September 13, 2007 | Washington ‘misled’ Blair over plans for postwar Iraq

Britain’s outgoing Ambassador to Washington has accused the Bush Administration of misleading Tony Blair over its much-criticised plans for the reconstruction of Iraq after the invasion of 2003.

Sir David Manning, who leaves his post at the end of this month, said that Britain was left in the dark as Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defence Secretary, overruled the plans for postwar Iraq drawn up by Colin Powell and the US State Department.

“There were plans made and deployed in the State Department, but in the end the State Department wasn’t allowed to take the job,” Sir David told the New Statesman. ...
- posted by Editor @ 5:41 AM

Poll: Civilian death toll in Iraq may top 1 million | By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | September 14, 2007

A British survey offers the highest estimate to date. At least 4 die in a Sadr City car bombing.

... as a new survey suggested that the civilian death toll from the war could be more than 1 million.

The figure from ORB, a British polling agency that has conducted several surveys in Iraq, followed statements this week from the U.S. military defending itself against accusations it was trying to play down Iraqi deaths to make its strategy appear successful.
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According to the ORB poll, a survey of 1,461 adults suggested that the total number slain during more than four years of war was more than 1.2 million. ...
- posted by Editor @ 2:19 PM

President Petraeus? Iraqi official recalls the day US general revealed ambition | By Patrick Cockburn | Published: 13 September 2007

The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, expressed long-term interest in running for the US presidency when he was stationed in Baghdad, according to a senior Iraqi official who knew him at that time.

Sabah Khadim, then a senior adviser at Iraq's Interior Ministry, says General Petraeus discussed with him his ambition when the general was head of training and recruitment of the Iraqi army in 2004-05.

"I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, 'No, that would be too soon'," Mr Khadim, who now lives in London, said.
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But General Petraeus's open interest in the presidency may lead critics to suggest that his own political ambitions have influenced him in putting an optimistic gloss on the US military position in Iraq . ...
- posted by Editor @ 2:15 PM

U.S.-IRAQ: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge | By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Sep 12 (IPS) - In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior. ...
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A crucial element of Petraeus's path of advancement in the Army, on the other hand, was through serving as an aide to senior generals. He was assistant executive officer to the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Carl Vuono, and later executive assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton. His experience taught him that cultivating senior officers is the key to success. ...
- posted by Editor @ 2:11 PM

Two of Seven Soldiers Who Wrote 'NYT' Op-Ed Die in Iraq | By Greg Mitchell | Published: September 12, 2007 7:25 AM ET

NEW YORK The Op-Ed by seven active duty U.S. soldiers in Iraq questioning the war drew international attention just three weeks ago. Now two of the seven are dead.
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The controversial Times column on Aug. 19 was called "The War As We Saw It," and expressed skepticism about American gains in Iraq. “To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched,” the group wrote.

It closed: "We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through."
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One of the other five authors of the Times piece, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head while the article was being written. He was expected to survive after being flown to a military hospital in the United States.
- posted by Editor @ 2:58 PM

Sep 13, 2007 | Page 1 of 2 | SPEAKING FREELY | US public shrinks from war's reality | By K Darbandi

Why is the United States so close to another major war in the midst of the Iraq fiasco?
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These assumptions, however, truly insult people's intelligence. They assume that after four years the US public is not yet aware that the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Iraq are not connected, other than the fact that both involve Arabic-speaking peoples. It assumes that people still do not realize that the Iraq war was pre-preemptive, a war of choice, and waged on shaky allegations and against international law. It assumes that in the wealthiest democracy on Earth, the public has been stupefied to such an extent that they just need to know the facts to act in a very anti-warlike fashion.

Fox News and a few very large conglomerates have done it again: the US public still does not know that Israel is the biggest recipient of US aid and has been using it slowly to exterminate a whole group of people. If only people knew after more than 40 months that their soldiers in the field are also torturers who kill detainees in their custody, and rape and murder 13-year-olds and their whole families; if only they had seen the Abu Ghraib pictures and videos, they would know how criminally disposed the US military can be and how much worse the next war is going to get. If only the US public knew how they have destroyed a country of 25 million people, they would stop their president from picking on another one of 70 million.
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Anti-war activists in the US could have the wrong assumption about US public, in that they assume people in general are inherently good, moral and ethical beings. So if they are complicit in participating indirectly in one genocide after another, if they send their sons to commit one atrocity after another, then there must be a lot of brainwashing and false propaganda going on that have led them to act that way.
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A large number of people who watch Fox actually do not care about the truth, they want to hear a sort of affirmation ritual to feel better; but as the war-junkies that they are, they won't rest until they get their war. In this context, 300 is part of the war plan: to de-humanize the Persians, who are depicted in the picture as all the colored and sexually ambiguous people on this Earth. The neurotically selfish culture will reaffirm its racial superiority once again while we all wait for the anti-war sentiments to grow in the US public.
- posted by Editor @ 2:46 PM

Is the U.S. Responsible for a Million Iraqi Deaths? | By Patrick McElwee and Robert Naiman | Just Foreign Policy

09/11/07 "ZNet" -- -- In October 2006 researchers from Johns Hopkins University published a peer-reviewed article in The Lancet, one of Europe's most important and respected medical journals, estimating that 650,000 Iraqis had been killed due to the U.S.-led invasion of their country, 601,000 violently. [1] The report was quickly marginalized in public debate in the United States.
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As of this writing, Iraq Body Count reports that between 69,000 and 76,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. But, as Les Roberts, co-author of the Lancet study, points out, "There have to be at least 120,000 and probably 140,000 deaths per year from natural causes in a country with the population of Iraq." If the Iraq Body Count figure captured all deaths (which the group does not claim), then the annual death rate for the past four years has increased less than 15 percent. Roberts remarks that this is not consistent with "numerous stories we hear about overflowing morgues, the need for new cemeteries and new body collection brigades." [5] Estimates of violent deaths on the scale of the Iraq Body Count numbers are also hard to reconcile with estimates that 4 million Iraqis have fled their homes, since interviews with refugees indicate that the violent death of family members was often the event that precipitated flight.

The Iraq Study Group itself found that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." They cite a day in July 2006 when U.S. intelligence reported 93 attacks. "Yet a careful review of reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence." [6] The British daily Independent reports that the Iraqi government bans journalists from the scenes of bombings and has banned hospitals from providing information on casualties. [7]

On January 9, 2007, a reporter from Fox News was embedded with the U.S. Air Force. He reported that planes taking off from his location "dropped thousands of pounds of munitions. They bombed 25 targets deep inside Iraq." Yet no reports of any deaths from those bombings reached the English-language press. [8]
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The best estimate indicates that more than a million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation. It is reasonable to suppose that if politicians and news media in the United States were forced to confront this reality, pressure for the end of the war would increase dramatically, and cavalier discussions of new military actions in Iran and Pakistan would be less likely.
- posted by Editor @ 2:42 PM

Iraqi reporter: Baghdad '100 times worse' than a year ago | David Edwards and Muriel Kane | Published: Monday September 10, 2007

Ayub Nuri, an Iraqi journalist residing in the United States, told CNN on Monday that even when he was last in Baghdad in 2006, "the situation was very, very dangerous," but that things are much worse now.

"When I speak to my friends and family these days on the phone, they tell me that it is 100 times worse than when I was there," Nuri stated. "Even the regular people cannot leave their own neighborhoods. ... If you go to another neighborhood, that's completely unknown to you, and you might not be able to come home alive." ...
- posted by Editor @ 2:56 PM

The view from Baghdad: Mounting death toll which makes a mockery of US optimism | By Kim Sengupta | Published: 11 September 2007

By the time General Petraeus had finished speaking yesterday the slaughter in Iraq for the previous 24 hours could be tallied. It was not an exceptionally violent day by the standards of Iraq: seven US soldiers lay dead and 11 injured in the capital; other instances of sectarian violence included a suicide bomb which had killed 10 and wounded scores near Mosul while 10 bodies were found in Baghdad. Three policemen were killed in clashes in Mosul, and a car bomb outside a hospital in the capital had exploded, killing two and wounding six.

In Baghdad, on the surface the overt violence appears to have diminished. There are fewer loud explosions. But, the city is now being partitioned by sectarian hatred and fear; by concrete walls and barbed wire. Claims that the US military strategy is paving the way for a stable society bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground.

The US is accused of manipulating figures relating to violence to fit their case, ignoring evidence which shows that the influx of 30,000 troops has done little to end the continuing bloodshed.

The death of Omar al-Husseini in the Huriya district of Baghdad is one of many which does not even figure in the American reckoning. ... But both the US military and the Iraqi police have told his parents that as far as they are concerned the abduction and killings were purely criminal acts. This means, statistically, that his death is not included by the US in the calculations for sectarian killings produced yesterday.
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The purge of the neighbourhoods, however, has helped to bring down the number of violent deaths, providing fewer sectarian targets. Residents seeing their neighbours being driven out are too afraid to do anything. Ali Mohammed, a Shia in Huriya, spread his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. " If we say anything we will be attacked," he said. "So what can we say? We know of people being driven out, being killed, but there is no one we can go to." ...
- posted by Editor @ 2:48 PM

GAO: Iraq Hasn't Met 11 of 18 Benchmarks | By Anne Flaherty | The Associated Press | Tuesday 04 September 2007

Washington - Baghdad has not met 11 of its 18 political and security goals, according to a new independent report on Iraq that challenges President Bush's assessment on the war.

The study, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, was slightly more upbeat than initially planned. After receiving substantial resistance from the White House, the GAO determined that four benchmarks - instead of two - had been partially met.

But GAO stuck with its original contention that only three goals out of the 18 had been achieved. The goals met include establishing joint security stations in Baghdad, ensuring minority rights in the Iraqi legislature and creating support committees for the Baghdad security plan.

"Overall key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," said U.S. Comptroller David Walker in prepared remarks for a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

An advance copy of the 100-page report and Walker's testimony was obtained by The Associated Press.

GAO's findings paint a bleaker view of progress in Iraq than offered by Bush in July and comes at a critical time in the Iraq debate. So far, Republicans have stuck by Bush and staved off Democratic legislation ordering troops home. But many, who have grown uneasy about the unpopularity of the war, say they want to see substantial improvement in Iraq by September. ...
- posted by Editor @ 8:55 PM

Advisers Tell Bush to Stand Pat on Iraq | MATTHEW LEE and ANNE GEARAN | September 4, 2007 11:13 PM EST | AP
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Also Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative and auditing arm, reported that Iraq has failed to meet 11 of its 18 political and security goals.

The study was slightly more upbeat than initially planned. After receiving substantial resistance from the White House, the GAO determined that four benchmarks _ instead of two _ had been partially met.

But the GAO stuck with its original contention that only three goals out of the 18 had been fully achieved. The goals met include establishing joint security stations in Baghdad, ensuring minority rights in the Iraqi legislature and creating support committees for the Baghdad security plan.

U.S. Comptroller David Walker said the GAO did not soften its report due to pressure from the administration and reached its conclusions on its own. Walker said Congress should ask itself what it wants to achieve in Iraq and can do so realistically. ...
- posted by Editor @ 8:37 PM

Cholera spreads in Iraq as health services collapse | Patrick Cockburn, The Independent | 31 August 2007

Lack of clean drinking water and poor sanitation has led to 5,000 people in northern Iraq contracting cholera.

The outbreak is among the most serious signs yet that Iraqi health and social services are breaking down as the number of those living in camps and poor housing increases after people flee their homes.

"The disease is spreading very fast," Dr Juan Abdallah, a senior official in Kurdistan's health ministry, told a UN agency. "It is the first outbreak of its kind here in the past few decades."

Doctors in Sulaimaiyah in Iraqi Kurdistan have appealed for help because of the rapidly increasing number of cases, saying there is a shortage of medicines. Although the city has been less affected by fighting than almost anywhere in Iraq, Unicef says that mains water is only available for two hours a day and many people have dug shallow wells outside their homes. ...
- posted by Editor @ 8:19 PM