Long War Journal : US official explains National Counterterrorism Center's view of the enemy

US official explains National Counterterrorism Center's view of the enemy

By Thomas Joscelyn | September 23, 2010

In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee yesterday, Michael Leiter provided an overview of how his National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) sees the terrorist threat. Leiter highlighted three types of threats: al Qaeda in northern Pakistan, al Qaeda affiliates around the world, and “homegrown” extremists who are inspired by al Qaeda’s “narrative” but do not necessarily receive guidance or assistance from senior al Qaeda leaders.

Leiter said the “range” of terrorist plots over the past year “suggests the threat against the West has become more complex and underscores the challenges of identifying and countering a more diverse array of Homeland plotting.”

Al Qaeda central

Leiter claimed that al Qaeda in Pakistan is “weaker today than at any time since the late 2001 onset of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.” Still, al Qaeda “remains intent” on “attacking the West and continues to prize attacks against the US Homeland and our European allies above all else.”

Al Qaeda launched a plot against the New York City subways last year. In Europe, there have been five “disrupted plots during the past four years,” Leiter told Senators in his written testimony. These include “a plan to attack airliners transiting between the UK and US, a credible plot in Germany, disrupted cells in the UK and Norway, and the disrupted plot to attack a newspaper in Denmark.”

Leiter also cited al Qaeda’s “propaganda efforts” as a substantial threat since “they are intended to inspire additional attacks by motivating sympathizers worldwide to undertake efforts similar to Nidal Hassan’s attack on Fort Hood last fall.”

Al Qaeda’s affiliates

Leiter cited al Qaeda’s “personnel losses” as one reason the core of al Qaeda has been weakened in recent years. Indeed, al Qaeda has lost key leaders due to America’s ongoing drone attacks in northern Pakistan. However, Leiter’s testimony also indicates why al Qaeda has been able to remain a serious threat despite these losses.

If al Qaeda is defined as only Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and their immediate followers in northern Pakistan, then the threat they pose would still be worrisome but not nearly a global menace.

Unfortunately, al Qaeda’s power reaches beyond this narrow band of individuals. Leiter’s testimony confirms, once again, that al Qaeda is the tip of the jihadist spear – the vanguard of a global jihadist movement that shares a common ideology, goals, and resources.

Afghanistan-Pakistan

Inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, al Qaeda’s senior leadership forged close relations with the heads of various jihadist organizations, thereby providing al Qaeda with strategic depth. For example, while Leiter cited the disrupted plot against a newspaper in Denmark as a success against al Qaeda, which is undoubtedly true, he noted that the plot was organized by Mohammed Ilyas Kashmiri, a commander in Harakat-ul Jihad Islami (HUJI).

HUJI was originally forged by jihadists committed to fighting the Soviets in the 1980s in Afghanistan. They received support from the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment, as did most if not all Pakistan-based jihadist organizations. In the 1990s, HUJI expanded its sphere of activity to India and Bangladesh, reportedly with assistance from Osama bin Laden.

Today, senior HUJI leaders such as Kashmiri actually work with and for bin Laden’s al Qaeda in the global jihadist struggle against America and her allies in Central and South Asia and beyond. In fact, Kashmiri is now a senior al Qaeda commander responsible for external operations – that is, operations against the West.

The same phenomenon can be seen in the disrupted plot against airliners traveling from the UK to the US in 2006, which was also cited by Leiter. Al Qaeda intended to destroy multiple airliners using liquid explosives assembled on board the planes once they were airborne. The plot was modeled after a plan named “Bojinka,” which was conceived by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his nephew Ramzi Yousef in the mid-1990s.

The plan was revived by al Qaeda after KSM’s arrest in 2003. The point man for the operation was Rashid Rauf, a senior member of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM). JEM was originally formed with assistance from the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment in the 1990s to fight Indian forces inside Kashmir. Like HUJI, JEM leaders serve al Qaeda’s global jihad. Thus, Rauf became one of the key figures in al Qaeda’s external operations wing.

The dossiers of terrorists like Rauf and Kashmiri illustrate that the lines between al Qaeda and other, like-minded jihadist organizations are becoming increasingly blurred.

Leiter cited other relationships in this vein. He called the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP), which was responsible for the failed Times Square plot in May, al Qaeda’s “closest ally.” Leiter added, “TTP leaders maintain close ties to senior [al Qaeda] leaders, providing critical support to [al Qaeda] in the FATA and sharing some of the same global violent extremist goals.”

Counterterrorism authorities are “looking closely” at the TTP, as well as the Haqqani Network, “for any indicators of attack planning in the West,” Leiter said. Like the TTP, the Haqqani Network has “close ties” to al Qaeda.

Leiter noted that Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), another creation of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in the 1990s, “poses a threat to a range of interests in South Asia.” Moreover, LeT’s “involvement in attacks in Afghanistan against US and Coalition forces and provision of support to the Taliban and [al Qaeda] extremists there pose a threat to US and Coalition interests.”

Leiter said that while the LeT has not launched an attack against the West, it “could pose a direct threat to the Homeland and Europe, especially should they collude with [al Qaeda] operatives.”

Yemen, Somalia, North and West Africa, and Iraq

Outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Leiter cited four areas where al Qaeda’s affiliates are a particular concern.

Leiter described Yemen as a “key battleground and potential regional base of operations from which [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP] can plan attacks, train recruits, and facilitate the movement of operatives.” As evidence of the threat posed by AQAP, Leiter cited an assassination attempt on a Saudi prince last August, as well as Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab’s attempted attack on Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009.

Al Qaeda cleric Anwar al Awlaki “played a significant role in” Abdulmutallab’s plotting, Leiter says. According to published reports, Abdulmutallab met with the al Qaeda cleric in Yemen months prior to boarding a Detroit-bound airliner.

Some commentators have tried to distance Shabaab in Somalia from al Qaeda. But Leiter said that East Africa “remains a key locale for al Qaeda associates.” In addition, some Shabaab “leaders share [al Qaeda’s] ideology and publicly have praised Usama bin Ladin and requested further guidance from the group, although Somali nationalist themes are also prevalent in their public statements.”

Leiter also noted that Shabaab “leaders have cooperated closely with a limited number of East Africa-based [al Qaeda] operatives and the Somalia-based training program established by al Shabaab and now deceased [al Qaeda] operative Saleh Nabhan, continues to attract hundreds of violent extremists from across the globe, to include dozens of recruits from the United States.”

“The potential for Somali trainees to return to the United States or elsewhere in the West to launch attacks remains a significant concern,” Leiter explained in his written testimony.

In North and West Africa, al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is a “persistent threat to US and other Western interests.” The “primary” threat, Leiter reported, comes from AQIM “conducting kidnap for ransom operations and small-arms attacks, though the group’s execution in July of a French hostage and first suicide bombing attack in Niger earlier this year punctuate AQIM’s lethality and attack range.”

Finally, counterterrorism operations have “continued to pressure” al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and “hinder its external ambitions.” But it remains a “key” al Qaeda affiliate, Leiter reported. “While AQI’s leaders continue to publicly threaten to attack the West, to include the Homeland, their ability to do so has been diminished, although not eliminated.”

Homegrown Sunni extremism

Homegrown Sunni extremist activity has spiked, according to Leiter, with “plots disrupted in New York, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska, Texas, and Illinois during the past year.” Although these plots were “unrelated operationally,” they are “indicative of a collective subculture and a common cause that rallies independent individuals to violence.”

A crucially important part of Leiter’s testimony is his public identification of a “US-specific narrative that motivates individuals to violence.” This narrative, according to Leiter, is “a blend of [al Qaeda] inspiration, perceived victimization, and glorification of past homegrown plotting.”

In his new autobiography, A Journey: My Political Life, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair discusses this “narrative” at length and points out that it is not only a problem in the West, but also throughout the Middle East. Blair writes:

Here is where the root of the problem lies. The extremists are small in number, but their narrative – which sees Islam as the victim of a scornful West externally, and an insufficiently religious leadership internally – has a far bigger hold. …

It is the narrative that has to be assailed. It has to be avowed, acknowledged; then taken on, inside and outside Islam. It should not be respected. It should be confronted, disagreed with, argued against on grounds of politics, security and religion.

Leiter explained that the NCTC is coordinating a number of initiatives within the US government to counter this narrative. For example, the NCTC “helps coordinate the Federal Government’s engagement with Somali American communities” in order to counter radicalization. It is not clear, however, if the NCTC has a comprehensive plan in place to counter the narrative, as Blair argues is necessary.

Leiter cited two specific terrorist attacks in 2009 as examples of the threat posed by homegrown extremism: Major Nidal Malik Hassan’s shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas and Carlos Leon Bledsoe’s attack on an US military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Leiter said these attacks “serve as stark examples of lone actors inspired by the global violent extremist movement who attacked without oversight or guidance from overseas-based [al Qaeda] elements.”

Leiter’s description does not match the facts of Hassan’s and Bledsoe’s attacks. Maj. Hassan contacted Anwar al Awlaki repeatedly by email to ask about the permissibility of certain acts (e.g. turning against the American Army) under Sharia law. Awlaki gave his blessing to Hassan. Awlaki would later claim in a propaganda video that he was proud to call Hassan one of his “students.” This certainly amounts to guidance.

In a letter to the judge in his case, Bledsoe (who changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad) admitted he was guilty of the “Jihadi attack.” It is at least possible that Bledsoe did receive some “guidance” from overseas actors as he admittedly studied jihad in Yemen, and claimed that he was a member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It is not clear how much of Bledsoe’s letter is true, as opposed to bluster. But it is at least plausible that he did consort with al Qaeda or other jihadist organizations in Yemen.

"Homegrown" extremism is undoubtedly a serious security threat. However, it is often poorly defined.

WaPo : What's an Iraqi Life Worth?

What's an Iraqi Life Worth?

By Andrew J. Bacevich | July 9, 2006

In Iraq, lives differ in value -- and so do deaths. In this disparity lies an important reason why the United States has botched this war.

Last November in Haditha, a squad of Marines, outraged at the loss of a comrade, is said to have run amok, avenging his death by killing two dozen innocent bystanders. And in March, U.S. soldiers in Mahmudiyah allegedly raped a young Iraqi woman and killed her along with three of her relatives -- an apparently premeditated crime for which one former U.S. soldier has been charged. These incidents are among at least five recent cases of Iraqi civilian deaths that have triggered investigations of U.S. military personnel. If the allegations prove true, Haditha and Mahmudiyah will deservedly take their place alongside Sand Creek, Samar and My Lai in the unhappy catalogue of atrocities committed by American troops.

But recall a more recent incident, in Samarra. On May 30, U.S. soldiers manning a checkpoint there opened fire on a speeding vehicle that either did not see or failed to heed their command to stop. Two women in the vehicle were shot dead. One of them, Nahiba Husayif Jassim, 35, was pregnant. The baby was also killed. The driver, Jassim's brother, had been rushing her to a hospital to give birth. No one tried to cover up the incident: U.S. military representatives issued expressions of regret.

In all likelihood, we will be learning more about Haditha and Mahmudiyah for months to come, whereas the Samarra story has already been filed away and largely forgotten. And that's the problem.

The killing at the Samarra checkpoint was not an atrocity; most likely it was an accident, a mistake. Yet plenty of evidence suggests that in Iraq such mistakes have occurred routinely, with moral and political consequences that have been too long ignored. Indeed, conscious motivation is beside the point: Any action resulting in Iraqi civilian deaths, however inadvertent, undermines the Bush administration's narrative of liberation, and swells the ranks of those resisting the U.S. presence.

Gen. Tommy Franks, who commanded U.S. forces when they entered Iraq more than three years ago, famously declared: "We don't do body counts." Franks was speaking in code. What he meant was this: The U.S. military has learned the lessons of Vietnam -- where body counts became a principal, and much derided, public measure of success -- and it has no intention of repeating that experience. Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war.

Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it. This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It's not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count -- for internal use only -- some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.

Through the war's first three years, any Iraqi venturing too close to an American convoy or checkpoint was likely to come under fire. Thousands of these "escalation of force" episodes occurred. Now, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, has begun to recognize the hidden cost of such an approach. "People who were on the fence or supported us" in the past "have in fact decided to strike out against us," he recently acknowledged.

In the early days of the insurgency, some U.S. commanders appeared oblivious to the possibility that excessive force might produce a backlash. They counted on the iron fist to create an atmosphere conducive to good behavior. The idea was not to distinguish between "good" and "bad" Iraqis, but to induce compliance through intimidation.

"You have to understand the Arab mind," one company commander told the New York Times, displaying all the self-assurance of Douglas MacArthur discoursing on Orientals in 1945. "The only thing they understand is force -- force, pride and saving face." Far from representing the views of a few underlings, such notions penetrated into the upper echelons of the American command. In their book "Cobra II," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor offer this ugly comment from a senior officer: "The only thing these sand niggers understand is force and I'm about to introduce them to it."

Such crass language, redolent with racist, ethnocentric connotations, speaks volumes. These characterizations, like the use of "gooks" during the Vietnam War, dehumanize the Iraqis and in doing so tacitly permit the otherwise impermissible. Thus, Abu Ghraib and Haditha -- and too many regretted deaths, such as that of Nahiba Husayif Jassim.

As the war enters its fourth year, how many innocent Iraqis have died at American hands, not as a result of Haditha-like massacres but because of accidents and errors? The military doesn't know and, until recently, has publicly professed no interest in knowing. Estimates range considerably, but the number almost certainly runs in the tens of thousands. Even granting the common antiwar bias of those who track the Iraqi death toll -- and granting, too, that the insurgents have far more blood on their hands -- there is no question that the number of Iraqi noncombatants killed by U.S. forces exceeds by an order of magnitude the number of U.S. troops killed in hostile action, which is now more than 2,000.

Who bears responsibility for these Iraqi deaths? The young soldiers pulling the triggers? The commanders who establish rules of engagement that privilege "force protection" over any obligation to protect innocent life? The intellectually bankrupt policymakers who sent U.S. forces into Iraq in the first place and now see no choice but to press on? The culture that, to put it mildly, has sought neither to understand nor to empathize with people in the Arab or Islamic worlds?

There are no easy answers, but one at least ought to acknowledge that in launching a war advertised as a high-minded expression of U.S. idealism, we have waded into a swamp of moral ambiguity. To assert that "stuff happens," as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is wont to do whenever events go awry, simply does not suffice.

Moral questions aside, the toll of Iraqi noncombatant casualties has widespread political implications. Misdirected violence alienates those we are claiming to protect. It plays into the hands of the insurgents, advancing their cause and undercutting our own. It fatally undermines the campaign to win hearts and minds, suggesting to Iraqis and Americans alike that Iraqi civilians -- and perhaps Arabs and Muslims more generally -- are expendable. Certainly, Nahiba Husayif Jassim's death helped clarify her brother's perspective on the war. "God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here," he declared after the incident. "They have no regard for our lives."

He was being unfair, of course. It's not that we have no regard for Iraqi lives; it's just that we have much less regard for them. The current reparations policy -- the payment offered in those instances in which U.S. forces do own up to killing an Iraq civilian -- makes the point. The insurance payout to the beneficiaries of an American soldier who dies in the line of duty is $400,000, while in the eyes of the U.S. government, a dead Iraqi civilian is reportedly worth up to $2,500 in condolence payments -- about the price of a decent plasma-screen TV.

For all the talk of Iraq being a sovereign nation, foreign occupiers are the ones deciding what an Iraqi life is worth. And although President Bush has remarked in a different context that "every human life is a precious gift of matchless value," our actions in Iraq continue to convey the impression that civilian lives aren't worth all that much.

That impression urgently needs to change. To start, the Pentagon must get over its aversion to counting all bodies. It needs to measure in painstaking detail -- and publicly -- the mayhem we are causing as a byproduct of what we call liberation. To do otherwise, to shrug off the death of Nahiba Husayif Jassim as just one of those things that happens in war, only reinforces the impression that Americans view Iraqis as less than fully human. Unless we demonstrate by our actions that we value their lives as much as the lives of our own troops, our failure is certain.

bacevich@bu.edu

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

Reuters : Iraq's second energy auction late Nov-Oil Ministry

Iraq's second energy auction late Nov-Oil Ministry

July 30, 2009

BAGHDAD, July 30 (Reuters) - Iraq will hold an auction for its second major bidding round for energy fields at the end of November, the Oil Ministry spokesman said on Thursday.

Spokesman Asim Jihad also said that a new acting director had been named to head Iraq's state-run South Oil Company, after Fayad al-Nema, a critic of the ministry's plans for an initial bidding round giving foreign firms a chance to develop oilfields already in production, was removed from his post this week.

"Dhiya Jaafar was the head of the southern operations commission of the South Oil Company and he became head of the company," Jihad said. The government said Nema was removed for reasons related to 'restructuring' at the Oil Ministry.

(Reporting by Missy Ryan; editing by James Jukwey)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

Financial Times : Critic of Iraq's oil plan transferred

Critic of Iraq's oil plan transferred

By Anna Fifield | July 30, 2009

Iraq yesterday removed the director of its state-run South Oil Company, Fayad al-Nema, who had previously criticised the government's plans to auction large oil and gas fields, a spokesman said. He has been transferred to a different job at the ministry in Baghdad. No replacement was named.

Anna Fifield, Beirut | Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

AFP : Iraq fires head of state-owned oil company

Iraq fires head of state-owned oil company

AFP | July 30, 2009

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government has fired the head of state-owned South Oil Company (SOC), who publicly criticised Baghdad's auctioning off of oil and gas fields to foreign energy giants, an oil ministry spokesman said on Thursday.

Fayadh Hassan Nima was replaced as SOC's chief executive by the head of the company's department of oil fields, Dia Jaafar, ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said.

"The oil ministry and the government are always looking for ways to improve administration of the oil sector," Jihad said, referring to the reasons Nima was dismissed.

Nima had loudly protested the public auction for six giant oil fields and two major gas fields, arguing that the SOC should be given the task of exploiting the fields in southern Iraq with only technical assistance from foreign companies.

Baghdad held the sale at the end of June, but reached agreement on only one of the fields, with the government facing accusations that the sale had been a failure.

It was the first time Iraq's oil industry was opened up to foreign companies since its nationalisation four decades ago.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.

NYT : In Baghdad, Obama Presses Iraqi Leader to Unite Factions

In Baghdad, Obama Presses Iraqi Leader to Unite Factions

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and HELENE COOPER | April 7, 2009

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq — President Obama made an unannounced trip to Iraq on Tuesday, his first visit as commander in chief to the site of one of the two wars he inherited and must now see through to an end.

President Obama spoke to American troops at Camp Victory, Iraq, on Tuesday. The president said that it was time for Iraqis “to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty.”

He returned to Washington early Wednesday, The Associated Press reported, landing at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and then proceeding by helicopter to the White House.

In Baghdad, reiterating his pledge to end a war he opposed from the start, he told a cheering crowd of American troops that it was time for Iraqis “to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty.” Later, with a hint of impatience in his words, he urged Iraq’s leaders to unite the country’s deeply divided ethnic and sectarian factions and to incorporate them all into government and security forces.

“It is time for us to transition to the Iraqis,” Mr. Obama told hundreds of American troops jammed into Al Faw Palace, an imposing sandstone building in an artificial lake that once belonged to Saddam Hussein. The uniformed crowd greeted that remark specifically with rousing applause.

Since becoming president less than three months ago, Mr. Obama has moved swiftly to reshape the war in Iraq. He announced plans to withdraw all combat forces by August 2010, as he sought to shift the military’s focus to the troubled war in Afghanistan.

He chose to visit Iraq first, though. The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said he did so because of Iraq’s proximity to Turkey, where he began his day; the need to urge the Iraqis to do more to seek political reconciliation; and a desire to support “our men and women who are in harm’s way, either in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Mr. Obama’s visit punctuated a trip that took him from an economic summit meeting in London to a NATO gathering and finally to Turkey, where during a discussion with students on Tuesday he faced a probing question of whether his policies were not in substance more like those of his predecessor, George W. Bush, than he liked to acknowledge.

“I have a responsibility to make sure that as we bring troops out, that we do so in a careful enough way that we don’t see a complete collapse into violence,” he replied, discussing Iraq among other issues. He added: “Moving the ship of state is a slow process. States are like big tankers. They’re not like speedboats.”

Mr. Obama arrived here aboard Air Force One at 4:42 p.m. after a flight carried out in secrecy and with heightened security, which included the closing of the main road to Baghdad International Airport. His visit was not a total surprise, because it had been widely discussed here since he arrived in Turkey on Sunday.

A pall of dust hung over Baghdad, grounding the helicopters that were to take the president and his entourage into the city itself, where a news conference with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had been scheduled.

Mr. Obama instead met Mr. Maliki and several other senior officials in another palace near the airport before leaving Iraq, less than five hours after he arrived.

One of the Iraqis in the meeting, Saif Abdul Rahman, a senior adviser to Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Obama focused on building institutions in Iraq, including the army and security forces, that were free of the sectarian tensions that still haunt this country.

He said that Mr. Obama pledged to abide by American commitments to Iraq, including the timetable for withdrawing all troops by the end of 2011. Mr. Rahman said he welcomed the president’s attention to a conflict and a country that seemed to demand less as of late than Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“That he chose to come to Iraq — that the first visit in the Middle East of a sitting American president is Iraq — is an important message,” he said.

Mr. Obama arrived only hours after a car bomb exploded in Kadhimiya, a predominately Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad that includes one of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines. At least eight people were killed and nearly two dozen were wounded. That attack was carried out a day after a series of six car bombings killed at least 33 people and wounded scores in and around Baghdad, one of the bloodiest days in Iraq this year.

Mr. Obama, appearing briefly with Mr. Maliki on Tuesday night, referred to what he called “this senseless violence,” expressing condolences to the victims’ families and adding, “I remain convinced that our shared resolve and commitment to progress is greater than the obstacles that stand in our way.”

Their appearance, held at Camp Victory, was a contrast to Mr. Bush’s last visit here in December, which was marred when an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at him during an appearance beside Mr. Maliki. By coincidence, an Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday reduced the sentence that the journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, received last month to one year in prison, instead of three, his lawyer and a spokesman for Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said.

Mr. Obama’s plan to begin withdrawing the roughly 140,000 American troops in Iraq on a strict timetable that would leave 35,000 to 50,000 by August 2010 has faced wariness from commanders, who fear that the security improvements remain fragile and could still be reversed. The troops who greeted him, however, appeared to support him enthusiastically. So many filled the vast, chandeliered rotunda where he spoke that people were being turned away.

Mr. Obama praised the troops for their accomplishments in a war he did not, as a candidate and a senator, support. “You have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country,” he said. “That is an extraordinary achievement, and for that you have the thanks of the American people.”

His remarks with Mr. Maliki had a more cautionary tone. He emphasized the need for Iraq to do more to advance political reconciliation, to improve governance and basic services, and to create security.

“Overall violence continues to be down,” Mr. Obama said. “There has been movement on important political questions. But we have been reminded that there’s more work to do.”

Mr. Maliki responded that “dialogue should be the only way to resolve any issue, whether it was between the Iraqi security components, or in the region.”

Earlier Tuesday, in Istanbul, Mr. Obama called for Israelis and Palestinians to make the compromises necessary to reach a Middle East peace accord. During his meeting with students, Mr. Obama said he still believed that peace was possible but added pointedly, “What we need is political will and courage on the part of the leadership.”

His comments came a day after he publicly repudiated statements from Israel’s hawkish new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, that agreements reached at an American-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, Md., in 2007 had “no validity.” Speaking before the Turkish Parliament on Monday, Mr. Obama said that Palestinian statehood was “a goal that the parties agreed to in the ‘road map’ and at Annapolis. That is a goal that I will actively pursue as president.”

Steven Lee Myers reported from Camp Victory, and Helene Cooper from Istanbul. Alissa J. Rubin and Rod Nordland contributed reporting from Baghdad.

AHN : Suicide Bomber Hits Iraqi Restaurant, Kills 50

Suicide Bomber Hits Iraqi Restaurant, Kills 50

AHN Staff | December 11, 2008

Baghdad, Iraq (AHN) - A suicide bomber walked in and blew himself up inside a restaurant near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk killing about 50 people and injuring 100 hundred others on Thursday.

Officials and witnesses said women and children were among those killed and injured from the explosion that struck during lunch hour and on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

Kirkuk deputy governor Saeed Rakan suspect that the suicide bomber was targeting Kurdish politicians and Arab tribal officials having a lunch meeting at the restaurant.

Last year, a car bomb exploded and killed 25 people in a branch of the same restaurant, which was regarded as safe and frequented by Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen politicians.

Counterpunch : By Way of Pakistan: From Baghdad to Mumbai

By Way of Pakistan: From Baghdad to Mumbai

By PATRICK COCKBURN | December 1, 2008

I used to look out from the balcony of The Independent’s first floor room in the al-Hamra hotel in Baghdad thinking that one day the hotel would attacked and wondering from which direction the attack would come. The general consensus among the correspondents and security men in the Hamra, which boasted 65 armed guards, was that the weak point in our defences was the single blast wall about 30 yards from the back of the hotel. On the other side of it was a public car park which anybody could enter.

The consensus view turned out to be all too correct. I was out of the hotel on November 18, 2005, when two vehicles driven by suicide bombers entered the car park. The first rammed the concrete wall and detonated his explosives, the idea being that the blast would open a breach enabling the second vehicle, packed with 1,000 kilos of explosives to reach the hotel. It almost worked, but the crater created by the first bomb was so deep that the second bomber could not get through. He blew himself up just short of his target, killing half a dozen people and badly damaging this part of the hotel which has never been reoccupied.

We never knew the identity of the two men who had died trying to kill us but at that time most of the suicide bombers were Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians and Libyans. I had been emphasizing for several years that the Iraqi insurgency against the US occupation was essentially home grown. Aside from the suicide bombers themselves, almost all the guerrilla fighters who were launching attacks on American troops and fledgling Iraqi government forces were Iraqi. Most of them had been trained militarily in Saddam Hussein’s army or security forces.

At that time the White House and the Pentagon were still ludicrously pretending that the Sunni Arab uprising which spread so fast after the summer of 2003 was a mixture of foreign fighters and ‘remnants’ or ‘dead enders’ of the old regime. It was easy enough for me and other correspondents to pour scorn on this idea. Iraq was full of weapons and every household owned one. No foreign suppliers were needed. Whenever there was a successful ambush of US troops in a Sunni area local people would dance with joy amidst the blazing vehicles.

We were essentially right about the rebellion being home grown, but perhaps we should have emphasized more the significance of foreign support for the rebels. The American neo-cons were openly boasting that after overthrowing Saddam the Iranian and Syrian regimes were next on the US list. Not surprisingly both governments had an incentive to make sure US rule in Iraq never stabilized. Nor were they alone. All the conservative Sunni Arab regimes of the Middle East were alarmed by an American land army in Iraq in support of a Shia-Kurdish government. The anti-American guerrillas found they had many friends.

In the immediate aftermath of the murderous attacks in Mumbai much of the analysis has a familiar ring, but now it is the west which is downplaying foreign involvement. Indian allegations about “external linkages” of the terrorists is wearily reported as an unfortunate resumption of Pakistani-Indian finger pointing. Television and newspaper commentary on terrorist outrages is frequently provided by self-appointed ‘terrorist experts’ whose credentials remain mysterious. These supposed experts now emphasise the alienation of Indian Muslims and suggesting that the origin of the terrorist assault on Mumbai is home grown, the fruit of the radicalization of Indian Muslims by systematic discrimination against them by the Indian state.

Exactly who was behind the bloody mayhem in Mumbai is still unclear. The Hindu newspaper was yesterday reporting that three of the suspects captured by the police were members of Lashkar-i-Taiba (the Army of the Pious), which has several thousand members in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and the gunmen had arrived in Mumbai by ship from Karachi in Pakistan. The group is one of the three largest fighting against India in Kashmir.

The origins and motives of the men who slaughtered so many people in Mumbai will emerge in the coming days. But already the butchery should be underlining one of the greatest of the many failings of the Bush administration post 9/11. Pakistan was always the real base for al-Qa’ida. It was the Pakistani ISI military intelligence which fostered and partly directed the Taliban before 2001 and revived it afterwards. It is Pakistan which has sustained the Islamic Jihadi fighters in Kashmir where half the Indian army is tied down. Yet the Bush administration in its folly allied itself to General Pervez Musharaf and the Pakistani army post 9/11 ensuring that Jihadi groups always had a base.

It is self-defeating hypocrisy for the west to lecture the Indian government now about not over-reacting and not automatically blaming the Pakistani government or some part of its security apparatus for Mumbai. The way in which the Pakistani military has allowed Kashmiri and Pakistani militants free range in Pakistan created the milieu from which the attacks this week came. It may be that the monster the ISI created is no long under its control, but it is ultimately responsible for what has happened.

The real political background to Mumbai is succinctly summed up by Ahmed Rashid in his excellent book ‘Descent into Chaos: How the war against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.’ In Pakistan, he writes, ‘a nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive and double-dealing policies.’ Unless Barack Obama can persuade them to do so he will achieve no more as president than Mr Bush.

Press TV : Private security firms ravaging Iraq

Private security firms ravaging Iraq

August 23, 2008

Iraq's Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Mohammad al-Askari says western security firms are behind the upsurge of violence in his country.

Al-Askari said the security firms are working on behalf of intelligence agencies in some countries that see Iraq's stability as being against their strategic interests.

The Iraqi official would not name any states but noted that the security firms have recruited thousands of volunteers mainly from North African Arab countries and have deployed them in Iraq.

“Once trained to carry out special violent actions they are sent to Iraq to execute their plans,” Askari said.

The Iraqi official added that a new class of foreign fighters has emerged in Iraq which includes many detainees who have admitted to being trained in Europe by specialized security firms and then being sent to Iraq "to kill Iraqis and cause further insecurity."

“I am certain about the information I have and I believe that there are now some 2,000 such fighters in the country,” he said.

Al-Askari said these fighters are tasked with assassinating top Iraqi figures including scientists and university professors.

Reuters : Iraq "surge" followed sharp internal debate: report

Iraq "surge" followed sharp internal debate: report

August 31, 2008

NEW YORK (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's decision to mount a troop "surge" in Iraq last year was taken against the initial recommendations of his top advisers, including his field commander, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.

Bush's January 2007 decision to send an extra 20,000 troops to Iraq was criticized for deepening the unpopular conflict but has since been credited with sharply reducing the violence.

Citing secret memorandums and interviews with a host of current and former officials, the Times said Bush's decision to increase troops for a counterinsurgency in Iraq came after months of tumultuous debate within the administration.

Bush's tendency to defer to commanders in the field and his defense secretary had delayed a new approach to Iraq until the situation bordered on anarchy and "civil war," as a late 2006 CIA analysis termed it, the Times reported. At that point the Pentagon was in favor of moving responsibility to Iraqi forces, facilitating U.S. troop reductions.

The State Department was pushing an alternative plan to fight al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, reining in Baghdad's violence and stemming sectarian violence only when it reached the level of "mass killing," the Times reported. The U.S. ambassador to Baghdad was arguing for authority to negotiate a political solution with the Iraqis.

"The proposals to send more U.S. forces to Iraq would not produce a long-term solution and would make our policy less, not more, sustainable," the newspaper quoted ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad as writing in a classified cable.

Members of the National Security Council staff made the initial effort to explore a possible troop increase, and a staff member, retired Navy Capt. William Luti was asked to quietly find out if forces were available, the Times said.

A confidential briefing titled "Changing the Dynamics: Surge and Fight, Create Breathing Space and Then Accelerate the Transition" was submitted in October 2006 after consultation with Army staff. It called for a substantial troop increase, or about five brigades, to Baghdad and other hot spots.

The troop reinforcement proposal split the U.S. military, with some officers supporting the idea, but aides to the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggesting the army was stretched too thin.

Three days after the 2006 midterm congressional elections, the White House convened a formal government-wide review to look into increasing the troop level in Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation on November 6 removed some institutional resistance to the "surge" at the Pentagon, the Times said.

Top aides at a November 22 White House meeting outlined an "emerging consensus" on the route ahead, citing widespread agreement that success in Iraq was critical for the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

A document prepared for the review stated, "Our center of gravity -- public support -- is in jeopardy because of doubts that our Iraq efforts are on a trajectory leading to success," the Times reported.

At the same time, a classified Joint Chiefs of Staff paper argued for "accelerating Iraqis into 'operational lead,'" and proposed measures including assigning one U.S. brigade to each Iraqi division to improve Iraqi troops' performance.

Even after Bush announced his decision on January 10, the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, never sought more than two brigades, about 8,000 troops in all, the paper said.

(Writing by Chris Michaud, Editing by Anthony Boadle)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

NYT : Troop ‘Surge’ Took Place Amid Doubt and Debate

Troop ‘Surge’ Took Place Amid Doubt and Debate

By MICHAEL R. GORDON | August 31, 2008

WASHINGTON — The White House has long touted the “surge” of forces in Iraq as one of President Bush’s proudest achievements. But that decision, one of Mr. Bush’s most consequential as commander in chief, was made only after months of tumultuous debate within the administration, according to still-secret memorandums and interviews with a broad range of current and former officials.

In January 2007, at a time when the situation in Iraq appeared the bleakest, Mr. Bush chose a bold option that was at odds with what many of his civilian and military advisers, including his field commander, initially recommended. Mr. Bush’s plan to send more than 20,000 troops to carry out a new counterinsurgency strategy has helped to reverse the spiral of sectarian killings in Iraq.

But Mr. Bush’s penchant to defer to commanders in the field and to a powerful defense secretary delayed the development of a new approach until conditions in Iraq, in the words of a November 2006 analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency, resembled anarchy and “civil war.”

When the White House began its formal review of Iraq strategy that month, the Pentagon favored a stepped-up effort to transfer responsibility to Iraqi forces that would have facilitated American troop cuts.

The State Department promoted an alternative that would have focused on fighting terrorists belonging to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, containing the violence in Baghdad and intervening to quell sectarian violence only when it reached the proportions of “mass killing.”

The American ambassador to Baghdad argued that he should be given broad authority to negotiate a political compact among the Iraqis.

“The proposals to send more U.S. forces to Iraq would not produce a long-term solution and would make our policy less, not more, sustainable,” the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, wrote in a classified cable.

Members of the National Security Council staff made an initial effort to explore a possible troop increase by October, drafting a paper that raised the prospect that the United States might “double down” in Iraq by sending more troops there.

Because some aides to the Joint Chiefs of Staff were suggesting at the time that the military was stretched too thin to send many more troops, another security council staff member, William J. Luti, a retired Navy captain, was asked to quietly determine whether forces were available. Mr. Luti reported that five brigades’ worth of additional combat forces could be sent and recommended that they be deployed. The idea later won additional support among some officials as a result of a detailed study by Gen. Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff at the Army, and Frederick W. Kagan, a military specialist, that was published by the American Enterprise Institute.

In the end, the troop reinforcement proposal split the military. Even after the president had made the basic decision to send additional troops, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, never sought more than two brigades, about 8,000 troops in all, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reported to Mr. Bush in late December. But General Casey’s approach substantially differed from those of two officers who wanted a much bigger effort: the No. 2 commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, who helped oversee the military’s new counterinsurgency manual and whose views were known by the White House before he was publicly named to replace General Casey, administration officials said.

Current and former officials from the Bush administration and the military agreed to disclose new details about the debate over the troop increase in response to repeated requests. Most insisted on anonymity because the documents were still classified, but said they believed the historical record should reflect the considerations that were being weighed at the time.

Troop Reduction Strategy

On Aug. 17, 2006, Mr. Bush conferred in a videoconference with his top military commanders and senior advisers.

General Casey’s strategy was to gradually transfer authority to the Iraqi forces and progressively reduce American troops. He had told officials in Washington during a June visit that he hoped to reduce the number of American combat brigades to five or six by the end of 2007 from the 14 that were deployed at the time.

By August, the sectarian killings had led General Casey to modestly increase his forces. The hope was that American forces would help clear insurgent and militia-infested neighborhoods in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, while Iraqi troops would be brought in to secure them. After that, the push to make a transition to Iraqi control would continue.

During the videoconference with the president, General Casey said he had enough troops but said he was not sure the Iraqis could “deliver” on securing the neighborhoods. Mr. Bush underscored that more American troops were available if the commander needed them. “We must succeed,” Mr. Bush told General Casey, according to notes taken by a participant. “We will commit the resources. If they can’t, we will. If the bicycle teeters, put our hand back on it.”

“I support you guys 100 percent, but I need to ask you tough questions,” Mr. Bush added. “Different times call for different kinds of questions.”

It was hardly the first time that officials had raised questions about the American approach in Iraq. In March 2006, Philip D. Zelikow, a senior aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called in a memorandum for a “massive effort to improve security in Baghdad and surrounding areas, and a reckoning with the most violent Shia/Sadrist militias.”

He elaborated on that theme in a paper he drafted in June with James F. Jeffrey, now Mr. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, that recommended “selective counterinsurgency” that might involve additional American forces.

Some aides had also hoped that a meeting that Mr. Bush held at Camp David in June would signal the start of a major review. That did not happen, but over the summer, the security council staff members began a critique of the strategy.

By October, the aides, Meghan O’Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Peter D. Feaver, had collaborated on the paper that raised the prospect of a troop increase. J. D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, called in Mr. Luti to ask for a separate look.

After contacting the Army staff, Mr. Luti submitted a confidential briefing in October titled, “Changing the Dynamics: Surge and Fight, Create Breathing Space and Then Accelerate the Transition.”

The briefing called for a substantial troop increase, which Mr. Luti later defined as sending 20,000 additional troops — about five brigades — to Baghdad and other hot spots in Iraq. The National Security Council staff was trying to walk a fine line under a Bush White House that cast staff members as coordinators, not advocates. Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, later gave a copy to Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked for his assessment.

Public Support ‘in Jeopardy’

Three days after the 2006 midterm Congressional elections, the White House finally convened a formal governmentwide review. The Republicans had taken a beating at the polls and the Iraq Study Group, a nonpartisan panel led by Lee H. Hamilton, the former Democratic representative, and James A. Baker III, the secretary of state to the first President Bush, was preparing to publish its recommendations — to step up efforts to train Iraqi troops and withdraw virtually all American combat brigades by spring 2008.

At a Nov. 22 White House meeting, top aides outlined an “emerging consensus” on the way ahead. There was wide agreement that a successful outcome in Iraq was vital for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and a candid assessment of the difficulties.

A document prepared for the review stated: “Our center of gravity — public support — is in jeopardy because of doubts that our Iraq efforts are on a trajectory leading to success.”

Each agency outlined its position in a series of classified papers. Civilian Pentagon officials endorsed General Casey’s strategy making transition a top priority.

“General Casey has a good plan. He has identified ways to do things faster and accelerate the timeline to Iraqi self-reliance,” said a Nov. 22 memorandum by policy officials in the office of the secretary of defense. “There may be some opportunities outside of Baghdad — Anbar; border control — for a relatively small surge force to have a noticeable impact. (The uniformed military remains against the surge force without a clearly defined objective.)”

A classified paper by the Joint Chiefs of Staff also argued for “accelerating Iraqis into ‘operational lead.’ ” It proposed a number of measures, including assigning one American brigade to each Iraqi division, to improve the performance of Iraqi troops.

Ms. Rice and her top deputies prepared a paper on “Advancing America’s Interests, Preserving Iraq’s Independence” that recommended that the United States focus on “core” interests like fighting terrorism and countering Iranian aggression. Moving to the periphery of the capital, American forces would contain the violence and intervene in the sectarian fighting in Baghdad only if there were “mass killings or mass expulsions.” State Department aides were not aware of the Luti paper raising the prospect that substantial American reinforcements might be available, despite Pentagon complaints that troops were overstretched.

On the political front, the United States would no longer count on efforts to encourage the Iraqi leadership in the Green Zone to reconcile their differences. Instead, the United States would emphasize efforts on the local level and double the number of civilian “provincial reconstruction teams” to help the Iraqis rebuild their infrastructure and improve governance.

John P. Hannah, a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, urged a new effort to strengthen ties with Shiites, a majority of Iraq’s population. Many Shiites, he said, believed the United States was more concerned with countering Shiite militias than fighting Sunni insurgents. On Nov. 30, Mr. Bush met in Amman, Jordan, with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who advanced his own proposal that American forces pull back to the outskirts of Baghdad to fight Sunni insurgents while Iraqi forces took control of the capital. With violence escalating out of control, few American officials thought that was feasible. Mr. Bush told the Iraqi prime minister that General Casey would study the plan and said that the United States could send more troops if the Iraqis removed political impediments to the Americans’ ability to confront Shiite factions involved in sectarian attacks and took other steps to rise above sectarianism.

Still, the debate continued to swirl. In an early December meeting of top officials, Mr. Cheney argued for sending forces to address the sectarian violence in Baghdad, while Ms. Rice reiterated her argument that there was little the military could do to stop sectarian violence there, according to notes taken by a participant.

A ‘Slow-Motion Lateral’

Mr. Bush signaled his decision to pursue some kind of troop increase in Iraq when his National Security Council met Dec. 8 and Dec. 9. The idea was to make protection of the Iraqi population an important goal and reduce violence before resuming efforts to transfer responsibilities to the Iraqis. Invoking a sports metaphor, he described the surge as a “slow-motion lateral” to Iraqi control.

Still, the size of the deployment and exactly how it would be used were not settled. Would the “surge” be a slightly expanded version of General Casey’s approach toward securing Baghdad with limited American forces? Or would it represent a radical break with the current strategy?

By now, there was a split in the military community. General Odierno had taken over in early December as the second-ranking officer in Iraq. He conducted a review that called for a minimum of five additional brigades in and around Baghdad and two more battalions in Anbar Province to reinforce efforts to work with Sunni tribes there.

As a subordinate to General Casey, General Odierno had no role in the security council review. But his views were known to General Keane, the retired four-star general who had helped oversee the study for the American Enterprise Institute that advocated adding five Army brigades and two Marine regiments. In separate meetings with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney on Dec. 11, General Keane relayed General Odierno’ assessment, which was forwarded by General Pace as well.

Along with Mr. Kagan, General Keane also described in detail to Mr. Cheney and his staff his own plan calling for American forces to be deployed in mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad to demonstrate that the United States would be even-handed in protecting civilians.

Donald H. Rumsfeld’s resignation on Nov. 6, and Mr. Gates’s swearing-in to replace him as defense secretary in mid-December, removed some of the institutional resistance at the Pentagon to the “surge.” Ms. Rice also became more supportive after it was made clear that demands would be made of the Iraqis.

Mr. Gates flew to Baghdad in late December to confer with General Casey and Mr. Maliki. On the flight, Eric S. Edelman, the undersecretary of defense for policy, gave Mr. Gates a copy of the enterprise institute study.

During his Baghdad meetings, General Casey stuck to his approach, and said that he only needed one or two additional brigades, which might only be used for several months to hold cleared neighborhoods in Baghdad until Iraqi troops were ready to take over. On the flight home, Mr. Gates and his aides discussed what to say in his report to Mr. Bush. Mr. Hannah, Mr. Cheney’s aide, who was also on the trip, questioned whether two brigades would be just enough to fail. He asked whether the Pentagon should be proposing more.

Mr. Gates said it was difficult to get Mr. Maliki to accept that much. The defense secretary later reported to Mr. Bush that the commander wanted no more than two brigades, which would be stationed on each side of the Tigris River in Baghdad.

A Dec. 28 National Security Council meeting had been arranged at Mr. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex. General Keane was concerned that General Pace might ask only for the two brigades recommended by General Casey, with three more held in reserve. General Keane called Mr. Hannah and said that General Pace should be asked if he thought such a small deployment would be decisive. That meeting confirmed the need to send more troops to Anbar Province and all but affirmed the plan to send five more brigades to Baghdad.

General Petraeus’s views were also influential. He was being considered to replace General Casey and wanted as many forces as he could get, to pursue a strategy that, like General Odierno’s, would give priority to protecting Iraqi civilians and move American forces out of large bases. The tussle over the number of forces to be sent went down to the wire. As White House officials began to work on Mr. Bush’s Jan. 10 speech announcing the increase, one draft had Mr. Bush saying he would send “up to five” combat brigades. Aides at the National Security Council took the issue to Mr. Bush, who made the commitment explicit. “I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq,” Mr. Bush said in his televised address. “The vast majority of them — five brigades — will be deployed to Baghdad.”

Guardian : No U-turn. Obama's stance on Iraq is chillingly consistent

No U-turn. Obama's stance on Iraq is chillingly consistent

The presidential hopeful has been accused of flip-flopping over the occupation, but he was never for full withdrawal

by Sami Ramadani | The Guardian | July 22, 2008

As November's American presidential elections approach, Barack Obama's message on Iraq is being widely interpreted as "flip-flopping" and a "retreat" from a previously unequivocal stance of fully withdrawing the US occupation forces. This is to misunderstand Obama, who is not someone who shoots from the hip. There is much more to his words than cursory reading could unravel.

His remarks before the 2003 invasion resonated well within the American antiwar movement. His scathing references to the Bush administration's folly and his demands for "ending the war" were probably decisive in winning him the Democratic party nomination against Hillary Clinton, whose vote for war in 2003 ultimately crippled her credibility as the commander-in-chief who would bring it to an end.

Obama himself has reacted angrily to claims of a policy U-turn: "For me to say I'm going to refine my policies is I don't think in any way inconsistent with prior statements and doesn't change my strategic view that this war has to end and that I'm going to end it as president." Earlier this month he resorted to an op-ed article in the New York Times to emphatically state: "On my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war."

As always in examining the words of politicians, let alone Obama (who now has 300 foreign policy advisers), the devil is in the details. Here, Obama's "ending the war" declarations begin to look far from reassuring, even before he "refines" his line after meeting the US commander, General Petraeus, in Iraq.

Obama sees Iraq as part of a wider theatre of war and potential wars engulfing the entire Middle East, where US strategic goals and interests are at stake. So his obvious shift on the "surge" operations in Iraq (underlined by deleting criticisms of it from his website last week) is strengthening his call for "redeployment" from Iraq to Afghanistan. His current strategy could be summed up as: de-escalate the war in Iraq, escalate it in Afghanistan, and talk to Iran. On Iran, his offer of talks was coupled with an alarming, Bush-style threat. "I'll do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything," Obama told a gathering of the pro-Israel lobby group, Aipac, in April. He is echoing the sentiments of his famous anti-Iraq war speech in 2002, in which he repeatedly stressed that he was not opposed to all US wars.

It is worth noting that the term withdrawal, let alone a full unconditional withdrawal that will satisfy most of the Iraqi people, has never been part of Obama's vocabulary. His first carefully considered statement on Iraq was made in January last year, when he introduced the Iraq war de-escalation act to Congress. It was then that he envisaged stationing troops in Iraq on a longer-term basis: "A residual US presence may remain in Iraq for force protection, training of Iraqi security forces and pursuit of international terrorists." Using similar phrases, this is what he outlined in the New York Times last week.

To distinguish his policy from that of his rival for the White House, Obama declared: "Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea." But it doesn't require rocket science to know that keeping "residual" forces requires heavily fortified areas, installations and a state of readiness to go to war. Unless Obama has discovered something new, such areas are known as military bases. So it is the word "permanent" that separates the two, as McCain may want to stay "100 years" in Iraq. The comparison with South Korea is not heartening, considering massive US bases have been in that country for over half a century.

Obama has even pre-empted a possible line of attack from hawks by chillingly suggesting he would possibly invade Iraq again if necessary. His website states: "He would reserve the right to intervene militarily, with our international partners, to suppress potential genocidal violence within Iraq." The word potential is worth pausing over; it is salutary to remember Bush and Blair occupied Iraq and caused the death of perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people for "humanitarian" reasons.

Neither is Obama opposed to signing a military treaty with Iraq. He has two conditions to make Bush's current attempts to impose a pact acceptable: the pact should get Congressional approval, and renounce "permanent" military bases. However, leaked drafts of this colonialist-style pact do not mention the word "permanent" at all. And his "benchmarks" for continued support for the corrupt Iraqi politicians protected by US forces in Baghdad's Green Zone are strikingly similar to those of the Bush administration.

Tactical differences and issues of style aside, Obama's message on occupied Iraq is deeply troubling - not because it has U-turned but because it has been consistent. His 300 foreign policy advisers are making sure that he will not stray from protecting US imperialist interests, even if it does mean launching new wars and bolstering puppet regimes and corrupt dictatorships throughout the "greater Middle East".

Sami Ramadani, a political exile from Saddam's regime, is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University sami.ramadani@londonmet.ac.uk

NYT : In Iraq, Affection for Obama ... but His Proposal?

In Iraq, Affection for Obama ... but His Proposal?

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. | July 17, 2008

BAGHDAD — A tough Iraqi general, a former special operations officer with a baritone voice and a barrel chest, melted into smiles when asked about Senator Barack Obama.

“Everyone in Iraq likes him,” said the general, Nassir al-Hiti. “I like him. He’s young. Very active. We would be very happy if he was elected president.”

But mention Mr. Obama’s plan for withdrawing American soldiers, and the general stiffens.

“Very difficult,” he said, shaking his head. “Any army would love to work without any help, but let me be honest: for now, we don’t have that ability.”

Thus in a few brisk sentences, the general summed up the conflicting emotions about Mr. Obama in Iraq, the place outside America with perhaps the most riding on its relationship with him.

There was, as Mr. Obama prepared to visit here, excitement over a man who is the anti-Bush in almost every way: a Democrat who opposed a war that many Iraqis feel devastated their nation. And many in the political elite recognize that Mr. Obama shares their hope for a more rapid withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

But his support for troop withdrawal cuts both ways, reflecting a deep internal quandary in Iraq: for many middle-class Iraqis, affection for Mr. Obama is tempered by worry that his proposal could lead to chaos in a nation already devastated by war. Many Iraqis also acknowledge that security gains in recent months were achieved partly by the buildup of American troops, which Mr. Obama opposed and his presumptive Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, supported.

“In no way do I favor the occupation of my country,” said Abu Ibrahim, a Western-educated businessman in Baghdad, “but there is a moral obligation on the Americans at this point.”

Like many Iraqis, Mr. Ibrahim sees Mr. Obama favorably, describing him as “much more humane than Bush or McCain.”

“He seems like a nice guy,” Mr. Ibrahim said. But he hoped that Mr. Obama’s statements about a relatively fast pullout were mere campaign talk.

“It’s a very big assumption that just because he wants to pull troops out, he’ll be able to do it,” he said. “The American strategy in the region requires troops to remain in Iraq for a long time.”

It is not certain exactly when Mr. Obama will arrive here or whom he will meet. Such official trips are always shrouded in secrecy for security reasons.

But as word spread of the impending visit — Mr. Obama’s first as the presumed Democratic nominee for president — there were fresh reminders of the country’s vulnerability. In the past two days, around 70 Iraqis were killed in suicide bomb attacks, despite recent gains in safety that Mr. Obama uses as one argument for withdrawal.

And despite those improvements, street interviews remain risky in Iraq. For this article, 18 people were interviewed about their opinions of Mr. Obama, in Baghdad, in the northern city of Mosul, in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, and in the Sunni suburb of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad.

Even as some Iraqis disagreed about Mr. Obama’s stance on withdrawal, they expressed broad approval for him personally as an improvement over Mr. Bush, who remains unpopular among broad portions of Iraqi society five years after the war began. No one interviewed expressed a strong dislike for Mr. Obama.

Saad Sultan, an official in an Iraqi government ministry, contended that Mr. Obama could give a fresh start to relations between the Arab world and the United States. Mr. Obama has never practiced Islam; his father, whom he barely knew, was born Muslim, but became a nonbeliever. Mr. Sultan, however, like many Iraqis, feels instinctively close to the senator because he heard that he had Muslim roots.

“Every time I see Obama I say: ‘He’s close to us. Maybe he’ll see us in a different way,’ ” Mr. Sultan said. “I find Obama very close to my heart.”

Race is also a consideration. Muhammad Ahmed Kareem, 49, an engineer from Mosul, said he had high expectations of Mr. Obama because his experience as a black man in America might give him more empathy for others who feel oppressed by a powerful West. “Blacks suffered a lot of discrimination, much like Arabs,” Mr. Kareem said. “That’s why we expect that his tenure will be much better.”

But Mr. Obama also frames the sometimes contradictory feelings Iraqis have about America as the withdrawal of troops has moved closer to the political mainstream in both countries. Already, the units brought in for the so-called surge last year have left, and the Bush administration has in recent days acknowledged the need both to transfer troops from Iraq to an ever-more-volatile Afghanistan and to recognize that a broader withdrawal is an “aspirational goal” for Iraqis.

Mr. Obama has advocated a withdrawal that would remove most combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Despite some fears about such a departure, that stance is not unpopular here. Many Iraqis hate American forces because soldiers have killed their relatives and friends, and they say they want the troops out.

“Of course I want the American forces to leave Iraq,” said May Adnan Yunis, whose sister was killed, along with a female and a male co-worker, when they were gunned down by American soldiers while driving to work at Baghdad International Airport three weeks ago. “I want them to go to hell.”

After the killings, a statement by the American military describing the three employees as “criminals” who shot at the soldiers inflamed Iraqi officials even more. In a rare public rebuke of the American military, the Iraqi armed forces general command described the American soldiers’ actions as crimes “committed in cold blood.”

For General Hiti, who commands a swath of western Baghdad, the American military is a necessary, if vexing, presence. He ticks off the ways it helps: evacuating wounded Iraqi soldiers, bringing in helicopters when things go wrong, defusing bombs, getting detailed pictures of areas from drone planes.

But the issue of withdrawal is immensely complex, and some of the functions mentioned by General Hiti would not be affected under Mr. Obama’s plan. The senator is calling for the withdrawal of combat brigades, but has said a residual force would still pursue extremist militants, protect American troops and train Iraqi security forces.

In negotiations on the future troop presence, both sides were initially focused on concluding a long-term security agreement. But the Iraqi government is now rejecting that and has focused solely on a temporary agreement to begin next year after the United Nations mandate that serves as the legal basis for the American military presence expires.

For weeks American officials had insisted that widespread Iraqi objections to the long-term pact were merely overheated words from Iraqi politicians. Now, they acknowledge that they underestimated Iraqis’ fears of acquiescing to what the Iraqis see as a colonial relationship that would allow American forces to indefinitely operate permanent bases under special laws.

“The Iraqis have a real political issue here,” said one American official, who said the Iraqis viewed any deal that would replicate the broad powers Americans now have “as a scarlet letter.”

But for some Iraqis the American presence remains the backbone of security in the neighborhood. Saidiya, a southern Baghdad district, was so brutalized by violence a year ago that a young Iraqi television reporter who fled thought he would never come back. But a telephone call from his father in December persuaded him to return. An American unit had planted itself in the district, helping chase away radicals. The family could go out shopping. They could drive their car to the gas station.

“The Americans paved the way for the Iraqi Army there,” said the young man, who married this year. “If they weren’t there, the Iraqi forces could not have taken control.” Even so, he agreed with Mr. Obama’s plan for a faster withdrawal. American forces “helped the Iraqi Army to get back its dignity,” he said. “They are qualified now.”

But Iraq is now a complex landscape. Some areas are subdued, and others are still racked by violence and calibrating troop presence will be tricky.

Falah al-Alousy is the director of an organization that runs a school in an area south of Baghdad that was controlled by religious extremists two years ago. Former insurgents turned against the militant group, but local authorities still rely heavily on Americans to keep the peace; the Iraqi Army, largely Shiite, is not allowed to patrol in the area, Mr. Alousy said.

“Al Qaeda would rearrange itself and come back, if the Americans withdraw,” he said. As for Mr. Obama’s plan for withdrawal, “It’s just propaganda for an election.”

Most Iraqis dislike the fact that their country is occupied, but a few well-educated Iraqis who have traveled abroad say they would not oppose a permanent American military presence, something that Mr. Obama opposes. Saad Sultan, the Iraqi government official, said his travels in Germany, where there have been American bases since the end of World War II, softened his attitude toward a long-term presence. “I have no problem to have a camp here,” he said. “I find it in Germany and that’s a strong country. Why not in Iraq?”

Reporting was contributed by Alissa J. Rubin, Mohammed Hussein, Riyadh Muhammad, Anwar J. Ali and Suadad al-Salhy from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.

NYT : Barack Obama: My Plan for Iraq

My Plan for Iraq

By BARACK OBAMA | July 14, 2008

CHICAGO — The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.

The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.

In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.

It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.

Barack Obama, a United States senator from Illinois, is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Reuters : U.S. and Iraq scale back security deal plans: W.Post

U.S. and Iraq scale back security deal plans: W.Post

By Dean Yates | July 13, 2008

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi negotiators have ended efforts to reach a formal security pact before President George W. Bush leaves office in favor of an interim deal, the Washington Post said on Sunday, citing senior U.S. officials.

The two sides had been negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement that would provide a legal basis for U.S. troops to remain when a U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

But in the past week Iraqi leaders have spoken of only agreeing what they call a memorandum of understanding. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has also raised for the first time the prospect of setting a timetable for U.S. troops to leave Iraq.

The Washington Post quoted one U.S. official close to the negotiations as saying "we are talking about dates", even though Bush has previously rebuffed calls for a timetable.

Iraq is a major issue in November's presidential election battle between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. McCain supports the Bush administration's current strategy, while Obama has called for a timetable for withdrawal.

The Post said the "bridge" security document would be limited in both time and scope and would allow basic U.S. military operations to continue once the U.N. mandate ended.

Iraq has rejected a number of Washington's demands, insisting they infringe on the country's sovereignty.

The document now under discussion with Iraq was likely to cover only 2009, the Post said.

Negotiators expected it to include a "time horizon", with specific goals for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Baghdad and other cities and installations, it added.

The fixed dates are likely to include caveats referring to the ability of Iraqi forces to take over security. Some Iraqi officials themselves have said any timetable would be determined by security conditions on the ground.

PRESSURE

There is strong domestic pressure in Iraq to set dates for a withdrawal of U.S. forces, especially with violence at a four-year low and with Iraqi security forces getting larger and taking the lead in more security operations.

Maliki's political opponents would also likely try to exploit the issue of an undefined U.S. troop presence in provincial elections later this year.

The most contentious unresolved issue was the legal immunity of U.S. troops in Iraq, the Post reported.

U.S. officials have said this is non-negotiable. But Iraq's deputy parliament speaker has said lawmakers would probably veto any deal that gave U.S. soldiers immunity from Iraqi law.

The Bush administration has always opposed setting any withdrawal timetable, saying to do so would allow militant groups to lie low and wait until U.S. troops in Iraq have left.

U.S. troop levels are already being cut, with the last of five additional combat brigades Bush deployed last year expected to pull out this month. That will leave 15 combat brigades in Iraq, or around 140,000 soldiers.

Washington was considering withdrawing additional troops beginning in September, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing administration and military officials.

The withdrawal stemmed partly from the need for more U.S. troops in Afghanistan to fight the rising insurgency by the Taliban and other fighters.

No final decisions had been made, but up to three combat brigades in Iraq could be withdrawn, or slated for withdrawal, by the end of the administration in January, the Times said.

The White House declined to discuss the withdrawals, but spokesman Gordon Johndroe told the newspaper that while Bush hoped to bring more troops home, he would await recommendations in September from General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, the Times said.

(Additional reporting by Christopher Michaud in New York; Editing by Catherine Evans)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

NYT : Iraqi Officials Still Insisting on Timetable to Withdraw

Iraqi Officials Still Insisting on Timetable to Withdraw

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON | July 9, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraqi officials continued to insist Tuesday that a timetable for the withdrawal of coalition troops must be included in any security agreement with the United States.

Meanwhile, in western Anbar Province, 22 bodies were found at a Ramadi elementary school that was undergoing construction, 20 of them buried in the playing fields, apparently over a lengthy period, the local police said.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser, said the government would reject any security agreement that did not include a schedule for the departure of foreign troops.

“We will not accept a memorandum of understanding without having timeline horizons for the cessation of combat operations as well as the departure of all the combat brigades,” Mr. Rubaie said in a telephone interview. However, he declined to offer specifics on a timeline, suggesting that the Iraqi government itself was not yet sure how quickly it wanted the United States to withdraw.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Rubaie was in the holy city of Najaf meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shiite religious leader. The ayatollah has not expressed an opinion on the specifics of the negotiations, emphasizing only that Iraq must protect its sovereignty.

Mr. Rubaie’s remarks came a day after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki confirmed that his government was considering a short-term pact with the United States that would extend the presence of American troops but also include a timetable for withdrawal.

The insistence on withdrawal is a popular position for many Shiites, and has been championed by one of Mr. Maliki’s chief rivals, the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. With provincial elections expected before the end of the year, Mr. Maliki is said to be eager to demonstrate his independence from the United States while undercutting Mr. Sadr.

The Bush administration has consistently opposed a timetable, arguing that it would only embolden insurgents. Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman, reiterated that argument on Tuesday in Japan, where President Bush was attending the Group of 8 summit meeting.

“Negotiations and discussions are ongoing every day,” Mr. Johndroe said. “It is important to understand that these are not talks on a hard date for a withdrawal, but are discussions on a security horizon that reflect the Iraqis’ increasing capacity, as well as improved conditions on the ground that should allow for a further reduction of U.S. forces.”

In Ramadi, at an elementary school that was being renovated, an excavator uncovered 20 corpses buried in the volleyball and soccer fields, said Tariq Yousif, a provincial police commander. Two bodies were also discovered in cisterns at the school.

Local mosques are asking families with missing relatives to come to the school to try to identify the bodies. One woman recognized the body of her husband, who was an imam at the nearby Gailani Mosque and a professor at a local Islamic college.

At noon on Sunday, a senior adviser at the Ministry of Justice was shot as he was driving on a Baghdad highway, and a woman who worked for Iraqi Airways was killed by a gunman on a city bridge, according to the Ministry of the Interior.

Riyadh Muhammad and Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Ramadi.

NYT : Iraqi Favors Short Security Pact With U.S.

Iraqi Favors Short Security Pact With U.S.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE | July 8, 2008

BAGHDAD — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki publicly confirmed Monday that his government was leaning toward concluding a short-term security pact with the United States instead of a broader agreement that would last for years.

The legal authority for American troops in Iraq is now provided by a United Nations mandate that expires at the end of the year. Iraq and the United States have been negotiating details of a broad new agreement that would formalize the security relationship, but with elections nearing in both countries and opposition likely from the Iraqi Parliament, Iraqi leaders seemed to be opting for a narrower and short-term pact.

Mr. Maliki’s office said in a statement that the “current trend is toward reaching a memorandum of understanding” that would extend the presence of American troops for a period of time. While the statement used the words “scheduled withdrawal” about American troops, it did not seem to mean that a precise timetable for troops to depart was being negotiated.

Ali al-Adeeb, a prominent leader in Mr. Maliki’s political party, said in a telephone interview that while there were many options for withdrawal and several end points under discussion, “We think that what is suitable for withdrawal is when our soldiers are ready and well armed to take the responsibility.”

The issues being negotiated are prickly: How much control, if any, should Iraqis have over American security operations? Should American soldiers have the right to detain suspects without Iraqi approval?

Iraq’s Parliament said Monday that it would vote next Tuesday on a law to authorize and set rules for provincial elections this year. Lawmakers agreed to resolve by a simple majority vote several troublesome issues, like whether there should be a minimum quota for women in the legislature and whether parties should be allowed to use religious symbols.

In other developments, a crackdown continued against members of the political party of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, as Iraqi authorities arrested Salam Abdulwahed Jubara, the manager of the education department in al-Majar al-Kabeer, a village in southern Iraq.

The governor of Maysan Province, where the village is located, is Adel Muhoder, whose arrest has been ordered by Iraqi authorities. He is Mr. Jubara’s uncle, a security official said.

In Diyala Province, near the Iranian border, an improvised explosive near Mandali killed a family of four. The four, who were ethnic Kurds, were traveling in a vehicle when the explosion occurred. In the same province, a bomb exploded in the Mafraq market in Baquba, killing a woman and wounding 14 others. Two more women were killed in an explosion on a farm north of the city, an Iraqi official said.

A bomb attack on a convoy south of the northern city of Mosul killed four contractors and wounded eight others, the American military said in a statement.

Riyadh Muhammad and Mohamed Hussein contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baquba and Amara.

The Times : Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demands US withdrawal timetable

Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demands US withdrawal timetable

Iraqis want an end to the immunity that US troops have from prosecution

James Hider in Baghdad | From The Times | July 8, 2008

Iraq said for the first time yesterday that it wanted to set a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from its territory.

President Bush has long resisted a schedule for pulling his 145,000 soldiers out, arguing that it would play into the hands of insurgents. Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia Prime Minister, who boasted last week that he had crushed terrorism in the country, suggested that it was time to start setting time-lines.

“The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or to put a timetable on their withdrawal,” Mr al-Maliki said during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. He rejected efforts by Mr Bush to hurry through an agreement on vital issues such as the immunity of US troops in Iraq and use of the country’s airspace. Mr Bush had hoped to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) by the end of July to establish the basis for a long-term presence of US troops in the country.

The Iraqi parliament has bridled at pushing through such a binding deal with the outgoing and unpopular Bush Administration, saying that the negotiations have been secretive and could undermine Iraq’s sovereignty. “I don’t know anything about this agreement and neither does parliament,” said Ezzedine Dawla, a Sunni MP. “We’re going to pass something we don’t know anything about.”

Mr al-Maliki’s announcement showed a growing self-confidence that Iraqi leaders can stand up to their powerful ally. His oil minister said last week that leading Western oil companies would not be allowed to set conditions for future deals over Iraq’s main natural resource. The tough stance also comes before Iraqi provincial elections later this year, and may mark the start of the Prime Minister’s campaign to be reelected. His popularity was bolstered by military operations to take back the southern oil city of Basra and the town of al-Amarah from Iranian-backed Shia militias.

His comments may also hint at future cooperation with Barak Obama, the Democratic candidate, who has promised to pull US troops out of Iraq within 16 months, although Mr Obama has since appeared to waver on the commitment.

“The negotiations are continuing with the American side,” Mr al-Maliki said, reflecting the desire of many MPs to wait until a new administration is in the White House, and Iraq’s provincial elections are over, before making any deal. The agreement would govern such issues as immunity for US troops from prosecution, the use of Iraqi airspace, and which side takes operational control for military missions against insurgents.

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish MP, said that the issue of immunity for US forces had become a particularly sensitive subject for Iraqis. “We have suffered so much from immunity. Immunity equals committing crimes. In the name of immunity they have killed people, they have their own prisons, they captured Iraqis. We can’t continue like this,” he said.

Haidar al-Abadi, a close aide to the Prime Minister, said that the US had wanted complete control of Iraqi airspace, since Iraq still had no air force. Mr al-Abadi said that the Government had rejected the demand. “Air-space will be decided by the Iraqi Government,” he said.

In a rebuff to the Mr al-Maliki the Pentagon said any timetable would be [artificial] and withdrawal would depend on conditions on the ground.

WaPo : McCain Responds to Maliki's Call for an Iraq Withdrawal Timetable

McCain Responds to Maliki's Call for an Iraq Withdrawal Timetable

By Michael D. Shear | July 8, 2008

Sen. John McCain, who has repeatedly derided anyone who advocated a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, now suddenly finds himself in a political box as the American-backed Iraqi leadership yesterday raised the prospect of exactly that.

For the first time on Monday, Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki said in a statement from his office that the two countries should consider deciding the future of American troops with "a memorandum of understanding to put a timetable on their withdrawal."

McCain was silent on the comments Monday. But today, his top foreign policy adviser declined to criticize Maliki or distance McCain from him. And they sought to portray Maliki's comments as consistent with the Republican nominee's long-standing position.

"Senator McCain has always said that conditions on the ground -- including the security threats posed by extremists and terrorists, and the ability of Iraqi forces to meet those threats -- would be key determinants in U.S. force levels," said adviser Randy Scheunemann, who criticized Sen. Barack Obama's "constantly shifting positions" on Iraq.

But McCain's position on the question of a specific timetable for withdrawal has been shifting as the candidate moved from the Republican primary into the general election.

In speeches, town hall meetings, interviews and campaign commercials, McCain has said a timetable would provide terrorists the knowledge of how long they have to wait until American troops are gone. He has repeatedly said that setting a date for withdrawal would lead to "chaos, genocide and we will be back with greater sacrifice."

His rhetoric has been withering and aimed at both Democrats and Republicans. During the waning days of the GOP primary, he eviscerated former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for a comment that McCain said amounted to support for a timetable.

Romney disputed that, but the damage to his candidacy was unmistakable. Later, McCain turned his fire on Democrats, including Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, accusing them of endangering Americans by advocating a specific timetable for withdrawal.

"It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible and premature withdrawal," he said in a California speech.

In that speech, McCain offered his "vision" for 2013, by which time he said most of the troops would be gone from Iraq. That was quickly seen by many observers as a timetable for withdrawal by that date.

But immediately after the speech, McCain disputed the idea that he was setting a firm date for withdrawal of troops from Iraq, telling reporters that he is "promising that we will succeed in Iraq" but not promising that troops will come home if that success has not materialized.

"I'm not putting a date on it. It could be next month. It could be next year," he told reporters on the Straight Talk Express bus. "I said by the end of my first term we will have succeeded in Iraq.... This is what I want to achieve. This is what I believe is achievable."

McCain fought Democratic attempts in Congress to legislate the withdrawal of troops. And he famously said troops might be in Iraq for as long as 100 years, though he says that referred to a Korea-like presence, not active fighting like that occurring now.

On Tuesday, McCain's campaign declined to respond directly to the question of whether he now supports the idea of setting a date for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.

Speaking on MSNBC Tuesday morning, McCain said that "The fact is that we and the Iraqis will deal in what is in the national security interests of both countries. And there is no reason to assume that the Iraqis aren't going to act in what they perceive as their national
interest. I believe we will enact ours and I believe we will all come home."