Edited by author 04-15-2003 06:32 PM
Broke Allies Make for a Bankrupt War
By Gioconda Belli The Los Angeles Times April 9, 2003
The fact that Nicaragua is a member of the mismatched coalition supporting the U.S. war on Iraq has become an endless source of banter in my country.

A recent e-mail forwarded to me titled "Letter from President Enrique Bolanos to President Bush" outlined the plan that the highest authorities in Nicaragua, the poorest country in Latin America, after Haiti, would have devised to support the coalition forces:
"1. We will cut the water supply to our major cities to collect 100,000 barrels that the coalition will be able to use as chemical and biological weapons.

"2. We will support the air campaign by sending to Iraq 300 million mosquitoes, from our ample supply, to infect the Iraqi troops with malaria and dengue fever.

"3. We will infiltrate the Iraqi Cabinet with some of our financial advisors to starve the Iraqi army and Iraqi people to death."

Humor underscores the feeling most Nicaraguans have about our government's willingness to join the coalition put together by Bush: It is an empty gesture, a sort of political prostitution aimed at obtaining badly needed funds for our country. Bolanos is, in fact, meeting with President Bush in Washington this week, hoping to claim his reward: more than $500 million in aid from Washington.

In an article by Condoleezza Rice, published March 31 in Managua's local newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, she tries to glorify the status of the needy countries that make up most of this coalition by saying they represent 230 million people with a combined gross national product of $22 million.

The U.S. national security advisor goes on to mention the Estonian prime minister's support and mentions the Czech and Slovak brigades in Kuwait. She underlines the fact that, although some nations do not have the means to participate in the operations to free Iraq, they share a willingness to fight terrorism: "Together we are determined to do everything in our power to prevent Saddam Hussein or terrorists using Saddam's weapons to repeat what happened on Sept. 11 on a larger scale."

Good try, but considering the weight of self-interest in international politics, I doubt that Estonia, Poland, Nicaragua, Solomon Islands, Tonga or Bulgaria are worried about Al Qaeda's terrorists acts. What they share is their preoccupation that the United States would pull the plug on financial aid if they were to dissent from the Bush administration on Iraq.

So we could say this coalition, with a few exceptions, consists mainly of new and old "banana republics" that have nothing to lose in joining the U.S. but their self-respect, a commodity that is hard to maintain when financial survival is at stake.

One cannot help but be saddened to see the U.S. using this kind of economic pressure to rally international support for war.

A friend of mine, Andres Perez B, made a good point in a recent article. He compared Saddam Hussein with a rat and international law with the edifice that shelters the different nations of the world. "To neutralize a rat within the edifice of international law requires the same care you and I would have in dealing with a rat in our homes. Neither of us would choose to attack the rat with dynamite or hand grenades because we wouldn't be willing to endanger the foundations of our homes, or the life of our families."

I could not agree more. In building a coalition using the "carrot and stick" principle, the Bush administration has diminished not only the U.S. but the countries that see their participation as a business venture that eventually will pay off.

Our president has been asking people to volunteer to go to Iraq to, in his own words, "make a few bucks." Given Nicaragua's 60% unemployment rate, I am sure a few desperate Nicaraguans will end up dying in this war.

For 45 years, my country lived under a dynasty of tyrants supported, armed and financed by the United States. It seems ironic now that we should be participating in a coalition to get rid of this one. My country once had some pride. Now we have been forced by want to give this up too.

There surely won't be a better world as a result of this war.

Gioconda Belli is a Nicaraguan poet and novelist.

#

Egypt, Jordan demand withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq
Yahoo News April 14, 2003
CAIRO (AFP) - Egypt and Jordan are calling for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq and the formation of a "representative Iraqi government", their respective foreign ministers Ahmed Maher and Marwan Moasher said.

They were speaking after talks between President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II of Jordan on the situation in Iraq following the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime by US-led forces.

Maher urged "the withdrawal of the foreign forces and the formation of a government chosen by the Iraqi people."

"We want a government which will really represent the Iraqi people in all their components, and that will be the criteria by which we will judge any government which will be set up in Baghdad," he said.

"We want a credible Iraqi government representative of the Iraqi people largely from the inside", Moasher said, also calling for the withdrawal of foreign forces.

He did not say if he was against certain exiled Iraqi opposition such as Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Council, who has the backing of some figures within the US administration.

Moasher said Egypt and Jordan were working together to create "an effective Arab role which will help in setting up a government representative of the Iraqi people which can preserve the unity of Iraq."

In Amman, Moasher later said Jordan's King Abdullah II would travel to Bahrain and then on to Saudi Arabia Tuesday to discuss the situation in Iraq, the official Petra news agency reported.

Egypt and Jordan are both allies of the United States but strongly opposed the assault on Iraq, which aimed at overthrowing President Saddam Hussein and neutralising his alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Mubarak's office said earlier his talks with King Abdullah were focused on "the need to put a halt to the chaos in Iraq, to restore order and form an interim government."

Arab countries are concerned that the current unrest in post-Saddam Iraq could deteriorate into a full-fledged civil war and spread to other states in the Arab world.

The foreign ministers of countries neighbouring Iraq are to meet in Riyadh on Friday to review the fallout of the war, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said.

Amid the preparations, Prince Saud visited Damascus on Monday to discuss Iraqi security and sovereignty with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Referring to US allegations against Syria, claiming it has weapons of mass destruction and is aiding senior officials of Saddam Hussein's regime to escape, Maher said, "We are going to raise this question with our Arab brothers."

"What has happened must not happen again," he added, without elaborating.

#

America targeted 14,000 sites. So where are the weapons of mass destruction?
By Andrew Gumbel The Independent April 13, 2003
They were the reason the United States and Britain were in such a hurry to go to war, the threat the rank-and-file troops feared most.

And yet, after three weeks of war, after the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – those weapons that President Bush, on the eve of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the United States – have still to be identified.

Many influential people – disarmament experts, present and former United Nations arms inspectors, our own Robin Cook – have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all.

The public surrender of a senior Iraqi scientist could yet backfire against the US and Britain. Lieutenant-General Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, who handed himself over to US forces yesterday, continued to proclaim that Iraq no longer holds any chemical or biological weapons. He should know: the British-educated chemical expert headed the Iraqi delegation at weapons talks with the United Nations.

The few "discoveries" trumpeted in the media – the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there – have not been on a scale that could reasonably justify the unprovoked military invasion of a sovereign country, and in most cases have been proven to been no more than rumour, or propaganda, or a mixture of the two.

It could still be that, as American forces advance on Tikrit, Saddam's home town, chemical or biological weapons may be discovered, or even deployed by diehard Iraqi troops. But if the casus belli pleaded by George Bush and Tony Blair turns out to be entirely hollow – and it should be stressed that we can't yet know that – what does it say about their motivations for going to war in the first place? How much deception was involved in talking up the Iraqi threat, and how much self-deception?

As Susan Wright, a disarmament expert at the University of Michigan, said last week: "This could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion." Even The Wall Street Journal, one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders, has warned of the "widespread scepticism" the White House can expect if it does not make significant, and undisputed, discoveries of forbidden weapons.

Before the war, American intelligence officials said that they had a list of 14,000 sites where, they suspected, chemical or biological agents had been harboured, as well as the delivery systems to deploy them. A substantial number of those sites have been inspected by the invading troops. Evidence to date of a "grave and gathering" threat: precisely zero.

Much of what has been unearthed points to something we knew about all along: the weapons programmes that Iraq ran before the 1991 Gulf War, before sanctions, before regular US and British bombing raids in the no-fly zones and before the UN weapons inspection regime that ran from 1991 to 1998.

US troops have discovered a few suspect barrels here, a sample bottle of nerve agent there, stacks of chemical suits and some drugs typically used to counteract the effects of a chemical attack, such as atropine and 2-pam chloride. According to many military experts, these finds suggest the vestiges of a weapons programme that has been dismantled, not one that is up and running. The US government argues that the weapons have been deliberately dispersed and hidden – a claim that would have more merit if there were any evidence of where the materials might have gone.

In his State of the Union address in early February, President Bush was quite specific about the materials he believed Saddam was hiding: 25,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas. These days, he does not mention weapons of mass destruction at all, focusing instead on the liberation of the Iraqi people – as if liberation, not disarmament, had been the project all along.

The administration has shown its embarrassment in other ways. On day two of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, said finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction was the invading force's number two priority after toppling Saddam Hussein – itself a reversal of the argument presented at the UN Security Council.

A week later, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, pushed the issue further down the list, behind capturing and evicting "terrorists sheltered in Iraq" and collecting intelligence on "terrorist networks". Now we are told that hunting for weapons is something we can expect once the fighting is over, and that it might go on for months before yielding significant results. "It's hard work," a plaintive Ms Clarke said last week.

Nonsense, say the disarmament experts. "It's clear there wasn't much," said Professor Wright, "otherwise they would have run into something by now. After all, they've taken Baghdad." Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector who spent four months badgering the United States and Britain in vain for reliable intelligence information about the whereabouts of lethal weapons, now says he believes the war was planned on entirely different criteria, well before his inspection teams went back into Iraq in December.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some [weapons]. I think they now believe less in that possibility," he told the Spanish daily El Pais. "You ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try to show that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger."

Anxious to find a "smoking gun", a team of US disarmament experts has been set up to question Iraqis involved in weapons programmes, while others comb sites and analyse samples in the field using mobile labs.

The move has alarmed the weapons inspectors at the UN, where Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, pointedly said last week: "I think they are the ones with the mandate to disarm Iraq, and when the situation permits they should go back to resume their work."

The US team has attempted to lure some of the inspectors, who are recognised as the sole legitimate international authority on Iraq's weapons programmes.

The latest theory being touted in Washington by the usual unnamed government sources is that the Iraqis have moved their weapons out of the country, very possibly into Syria. This claim appears to have originated with Israeli intelligence – which has every motivation for stirring up trouble for its hostile Arab neighbours – and has been bolstered by reports of fighting between Iraqi Special Republican Guard units and US special forces near the Syrian border.

Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed long before it reached Syria.

But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock's films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.

If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.

#

Rout proves anti-war point
By DAVID OLIVE Toronto Star April 13, 2003
Sometimes the United States and its allies are wrong, and the rest of the world is right.

The opponents of war in Iraq - France, Germany, Russia, China, Canada, Mexico, the Arab nations and the many others — were vindicated last week when Baghdad fell just 21 days after the U.S.-led invasion began.

The anti-war argument had always been that Saddam Hussein posed no significant threat to the U.S. or its neighbours because Iraq's military power was vastly degraded after Saddam's humiliation in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the subsequent dozen years of punitive United Nations-imposed sanctions.

And that any nuclear, chemical and biological weapons Iraq might still possess could be destroyed through the U.N. inspection process without resorting to a war that has cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis.

With an invasion force the U.S. itself now boasts was of relatively minimal strength, Saddam's regime was easily toppled. On that point, the neo-con war hawks were correct. Iraq was poised to fall like a house of cards.

By the second week of the conflict, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was saying he felt embarrassed by the Iraqis' poor fighting skills - or unwillingness to fight at all.

As the enormity of the rout was clear early last week, the Pentagon was dismissing the Iraqi forces as "a paper army."

Pushed to the wall, the Iraqi regime did not try to blunt the enemy advance by dipping into its vaunted stockpile of "weapons of mass destruction" - or perhaps that, too, was a paper inventory.

Of course, the outcome of this dubious contest between the world's lone superpower and a puny, impoverished adversary with no allies was never in doubt. The U.S. and its British ally were taking on an enemy that had not been able to obtain spare parts for its tanks for the past decade and proved unable to get its fighter jets airborne.

Still, Americans need to know they got their money's worth from this unprecedented adventure, which will cost U.S. taxpayers already suffering from a weak economy at least $200 billion (all figures U.S.) in war expenses and anticipated spending on Iraqi reconstruction.

And both Americans and future "rogue states" targeted by the Bush administration for discipline also need to know that the United States can effortlessly project its power across the globe. Hence last week's triumphalism by Bush officials.

"Saddam Hussein is now taking his place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed brutal dictators," said Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defence secretary.

Equating the regional bully Saddam with the savage imperialism of Hitler, who brought about the death of more than 40 million people, is dime-store sophistry. But it's essential in the bid to approximate Rumsfeld's genius as a military strategist with that of William Tecumseh Sherman or Dwight Eisenhower.

It's not that Rumsfeld's ego needs the boost. In exaggerating both the monstrosity of Saddam and the sagacity of his conqueror, Rumsfeld's civilian defence planners seek to justify regime change and validate their Iraq strategy of rapid, lightly armed strikes at an enemy.

Since the spectre of serial regime change is new, it is imperative, too, that Americans be comforted in knowing that "Rummy" has devised a new method of warfare for achieving it. Never mind that blitzkrieg wasn't new even when Hitler used it.

And that hubris from their early success with it led both Hitler and Douglas MacArthur to disaster in Russia and Korea, respectively.

Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice-president, also heaped praise on the new Rumsfeld doctrine last week, approvingly quoting historian Victor Davis Hanson's gushing tribute to the early phases of the Iraq campaign:

"By any standard of even the most dazzling charges in military history, the Germans in the Ardennes in the spring of 1940 or Patton's romp in July of 1944, the present race to Baghdad is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties."

That is pure bunk.

We'll never know how "light" the casualties were. For, as the New York Times reported last week, "powerful munitions used by American and British forces probably left hundreds or thousands of battlefield victims pulverized, burned or buried in rubble."

The Bush administration wants it known that it has achieved battlefield wizardry that can be safely deployed in future. But what the U.S. forces did in Iraq against a poorly trained, poorly motivated enemy on favourable terrain does not begin to compare with the 38 days it took the Wehrmacht to bring the Low Countries and France, one of the world's great military powers, under Nazi subjugation in the spring of 1940.

Against fierce resistance in 1944, U.S. Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army swept roughly 900 kilometres across northern France in two weeks - more than twice the distance traversed by U.S. forces between Kuwait and Baghdad. By war's end, Patton had inflicted 1.4 million casualties on the enemy.

But bold nonsense is to be expected of a Bush administration whose foreign policy has been marked by deception. This dates from its success in winning congressional approval for war in Iraq by grossly inflating the threat posed by Saddam and later its failure to win pro-war votes on the U.N. Security Council with documents about alleged Iraqi nuclear plans that were revealed as forgeries.

Not since Vietnam has mendacity so thoroughly characterized both the goals and methods of U.S. foreign policy.

Feigning diplomacy, the U.S. built up its forces in the Persian Gulf. Declaring itself committed first to the objective of Mideast security, then of destruction of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction," then of Saddam's ouster and finally of "liberating" a long-oppressed people, the Bush administration is only now revealed to be in apparent pursuit of something it dares not formally promulgate - the imposition of democracy, Western-style capitalism and a benign regard for Israel throughout the region.

Having come this far by prevarication, administration officials cannot now extricate themselves from their deceptions, indeed, self-deceptions.

Wedded of necessity to the concept of ad hoc coalitions as an alternative to the constraints of the U.N. and NATO, the Pentagon has come to believe what it says about its latest "coalition of the willing" - that it is one of the largest, if not the largest, such coalition in history.

Former U.S. allies can react only with disbelief at such revisionism.

How soon the U.S. forgets the significant military contributions by Europe, Pakistan, Egypt, Canada and others to the Persian Gulf War, and the more genuine multinationalism of the coalition to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban only a year and a half ago.

The prime minister of Solomon Islands, one of many Pacific microdots hastily recruited into the coalition of the willing by the U.S. State Department, was asked about his role in the Iraqi conflict. He could only express surprise. He was, he said, "completely unaware" of his country's involvement in Iraq.

Even the once-dovish Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, now in penance after U.S. failure to achieve the Security Council's blessing for war in Iraq, has begun to lose his grip on the truth.

Irritated by a German TV interviewer, Powell snapped that the U.S. would not, as many expect, abandon post-war Iraq to its own devices.

"And guess who will be the major contributor, who will pay the most money to help the Iraqi people to get back on their feet?" Powell said. "It will be the United States, as always."

As always? As chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Gulf War, Powell would very well know that America's allies paid $53 billion of the $63 billion cost of that war.

That about two-thirds of humanitarian and reconstruction work in the developing world is paid for by Europeans.

That European and Canadian forces, among others, cleaned up after the Americans in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Of the U.S. record in post-war Afghanistan, already in chaos as insurgent Taliban gangs terrorize civilians and aid workers, Powell said: "We are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We're very proud of it. It's been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again and again."

That claim is preposterous. After the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. returned Kuwait to its despotic emirs and left Saddam to murder thousands of dissidents.

In the aftermath of 1990s U.S. interventions in Somalia, Haiti and Afghanistan, local autocrats and warlords lost no time re-imposing their violent rule.

In a must-read analysis of Bush war strategy in the current Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall writes that the administration's "preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda impossible not to pursue .... Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con."

On the economic front, the audacious Bush's tax cuts for the rich have swollen the deficit, which becomes the justification for slashing social programs - including a Bush-endorsed cut in veterans-affairs spending by $15 billion over the next decade. (Yes, at a time like this.)

On the war front, it means explaining that a buildup of military force in the Gulf is the only means of pressuring Saddam to comply with U.N. sanctions.

It means letting unofficial spokesmen like Henry Kissinger suggest that those forces must be unleashed for combat in Iraq because "if the United States marches 200,000 troops into the region and then marches them back out ... the credibility of American power ... will be gravely, perhaps irreparably impaired."

And it means orchestrating dire warnings from unnamed Pentagon sources that if an Iraqi assault didn't commence soon, it would bog down in seasonal sandstorms. (It was darkly amusing to watch one U.S. commander after another on CNN these past three weeks insisting that weather conditions had not, after all - and never would - stall the progress of an Abrams tank column for more than an afternoon.)

It is that cumulative duplicity, much of it almost comically transparent, that baffled and finally alienated so many world leaders over the past months.

These included Jacques Chirac, the most pro-American French president of modern times, who once operated a forklift at a Budweiser plant in St. Louis and was the first head of state to pay an official visit to the Bush White House.

That France had commercial interests in Saddam's Iraq might have had less to do with Chirac's war skepticism than his experience as a combat veteran in the Algerian desert.

For Chirac and his peers, so little of what came out of the Bush administration made any sense.

And they hardly grasp it now.

The neo-con theory behind the Iraq campaign is that a democratized Middle East will be a safer place, because democracies don't make unprovoked attacks on other countries.

It's an attractive idea. But when the world's most powerful democracy launched its invasion of Iraq last month, that theory failed its first test.

#

How America Lost the War
By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Perspective April 14, 2003
Television news stations, along with newspapers from coast to coast, have been showing scenes of celebration in Baghdad. The dictator, Saddam Hussein, has been removed from power. News anchors have likened this event to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris by Allied forces during World War II. Never mind that the joyful crowds who tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last week numbered perhaps one hundred people, or that the entire event was a staged media scam. A wide angle shot of the square where this 'celebration' took place showed a deserted, ruined city with that one small clot of people. The true feelings of the Iraqi people in the aftermath of the invasion were best summed up by a woman who screamed at a reporter for the UK Independent: "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city."

The war against Iraq was proffered and pursued by the Bush administration with two clear goals on the table. 1) We were, first and foremost, there to capture and destroy any and all weapons of mass destruction; 2) We were there to 'liberate' the Iraqi people and plant a seedcorn of democracy. Enveloping this entire scenario was the Bush administration's premise that what we were doing was just and moral.

We need, first of all, to get our terms straight so as to achieve a sense of clarity regarding the issue of America's moral standing on the matter. Saddam Hussein was not defeated. He was not overthrown, bested, beaten or destroyed. Saddam Hussein was fired, relieved of his position by a nation that hired him for a dirty job way back in 1979.

When the Shah of Iran, another employee of the United States, was overthrown by fundamentalist revolutionaries controlled by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, America lost a staunch ally against the rise of Soviet influence in the Middle East. That same year saw Saddam Hussein take control of Iraq, and America immediately leaped into his corner so as to maintain the bulwark against the USSR. In short, he was hired. On September 22, 1980, Hussein attacked Iran ostensibly to gain strategically important territory along with the rich oil fields around Khuzestan. At bottom, however, Hussein was acting as an instrument of American policy and attempting to overthrow Khomeini, so as to dissolve a dangerous Iranian/Soviet alliance.

The relationship between Iraq and America bloomed throughout the Reagan administration in the 1980s. We provided intelligence data to Iraqi forces that described, in detail, the order of battle of Iranian forces. American government and private industry interests provided Iraq with the means to create all of the terrible weapons Hussein was so covetous of. We knew Iraq was using chemical weapons during their fight with Iran, and continued to give them this intelligence data. In fact, Iran in 1984 brought a draft resolution before the United Nations Security Council condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Iraq petitioned the United States several times to make sure the international response to their chemical attacks was muted, and that no specific country was named regarding Iran's petition. The Iraqi/American version of the resolution carried the day.

That same year saw a public American condemnation of the use of these weapons. However, that same condemnation carried within it the following language: "The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims." (Emphasis added)

The National Security Archive released a number of recently declassified documents in February of 2003 which further describe the intimate relationship the Reagan administration maintained with Saddam Hussein and Iraq. National Security Decision Directive 114 of November 26, 1983, "U.S. Policy toward the Iran-Iraq War," described American intentions: The ability to project military force in the Persian Gulf and to protect oil supplies. There was no reference made to chemical weapons or human rights concerns. National Security Decision Directive 139 of April 5, 1984, "Measures to Improve U.S. Posture and Readiness to Respond to Developments in the Iran-Iraq War," focused again on increased access for U.S. military forces in the Persian Gulf and enhanced intelligence-gathering capabilities. The directive ordered preparation of "a plan of action designed to avert an Iraqi collapse."

Saddam Hussein was such a valued employee that the Reagan administration sent a high level envoy to Iraq to ensure the relationship was on steady ground. That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld, who was filmed by CNN on September 20, 1983, warmly shaking hands with Hussein. Although Rumsfeld said during a September 21, 2002 CNN interview, "In that visit, I cautioned him about the use of chemical weapons, as a matter of fact, and discussed a host of other things," documents pertaining to that September 1983 meeting from the National Security Archive clearly demonstrate that there was no mention of chemical weapons between the two men.

Bush's bloviating sermons on morality in this matter fail in the face of the facts. Saddam Hussein would not have existed were it not for the energetic support of the United States. We didn't defeat Hussein. We fired him. The fact that he was a valued employee for so long, the fact that we averted our eyes as late as 1988 to his use of chemical weapons, the fact that we gave him vital intelligence data so he could more accurately and effectively use those weapons, and the fact that we gave material assistance via government and private institutions for the creation and promulgation of said weapons, all burst the bubble of righteousness the entire debate has been contained in. Bush can talk all he wants about the evil Saddam Hussein. There is little argument with the appellation of that adjective to that name. Yet it was America who allowed him to become so, and the moral arguments surrounding his firing are indelibly tainted by these sad facts. The Kurds in Halabja who were gassed to death in March of 1988 can level a damning finger of blame as much at America as at Hussein.

As for the location and destruction of these chemical weapons, it can be said at this point that the Bush administration has suffered an incredible array of embarrassments in this matter. American forces have investigated 14,000 suspected weapons sites during the Iraq invasion, and have not located so much as a teaspoon of prohibited weaponry. The Bush administration pointedly ignored the facts in this matter and whipped the American people into a fearful frenzy. According to Bush, Hussein had 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas - all nightmares that were just waiting to be used in New York or Los Angeles. The hood ornament on this push to war has been utterly discredited thus far, as not a speck of evidence backing these claims has been located.

We are supposed to forget about that now, because according to the new spin, the war was never about these weapons. It was about freeing the Iraqi people. It is clear by now that Iraq is no longer ruled by Saddam Hussein, but let us take a step further and analyze the newfound 'freedom' of the Iraqi people.

At this moment, the city of Baghdad is in utter chaos. The Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, repository of over 5,000 years worth of cultural and regional history, has been utterly destroyed. Mesopotamia and its people have lost an immeasurable portion of their history with this terrible act, one that could have been stopped by a few Marines outside the museum. That simple precaution never happened. Beyond that, the looting has had a darker social edge. The strata of society in Iraq has seen for years the minority Sunnis – who claim Saddam Hussein as their own – ruling over the majority Shia. The orgy of looting that has broken out in Iraq is, basically, the Shia robbing the Sunni. An ever-rising boil of gunplay between these two groups is putting a match to the fuse of religiously-based civil war, and the American troops have done nothing to stop it except recruit members of Hussein's feared police force to try and restore order. So much for regime change.

This is exactly the scenario that led to the attacks of September 11. America dared the Soviets to invade Afghanistan by sending mujeheddin guerillas against the communist Afghan government. The USSR did invade, falling into Zbignew Brzyzinski's "Afghan Trap," and smashed the country to flinders. In the devastated aftermath, America did absolutely nothing to heal that shattered nation, and the vacuum was eventually filled by the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. The rest is a history that seems destined to be repeated as we pointedly ignore the rising tide of lawlessness and anarchy, caused directly by our actions, in yet another country.

Further exacerbating the tensions is the hard talk coming out of Washington regarding a coming attack on Syria. Baghdad has not yet stopped bleeding, and the hawks want to take on Damascus. Syria has its own downtrodden Shia segment within the society, and the Shia in Iraq will not take kindly to their kin across the border coming under siege. In the end, though, the Shia do not matter. Despite all the happy talk about democracy in Iraq, no such birth will take place there if the Bush administration has anything to say about it. Democracy, or majority rules in the western sense, would create a Shia fundamentalist regime rule. The Shia share cultural allegiance not only with a segment of Syria, but with the mullahs who rule Iran. A Shia Iraq would ally with Iran, creating a strategically untenable situation. The Bush administration knows this all too well, and has been lying with its bare face hanging out every time it speaks of democracy in that bruised country.

Instead of democracy, the Bush administration has a two-pronged leadership thrust in mind for Iraq. The first stage will see Iraq ruled by an American named Jay Garner, former weapons manufacturer and avowed proponent of the failed 'Star Wars' missile defense shield. Garner, a unilateralist hawk who shares a brain with Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, is also on record as supporting a number of the harsher measures Israel has taken against the Palestinians. Opinions on this matter vary, of course. It is all too clear, however one may feel on that matter, that in a part of the world where the Palestinians are seen as martyred victims, having a man like Garner running the show in Iraq gives the appearance that America believes the best way to deal with the Palestinians is with bulldozers and helicopter gunships. This will not sell in the Mideast marketplace.

After Garner will come Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi national Congress and Rumsfeld's first choice for final ruler of Iraq. Chalabi is an interesting pick. His Shia background makes a great many people in the State Department, the CIA and the Middle East nervous. The degree to which Chalabi will kowtow to American interests at the expense of the Iraqi people is also of concern; Chalabi, Rumsfeld, Perle and Wolfowitz have been brothers in arms for years, and Chalabi seems all too likely to do their bidding instead of tending to the needs of Iraqis. Finally, there is Chalabi's dubious Enronesqe background. He was convicted of 31 counts of bank fraud in a Jordanian court and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison. Chalabi has not set foot in Iraq since 1956.

Raise your hand if you see democracy and liberation in all of this. There is little to see. To be sure, the murderous tyrant has been removed. In his absence, however, there is the complete breakdown of social order; there is the beginnings of a civil war; there is no thought whatsoever to instituting any form of representative government; there is not even the pretense of an attempt by American forces to do anything about the social catastrophes that are unfolding, except hire back the 'thugs' who were supposedly the cause of the war in the first place; there are thousands and thousands of Iraqis who are now dead or maimed, all of whom have families and friends, all of whom see this war for what it truly was. This is not freedom by any standard.

We lost the war.

We defeated the Iraqi military, to be sure, and we fired Saddam Hussein. We have lost the real war, the important war, the war against those who attacked us on September 11. We lost the war because we betrayed the international community, whose help we desperately need in this wider war, by lying to them about Iraq's weapons and by disregarding their legitimate concerns. We have lost the war because our actions have given aid and succor to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, whose agents were and are nowhere to be found in Iraq despite the avowed words of the Bush administration. We have lost the war because the Iraqi people themselves already understand that the 'liberation' they were promised is as false as the evidence we used to invade their country. We lost the war because our moral standing to make it in the first place was utterly bereft of substance. We lost the war because the rest of the world sees the American government for what it is – a mob of hyperactive right-wing extremists with an army to play with and a dream of global dominance glowing like coals in their eyes.

There is no victory here. We lost the war before the first shot was fired.

#

U.S. May Have to Allow Others to Inspect Iraqi Arms
By WILLIAM J. BROAD The New York Times April 14, 2003
The Bush administration may be legally bound to let independent inspectors confirm any findings of unconventional weapons in Iraq, administration and independent arms experts said. But they added that the White House, which has resisted help from the United Nations in the search for weapons, may decide to ignore such legalities.
 
The administration is debating its obligations under arms control treaties that govern chemical, biological and nuclear arms, an official involved in the discussions said in an interview.

"If we gain control, then theoretically they're ours," the official said of Iraqi unconventional arms. "Someone could argue that because we now own them, we have to meet all the requirements" of the weapon treaties, which predate recent United Nations inspections of Iraq.

The official added that the Pentagon, which has responsibility for any discovered Iraqi arms, wants no outside help. "But people are thinking about that," he added. "Although the current guidance is not to plan to operate with an international organization, that doesn't mean that won't change."

Last week, when asked about possible doubts about chemical finds, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said measures had been put in place to diminish the chance that someone might tamper with battlefield evidence or exploit a murky situation to charge fraud, incompetence or self-deception. "We've got people who have been alerted to the importance of chain of custody," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters.

A White House official said the White House would have no public comment on the debate over independent inspectors.

Outside the government, weapon experts have argued for the United States to let international inspectors help identify and destroy any discovered unconventional weapons in Iraq. They say that independent confirmation would help convince skeptics that the war was just.

Washington cited the need to disarm Iraq as the main reason for the invasion. Yet, so far, no unambiguous evidence has come to light demonstrating that Iraq possessed such prohibited weapons.

"Bush's credibility is hanging in the balance," said Dr. Elisa D. Harris, a Clinton administration arms control official now at the University of Maryland.

For weeks, advancing troops have reported signs of chemical arms: gas masks, protective suits, nerve gas antidotes, training manuals, barrels of suspicious chemicals and a cache of mysterious shells. While the military has undertaken many tests and inspections, none of the chemicals have been proven to be warfare agents, rather than pesticides or other legitimate chemicals they can closely resemble.

Administration and private experts said one treaty that may require letting independent weapon inspectors into Iraq is the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, which 150 nations, including the United States, have signed.

The treaty bars the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical arms. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague and known as the O.P.C.W., polices the treaty around the globe and in the United States, which is slowly destroying its old stockpiles of chemical arms.

Though Iraq did not sign the treaty, several leading experts said the United States, by taking possession of Iraqi chemical arms, would fall under its provisions even though the treaty makes no explicit reference to the responsibilities of a victor in war.

"The spirit of the treaty is that the destruction of chemical weapons globally is up to the O.P.C.W. to verify," said Barry Kellman, director of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University in Chicago and co-author of a book on how states can meet treaty duties. "If we find chemical weapons, the O.P.C.W. should supervise their destruction."

Mary E. Hoinkes, general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Clinton administration, said the crucial issue was who determines the fate of captured chemical weapons. "If we're talking about destroying them after hostilities are over, collecting them and destroying them, that's when the obligations kick in," she said.

Experts said the reverse might also be argued. Under international law, some noted, obligations usually run to states rather than particular governments or controlling forces. The nuclear issue is clearer, legal experts agreed. That is because Iraq signed the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty, which aims to bar the spread of nuclear weapons. The treaty's enforcement arm, the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna and known as the I.A.E.A., has teams of inspectors that regularly checked Iraq's nuclear facilities before the war.

Thomas Graham Jr., general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency during the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations, said there was no question that the United States had to let in I.A.E.A. inspectors. "If we didn't," he said, "we'd be accessory to a violation."

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the I.A.E.A., has publicly called for the Bush administration to let his inspectors into Iraq when the fighting stops. Late last week, an agency spokesman in Vienna said it had so far received no reply.

#

Feet force cars from city streets
By Joseph Kerr and agencies The Sydney Morning Herald April 14, 2003
About 10,000 protesters turned out in Sydney streets yesterday as part of another wave of anti-war rallies around the world at the weekend, again forcing traffic out of large parts of the city.

While protesters overseas were involved in more radical action, such as burning the US flag and throwing red paint at the US consulate in Brazil, the local action was relatively gentle, led by church leaders on Palm Sunday.

In London, as the first British troops started to return from the Gulf, thousands of people opposed to the war marched through the streets, and peace activists across 45 Canadian cities and towns also protested.

In Washington, rallies were held both for and against the war - thousands wanting to support US troops joined a "Rally for America" outside the US Congress.

In Sydney, police reported no trouble and no arrests. The local rally marched from Belmore Park, near Central, to the Domain without any significant incidents.

Religious leaders from a range of faiths - Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian - spoke to the pre-march rally at Belmore Park, where people sat quietly, listening to short speeches, prayers, chants and hymns.

"If only we can put as much effort into what makes for peace," said Father Claude Mostowik, the director of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart Justice and Peace Centre at Erskineville.

Walking far more placidly than during the huge pre-war protest of February 16, the diverse group of people moved up Elizabeth Street to Park Street. Crossing to College Street, they walked up Art Gallery Road to the Domain.

One of the key messages from several speakers was that while Saddam Hussein may have lost control of Baghdad, the war was far from over - and the troops should come home.

Church and union groups yesterday also published a "Beyond War" statement, calling on the United Nations to step in to manage postwar Iraq and describing the conflict as a "failure of both political will and our social contract and primary responsibility to protect human life and the wider environment".

"It's the first time in my life I've ever been ashamed to be Australian," said 71-year-old Mary Kenna, of Botany, who was with her husband, Jim. She said it was only the second protest she had ever been to, the first having been the mass protest on February 16 in which 250,000 people crammed onto Sydney's streets.

"That's how much it means to us," she said.

At the Domain, a woman who has returned from being a "human shield", Donna Mulhearn, joined the former Office of National Assessments analyst, Andrew Wilkie, who resigned in March in protest at Howard Government actions over the war, and ALP left-winger Carmen Lawrence to address the rally in Sydney.

"There will be a terrorist backlash, and we are now that bit closer to the so-called clash of civilisations," Mr Wilkie said.

"Why kill so many to remove one man?' I asked John Howard," said Dr Lawrence.

Leaving the rally about 3.30pm, 31-year-old Rachel Nelson, a teacher from Newtown, said it was "quite amazing" to see how many among the crowd were over 50.

"I wonder if it's wisdom," Ms Nelson said.

#

United States Department of Defense
News Transcript
On the web: http://dod.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030413-secdef0101.html
Media contact: media@defenselink.mil or +1 (703) 697-5131
Public contact: public@defenselink.mil or +1 (703) 428-0711
 
Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld Sunday, April 13, 2003 - 10:30 a.m. EDT

Secretary Rumsfeld Interview on CBS Face the Nation
Interview on CBS Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer and and Tom Friedman, New York Times

Schieffer: And good morning again. The Secretary of Defense is in the studio with us this morning. He'll be here for the whole broadcast. Also here, Tom Friedman, just back from Iraq, the foreign affairs columnist from The New York Times. Well some very good news apparently, Mr. Secretary about these Americans. What can you tell us?

Rumsfeld: Well, it is correct that seven American service people have been located and they are in U.S. hands at the present time. I'm told they are all in good shape. There are two that have gunshot wounds, but they're in reasonably good shape, and that they are going to be brought into - probably into Kuwait and certainly their families are being notified at the present time. Needless to say, all of the loved ones of the people who are missing, or prisoners of war are anxious to know what's up, and worried about their loved ones.

Friedman: How did we find them?

Rumsfeld: What happened was, as I understand it, I was talking to Central Command this morning before I came here to your show. Some Iraqis told American military that there were seven American service people in the area. They told them where they were, and they were somewhere six, eight, ten kilometers south of Tikrit, as I understand it, and the service people went up and found them, and they rescued them and they're en route.

Schieffer: And as I understand it, you don't intend to give us any more detail than that, until these families are notified. Once they are, then you'll reveal who they are, and so forth.

Rumsfeld: Exactly. Their names and their units will be made public after the families have been notified, and that should - you never know how long that's going to take, but it's the proper way to handle it.

Schieffer: Tom?

Friedman: Mr. Secretary, how do you see the political structure now evolving in Iraq. The war is over, what happens next? Will it be -

Rumsfeld: The war isn't over Tom. There are still people being killed. We lost some people last night. There are pockets of resistance. There are Fedayeen Saddam people--the death squad people who are going out trying to kill people. We just found, I don't know, I think it was 80 vests filled with explosives and ball bearings. And the inventory list suggested there were another 30 that are not there. So there are people - suicide types who are out. There are a number of non-Iraqis who are in the country, particularly in Baghdad we find.

Friedman: Are these from Syria?

Rumsfeld: A lot from Syria, most from Syria it appears.

Friedman: There were actually Syrian soldiers, or nationals, how would you describe them?

Rumsfeld: Nationals.

Friedman: Syrian nationals.

Rumsfeld: That's what we're told.

Friedman: Involved in operations against American forces?

Rumsfeld: Absolutely. In a firefight, a lot of them got killed last night.

Schieffer: What would they be? Intelligence agents or are they people there with some official tie to the government, or just people who just wandered in there?

Rumsfeld: I have no idea. People were busy fighting them. They weren't asking their biographies.

Schieffer: I understand.

Rumsfeld: We did see busloads of people coming out of Syria into the country. Some were stopped. The ones we could find, turned them around and sent them back. And some we impounded and put in enemy prisoner of war camps. And others are getting killed.

Friedman: Are the Syrians going to pay a price for this?

Schieffer: The reason I ask that - I mean it seems to me that people wouldn't just be sitting around in Syria and saying, "Gosh let's go over to Iraq." These people must've been sent there with a mission and they must've had some connection would you assume, to the Syrian government?

Rumsfeld: On one of the buses, they found something like several hundred thousand dollars and a number of leaflets that suggested that people would be rewarded if they killed Americans, which is not surprising. Saddam Hussein's regime was paying 25 thousand dollars to people who blew up shopping malls in Israel - suicide bombers.

Friedman: Is the Syrian government going to pay a price for this?

Rumsfeld: I'm sure they already are if you think about it. I mean who in the world would want to invest in Syria? Who would want to go into tourism in Syria? The government's making a lot of bad mistakes, a lot of bad judgment calls in my view and they are associating with the wrong people and the affect of that hurts the Syrian people. It hurts the Syrian people because reasonable people don't want to be associated with a state that's on a terrorist list. They don't to be associated with a country that's engaged with Hezbollah and moving terrorists down and terrorist materials, equipment, and explosives, down to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. They don't want to be associated with a country that's still occupying their neighboring country of Lebanon.

Schieffer: But is that enough, Mr. Secretary, just to be on the terrorist list? I mean, should we take some other action or contemplate some other action?

Rumsfeld: Oh, that's for Presidents and countries to decide, not for me.

Schieffer: What if we find out that Saddam Hussein is in Syria? That if he is indeed still alive, that he's there?

Rumsfeld: Then I think Syria would've made an even bigger mistake.

Schieffer: What would we do about that?

Rumsfeld: The last thing I would do would be to discuss that.

Friedman: Mr. Secretary, I want to take you back to, when the war's over. Let me rephrase my question. How do you see, because obviously you've learned some things now by this engagement with Iraq, the way the country has fallen out since the war. What kind of political structure do you see evolving? That is -- where will Tommy Franks and Central Command be? What kind of Iraqi input into this do you see happening? What will be the first steps in terms of the political reconstruction of Iraq? What are you expecting?

Rumsfeld: I would think of it this way, that it will be a transition that will occur over a period of time. There will be a number of things occurring near simultaneously. The first thing that has to be done is that the war has to be won. We have to stamp out these pockets of resistance that exist. We have then a great deal of work to go out and look for weapons of mass destruction and explore these sites and to find terrorists and the terrorist areas that we know of. We have to find people who can help us find these things, and who can find the Ba'ath Party records and the intelligence service records. And hope they haven't all been burned and destroyed. We have to find the people on the war criminal list and we have to find people who would like to have a better life and therefore would like to be willing to cooperate with us. And we're actively looking. We're using rewards. We're using carrots and sticks both. And we're finding an awful lot of people starting to cooperate with us, which is a good thing. So all of that work has to go forward. We have second, see that we provide the humanitarian needs for the people of that country. It's just terribly important that they have the water and the food and the medicines.

And we've got an excellent group of people organized and assisting and the international community is participating. And it's not perfect, but I know that our folks - President Bush from well before this started, once he believed it might have to happen, said he wanted the humanitarian effort to be right in parallel with the military effort. As a result, our forces when they went in brought water, brought food, brought medical supplies for the people as they passed from the South up to the North. The other thing that has to happen is that the Iraqi people have to figure out how they want to have their government selected and what kind of a constitution they want to have and what kind of a pace they want to have for that. It's going to be their decisions, not ours. And Tom Franks, needless to say, will be there and will see that the security environment is such that these kinds of things can happen. But, there will begin to be meetings of Iraqis, and they'll begin to figure out a way to fashion an interim Iraqi authority. And then they will very likely figure out a way to fashion a new constitution. And then that constitution will have a mechanism to select their permanent government and leadership. And it will happen as soon as is possible we hope. The Iraqi people - some people are skeptical of whether or not the Iraqi people are capable of self-government. I'm not, I think it may not be perfect, and certainly there's going to be some bumps along the road, but the Afghan people are figuring out how to do that. And they had a process that was uniquely Afghan and I suspect that the Iraqis will figure out something out that's uniquely Iraqi.

Schieffer: Go ahead Tom.

Friedman: Do you see an Arab role in terms of--we're going to have a security structure there under General Franks. Do you see possibly bringing in NATO or certain friendly Arab countries to participate in that peacekeeping role, once the war is won?

Rumsfeld: Well, I was with, I'm going to guess 50 Ambassadors from countries that have been a part of this coalition. It's kind of amusing when you think back everyone said the United States was acting unilaterally, and going it alone. We weren't, we had some 50 plus countries that have been participating and I was with many of them last night. And as they walked in and shook hands, they - one after the other said, our country is ready to supply three thousand people for a peacekeeping force. Our country's ready to supply a medical unit. We're ready to assist with this. We're ready to assist with that. And that process has been going forward. And it is accelerating at this stage and I do anticipate - I have said from the beginning that we -

Friedman: You anticipate - finish that sentence.

Rumsfeld: That there will be a great many countries that will be part of this process. There already are. Another country, Spain, has some troops on the ground in the port city of Umm Qasr, where you were recently.

Schieffer: Including Arab countries?

Rumsfeld: Sure. Why not, and certainly Muslim countries. NATO I've suggested to the Secretary General that I thought that would be a good thing. If NATO wanted to do that obviously France would be opposed I'm told. They are opposed to a lot of things so that shouldn't be a problem, because you can do it at 18 instead of at 19 countries since they're not a member of the defense planning committee. So I would hope that NATO would play a role. Some of the United Nations is playing a role and been very helpful and we expect that that will grow.

Schieffer: What about Germany?

Rumsfeld: I can't speak for any country.

Schieffer: I mean would they be welcome if they wanted to help?

Rumsfeld: Oh look, the needs there are real. We've got to find people who are willing to assist and I'm certainly hopeful that a lot of countries will participate in various ways.

Friedman: You know the French Foreign Minister today said that the time is not right for the United States to put pressure on Syria, by accusing it of aiding Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime. Do these guys piss you off?

Rumsfeld: The French?

Friedman: Yeah.

Rumsfeld: Oh goodness. I think I'll leave diplomacy to Secretary Powell.

Friedman: Why? (Laughter.) Why start now? (Laughter.)

Rumsfeld: You know, I'm always a believer that people ought to - sovereign nations and individuals ought to have their own views. And they ought to argue them and debate them and discuss them. And I think that's good. That's healthy. And I like debate and discussion and competition of ideas. I think that's healthy. I think what is not healthy is when a - someone tries to define themselves by their opposition to others as opposed to what they're for or what they're doing. And the comment that you just sited, suggests that the truth doesn't have any value. And the truth does have value. And the fact of the matter is that Syria has been unhelpful and pretending that that's not the case it strikes me, is to deny the truth. And I don't think you can live a lie.

Schieffer: Let me shift just a minute from diplomacy to intelligence matters. David Martin of CBS News has learned that the - that we have in custody, I guess is the word, of the head of the Iraqi Nuclear Program. Can you tell us anything about that?

Rumsfeld: I'm sure there are a number of people who have been or were involved at senior levels of the Iraqi Nuclear Program and I have been told that one of those individuals may be in custody, but I wouldn't want to get into who it was.

Schieffer: Well the name we have been given is Jafar dhia Jafar.

Rumsfeld: I'll let the people who do this announce names. I don't do that.

Schieffer: All right. One of the things that apparently he has told U.S. officials is that the Iraqi Nuclear Program ended in 1991.

Rumsfeld: That's been the standard mantra from the Iraqis over a sustained period of time.

Schieffer: Do you believe that?

Rumsfeld: Did you believe the Minister of Information of Iraq when he said there were U.S. forces in Baghdad?

Schieffer: No.

Rumsfeld: There hasn't been much that they've said that is believable. Anyone who's watched them over the years knows that they're liars, skillful to be sure. And they've been able to get the world's press to carry their lies around as though they were true without saying, "Be on notice. Caution. These people lie repeatedly." And it wasn't until they had the split screen with the U.S. forces at the Baghdad Airport and the Minister of Information saying they weren't there. That people said, "Oh my goodness he's lying. Isn't that amazing."

Schieffer: Let's take a break right there. We'll come back in just a moment.

Schieffer: Back again with the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Mr. Secretary, what is the latest on Saddam Hussein? Do we believe he's dead? Do we have DNA that if we do turn up a body we'll be able to identify it? Just tell us what you can tell us about the whole business of where he is or if you think he's dead.

Rumsfeld: Well, there isn't a day that goes by that we aren't given intelligence information. When I say intelligence - I shouldn't say that, it's scraps of information and it's this report or that report. And if you add it all up and inhale it I think reasonable people come to the conclusion that we don't know, that there are people who think he's dead, there are people who think he was badly injured, there are people who think he may be alive. I don't chase those rabbits. My attitude is we'll find out and eventually he'll be through, but ---

Schieffer: Do you think we'll ever know?

Rumsfeld: Sure.

Schieffer: We will know?

Rumsfeld: I think so.

Friedman: Mr. Secretary, in the vacuum that was naturally created between the collapse of this regime and a new order, obviously, there's been a lot of chaos, we've seen looting in all the major cities now. What are you doing now to secure that situation now? Are you sending more troops, are you devoting different units to secure different ministries now? There was a report in the Washington Post today that the oil ministry had been secured but the national museum hadn't, people are raising questions about that. What are you doing to secure the situation?

Rumsfeld: People raise questions about everything. That's fair enough. There have been more troops arriving in the country every day for the past three weeks, ever since they went in, three weeks and two days ago, additional troops have been arriving. They've been going up, oh, anywhere from fifteen hundred to thirty-five hundred a day and - ours and some other countries as well. They are also able as the war was being won and is in the process of succeeding, the troops have been spreading all across the country. There are places where we have a control in a way that people can go out in the streets and do what they do and start rebuilding their lives. There are places where we do not have that kind of control at the present time. And we do find that everywhere we do, when our terrific young men and women in uniform go into a town and create that presence, the security and see that there isn't anarchy, there's not disorder and that people can safely go out into the street, people are coming in and volunteering. They're volunteering to engage in joint patrols with our people, the clerics are calling for people to not loot, not riot, the humanitarian assistance flows in and the beginning of a return to a more normal situation is occurring and it's a good thing. And they're doing that in the south and they're doing it now in the north. There are patrols -- Baghdad, to be quite honest, is a very big place and that is not the case yet and that's sad, it's unfortunate. But it will be the case in very short order and that's a good thing.

Schieffer: Mr. Secretary, you talked to us a minute ago about the Iraqi information minister and some of these statements that they're putting out. A lot of the Arab world, as you well know, the information they get about this comes from Al Jazeera, the Arab television network. What do you think about -

Rumsfeld: I wouldn't say "the Arab" -

Schieffer: Well, one of them, it's certainly the main one.

Rumsfeld: It is one of many -

Schieffer: Do you believe Al Jazeera is anything more than an Arab television network?

Rumsfeld: It puts out television images in Arabic, in Arabic language and I don't watch it carefully. People who do tell me that it has a pattern of being anti-U.S., anti-West and I've also seen pieces of information that suggests that they're influenced by people like Saddam Hussein's regime.

Schieffer: Do you have any information that would lead you to believe that it goes beyond being influenced, that perhaps they've been infiltrated by Saddam's people?

Rumsfeld: Oh, I've seen allegations to that effect, but I don't watch it so I can't speak from certain knowledge.

It's unfortunate that the people of the world don't see as open and accurate a set of images in Arabic as I think they might and anything that can be done about that is a good thing. I think the free press and free television and the opportunity for people to do things badly and to do things well and to gain supporters and listenership when they do it well, and lose it when they lie and don't have balance, I think that's the answer to it.

Schieffer: What lessons should North Korea and its leaders draw from what they are seeing on television in Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Oh, I think the circumstances are quite different. But the United States is attempting to see if there isn't a way to deal with this problem from a diplomatic standpoint. It's a terrible risk to the world that if North Korea does in fact go through the reprocessing of nuclear materials and end up with sufficient materials to make six or eight more weapons in three or four, five months, that would be not a good thing. If they started selling that material to countries around the world and we ended up with a large increase in the total number of nuclear powers in the world, that's not a happy place.

Schieffer: Would we stand for that?

Rumsfeld: That's up to other people.

But I think what the world needs to do is recognize that these weapons are enormously powerful -- biological weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, radiation weapons -- and that they can kill tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of human beings and that's a risk to the world.

And the idea that those things could get in the hands of additional terrorist states, terrorist networks is something that the world needs to grasp. And I think that the like-thinking countries in the world, free people need to -- international organizations and collectively -- recognize how serious that threat is and -

Schieffer: Are you still convinced we will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Oh my goodness, there's been so much intelligence, CIA material about what's been going on in that country that if we can find the right people who will tell us where they've located them then that's the way we're going to find them. Inspectors didn't find them and certainly we're not going to find them. It's not like a treasure hunt when you run around and dig down and see if there's a tunnel some place. You've got to find the people who dug the tunnels, the people who've worked in those operations.

Schieffer: And you think we will?

Rumsfeld: I do.

Schieffer: All right. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much.

Rumsfeld: Thank you.

"THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS PREPARED BY THE FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE INC., WASHINGTON, D.C. FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE IS A PRIVATE COMPANY. FOR OTHER DEFENSE RELATED TRANSCRIPTS NOT AVAILABLE THROUGH THIS SITE, CONTACT FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE AT (202) 347-1400."

#

Rumsfeld cracks jokes, but Iraqis aren't laughing
Lawrence Smallman April 12, 2003
At a Pentagon briefing, the US defence secretary faced questions about the rapidly deteriorating security situation, amid calls by aid agencies to allow them to do their job.

"Stuff happens," came the Rumsfeld reply.

"It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," his adroit fingers this time pointing at no particular member of the press. Lawlessness, closed hospitals and fires burning in Baghdad and other cities are a freed people venting their frustrations, apparently.

If ever an Oscar was deserved for minimizing catastrophic reports coming out of Iraq with jocular "henny penny" disbelief, then Rumsfeld has a date with Hollywood.

"Television is merely running the same footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over," he joked, adding he didn't think there were that many vases in Iraq. The US may be the strongest nation in the world, but their history is incomparable to that of Iraq - a region that has been described as the cradle of civilization.

Flippant remarks cannot replace priceless artefacts that have disappeared from the National Museum in Baghdad, or the books of the University of Mosul - one of the oldest and best universities in the whole of the Middle East.

But Secretary Rumsfeld has "a lot of confidence in the American people" not to believe TV footage from Iraq. Widespread theft across Iraq, reported in every language on screens worldwide, is an acceptable expression of freedom and really just the same picture shown again and again, he claimed. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera correspondents in Tikrit, Mosul, Basra and Baghdad confirm that US troops are still just watching looters steal private property and destroy any feelings of public safety.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and World Health Organizations issued appeals today to the US and British military to restore order, as the Geneva Convention requires.

US and British commanders say they don't have the troops to do this, or play a policing role. President Bush reinforced Rumsfeld's view on Friday, saying that "out of chaos that takes place there now ... the Iraqi people will run their own country."

"I reminded them that war in Iraq is really about peace," said Bush. "This victory in Iraq, when it happens, will make the world more peaceful." Iraqis who have been starved by sanctions for 12 years, bombed for three weeks and now robbed for three days must be beginning to wonder when this peace will begin.

"Tommy tells us what is necessary to achieve the objective. We gave Tommy the tools necessary to win," said Bush. "And when Tommy says we've achieved our objectives, that's when we've achieved our objectives. The war will end when Tommy says we've achieved our objectives.'' Let’s hope Tommy decides to impose some law and order soon.

"Freedom is a gift from the Almighty God," President Bush added, failing to define what General Frank’s objectives were, when asked.

At the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld said the US does feel an obligation to assist in providing security: "We're looking for the police" in Iraqi towns and villages, he added. Concerns expressed before the war look likely to be fulfilled, those best able to police Iraq now might be those who have had the most experience - namely Ba’athists and supporters of the old regime. Calling into question, the logic of much of the war.

Appeals for quick solutions may exacerbate a terrible problem. US troops "should be doing something because (the chaos) destroys our image as the liberators and the people who are going to bring a new order to Iraq," foreign affairs analyst Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution in Washington. It’s not nice for Iraqi civilians either.

There has been some crucial action to bring peace. Central Command in Qatar said it was issuing decks of `Saddam regime' cards to troops to help them spot Saddam and his supporters - showing a US-blacklisted 55 personalities. The American military has also rushed to dispatch 2,000 troops to secure northern Iraq's oilfields, which will alleviate Turkish political concerns - though probably not aid Kurdish interests.

The Pentagon has also been busy, admitting yesterday that it had awarded - without competition - a contract worth up to $7 billion, to the subsidiary of a company run until three years ago by Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Democrat Representative Henry Waxman of California, from the government reform committee, called for an investigation into the deal with oil services giant Halliburton, saying he could understand the contract if it had been issued in an emergency.

"But it's harder to understand what the rationale would be for a sole-source contract that has a multi-year duration and multi-billion-dollar price tag," he said. --Al Jazeera

#

Despite fall of Iraq regime, anti-war groups keep on marching
Yahoo News April 12, 2003
PARIS (AFP) - Hundreds of thousands of opponents of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq held new anti-war protests across Europe and the Americas, arguing that the regime's collapse was no reason to let up the pressure.

Possibly the biggest European showing was half a million protesters on the streets of Rome, according to organisers, while a similar number turned out across Spain.

Even in central Washington thousands gathered to blast the US toppling of Iraq's Saddam Hussein as the first in a series of occupation wars.

"This is not about liberation, it's about the occupation of Iraq and the plundering of its natural resources," said Dustin Langley, a volunteer with the protest's sponsor, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, or ANSWER.

"We're calling to stop this series of endless wars, to stop this occupation of Iraq and the Middle East," he said, adding that the "axis of evil" fingered by US President George W. Bush more than a year ago was no more than a "list of targets."

In London, tens of thousands rallied even as the first British troops were set to pull out of the Gulf.

"It is clear the war is not over," said Andrew Murray, chairman of Britain's Stop the War Coalition: "There are still people being killed and we will also emphasize our opposition to occupation."

In Paris, more than 10,000 rallied behind a banner: "Iraq to the Iraqis".

In Rome, crowds swelled to half a million according to unofficial estimates.

"The war is over in its most obvious form as a classic means of destruction," said Fausto Bertinotti, Secretary-General of Italy's Refounded Communist Party (PRC):

"But it continues as low intensity conflict and a strategic hypothesis of world domination by means of preventive war as conceived by (US President George W.) Bush."

Italian pacifists with banners reading: "Stop Esso war," demonstrated peacefully at gas stations of the American ExxonMobil oil group in protest at it getting a 48 million-dollar contract to supply fuel to US military in Iraq.

One told Italian television: "We're glad the Saddam Hussein regime has fallen, but it wasn't necessary to impose this conflict and this humiliation on the Iraqis."

In Florence, three parties in Italy's government coalition paraded in support of US policy in line with government support for Washington, with banners reading: "The French are cowards."

France has strongly opposed intervention in Iraq.

In Paris, banners read: "Stop the occupation of Iraq" and "Yes to a democratic and independent Iraq." Protesters chanted "US go home!"

"We're very glad to be rid of Saddam, but we don't trust the Americans," said Mazin Yassine from Baghdad: "...We don't want a new dictator."

Three men were arrested for possessing anti-Semitic placards inciting to racial hatred, police said.

In the Spanish city of Barcelona, more than 200,000 people turned out.

They chanted "Aznar resign!" in protest at Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's support for the American line on Iraq despite its rejection by the vast majority of the Spanish public.

Some 200,000 took to the streets of the capital Madrid, organisers said.

Smaller demonstrations involving thousands were held in other cities.

In London protestors held a moment of silence in Parliament Square at the Houses of Parliament.

Organisers said 100,000 rallied against Prime Minister Tony Blair's support for the war, with the crowd chanting "Blair calls it liberation, it looks to us like occupation."

British film director Ken Loach said: "We have to stop the occupation. This is illegal. This is against international law."

Saturday's march was the third held in London in recent weeks over the Iraqi conflict. On February 15, more than one million people took to the streets and on March 22 between 200,000 and 700,000 protested.

In Berlin anti-war protesters carried a banner reading "Peace before occupation" to the Brandenburg Gate, once the symbol of the division of Germany and Europe.

Police put the turnout at some 15,000.

The scene was different in Kuwait City -- invaded by Saddam Hussein's troops in 1990 -- where demonstrators expressed gratitude for the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.

#

Iraq National Museum Treasures Plundered
By HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated Press Writer Yahoo News April 12, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The famed Iraq National Museum, home of extraordinary Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections and rare Islamic texts, sat empty Saturday - except for shattered glass display cases and cracked pottery bowls that littered the floor.

In an unchecked frenzy of cultural theft, looters who pillaged government buildings and businesses after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime also targeted the museum. Gone were irreplaceable archaeological treasures from the Cradle of Civilization.

Everything that could be carried out has disappeared from the museum - gold bowls and drinking cups, ritual masks worn in funerals, elaborately wrought headdresses, lyres studded with jewels - priceless craftsmanship from ancient Mesopotamia.

"This is the property of this nation and the treasure of 7,000 years of civilization. What does this country think it is doing?" asked Ali Mahmoud, a museum employee, futility and frustration in his voice.

Much of the looting occurred Thursday, according to a security guard who stood by helplessly as hoards broke into the museum with wheelbarrows and carts and stole priceless jewelry, clay tablets and manuscripts.

Left behind were row upon row of empty glass cases - some smashed up, others left intact - heaps of crumbled pottery and hunks of broken statues scattered across the exhibit floors.

Sensing its treasures could be in peril, museum curators secretly removed antiquities from their display cases before the war and placed them into storage vaults - but to no avail. The doors of the vaults were opened or smashed, and everything was taken, museum workers said. That lead one museum employee to suspect that others familiar with the museum may have participated in the theft.

"The fact that the vaults were opened suggests that employees of the museum may have been involved," said the employee, who declined to be identified. "To ordinarily people, these are just stones. Only the educated know the value of these pieces."

Gordon Newby, a historian and professor of Middle Eastern studies at Emory University in Atlanta, said the museum's most famous holding may have been tablets with Hammurabi's Code - one of mankind's earliest codes of law. It could not be determined whether the tablets were at the museum when the war broke out.

Other treasures believed to be housed at the museum - such as the Ram in the Thicket from Ur, a statue representing a deity from 2600 BC - are no doubt gone, perhaps forever, he said.

"This is just one of the most tragic things that could happen for our being able to understand the past," Newby said. The looting, he said, "is destroying the history of the very people that are there."

John Russell, a professor of art history and archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art, feared for the safety of the staff of Iraq's national antiquities department, also housed at the museum; for irreplaceable records of every archaeological expedition in Iraq since the 1930s; for perhaps hundreds of thousands of artifacts from 10,000 years of civilization, both on display and in storage.

Among them, he said, was the copper head of an Akkadian king, at least 4,300 years old. Its eyes were gouged out, nose flattened, ears and beard cut off, apparently by subjects who took their revenge on his image - much the same way as Iraqis mutilated statues of Saddam.

"These are the foundational cornerstones of Western civilization," Russell said, and are literally priceless - which he said will not prevent them from finding a price on the black market.

Some of the gold artifacts may be melted down, but most pieces will find their way into the hands of private collectors, he said.

The chances of recovery are slim; regional museums were looted after the 1991 Gulf War, and 4,000 pieces were lost.

"I understand three or four have been recovered," he said.

Samuel Paley, a professor of classics at the State University of New York, Buffalo, predicted whatever treasures aren't sold will be trashed.

The looters are "people trying to feed themselves," said Paley, who has spent years tracking Assyrian reliefs previously looted from Nimrud in Northern Iraq. "When they find there's no market, they'll throw them away. If there is a market, they'll go into the market."

Koichiro Matsuura, head of the U.N.'s cultural agency, UNESCO, on Saturday urged American officials to send troops to protect what was left of the museum's collection, and said the military should step in to stop looting and destruction at other key archaeological sites and museums.

The governments of Russia, Jordan and Greece also voiced deep concern about the looting. Jordan urged the United Nations to take steps to protect Iraq's historic sites, a "national treasure for the Iraqi people and an invaluable heritage for the Arab and Islamic worlds."

Some blamed the U.S. military, though coalition forces say they have taken great pains to avoid damage to cultural and historical sites.

A museum employee, reduced to tears after coming to the museum Saturday and finding her office and all administrative offices trashed by looters, said: "It is all the fault of the Americans. This is Iraq's civilization. And it's all gone now." She refused to give her name.

McGuire Gibson, a University of Chicago professor and president of the American Association for Research in Baghdad, was infuriated. He said he had been in frequent and frantic touch with U.S. military officials since Wednesday, imploring them to send troops "in there and protect that building."

The Americans could have prevented the looting, agreed Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities.

"It was completely inexcusable and avoidable," she said.

The museum itself was battered. Its marble staircase was chipped, likely by looters using pushcarts or heavy slabs of wood to carry booty down from the second floor. The museum is in the Al-Salhiya neighborhood of Baghdad, with its back to a poor neighborhood.

Early Saturday, five armed men showed up at the gate: One was armed with a Kalashnikov, three carried pistols, one wielded an iron bar. The man with the assault rifle walked into the museum, accused journalists there of stealing artifacts and ordered them to leave.

He claimed to be there to protect the museum from plundering. One of the men said he was a member of the feared Fedayeen Saddam militia.

"You think Saddam is now gone, so you can do what you like," he raged.

#

War planned 'long in advance'
News24.com April 9, 2003
Madrid - The invasion of Iraq was planned a long time in advance, and the United States and Britain are not primarily concerned with finding any banned weapons of mass destruction, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said in an interview on Wednesday.

"There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections," Blix told Spanish daily El Pais.

"I now believe that finding weapons of mass destruction has been relegated, I would say, to fourth place, which is why the United States and Britain are now waging war on Iraq.

Today the main aim is to change the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein," he said, according to the Spanish text of the interview.

Blix said US President George W Bush had told him in October 2002 that he backed the UN's work to verify US and British claims that Baghdad was developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Washington 'less convinced now'

But he said he knew at the time "there were people within the Bush administration who were sceptical and who were working on engineering regime change". By the start of March the hawks in both Washington and London were getting impatient, he added.

Blix said that he thought the US might initially have believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction - although its "fabrication" of evidence raised doubts about even that - but that Washington was now less convinced by its own claims.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some. I think they now believe less in that possibility.

But I don't know - you ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try and demonstrate that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger," he explained.

That was a reference to US allegations - later denied - that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from the west African state of Niger.

"I'm very curious to see if they do find any (weapons)," he said.

Blix said the war, which on Wednesday entered its 21st day, was "a very high price to pay in terms of human lives and the destruction of a country" when the threat of weapons proliferation could have been contained by UN inspections.

By attacking Iraq, Washington had sent the wrong message - that if a country did not possess biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, it risked being attacked.

US sending out the wrong signal

"The United States maintains that the war on Iraq is designed to send a signal to other countries to keep away from weapons of mass destruction.

But people are getting a different message.

Take the announcement North Korea has just made. It's tantamount to saying 'if you let in the inspectors, like Iraq did, you get attacked'.

North Korea accused the United States on Sunday of using a UN Security Council discussion of its nuclear programme as a "prelude to war" and warned that it would fully mobilise and strengthen its forces.

"It's an important problem," Blix continued.

"If a country perceives that its security is guaranteed, it won't need to consider weapons of mass destruction. This security guarantee is the first line of defence against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The 74-year-old Swede announced in March that he would step down from his post when his contract runs out in June.

Blix's reputation for independence and resisting political pressure was sorely tested as the Iraq crisis unfolded and US officials became exasperated with his measured reports on Iraqi cooperation with his inspection teams.

#

Robert Fisk: Baghdad: the day after
The Independent April 11, 2003
Arson, anarchy, fear, hatred, hysteria, looting, revenge, savagery, suspicion and a suicide bombing
It was the day of the looter. They trashed the German embassy and hurled the ambassador's desk into the yard. I rescued the European Union flag - flung into a puddle of water outside the visa section - as a mob of middle-aged men, women in chadors and screaming children rifled through the consul's office and hurled Mozart records and German history books from an upper window. The Slovakian embassy was broken into a few hours later.

At the headquarters of Unicef, which has been trying to save and improve the lives of millions of Iraqi children since the 1980s, an army of thieves stormed the building, throwing brand new photocopiers on top of each other and sending cascades of UN files on child diseases, pregnancy death rates and nutrition across the floors.

The Americans may think they have "liberated" Baghdad but the tens of thousands of thieves - they came in families and cruised the city in trucks and cars searching for booty – seem to have a different idea of what liberation means.

American control of the city is, at best, tenuous - a fact underlined after several marines were killed last night by a suicide bomber close to the square where a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down on Wednesday, in the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima.

Throughout the day, American forces had fought gun battles with Saddam loyalists, said to be fighters from other Arab countries. And, for more than four hours, marines were in firefights at the Imam al-Adham mosque in the Aadhamiya district of central Baghdad after rumours, later proved untrue, that Saddam Hussein and senior members of his regime had taken flight there.

As the occupying power, America is responsible for protecting embassies and UN offices in their area of control but, yesterday, its troops were driving past the German embassy even as looters carted desks and chairs out of the front gate.

It is a scandal, a kind of disease, a mass form of kleptomania that American troops are blithely ignoring. At one intersection of the city, I saw US Marine snipers on the rooftops of high-rise building, scanning the streets for possible suicide bombers while a traffic jam of looters - two of them driving stolen double-decker buses crammed with refrigerators - blocked the highway beneath.

Outside the UN offices, a car slowed down beside me and one of the unshaven, sweating men inside told me in Arabic that it wasn't worth visiting because "we've already taken everything". Understandably, the poor and the oppressed took their revenge on the homes of the men of Saddam's regime who have impoverished and destroyed their lives, sometimes quite literally, for more than two decades.

I watched whole families search through the Tigris-bank home of Ibrahim al-Hassan, Saddam's half-brother and a former minister of interior, of a former defence minister, of Saadun Shakr, one of Saddam's closest security advisers, of Ali Hussein Majid - "Chemical" Ali who gassed the Kurds and was killed last week in Basra - and of Abed Moud, Saddam's private secretary. They came with lorries, container trucks, buses and carts pulled by ill-fed donkeys to make off with the contents of these massive villas.

It also provided a glimpse of the shocking taste in furnishings that senior Baath party members obviously aspired to; cheap pink sofas and richly embroidered chairs, plastic drinks trolleys and priceless Iranian carpets so heavy it took three muscular thieves to carry them. Outside the gutted home of one former minister of interior, a fat man was parading in a stolen top hat, a Dickensian figure who tried to direct the traffic jam of looters outside.

On the Saddam bridge over the Tigris, a thief had driven his lorry of stolen goods at such speed he had crashed into the central concrete reservation and still lay dead at the wheel.

But there seemed to be a kind of looter's law. Once a thief had placed his hand on a chair or a chandelier or a door-frame, it belonged to him. I saw no arguments, no fist-fights. The dozens of thieves in the German embassy worked in silence, assisted by an army of small children. Wives pointed out the furnishings they wanted, husbands carried them down the stairs while children were used to unscrew door hinges and - in the UN offices - to remove light fittings. One even stood on the ambassador's desk to take a light bulb from its socket in the ceiling.

On the other side of the Saddam bridge, an even more surreal sight could be observed. A truck loaded down with chairs also had the two white hunting dogs that belonged to Saddam's son Qusay tethered by two white ropes, galloping along beside the vehicle. Across the city, I caught a glimpse of four of Saddam's horses - including the white stallion he had used in some presidential portraits - being loaded on to a trailer. Tariq Aziz's villa was also looted, right down to the books in his library.

Every government ministry in the city has now been denuded of its files, computers, reference books, furnishings and cars. To all this, the Americans have turned a blind eye, indeed stated specifically that they had no intention of preventing the "liberation" of this property. One can hardly be moralistic about the spoils of Saddam's henchmen but how is the government of America's so-called "New Iraq" supposed to operate now that the state's property has been so comprehensively looted? And what is one to make of the scene on the Hillah road yesterday where I found the owner of a grain silo and factory ordering his armed guards to fire on the looters who were trying to steal his lorries. This desperate and armed attempt to preserve the very basis of Baghdad's bread supply was being observed from just 100 metres away by eight soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division, who were sitting on their tanks - doing nothing. The UN offices that were looted downtown are 200 metres from a US Marine checkpoint.

And already America's army of "liberation" is beginning to seem an army of occupation. I watched hundreds of Iraqi civilians queuing to cross a motorway bridge at Daura yesterday morning, each man ordered by US soldiers to raise his shirt and lower his trousers - in front of other civilians, including women - to prove they were not suicide bombers.

After a gun battle in the Adamiya area during the morning, an American Marine sniper sitting atop the palace gate wounded three civilians, including a little girl, in a car that failed to halt – then shot and killed a man who had walked on to his balcony to discover the source of the firing. Within minutes, the sniper also shot dead the driver of another car and wounded two more passengers in that vehicle, including a young woman. A crew from Channel 4 Television was present when the killings took place.

Meanwhile, in the suburb of Daura, bodies of Iraqi civilians - many of them killed by US troops in battle earlier in the week - lay rotting in their still-smouldering cars. And yesterday was just Day Two of the "liberation" of Baghdad.

#

The Iraqi killing fields
By Pepe Escobar Asia Times April 10, 2003
AMMAN - "We know we don't target journalists," said the US Central Command (CentCom) in Qatar. Contrary to CentCom's assertions, non-embedded journalists know that they have been targeted.

It was inevitable. When it finally happened, it was like clockwork. Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul was incinerated by four missiles in the 2001 ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan. True to CentCom form, al-Jazeera's office in Baghdad was hit by a Tomahawk this week in the invasion of Iraq - even though the Qatari network had offered its global positioning system (GPS) position to the Pentagon in late February.

Correspondent-producer Tariq Ayyoub, 35, Jordanian, father of an infant girl, was killed and a photographer was wounded. The Abu Dhabi TV office in Baghdad was hit by an Abrams tank - although they have been broadcasting from the same building for three years now. Another Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, near Tahir square: even Mesopotamian desert rats know that this is where virtually all the Western and Asian journalists in Baghdad stay: A Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters and a Spanish cameraman for Telecinco were killed, and four other journalists were wounded.

France 3 television broadcast footage of the turret of the Abrams tank, positioned on the west margin of the Tigris, at least 300 meters away from the Palestine, moving in the direction of the hotel and taking its time to aim and shoot. The official American version - that they were threatened by sniper fire coming from the hotel - was universally dismissed. Asia Times Online was among many to confirm that no journalists who were in the open doing live feeds for TV reported hearing any sniper fire or rocket launchers being fired from the hotel. As Sky TV's David Chater put it, the shell "was aimed directly at this hotel and directly at journalists. This wasn't an accident, it seems to be a very accurate shot."

There's a problem with the absolute majority of the journalists in Baghdad - surreptitiously betrayed by the rhetoric emanating from US CentCom in Qatar. They are non-embedded. "Unilaterals" - non-embedded journalists - may be mistaken for "legitimate" targets by the Pentagon: or rather "targets of opportunity". They can be bombed because of their annoying Thuraya satellite telephones with GPS. They can be beaten - like a group of Portuguese journalists in southern Iraq. They can be humiliated at will, just because they are able to think independently, or they are also reporting the Iraqi side, or they are not telling the official, sanitized, Pentagon-censored story of the carnage in Iraq.

Even diplomatic convoys are not immune. Alexander Minakov, a reporter for Russian TV who was involved in Sunday's incident when a Russian convoy with 10 diplomats and 10 journalists was trying to leave Baghdad towards Damascus, confirmed that they were targeted by M-16 rifles, standard equipment for American soldiers and marines. According to the Russian ambassador, Vladimir Titorenko, speaking to the Itar-Tass agency, "A column of American armored vehicles suddenly blocked our way. There were tanks, APCs and mobile gun mounts. Our convoy led by my car under the Russian flag stopped but they suddenly opened fire. All the attempts to leave the cars and explain the situation were thwarted by bursts from automatic weapons," said Titorenko. Several grenades were hurled at the cars. Four people were wounded and the ambassador's driver was seriously wounded in the stomach. American officials predictably denied any responsibility.

The attack on the Palestine hotel has been vehemently condemned all over the world. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) says that it is a possible war crime, or at least "a grave and serious violation of international law". IFJ general secretary Aidan White stressed that "the bombing of hotels where journalists are staying and targeting of Arab media are particularly shocking events in a war which is being fought in the name of democracy".

While Arab satellite channels are showing the tragic reality of war, American corporate media - also available by satellite all over the Middle East - all but totally ignores the suffering of the Iraqi people. Torrents of abuse in America are directed against Arab and European news outlets that publish and broadcast the real extent of the carnage and human suffering that is being inflicted on civilians.

In this context, the bombing of al-Jazeera could not but please the neoconservatives in Washington. Carnage it is. The American advance has been described as the "infernal column" by Yves Debay, a war correspondent for the military affairs magazine Raids who observed the US modus operandi at very close range: "They organize columns of 40 to 50 armored vehicles. Up front, M1 Abrams tanks, followed by Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees. They roll with two tanks up front, occupying the whole road. They shoot everything in sight, everything suspicious. It's 'fire at will'. They love shooting Saddam portraits with 25 mm cannons. They have no fire discipline. The initiative is left to the soldiers, 20-year-old kids. That's the reason why they also shoot civilians. An European army would never behave like this. By better controlling its troops, the British army kills considerably less civilians." Debay's observations are corroborated by what happened at the Palestine: crucial tactical decisions are left to low-level local tank commanders.

On his way to Baghdad from Mahmudiyah, Debay saw dozens of burning civilian vehicles, all of their passengers dead. He volunteers an explanation for the indiscriminate killing: "They [the Americans] have two problems. They are still taking revenge for September 11, and there are no sanctions when a soldier kills a civilian. Their objective is not to kill civilians, but they behave like cowboys. They even shoot cows ... I have the impression it's a way to mask their fear. They are very afraid. And it gets worse every time they sustain losses."

The American superiority in technology, mobility and firepower is overwhelming beyond comprehension - also considering that Iraq's military capability had been totally smashed in 1991, plus the 12 years of debilitating United Nations sanctions. The road to Baghdad for the advancing American troops was cleared by a devastating combination of B-52 carpet-bombing, artillery barrages and strafing by Apache helicopters. Initially, the killing in Baghdad had no military objective, or was not about taking or holding ground (CentCom briefing). Even after Monday's spectacular foray into the National Parade Ground and Saddam's palaces in Baghdad, the rhetoric remained the same.

Now territory in central Baghdad has indeed been taken: the Americans control large swaths of the west bank of the Tigris (echoes of Israel controlling large areas of the West Bank in Palestine). So the rhetoric has changed to "targets of opportunity". Like the bombing of houses of Iraqi Christians (at least eight civilians dead), or the blitz with four satellite-guided 900-kilogram bombs of the famous al-Sa'a restaurant in the al-Mansour residential district (at least 14 civilians dead) where Saddam Hussein and his sons "might" have been - according to a web of 37 American satellites plus "human intelligence" on the ground. The satellites and the intelligence failed. Behind the al-Sa'a there is now a huge crater 10 meters deep and 15 meters wide, and the families of residents Abdel Massyah and Salman Daoud are buried under the rubble.

Outside the five-star al-Rashid hotel, a Reuters photographer said that the marines on Monday were firing indiscriminately on civilians and militias: he has bullet holes in his car to prove it. "Human intelligence" on the ground in Baghdad has revealed to Asia Times Online that the rate of casualties in the city could be anywhere from 100 to 500 Iraqis to each American. Even though the resistance is now minimal, the carnage will go on because although the Americans have practically encircled Baghdad they don't have enough troops to control a sprawling city of 5 million-plus inhabitants.

The military plan is to divide the city in pockets and secure it pocket by pocket - with overwhelming support of F/A-18s, A-10 tankbusters and Apache helicopters, now flying very low because there's absolutely no air defense left in Baghdad to speak of. If it looks and sounds like a deadly video game, that's because it is: even American generals are describing it as an aerial form of house-to-house fighting. The main victims are, of course, Iraqi civilians.

Popular reaction has been graphic. The Bush administration, the Pentagon and the breathless, embedded cheerleaders of American corporate media are ecstatic. The whole planet is horrified. By watching those images of the proud cradle of human civilization reduced to Fourth World status, anybody that is not a military expert may understand that the only thing left for the "poor bastards" - as the marines call them - absolutely unable to resist overwhelming military force, is to resort to guerrilla and suicide attacks. History shows that this is how occupied lands and peoples have always reacted. Extraordinary footage by the Capa photo agency shows a group of ragged teenagers with rocket launchers trying to retake a bridge from Abrams tanks: the operation takes a few minutes, and half of the bunch is left soaking in pools of blood.

All over Baghdad, the city's five main hospitals simply cannot cope with an avalanche of civilian casualties. Doctors can't get to the hospitals because of the bombing. Dr Osama Saleh-al-Duleimi, at the al-Kindi hospital, confirms the absolute majority of patients are women and children, victims of bullets, shrapnel and most of all, fragments of cluster bombs: "They are all civilians," he says, "caught in aerial and artillery bombardment."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is in a state of almost desperation. Its spokesman, Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, contacted by satellite telephone, still mentions casualties arriving at hospitals at a rate of as many as 100 per hour and at least 100 per day. This correspondent has been to many Baghdad hospitals: after fighting 12 years of sanctions and a list of as many as 500-prohibited items, it's a miracle that they barely remained functional. In a city now with no regular phones, no electricity and practically no water, they are all operating on generators. One of the larger hospitals has no power and no water at all. Getting clean water for the patients remains a nightmare. Anaesthetics, antibiotics and insulin are almost gone. The hospitals are running out of blood, beds, everything.

The victims of the blitz are inevitably the young and the poor. How many? Even the ICRC cannot determine it yet: hospital doctors talk about hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded. Dr Sadek al-Mukhtar has seen it all in terms of death and destruction. He is adamant: "Before the war I did not regard America as my enemy. Now I do. There are military and there are civilians. War should be against the military. America is killing civilians." Fifty percent of Iraq's population of 24 million is under 15. Malnutrition is endemic. The majority of families depend on state food rations - the meager standard package of flour, rice, tea, cooking oil and soap - and rations should run out by next month.

A-10 tankbusters have fired the hungry, terrified Baghdadis with depleted uranium rounds - the surefire way to win their hearts and minds. There may be some scenes of jubilation with the marines coming to town - basically in the huge Shi'ite Saddam City slum, bursting with more than 2 million people who have been frustrated and oppressed for so long by the Sunni-dominated Saddam regime.
But these desperately poor and angry masses want food.They want water. They don't necessarily want to see marines in tanks for more than a day or two. Eastern Baghdad is in total anarchy. But there's still fighting. And people are not only scared - or involved in looting. They are suffering. One just needs to ask 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas. His father, his five-month-old pregnant mother, his brother, his aunt, three cousins and three other relatives were incinerated by a missile in Diala, eastern Baghdad. He is now an orphan, he is terribly burned and he has lost both his arms. He wants to be a doctor. "But how can I? I lost both hands." George W Bush can always say that at least he has been "liberated".

(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
#

US-backed militia terrorises town
By Charles Clover in Najaf Financial Times April 8, 2003
Hay Al Ansar, on the outskirts of Najaf in Iraq, was glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party government, when the city was seized by US forces last week.

But they appear to be just as terrified, if not more so, of their new rulers - a little-known Iraqi militia backed by the US special forces and headquartered in a compound nearby.

The Iraqi Coalition of National Unity (ICNU), which appeared in the city last week riding on US special forces vehicles, has taken to looting and terrorising their neighbourhood with impunity, according to most residents.

"They steal and steal," said a man living near the Medresa al Tayif school, calling himself Abu Zeinab. "They threaten us, saying: 'We are with the Americans, you can do nothing to us'."

Sa'ida al Hamed, another resident, said she witnessed looting by the ICNU and other armed gangs in the city, which lost its police force when the government fled last week. One man told a US army translator on Monday that he was taken out of his house and beaten by ICNU forces when he refused to give them his car. They took it anyway.

If true, the testimony of residents reveals a darker side to US policy in Iraq. In their distaste for peacekeeping and eagerness to hand the ruling of Iraq back to Iraqis, US forces are in danger of losing the peace as rapidly as they have won the war.

US special forces said they were looking into the complaints, which had been passed to them by US military sources. They declined, however, to discuss the formation of the group, how its members were chosen, or who they were.

The head of the ICNU, who says he is a former colonel in the Iraqi artillery forces who has been working with the underground opposition since 1996, announced on Tuesday that he was acting mayor of Najaf, and his group had taken over administration of the city.

Other Iraqi exiles, brought in by the CIA and US special forces to help assemble a local government over the next few days, say the militia is out of control.

"They are nobody, and nobody has ever heard of them, all they have is US backing," said an Arab journalist.

Abu Zeinab said the ICNU "has no basis in this city, we don't know who they are". He said the residents, who are predominantly Shia Muslims, followed only Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, leader of much of the Shia world, who lives in the city.

Ayatollah Sistani has so far refused to meet representatives of US forces and has made no public pronouncements on co-operating with the US military. Associates say he is "waiting for the situation to become clearer".

Hassan Mussawi, a Shia cleric who helps lead the ICNU, said reports of looting by his group were untrue - fabricated by religious extremists to discredit his movement.

He said his group was seeking to arrest former Iraqi government officials and "collaborators" with Mr Hussein's regime.

"If they do not resist arrest we hand them over to the Americans. If they resist then we take measures accordingly."

The allegations against the ICNU threaten to undermine much of the goodwill built up by US forces among the citizens of Najaf, who still cheer troops driving through the city. In an effort to curb rampant looting, US forces have begun to patrol at night.

They will not be undertaking police functions, but "if we come upon looting, we will try to control the situation and disperse those doing the looting," said Lt Col Marcus De Oliveira, of the 101st Airborne Division.

The city's political rivalries appear to be affecting humanitarian assistance. US special forces have objected to certain Shia leaders distributing food aid, for fear of their ties to Iran.

Sixteen truckloads of food from the Kuwait Red Crescent Society is being distributed according to a ration plan drawn up by the Iraqi Ministry of Commerce for the United Nation's oil for food programme.

US forces are also trying to get running water and power returned to the city, by bringing in a 2.5MW generator from Kuwait to restart the city's power plant, which was shut off by Iraqi forces.

Hussein Chilabi, father of a family of six in Chilabat, on the outskirts of Najaf, said that until running water was restored, his family would have to drink from canals. "The children are sick in their stomachs from drinking this water. We need running water more than food, more than anything right now."

#