascists had their say, go the way of its twin counterparts, is content to contend that Saddam Hussein never actually met with Osama bin Laden or his henchmen, despite the fact that everyone who believes such meetings took place says firmly that such meetings took place. This is pure cowardice, a failure to make assertions in the face of a mounting threat. “How do you know it is mounting?” such so-called progressives ask. The answer is obvious: how could one not know when confronted with so much confidence that it is so?

The rapport between these first two paragraphs is, I hope, clear. Though I didn’t feel the shockwaves of the first Trade Center bombings on that crisp day in 1993, I know in retrospect that I must have felt them, unlike those Leftists who have no discernible feelings, and who would have been quite happy to allow Saddam Hussein to continue to brutalize his own people. Indeed, it was on that fateful day, eight years before the same miscreants accomplished their fanatical goal, sometime between high tea and happy hour, that I began to realize that unreconstructed Trotskyism was an ideology insufficient to the gathering threat posed by the medieval-minded populations of the world and their festering anger at the success of the West.

I should point out, since it is fashionable for the anti-war set to hurl unthinking accusations of racism and neo-imperialism at any who sit in disagreement, that such medieval mentalities are not confined solely to the Islamic world, though they have there reached, perhaps, their apogee. Indeed, religious sentiment, regardless its source, breeds backward-looking thought, and so it must be done away with, except in the United Kingdom and the United States, where monotheism has given moral backbone to the two principle architects of our necessary war against barbarism - Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair.

Of course, the Left will read in these statements about religion a “root cause,” and will go on and on about Muslim anger and the conditions of poverty in Islamic nations, though they know as well as I that all through Europe’s Dark Ages Islam kept alive the light of learning. For centuries, quite literally, while European Christians hacked each other to death, lost their literacy, lost medicine, lost architecture, lost art, the great Islamic civilizations of Northern Africa and the Middle East preserved Classical learning through the Arabic language. Were it not for the Islamic universities of Spain and Persia, the Renaissance and indeed the Enlightenment would never have occurred, and I would have had nothing to rebel against during that not so distant time when I believed neo-Marxian thought to be the necessary antidote to colonialism. Since past is prelude, there is no excuse for the failure of Islam to embrace once again the light of learning, science, and democracy. One might contend - believably, I believe - that only Saddam Hussein had been their downfall. I may be accused of exaggeration. Very well, I stand accused. But I am accused by the supposed humanitarians that lacked the uprightness to destroy a nation in order to save it. Now that Hussein has been deposed and the marshes of Southern Iraq re-flooded, there is no reason to suppose that the Muslim world cannot once again flower with learning and democracy, as it did under the caliphates, minus the democracy.

Lest we forget, George W. Bush had given Saddam an ultimatum, thinking perhaps of Dr. Johnson’s famous words: “Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don’t let him go to the devil, where he is known.” I for one am happy that this devil has been dispatched. That is morality - that it is a good thing is clear as day.

Christopher Snitchens is not related to columnist and raconteur Christopher Hitchens. No, not in any way, shape or form. Not related. To Christopher Hitchens

Stolen from http://www.newamericanempire.org/theimperium/archives/2004/03/000032print.html