Iraq analysis

[Al-khiyal]

BAGHDAD: In 2003, when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, a woman named Hamdiyah al-Dulaimi had three handsome sons. They had grown into good men with wives and families. They were the shining accomplishments of her life.

In hindsight, it was a much better life than she realized at the time. Most certainly better than it is now, four years after the fall of Baghdad.

On April 9, 2003, the people of the city cheered invading U.S. soldiers in the city square. Leaders of the coalition troops promised liberty, freedom and life without tyranny.

But Baghdad still has none of those things. And al-Dulaimi has no sons.

One day last spring, a dozen men in black uniforms knocked down her door with machine guns. They screamed "Filthy Sunnis!" and they handcuffed her sons: Haqqi, 39, Qais, 37, Ali, 31.

"Why? What did my boys do?" the mother cried. She got no answers. The dozen gunmen dragged their new prisoners across the floor, pummeling heads with their rifle butts.

Al-Dulaimi dropped to her knees, clinging to the ankles of a kidnapper. She begged, kissing his shoes. Then she bargained: "At least leave me one. Take the other two. Leave me one."

They beat her head with their gun stocks until she passed out. Then they took her sons.

The next day, their corpses were on the sidewalk. Haqqi's body was headless. The bodies of Qais and Ali had been mutilated; some parts were missing.

Like so many others, their grieving mother fled — to Syria, in her case.

She left behind deprivation and corruption, mayhem and madness; a city that is hemorrhaging many of its best and brightest, while many of those left behind are brutalized and traumatized.

Not withstanding Sen. John McCain's stroll through a city market last week — "Things are better," he insisted — Iraqis wonder: Can a place where men blow themselves up in street markets, cars implode at traffic lights and kidnappings occur in broad daylight ever recover?

There is a way out, say historians and sociologists. South Africa went on, after the horrors of apartheid, in large part because of reconciliation hearings headed by Nobel-prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who gathered victims and perpetrators in the 1990s and led them through extraordinary meetings of shared memories that led to forgiveness.

In the same way, Rwanda tried to reach beyond the machetes that hacked to death 800,000 Tutsis, putting the Hutus who wielded them in the same room with their victims' families.

Such methods take years, and nothing can be done until the fighting stops.

"It's one of those terrible situations where you are at first aghast that such things could happen," said Jack Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia, who specializes in international conflict. "And then you realize that people are people and they've been doing this kind of thing forever and it's not the end of the world. People do go on."

But, "for any of this to occur, there has to be a settlement that provides security for the people of Iraq," he cautioned. "And we're a long way from that."

Gone missing are the simple things that feed body and soul: drinkable water that flows from a tap, electricity that stays on, movie theaters that open, booksellers with new books.

Also missing are an ever-growing number of doctors, professors and teachers — "the brain of Baghdad," as the Iraqis say.

There is no official record of the number of professionals who have fled. There are only anecdotes — an Iraqi doctor now living in Jordan who says 80 percent of his colleagues ran for their lives, based on what he saw at his hospital. An architect in Baghdad who must now work at home, who says 30 percent of her fellow designers are gone.

Dr. Haidr al-Maliki, a specialist in child psychology, is a guarded but compassionate man. For him, leaving Iraq is not an honorable option. "If I leave and all the other doctors leave, all the hospitals would be closed," he said. "We have to take care of our people. Death can come in any country."

It has already come calling for al-Maliki, but the visit was unsuccessful. A 16-year-old, "fine looking boy" walked into his clinic in 2005 and asked, "Are you Dr. Haidr?"

"Yes," said al-Maliki. With that, the teenager produced a pistol and opened fire. The doctor dove under his desk; he was shot twice, in the hand and shoulder.

He said the attack was part of an insurgent campaign against doctors. Six others were attacked in the city, and four died.

The doctor never returned to his clinic. Instead, he now works out of a hospital in central Baghdad. The flashbacks he suffers from the shooting are horrible, he says, but sometimes they help him empathize with his young patients, who are more traumatized than their parents. They have no coping mechanisms, and no way to process what is happening around them.

There is the 16-year-old girl who was abducted in February outside her school in a Sunni neighborhood. She was beaten and kept in a room for nine days with about 20 other kidnapped girls. She was forced to sleep next to the corpse of another victim, a girl who was killed when her parents couldn't pay.

The parents of al-Maliki's patient paid US$20,000 (€14,000) — the going rate in ransom negotiations — for her safe return. She is seriously damaged — terrified of darkness and the nightmares that come with sleep; hostile and aggressive when she is awake.

There are the sister and brother haunted by the recurring images of gunmen who invaded their house, tied up their parents, and beat them before their eyes. The children cannot function at school and now remain at home. Their fear has made it impossible for them to concentrate.

There is little al-Maliki can do except listen and offer words of calm comfort.

Faiza al-Arji last visited Baghdad in November. She stayed for a week. She had planned to stay longer, but her friends begged her to leave. It's too dangerous, they said. Maybe someone will shoot you. Maybe there will be a bomb in the road. Who knows where death comes from?

But she remembers a night when she and her friends had gathered for dinner. There was laughter at the table. Al-Arji could not join in. She couldn't even eat. She sat there, bewildered by the revelry, astonished that her friends could make light of such darkness.

"Faiza, relax," they told her. "It's OK to have fun. We have to go on. We cannot give up."

Al-Arji gave up on life in Baghdad long ago. She now lives in Jordan, which has become home to roughly 700,000 Iraq refugees — a staggering number for a small country whose population is 5.6 million. Another estimated 1 million are scattered in Syria, Lebanon and other countries.

Al-Arji is lucky. She and her husband have money and can afford to live in the expensive city of Amman. Both are civil engineers. They left in 2005, even though she vowed after the invasion that she would never leave.

She endured having guns shoved in her face and her car stolen. She reported it to the Iraqi police, who said, "My sister, I understand. But what can I do? The police are weak."

But when they kidnapped one of her three grown sons, that was the end. He was abducted by security guards at his university, who considered him a terrorist because "he had a beard on his face," said his mother. The kidnappers demanded US$20,000 (€14,000). Her husband paid it. They fled.

Still, she maintains her ties to her homeland. She works with aid agencies, navigating a rabbit warren of bureaucracy and logistics, sending water filtration kits to hospitals in Iraq. She often hears horror stories from loved ones left behind.

An aunt was standing in her garden last year. A missile fell, and she was killed. A neighbor was standing outside his door when a roadside bomb erupted. He was killed. "I loved him like he was my son," al-Arji said.

Just the other day, she spoke to her sister in Baghdad. On the walls of the houses on her street, someone had scrawled, 'All Shia must leave.'

Her sister wasted no time. The family abandoned their house and most of their belongings. They are staying with friends in another neighborhood, hoping the invaders will someday leave.

"It is hell," al-Arji said. "It is a war zone. It is not a city anymore."

She cannot understand the insurgents. "Who are these people?" she cries on the phone from her home in Amman. "Who is funding them? How can they do this?"

They are simple questions with no answers, sensible thoughts for an insensible city.

"You can't walk in the street. You can't go to buy a book. Everything has been canceled. They have lost the meaning of life."

Fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad: life in a city where life has been canceled

[Al-khiyal]

BAGHDAD: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told U.S. President George W. Bush in a recent videoconference that some Iraqi officials are involved in terrorism, government officials said Wednesday.

The two leaders spoke Monday, a day after U.S. officials in Baghdad reported two suicide vests had been found near a trash bin in the "Green Zone," the highly guarded area of central Baghdad where the U.S. Embassy is located.

"The prime minister told him this is what we expect. Some politicians are involved in terrorism," said one Iraqi official. The official's comments were confirmed by two other officials. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

"Terrorists work in two ways, either as gunmen in the field or in politics," the official quoted al-Maliki as telling Bush.

The Iraqi official said terrorists wanted the new security plan in the capital to fail "so they entered the Green Zone."

Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Bush's National Security Council, said Wednesday that Bush and al-Maliki "talked about the importance of fighting terrorists, but I don't recall the suicide belts coming up."

The White House said on Monday that the two leaders had talked about the pace of the 7-week-old security crackdown. Extra troops from both countries are aiming to calm Baghdad and troubled Anbar Province, and some initial improvement has been reported.

The discovery of the suicide vests was announced less than a week after a rocket attack on the Green Zone killed two Americans — a contractor and a soldier

Iraqi prime minister says some officials are involved in terrorism

[Al-khiyal]

WASHINGTON - Interrogations of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and documents seized after the 2003 US-led invasion confirmed that his regime had not been cooperating with Al-Qaeda, the Washington Post reported on its website Friday.

The report contradicted a strong argument for the invasion made by the administration of President George W. Bush that Baghdad had a working relationship with Al-Qaeda, the Afghanistan-based group led by Osama bin Laden blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The Post reported that a newly released declassified Department of Defense report said information obtained after the fall of Saddam confirmed the prewar position of the US Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon intelligence that the Iraqi government had had no substantial contacts with Al-Qaeda.

This position was shored up by interrogations of Saddam and other top officials captured by the US-led coalition forces in Iraq, said report, obtained by the Post.

The report noted that the office of then-undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, one of the foremost advocates for invading Iraq after the 2001 attacks, had ignored the CIA's position and characterized the the Al-Qaeda-Iraq relationship as "mature" and "symbiotic" in a September 2002 briefing to the chief of staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Feith briefing alleged that the two cooperated in 10 areas, including training, financing and logistics.

But the new report, the Post says, said the US intelligence community had concluded at the time that there were "no conclusive signs" of links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, and that "direct cooperation ... has not been established" between the two.

Prior to the war there was little public dispute inside the United States over the Bush administration's linking Iraq and bin Laden's group.

But since the invasion, a number of intelligence officials have alleged that the White House and its backers ignored their intelligence and "cherry picked" information that supported their campaign to persuade Americans of the need to go to war.

In a radio interview Wednesday Cheney insisted on a prewar link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, saying that the group was working in Iraq "before we even arrived on the scene."

"As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq," Cheney told conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

New documents confirm no Saddam Hussein - Al-Qaeda links

[Al-khiyal]

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost the American people more than $500 billion, the deaths of 3200 U.S. troops, 25,000 others wounded, and countless Iraqi lives. The total price tag is projected to top $1.2 trillion.With the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq upon us, the Bush administration asks Congress for $93 billion more for the war, over and above the fiscal year 2008 Pentagon request for $484 billion - an 11% increase over last year! The war machine eats well while starving our people of decent housing, quality health care, and education. The Gulf Coast remains a disaster.

Many of us felt shame in the opening days of the invasion as our soldiers were ordered to protect the Oil Ministry, oil fields, refineries, and distribution system while wholesale looting of Iraq’s antiquities unfolded. The message to the Iraqis was clear: “We’ve come for the oil.” There were no weapons of mass destruction. Hussein is gone yet we are still there. Rather than democracy, we brought massive destruction and civil war to Iraq.

Giving credence to Iraqis’ fears, a new Petroleum Law will be presented to the Iraqi Parliament that, if enacted, will put effective control of Iraq’s vast oil resources in the hands of foreign companies. Nationalized since 1975, Iraq’s oil was, before the years of sanctions and the invasion, the foundation for a relatively high standard of living, producing more PhDs per capita than the U.S. and a health care system prized as the best in the region.

President Bush says the war is not about oil but his actions belie that claim. In the months before the March 2003 invasion, members of the U.S. State Department “Oil and Energy Working Group” met to plan how to open Iraq to international oil companies. As reported by investigative journalist Greg Palast, the oil law now proposed by the Iraqi Council of Ministers is a virtual photocopy of a plan first drafted by U.S. oil industry executives and consultants in Houston long before Iraq was “liberated.”

The proposed Petroleum Law creates a Federal Oil and Gas Council on which would sit representatives of Exxon- Mobil, Shell, BP, etc., whose tasks include approving their own contracts. Instead of Iraqi central government decision-making on oil, the proposal authorizes regional authorities to individually sign contracts with foreign companies, promoting contract bidding wars between regions that could lead to breaking Iraq into three states.

The practice in Iraq - as in other countries with giant reserves - has been that control of oil production rests with public sector oil companies. The role of foreign companies is limited to “service contracts.” A company is contracted to provide a stated service for a limited period - build a refinery, lay a pipeline, drill a field. Decisions on development, distribution, and flow of profits remain with the government. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran run their industries this way.

However, the proposed Petroleum Law provides for “production sharing agreements,” or long-term contracts whereby foreign companies control production, development and sale of the oil for up to 30 years, and reap as much as 70% of the profits. Given the severe weakness of Iraqi institutions, with the country devastated, under military occupation and mired in civil strife, Iraq is unlikely to receive a fair deal. With huge reserves and low production costs, foreign oil companies in Iraq stand to make enormous profits at the expense of the welfare of Iraq’s people and Iraqi sovereignty.

Iraq’s people will not take this looting of their national treasure lying down. Five major Iraqi labor federations, including the Federation of Oil Workers, have condemned the draft law and warn this is a “red-line” issue for Iraq. They recognize the hijack this law, drafted at the behest of the oil cartel, represents.

This oil scenario further stains our international reputation while doing nothing to curb U.S. dependence on foreign oil and our urgent need to develop sustainable energy.

Congress must cut all funding for the war except what is needed for the safe, rapid withdrawal of every U.S. soldier and private contractor, closing of U.S. bases, and meeting our obligation to fund Iraq’s reconstruction. Iraqi sovereignty over their oil and every day life is in the best interests of U.S. working people, starting with our troops. Bring all the troops home now.

Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people

[Al-khiyal]

Iraqis surviving violence are not so sure they can also survive disease.

"Iraq was known to be the best in healthcare in the region," Dr. Iyad Muhammad from Ramadi General Hospital told IPS. "Best doctors, hospitals, nurses and cheapest medicines. The situation now is the opposite."

Dr. Muhammad said several doctors have been killed, and many more have fled the country. Patients are looking to follow them too, he said, with many prepared to sell their property to go abroad for treatment.

"Our situation now has become worse than during the sanctions period (in the 1990s after the first Gulf war) when more than one million died and we had very little medicine and supplies to treat them."

Iraq's health index has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s, Joseph Chamie, former director of the United Nations Population Division and an Iraq specialist has said.

With only sparse care now available at hospitals, Iraqis in need cross the border to Syria and Jordan for treatment. That comes at a price because as foreigners they can go only to private hospitals.

Iraqi officials say remedies are on the way. "There have been many contracts to construct new hospitals, and our ministry is studying more all over Iraq," Ahmed Hussein from the Iraqi Ministry of Health told IPS. "The existing hospitals are old and we would rather build new ones."

But widespread corruption has been reported in the Ministry of Health, which is being led by politicians with no experience in healthcare. The ministry is officially led by a member of the movement of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Sectarianism determines who gets the kind of treatment still available.

"You go to a hospital and you find pictures of clerics all over the place, as if you were in a shrine," Qassim Brissam, a Shia Iraqi analyst in London told IPS on telephone. "Clerics are not doctors, and they should not run hospitals."

Iraqi doctors are painfully aware that growing sectarianism has worsened the deteriorating health system.

"I appeared on a documentary concerning Iraqi hospitals, and that was the biggest mistake I ever committed," Dr. Rafi Jassim from Baghdad told IPS. "I was lucky to learn in proper time that militias were to raid my house that night. Now I am on the run just like any fugitive criminal, and my family faces the threat of a terrorist attack any moment."

A combination of sanctions, war and occupation has brought to Iraq the world's worst deterioration in child mortality rate. According to a report 'The State of the World's Children' released by UNICEF this year, Iraq's mortality rate for children under five was 50 per 1000 live births in 1990, and 125 in 2005, an annual average deterioration of 6.1 percent.

When the U.S.-led invasion was launched in 2003, the Bush administration pledged to cut Iraq's child mortality rate by half by 2005. Instead, the rate has worsened, now to 130 in 2006, according to Iraqi Health Ministry figures.

Availability of medical supplies continues to be a critical factor.

"We have been exporters of medicines to Iraq, but we are not able to get any contract now to supply the Ministry of Health with medicines," Dr. Hammed al-Nuaimy, manager of a large medical supply company told IPS in Baghdad. "This is the case even though we always submit the best prices and brands of European origin."

Al-Nuaimy would not say why his company failed to get supply contracts despite competitive offers. "I leave it for you and your readers to answer," he said.

"We are being ignored by our government and by the Americans," 55-year-old Hammad Hussein from Fallujah told IPS on a visit to Baghdad. "The promises of a better life have just turned out to be ugly death."

Hussein added, "Our hospitals and clinics are paralysed and we do not find the simplest treatment, so we always have to buy medicines from the commercial market which means we have to sell something like a refrigerator or a TV set to cure a sick member of the family."

Sanaa Sulayman, studying for a biology degree at the University of Baghdad's science department told IPS that no one seems to look at health in Iraq from the environmental perspective.

"The huge amounts of explosives dropped on Iraq including those 'special weapons' like radioactive Depleted Uranium and white phosphorous have caused a dramatic increase in numbers of patients and severity of diseases," Sulayman said. "It is still getting worse by the day and no one seems to care."

A dentist from Fallujah told IPS that most Iraqis have been neglecting dental care because they are unable to afford it.

"Dental care is considered a luxury by Iraqis now, and they will not visit our clinics unless they have an intolerable toothache," said the doctor. "Most of them would ask for a tooth to be pulled rather than filling it because they cannot afford proper treatment."

The mental health situation is equally grim for Iraqis.

In a study 'Psychological effects of war on Iraqis' the Association of Iraqi Psychologists (AIP) reported in January 2007 that of 2,000 people interviewed in all 18 Iraqi provinces, 92 percent said they feared being killed in an explosion.

Sixty percent of those interviewed said the level of violence had caused them to have panic attacks, and this prevented them from going out because they feared they would be the next victims.

How much can Iraq survive

[Al-khiyal]

New documents confirm no Saddam Hussein - Al-Qaeda links

The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, continued to insist yesterday that there was a link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaida, in spite of the publication of declassified intelligence documents showing the opposite.

The documents were released after pressure from the Democrats, who took control of Congress in November. A link with al-Qaida was one of the reasons given by the Bush administration for invasion.

The documents, previously marked secret, form part of an internal US inquiry into whether hawks in the Bush administration - in particular Douglas Feith, an under-secretary at the defence department - manipulated intelligence. The report, carried out by the inspector-general, Thomas Gimble, concludes Mr Feith acted inappropriately but not illegally and ignored the consensus in the intelligence community that there was no established link between Iraq and al-Qaida.

But interviewed yesterday, Mr Cheney, who was one of the hawks favouring invasion, reiterated his claim that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before the March 2003 invasion.

"He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organised the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene, and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June," Mr Cheney told a radio interviewer yesterday. "As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq."

Intelligence analysts say Zarqawi was not then part of al-Qaida , but became its leader in Iraq after the invasion.

A summary of Mr Gimble's findings came out in February, but the Democrats pushed for the full report and classified material to be made public. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate armed services committee, who led the campaign, said: "It is important for the public to see why the Pentagon's inspector-general concluded that secretary Feith's office 'developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al-Qaida relationship'."

The report said postwar interrogations of Saddam and members of his government, as well as seized Iraqi documents, confirmed there was no cooperation with al-Qaida. It said Mr Feith's assessment in mid-2002 offered several examples of cooperation between Saddam's government and al-Qaida. In a briefing to Mr Cheney in September 2002, he described a "mature, symbiotic" relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida, including training, finance and logistics. But, the report said, the CIA had concluded months earlier there was no evidence of significant or long-term relationships.

Mr Feith rejects Mr Gimble's conclusions. His defence department successor, Eric Edelman, attached a 52-page rebuttal to the report, saying the idea that a small number of people had distorted the intelligence had taken root but was wrong.

Cheney defiant over al-Qaida link to Iraq

[Al-khiyal]

LONDON - A British female soldier killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq was a close friend of Prince William, a spokesman for the royal family said Friday.

Second Lt. Joanna Yorke Dyer, 24, was among four soldiers killed when a British patrol was attacked early Thursday in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

William, who is second in line to the British throne, met Dyer while both were at the Sandhurst military academy, family spokesman Patrick Harrison said.

"Prince William was deeply saddened to hear the tragic news of Jo Dyer's death," said Harrison, press secretary for Prince Charles, William's father.

"Jo was a close friend of his at Sandhurst and he is very much thinking of her family and friends right now. They are in his thoughts and prayers."

William and his younger brother, Prince Harry, are both serving officers with the Blues and Royals, an elite cavalry regiment. Harry, third in line to the throne, is to be deployed to Iraq, the Ministry of Defense has said.

Dyer's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Mark Kenyon, said in a statement that the soldier was "a talented and energetic officer who was determined to make the most of her deployment to Iraq."

Prime Minister Tony Blair called the ambush an "act of terrorism" Thursday and suggested it may have been carried out by elements linked to Iran, although he stopped short of blaming Tehran.

The British patrol struck a roadside bomb and was hit by small-arms fire, a British military spokeswoman, Capt. Katie Brown, said. The explosion created a 9-foot crater in the road.

A civilian interpreter was also killed and a fifth British soldier was seriously wounded, Brown said.

Close friend of Britain's Prince William dies in Iraq