How do Iraqis feel about Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the fact that for the past three years, it has been permitted to operate as a de-facto part of the Iraqi state - in the process driving away a good portion of Baghdad’s non-Shiite population? Now that Baghdad seems serious about putting a stop to the Mahdi Army, Fateh Abdusalam asks in Iraq’s Azzaman newspaper:

“One of the many questions that are forbidden or that can only be asked with great difficulty - like something that’s so hard to swallow, one needs a drink afterwards - is this one: Why was the Mahdi Army permitted to operate day and night for three years … Why was the Mahdi Army allowed to parade in front of the public and guard areas of central Baghdad, flouting what passes for democracy, the rule of law and the fiction of a “just constitution?” … Why is a person who was above the law three years ago, now wanted by the law? What has changed: the person or the law or the ones in charge of overseeing that law?

By Fateh Abdusalam

Translated By Nicolas Dagher

April 24, 2008

Iraq - Azzaman - Original Article (Arabic)

There’s a king of perverse equality in Iraq, which is that no one has a right to ask questions. Or everyone has a right to ask questions, according to Democratic theory, but not everyone who asks a question has a right to an answer.

The same can be said about questions on political matters. There are those who excuse this situation and exempt the Iraqi government from any responsibility on the grounds that, ‘the eye cannot overcome the will” … or the American administration of Iraq, where the file of outstanding problems remains suspended in the Pentagon.

One of the many questions that are forbidden or that can only be asked with great difficulty - like something that’s so hard to swallow, one needs a drink afterwards - is this one: Why was the Mahdi Army permitted to operate day and night for three years - and especially the last two years - since the eruption of sectarian strife [since the bombing of the Golden Mosque] and the failure of the notorious government of al-Jaafari, which showed leniency toward all parties involved and failed to control the strife, all of which only served to pour oil on the fire?

Why was the Mahdi Army allowed to parade in front of the public and guard areas of central Baghdad, flouting what passes for democracy, the rule of law and the fiction of a “just constitution?” The public airwaves reported on these “authorities” as though they comprised part of the new Iraqi state - until three-quarters of Baghdad’s original population comprised of various sects and groups were forced to flee because they weren’t “loyal” to those who prevailed in the street … or to those who prevailed in the secret/or open headquarters of public authorities or armed parties.

Why does the Mahdi Army remain silent about the “renegades and infiltrators” who used its name and address for years, through the consent of alliances and friendships. … until a crisis of “existence” and “authority” broke out with a party that was smarter and better equipped logistically [the Badr Brigades of al-Hakim?] and which caused all parties to expose the dirty laundry of their opponents.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated coverage of the Iraqi side of the war.

Why is it that Iraq’s wealthy Arab neighbors refuse to forgive its debts or restore full relations with in the country, while Western and Asian countries have forgiven billions and long ago reopened their Baghdad Embassies?

According to this analysis of the results of the Third Expanded Ministerial Conference of the Neighboring Countries of Iraq, which was held last week in Kuwait, Maria Appakova of Russia’s Novosti news service writes:

“One can understand their reasons. The damage done to many of them during the years of the Saddam Hussein regime was simply too great, despite the fact that today, Iraq is ruled by a different regime. … one would have though that this page would have been turned long ago. … However, Iran stated in the conference’s final communique that relations with Iraq during the dark past would not prevent it from developing new relations with Baghdad. And it is here that we see the true cause of Arab reluctance. It is Iran’s influence on the new Iraqi Government, which largely represents the Shiite community, that is making the Sunni-led governments of Iraq’s Arab neighbors so reluctant to develop new ties and cancel its debts.”

By political commentator Maria Appakova

Translated By Igor Medvedev

April 23, 2008

Russia - Novosti - Original Article (Russian)

MOSCOW: For some reason, the outcome of the Third Expanded Ministerial Conference of the Neighboring Countries of Iraq, in Kuwait City on April 22, which was designed to combine the efforts of countries interested in stabilizing Iraq, has instead created a sense of unease.

The opening speech by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the final communiqué released by the conference raises the question of who needs Iraq more - its neighbors or the West (and Russia, for that matter).

The Kuwait conference was already the third event of its kind in the past year. The first meeting of Iraq’s neighbors, with the participation of other concerned nations, was held in May 2007 in Egypt; the second, in November in Turkey. And in that intervening year, very little of the underlying intrigue in regard to the U.S.-Iran standoff has changed, nor has the agenda of these meetings - discussing the possibility of writing off Iraq’s debts to other Arab countries and the reopening of their embassies in Baghdad.

In his speech, Nouri al-Maliki appealed to creditor countries to forgive Baghdad’s debts - a legacy of the government of Saddam Hussein. And he asked Arab countries to re-open their embassies in Baghdad.

According to Maliki, it’s difficult to understand why they have yet to restore diplomatic relations with Iraq, while many other countries have reopened embassies in Baghdad despite ongoing difficulties in the security sphere. With regard to Arab countries, they seem to be biding their time - Saudi Arabia promised to reopen its embassy a year ago, but still hasn’t implemented its intentions. Now Kuwait and Bahrain are making vague promises, careful not to mention specific dates.

On the one hand, one can understand these Arab countries. The first attempts some of them made to reopen embassies in Baghdad ended tragically - in August 2003, during a terrorist attack mounted against Jordan’s diplomatic mission, 17 people were killed. In 2005, several Algerian and Egyptian diplomats were abducted and killed. And then, for example, there was the murder of Russian Embassy staff in 2006, although this was not used as a pretext to close the mission.

Granted, security is a sensitive issue. But what prevents Arab countries - and these countries are not poor - from easing Baghdad’s debt burden?

Over the past three years, $66.5 billion of Iraq’s $120 billion debt burden has been forgiven. Along with Russia’s $12 billion in debt relief, the Paris Club waived a total of $42.3 billion, while non-Paris Club members cancelled another $8.2 billion under the same conditions as the Club. Commercial creditors relieved Iraq of $16 billion. Of the remaining amount - between $56.6 and $79.9 billion - about half is owed to the nations of the Arab Gulf, which seem in no hurry to help.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the War in Iraq.

It will doubtless come as no surprise to readers of the Moderate Voice that people around the world have been outraged by the Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq War. But the passing of the fifth anniversary of the war has triggered a particularly strong upwelling of anger, which one can get a sense of by reading this article by Reinaldo Spitaletta of Colombia’s El Espectador.

Spitaletta writes, “Is it worth killing over 450,000 people, mostly civilians? Yes. And destroying a culture thousands of years old? Yes. And as if the matter was of little consequence, torturing prisoners in a jail? Yes, indeed. That’s how the president of the United States, George W. Bush, sees it, now five years after invasion of Iraq.”

As for the Iraqis, Spitaletta writes, “Perhaps it never occurred to the Gringos that their bombers, their infantry, their paraphernalia - yes- of mass destruction, would be unable to overcome an entire people … the Iraqi people, who today are suffering through the most unspeakable criminal invasion, know that never in their history has any foreign occupier triumphed. Neither the Romans nor the British. Today, without jobs, without social security, without tranquility but with the living hope of expelling the invader, they continue their resistance. And for those who have been displaced and mutilated - for the humiliated Iraqis of today - it will all be worth it to reverse the situation and defeat the troops of the superpower.”

By Reinaldo Spitaletta

Translated By Douglas Myles Rasmussen

March 25, 2008

Colombia - El Espectador - Original Article (Spanish)

Is it worth killing over 450,000 people, mostly civilians? Yes. And destroying a culture thousands of years old? Yes. And as if the matter was of little consequence, torturing prisoners in a jail? Yes, Read the rest of this entry »

I have excerpted some of her key points and arguments, many of which are already in the process of being twisted and taken out of context by her opponents. Here’s what she actually said in what I thought was an eloquent and crucial speech. 

Hillary began by expressing what many Democrats believe:  the surge can’t be said to be working unless its purpose is being realized: political reconciliation within the Iraqi government.  Otherwise, we are simply polic[ing Iraq’s civil war."  If elected, she said:

I will start by facing the conditions on the ground in Iraq as they
are, not as we hope or wish them to be. President Bush points to the reduction in violence in Iraq last year and claims the surge is working. Now, I applaud any decrease in violence. That is always good news. But the point of the surge was to give the Iraqis the time and space for political reconciliation. Yet today, the Iraqi government has failed to provide basic services for its citizens. They have yet to pass legislation ensuring the equitable distribution of oil revenues, yet even to pass a law setting the date of provincial elections. Corruption and dysfunction is rampant….

Pointing out that neither Petraeus nor the Iraqis are satisfied with the progress toward reconciliation, Hillary argued that it is not feasible for the US to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely simply to keep down the violence.  We simply cannot afford to police Iraq’s civil war without mounting threats "to our national security, our economy, and our standing in the world."(GWU speech)

Read the rest of this entry »

From the March 2003 invasion through to the here and now, the story line for the Iraq war has been one of stops and starts, peaks and valleys, and upheavals and calms.

By this reckoning we are now in an extended calm. The Surge has substantially met its military goals, U.S. and civilian deaths are way down, Bush and Al-Maliki have signed a deal that gives new meaning to back scratching, and refugees are cautiously making their way back to their now walled neighborhoods – if they still exist.

But this is a damning calm – and likely a calm before yet another storm.

This is because that window of opportunity the Surge was supposed to provide for the Baghdad government to reconcile and consolidate has pretty much closed as regional warlords, armed and abetted by a feckless U.S. that is flying without a wing, prayer or strategy, are quickly consolidating their power.

Is a warlord state preferable to no state at all?

The cynical answer is “of course.” This is because both Washington and Baghdad have gotten what they want in the form of that business deal: The corrupt weakling Al-Maliki gets long-term coup insurance in the form of U.S. troops stationed at permanent bases and the mighty U.S. gets first dibs at Iraq’s vast untapped oil riches.

A headline in the Los Angeles Times captures the current edition of the Iraq conundrum well:

Writes Times reporter Ned Parker:

“The U.S. troop buildup in Iraq was meant to freeze the country’s civil war so political leaders could rebuild their fractured nation. Ten months later, the country’s bloodshed has dropped, but the military strategy has failed to reverse Iraq’s disintegration into areas dominated by militias, tribes and parties, with a weak central government struggling to assert its influence.

“In the south, Shiite Muslim militias are at war over the lucrative oil resources in the Basra region. To the west, in Anbar province, Sunni Arab tribes that once fought U.S. forces now help police the streets and control the highways to Jordan and Syria. In the north, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens are locked in a battle for the regions around Kirkuk and Mosul. In Baghdad, blast walls partition neighborhoods policed by Sunni paramilitary groups and Shiite militias.”

One of life’s lessons is learning to settle for less.

But even for those of us who never believed that the Bush administration’s grandiose vision of Iraq being a beacon of democracy could succeed, settling for a failed state is a bitter pill.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

There’s been a lot of hype about the alleged recent return of thousands of Iraqi refugees from neighboring countries like Syria and Jordan. American officials have touted this development as a clear indication that security is improving and that Iraqis feel safe enough to return to their homes. Not surprisingly, though, we’re not being given an accurate picture.

For starters, reports of Iraqis returning appear to be badly distorted. Although an Iraqi official recently announced that over 45,000 refugees returned to Iraq in October, the UNHCR has seriously disputed this claim. According to their figures, only about 4,000 Iraqis returned in October and not all of them are even refugees. In Iraq, according to Damien Cave of The New York Times, the numbers are being fudged because “returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.” Indeed, that 45,000 figure that the Iraqi government came up with is be based on some very fuzzy math.

Officials from the ministry acknowledged that the count covered all Iraqis crossing the border, not just returnees. “We didn’t ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry,” said Sattar Nowruz, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

As a result, the tally included Iraqi employees of The New York Times who had visited relatives in Syria but were not among the roughly two million Iraqis who have fled the country.

The figures apparently also included three people suspected of being insurgents arrested Saturday near Baquba in Diyala Province. The police described them as local residents who had fled temporarily to Syria, then returned.

Some Iraqi lawmakers said that overly broad figures were being used intentionally.

“They are using this number because they want to show that Maliki is succeeding,” said Salim Abdullah, a lawmaker and member of the largest Sunni bloc, known as the Accordance Front, referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “But this does not make the number correct. I think dozens of Iraqis return home daily, but not 1,600.”

Furthermore, most Iraqis who are returning to their country are doing so out of economic concerns, not out of a newfound faith in the security situation. As the UNHCR notes, of those returning Iraqi families they spoke with, the majority are going back to Iraq because the economic situation has gotten so bad in their respective countries that they have no other option. Whether or not the surge is working is up for debate; but whether most Iraqi refugees perceive it to be successful is not.

I’ve been a military wife for two decades; my husband USAF, 21 years, retired, now working for the VA helping vets get their prosthetics.

Not long ago, on a rehab ward, having gone to visit with two dozen vets recovering from injuries …I brought ice cream cones… a hit…. what laughing boy moments there still can be sometimes, the spirit of boy still deeply rooted inside the adult soldier, even though injured.

Later, in the visiting room, the conversation turned more serious: hopes and dreams, disappointments, perceived failures, visions and plans. I’d mentioned I’d been trained to pray by ‘the madwomen in black’ (the good Sisters of the Holy Cross). Some men asked, would I pray for them? ‘My specialty,’ I said, ‘the Angelus three times a day, every day of my life.’ I would be honored to pray for the men.

We requisitioned scraps of paper and everyone wrote down as best they could what they’d like prayed for. Some told me what to say, and I wrote for them. Then, I gathered up the papers, asked would it be alright if we prayed right now, out loud? And all assented.

I come from old country refugees and immigrants who prayed so loud in church that other more sophisticated people born in the USA would give us dirty looks. So yes!, the men and I did pray. We did pray big and wide and loud… with some pretty good counterpoint Amens and Right ons! and Yes sisters! flying.

One soul wept, saying he couldn’t pray. Someone greater with wings, put a hand on his shoulder, saying through me, ‘Tears are prayers, liquid prayers.’ By the end we all prayed in the rivers we stood in.

I promised that their askings would be in my prayers from that day forward, and asked permission, ‘Could I pass their needs onto others to pray for too?’ And they said, very much yes. And I have.

So I was thinking to share some of their prayer requests in a different way today, a way that most readers never see, a kind of hidden news of the goodness of warrior souls… just in case readers would like to, on this Veterans Day, have a direction to aim their prayers… fluid, rough, or otherwise.

You’ll see, what is being asked for is not material, but of this time, and also, eternal… which is simple in words, but more complex in another way: I think written prayer requests, (of which I have literally thousands from my travels to see and be with many different groups of souls,) contain inside a hidden story, each one. If you have inner seeing and inner hearing you can definitely hear and see the inner story of others who ask for prayers.

Here are some of what the men asked prayer for… any to be added are welcome here too:

Please pray for my daughter who is in prison, not in jail, but in a prison of alcohol. I am ashamed she got this from me. Please pray for my continued sobriety. Please pray for her to find the way out.

Please pray for all my buds, that they make it home in one peace. That their women wait for them.

Please pray that they will let me sit in this wheelchair all my life, that my butt will not wear out so I have to lie down on a gurney for the rest of my life.

Please pray for my son to be returned to me whole. He is lost and beyond reach.

Please comfort my mother over losing my brother. He’s in a better place, but we aren’t yet.

Pleas stiff the sumbatch captain who cheated me out of a 20 after poker game. No serious, keep him safe. I take it out of his hide when he gets home.

Please hold me and my children and my wife together. Please let me not let them down.

I would appreciate it if you would pray for me. I hope God understands that sometimes you need someone else to talk for you. I am in need.

Thank you for remembering in prayer that we will soon have another child. Everyone is tense. we lost our first to sids. I pray for you to continue in your work.

Please pray that my boy can get a stem cell transplant, and for me to find the place of peace that has eluded me so far. I know it’s there somewhere. If you could just pray that God shows it to me really big so I can see it. Or pray for me to get a spiritual magnifying glass.

Please pray that my father will speak to me again. We are on opposite sides. Thank you.

For my mother who is in a wheelchair too. For her to learn humor.

Prayer for the kids I met. All of them. Keep them somewhere they don’t have to see everything.

Please pray for those who do funeral detail. The boxes are heavier than just the bodies.

Please pray that God forgives me for saying the word F in front of my mother-in-law. She just about faints. Please ask God to give me another word. If he cant do that, just ask him to make my Mother-in-law temporarily deaf.

Please pray for a new road.

Pray to have these memories retired.

Pray that everyone can re-up into greater capacity. Pray for me to know the message I’m supposed to carry now.

Please pray for better painkillers, and big scissors to cut all the red tape.

I’ve been through a lot. We all have. Please pray that there really are ponies for all of us somewhere in all this horseshi-.

To which I have only one thing to say, a reverent and fervent Amen.

Like the Burmese presently, like other innocent groups risking their lives for true liberty just to be allowed to live in free and decent ways without governmental oppression… in 1956 the Hungarian young, middle-aged and elderly, took to the streets to rail against the Soviets, fighting for freedom for Hungary.

When the marchers were met in the streets by Russian soldiers in iron tanks, the Hungarians fought with rocks, with wine bottles filled with benzene lighter fluid and stuffed with doilies made by the old women. When the people ran out of their munitions, they fought the tanks with their hands.

President Bush issued a proclamation honoring the 1956 Hungarian Revolution… “The story of Hungarian democracy represents the triumph of liberty over tyranny. In the fall of 1956, the Hungarian people demanded change, and tens of thousands of students, workers, and other citizens bravely marched through the streets to call for freedom. Though Soviet tanks brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising, the thirst for freedom lived on, and in 1989 Hungary became the first communist nation in Europe to make the transition to democracy.”

THE TELEVISION WARRIOR

My foster father is Magyarok, a Hungarian born Hungarian. He came to ‘Amereeka’ with a sewing machine under his arm. And now, he is in the living room yelling at the television again. He thinks the people inside the TV can hear him.
Hollering is a form of Hungarian aerobics;
it’s kept Dad strong all these years.
He immigrated to the USA before World War II.
Afterwards, the small ancestral farm still worked by
his mother and brothers and sisters in Hungary,
was confiscated by Germans, then Soviets.
The men dragged onto freight rollers,
the women, their children held like empty rifles,
were marched to Russian labor camps,
the rest forced from Hungary to Germany.
No children survived. Dad found
his people in the camps, brought the tiny band
one by one and oh so filled with bad night dreams,
to ‘Amereeka’.

My much older cousin had fallen in love with a man
she’d met in the refugee camps.
They’d married in secret there and she was now pregnant.
Now, in ‘Amereeka’, the old people watched over her round belly
as though a ghost Bread of Life
was baking there. A child, a child, they all
sighed, and said hope makes people cry harder than hurt.

So, we all lived together in our little house with Dad going toe to toe every night with the evening news. He’d yell at the TV in his broken English, “You e-diots, you fools!” and heave back in his chair like a soldier thrown by a blast. Dad was the intimate enemy of Vyacheslav Molotov who was a protégé of Stalin; the fascist Franco; Nikita Khrushchev, any dictator who said he wasn’t.

In 1956, so distraught was he seeing the first news reels of Russian tanks in the streets of Budapest, and the young and elderly Hungarians trying to fight the iron tanks with rocks and bare hands, that Dad waved his arms like windmills and threw himself down on the living room rug, daring the tanks to come run over him, “Come get me, you cowards, Come! Get! me!!”

In the ‘60s it was missiles in Cuba and these last many years he has had a yell-fest with apartheid and ayatollahs. He warned Ortega, “Hah! Roll yourself in a tamale, let the comunistos eat you. May they all suffer indigestion.” To the lone student in Tiananmen Square, he waggled his finger, “Ya, ya, I told you so. Ve haf seen dis before. So run him over already!
Get it over with! Dere are no living heroes.” Dad’s eyes watered and watered — he said — from sitting too close to the TV screen.

Last year when Dad was 80 years old, he went hoarse from indicting the televised Ceausescu.
“He vants to bulldozing 7,000 farm villages?
You vant to tear people away from their trees??
You craze man! You want to stack them like chickens?? Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Post’s Ad Watch Fact-Checker evaluates the claims made by MoveOn.org in its recent NY Times ad and concludes :

The Pinocchio Test

The data provided by Gen. Petraeus on sharply declining Iraqi casualty rates is certainly open to analysis, debate, and challenge. We plan to take a closer look at them in a future post. However, MoveOn.org does not provide adequate factual support for its larger assertion that Petraeus is “constantly at war with the facts” and is “cooking the books” for the White House. In the absence of fresh evidence, we award MoveOn.org three Pinocchios

With General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker set to testify before Congress next week and President Bush planning to deliver his own progress report on the Iraq war, here are five things you should know about these hugely anticipated events:

This dog-and-pony show is a cover-up for a White House-manufactured catastrophe of epic proportions and an exercise in finding excuses for staying the course without further alienating voters.

As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright puts it:

“In Iraq, the list of missions that were tried on but didn’t fit includes: protection from weapons of mass destruction, creating a model democracy in the Arab world, punishing those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and stopping terrorists from catching the next plane to New York. . . .

“A cynic might suggest that the military’s real mission is to enable President Bush to continue denying that his invasion has evolved into disaster. A less jaded view might identify three goals: to prevent Iraq from becoming a haven for al-Qaeda, a client state of Iran or a spark that inflames regionwide war. These goals respond not to dangers that prompted the invasion but to those that resulted from it.”

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

Hollywood activists are easy targets, often earnestly silly and self-congratulating, but a shining exception is Mia Farrow and her work to stop the genocide in Darfur. This week, her efforts provoked two world powers-—the People’s Republic of China and Steven Spielberg.

During the YouTube debate, Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, hemmed and hawed about diplomacy to stop the killing, clearly uneasy about a complex humanitarian crisis in far-off Africa (only Joe Biden was an angry exception) and exuded helplessness.

Not Mia Farrow. For three years, the 62-year-old waif-like actress has been devoting herself to traveling in Darfur, Chad and the Sudan, photographing and writing about the atrocities, running a web site about them and pressuring for activism to relieve the suffering.

One of her targets, Steven Spielberg, who is artistic director for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, has now threatened to quit unless China, the Sudan’s largest oil customer, joins in the effort to stop the slaughter.

In the Wall Street Journal, Farrow and her son had written: “Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur’s genocide?”

A diminutive woman, Farrow is an emotional powerhouse. Married to Frank Sinatra at 21, then to composer Andre Previn and after that in an all-but-married relationship with Woody Allen for almost two decades, she has fifteen children, eleven of them adopted.

She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, drawing attention to the fight to eradicate polio, which she survived as a child, and the plight of suffering children everywhere.

If there is any such person as the mythical Earth Mother, Mia Farrow is that and more.

Cross-posted from my blog