Iraq: When Will we Ever Learn?
UKWatch.net - 27 Mar 2008
Five years after the American and British governments launched the most ill-conceived and fundamentally flawed war of the modern era; the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has finally promised a full-scale inquiry into the war. Although the Labour government has held four political “Inquiries” before, this is the first time that a British Prime Minister has acknowledged that a full public inquiry is necessary to unpick the disastrous lessons of the conflict. His admission is in direct contrast to Tony Blair who said in 2005: “We have had inquiry after inquiry we do not need to go back over this again and again.” So what would a public inquiry find? It would have to hear evidence as to whether the war was legal, and would most likely conclude it was not. One key witness would be Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who was deputy legal adviser to the British Foreign Office before the war. Wilmshurst resigned the day the war started. She argued that without a second resolution at the UN Security Council authorizing force, the war was illegal. Her resignation letter said she could not “in conscience go along with advice” of then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, as he changed his view to try and fudge the facts to say war was justified. Any inquiry would also have to hear from Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, who just last weekend week-end admitted the British and US governments had seriously underestimated the scale of any post-invasion task. Powell said: “The trouble with Iraq is we were kind of preparing for the wrong sort of aftermath. We made lots of preparations for humanitarian disaster, for the lack of water, of all that kind of thing, and what we hadn’t in my view thought through was the long-term nature of this. I don’t think any of us had thought through this much bigger question of what we are dealing with.” The truth is that the Blair and Bush governments were too preoccupied to try and spin the case for war to understand its full consequences. The falsehoods of Britain and America’s “dirty dossiers” purporting to show weapons of mass destruction have been long exposed. But in a retreat of another justification for war, the Pentagon finally acknowledged last week that a review of more than 600,000 captured Iraqi documents showed "no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida terrorist network". The reality is one we have known all along. Al Qaeda never had a presence in Iraq, until the chaos created by the war allowed it to have one. Moreover, as the US has got bogged down in Iraq, it has allowed Al Qaeda to re-establish itself in the tribal lands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Even the feeble justification for removing Saddam on humanitarian grounds, now, five years later, looks like a complete disaster. Let’s quickly look at the lethal legacy of the war five years on. Figures on the numbers killed vary depending on who you talk to, ranging from an estimated 90,000 by the Iraqi Body Count to 1.2 million by the British polling company Opinion Research Business. Over 2.2 million Iraqis have fled the country, with an estimated two million internally displaced. Some 50,000 are said to be homeless in Baghdad alone. It is impossible to describe the scale of human suffering that hides behind each statistic. A generation of Iraqi children is growing up terrorized and traumatized, having witnessed or been subject to violence. Each story is a human tragedy. “My children and I left my home in Anbar almost two years ago” thirty-eight year old Ruba told the Red Cross. “My husband had been killed right in front of us. I had to protect my children, so we fled the same night with nothing but some money. For me, there is no past and no future, only a horrible present.” The Red Cross recently concluded that “five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care.” For those providing services such as health care it can be perilous: Over 2,200 doctors and nurses have been killed, with over 250 kidnapped. For many it is too much: Some 20,000 of the 34,000 registered doctors in the country have left. The average wage in Iraq – that is, if you can get a job, is now around $150 per month, yet many families are having to spend at least $50 just to get clean water.  Baghdad still struggles to get one hour of electricity per day. To coincide with the fifth anniversary of the conflict, many media have undertaken different surveys of what life is like in Iraq. Given the appalling state of the country, an overtly optimistic picture was painted by a BBC poll that found that over 50% of Iraqis think their lives are “good.” Whilst this is a national figure, it masks the deep ethnic divisions with only 33% of Sunnis being “happy”, compared with 62% of Shias and 73% of Kurds. This seems far too optimistic and is contradicted by other surveys and reports. For example, of the ten people interviewed for the Observer earlier this month, 3 people or 30 per cent, said they wished Saddam was still in power, another argued that the war had set Iraq back 50 years. What the BBC and other surveys have shown is that Iraqis still rate security as the biggest problem for the country overall. Thabit is a Sunni who lives near Kirkuk. He says “before 2003 we only had to worry about not saying anything against the government. Now we can say all we want, but life is in continuous threat”. Another Iraqi, Amaal, a mother of six and teacher of biochemistry in Baghdad says: “It is true that some people are very poor in society, but I know many people who would prefer to live in poverty if they were given security.” The US claims that the “surge” in American troops has had a dramatic effect on reducing the violence in Baghdad. They spout statistics to back this up. The number of sectarian attacks in Baghdad dropped from 2200 in December 2006 to 200 in November 2007. This, like most American military propaganda, has missed the point. The reason that violence is fallen is that the city has now been effectively ethnically cleansed. Instisar is a Sunni accountant who lives in Baghdad. She says that in her street there are only three families left who lived there before the war. The rest have “emigrated or fled”. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi photo-journalist has just returned from the city. Able to go to districts no western journalist can go, he says that Baghdad has been transformed into a city of walls. Some 20 miles of 12 foot concrete barriers now dissect this city keeping Sunni and Shia apart. Each neighborhood or district is controlled by different militia. “The people are more desperate than ever”, reports Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. This post-apocalyptic hell is surely not what President Bush had in mind when he said in 2003: "Iraqi democracy will succeed – and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran – that freedom can be the future of every nation." For the Americans there is no end is sight, either: In 2008, there were more American troops in Iraq than during the invasion. Nearly 4000 American soldiers have been killed and 30,000 wounded. Over 16,000 American troops have deserted. The figure may well be higher, with many of the runaways quietly discharged. Britain may have lost far fewer soldiers – just 175 – but it has been forced to retreat out of the city of Basra and still cannot pull its soldiers out of the country. The cost is not just in lives either. In 2003, US Defence Secretary said the cost of the war would be $60bn. To date, the US government has spent at least $500 billion on the war, with some estimates it is as high as $4 trillion. In the UK, an influential Commons Committee recently warned of a “surprising” 52 per cent increase in the cost of military action in Iraq to nearly £1.45bn, despite recent reductions in troop levels. Gordon Brown has said of the public inquiry: "There is a need to learn all possible lessons from the military action in Iraq and its aftermath." The main lesson, according to Hans Blix the UN’s former weapons chief, is “that there are limitations to what you can achieve by military means.” But the British and Americans should have realized this before they invaded. As Robert Fisk, the award winning journalist wrote last week: “The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn”. And we don’t need a public inquiry to tell us that.

Brown Government Promotes Patriotism and Militarism
UKWatch.net - 27 Mar 2008
Faced with intractable problems, the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown has embarked on an attempt to promote British patriotism and militarism. Domestically, the government confronts growing social inequality and an impending economic crisis that threatens to devastate living standards, while overseas Britain is still mired down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such military setbacks have in no way lessened the British bourgeoisie?s ambitions internationally. Competition for strategic resources has rather seen the government reiterate its support for military intervention overseas. Such a policy requires the silencing or marginalisation of dissent. To this end, together with the armed forces and the media, the government has set about trying to manipulate and intimidate public opinion. Immediately prior to the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the British Army launched a 2 million recruitment drive. The military is faced with a 10 percent drop in troop numbers because of a chronic inability to retain trained soldiers that has been brought on by the unwillingness to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. The army also retained the services of a public relations company some 18 months ago. Chief recruiter Brigadier Andrew Jackson is responsible for the launch of the new ?One of the best? recruitment campaign, supported by Rugby Union England international Jonny Wilkinson. This is the first interactive campaign for army recruitment, and the public are encouraged to express their support for British troops. Conscious of the widespread opposition to the Afghanistan and Iraq occupation, the army is playing on sympathy for soldiers over their poor wages and substandard housing and the chronic lack of protective equipment for combat to legitimise militarism. The campaign was spearheaded by the media?s lauding Prince Harry as a hero for his brief spell of duty in Afghanistan. Earlier this week, it was announced that Princes Harry and William are to host a party to raise funds for soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ?Help for Heroes? appeal, backed by the right-wing Daily Mail, is to take place in London on May 7. The princes, serving army officers, are to be joined by former SAS soldier Andy McNab and head of the Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt. Open to wealthy celebrities and individuals, the party is to be held at a secret location and will feature a military display and marching band. The event was announced at the same time that the government set aside plans for a further withdrawal of UK troops from Iraq due in May. Last year, Brown had pledged that UK forces would be cut from 4,100 to 2,500 by next month. This has been delayed indefinitely as British forces in the south of the country prepare for a major offensive against insurgents. The last weeks also saw a concerted campaign of official outrage and indignation over the supposed harassment of military personnel at RAF Wittering, near Peterborough. Service personnel had been instructed not to wear their uniforms in public because of alleged verbal abuse. The Conservative MP for Peterborough, Stewart Jackson, has since admitted that ?The police don?t have records of any serious problems. My understanding is that it?s a small number of incidents of verbal abuse.? But this did not stop Brown from making a statement to the press that soldiers should be able to display their uniforms with pride and that civilians must respect and defer to uniformed service people in public for their ?sacrifices? and their ?public service.? The palace also issued a statement of concern. The media campaign around RAF Wittering dovetails with the upcoming report Brown commissioned to be presented by Quentin Davies, a former Tory defence spokesperson who defected to New Labour, reviewing ways in which to improve the public?s attitude towards the armed forces. It is understood the report will encourage British military personnel to wear their military attire at all times in public. The aim is to condition public opinion to the sight of combat-ready troops on the streets. In addition, the report is expected to recommend that local councils should organise homecoming parades for units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers wounded in conflict should be awarded Purple Heart-style medals at public ceremonies wearing full military regalia and with a full military band, to recognise their sacrifice. Football clubs and other organisations should also give free entrance to the military when dressed for combat. Other suggestions emanating from within the establishment include an Armed Forces Day, backed by the former chief of defence staff, Lord Guthrie. Another Brown-commissioned report on ?Citizenship: Our Common Bond? has been unveiled by Lord Goldsmith. The former attorney general, who legally sanctioned Britain?s role in the US-led invasion of Iraq, focussed on inculcating patriotism amongst school children, with a proposal that they be required to pledge allegiance to the Queen. The proposed pledge would involve declaring ?true allegiance? to ?Her Majesty,? continuing, ?I will give my loyalty to the United Kingdom and respect its rights and freedoms. I will uphold its democratic values. I will observe its laws faithfully and fulfil my duties and obligations as a British citizen.? Goldsmith?s report also proposes ending the right of Commonwealth citizens residing in the UK and Irish citizens not resident in Northern Ireland to vote in British general elections. Incentives are to be given to students and young people to do volunteer work on behalf of charities, which the government is increasingly pushing as a replacement for state provision.

Iraq implodes as Shia fights Shia
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 27 Mar 2008
Summary: A new civil war is threatening to explode in Iraq as American-backed Iraqi government forces fight Shia militiamen for control of Basra and parts of Baghdad. source: The Independentread more

Religion is now a potential ally of radical social change
UKWatch.net - 27 Mar 2008
The two faces of modern religion were on stark display in Britain this week. In Canterbury, the much-abused anti-war archbishop, Rowan Williams, used his Easter sermon to launch a powerful attack on individualist consumerism and “the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires -enough oil, enough power, enough territory”. Meanwhile in Edinburgh, the conservative Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of Scotland’s Catholics, denounced the government for a “monstrous attack on human rights” through its “evil” endorsement of “Frankenstein” experiments. There are clearly serious arguments about the government’s embryology bill and its licensing of the use of empty animal eggs for short-term human stem-cell research into life-destroying diseases, but the message from the cardinal’s outburst was plain: in his wing of the church, the policing of sexuality and procreation trumps the cause of human suffering and liberation every time. For the militant secularists whose voices have grown ever louder in recent years, O’Brien’s is the only face of religion that matters. This has been the decade of liberal rage against religion, reflected in the runaway success of books like Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great. In the eyes of secular absolutists – whose attitudes uncannily mirror those of religious literalists – religion is simply an intellectual travesty, a perverse belief in a supernatural being and an affront to the enlightenment that refuses to die. As the novelist Martin Amis declared recently: “Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally.” Entirely missing from their perspective is the social context and significance of the religious resurgence they are so anxious to beat back. Panicked by the rise of radical Islamism and the newly assertive religious identity of migrant communities in a secular Europe, the anti-religious evangelists are increasingly using atheism as a banner for the defence of the global liberal capitalist order and the wars fought since 2001 to assert its dominance. At the same time, they are unable to recognise the ethnic dimension of their Islamophobia, let alone the deeper reasons why people continue to search for spiritual meaning in a grossly destructive economic environment where social alternatives have been pronounced dead and narcissistic consumption is king. Historically, of course, it was the left, rather than liberalism, that was most hostile to religion. From Tsarist Russia to Tibet, after all, organised religion stood with the established order, preaching social deference to the powers that be and leaving hope of justice to the hereafter. But as religion has declined in Europe and elsewhere and capitalism has eroded the ties binding religious institutions to ruling elites, that has become ever less true. In the wake of the cold war, the pressure on the Catholic church to struggle against godless communism disappeared, and the pope who had played such a key role in its demise became one of the few international figures in the 1990s to speak out against “savage capitalism” and western warmongering. At the same time, Islamist groups which had provided crucial support for conservative pro-western regimes around the Muslim world in the postwar era began to fill the political space left by the decline of Arab nationalism and the left, increasingly drawing their support from the poor and marginalised. Religion cannot but now find itself in conflict with the unfettered rule of money – a capitalism that seeks to dominate exactly the social and personal arena which religion has always regarded as its own preserve. And as it becomes less useful as an ideological prop for power, religion’s more radical and anti-establishment strains have become stronger. That is the context in which, for example, Hugo Chvez of Venezuela declares Jesus as the first socialist and Che Guevara-style images of the founder of Christianity are carried on demonstrations in Caracas. Not that there should be any difficulty in extracting a radical social message from religious traditions, though you’d never know it from grim textual exegesis favoured by the militant secularists. The rightwing bishop Michael Nazar-Ali – who recently blamed multiculturalism for supposed “no-go” Muslim areas – tried to argue at the weekend that Jesus had been guilty of “typical Middle Eastern exaggeration” when he warned that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”: a hard case to sustain, given the similar message of downfall for the rich and liberation for the poor in the Magnificat, the sermon on the mount, Jesus’s exhortatory quotations from the prophet Isaiah, or the even more militant epistle of James. No wonder the medieval church tried so hard to prevent people reading such incendiary stuff in their own language. But similar demands for equality and social justice can of course also be found in Judaism (“you shall not oppress a stranger”), Islam (“a white has no superiority over a black nor a black over a white”), and other religions. None of that is to deny the strength of regressive trends within religion and its texts, from the Vatican’s opposition to contraception in Aids-blighted Africa, to Hindu nationalism, takfiri Islam, or the power of rightwing US evangelicals (though that is mercifully now loosening). Nor does it in any way imply compromise with social conservatism over women’s or gay rights. But it does highlight the scope for stronger alliances between the secular left and religious progressives against poverty, capitalism and war – an engagement that has the potential to change both sides in other ways, too. The National Union of Teachers’ proposal for secular schools to offer religious instruction as a way out of the faith school controversy is one such positive attempt at engagement. Just as the French republican tradition of liberation came to be used as a stick to beat Muslims in a completely different social context from which it emerged, so the militant secularists who fetishise metaphysics and cosmology as a reason to declare the religious beyond the liberal pale are now ending up as apologists for western supremacism and violence. Like nationalism, religion can play a reactionary or a progressive role, and the struggle is now within it, not against it. For the future, it can be an ally of radical change.

PBS’s Frontline: Too Timid, Too Little, Too Late on Iraq
AlterNet: War on Iraq - 27 Mar 2008
Frontline’s “Bush’s War” series verged on infotainment, bereft of substantive discussion of one of the most disastrous policy blunders in US history.

Alternative Radio
Dahr Jamail - 27 Mar 2008
April 15 Dahr Jamail – Iraq: Beyond the Green Zone (lecture) -Alternative Radio is a weekly one-hour progressive radio show syndicated on more than 190 stations in the U.S. and beyond. Feed Date & Time: Tuesdays, 1400-1459ET Channel: A68.5 Terms:...

BTGZ Wins James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for 2007
Dahr Jamail - 27 Mar 2008
Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq Dahr Jamail (Author) Foreword by Amy Goodman Published: 10/01/2007 9781931859479 | $20.00 | Trade Cloth Forthcoming in paperback http://www.cbsd.com/inventory.aspx?id=22349 has just won a James…

In New Book, Chilean Ambassador to the UN Details Bush Admin’s Pre-War Efforts to Coerce Allies into Supporting Iraq Invasion
Democracy Now - 27 Mar 2008
Heraldo Munoz, the Chilean Ambassador to the United Nations, has revealed new details of how the United States bullied and threatened other countries to support the Iraq war. Munoz has written an account of the period, A Solitary War: A Diplomat’s Chronicle of the Iraq War and Its Lessons. [includes rush transcript]

British Correspondent Patrick Cockburn on Iraq’s Growing Sectarian Divide and the Myth of “Success” in the US “Surge”
Democracy Now - 27 Mar 2008
As a new civil war threatens to explode in Iraq between US-backed Iraqi government forces and Shia militiamen, we go to London to speak with Patrick Cockburn, Iraq correspondent for the London Independent. Covering the invasion and occupation from the ground in Iraq for the past five years, Cockburn has been described as “the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today.” He is author of the new book Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq. [includes rush transcript]

Headlines for March 27, 2008
Democracy Now - 27 Mar 2008
Up to 60 Iraqis Killed in US Attack on Hilla, Oil Rises to $107 a Barrel After Pipeline Attack, Report: US Escalates Military Strikes in Pakistan to Preempt Anticipated Opposition, UN Climate Change Head Warns on Antarctic Ice Melt, McCain: US Casualties, Not Occupation, at Issue in Iraq, Citing Security, Ex-Obama Pastor Cancels Texas Appearances, Protesters Flood Bear Stearns to Protest Government Bailout, Foreclosure Inaction, Ex-Gitmo Prosecutor Leaving Military, Olmert Hints at Renewed Israeli Attacks on Gaza, US War Contractor Shipped Decades-Old Ammo to Afghanistan