YEMAN - More Arib-Spring Fallout

"Renewed Bloodshed in Yemen Draws International Condemnation" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 9/19/2011

Excerpt

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): At least 50 people have been killed since Sunday, when government forces in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, fired on huge crowds demanding the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

After more killing today, thousands of protesters and army defectors overran a key military base. Gunfire also echoed in the southern city of Taiz, as security forces held back protesters and armed vehicles sprayed crowds with water cannon and tear gas. At least one person was killed there. The renewed bloodshed brought new warnings from the international community, including British Foreign Secretary William Hague.

"Amid Yemen's Renewed Violence, 'It's Unclear Who Is in Charge of Things'" (Part-2)
PBS Newshour 9/19/2011

WAR ON TERROR - Yemen, Not Good News

"Islamic militants escape from Yemeni prison" by Mohammed al-Qadhi and Debbi Wilgoren, Washington Post 6/22/2011

Excerpt

More than 60 suspected al-Qaeda militants escaped from a jail in southern Yemen on Wednesday through a tunnel, authorities said, the latest sign that insurgents are capitalizing on the political unrest that has rocked the country for months.

The inmates dug the 50-yard-long tunnel themselves, said one official at the jail, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give details of the escape.

They attacked a guard with daggers, snatched his gun and fired it as they were making their escape, the official told The Washington Post. One guard was fatally shot, and another was wounded.

The Associated Press reported that bands of gunmen attacked the prison from the outside just as the prisoners were escaping, opening fire on guards to divert their attention from the escape.

IRAQ - The Show Goes On

More from an insider.....

"And the "Show" goes on..." by Layla Anwar, Arab Woman Blues

Conquer, divide, split and fragment. Pit one against the other and one against the same...

Yesterday’s foes are today’s friends, and today’s friends are tomorrow’s enemies...

And the show goes on...

I have been reading extensively about the Sunni Awakening Council, the new Sunni- Kurdish rapprochement, the Sunni–Sunni tensions, the Shia–Shia conflicts...

I have also been reading the so-called analysis circulating.

A lot of them are bullshit, as usual...

They all seem to miss the essential crucial point, the core essence, the crux of the matter and you don’t have to be a wiz in sociology and politics to figure that one out.Namely, that:

• in the absence of a functional representative State,
• following the dismemberment of all political and civil institutions,
• in the wake of over 5 years of a condensed, concentrated, violence that has totally DESTROYED the country,
• with a massive exodus and a massive death rate,
• with a continuous, debilitating, provoked poverty, and an unemployment rate of over 70% and over 50% of the population cannot afford to eat,
• with over 100’000 in jails, and a X number of disappeared,
• with the total destruction of all the infrastructural system – the DELIBERATE destruction.
• when basics like water, electricity and fuel are still not available,
• when hospitals are non functional, when universities are ransacked and closed, when corruption is contagiously rampant...

With all of the above – it is simply not possible to talk of a FAILED STATE, what you need to address is the real issue – a NON-EXISTENT STATE in a country with no boundaries and no more structures.

You need to address the real issue, that of the breaking up of the country and its fragmentation. And the more a country fragments the more you will see walls being erected. And the more you will see some sort of local governance on a community/neighborhood basis...

Surely those 600’000 Americans and their contractors and death squads did not come for a holiday. They had a mission...And that mission was exactly what I enumerated above. DESTROY.

So when all the conditions are created, provoked and grouped together they lead to one obvious socio-political reaction.

When the state disintegrates or is willfully destroyed, people fall back on religion and their sect, their neighborhood, their tribes. In other words, they hang on to the points of reference, the anchors they know best and they can trust.

It is called SURVIVAL. And Iraqis have been doing nothing and operating on nothing but SURVIVAL.

So those who pontificate and argue that the seeds of sectarianism/tribalism were already present in Iraq since the times of the British or those who hold the argument that in over 30 years, the Iraqi State had failed to form a national identity... And that after all, what is happening now is a natural consequence of those already existing divisions.

There's much more in the full article.

The real truth of Iraq is that Bush and his cohorts don't give a damn about Iraq and Iraqis. They only care about their self-image (Napoleonic), the Iraq oil, and their paymasters (Big Oil and the Defense Industry).

MIDDLE EAST - 'Round n 'Round It Goes, Where It Stops No-one Knows

"Peace talks back to square one" Checkpoint Jerusalem, McClatchy News 12/17/2007

One of those ever-ubiquitous "senior Israeli officials" held a briefing today for members of the international media and offered an interesting insider's view of the post-Annapolis/pre-Bush visit peace talks with the Palestinians:

"We are starting discussions now from scratch," he said.

According to this well-informed source who can't be named, Abbas and Olmert were making progress on a joint statement for Annapolis when, as always seems to happen in these kind of negotiations, things fell apart at the end.

When the two sides brought their four-person drafting team together to put on paper the agreements Olmert and Abbas reached in their informal talks, this official said, they found that they couldn't agree on what had been agreed upon.

Well that certainly helps explain why the first round of post-Annapolis talks last week got off to such an inauspicious start. And it probably means that there won't be any significant progress between now and the president's visit in early-January.

Bush is expected to arrive on Jan. 9th for a three-day working visit (his first as president) that is expected to take him to Jerusalem and Jericho.

Today, Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper put things succinctly -- and in context:

"The visit by US President George Bush is going to make the lives of many Jerusalem residents hell."

Plans to ferry the president around by helicopter have apparently been scuttled. Instead, Bush will travel by motorcade. The streets apparently have to be cleared so the whole of downtown Jerusalem could be paralyzed.

According to YA, the US has told the advance team to reserve between 800 and 1,000 rooms for the visit.

One has to wonder if "they" have heard of modern technology; like recording the Abbas/Olmert meetings, audio and video. Then again, the idea may be neither side really wants to be held to their promises. No recording = excuses not to implement anything.

IRAN - And the Lies March On

"Bush told in August that Iran nuke program 'may be suspended'" by Ed Henry, CNN 12/5/2007

President Bush was told in August that Iran's nuclear weapons program "may be suspended," the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday.

Adm. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told Bush the new information might cause intelligence officials to change their assessment of the Iranian program, but said analysts needed to review the new data before making a final judgment, White House press secretary Dana Perino said late Wednesday.


"Director McConnell said that the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran's covert nuclear program, but the intelligence community was not prepared to draw any conclusions at that point in time, and it wouldn't be right to speculate until they had time to examine and analyze the new data," Perino said in a statement issued by the White House.

The new account from Perino seems to contradict the president's version of his August conversation with McConnell and raised new questions about why Bush continued to warn the American public about a threat from Iran two months after being told a new assessment was in the works.

But Perino said there was no conflict between her statement and Bush's Tuesday account of the meeting, when he said McConnell "didn't tell me what the information was."

"The president wasn't given the specific details" of the revised intelligence estimate, which was released Monday, Perino said. Nor did Bush mislead Americans in October, when he warned of a third world war triggered by Iran's development of nuclear technology, she said.

"The president didn't say we're going to cause World War III," Perino said. "He was saying he wanted to avoid World War III."

In October, the president told reporters, "If you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." The apparent gap between what U.S. intelligence officials knew in August and Bush's later warnings drew sharp criticism from Sen. Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic presidential candidate, who called Bush's explanation unbelievable.

"I refuse to believe that," Biden said Tuesday. "If that's true, he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history, and he's one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history."

But Perino said there was no need for Bush to pull back on any of his public statements after the August meeting, because McConnell stressed to the president that intelligence officials still had to do "due diligence" to make sure the new information was correct.

"The director advised that there were many streams of information that had the potential to be in conflict, and it would take more time to vet it all to determine validity, and that's why they were not able to meet the deadline," she said in the prepared statement.

Perino said her account came from a conversation that McConnell had Wednesday with another White House official. Earlier, Perino's deputy, Tony Fratto, had refused to provide reporters with further details about the August meeting between Bush and McConnell.

The Bush administration has spent years warning that Iran's development of nuclear power plants and enriched uranium masked an effort to produce an atomic bomb. But in a reversal of a 2005 report, the National Intelligence Estimate released Monday concluded that Iran suspended nuclear weapons work in late 2003 and was unlikely to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb until at least 2010.

Instead of focusing on that reversal, Bush has continued to stress that the report confirms long-standing suspicions that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in the first place. He said Wednesday that Tehran "has more to explain about its nuclear intentions and past actions," including a weapons program "which the Iranian regime has yet to acknowledge."

But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the report was "a declaration of victory" for Iran in the face of international pressure to suspend his country's production of nuclear fuel.

"Iran is a peaceful nuclear country now, and they have all accepted Iran as a nuclear country and have announced they will stand a nuclear Iran," Ahmadinejad said Wednesday.

But Bush said Tuesday the report "doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world." And Perino called Ahmadinejad a "liar" Wednesday, because the new NIE shows that Tehran did have a clandestine nuclear weapons program at one time.

"If anyone wants to call the president a liar, they are misreading the situation for their own political purposes," Perino said. "The liar is Ahmadinejad, and he has a lot of explaining to do."

In the August meeting, the White House said, McConnell told Bush "that the intelligence community would not be able to meet a congressionally imposed deadline requiring a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran because new information had been obtained."

Perino said this information showed the White House was correct in believing that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, which it halted only because of Bush's policies.

"The international pressure -- and the president's approach -- has worked," she said.

"A Pattern of Deception" by Dan Froomkin, Washington Post

President Bush changed the way he talked about Iran in August: He stopped making explicit assertions about the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

On Monday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a new national intelligence estimate in which the nation's 16 intelligence agencies concluded that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program four years ago -- a dramatic rejection of an earlier set of findings.

Bush yesterday said he was only briefed about the new estimate last week.

But a close examination of his word choice over the past year suggests that he learned something around August that got him to stop making claims that were apparently no longer supported by American intelligence.

Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon.

Even as he did that, however, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent. Bush went so far in late August and October as to warn of the potential for a nuclear holocaust.

Indeed, a careful parsing of Bush's words indicates that, while not saying anything that could later prove to be demonstrably false, Bush left his listeners with what he likely knew was a fundamentally false impression. And he did so in the pursuit of a more muscular and possibly even military approach to a Middle Eastern country.

It's an oddly familiar pattern of deception.

In the rest of this 5 page article, Bush's Changing Words, is a chronological list of what Bush said and when.

Spin, obfuscation, and down-right lies about anything that does NOT fit The World According to Bush.

IRAQ - "Outstanding Job" DOD Management

Ah, yes. Another example of the "outstanding job" under Bush's Management Team.

"$1B In Military Equipment Missing In Iraq" by Laura Stirickler, CBS News

Tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, crates of machine guns and rocket propelled grenades are just a sampling of more than $1 billion in unaccounted for military equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces, according to a new report issued today by the Pentagon Inspector General and obtained exclusively by the CBS News investigative unit. Auditors for the Inspector General reviewed equipment contracts totaling $643 million but could only find an audit trail for $83 million.

The report details a massive failure in government procurement revealing little accountability for the billions of dollars spent purchasing military hardware for the Iraqi security forces. For example, according to the report, the military could not account for 12,712 out of 13,508 weapons, including pistols, assault rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers and machine guns.

The report comes on the same day that Army procurement officials will face tough questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding their procurement policies. One official, Claude Bolton, assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology has already announced his resignation on the heels of sharp criticism of army contracting. Bolton’s resignation is effective Jan. 2, 2008. The Army has significantly expanded its fraud investigations in recent months.

Inspector General Report (PDF)

WAR ON TERROR - Change in Focus? About Time!

"Marines Press to Remove Their Forces From Iraq" by Thom Shanker, New York Times

Excerpt

The Marine Corps is pressing to remove its forces from Iraq and to send marines instead to Afghanistan, to take over the leading role in combat there, according to senior military and Pentagon officials.

The idea by the Marine Corps commandant would effectively leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while giving the Marines a prominent new role in Afghanistan, under overall NATO command.

The suggestion was raised in a session last week convened by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and regional war-fighting commanders. While still under review, its supporters, including some in the Army, argue that a realignment could allow the Army and Marines each to operate more efficiently in sustaining troop levels for two wars that have put a strain on their forces.

As described by officials who had been briefed on the closed-door discussion, the idea represents the first tangible new thinking to emerge since the White House last month endorsed a plan to begin gradual troop withdrawals from Iraq, but also signals that American forces likely will be in Iraq for years to come.

It's about time we get the "War on Terror" focused where it should have been all along. Before Emperor Bush made Iraq the rallying cry for terrorists world-wide.

ON THE LITE SIDE - FAQs on General Petraeus' Testimony

"You Can't Make Stuff Up Like This" by Will Durst, Humor Times

Answers to some of the most frequently asked questions regarding General Petraeus' testimony to Congress.

Q. How did General Petraeus' testimony in front of Congress go?
A. Pretty good. He emphasized that progress was being made in Iraq. The same way he talked about the progress being made in Iraq when he testified in the same room back in 2004. He might be using the same script.

Q. What's the difference between then and now?
A. Back then, Baghdad still had electricity and water and the wheel.

Q. Did General Petraeus speak about what the future holds for our Iraqi involvement?
A. He acknowledged the road ahead would be difficult. He also allowed that fire engines are often red.

Q. The General said we have raised the number of trained Iraqi security forces fighting alongside American troops. Is it a significant rise?
A. 60 percent. From five to eight.

Q. Five to eight brigades? Divisions?
A. No. Troops. Used to be five guys we could trust. Now it's eight.

Q. What happened to the Democrats holding the General's feet to the fire?
A. Everyone except MoveOn.org scampered away like 12-year-old girls running from a big hairy spider.

Q. What did MoveOn.org do?
A. They ran a full page ad in the New York Times spotlighting General Betray Us.

Q. Why?
A. How often do you get a rhyme like that? Once in a lifetime shot; they took it.

Q. Doesn't the latest National Intelligence Estimate report Iraq's government is paralyzed by internal squabbling and petty personal differences?
A. Yes, so if you think about it, we have made strides in installing an American-style democracy.

Q. Did the General really respond to whether our intervention in Iraq was making America safer, by saying, "Unh, I don't know, actually"?
A. Yeah. So?

Q. Nothing. Just curious.
A. Well, move on. I mean, keep going.

Q. What does the General mean when he says security gains since the surge have been "uneven."
A. "Uneven" is traditional Pentagon speak for "getting our butts handed to us on a paper plate."

Q. What about those benchmarks that were oh-so-important in January?
A. Turns out they weren't really all that important. What is important is other stuff. Stuff that looks good right now.

Q. The President called the insurgents in Iraq, Al Qaeda 12 times in his speech. What's up with that?
A. A small group calls itself Al Qaeda of Iraq, but its not the same Al Qaeda responsible for 9/11. Surfing off the credibility of the name. Kind of like a terrorism franchise.

Q. Does fighting one hurt the other?
A. There used to be two teams in the Canadian Football League called the Red Ryders. But if you beat one it didn't mean you got credit for two victories in the standings.

Q. What ever happened to "we'll step down when the Iraqis step up?"
A. Someone stole the steps.

Q. Was a timetable provided for reducing troops in Iraq?
A. Nothing clear cut. Something to do with snow and hell.

Q. And the upshot of the whole thing?
A. General Petraeus asked for more time. He's hoping to come back in March with a new report.

Q. So, they're just going to keep kicking the dead cat down the road. Until when, do you think?
A. Does November 4th, 2008 have any meaning here?

Q. Is that a question?
A. Sorry, no.

IRAQ - Blackwater = Bush Brownshirts

"Blackwater Tops All Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate" by John M. Broder & James Risen, New York Times

Excerpt

The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials.

Blackwater is now the focus of investigations in both Baghdad and Washington over a Sept. 16 shooting in which at least 11 Iraqis were killed. Beyond that episode, the company has been involved in cases in which its personnel fired weapons while guarding State Department officials in Iraq at least twice as often per convoy mission as security guards working for other American security firms, the officials said.

The disclosure came as the Pentagon said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates had sent a team of officials to Iraq to get answers to questions about the use of American security contractors there.

The State Department keeps reports on each case in which weapons were fired by security personnel guarding American diplomats in Iraq. Officials familiar with the internal State Department reports would not provide the actual statistics, but they indicated that the records showed that Blackwater personnel were involved in dozens of episodes in which they had resorted to force.

The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq.

Hail, hail oh great and glorious Supreme Leader Bush! GOP's God's anointed!

IRAQ - Again and Again, Surge Failure

"Surge not working, Powell tells chamber" by Brett Lieberman, Patriot-News, PA

Excerpt

One of the most important figures in America’s road to war in Iraq delivered a blunt assessment Monday night of the Bush administration’s troop surge.

The surge has not worked, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told 1,400 business and political leaders attending the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry’s annual dinner in Derry Twp.

The window of opportunity is narrowing, Powell said. If Iraq’s government isn’t standing on its own within six to eight months, American troops will have to come home, said the man whose historic argument to the United Nations in 2003 that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction was arguably the critical moment in the run-up to the American invasion.

"The surge that we are undertaking right now has had some success in reducing the violence, but that wasn’t the purpose of the surge," Powell told his audience at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center.

The purpose was to give the Iraqi government time to stand up, Powell said. "So far, the surge is not a success, even if Gen. (David) Petraeus’ part of it is working," he said. Petraeus is the U.S. commander in Iraq.

IRAQ - Tracking Corruption

"Graft in U.S. Army Contracts Spread From Kuwait Base" by Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmitt, New York Times

Excerpt

..... The congregation at New Friendship Baptist Church celebrated his last promotion with a parade. At his sons’ baptism, he told fellow worshipers that he hoped to instill in his children the values he had wrested from hardship.

Less than 24 hours later Major Cockerham was behind bars, accused of orchestrating the largest single bribery scheme against the military since the start of the Iraq war. According to the authorities, the 41-year-old officer, with his wife and a sister, used an elaborate network of offshore bank accounts and safe deposit boxes to hide nearly $10 million in bribes from companies seeking military contracts.

The accusations against Major Cockerham are tied to a crisis of corruption inside the behemoth bureaucracy that sustains America’s troops. Pentagon officials are investigating some $6 billion in military contracts, most covering supplies as varied as bottled water, tents and latrines for troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The inquiries have resulted in charges against at least 29 civilians and soldiers, more than 75 other criminal investigations and the suicides of at least two officers. They have prompted the Pentagon, the largest purchasing agency in the world, to overhaul its war-zone procurement system.

This is another example of what happens when you outsource, and why outsourcing is a bad idea especially when done within the government. In the civilian world, outsourcing takes away American work's jobs and takes day-to-day functional control of business outside of the U.S., and profits ONLY the company.

IRAQ - Inside View 8/16/2007

"Hide & Seek...again !" by Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues

You know something, this business with figures is starting to really aggravate me. I understand that you can count very well, when it comes to dollars...This we all know. But why is it when it comes to killings, you conveniently misplace numbers ?

In previous posts, "An Add'h'olic" and "Let's call...", I alluded both directly and indirectly as to the number of deaths in Iraq. I even asked you to check the series of correspondence between Gabriele Zamparini, the Guardian and Znet.

I maintain that the Iraq Body Count figure of 70'000 is shameful to say the least.

I have also said on numerous occasions, that even the Lancet figure of 655'000 Iraqis dead is obsolete by now. I was slightly relieved to see that some websites did publish the more accurate figure of 1 million +. I reiterate yet again, the figure is greater than 1 million+.

I have also said that prior to the invasion the total population of Iraq was approximately 24 million in 2003.

German figures for 1997, placed the population number at 22.5 million. Remember that 1990-2003 were sanctions years and we lost 1.5+ million people during those 13 years.

I have also mentioned the famous Bremer question time and time again, when he asked one of the persons in his bureau in Baghdad what the population was and when the answer given was 24 million, he said let us bring it down to 5 or 6 million, that should be enough.

There is much more in the full article

We Americans need to remind ourselves that it is not just American lives being lost in Iraq.

==============

"Bush’s War Forces Iraqi Women Into Prostitution" by Ken Grandlund, Bring It On

We went over to “win hearts and minds” while establishing “democracy in the Middle East” and saving America from a “looming mushroom cloud” of nuclear decimation perpetuated by Saddam Hussein. None of that has come to pass. What we have managed to achieve is increased hatred for America in the region, a hopelessly degrading civil war at foot, and no sign of the so-called WMD’s anywhere. Add turning pious Muslim women into prostitutes so they can feed their kids to the list of grand achievements America has realized under the woefully inadequate eye of George W. Bush.

According to this CNN report, Iraqi women are being forced into prostitution just to keep their families alive. And when I say “forced” I don’t mean that armed gangs are dragging them out of their homes and savagely raping them , tossing a few dinars at their feet. I mean that the country is in such a shambles, and so many men have been killed in sectarian violence, that family matriarchs are choosing to sell their sexual wares for food money just to keep their children from starving. In a country where religion often sees walking hand in hand or kissing in public as an affront to modesty and piety, these women are abandoning all their religious traditions and risking certain death upon discovery by family members simply to eat.

Kudos Dub’ya- you managed to become the Pimp of Iraq, albeit as a consequence of your incompetence.

IRAQ - Oh Yes, Hold Your Breath For Unbiased Report

"Not written by the pen of Petraeus" (video) Countdown, MSNBC

Aug. 15: Buried in a L.A. Times article was the statement that the Petraeus Report will not be written by Gen. Petraeus but by the White House instead. Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford and former Pentagon advisor P.J. Crowley discusses.

Yap, an unbiased report, NOT! Watch the video and see the Whitehouse Shill all but admit that Petraeus will not be giving the report.

IRAQ - The Bush Nightmare, Lies Exposed

NO END IN SIGHT
Documentary

IRAQ - View From "Across the Pond"

"The lessons Northern Ireland holds for Iraq" by David McKittrick, The Independent UK 8/1/2007

Excerpts....

The fact that the Army was yesterday able to stand down its Northern Ireland operation after almost four grueling decades is a sign that even the most intractable conflicts can eventually be settled. A region that was long a symbol of discord has become a beacon of hope. Belfast is not Basra, and there are huge differences between the two conflicts, but perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the Northern Irish experience.

This applies on both the military and political fronts. First, it hardly needs saying that these things take time, as the duration of the Northern Ireland violence all too plainly indicates. The fact also has to be faced that armies, no matter how professional and well trained, learn slowly. In 1972, the IRA managed to kill 100 soldiers in a single year - that is, three full years after the Army arrived.

As this illustrates, the best-equipped national army can struggle against irregular forces which often use irregular weapons. In particular, the IRA proved especially ingenious in home-made explosive devices.

It may seem ridiculous to think of baked bean tins having a place in warfare, but the IRA, using plastic explosives and cunning adaptation, was able to penetrate military armor and claim soldiers' lives. Millions of pounds had to be spent on counter-measures. It is also vitally important to minimize friction between troops and civilians, since this can have hugely counter-productive results. A surprising number of IRA members, for example, tell of getting involved following apparently trivial incidents.

..........................

Long, bloodstained years were to pass before the realization began to dawn that neither Britain nor the IRA were ever going to surrender to each other. The recognition of this reality did not end the violence: that continued for many more years. But it led to a period of brooding introspection, much of it among imprisoned activists, as various elements came to grips with a central question: if victory is not possible, then what is?

For most, this was an unwelcome question, but as time went by it became an inescapable issue. Eventually this led on to dialogue across different groups.

To begin with, both the processes of debate and dialogue were conducted in strict secrecy, accompanied by repeated denials that anything of this type was going on at all. Again, violence continued while clandestine contacts went on, but eventually a subculture of negotiation developed. Quite apart from the wider issues, the violence itself was an issue, with the authorities pressing for ceasefires and the IRA demanding concessions in return.

Relationships developed among the protagonists and various go-betweens, with a certain amount of give-and-take. What did not develop was trust, yet this did not prove an insuperable obstacle. Each side in fact took it for granted that all the others were unscrupulous, up to all sorts of tricks and needed to be watched like a hawk. With this as a given, protagonists got used to the idea of conducting business on a basis of mutually anticipated perfidy.

..........................

Yet in the latter years, once some sort of negotiating framework has been established, gratuitous acts of violence lost their power to blow the process apart and instead seemed to increase the determination to see it through. In Northern Ireland the tragic case in point was the Omagh bomb, with which dissident republicans killed 29 people some months after the historic 1998 agreement was signed. At an earlier stage that might have wrecked everything; instead those innocent deaths cemented the peace by providing the most graphically terrible reminder of the alternative to a peace process.

This was partly because of the immense power of the sense, when it finally arrives, that peace is an idea whose time has come. It take years for this to permeate the more extreme elements but, in Belfast at any rate, the idea that peace was achievable generated surges of hope and energy.

It may be that at this juncture emotions in Iraq are too raw for a peace process to take root. Yet it is probably never too early to try to lay the groundwork for some future phase in which realism and pragmatism can take root. At some stage, the ambition for victory will hopefully give way to an acknowledgment of the inevitability of a negotiated settlement. For many, that will be an unpalatable thought, yet that is the lesson of the Belfast experience of war and peace.

This MAY be food for thought in today's Iraq.

Substitute Iraq's factions factions for Northern Ireland's factions. Replace the public (in our face) dialog in Iraq today, with the Northern Ireland dialog conducted in strict secrecy.

But then, is the Iraq solution a decades long one? This may be the reality, thanks to Bush.

MIDDLE EAST - Inside Gaza Commentary

Here's are some EXCERPTS from an interesting commentary from the inside. Inside Gaza:

"A Hawk's Tale" by Kevin Peraino, Newsweek

As U.S. plans to sell arms to Saudi Arabia make waves in the Middle East, NEWSWEEK’s Kevin Peraino visits a Gaza arms dealer.

July 30, 2007 - It is not a fact that he particularly likes to advertise, but, if pressed, Abdel Hamid Bahar will acknowledge that his business is at its best when people are dying. Last Sunday I went to see the black-market arms dealer at his home, a squat, dilapidated structure made of cinderblocks and tin sheeting, in the central Gaza village of Moghraga. We sat on pink plastic chairs in the shade, next to a slightly sickly garden with a couple of banana plants and a slender olive tree. The weapons merchant's business varies widely, of course, depending on how much fighting is going on. Last summer, when Gaza was at war with Israel after the kidnapping of Gilad Schalit, Bahar was pulling in almost $3,000 per month, more than most Gazans earn in a year. How is business now, I asked, with Hamas in power and the streets relatively calm? "Zero," the gun dealer complained, without bothering to hide his frustration.

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Bahar grew up in Gaza's Bourej refugee camp, and eventually moved to Moghraga, a poor farming village of about 5,000. He married when he was 16 and got a job as a construction worker with his father in Israel for a while. Later he earned a living as a taxi driver and auto mechanic. During the first intifada he fought against Israel as a militant in the Tanzim, the Fatah-affiliated militia. Still, despite his youthful loyalties, it is bad business for an arms dealer to be taking sides; he says he now sells to both Hamas and Fatah. One of his kids had scrawled the word HAMAS in black spray paint on the side of the house. "I started my business in order to feed my children," he told me. As the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah intensified last spring, "all the factions began to buy weapons."

I (Kevin Peraino) had come to see Bahar because arms sales were the talk of the Middle East over the weekend. On Friday the Bush administration said it would like to sell Saudi Arabia and its regional allies billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weaponry. Washington has also promised Israel –which, in a sign of its concern about Iran possibly obtaining nuclear weapons, has dropped its traditional objections to U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia—another $30.4 billion in weaponry. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were set to tour the region this week to help work out the details of the proposal. Israel also promised to allow 1,000 M-16s to pass from Jordan to Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank—an effort to prop up the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Against that backdrop, it seemed like a good idea to visit one of the trade's real-world practitioners. In the news stories about American support for proxies in the region, the recipients of such weaponry are usually described as "moderate," while their antagonists are inevitably "radical." Those are cartoon descriptions, of course, and are often carelessly applied. In the four years since I've been working in the Middle East, I've met plenty of radical American proxies, and just as many moderate "radicals." The labels "Islamist" and "secular" don't reveal all that much about character either, although they're slightly better than "terrorist" and "stooge." If I were forced to divide and classify the Gazans I meet, I'd say they tend to be better described as hawks and doves, and there are both of those in all camps. Bahar, the arms dealer, is one of the former by trade.

Bold emphasis, mine

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The frustrating, inconvenient thing about all this is that, when you meet the people up close, it is often the hawks who seem the most shrewd and competent, at least tactically. They sometimes appear a little paranoid, but in the unforgiving Middle East they are also often the most determined survivors, the ones you would want on your side in a street fight.

IRAQ - Really is the GPO War

"The Republican War" by Charley Reese, LewRockwell

It is now clear that the proper name for the war going on in Mesopotamia is the "Republican War." Never before has a political party so decisively asserted ownership of a foreign war.

The Republicans refuse to share it with the Democrats, who, despite their many resolutions, have yet to call for a complete withdrawal of American forces. Democrats have not come close to proposing to cut off the war funding, which is the only way the war can be ended.

Yet Republicans act like jealous suitors and seem to want to keep the war as their very own. They have killed every single proposal to alter the strategy or the tactics. They even killed a bill that would have done nothing more than guarantee that American soldiers would get a rest period at home equal to the time spent in the war.

Killing that bill, which had nothing to do with withdrawal or timetables for withdrawal, clearly proves that Republicans do not support the troops. They support the war. There is a huge difference. Little Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, has become so possessive of the war that he seems on the edge of hysteria.

He seems frightened to death of what will happen when Americans leave. In fact, nothing much will happen except that Iraqis will concentrate on killing each other rather than killing Americans and each other. Most normal people would consider that a positive development for us.

The Republicans and their shrinking number of warmonger supporters have long since forgotten that the Republican War is an illegal war, a war of aggression launched against a country that had not attacked us or ever threatened to attack us. They have conveniently forgotten how the Republican War was sold to the American people with outright lies. They ignore the fact that the war was bungled from Day One and that ordinary Americans have paid a terrible price for those blunders.

If ever there were a valid reason to shed the label "Republican," the nutty administration and its war-loving allies in the House and Senate have provided it. They seem to have lost their collective minds. They know darn well what their general du jour, David Petraeus, is going to say in September: "Gosh, fellows, things are looking up, but give us another five years. Or maybe 10."

That would be insanity to the third power. The Iraqis are killing us on the cheap with secondhand AK-47s, rifle grenades and homemade bombs created out of old artillery shells. We are using the most expensive weapons in the world, wielded by the most expensive army in the world, to kill them by the small handful. I don't know what the insurgency has cost, but the Republican War has cost us half a trillion dollars, and all we have to show for it are 3,600 graves, several thousand wounded, a civil war and a corrupt, ineffective civilian government. The Iraqi supply line stretches around the corner; ours stretches 7,000 miles. The Iraqis know what their mission is; our soldiers don't have the foggiest notion of why they are still there.

Even to put the best face on it, we replaced a dictatorship and allowed the Iraqis free elections and time to adopt a constitution. At that point, the president should have said: "We've done our part. Now you're on your own. Goodbye." But no, he didn't do that, because his intention is for the Republican War to never end and for our troops to become a permanent part of the Iraqi landscape.

George W. Bush is by no means the first Westerner to make a fool of himself by overestimating his powers and underestimating the determination of the people of the Middle East to rid themselves of foreign conquerors.

IRAQ - Baghdad Summary

"A monument to failure" by Dale McFeatters, Capitol Hill Blue

A case of wretched excess in Baghdad

In September, the world's largest, most expensive and most heavily fortified embassy will open. It is ours and it is in Baghdad.

The embassy compound occupies 104 acres of primo real estate along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. If the embassy were in Washington, it would take up most of the National Mall.

For security reasons, the embassy will be out of sight and off-limits to most Iraqis, just as Baghdad outside the blast walls is out of sight and off-limits to the people at the embassy.

Instead, they will live in their own self-contained world with its own power, water and wastewater-treatment plants, amenities we have so far been unable to operate elsewhere in Baghdad on any regular basis.

The embassy will cost $592 million, although Congress is mulling a $50 million request for additional housing. The compound will contain 21 buildings, in addition to the embassy itself, residences for the ambassador and deputy, housing for 380 families, a PX, commissary, theater, schools, restaurants and a firehouse.

The Associated Press notes: "The embassy is one of the few major projects the administration has undertaken in Iraq that is on schedule and within budget." Apparently the concept of modesty and restraint never entered into it's planning, and if the war continues in its current direction, it will stand as a monument to American hubris and overreaching under the Bush administration.

And this while some military families are buying armor vests for their love ones out of pocket because the Bush Administration hasn't.

"Iraq's leader can't get out of 1st gear" by Ned Parker, LA Times

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and Tariq Hashimi, the country's Sunni vice president, faced each other across the room as the latter spoke angrily of the bad blood between Sunni and Shiite officials.

A hush fell over the room as Hashimi demanded to know whether the prime minister had been accusing his political bloc of being infiltrated by terrorists. "Are you talking about us? If you are … we would ask for proof," said Hashimi, according to his account of a recent closed-door meeting of Iraq's top political and national security officials. "I am treated as an opponent," he said, his voice rising. "If you continue treating me like this, it is better for me to quit."

Maliki sat in silence.

Iraq's government is teetering on the edge. Maliki's Cabinet is filled with officials who are deeply estranged from one another and more loyal to their parties than to the government as a whole. Some are jostling to unseat the prime minister. Few, if any, have accepted the basic premise of a government whose power is shared among each of Iraq's warring sects and ethnic groups.

Maliki is the man U.S. officials are counting on to bring Iraq's civil war under control, yet he seems unable to break the government's deadlock.

Even Maliki's top political advisor, Sadiq Rikabi, says he doubts the prime minister will be able to win passage of key legislation ardently sought by U.S. officials, including a law governing the oil industry and one that would allow more Sunni Arabs to gain government jobs.

"We hope to achieve some of them, but solving the Iraqi problems and resolving the different challenges in the [next] three months would need a miracle," Rikabi said.

Interviews with a broad range of Iraqi and Western officials paint a portrait of Maliki as an increasingly isolated and ineffectual figure, lacking in confidence and unable to trust people.

Iraq's intractable problems would challenge even the most skilled of politicians. But skilled politicians are in short supply here. Most of Iraq's current leaders grew to adulthood as members of underground militias, skilled in the arts of conspiracy, not compromise. And many of those leaders appear to believe that their side can still win a decisive military victory in the country's civil war.

There's more in the full article.

IRAQ - The Spreading Cancer

"Georgie Anne Geyer: A spreading terror" Dallas News Opinion

Iraq now set up as a school for insurgents ready to be exported

Anyone who knows anything about cancer knows that the danger point comes when the cancer suddenly and unexpectedly appears in another supposedly "clean" part of the body. As when, say, breast cancer, an implacable traveler, reappears in the bloodstream or the bones.

That there are stunning similarities between what happens medically in the body of man and what occurs sociologically and militarily in the societies of men is far less noticed – but just as frightening and dangerous.

Think of what has happened in only the last week in the Middle East. In northern Lebanon, in the long-established Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, out of the blue arose a new al Qaeda-related insurgent group, Fatah al-Islam. Within days and even hours, the recurring hell of the Middle East was loosed, and refugees poured out of the camp in terror.

There had been none of this kind of terror networking in these northern camps. Indeed, since this camp was established in 1949 to accommodate refugees from northern Palestine after the creation of Israel, it has housed one of the more formal and conservative of peoples.

But it was soon established that these new "insurgents" or "terrorists" – or whatever they really are – had arrived at the camp only recently, that they marched in one day with brand-new weapons, ready to fight.

Two points grip you:

• The first is found in the words of French scholar Bernard Rougier, author of Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam Among Palestinians in Lebanon. "The main point is that these camps are no longer part of Palestinian society," he told The Washington Post . "They are only spaces – now open to all of the influences running through the Muslim world."
• The second is that Iraq, where we were supposed to be "containing terrorism," is now clearly exporting insurgents to other regions – to Lebanon, to Syria, to Gaza, to Bangladesh, to Kurdistan.

And so, on the one hand, you have weakened societies vulnerable to the "new answers" of "new insurgencies," and on the other hand, you have Iraq set up as a school for terrorists with American troops and policy providing the constant inspiration for their fight.

This, of course, is not the way the Bush administration sees it.

The White House sees terrorists as born, not created by history, bearing the mark of Cain, not the mark of circumstance. There is a scarlet "T" written on their foreheads at birth and the only answer is to destroy them. This kind of thinking, of course, relieves the thinker of any responsibility for the presence of the insurgent-terrorist-whatever in our innocent midst.

What's more, there is not much real give in the administration's policies. True, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other American diplomats met Memorial Day weekend with the Iranians in Baghdad (a good first move but limited, since the Iranians have most of the power because of our incredible stupidity in Iraq). But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

The truth of the steadily deteriorating situation in the Middle East is, of course, quite different. The Palestinian people of 40 and even 30 years ago were formal, conservative people who remained closely tied to their families, clans and religious groups. Theirs was a highly stratified society, which has now been shattered.

In the institutional vacuum that is a camp like Nahr el-Bared, a few hundred men trained and tempered in Iraq can make a huge difference. At the same time, the Turkish military is ready to go into northern Kurdistan, al-Qaeda operatives from Iraq are popping up in hitherto untouched places, and the American military's advice to its troops is, "Get down with the people – listen to them!" Only four years and thousands of bombs and night missions too late.

IRAQ - Another View

"A Bed of Roses, A Bed of Thorns"

If I ever get married again
..I don't want any of this white dress business. I shall wear red.

Bright red.

The color of blood, the color of roaring, erupting volcanoes, the color of a dying sun, the color of passion, the color of Resistance...The color of Iraq.

Layla Anwar
Arab Woman Blues

There's more in the full article