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washingtonpost.com
Kerry Calls for Allies to Aid Iraq Transition

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A625-2004Jun23.html?referrer=email

By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A08

After months of criticizing President Bush for failing to attract international support for the U.S. mission in Iraq, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) shifted his tone yesterday, putting NATO nations on notice that the time has come for them to contribute military forces to help secure the country as a new government takes power.

Kerry did not absolve the administration of responsibility for other nations’ reluctance to participate in the Iraq mission, but said it was long past time for them to withhold support, given shifts in U.S. policy that have brought a more active role by the United Nations.

“In light of the failed diplomacy of the Bush administration, that reluctance is not surprising,” he said in a statement issued while campaigning in California. “But now is the time that our allies must join the effort to support Iraq’s transition. The NATO summit is the perfect opportunity for them to demonstrate their commitment to the new U.N. resolution.”

Kerry urged the administration to invite Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to the NATO summit in Istanbul next week as a way to put pressure on other nations to send troops to help secure Iraq’s borders and safeguard the United Nations’ mission.

He said Allawi’s presence would challenge NATO countries to respond “to an appeal from the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people” and called the summit “a clear test of their [NATO’s] resolve and a clear test of ours.”

A senior Kerry foreign policy adviser, who declined to be identified to talk about internal campaign matters, acknowledged that the statement represents a shift. “We’re obviously calling on the president of the United States to make the supreme effort to attain these objectives, but we’re also calling on NATO to recognize their own interests in terms of what we would like them to do,” he said. “Are we shifting direction? Maybe we haven’t said it quite this way before.”

Kerry’s statement put down a marker for the administration in advance of a NATO summit where Bush will be seeking military support, but it reflected the fact that the administration’s efforts to involve the United Nations more actively in the creation of a new government in Iraq has narrowed the differences with Kerry on Iraq.

A Kerry adviser said Bush and administration officials must demonstrate that they are prepared to welcome more military support and will operate cooperatively, but Kerry reflected the view of some other Democrats that NATO nations should stand behind their vote for the U.N. resolution. “I hope the NATO countries will live up to that resolution and act on what is in their national interest,” Kerry said.

Kerry was far from signaling solidarity with the president yesterday, either on Iraq or in general. Still seething over spending the day in Washington on Tuesday as Republicans blocked a vote on veterans health care, Kerry lambasted Bush on the campaign trail.

“George Bush talked about being a uniter, not a divider,” Kerry said in San Francisco, according to news service reports. “But he’s been the greatest divider as president in the modern history of the country.”

Kerry had ripped up his schedule and returned to Washington from Denver early Tuesday for the vote. He waited all day and then gave up and left for San Francisco on Tuesday evening. “These people are so petty, so sad, so political that all they could do was find a way not to let John Kerry vote,” he said yesterday, referring to GOP leaders.

Republicans expressed little sympathy for Kerry, noting that he had missed 89 percent of Senate votes this year. “Senator Kerry’s belief that he is entitled to special treatment on one of the rare days he shows up to perform his duties is not shared by his colleagues,” said Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt.

While in San Francisco, Kerry spoke to the Service Employees International Union convention, where he called on Congress to act on legislation to negate Monday’s Supreme Court decision blocking state laws that allow lawsuits against HMOs.

“Three years ago, we passed a bipartisan and real patients’ bill of rights in the Senate,” he said, according to a text of his remarks. “It is time we had a president who wants to get this done.”

The House passed a separate version with White House support, but the two bills have languished since, with each side blaming the other for the impasse.

Kerry also used the forum to promote his plan to expand access to health insurance, which he said would cut employers’ costs by almost $27 billion and reduce health care premiums by almost $1,000 a year, on average.

In Washington on Tuesday, Kerry met with Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), who is among those under consideration for vice president. Edwards declined to describe the meeting, but yesterday he received an unlikely endorsement when independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader urged Kerry to select him. Nader said Edwards, a former trial lawyer, would fight to protect the right of citizens to sue corporations if they have been harmed.

Debate
http://www.nato.int/docu/review/2004/issue1/english/debate.html

Should the Middle East be NATO’s new central front?
    Will Marshal VERSUS   Peter Rudolf

Will Marshall is director of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC.
 

Peter Rudolf is an analyst with the Berlin-based Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik specialising in transatlantic relations.

 
Dear Peter,

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, opinion in the United States has been congealing around the proposition that the Greater Middle East is to the 21st century what Europe was to the 20th century – the world’s prime crucible of conflict.

Of course, there are other hot spots; North Korea is especially worrisome. But the Greater Middle East, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan, is far and away the most likely nexus of the dangers we fear most today: nihilistic terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue dictators and failed states.

This view seems to be gaining ground in Europe. At February’s Munich Conference on Security Policy, for example, Joschka Fischer described the Middle East as “the epicentre of the greatest threat to our regional and global security at the dawn of this century: destructive jihadist terrorism with its totalitarian ideology”.

NATO should be rededicated to defending our common security interests against the new totalitarianism brewing in the Greater Middle East

If Americans and Europeans are indeed moving toward a common definition of the new threats we face, it follows that NATO, the institutional cornerstone of the transatlantic Alliance, should reorient itself to confront those threats.

What’s the alternative? The Alliance has been running on fumes since the Soviet Union unravelled. NATO enlargement has given the appearance of purposeful activity, but it has had more to do with consolidating the West’s Cold War gains than with defining a new mission for the Alliance. The question remains, what is NATO for? Especially after the rupture over Iraq, the transatlantic partners had better agree on an answer, and soon, or else find themselves moving inexorably down divergent paths.

I think the answer is pretty straightforward: NATO should be rededicated to defending our common security interests and liberal values against the new totalitarianism brewing in the Greater Middle East. This is not exclusively a military challenge. Over the long haul, success requires changing the conditions – harsh political repression, economic stagnation and pervasive fears of cultural decline – that breed fanaticism and violence in the region. In the United States, both President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic challenger for the White House, have called for a broad strategy of modernising the region, through expanded trade, increased aid tied to governance reforms and vigorous support for human rights, the rule of law and independent civic groups. Fischer calls this strategy “positive globalisation”, but it amounts to the same thing.

But if military power by itself can’t defeat the new totalitarian threat, neither is victory likely without the credible threat of force. After all, al Qaida has already attacked three NATO Allies: Spain and Turkey as well as the United States. To defend the “transatlantic homeland” against further terrorist attacks, NATO must develop the capacity to detect and disrupt terror cells and deprive terrorists of safe havens. This of course is the justification for NATO’s precedent-shattering intervention in faraway Afghanistan.

In fact, in organising the 6,500-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, NATO has already crossed the Rubicon and begun its strategic reorientation toward the Greater Middle East. The challenge now is for NATO to become a more aggressive and effective peacemaker. That means moving out of the capital, disarming warlords and militias and bringing them under the central government’s authority, and cooperating more closely with the 10,000 Americans who are fighting Taliban and al-Qaida remnants along the Pakistan border.

Just as the United States cannot afford to fail in Iraq, NATO cannot afford to fail in Afghanistan. It’s essential that our European partners beef up ISAF with more troops and equipment and start extending security and stability to other parts of the country, especially the restive Pathan regions in the south. In fact, Afghanistan could be the catalyst Europe needs to hasten development of its new Rapid Deployment Force as well as the lift and logistical capacity necessary to project power at long distances.

A better-focused and equipped NATO could also reinforce more vigorous international diplomacy aimed at stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the region. Would Europe have succeeded in getting Iran to open its nuclear programmes to international inspection without a vivid demonstration of US military power next door? It seems unlikely. The same is true of Libya’s decision to renounce WMD and Pakistan’s belated crackdown on A.Q. Khan’s nuclear bazaar. But beyond improving its ability to project force in the region, NATO should work out arrangements with countries in the region, modelled on the Partnership for Peace programme with former Soviet bloc countries, aimed at boosting security cooperation, transparency and confidence-building measures throughout the region. And yes, NATO should develop the capacities that will allow it to strike pre-emptively at nuclear facilities in countries that flout international non-proliferation norms.

In addition, it’s not inconceivable that NATO could take a more active part in stemming conflicts and reinforcing political settlements in the region. For example, it could reinforce efforts to stop civil strife in Sudan by posting forces to protect non-Arabs in the south from slaughter. It could provide security guarantees to facilitate a negotiated, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A new Palestinian state would need help in disarming Hamas and other terrorist groups, while Israel would need reassurance that it would not have to bear the burden of protecting its citizens alone. And NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s openness to a NATO mission in Iraq bodes well both for bolstering a new Iraqi government and for rebuilding Alliance unity.

Obviously, all this would require dramatic changes in European military budgets, the decision-making structure of an expanded NATO, and, above all, the outlook of Europeans themselves. Whereas security during the Cold War meant deterring a Soviet attack on Western Europe, security in the age of terror and jihad requires a more active and preventive approach. Are Europeans ready to trade present risks for future safety? I don’t know, but I hope they will ponder the key lesson Americans learned from 9/11: ignoring gathering threats doesn’t make you any safer.

Yours,
...top…
Will

 
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Dear Will,

I may sound like an old-fashioned “realist”, but I believe that the management of great-power relations remains the basic international challenge. If there is a region with the potential for a great-power conflict escalating into (nuclear) war it is East Asia. The rise of China will surely pose difficult questions for both American policy-makers and their European counterparts. I don’t wish to downplay the fact that Islamist terrorism currently poses the most serious transnational threat. I only want to question the assumption that the Greater Middle East may be to the 21st century what Europe and Asia were to the 20th century.

On the other hand, I am too much influenced by liberal international relations thinking to believe that NATO will inevitably disintegrate as a security institution unless it has an overarching mission in terms of addressing common threats. Such a development, which you seem to expect, would entail a profound shift in strategic preferences within the core members of NATO. So dramatic a change in the domestic coalitions and ideas that favour the preservation of NATO as a security institution with multiple functions would surely only become possible, were the cost of NATO membership to become unacceptably high. Perhaps we should be more concerned about over-stretching the Alliance than about the absence of a unifying mission and a new central front.

Yes, there is a common threat. However, leaving political rhetoric aside, it is a threat of much greater importance to the United States as a “Middle Eastern power” than it is to Europe. That said, the threat posed by Islamist terrorism is, as you pointed out, not exclusively a military challenge. Indeed, I would argue that it is not primarily a military challenge at all. The real question seems to me: what functional contribution can NATO make to a broad strategy of addressing threats by transnational Islamist terrorists and of coping with security risks posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons? So broad a strategy should avoid grouping different challenges and risks into one monolithic threat, as appears to be the case in the current US foreign policy debate.

The focus on the Greater Middle East should not be seen as Alliance therapy. In the absence of a analysis of engagement in the Greater Middle East – one that is based upon strategic priorities and takes into account finite resources and capabilities – your long list of things the Alliance might get involved in could easily lead to over-stretch. NATO remains too important an institution for its existence to be jeopardised by an overly ambitious and costly engagement in the Middle East.

We should be more concerned about over-stretching the Alliance than about the absence of a unifying mission and a new central front

It has almost become a cliché to say that the West cannot afford to fail in Iraq and Afghanistan. But one should be careful about putting NATO’s prestige and credibility on the line. What does failure mean? It is certainly desirable that both countries develop into stable democracies. But this cannot be a yardstick for measuring success and failure in terms of an “exit strategy”. Preventing Afghanistan from again disintegrating into a haven for transnational terrorism is a more limited and realistic goal. Resources are finite and the readiness to incur costs limited – even in the United States. Official rhetoric and actual policies do not match. Deeds speak louder than words when it comes to assessing vital interests. Few NATO member states relish the idea of taking on warlords all over the country, which is presumably what you would expect from European Alliance forces.

You are right to say that your vision requires “dramatic changes” on the European side, including higher military budgets and a different strategic outlook. Yet these changes are no more likely than the required change on the US side that you failed to mention: a willingness to treat European states somewhat better than junior partners whose only option is to jump on the US bandwagon or to risk a confrontation with the dominant partner. The reasons that the United States is eager to share the burden of being a Middle Eastern power are clear. But burden-sharing among Allies involves shared decision-making. But while the tone of US foreign policy might become more amenable under a different President, accepting greater European influence in the Middle East will not come easy to Washington irrespective of who is in the White House.

Pre-emptive strikes “at nuclear facilities that flout international non-proliferation norms” might become necessary at some point. But would any US president be willing to try and build consensus within NATO for such a policy? NATO legitimisation for such a policy is no doubt a major political incentive for entering into such delicate negotiations, but the cost of trying to reach agreement on action against, say, Iran, might prove prohibitively high.

If the United States is successful in fighting the insurgency in Iraq and the political situation there begins to improve and evolve in a positive direction, involving NATO would be politically attractive but of comparatively modest military value. If, however, the situation does not improve, the guerrilla campaign gathers momentum and Iraq disintegrates in civil war, any NATO forces deployed there would have to expect to face combat missions. This is not an attractive scenario, given public sentiment in most member states and it would surely be a recipe for transatlantic strife.

The Greater Middle East is emerging as the focal region of European-US policy coordination. But Greater Middle East initiatives will lead nowhere unless the US administration re-engages in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Pushing for economic modernisation and political liberalisation might in the very long run contribute to drying out the reservoir for new terrorists. In the process, however, we must expect a lot of instability and this may pose even greater challenges and dilemmas for the West. If NATO can contribute to managing those challenges, it should be used to this end. If, for example, military partnerships along the lines of the Partnership for Peace can help socialise Middle Eastern military officers in democratic norms, such initiatives would no doubt bolster the overall strategic approach.

But NATO as a security institution with a growing membership cannot be expected to develop into the central forum for transatlantic policy coordination on the Greater Middle East. Such coordination would surely be easier within functional and smaller groupings involving the European Union as an important actor.

Yours,
...top…
Peter

 
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Dear Peter,

With images of the horrendous carnage of Madrid fresh in my mind, it’s hard to take seriously the idea that “the management of great-power relations” is more important than confronting the new terrorism of mass murder, as well as the dreadful prospect that terrorists could get their hands on mass destruction weapons. The one challenge seems abstract, academic; the other is exploding in our faces.

In any case, the United States has been managing its great-power relationship with China since the Korean War and will go on doing so even as we confront terrorism and jihadi fanaticism. I don’t believe China’s growing geopolitical weight poses a potential threat to America or Europe. The threat, if there is one, arises from the ideology and ambitions of China’s leaders, and the habitual tendency of despotic regimes to conjure up external “threats” to justify their repressive rule. If the liberalising forces now transforming China aren’t suppressed and continue to seep from the economic into the political realm, Sino-US relations are likely to get better, not worse. That’s why, for the present, I’m more worried about Russia’s relapse into authoritarianism than the prospect of war with China.

But let’s get to the crux of our disagreement. You say NATO is too important for “its existence to be jeopardised by an overly ambitious and costly engagement in the Middle East.” Important for what? Does NATO now exist simply for the sake of existing, or does it have a strategic purpose? If the Alliance now confronts challenges of such overriding importance that it cannot commit more resources to stabilising Afghanistan, I would like to know what they are. Without a real mission to counter real threats, NATO risks becoming the institutional equivalent of a child’s security blanket – something that comforts but doesn’t actually ward off dangers.

NATO could provide security guarantees to facilitate a negotiated, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Incidentally, contrary to your suggestion I did not say that NATO’s mission in Afghanistan should be to establish a democratic government. Rather it is to help the central government pacify the country so that it doesn’t dissolve into chaos and once again become a haven for terrorists. Yes, that will probably require taking on some warlords, an idea you say few European countries would relish. And yet it needs to be done if the mission is to be accomplished. There’s no danger of overreach in this instance: Wealthy Europe obviously has ample human and material resources to help the government of an impoverished, backward country extend its writ beyond Kabul and, while you’re at it, help US forces destroy Taliban and al-Qaida remnants along the Pakistan border. This is a question of will, not resources.

Finally, you are right that a new transatlantic project aimed at modernising the Greater Middle East will require a new attitude in the United States as well as in Europe. But Europeans can’t have it both ways: If they don’t want the United States to treat them like “junior partners”, they’ve got to carry a senior partner’s load. That means spending more on defence, developing the new capabilities of high-tech warfare and, probably hardest of all, being willing to use force when our mutual security interests demand it. I recognise that these are big, politically difficult steps. Many European leaders apparently don’t believe the threats arising from the Greater Middle East justify taking them. Maybe they are right, but what happened in Madrid argues powerfully against complacency.

Yours,
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Will

 
 
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Dear Will,

Let’s leave aside the issue of whether the peaceful management of great-power relations and the avoidance of catastrophic greater-power conflict will remain as great a challenge in this century as it was in the last. I only wish that I could share your liberal optimism about the end of great-power rivalry. What I question is the emerging assumption in the US foreign policy debate that the Middle East will become the predominant conflict region of this century – not the fact that we are confronted with a mortal, transnational terrorist threat of unprecedented historic proportions.

This transnational threat does originate in the Middle East, but it has already been present within European societies for some time and cannot be dealt with primarily by military means. As a result, NATO will be of limited value in this struggle. But, as far as most Europeans are concerned, this does not mean that the Alliance will become irrelevant unless it goes into the Middle East. You seem to take it for granted that traditional European security dilemmas and problems will never re-emerge, though, to be fair, you do express some concern about developments in Russia. Maybe they won’t re-emerge. But we cannot be sure. NATO is not “a child’s security” blanket, but a wise insurance policy. Certain risks may not be particularly likely and therefore appear, in your words, “academic”. But it is surely both prudent and rational to insure against them, as long as the premiums are not too high.

Greater Middle East initiatives will lead nowhere unless the US administration re-engages in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

In addition to the structural role the Alliance plays in underwriting European security, as a result of ingrained habits formed by years of military cooperation, the “new” NATO is in many ways a security-services provider. As such, it is also able to make available a pool of forces of coalitions of the willing. If, therefore, NATO can make a useful contribution to resolving or managing specific problems in the Middle East, it should clearly be used. But contingency planning for politically delicate military missions in the region – and one could easily imagine crisis scenarios involving “friendly” countries such as Saudi Arabia and/or Pakistan – is one thing. Elevating the importance of the Greater Middle East to the Alliance so that it becomes NATO’s new central front and raison d’être is another.

In the case of Afghanistan, there is simply no denying the fact that no member of NATO – not even the United States – is willing to devote the human and material resources necessary to get the job done. Well-meant calls for ambitious undertakings, which ignore political constraints and different strategic perspectives, are doomed to end in frustration and irritation.

Nevertheless, I think that we agree that both within NATO and, more likely, in other settings, a sustained transatlantic dialogue about strategic priorities and possible common policies in the Greater Middle East is urgently needed.

Yours,
...top…
Peter

 
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Dear Peter,

I don’t assume the end of great-power rivalry. It’s not inconceivable that a new strain of pan-Slav nationalism could take hold in Russia, perhaps prompting an aggressive bid by Moscow to absorb parts of the old Soviet empire. This is a worst-case scenario, but with liberalism seemingly in retreat in Russia now, it cannot be entirely ruled out so by all means, let’s preserve NATO as an insurance policy.

What’s puzzling, however, is the argument that such purely conjectural dangers should take precedence over the unmistakable threats we face right here and now. NATO is a military alliance formed to protect its members against armed attacks and intimidation. Three NATO members have now been attacked by a global terrorist network rooted in the Middle East and Islamic extremism. Either NATO should develop the plans, capacities and will to combat this menace effectively, or it should give up any pretence of remaining a true mutual-defence pact.

The notion that NATO could become a pool from which members could draw military assets or form “coalitions of the willing” seems fanciful given the absence of a political consensus about the purposes for which those assets should be used. More likely, it would devolve into a transatlantic security forum or perhaps a predominantly European framework for security integration. In either case, that would spell an end to NATO as we knew it – the potent American-European partnership, based on a clear and unambiguous mission, that underpinned the West’s successful Cold War strategy and a dramatic expansion of liberal democracy.

We agree that terrorism cannot be defeated by military means alone. But some tasks – denying terrorists safe havens in failed or rogue states, detecting and destroying terror cells wherever they may be plotting to do us harm, keeping the peace and nation-building in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, interdicting the transport of nuclear and other dangerous materials – ineluctably involve military force. Afghanistan does pose a crucial test. You assert that neither the United States nor European members of NATO are willing to devote the resources to get the job done. Shall we then withdraw and hope for the best? Is Osama bin Laden right about the irresolution of the democratic West?

Without a real mission to counter real threats, NATO risks becoming the institutional equivalent of a child’s security blanket

Lurking just below the surface of today’s transatlantic debates on terrorism, Iraq and Middle East transformation are mostly unstated fears about each other. Europeans fear that America will drag them into unnecessary fights; Americans fear that Europeans don’t have the stomach for necessary fights. I do agree with you that a candid transatlantic dialogue is urgently needed to dispel both fears and forge a more effective, common response to the new dangers we face.

Yours,
...top…
Will

 
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Dear Will,

You rightly mention fears lurking just below the surface of the transatlantic debate. They seem to be the current manifestation of what academics have called the “alliance security dilemma”. On the one hand, states belonging to an alliance fear that their allies may abandon them in their moment of need. On the other, they themselves are afraid of becoming entrapped in conflicts they do not consider to be in their own vital interests. And the Iraq War stirred up some fear of entrapment in Europe – and created serious doubts about the strategic wisdom of this US administration and its priorities at a time when global Islamist terrorism is, no doubt about it, the clear and present danger.

Again, I do not believe that the “old” NATO based on one overriding geographically focused mission can be resurrected. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, NATO did invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, yet no member state interpreted this action as obliging it to provide unconditional military support. Moreover, as you will recall, Washington clearly preferred to build a coalition of the willing for its war on terror to risking becoming entangled in Alliance decision-making.

NATO is not a “child’s security blanket”, but a wise insurance policy

I have not advocated and do not advocate a NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan. However, I don’t see how the mismatch between high-flying rhetoric and actual policies can be bridged. And I’ve been unable to detect any evidence to the effect that the stabilisation of Afghanistan is a top priority for Washington. As a result, I would be cautious about the extent to which we put NATO`s credibility and prestige on the line in this operation. More than a decade ago, the United Nations was strongly (and wrongly) criticised and subsequently held responsible in the United States for the failure of the international community’s intervention in Somalia. This contributed to further erosion of support for the United Nations in the United States. For the sake of NATO and the transatlantic relationship I hope that the Alliance is able to avoid a similar fate in Afghanistan.

Yours,
...top…
Peter

depuis http://www.stratfor.biz une étonnante analyse du Dr. George Friedman
——
U.S. and Iran: Beneath the Roiled Surface
June 23, 2004   2137 GMT

By George Friedman

We are in a pattern of escalating confrontation between Iran and the United States and its allies. Two issues have surfaced. There is the question of Iran’s nuclear program. And there is the more urgent question of Iran’s capture of three British patrol boats along the Iraq-Iran frontier. Neither of these surface issues is trivial, but the underlying issues are far more significant. The fact that they have surfaced indicates how serious the underlying questions are, and points to serious tensions between the Iranians and the United States.

Iran has historically faced two threats. Russia has pressed it from the north; during and after World War II, the Soviets occupied a substantial part of Iran, as did the British. The other threat has come from the west—from Iraq, from its predecessor states or from states that have occupied Iraq, including Britain. The collapse of the Soviet Union has gone a long way toward securing Iran’s northern frontier. In fact, the instability to Iran’s north has created opportunities for it to extend its influence in that direction.

Iraq, however, has remained a threat. Iraq’s defeat in Desert Storm decreased the threat, with the weakening of Iraq’s armed forces and constant patrolling of Iraqi skies by U.S. and British warplanes. But what Iran wanted most to see—the collapse of the hated Saddam Hussein regime and its replacement by a government at least neutral toward Iran and preferably under Iranian influence—did not materialize. One of the primary reasons the United States did not advance to Baghdad in 1991 was the fear that an Iraqi collapse would increase Iran’s power and make it the dominant force in the Persian Gulf.

Iran Develops a Strategy

Subsequently, Iran’s goals were simple: First, Iraq should never pose a threat to Iran; it never wanted to be invaded again by Iraq. Second, Iran should be in a position to shape Iraqi behavior in order to guarantee that it would not be a threat. Iran was not in a position to act on this goal itself. What it needed was to induce outside powers—the United States in particular—to act in a manner that furthered Iranian national interests. Put somewhat differently, Iran expected the United States to invade Iraq or topple Hussein by other means. It intended to position itself to achieve its primary national security goals when that happened.

From the end of Desert Storm to the fall of Baghdad, Iran systematically and patiently pursued its goal. Following Desert Storm, Iran began a program designed both to covertly weaken Hussein’s regime and to strengthen Iranian influence in Iraq—focusing on Iraq’s Shiite population. If Hussein fell under his own weight, if he were overthrown in a U.S.-sponsored coup or if the United States invaded Iraq, Iran intended to be in a position to neutralize the Iraqi threat.

There were three parts to the Iranian strategy:

1. Do nothing to discourage the United States from taking action against Iraq. In other words: Mitigate threats from Iran so the United States would not leave Hussein in place again because it feared the consequences of a power vacuum that Iran could fill.

2. Create an information environment that would persuade the United States to topple Hussein. The Iranians understood the analytic methods of U.S. policy makers and the intelligence processes of the Central Intelligence Agency. Iran created a program designed to strengthen the position of those in the United States who believed that Iraq was a primary threat, while providing the United States with intelligence that maximized the perception of Hussein as a threat. This program preceded the 2003 invasion and the Bush administration as well. Desert Fox—the air campaign launched by the Clinton administration in December 1998—was shaped by the same information environment as the 2003 invasion. The Iranians understood the nature of the intelligence channels the United States used, and fed information through those that intensified the American threat perception.

3. Prepare for the fall of Hussein by creating an alternative force in Iraq whose primary loyalty was to Iran. The Shiite community—long oppressed by Hussein and sharing religious values with the Iranian government—had many of the same interests as Iran. Iranian intelligence services had conducted a long, patient program to organize the Iraqi Shiite community and prepare the Shia to be the dominant political force after the fall of Hussein.

As it became increasingly apparent in 2002 that the United States was searching for a follow-on strategy after Afghanistan, the Iranians recognized their opportunity. They knew they could not manipulate the United States into invading Iraq—or provide justification for it—but they also knew they could do two things. The first was to reduce the threat the United States felt from Iran. The second was to increase, to the extent possible, the intelligence available to those in the Bush administration who supported the invasion.

They accomplished the first with formal meetings in Geneva and back-channel discussions around the world. The message they sent was that Iran would do nothing to hinder a U.S. invasion, nor would it seek to take advantage of it on a direct state basis. The second process was facilitated by filling the channels between Iraqi Shiite exiles and the United States with apparently solid information—much of it true—about conditions in Iraq. This is where Ahmed Chalabi played a role.

In our opinion, Iranian intelligence knew two things that it left out of the channels. The first was that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs had been abandoned. The United States did not invade Iraq because of WMD, but used them as a justification. The Iranians knew none would be found, but were pleased that the United States would use this as a justification. The second thing Iran kept from the United States was that Hussein and his key aides did not expect to defeat the United States in a conventional war, but had planned a guerrilla war to follow the fall of Baghdad.

The Iranians had a specific reason for leaving these things out. They knew the Americans would win the conventional war. They did not want the United States to have an easy time occupying Iraq. The failure to find WMD would create a crisis in the United States. The failure to anticipate a Baathist guerrilla war would create a crisis in Iraq. Iran wanted both to happen.

The worse the situation became in Iraq, the less the United States prepared for the real postwar environment—and the more the credibility of President George W. Bush was questioned, the more eager the United States would be in seeking allies in Iraq. The only ally available—apart from the marginal Kurds—was the Shiite majority. As the situation deteriorated in the summer and fall of 2003, the United States urgently needed an accommodation with Iraq’s Shia. The idea of a Shiite rising cutting lines of supply to Kuwait while there was a Sunni rising drove all U.S. thinking. It also pushed the United States toward an accommodation with the Shia—and that meant an accommodation with Iran.

Such an accommodation was reached in the fall of 2003. The United States accepted that the government would be dominated by the Shia, and that the government would have substantial Iranian influence. During the Ramadan offensive, when the lid appeared to be flying off in Iraq, the United States was prepared to accommodate almost any proposal. The Iranians agreed to back-burner—but not to shut down—their nuclear proposal, and quiet exchanges of prisoners were carried out. Iran swapped al Qaeda prisoners for anti-Iranian prisoners held by the United States.

Things Fall Apart

Two things happened after the capture of Hussein in mid-December 2003. The first was that the Iranians started to make clear that they—not the Americans—were defining the depth of the relationship. When the United States offered to send representatives to Iran after an earthquake later in December, the Iranians rejected the offer, saying it was too early in the relationship. On many levels, the Iranians believed they had the Americans where they wanted them and slowly increased pressure for concessions.

Paradoxically, the United States started to suffer buyer’s remorse on the deal it made. As the guerrilla threat subsided in January and February, the Americans realized that the deal did not make nearly as much sense in January as it had in November. Rather than moving directly toward a Shiite government, the United States began talking to the Sunni sheikhs and thinking of an interim government in which Kurds or Sunnis would have veto power.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani—who is an Iranian—began to signal the United States that trouble was brewing in Iraq. He staged major demonstrations in January, calling for direct elections—his code words for a Shiite government. The United States, no longer pressured and growing uneasy about the enormous power of the Iranians, did two things: They pressed ahead with plans for the interim government, and started leaking that they knew the game the Iranians were playing. The release of the news that Chalabi was an Iranian agent was part of this process.

The Iranians and al-Sistani—seeing the situation slipping out of control—tried to convince the Americans that they were willing to send Iraq up in flames. During the Sunni rising in Al Fallujah, they permitted Muqtada al-Sadr to rise as well. The United States went to al-Sistani for help, but he refused to lift a finger for days. Al-Sistani figured the United States would reverse its political plans and make concessions to buy Shiite support.

Just the opposite happened. The United States came to the conclusion that the Shia and Iran were completely unreliable—and that they were no longer necessary. Rather than negotiate with the Shia, the Americans negotiated with the Sunni guerrillas in Al Fallujah and reached an agreement with them. The United States also pressed ahead with a political solution for the interim government that left the Shia on the margins.

The breakdown in U.S.-Iranian relations dates to this moment. The United States essentially moved to reverse alliances. In addition, it made clear to al-Sistani and others that they could be included in the coalition—in a favored position. In other words, the United States reversed the process by trying to drive a wedge between the Iranians and the Iraqi Shia. And it appeared to be working, with al-Sistani and al-Sadr seeming to shift positions so as not to be excluded.

Iran Roils the Surface

It was at that moment that the Iranians saw more than a decade of patient strategy going out the window. They took two steps. First, they created a crisis with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over nuclear weapons that was certain to draw U.S. attention. Second, they seized the British patrol boats. Their point? To let the United States know that it is on the verge of a major crisis with Iran.

The United States knows this, of course. Military planners are updating plans on Iran as we speak. The crisis is avoidable—and we would expect it to wax and wane. But the fundamental question is this: Are American and Iranian national interests compatible and, if they are not, is either country in a position at this moment to engage in a crisis or a war? Iran is calculating that it can engage in a crisis more effectively than the United States. The United States does not want a crisis with Iran before the elections—and certainly not over WMD.

But there is another problem. The Americans cannot let Iran get nuclear weapons, and the Iranians know it. They assume that U.S. intelligence has a clear picture of how far weapons development has gone. But following the U.S. intelligence failure on WMD in Iraq—ironically aided by Iran—will any policy maker trust the judgment of U.S. intelligence on how far Iran’s development has gone? Is the U.S. level of sensitivity much lower than Iran thinks? And since Israel is in the game—and it certainly cannot accept an Iranian nuclear capability—and threatens a pre-emptive strike with its own nuclear weapons, will the United States be forced to act when it does not want to?

Like other major crises in history, the situation is not really under anyone’s control. It can rapidly spin out of control and—even if it is in control—it can become a very nasty crisis. This is not a minor misunderstanding, but a clash of fundamental national interests that will not be easy to reconcile.

Video interview with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer,
NATO Secretary General

http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2004/s040614a.htm
Q: What will NATO decide about Iraq?
de Hoop Scheffer: Well, that’s a very important question and a sensitive question. You know that Allies… Allied Heads of State and Government are meeting hours before the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq. Let’s take the Security Council resolution which has been adopted last week as a starting point. Let’s not redo the discussion we have had in the run-up to the war in Iraq. I think if, on the basis of that resolution, the Iraqi government… the UN or the Iraqi government would come to NATO and ask NATO if we could do anything, then NATO should not turn a blind eye to such a request from what is a legitimate and sovereign Iraqi government.
I cannot, let’s say, prejudge, of course, the outcome of this discussion, but again I think that the Heads of State and Government will certainly discuss this, but I must add the key for the answer to this question you’re asking me is in fact in Baghdad, because after the 30th of June it will be up to the Iraqis and not up to anybody else to decide the fate of their country.
Q: Mr. Secretary General, thank you very much.
de Hoop Scheffer: Thank you.

Wolfowitz Says Iraq Stay Could Last Years

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61943-2004Jun22.html?referrer=email
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A16
The U.S. military could remain in Iraq for years, but with the passage of time it should be able to step back into more of a supporting role for Iraqi security forces, the Pentagon’s number two official said yesterday in a hearing notable for sharp partisan exchanges.
“I think it’s entirely possible” that U.S. troops could be stationed in Iraq for years, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee. But, he added, as the Iraqi army and new national guard develop, “we will be able to let them be in the front lines and us be in a supporting position.”
Wolfowitz said it is possible that U.S. troops could be used to enforce Iraqi martial law after the partial transfer of power a week from now. Ayad Alawi, Iraq’s interim prime minister, has said martial law is possible to crack down on insurgents.
Helping impose martial law, Wolfowitz said, “might actually be something that we might mutually agree was necessary to bring order in a particularly difficult place.”
But much of the hearing was devoted to a series of unusually pointed discussions between Wolfowitz and Rep. Ike Skelton, a centrist Missourian who is the committee’s senior Democrat.
Skelton told Wolfowitz he senses two Iraqs: “One is the optimistic Iraq that you describe, and the other Iraq is the one that I see every morning, with the violence, the deaths of soldiers and Marines.” He added, with some emotion: “I must tell you, it breaks my heart a little bit more every day.”
Skelton also was dismissive of White House comments about “staying the course” in Iraq. “I don’t think anyone here questions your resolve or questions the resolve of the president to succeed in Iraq,” he said. “But there’s a difference between the resolve on the one hand and competence on the other.” He said he now fears that the United States is descending into “a security quagmire” in Iraq.
The two men went back and forth several times.
“From your description, Mr. Secretary, I don’t see an end in sight,” Skelton said. “We’re stuck.”
“We’re not stuck, Mr. Skelton,” Wolfowitz replied. He said that the U.S. strategy in Iraq clearly is to develop Iraqi forces that can take over security from U.S. and allied troops.
At another point, Skelton said he did not see a plan to bring about success in Iraq. He added, “We broke it—we must do our best to fix it.”
Wolfowitz shot back, “We didn’t break Iraq. Saddam Hussein broke Iraq.” The Pentagon official, just back from a four-day visit to Iraq, said, “It is going to be a big job to repair it, but I feel much more confident than before this trip, after spending many hours with the new prime minister and members of his government, that there is an Iraqi team ready to take charge on July 1st and committed to fixing that damage.”
As the hearing went on, Wolfowitz sought to temper his initial presentation. “Maybe it’s optimistic compared to the total gloom and doom that one otherwise hears, but I in no way mean to minimize the security problem,” he said. “I agree with you, it is the obstacle to all the other progress that has been made.” He said he is worried especially about the next six months, as insurgents seek to derail the Iraqi elections being planned for January 2005.
Wolfowitz also said the media are part of the problem in Iraq. “Frankly, part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors,” he said.
Reporters in Iraq recently have restricted their movements, sometimes at the recommendation of U.S. officials, because of widespread violence.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Allaoui appelle l’Otan à la rescousse

http://www.lesoir.be/rubriques/mond/page_5179_229709.shtml
Le Premier ministre irakien Allaoui a envoyé une lettre à l’Otan demandant l’aide de l’organisation pour la formation des forces de sécurité de son pays, mais sans réclamer l’envoi de troupes alliées. Ce qui va toutefois contraindre l’Alliance à se pencher rapidement sur cette requête.
M. Allaoui a adressé une lettre à l’Alliance demandant l’assistance de l’Otan, en matière de formation et d’autres formes d’assistance technique, a affirmé un responsable de l’OTAN s’exprimant sous le couvert de l’anonymat. Il n’est pas fait mention dans la lettre d’une demande en termes d’envoi de soldats, a-t-il précisé.
  La demande est parvenue à l’Otan lundi et a été transmise aux différentes capitales pour examen par le secrétaire général de l’Otan, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, a ajouté le responsable. La prochaine étape est de consulter les nations membres, a-t-il encore affirmé.
  La demande irakienne intervient à quelques jours du sommet des chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de l’Alliance atlantique, les 28 et 29 juin à Istanbul (Turquie), à la veille du transfert prévu de souveraineté en Irak. Le président américain George W. Bush avait récemment suggéré que l’OTAN puisse peut-être aider à entraîner les forces de sécurité irakiennes.
  Je ne peux pas anticiper de décision mais les alliés vont clairement examiner la requête et auront une discussion approfondie sur ce sujet à Istanbul, a souligné le responsable de l’Alliance. Les Etats-Unis n’ont jamais fait mystère de leur volonté de voir l’Otan jouer un rôle en Irak, mais ils se sont heurtés jusqu’ici aux réticences exprimées par certains de leurs partenaires, comme l’Allemagne, la France et la Belgique qui formaient l’an dernier le “camp de la paix” opposé à l’intervention américano-britannique en Irak.
  Washington a déjà indiqué qu’il ne s’attendait pas à des renforts en soldats par le biais de l’Otan, étant donné que 16 des 26 Etats membres sont déjà militairement présents en Irak. En outre, les pays de l’Alliance opposés à la guerre l’année dernière, France et Allemagne en tête, ont refusé d’envoyer des troupes. La nécessité de mettre les services de sécurité irakiens à la hauteur de la tâche, notamment face aux attaques des insurgés, est l’une des priorités des Américains qui, dans l’attente, maintiennent 138.000 soldats dans le pays.
  Le Premier ministre irakien a affirmé de son côté dimanche que tous les services de sécurité du pays seraient mobilisés pour enrayer la vague de violence et annoncé la création de forces spéciales de l’armée pour combattre la guérilla. Le “camp de la paix”, qui ne souhaite pas renouveller les déchirements qu’avait subis l’Otan l’an dernier, estime toutefois que l’entraînement des forces de sécurité irakiennes n’est pas nécessairement une tâche pour l’Alliance dans son ensemble, mais plutôt pour des pays membres pris individuellement.
  L’Otan est considéré dans la région comme une succursale du Pentagone, a fait observer un diplomate en rappelant les objections déjà exprimées par la France et l’Allemagne. L’Otan n’a pas vocation à intervenir en Irak et une ingérence de l’Alliance dans ce pays comporterait de grands risques, avait récemment affirmé le président français Jacques Chirac.

  Plan B
  By Seymour M. Hersh
  The New Yorker
  Monday 21 June 2004
As June 30th approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds.
  In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been among the war’s most enthusiastic supporters, began warning the Administration that the American-led occupation would face a heightened insurgency - a campaign of bombings and assassinations - later that summer. Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. The Israelis urged the United States to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border, at whatever cost.
  The border stayed open, however. “The Administration wasn’t ignoring the Israeli intelligence about Iran,” Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has close ties to the White House, explained. “There’s no question that we took no steps last summer to close the border, but our attitude was that it was more useful for Iraqis to have contacts with ordinary Iranians coming across the border, and thousands were coming across every day - for instance, to make pilgrimages.” He added, “The questions we confronted were ‘Is the trade-off worth it? Do we want to isolate the Iraqis?’ Our answer was that as long as the Iranians were not picking up guns and shooting at us, it was worth the price.”
  Clawson said, “The Israelis disagreed quite vigorously with us last summer. Their concern was very straightforward - that the Iranians would create social and charity organizations in Iraq and use them to recruit people who would engage in armed attacks against Americans.”
  The warnings of increased violence proved accurate. By early August, the insurgency against the occupation had exploded, with bombings in Baghdad, at the Jordanian Embassy and the United Nations headquarters, that killed forty-two people. A former Israeli intelligence officer said that Israel’s leadership had concluded by then that the United States was unwilling to confront Iran; in terms of salvaging the situation in Iraq, he said, “it doesn’t add up. It’s over. Not militarily - the United States cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq - but politically.”
  Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who until last year served on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, told me that late last summer “the Administration had a chance to turn it around after it was clear that ‘Mission Accomplished’” - a reference to Bush’s May speech - “was premature. The Bush people could have gone to their allies and got more boots on the ground. But the neocons were dug in - ‘We’re doing this on our own.’”
  Leverett went on, “The President was only belatedly coming to the understanding that he had to either make a strategic change or, if he was going to insist on unilateral control, get tougher and find the actual insurgency.” The Administration then decided, Leverett said, to “deploy the Guantánamo model in Iraq” - to put aside its rules of interrogation. That decision failed to stop the insurgency and eventually led to the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison.
  In early November, the President received a grim assessment from the C.I.A.‘s station chief in Baghdad, who filed a special field appraisal, known internally as an Aardwolf, warning that the security situation in Iraq was nearing collapse. The document, as described by Knight-Ridder, said that “none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country” or to hold elections and draft a constitution.
  A few days later, the Administration, rattled by the violence and the new intelligence, finally attempted to change its go-it-alone policy, and set June 30th as the date for the handover of sovereignty to an interim government, which would allow it to bring the United Nations into the process. “November was one year before the Presidential election,” a U.N. consultant who worked on Iraqi issues told me. “They panicked and decided to share the blame with the U.N. and the Iraqis.”
  A former Administration official who had supported the war completed a discouraging tour of Iraq late last fall. He visited Tel Aviv afterward and found that the Israelis he met with were equally discouraged. As they saw it, their warnings and advice had been ignored, and the American war against the insurgency was continuing to founder. “I spent hours talking to the senior members of the Israeli political and intelligence community,” the former official recalled. “Their concern was ‘You’re not going to get it right in Iraq, and shouldn’t we be planning for the worst-case scenario and how to deal with it?’”
  Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that America had lost in Iraq; according to an American close to Barak, he said that Israel “had learned that there’s no way to win an occupation.” The only issue, Barak told Cheney, “was choosing the size of your humiliation.” Cheney did not respond to Barak’s assessment. (Cheney’s office declined to comment.)
  In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Several officials depicted Sharon’s decision, which involves a heavy financial commitment, as a potentially reckless move that could create even more chaos and violence as the insurgency in Iraq continues to grow.
  Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel’s view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad, Israel’s clandestine foreign-intelligence service, who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not carry Israeli passports.
  Asked to comment, Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said, “The story is simply untrue and the relevant governments know it’s untrue.” Kurdish officials declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the State Department.
  However, a senior C.I.A. official acknowledged in an interview last week that the Israelis were indeed operating in Kurdistan. He told me that the Israelis felt that they had little choice: “They think they have to be there.” Asked whether the Israelis had sought approval from Washington, the official laughed and said, “Do you know anybody who can tell the Israelis what to do? They’re always going to do what is in their best interest.” The C.I.A. official added that the Israeli presence was widely known in the American intelligence community.
  The Israeli decision to seek a bigger foothold in Kurdistan - characterized by the former Israeli intelligence officer as “Plan B” - has also raised tensions between Israel and Turkey. It has provoked bitter statements from Turkish politicians and, in a major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran, Syria, and Turkey, all of which have significant Kurdish minorities. In early June, Intel Brief, a privately circulated intelligence newsletter produced by Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, and Philip Giraldi, who served as the C.I.A.‘s deputy chief of base in Istanbul in the late nineteen-eighties, said:
  Turkish sources confidentially report that the Turks are increasingly concerned by the expanding Israeli presence in Kurdistan and alleged encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state. . . . The Turks note that the large Israeli intelligence operations in Northern Iraq incorporate anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity, including support to Iranian and Syrian Kurds who are in opposition to their respective governments.
  In the years since the first Gulf War, Iraq’s Kurds, aided by an internationally enforced no-fly zone and by a U.N. mandate providing them with a share of the country’s oil revenues, have managed to achieve a large measure of independence in three northern Iraqi provinces. As far as most Kurds are concerned, however, historic “Kurdistan” extends well beyond Iraq’s borders, encompassing parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. All three countries fear that Kurdistan, despite public pledges to the contrary, will declare its independence from the interim Iraqi government if conditions don’t improve after June 30th.
  Israeli involvement in Kurdistan is not new. Throughout the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Israel actively supported a Kurdish rebellion against Iraq, as part of its strategic policy of seeking alliances with non-Arabs in the Middle East. In 1975, the Kurds were betrayed by the United States, when Washington went along with a decision by the Shah of Iran to stop supporting Kurdish aspirations for autonomy in Iraq.
  Betrayal and violence became the norm in the next two decades. Inside Iraq, the Kurds were brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein, who used airpower and chemical weapons against them. In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., initiated a campaign of separatist violence in Turkey that lasted fifteen years; more than thirty thousand people, most of them Kurds, were killed. The Turkish government ruthlessly crushed the separatists, and eventually captured the P.K.K.‘s leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Last month, the P.K.K., now known as the Kongra-Gel, announced that it was ending a five-year unilateral ceasefire and would begin targeting Turkish citizens once again.
  The Iraqi Kurdish leadership was furious when, early this month, the United States acceded to a U.N. resolution on the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty that did not affirm the interim constitution that granted the minority Kurds veto power in any permanent constitution. Kurdish leaders immediately warned President Bush in a letter that they would not participate in a new Shiite-controlled government unless they were assured that their rights under the interim constitution were preserved. “The people of Kurdistan will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq,” the letter said.
  There are fears that the Kurds will move to seize the city of Kirkuk, together with the substantial oil reserves in the surrounding region. Kirkuk is dominated by Arab Iraqis, many of whom were relocated there, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, as part of Saddam Hussein’s campaign to “Arabize” the region, but the Kurds consider Kirkuk and its oil part of their historic homeland. “If Kirkuk is threatened by the Kurds, the Sunni insurgents will move in there, along with the Turkomen, and there will be a bloodbath,” an American military expert who is studying Iraq told me. “And, even if the Kurds do take Kirkuk, they can’t transport the oil out of the country, since all of the pipelines run through the Sunni-Arab heartland.”
  A top German national-security official said in an interview that “an independent Kurdistan with sufficient oil would have enormous consequences for Syria, Iran, and Turkey” and would lead to continuing instability in the Middle East - no matter what the outcome in Iraq is. There is also a widespread belief, another senior German official said, that some elements inside the Bush Administration - he referred specifically to the faction headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - would tolerate an independent Kurdistan. This, the German argued, would be a mistake. “It would be a new Israel - a pariah state in the middle of hostile nations.”
  A declaration of independence would trigger a Turkish response - and possibly a war - and also derail what has been an important alliance for Israel. Turkey and Israel have become strong diplomatic and economic partners in the past decade. Thousands of Israelis travel to Turkey every year as tourists. Turkish opposition to the Iraq war has strained the relationship; still, Turkey remains oriented toward the West and, despite the victory of an Islamic party in national elections in 2002, relatively secular. It is now vying for acceptance in the European Union. In contrast, Turkey and Syria have been at odds for years, at times coming close to open confrontation, and Turkey and Iran have long been regional rivals. One area of tension between them is the conflict between Turkey’s pro-Western stand and Iran’s rigid theocracy. But their mutual wariness of the Kurds has transcended these divisions.
  A European foreign minister, in a conversation last month, said that the “blowing up” of Israel’s alliance with Turkey would be a major setback for the region. He went on, “To avoid chaos, you need the neighbors to work as one common entity.”
  The Israelis, however, view the neighborhood, with the exception of Kurdistan, as hostile. Israel is convinced that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, and that, with Syria’s help, it is planning to bolster Palestinian terrorism as Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.
  Iraqi Shiite militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr, the former American intelligence official said, are seen by the Israeli leadership as “stalking horses” for Iran - owing much of their success in defying the American-led coalition to logistical and communications support and training provided by Iran. The former intelligence official said, “We began to see telltale signs of organizational training last summer. But the White House didn’t want to hear it: ‘We can’t take on another problem right now. We can’t afford to push Iran to the point where we’ve got to have a showdown.’”
  Last summer, according to a document I obtained, the Bush Administration directed the Marines to draft a detailed plan, called Operation Stuart, for the arrest and, if necessary, assassination of Sadr. But the operation was cancelled, the former intelligence official told me, after it became clear that Sadr had been “tipped off” about the plan. Seven months later, after Sadr spent the winter building support for his movement, the American-led coalition shut down his newspaper, provoking a crisis that Sadr survived with his status enhanced, thus insuring that he will play a major, and unwelcome, role in the political and military machinations after June 30th.
  “Israel’s immediate goal after June 30th is to build up the Kurdish commando units to balance the Shiite militias - especially those which would be hostile to the kind of order in southern Iraq that Israel would like to see,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Of course, if a fanatic Sunni Baathist militia took control - one as hostile to Israel as Saddam Hussein was - Israel would unleash the Kurds on it, too.” The Kurdish armed forces, known as the peshmerga, number an estimated seventy-five thousand troops, a total that far exceeds the known Sunni and Shiite militias.
  The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel’s most secretive commando units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American commando units had been unable to do - penetrate, gather intelligence on, and then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq. (I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) “The feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency,” the former officer said. “But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey.”
  The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said. Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer said, “Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way - as balance against Saddam. It’s Realpolitik.” He added, “By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.” He went on, “What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush Administration.”
  Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for intelligence and operational purposes. Syrian and Lebanese officials believe that Israeli intelligence played a role in a series of violent protests in Syria in mid-March in which Syrian Kurdish dissidents and Syrian troops clashed, leaving at least thirty people dead. (There are nearly two million Kurds living in Syria, which has a population of seventeen million.) Much of the fighting took place in cities along Syria’s borders with Turkey and Kurdish-controlled Iraq. Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, told me that while the disturbances amounted to an uprising by the Kurds against the leadership of Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, his government had evidence that Israel was “preparing the Kurds to fight all around Iraq, in Syria, Turkey, and Iran. They’re being programmed to do commando operations.”
  The top German national-security official told me that he believes that the Bush Administration continually misread Iran. “The Iranians wanted to keep America tied down in Iraq, and to keep it busy there, but they didn’t want chaos,” he said. One of the senior German officials told me, “The critical question is ‘What will the behavior of Iran be if there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to Israel?’ Iran does not want an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier” - that is, a military stronghold - “on its border.”
  Another senior European official said, “The Iranians would do something positive in the south of Iraq if they get something positive in return, but Washington won’t do it. The Bush Administration won’t ask the Iranians for help, and can’t ask the Syrians. Who is going to save the United States?” He added that, at the start of the American invasion of Iraq, several top European officials had told their counterparts in Iran, “You will be the winners in the region.”
  Israel is not alone in believing that Iran, despite its protestations, is secretly hard at work on a nuclear bomb. Early this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is responsible for monitoring nuclear proliferation, issued its fifth quarterly report in a row stating that Iran was continuing to misrepresent its research into materials that could be used for the production of nuclear weapons. Much of the concern centers on an underground enrichment facility at Natanz, two hundred and fifty miles from the Iran-Iraq border, which, during previous I.A.E.A. inspections, was discovered to contain centrifuges showing traces of weapons-grade uranium. The huge complex, which is still under construction, is said to total nearly eight hundred thousand square feet, and it will be sheltered in a few months by a roof whose design allows it to be covered with sand. Once the work is completed, the complex “will be blind to satellites, and the Iranians could add additional floors underground,” an I.A.E.A. official told me. “The question is, will the Israelis hit Iran?”
  Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A. director, has repeatedly stated that his agency has not “seen concrete proof of a military program, so it’s premature to make a judgment on that.” David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who is an expert on nuclear proliferation, buttressed the I.A.E.A. claim. “The United States has no concrete evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,” Albright told me. “It’s just an inference. There’s no smoking gun.” (Last Friday, at a meeting in Vienna, the I.A.E.A. passed a resolution that, while acknowledging some progress, complained that Iran had yet to be as open as it should be, and urgently called upon it to resolve a list of outstanding questions.)
  The I.A.E.A. official told me that the I.A.E.A. leadership has been privately warned by Foreign Ministry officials in Iran that they are “having a hard time getting information” from the hard-line religious and military leaders who run the country. “The Iranian Foreign Ministry tells us, ‘We’re just diplomats, and we don’t know whether we’re getting the whole story from our own people,’” the official said. He noted that the Bush Administration has repeatedly advised the I.A.E.A. that there are secret nuclear facilities in Iran that have not been declared. The Administration will not say more, apparently worried that the information could get back to Iran.
  Patrick Clawson, of the Institute for Near East Policy, provided another explanation for the reluctance of the Bush Administration to hand over specific intelligence. “If we were to identify a site,” he told me, “it’s conceivable that it could be quickly disassembled and the I.A.E.A. inspectors would arrive” - international inspections often take weeks to organize - “and find nothing.” The American intelligence community, already discredited because of its faulty reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, would be criticized anew. “It’s much better,” Clawson said, “to have the I.A.E.A. figure out on its own that there’s a site and then find evidence that there had been enriched material there.”
  Clawson told me that Israel’s overwhelming national-security concern must be Iran. Given that a presence in Kurdistan would give Israel a way to monitor the Iranian nuclear effort, he said, “it would be negligent for the Israelis not to be there.”
  At the moment, the former American senior intelligence official said, the Israelis’ tie to Kurdistan “would be of greater value than their growing alliance with Turkey. ‘We love Turkey but got to keep the pressure on Iran.’” The former Israeli intelligence officer said, “The Kurds were the last surviving group close to the United States with any say in Iraq. The only question was how to square it with Turkey.”
  There may be no way to square it with Turkey. Over breakfast in Ankara, a senior Turkish official explained, “Before the war, Israel was active in Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very dangerous for us, and for them, too. We do not want to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore it.” Then, citing a popular Turkish proverb - “We will burn a blanket to kill a flea” - he said, “We have told the Kurds, ‘We are not afraid of you, but you should be afraid of us.’” (A Turkish diplomat I spoke to later was more direct: “We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey’s good will lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions.”)
  “If you end up with a divided Iraq, it will bring more blood, tears, and pain to the Middle East, and you will be blamed,” the senior Turkish official said. “From Mexico to Russia, everybody will claim that the United States had a secret agenda in Iraq: you came there to break up Iraq. If Iraq is divided, America cannot explain this to the world.” The official compared the situation to the breakup of Yugoslavia, but added, “In the Balkans, you did not have oil.” He said, “The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country independence everybody will want it.” If that happens, he said, “Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis.”
  In Ankara, another senior Turkish official explained that his government had “openly shared its worries” about the Israeli military activities inside Kurdistan with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “They deny the training and the purchase of property and claim it’s not official but done by private persons. Obviously, our intelligence community is aware that it was not so. This policy is not good for America, Iraq, or Israel and the Jews.”
  Turkey’s increasingly emphatic and public complaints about Israel’s missile attacks on the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip is another factor in the growing tensions between the allies. On May 26th, Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, announced at a news conference in Ankara that the Turkish government was bringing its Ambassador in Israel home for consultations on how to revive the Middle East peace process. He also told the Turkish parliament that the government was planning to strengthen its ties to the Palestinian Authority, and, in conversations with Middle Eastern diplomats in the past month, he expressed grave concern about Israel. In one such talk, one diplomat told me, Gul described Israeli activities, and the possibility of an independent Kurdistan, as “presenting us with a choice that is not a real choice - between survival and alliance.”
  A third Turkish official told me that the Israelis were “talking to us in order to appease our concern. They say, ‘We aren’t doing anything in Kurdistan to undermine your interests. Don’t worry.’” The official added, “If it goes out publicly what they’ve been doing, it will put your government and our government in a difficult position. We can tolerate ‘Kurdistan’ if Iraq is intact, but nobody knows the future - not even the Americans.”
  A former White House official depicted the Administration as eager - almost desperate - late this spring to install an acceptable new interim government in Iraq before President Bush’s declared June 30th deadline for the transfer of sovereignty. The Administration turned to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy, to “put together something by June 30th - just something that could stand up” through the Presidential election, the former official said. Brahimi was given the task of selecting, with Washington’s public approval, the thirty-one members of Iraq’s interim government. Nevertheless, according to press reports, the choice of Iyad Allawi as interim Prime Minister was a disappointment to Brahimi.
  The White House has yet to deal with Allawi’s past. His credentials as a neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies - Saddam became President in 1979 - is much less well known. “Allawi helped Saddam get to power,” an American intelligence officer told me. “He was a very effective operator and a true believer.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, “Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug.”
  Early this year, one of Allawi’s former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted Allawi as a “big husky man . . . who carried a gun on his belt and frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students.” Allawi’s medical degree, she wrote, “was conferred upon him by the Baath party.” Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its intelligence agency, until 1975.
  “If you’re asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does,” Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A. officer, said. “He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff.” A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi’s personal history, told me early this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat “hit team” that sought out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital stay.
  The Saban Center’s Flynt Leverett said of the transfer of sovereignty, “If it doesn’t work, there is no fallback - nothing.” The former senior American intelligence official told me, similarly, that “the neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of the hat” in Iraq. “What’s the plan? They say, ‘We don’t need it. Democracy is strong enough. We’ll work it out.’”
  Middle East diplomats and former C.I.A. operatives who now consult in Baghdad have told me that many wealthy Iraqi businessmen and their families have deserted Baghdad in recent weeks in anticipation of continued, and perhaps heightened, suicide attacks and terror bombings after June 30th. “We’ll see Christians, Shiites, and Sunnis getting out,” Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, reported. “What the resistance is doing is targeting the poor people who run the bureaucracy - those who can’t afford to pay for private guards. A month ago, friends of mine who are important landowners in Iraq came to Baghdad to do business. The cost of one day’s security was about twelve thousand dollars.”
  Whitley Bruner, a retired intelligence officer who was a senior member of the C.I.A.‘s task force on Iraq a decade ago, said that the new interim government in Iraq is urgently seeking ways to provide affordable security for second-tier officials - the men and women who make the government work. In early June, two such officials - Kamal Jarrah, an Education Ministry official, and Bassam Salih Kubba, who was serving as deputy foreign minister - were assassinated by unidentified gunmen outside their homes. Neither had hired private guards. Bruner, who returned from Baghdad earlier this month, said that he was now working to help organize Iraqi companies that could provide high-quality security that Iraqis could afford. “It’s going to be a hot summer,” Bruner said. “A lot of people have decided to get to Lebanon, Jordan, or the Gulf and wait this one out.”
  Go to Original
  Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq
  By Dexter Filkins
  New York Times
  Sunday 20 June 20 2004
  Makhmur, Iraq - Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.
  The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.
  The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy.
  In Baghdad, American officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region. The Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands, but they want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability.
  But thousands of Kurds appear to be ignoring the American orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at the camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands.
  The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps.
  American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.
  “The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us,” said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. “They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, ‘You don’t own anything here anymore.’ ”
  Ten years ago, Mr. Qadam said, Iraqi officials forced him to turn over his home in the southern city of Diwaniya and move north to the formerly Kurdish village of Khanaqaan, where he received a free parcel of farmland. Now, like the thousands of Arabs encamped in the parched plains northeast of Baghdad, Mr. Qadam, his wife and three children have no home to return to.
  The push by the Kurds into the formerly Arab-held lands, while driven by the returnees themselves, appears to be backed by the Kurdish government, which has long advocated a resettlement of the disputed area. Despite an explicit prohibition in the Iraqi interim constitution, Kurdish officials are setting up offices and exercising governmental authority in the newly settled areas.
  The shift in population is raising fears in Iraq that the Kurds are trying to expand their control over Iraqi territory at the same time they are suggesting that they may pull out of the Iraqi government.
  American officials say they are trying to fend off pressure from Kurds to move their people back into the area. “There is a lot of pressure in the Kurdish political context to bring the people who were forced out back into their hometowns,” said a senior American official in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “What we have tried to do so far, through moral suasion, is to get the Kurds to recognize that if they put too much pressure on Kirkuk and other places south of the Green Line, they could spark regional and national instability.”
  But local occupation officials appear in some areas to have accepted the flow of Kurds back to their homes. According to minutes of a recent meeting of occupation officials and relief workers in the northern city of Erbil, an American official said the Americans would no longer oppose Kurds’ crossing the Green Line, as long as the areas they were moving into were uncontested.
  And Kurdish and American officials say the occupation authority has been financing projects here in Makhmur, a formerly Arab area recently resettled by Kurds.
  The biggest potential flash point is Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. Kurdish leaders want to make the city, with its vast oil deposits, the Kurdish regional capital and resettle it with Kurds who were driven out in the 1980’s.
  To make the point, some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.
  “The Kurds are pushing, pushing,” said Pascal Ishu Warda, the minister for displaced persons and migration. “We have to set up a system to deal with these people who have been thrown out of their homes.”
  To treat the burgeoning crisis, American officials last month approved spending $180 million to compensate Arab families thrown out of their homes; earlier they set up a similar program, with similar financing, for the Kurds.
  The Americans have distributed handbills in Arab and Kurdish camps calling on Iraqis to file claims and produce ownership documents.
  But some Iraqi and American officials say those claims could take months or even years to sort out, and will provide little immediate help to the families, Arab and Kurdish, languishing in the camps.
  Some people said American officials waited too long - more than a year - to set up a mechanism to resettle displaced Iraqis. By then, they said, the Kurds, tired of waiting, took matters into their own hands.
  Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, who has advised the Kurdish leadership, said he recommended a claim system for Kurds and Arabs to Pentagon officials in late 2002. Nothing was put in place on the ground until last month, he said, long after the Kurds began to move south of the Green Line.
  “The C.P.A. adopted a sensible idea, but it required rapid implementation,” Mr. Galbraith said. “They dropped the ball, and facts were created on the ground. Of course people are going to start moving. If the political parties are encouraging this, that, too, is understandable.”
  Kurdish leaders say they are merely taking back land that was stolen from them over four decades. Publicly, the Kurdish leaders say that they are committed to working within the Iraqi state as long as their federal rights are assured, and that no Arabs have been forced from their homes.
  But in the villages and camps where the Kurds have returned, Kurdish leaders are more boastful. They say they pushed the Arab settlers out as part of a plan to expand Kurdish control over the territory.
  “We made sure there wasn’t a single Arab left here who came as part of the Arabization program,” said Abdul Rehman Belaf, the mayor of Makhmur, a large area in northern Iraq that was emptied of Arabs and is now being resettled by Kurds.
  Mr. Belaf is a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish political parties active on the other side of the Green Line; virtually all of Makhmur’s officials belong to the party, too.
  “We haven’t stopped yet,” he said. “We have more land to take back.”
  Before the war began in 2003, Arab settlers worked the fields in the areas surrounding Makhmur. Most of the settlers were brought north by successive waves of Mr. Hussein’s campaign to populate the north with Arabs, killing or expelling tens of thousands of Kurds.
  Exactly what happened when Mr. Hussein’s army collapsed is disputed. Kurdish officials say the Arab settlers fled with the army. No expulsions were necessary, they said.
  But some Arab families, like those who settled around Makhmur long ago, have largely been left alone.
  “Saddam’s people asked me to take Kurdish lands in 1987, and I said no,” said Salim Sadoon al-Sabawi, a 60-year-old Arab farmer in the village where his family has lived for generations. “When the Kurds returned, they left me alone. There was no violence. We are like brothers.”
  Asked what the Kurds did to the Arabs who migrated into the area recently, Mr. Sabawi paused, and his son, Arkan, broke in. “They threatened people with death,” Arkan said. “They told them to get out.”
  “Let’s be honest,” Mr. Sabawi told his son. “The Arabs who left all came here as part of the Arabization program. They kicked out the Kurds. It wasn’t their land to begin with.”
  Mr. Belaf, the Kurdish mayor, said that before the war, the area around Makhmur was 80 percent Arab. A year later, he said, it is 80 percent Kurdish, as it used to be.
  As hard as life is for Arabs in refugee camps, it seems to be hardly better for the Kurds displacing them.
  Adnan Karim, 34, said his home was burned by the Iraqi Army in 1987. He began a life on the run after that, fighting Mr. Hussein as a pesh merga, marrying, having children and moving from one place to another. Last year he returned to an old military camp near Kirkuk, Qara Hanjir, hoping the new government would set aside some land for returnees like him. Nearly a year later, he is still waiting in a camp.
  Mr. Karim said he was trying to provide for his wife and three children with a $40-a-month pesh merga pension and money from odd jobs. But much of his money is spent buying water from a truck.
  Watching his children play in the dirt around him, Mr. Karim, a bedraggled man, gave in to despair.
  “I have spent my whole life this way,” he said, “just as you see me.”
———-

Iraq Police Training A Flop
Associated Press
June 10, 2004

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_police_061004,00.html?ESRC=dod.nl

TAJI, Iraq - Misguided U.S. training of Iraqi police contributed to the country’s instability and has delayed getting enough qualified Iraqis on the streets to ease the burden on American forces, the head of armed forces training said Wednesday.

“It hasn’t gone well. We’ve had almost one year of no progress,” said Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who departs Iraq next week after spending a year assembling and training the country’s 200,000 army, police and civil defense troops.

“We’ve had the wrong training focus - on individual cops rather than their leaders,” Eaton said in an interview with The Associated Press.

A credible, well-equipped national security force is crucial to America’s plans to pull its 138,000 troops out of Iraq, along with the 24,000 soldiers from Britain and other coalition countries.

As U.S. occupation leaders prepare to hand power to an Iraqi government in less than three weeks, Iraq’s own security forces won’t be ready to take a large role in protecting the country. A U.N. Security Council resolution approved Tuesday acknowledges Iraq’s lack of a developed security force and provides a continued multinational troop presence until 2006.

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy U.S. defense secretary, wrote in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that the Iraqi army - including the Taji-based Iraqi National Task Force, which focuses on internal strife - will begin assuming some security duties over the next few months.

Iraqi forces could soon “take local control of the cities,” with U.S. troops moving into a supporting role, Wolfowitz wrote.

In April, Iraqi security forces failed their first big test, when about half the police and military forces deserted during rebel uprisings in Fallujah, Najaf, Karbala and elsewhere.

Eaton, a plainspoken officer who didn’t shirk responsibility for his role in the problems, said soldiers of Iraq’s 2nd Brigade simply ignored U.S. orders to fight their countrymen.

“They basically quit. They told us, ‘We’re an army for external defense and you want us to go to Fallujah?’ That was a personal mistake on my part,” Eaton said.

When the uprising broke out in Fallujah, Eaton said he saw a chance to begin transferring the security mission to Iraqi forces. He agreed to allow the Iraqi army’s just-created 2nd Brigade to take on guerrillas that had seized control of the restive western city.

“We were premature,” said Eaton, 54, of Weatherford, Okla. “I could have stopped it. I had a bad feeling and I should have acted on it.”

The lesson learned was that the soldiers needed an Iraqi command hierarchy. Eaton said the soldiers may have battled Fallujah’s Sunni Muslim rebels if Iraqi leaders were spurring them on.

Wolfowitz also cited the importance of Iraqi commanders and said the April desertions shouldn’t have been a surprise because of the Iraqis’ shortcomings in training, equipment and leadership.

“No one had any expectation that Iraqi security forces would be ready this past April to stand up to the kind of fighting they encountered in Fallujah and in the Najaf-Karbala region,” Wolfowitz wrote.

One U.S. military official said Wolfowitz was partly to blame for those shortcomings.

Some $257 million in spending authority was held up by Wolfowitz’s office for two months, delaying construction of Iraqi army barracks for four brigades awaiting training, the official said on condition of anonymity.

The desertions could have happened in any country, said Iraqi army Brig. Gen. Khaled al-Sattar, the commander of the army brigade training at the Taji camp.

“The soldiers didn’t want to fight their own countrymen. Would you?” al-Sattar said as he and Eaton lunched on stewed beef and beans in the base mess hall. “Once there are division commanders and an Iraqi defense minister, the soldiers will start obeying orders because the orders come from an Iraqi leadership.”

U.S. trainers are currently instructing 550 new soldiers in the training camp in Kirkush to replace troops who deserted in April, Eaton said.

U.S. leaders, too, arrived in Iraq unprepared for the type of insurgency that began to flare last summer, Eaton said.

“We thought we were going to be nice and comfortable in a benign environment and rebuild this country,” he said. “Not everyone wanted to get Iraqi leaders in fast. I’d have been more aggressive early.”

Now, the U.S. military is reconfiguring the training mission. Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division when it occupied a large part of northern Iraq, returned to the country to head the Office of Security Transition, which oversees recruiting and training of Iraq’s five security forces.

Brig. Gen. James Schwitters, who has an Army special operations background, will take over the Iraqi army training mission from Eaton, who will become head of training at the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va.

British Brig. Gen. Andrew Mackay will head police training.

By January, the Iraqi army is expected to count 35,000 soldiers, with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps expected to number 40,000 by fall, according to Wolfowitz. There are now close to 90,000 Iraqi police officers and tens of thousands more Ministry of Interior forces, many have little or no modern police training, he wrote.

——

On va pas jusqu’à garantir l’exactitude du truc, mais bon ...
(source : http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/05/10/2036258.shtml?tid=127&tid=133&%20tid=186 )

Videogame Character Threatens National Security?

Posted by simoniker on Mon May 10, ‘04 05:31 PM
from the sonic-the-jailed-hog dept.
Watchful Babbler writes “Apparently, ‘the lead item on the government’s daily threat matrix one day last April’ was clear and definite: a reclusive millionaire had formed a terrorist group with the intent of launching chemical weapons attacks on Western cities. The White House was notified and the Director of the FBI briefed as the government raced to find information. But then, according to USNews.com, a White House staffer decided to Google for information on suspected threat Don Emilio Fulci and found him—in a video game - Sega’s action title Headhunter. No word on exactly which sources and methods came up with this gem, but word in the E Ring is that Fulci had issued the cryptic warning, ‘You have no chance to survive make your time’.”

Bonsoir à tous.

Depuis plusieurs jours je me tracasse au sujet de ce que j’ai pu lire et voir sur le site dont le lien est en fin de post.

Ce site décortique au ralenti les différentes images de la journée du 11/09 et d’autres sujets relatifs aux manipulations exercées par l’administration BUSH

Concrètement, on voit le deuxième avion ( celui de la TOUR Sud) lancer un missile peu avant son entrée dans le bâtiment.

Le site insiste sur le fait que cet avion n’est pas un Boeing de tourisme, mais Un B767 de ravitaillement. Autrement un boeing militaire.

Dépourvu de hublots, avec une manoeuvre digne d’un avion de chasse très performant, cet avion semble laisser perpexle pas mal d’observateurs.

D’après le site, les médias seraient au parfum mais participent au merdier orchestré en Haut Lieu.

J’aimerais avoir votre avis, à chacun de vous.

Ces images sont elles réelles?

Cette monstruosité est elle concevable?

A savoir qu’un gouvernement tue sciemment des milliers de personnes afin d’asseoir politiquement un président super mal élu, afin de plonger tout le secteur aérien dans une crise sans précédent ( justement Boeing laisse Airbus se charger des projets dans le civil car il ne peut plus rivaliser aujourd’hui, mais qu est ce que les contrats du Pentagone sont rentables pour Boeing!!)
Afin, bien sûr de trouver un prétexte, bancal, mais prétexte quand même pour aller créer un chaos bien loin de chez eux, au coeur du moyen orient, qui a besoin de tout, sauf des américains.

Je poste ça parce que je suis ahuri du peu de réaction de tous par rapport à tout ça.

De toutes façons, il suffit de voir les retours en bénéficent qui profitent à toute cette bande de criminels, pour douter sérieusement de tout ce pipotage et de la version US, toujours prompte à plonger dans le virtualisme, comme vous le dites si souvent, à juste titre.

le site en question
http://www.letsroll911.org/

et une des nombreuses vidéos disponibles sur ce site.
http://www.thewebfairy.com/911/letsroll911/Web/missileignitionandlaunch.swf

merci à vous tous de bien vouloir dire quelle impression ça vous laisse de consulter un site comme celui ci!

Je m’inquiète de plus en plus des l’état des libertés en France.
Participant au forum fr.soc.politique, je me suis déjà vu menacé par mon FAI de coupure de ma ligne, non en réponse aux propos certainement non politiquement correct que je tenais, mais sous le prétexte, entièrement non justifié, que j’effectuais du spamming (difficile de dire, dans un pays prétendument libre, que l’on vous prive de votre droit d’expression pour des raisons politiques).
J’ai donc utilisé un proxy pour éviter que l’on ne remonte trop facilement à ma ligne réelle. Depuis une dizaine de jours, l’accès à fr.soc.politique à travers un proxy (certains proxys?) est interdit.
Une chappe de plomb est en train de tomber sur la France. Si vous vous exprimez sous votre nom, on coupe votre ligne (au mieux), si vous masquez votre identité, on vous interdit l’accès au NewsGroups.
A quelle distance se trouve le régime actuel du totalitarisme ?

Mike

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-diamond10jun10.story
COMMENTARY
An Eyewitness to the Iraq Botch
By Larry Diamond

June 10, 2004

When I went to Baghdad in early January as a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, I believed that a democracy of sorts could gradually be constructed in Iraq, despite the formidable obstacles. Although I had opposed the war, I accepted the invitation because I believed that the United States could not allow postwar Iraq to sink into chaos and that the Iraqi people deserved an opportunity to live in freedom. This did not seem to me to be an unrealistic goal.

But I returned three months later sorely disappointed. Because of a long catalog of strategic and tactical blunders, the United States has failed to come anywhere near meeting the postwar expectations of Iraqis. It now seems clear that the occupation will leave a mixed, and on balance negative, record when the Americans hand over power June 30. Though we leave behind a framework for political transition, it is hobbled by two huge deficits: security and legitimacy.

Previous international efforts to build democracy after violent conflict counsel one clear, overriding lesson: “It’s security, stupid.” If a decimated country doesn’t restore enough security to rebuild its infrastructure, revive commercial life, employ workers and enable civic organizations to mobilize, political parties to campaign and voters to register and vote, it can’t craft a decent political order — certainly not a democratic one.

The aftermath of tyranny and war is never going to be perfectly tranquil. But to build a democratic state, a country must first build a state, and the transcendent imperative for that is to establish a monopoly over the means of violence. In Iraq, this meant moving quickly to prevent a resurgence of violence on the part of the defeated Baathists, radical Islamists, external jihadists and others threatened by the new political order. But despite warnings from the Rand Corp. and others, the Pentagon plunged blithely ahead with only half the necessary force (less than 150,000 troops). Our inability to control the savage looting that swept Baghdad in April 2003 signaled the hollowness of the U.S. posture and emboldened the die-hard Baathists to regroup for the insurgency that has devastated postwar reconstruction.

By the time I arrived, the signs of insecurity were pervasive. Iraqi translators and drivers at the palace where the CPA has its headquarters told me of the threats to their lives and the murders of their co-workers, while our soldiers confessed frankly that they could do nothing to protect those Iraqis outside the Green Zone. Repeatedly I had to cancel trips to meet Iraqis outside of the compound because we could not obtain the armored cars or helicopters that would enable me to travel with some measure of safety.

Today, in place of security, Iraq has a welter of heavily armed militias serving not the new Iraq but political parties, incipient regional warlords and religious leaders.

To the security deficit was added a yawning legitimacy deficit. The CPA delayed local elections and imposed one unwieldy transition plan after another while leaning too heavily on Iraqi exiles, especially the widely distrusted Ahmad Chalabi. Crippled by a severe shortage of American officials fluent in Arabic (as well as the steady loss of Iraqi translators to intimidation and assassination), and distanced from Iraqi society by formidable walls of security, the CPA never adequately grasped Iraqi preferences, hopes and frustrations.

While I was there, the CPA repeatedly misjudged and underestimated the most important Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and finalized in early March an interim constitution that most Iraqis (including Sistani) felt gave too sweeping a veto to minorities and too little participation to the people. When I traveled the country speaking about this new document, I was stunned by the anger and frustration of Iraqis who felt excluded from the process. But by then, the CPA was interested only in “selling” the document (for which we hired an expensive advertising agency). Too often, our engagement with ordinary Iraqis was a one-way conversation from above.

Today, as the U.S. continues to battle the radical Shiite insurgency led by cleric Muqtada Sadr while trying to sell Iraqis on its post-occupation plans, the challenges are as tough as ever. The new interim government includes a number of politically shrewd Iraqis, some with roots in Iraq’s crucially important tribes, who may yet prove capable of mobilizing support for the political transition. But the new government will not be viable and the elections for a transitional parliament will drown in bloodshed and fraud unless the new Iraqi state can defeat the former regime loyalists, the terrorists, the organized criminals and the militias. To do that, a recommitment from the United States — and a smarter American strategy — will be needed.

————————————————————————————————————————
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Fiabilité des sources, recoupement, ... y a du boulot

(en provenance de Secrecy News, http://www.fas.org)

INTEGRITY OF STATE DEPT TERRORISM REPORT QUESTIONED

A new report from the Congressional Research Service cautiously
notes that the State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global
Terrorism” report suffers from a variety of statistical and
methodological flaws, and that for the first time an errata
sheet to the latest edition will be provided.

The CRS report was first described in the Los Angeles Times
today.

See “The Department of State’s Patterns of Global Terrorism
Report: Trends, State Sponsors, and Related Issues” by Raphael
Perl, Congressional Research Service, June 1, 2004:

    http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32417.pdf

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) was more blunt about the terrorism
report’s defects.

“It appears… that the decline in terrorism reported by the
State Department results from manipulation of the data, not an
actual decline in terrorism incidents,” he wrote to Secretary
of State Colin Powell on May 17.

“This manipulation… calls into serious doubt the integrity of
the report,” Rep. Waxman wrote.  See his letter here:
    http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2004_cr/waxman051704.pdf

Oui, cela en devient éreintant à la fin : subir ce “ping pong” événementiel où l’on ce dit que ce sera la der des der : on ne nous aura plus avec la rouerie de l’administration bushienne. Mais non, les retrouvailles du D-Day, émouvantes il est vrai,  passent pour la façade politiquement correcte des bonnes relations entre ces éminents représentants autours du berceau des valeurs atlantistes: parce que les valeurs communes demeurent entre nous, paraît-il…? Laissez-moi pleurer : Les juristes US estiment que Bush n’est même pas lié par le principe d’interdiction de la torture (articles ci-dessous).
Pourtant, j’y crois à cette renaissance de l’Europe, enfin adulte par sa capacité à tourner la page de ses luttes fatricides. Mais nos élites peuvent-elles assumer le poids de leur responsabilité : représenter les citoyens au travers d’institutions transparentes par un lien direct (no authority without accountability).
L’actuel (non)débat entourant les élections du parlement européen exprime de manière assourdissante le malaise induit par des échafaudages institutionnels (25 scrutins nationaux…) dont les citoyens n’entendent que puic. C’est là pourtant , qu’il faut “porter le fer” si l’on veut éviter les dérives populistes. Mais le traité constitutionnel se fait désirer… Alors, débacle imminente… Nous le saurons bientôt. Mais déjà, on entend gronder les tendances “souverainistes”...

June 8, 2004
Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
ASHINGTON, June 7 - A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation’s security.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.

One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors “except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.”

“In order to respect the president’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign,” the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority.”

Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures,” said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman. “It was not a legal analysis.”

Mr. Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantánamo, four of which required Mr. Rumsfeld’s explicit approval, did not constitute torture and were consistent with international treaties.

The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration’s lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law.

A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.

The previously disclosed Justice Department memorandum concluded that administration officials were justified in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.

Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the administration’s top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department’s position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the administration’s public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.

The March memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was prepared as part of a review of interrogation techniques by a working group appointed by the Defense Department’s general counsel, William J. Haynes. The group itself was led by the Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker, and included military and civilian lawyers from all branches of the armed services.

The review stemmed from concerns raised by Pentagon lawyers and interrogators at Guantánamo after Mr. Rumsfeld approved a set of harsher interrogation techniques in December 2002 to use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot.

Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair, on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group’s review. Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military’s Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, told reporters last Friday that the working group “wanted to do what is humane and what is legal and consistent not only with” the Geneva Conventions, but also “what is right for our soldiers.”

Mr. Di Rita said that the Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel’s office.

The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.

The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator “knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith,” the report said. “Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control.”

The adjective “severe,” the report said, “makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be `severe.’ ” The report also advised that if an interrogator “has a good faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture.”

The report also said that interrogators could justify breaching laws or treaties by invoking the doctrine of necessity. An interrogator using techniques that cause harm might be immune from liability if he “believed at the moment that his act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm.”

Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration’s confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.

Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch, said Monday, “We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the criminal consequences of doing so.”

The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.

Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article.

-
Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture
Justice Dept. Gave Advice in 2002
By Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A01
In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad “may be justified,” and that international laws against torture “may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations” conducted in President Bush’s war on terrorism, according to a newly obtained memo.
If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, “he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network,” said the memo, from the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance. It added that arguments centering on “necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability” later.
The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives. It was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the wake of the attacks, according to government officials familiar with the document.
The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of al Qaeda detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defense Department’s detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At that time, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had asked the lawyers to examine the logistical, policy and legal issues associated with interrogation techniques.
Bush administration officials say flatly that, despite the discussion of legal issues in the two memos, it has abided by international conventions barring torture, and that detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere have been treated humanely, except in the cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for which seven military police soldiers have been charged.
Still, the 2002 and 2003 memos reflect the Bush administration’s desire to explore the limits on how far it could legally go in aggressively interrogating foreigners suspected of terrorism or of having information that could thwart future attacks.
In the 2002 memo, written for the CIA and addressed to White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, the Justice Department defined torture in a much narrower way, for example, than does the U.S. Army, which has historically carried out most wartime interrogations.
In the Justice Department’s view—contained in a 50-page document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee and obtained by The Washington Post—inflicting moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily constitute torture. Torture, the memo says, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
By contrast, the Army’s Field Manual 34-52, titled “Intelligence Interrogations,” sets more restrictive rules. For example, the Army prohibits pain induced by chemicals or bondage; forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time; and food deprivation. Under mental torture, the Army prohibits mock executions, sleep deprivation and chemically induced psychosis.
Human rights groups expressed dismay at the Justice Department’s legal reasoning yesterday.
“It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I’ve seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of military doctrine and standards on interrogations.”
But a spokesman for the White House counsel’s office said, “The president directed the military to treat al Qaeda and Taliban humanely and consistent with the Geneva Conventions.”
Mark Corallo, the Justice Department’s chief spokesman, said “the department does not comment on specific legal advice it has provided confidentially within the executive branch.” But he added: “It is the policy of the United States to comply with all U.S. laws in the treatment of detainees—including the Constitution, federal statutes and treaties.” The CIA declined to comment.
The Justice Department’s interpretation for the CIA sought to provide guidance on what sorts of aggressive treatments might not fall within the legal definition of torture.
The 2002 memo, for example, included the interpretation that “it is difficult to take a specific act out of context and conclude that the act in isolation would constitute torture.” The memo named seven techniques that courts have considered torture, including severe beatings with truncheons and clubs, threats of imminent death, burning with cigarettes, electric shocks to genitalia, rape or sexual assault, and forcing a prisoner to watch the torture of another person.
“While we cannot say with certainty that acts falling short of these seven would not constitute torture,” the memo advised, “. . . we believe that interrogation techniques would have to be similar to these in their extreme nature and in the type of harm caused to violate law.”
“For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture,” the memo said, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” Examples include the development of mental disorders, drug-induced dementia, “post traumatic stress disorder which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression.”
Of mental torture, however, an interrogator could show he acted in good faith by “taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts or reviewing evidence gained in past experience” to show he or she did not intend to cause severe mental pain and that the conduct, therefore, “would not amount to the acts prohibited by the statute.”
In 2003, the Defense Department conducted its own review of the limits that govern torture, in consultation with experts at the Justice Department and other agencies. The aim of the March 6, 2003, review, conducted by a working group that included representatives of the military services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the intelligence community, was to provide a legal basis for what the group’s report called “exceptional interrogations.”
Much of the reasoning in the group’s report and in the Justice Department’s 2002 memo overlap. The documents, which address treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, were not written to apply to detainees held in Iraq.
In a draft of the working group’s report, for example, Pentagon lawyers approvingly cited the Justice Department’s 2002 position that domestic and international laws prohibiting torture could be trumped by the president’s wartime authority and any directives he issued.
At the time, the Justice Department’s legal analysis, however, shocked some of the military lawyers who were involved in crafting the new guidelines, said senior defense officials and military lawyers.
“Every flag JAG lodged complaints,” said one senior Pentagon official involved in the process, referring to the judge advocate generals who are military lawyers of each service.
“It’s really unprecedented. For almost 30 years we’ve taught the Geneva Convention one way,” said a senior military attorney. “Once you start telling people it’s okay to break the law, there’s no telling where they might stop.”
A U.S. law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon group’s report, prepared under the supervision of General Counsel William J. Haynes II, said that “in order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.”
The Pentagon group’s report, divulged yesterday by the Wall Street Journal and obtained by The Post, said further that the 1994 law barring torture “does not apply to the conduct of U.S. personnel” at Guantanamo Bay.
It also said the anti-torture law did apply to U.S. military interrogations that occurred outside U.S. “maritime and territorial jurisdiction,” such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. But it said both Congress and the Justice Department would have difficulty enforcing the law if U.S. military personnel could be shown to be acting as a result of presidential orders.
The report then parsed at length the definition of torture under domestic and international law, with an eye toward guiding military personnel about legal defenses.
The Pentagon report uses language very similar to that in the 2002 Justice Department memo written in response to the CIA’s request: “If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” the draft states. “In that case, DOJ [Department of Justice] believes that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”
The draft goes on to assert that a soldier’s claim that he was following “superior orders” would be available for those engaged in “exceptional interrogations except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.” It asserts, as does the Justice view expressed for the CIA, that the mere infliction of pain and suffering is not unlawful; the pain or suffering must be severe.
A Defense Department spokesman said last night that the March 2003 memo represented “a scholarly effort to define the perimeters of the law” but added: “What is legal and what is put into practice is a different story.” Pentagon officials said the group examined at least 35 interrogation techniques, and Rumsfeld later approved using 24 of them in a classified directive on April 16, 2003, that governed all activities at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon has refused to make public the 24 interrogation procedures.
Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.

Puisque l’on en est à parler de psychiatrie ...

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4636.shtml

Bush Leagues
Bush’s Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
Jun 4, 2004, 06:15

President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.

In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”

Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.

“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”

In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.

“We’re at war, there’s no doubt about it. What I don’t know anymore is just who the enemy might be,” says one troubled White House aide. “We seem to spend more time trying to destroy John Kerry than al Qaeda and our enemies list just keeps growing and growing.”

Aides say the President gets “hung up on minor details,” micromanaging to the extreme while ignoring the bigger picture. He will spend hours personally reviewing and approving every attack ad against his Democratic opponent and then kiss off a meeting on economic issues.

“This is what is killing us on Iraq,” one aide says. “We lost focus. The President got hung up on the weapons of mass destruction and an unproven link to al Qaeda. We could have found other justifiable reasons for the war but the President insisted the focus stay on those two, tenuous items.”

Aides who raise questions quickly find themselves shut out of access to the President or other top advisors. Among top officials, Bush’s inner circle is shrinking. Secretary of State Colin Powell has fallen out of favor because of his growing doubts about the administration’s war against Iraq.

The President’s abrupt dismissal of CIA Directory George Tenet Wednesday night is, aides say, an example of how he works.

“Tenet wanted to quit last year but the President got his back up and wouldn’t hear of it,” says an aide. “That would have been the opportune time to make a change, not in the middle of an election campaign but when the director challenged the President during the meeting Wednesday, the President cut him off by saying ‘that’s it George. I cannot abide disloyalty. I want your resignation and I want it now.”

Tenet was allowed to resign “voluntarily” and Bush informed his shocked staff of the decision Thursday morning. One aide says the President actually described the decision as “God’s will.”

God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”

“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”

But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”

“The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment on the record.

© Copyright 2004 Capitol Hill Blue

http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=212089

Par Libération.fr
vendredi 04 juin 2004 (Liberation.fr - 13:19)

Un rapport encombrant pour Tenet
Selon le «New York Times», le patron de la CIA a démissionné avant la publication d’un rapport du Sénat très gênant sur les activités de l’agence en Irak.

George Tenet, le patron de la CIA, a trébuché sur l’Irak. Selon le New York Times

Une histoire locale, évidemment tragique pour son protagoniste, qui n’aura comme vertu que d’éclairer la tragédie globale qu’est l’état d’esprit aux USA actuellement.

The FBI’s Art Attack
Offbeat Materials at Professor’s Home Set Off Bioterror Alarm

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2004; Page C01

NEW YORK—“A forensic investigation of FBI trash.” On the telephone, Beatriz da Costa says it wryly. Her humor sounds bitter. She’s talking about the detritus of a terror probe at the Buffalo home of her good friends, the Kurtzes.

She’s talking about the pizza boxes, Gatorade jugs, the gloves, the gas mask filters, the biohazard suits: the stuff left by police, FBI, hazmat and health investigators after they descended on the Kurtz home and quarantined the place.

The garbage tells a story of personal tragedy, a death in the Kurtz household, that sparked suspicions (later proved unfounded) of a biohazard in the neighborhood. And it tells a story of the times in which we live, with almost daily warnings about terror, and with law enforcement primed to pounce.

Steve Kurtz, a Buffalo art professor, discovered on the morning of May 11 that his wife of 20 years, Hope Kurtz, had stopped breathing. He called 911. Police and emergency personnel responded, and what they saw in the Kurtz home has triggered a full-blown probe—into the vials and bacterial cultures and strange contraptions and laboratory equipment.

The FBI is investigating. A federal grand jury has been impaneled. Witnesses have been subpoenaed, including da Costa.

Kurtz and his late wife were founders of the Critical Art Ensemble, an internationally renowned collective of “tactical media” protest and performance artists. Steve Kurtz, 48, has focused on the problems of the emergence of biotechnology, such as genetically modified food. He and the art ensemble, which also includes da Costa, have authored several books including “Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media” and “Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas,” both published by Autonomedia/Semiotext(e).

The day of his wife’s death, Kurtz told the authorities who he is and what he does.

“He explained to them that he uses [the equipment] in connection with his art, and the next thing you know they call the FBI and a full hazmat team is deposited there from Quantico—that’s what they told me,” says Paul Cambria, the lawyer who is representing Kurtz. “And they all showed up in their suits and they’re hosing each other down and closing the street off, and all the news cameras were there and the head of the [Buffalo] FBI is granting interviews. It was a complete circus.”

Cambria, the bicoastal Buffalo and Los Angeles lawyer best known for representing pornographer Larry Flynt, calls the Kurtz episode a “colossal overreaction.”

FBI agents put Kurtz in a hotel, where they continued to question him. Cambria says Kurtz felt like a detainee over the two days he was at the hotel. Paul Moskal, spokesman for the Buffalo office of the FBI, says the bureau put Kurtz in a hotel because his home had been declared off limits. The probe, Moskal says, was a by-the-books affair from the very beginning.

“Post-9/11 protocol is such that first-responders have all been given training about unusual things and unusual situations,” Moskal says.

And obviously, says Lt. Jake Ulewski, spokesman for the Buffalo police, what the cops eyeballed raised some alarms. “He’s making cultures? That’s a little off the wall.”

Erie County health officials declared the Kurtz home a potential health risk and sealed it for two days while a state lab examined the bacterial cultures found inside. Officials won’t divulge what precisely was examined, but it turned out not to be a danger to public health. And the house was reopened for use.

Still, federal authorities think something in that house might have been illegal, Cambria surmises. But Cambria denies there was anything illegal in the house. William Hochul Jr., chief of the anti-terrorism unit for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Western District of New York, would not comment on the investigation.

Kurtz, on Cambria’s advice, isn’t speaking to the press either.

Da Costa, a professor at the University of California at Irvine who has flown to Buffalo to help out, says Kurtz is “depressed” and dealing with the loss of his wife, who died of a heart attack. Today the Buffalo arts community will memorialize her.

Adele Henderson, chair of the art department of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where Kurtz has tenure, is among the people who’ve been questioned by the FBI.

On May 21, she says, the FBI asked her about Kurtz’s art, his writings, his books; why his organization (the art ensemble) is listed as a collective rather than by its individual members; how it is funded.

“They asked me if I’d be surprised if I found out he was found to be involved in bioterrorism,” she says.

Her response? “I am absolutely certain that Steve would not be involved.”

They also asked about “his personal life,” Henderson says, but she would not describe the questions or her responses.

The investigation, she says, will have no bearing on Kurtz’s standing at the university, where he is an associate professor. (Prior to Buffalo, he taught at Carnegie Mellon University.)

“This is a free speech issue, and some people at the university remember a time during the McCarthy period when some university professors were harassed quite badly,” she says.

Nonetheless, considering the kind of art Kurtz practices and the kind of supplies he uses, “I could see how they would think it was really strange.”

For instance: the mobile DNA extracting machine used for testing food products for genetic contamination. Such a machine was in Kurtz’s home. His focus, in recent years, has been on projects that highlight the trouble with genetically modified seeds.

In November 2002, in an installation called “Molecular Invasion,” Kurtz grew genetically modified seeds in small pots beneath growth lamps at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, then engineered them in reverse with herbicide, meaning he killed them.

“We thought it was very important to have Critical Art Ensemble here because we try to have our visiting artist’s program present work that takes our curriculum to the next step,” says Denise Mullen, vice dean of the Corcoran College of Art and Design, whose Hemicycle Gallery hosted Kurtz’s molecular exhibit.

Beyond the cutting edge of art, she says, “we want work that is really bleeding edge.”

In Buffalo, in the aftermath of the bioterror probe that has found no terror, activist artists have scooped up the refuse from the Kurtz front yard and taken it away, perhaps, says da Costa, to create an art installation.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company