be sure to see info after article

Get Out: When?

As Congress began taking stock of the surge, we asked more than 50 policy and military experts their opinions and predictions on when the United States could—and should—start withdrawing from Iraq.

October 18, 2007

BAGHDAD (AFP) - The Iraqi government announced on Wednesday that it has decided to formally revoke the immunity from prosecution granted to private security companies operating in the war-ravaged country.

"The cabinet held a meeting yesterday and decided to scrap the article pertaining to security companies operating in Iraq that was issued by the CPA (Coalition Provision Authority) in 2004," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071024/wl_afp/iraqunrestblackwater

In contractors' shootings, Iraqis search for justice

The US Embassy in Iraq is now offering to pay relatives of those killed in a shooting involving Blackwater USA.

By Sam Dagher
from the October 25, 2007 edition
CSM

Reporter Sam Dagher talks about his interview with Haythem al-Rubaie, whose wife and son were shot dead by Blackwater contractors on Sept. 16.

Baghdad - Mohammed Hafidh says he refused to accept an envelope filled with $12,500 in cash from Patricia Butenis, deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Baghdad, as compensation for the death of his 10-year-old son, Ali.

"I told her that I want the courts to have their say," says Mr. Hafidh, whose son was among 17 Iraqi civilians killed in a Sept. 16 shooting involving Blackwater USA security guards – private contractors who were escorting a US diplomat at the time.

Haythem al-Rubaie, who lost his son and wife in the same shooting, says he won't even meet with Ms. Butenis, who offered cash compensation on Wednesday to seven of the victims' families, including Hafidh.

Pastor Jules Vivian from an Assemblies of God Christian church in Baghdad says the Iraqi government must put an end to the "law of the jungle" when it comes to security contractors like Blackwater.

He lost Jenevia Jalal, a close friend and minister at his church, who was killed along with a female friend a few weeks after the Blackwater incident by security guards working for another private company, Unity Resources Group (URG).

In a country that has grown almost numb to daily bloodshed, those two incidents triggered widespread outrage at the hired foreign gunmen, who many Iraqis say are mercenaries with licenses to kill. The incidents were a tipping point for Baghdadis, who regularly complain they are bullied by bands of heavily armed contractors bulldozing through traffic in SUVs or armored pickup trucks.

Anywhere from 125,000 to 180,000 foreign contractors operate at any given time in Iraq. Blackwater alone has been involved in at least 195 escalation-of-force incidents since 2005.

Tension over the case continues to rise between the US Embassy and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, seemingly eager to show he is standing up to Blackwater and other security firms. On Wednesday, his government issued an executive order that "cancels" legal immunity for private security groups, a move that still needs approval from Iraq's parliament.

Many Iraqis, especially the victims' families, say that the contractors should face charges in an Iraqi court. They say they are not willing to let the contractors go unpunished, despite the fact that the US government has already started the process of offering many victims' relatives compensation.

Mirembe Natongo, an Embassy spokesperson specially designated to comment on the Blackwater case, says offering to compensate families before the investigation is completed, is "standard procedure … and is not an admission of culpability."

lots more

House Panel Critical of Iraq Contractors

By ANNE FLAHERTY
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 25, 2007; 1:11 PM

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House oversight committee, said Thursday that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has issued an order requiring his approval of any corruption investigations of himself or senior ministry officials.

Waxman, D-Calif., said the order essentially grants immunity to al-Maliki and his ministry at a time when fraud and abuse is rampant and hurting reconstruction efforts.

"These are not unfounded allegations," Waxman said. "This is Nouri al-Maliki's edict that no one will be referred to court unless he approves it."

In testimony before the panel, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was not aware of the specific order, but that the U.S. would oppose any policy shielding senior officials from criminal prosecution or investigation.

"It would not be the intention of the United States of America that any official of Iraq ... would be immune from investigations of corruption," she said. If the prime minister were to demand immunity from corruption charges, "that would not be an acceptable policy from the view of the United States."

The issue prompted a tense exchange between Rice and Democrats on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who demanded that Rice publicly denounce the al-Maliki order they described. At one point, the usually unflappable Rice became visibly frustrated when Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., cut short her answers and repeatedly asked whether President Bush would call on Iraq to repeal the order.

"To assault the prime minister of Iraq, or anyone else in Iraq" with unsubstantiated allegations would be "deeply damaging, and frankly I think it would be wrong," she said.

Rep. Tom Davis, the top Republican on the committee, said he thought the order was not as sinister as suggested and only meant to consolidate corruption investigations. Democrats seemed to be trying "to drill enough small holes in the bottom of the boat to sink the entire Iraqi enterprise, while still claiming undying support for the crew about to drown," Davis, R-Va., said.

Al-Maliki has said the Integrity Commission, the country's top oversight agency, does seek his approval before it investigates a Cabinet member or senior members of his staff. But the Iraqi Parliament can open an investigation into the prime minister or any non-elected official without approval. Parliament members have immunity from prosecution, as in most countries.

The hearing comes after several weeks of wrangling between Waxman and the State Department. Waxman says the State Department has made gross missteps in its management of the war, including lax oversight of contractors and not doing enough to curb government fraud and abuse.

One particular issue has been the classification of specific corruption investigations by the United States. The State Department says such information should be classified because it could expose sources and hurt U.S.-Iraqi relations.

"I think there are a lot of things that ought to be made public," including whether money siphoned from corruption has funded attacks on U.S. troops, Waxman said. "We ought to know that information."

Rice said militias are being funded by multiple sources, including possibly corruption. But, she added, a bigger problem was money from Iran.

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Oct 26, 2007

Page 1 of 2
Oil: The sovereignty showdown in Iraq
By Jack Miles

The oil game in Iraq may be almost up. On September 29, like a landlord serving notice, the government of Iraq announced that the next annual renewal of the United Nations Security Council mandate for a multinational force in Iraq - the only legal basis for a continuation of the American occupation - will be the last. That was, it seems, the first shoe to fall. The second may be an announcement terminating the little-noticed, but crucial companion Security Council mandate governing the disposition of Iraq's oil revenues.

By December 31, 2008, according to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, the government of Iraq intends to have replaced the existing mandate for a multinational security force with a conventional bilateral security agreement with the United States - an agreement of the sort that Washington has with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and several other countries in the Middle East.

The Security Council has always paired the annual renewal of its mandate for the multinational force with the renewal of a second mandate for the management of Iraqi oil revenues. This happens through the "Development Fund for Iraq", a kind of escrow account set up by the occupying powers after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime and recognized in 2003 by UN Security Council Resolution 1483. The oil game will be up if and when Iraq announces that this mandate, too, will be terminated at a date certain in favor of resource-development agreements that - like the envisioned security agreement - match those of other states in the region.

The game will be up because, as Antonia Juhasz pointed out last March in a New York Times op-ed, "Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?":

Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia ... have outlawed foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced.

By contrast, the oil legislation now pending in the Iraqi parliament awards foreign oil companies coveted, long-term, 20-35 year contracts of just the sort that neighboring oil producers have rejected for decades. It also places the Iraqi oil industry under the control of an appointed body that would include representatives of international oil companies as full voting members.

The news that the duly elected government of Iraq is exercising its limited sovereignty to set a date for termination of the American occupation radically undercuts all discussion in the US Congress or by American presidential candidates of how soon the US occupation of Iraq may "safely" end. Yet if, by the same route, Iraq were to resume full and independent control over the world's third-largest proven oil reserves - 200 to 300 million barrels of light crude worth as much as $30 trillion at today's prices - a politically incorrect question might break rudely out of the Internet universe and into the mainstream media world, into, that is, the open: Has the Iraq war been an oil war from the outset?

much more

An Australian SAS soldier was fatally injured fighting in Afghanistan yesterday. He was on patrol in Oruzgan Province when he was severely wounded by small-arms fire from Taleban fighters.

Defence head Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said in Canberra late last night (Oct 25th)that a helicopter flew him to a nearby medical facility but "despite the best efforts of his mates and the aeromedical team the soldier succumbed to his wounds".

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10472205

Baghdad Burning

Thanks for the good reporting. I've been advertising on the site this week, and am glad to have had that space.

Regarding the Oct. 26th post on Iraq oil game being up: My own feeling is that this is just the beginning. The oil majors, desperate around the world to get fresh reserves, have cut the ground and will find a way to do deals. They will have to compete, primarily with Russia's well-prepared companies. But don't count them out quite yet. Perhaps one game is over. But another will begin.

Steve LeVine, author
The Oil and The Glory (Random House)
http://oilandglory.com/

The US state department has said it will require its diplomats to staff its embassy in Iraq due to a lack of volunteers.

Forty to 50 posts will be open next year in the embassy, located in Baghdad's fortified green zone.

Until now postings have been staffed on a voluntary basis and have often been hard to fill.

Up to 300 US diplomats will be notified that they are "prime candidates" for one-year terms in Iraq.

Only those with compelling reasons, such as medical problems or extreme personal hardships, will be exempt from disciplinary action if they refuse.

Difficult posting

Harry Thomas, state department human resources director, said: "We have all taken an oath to serve our country and so if someone decides they do not want to go, then we would then consider appropriate actions. We have many options, including dismissal from the foreign service."

On Thursday, Thomas returned from a visit to Iraq where he was assessing staffing needs for next year.

Privately, many US diplomats say they fear being posted to Iraq because of the risks of working in a war zone.

In addition, it is an "unaccompanied" posting, meaning children and a spouse cannot join the diplomat because of the dangers involved.

Thomas said the state department had made "directed" assignments before, such as in 1969 when an entire junior foreign officer class was sent to Vietnam and again in the 1970s and 1980s for some difficult African postings.

"This is not unique. Foreign service officers have always volunteered for their country," he said.

Disneyland

There are currently about 200 US diplomats in Iraq who serve on a one-year basis and the staffing would need to rise to about 250 for next summer, he said.

Thomas said about 1,200 state department employees have already served in Iraq since the US invasion in March 2003.

He said there was an attractive financial package for those serving in Iraq as well as five recreational breaks during the posting.

He did not believe the move would discourage people from joining the foreign service.

"After Google and Disney, we are the most popular place for people to work," Thomas said, referring to a recent survey that ranked the state department amongst the top five organisations to work for.
AFP

Oct 27, James Travers, Toronto Star

Let's stop fooling around and end the suspense now: Canada has no intention of leaving Afghanistan any time soon. Staying is the prohibitive preference of a Prime Minister firmly in command here and it will be a seismic shock if his handpicked panel, headed by once and perhaps future Liberal leadership contender John Manley, recommends anything else.

But it's entirely another matter if Canadian troops will be fighting there after 2009 or NATO will be training the Afghanistan army in 2016 as Gen. Rick Hillier gloomily predicts. As this country should now know from deadly experience, the mission's fate and longevity is ultimately controlled by others.

Pakistan is the best example of what's worst in the relationship. President Pervez Musharraf's inability or unwillingness to stop the Taliban and its Al Qaeda parasites from oozing across a porous frontier costs Canadian lives.

That's not the behaviour expected from an ally. But it's one of many variables Ottawa either discounted, ignored or didn't understand as a first, deceptively safe post-9/11 stabilization operation in Kabul morphed from reconstruction to war in Kandahar.

As Janice Gross Stein, the University of Toronto's justifiably revered international affairs analyst, and smart former defence insider Eugene Lang chillingly expose in their hot-selling new book, The Unexpected War, official Ottawa knew nothing and cared little about Afghanistan. Canada's focus was a traumatized U.S. where the trumping of security over trade threatened the free flow of prosperity across a suddenly infamously open border.

What Washington wanted from Canada was political cover for the looming Iraq invasion and a new commitment to Afghanistan that would help free U.S. troops for the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Liberals balked at the first appeal, but in bowing to the second set in motion events that now make this country as vulnerable to its friends' decisions as its enemies' assaults.

That dynamic resurfaced in the Netherlands this week where Defence Minister Peter MacKay again begged NATO members to share more of the combat burden. The small change rattling in his tin cup today is hopeful but won't buy Canada out of the box the Bush administration built when it lost interest in Afghanistan to pursue its fatal Iraq obsession.

Since then there have never been enough boots on the Afghanistan ground or dollars in the development pipeline to stabilize a country that's a loose affiliation of clans, warlords and opium traffickers or reconstruct one devastated by decades of civil war. So even if many Canadians don't yet grasp how we unwittingly drifted into a war or why the government is determined to keep fighting it, there should be no surprise that the mission is so problematic. With scattered strategies and varying degrees of enthusiasm, coalition partners are trying to do at minimum cost a job that demands maximum effort.

That would be dangerous anywhere; it's a recipe for disaster in a fragmented neighbourhood where the jagged pieces constantly shift. Nuclear power Pakistan hangs by a thread; India, Russia as well as a slew of smaller regional states advance conflicting interests. Then, and most ominously, there is the fear that Afghanistan will become impossibly hostile to foreigners if the current U.S. economic push at Iran becomes a military shove.

Those unknowns radically rephrase Canada's question. It's not how long Ottawa plans to keep troops in Afghanistan; it's how long NATO is willing or able to stay.

MoD begins study amid fears that up to 20,000 soldiers may be affected

The Guardian, Matthew Taylor & Esther Addley, October 27

The Ministry of Defence is conducting a major study into brain injury in troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan amid fears that thousands of soldiers may have suffered damage after being exposed to high-velocity explosions.

The US army says as many as 20% of its soldiers and marines have suffered "mild traumatic brain injury" (mTBI) from blows to the head or shockwaves caused by explosions. The condition, which can lead to memory loss, depression and anxiety, has been designated as one of four "signature injuries" of the Iraq conflict by the US department of defence, which is introducing a large-scale screening programme for troops returning from the frontline.

Defence officials were reluctant to extrapolate directly from the US experience, arguing that the science is still inconclusive and that the US and UK experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has been different. But the Guardian has learned that the government has put in place a series of measures - including a comprehensive screening process - to deal with what could be a 20-fold increase in troops with mTBI. If the most alarming US predictions are accurate, as many as 20,000 UK troops could be at risk.

Kit Malia, a cognitive rehabilitation therapist who will oversee the programme to treat TBI at Headley Court military rehabilitation centre in Surrey, said: "I think the issue is that we don't know whether the Americans are correct. But if the American figures are correct, this is massive. Absolutely massive."

Iraq balks as U.S. seeks more policing by Sunnis
By Michael R. Gordon
Published: October 27, 2007

HABBANIYA, Iraq: The U.S. military's push to organize Sunni Arabs into local neighborhood-watch groups has been one of its most important initiatives in Iraq — so much so that President George W. Bush flew to Anbar Province in September to highlight growing alliances with Sunni tribal leaders.

But now that the United States is trying to institutionalize the arrangement by training the Sunnis to become police officers, the effort has been hampered by half-hearted support and occasionally outright resistance from a Shiite-dominated national government that is still inclined to see the Sunnis as a once and future threat.

It was the U.S. military that pressed to open the new Habbaniya Police Training Center, where Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents are to be trained to serve as police officers in Anbar. And it was the United States that provided the uniforms, food, new classrooms and equipment for the police recruits.

While the Iraqi government has agreed to basic police instruction at the academy, it has balked at training more-senior officers there. The government has also scaled back plans by Anbar officials to expand the provincial police force by almost 50 percent.

"The Ministry of Interior deals with the Sunni provinces different than they deal with the other provinces," said Brigadier General David Phillips, a U.S. Army officer who oversees the training of the Iraq police. "The only reason the Anbar academy opened is because we built it, paid for it and staffed it." He said the Interior Ministry "was very hesitant about it."

The ministry says that it pays the salaries of the Iraqi personnel here and that more money will come as soon as proper administrative procedures are established between the government and the academy.

Anbar is not the only source of contention. In Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, U.S. military officers have pushed the Iraqi government to hire more than 6,000 local Iraqis, many of them Sunnis, as police officers. Despite promises of action by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, none have been hired by the Interior Ministry.

Major General Benjamin Mixon, who is winding up a tour as the senior U.S. commander for northern Iraq, said in an interview at his headquarters that the "foot dragging" stems from "highly sectarian" hiring in Baghdad. "They want to make sure that not too many Sunnis are hired," he said. "The situation is unsatisfactory in terms of hiring Iraqi police."

The growing tensions over efforts to hire more Sunni police officers comes at a critical moment in war in Iraq. With the number of U.S. combat brigades set to decline by a quarter by mid-July, commanders are eager to build up the Iraqis' capability to secure their neighborhoods.

One way has been to organize local Sunnis into neighborhood-watch groups, what the U.S. military calls "Concerned Local Citizens." The benefits of this approach have been evident near Yusufiya and Mahmudiya, in an area south of Baghdad that was once so violent it had been known as the "triangle of death" and has been overseen by the Second Brigade of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. Before neighborhood-watch groups were organized in this region in June, more than 12 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers were killed each month in the area, according to an analysis circulating within the U.S. military command. After June, the casualties declined to one soldier killed each month. The number of vehicles destroyed from roadside bombs was running at 11 per month before June and is averaging less than one per month now.

But organizing local Iraqis into neighborhood-watch groups is just the first step. The ultimate U.S. goal is to codify the arrangement by training these groups as police officers. The United States also hopes that by persuading the Iraqi government to hire Sunnis as police officers, it will encourage a new, ground-up form of political accommodation. Shiite-dominated ministries in Baghdad will develop new working relations with largely Sunni police forces in the field, easing the sectarian divide and laying the basis for a more representative national government, or so the theory goes.

At its best, the process of hiring new Sunni Arab police officers is a bureaucratic one. Prospective recruits have their fingerprints taken and undergo retina scans that are included in an intelligence database. The list of potential recruits is submitted to the Interior Ministry, which in turn generally submits them to a Committee of National Reconciliation overseen by close Maliki aides.

With persistent U.S. pressure, the process has led to some new hires. In the town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, 1,738 of the 2,400 Sunnis who had been put forward to serve as police officers in the town were hired. Plans have been made to add 12,000 new police officers in Baghdad over the next six months, and it is estimated that about half would be drawn from the ranks of local Concerned Local Citizens.

But as Diyala indicates, the process does not always run smoothly. U.S. forces pushed through western Baquba, the capital of the province, in June in an effort to sweep the city clear of militants from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a mainly Iraqi insurgent group with foreign leadership. More than 4,600 Concerned Local Citizens have since been organized in Diyala Province.

But hiring them as police officers has proved difficult. Maliki ordered that the Diyala police force be increased by more than 6,000, and in July, provincial officials submitted a list of names to the Interior Ministry in Baghdad that included many Sunnis. But some Interior Ministry officials have questioned whether such a substantial increase is needed, and some members of the National Reconciliation Committee have argued that the original Maliki decree may no longer be valid, putting the hiring plan in limbo.

While no action has been taken on the list, the Iraqi government surprised the United States by hiring 548 Iraqis who were not on the roster. When U.S. officials analyzed the new hires, they determined that the list was predominantly made up of Shiites.

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October 28, 2007
Afghan Ex-Militia Leaders Hoard Illegal Arms
By KIRK SEMPLE

KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 27 — Many former militia commanders and residents in northern Afghanistan have been hoarding illegal weapons in violation of the country’s disarmament laws, giving the excuse that they face a spreading Taliban insurgency from the south that government forces alone are too frail to stop, Afghan and Western officials say.

After years of moderate success for government disarmament programs, rumors of widespread defiance in the north have arisen recently among government officials and intelligence agencies in Kabul and elsewhere. Although there is little hard evidence that commanders are greatly enlarging their arsenals, officials say, some have been thwarting government programs, refusing to disarm and possibly even remobilizing militias.

The talk of rearming underscores a deepening north-south ethnic divide that some diplomats and Afghan officials privately worry could lead the way toward a shift of power back to warlords — and toward a countrywide armed conflict — if left unchecked. And the situation poses a major challenge for President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from the south, whose administration has failed to win the confidence of many non-Pashtun leaders and northerners.

Prices on the weapons black market in the north have skyrocketed as residents, governed by suspicion and foreboding, have kept their firearms, driving down the supply.

“There is an environment of mistrust” in the government, Brig. Gen. Abdulmanan Abed, a Defense Ministry official who works with the government’s demilitarization program, said in an interview this month in Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh Province. “There is a fear of the return of the Taliban.”

A prominent political leader from the north, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it this way: “The Taliban are coming toward us. What should we do? Who will defend us? Who will protect us? This is in the minds of the people in the north.”

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Regarding the Oct 28 news items, "Iraq's Gunmen Morphing Into Men In Suits" and "I go to school risking my life and my parents' lives" I'm reminded of something that has seemed an inconsistency in the generally accepted attitude towards the various insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the first news item the conversion of murdering thug militias into purveyors of assistance to the general public is considered a concern since it puts the U.S. in a position of preventing aid to the public that it either cannot or refuses to provide. In contrast, the second item describes the insurgents (the Taliban) as practicing open terror against the general population, destroying those institutions that provide aid to the people and yet there seems to be little outrage by those assaulted people against those actions. The Afghans seem to hate NATO forces for any and all errors that kill civilians and yet the directed slaughter of civilians by the Taliban doesn't seem to generate anything like a comparable backlash.

My simplistic view is that if you make a decision to go to war, recognize that war is murder and not nation building. You can only build a nation after you've taken complete control of it and if war is your method (and I'm not suggesting that there was a strong alternative in the case of the 9-11 planner protectors of the Taliban) then accept that approach. Sorry for the Rush Limbaugh like attitude on this but if people choose to be lead by the murders of their own innocents and our innocents then I find it very difficult to have any concern for them and their sensibilities. Sure, the real situation is colored by the corrupt American leadership and their true motivations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but if that can somehow be ignored, I can't help but wonder about the inconsistency of the attitudes toward insurgencies.

"our innocents on our land" sheesh, and I thought you were a citizen of the world.

Last time I counted, there was about 2700 dead from 9/11, including innocents from Australia, the UK, Canada and various African countries, that personally affect/effect me; as well as other countries "innocents", 'abroad', on that fateful day

However, the civilian death toll in Afghanistan, plus the death of "our troops", their "troops", their "taliban" and their 'el quaeda'
far exceeds that 2700 death toll. (and don't get me started on Iraq)

No-one is a winner here, except the manufacturers of weaponry, and the wheels of state that keep grinding on long after any "wheat" that could have been "ground" to make flour was available.

Imagine living in a hot/cold extremes, dusty, inhospitable country, where for well over 100 years your family and friends have been persecuted, abused and killed by 'foreigners.'

The taliban are no saints, but they are the afghans own devils, not foreign devils.

It gives me pause for thought.