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Saturday   April 17   2004

israel helps out america — again

The current Iraqi uprising started with the burnt American corpses hanging from a bridge outside Fallujah. The killers of the Americans claimed vengance for the death of Hamas leader Sheik Yassin at the hands of the Israelis. Now the Israelis have assassinated Sheik Yassin's replacement. I wonder if the Iraqis will notice?

Hamas leader Rantissi killed in IAF strike in Gaza City

Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi was killed in an Israeli helicopter missile strike on his car Saturday evening. Two other people were killed in the strike, witnesses said. A burned, destroyed car was left on the road near Rantisi's house and one badly burned body was removed from the car by paramedics. Witnesses said there were three people in the car at the time. Palestinians ran into the street following the strike and called for revenge. Rantisi was the newly-appointed head of the militant group in Gaza, following the assassination of Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a similar Israeli strike last month. He one of the most hard-line members of the militant movement, which rejects all compromise with Israel and calls for the destruction of the state. Israel had previously tried to kill Rantisi in a helicopter strike on his car on June 10. In a retaliatory attack the next day, 16 Israelis were killed in a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

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How many Israelis and Americans will die because of this? Shall we send thank you cards to Sharon?

[Update: 1:10 PM]
Daily Kos mentioned this article in relation to Rantisi's assassination. It's a Salon article so you have to watch an ad. Do so. It's important for the reason mentioned at Daily Kos:

If you haven't seen it, Juan Cole has an article about the relationship between Iraq and Israel re US standing in the Arab world and linkage of policy.

Turning into Israel?
Outraged by President Bush's embrace of Ariel Sharon and the bloody U.S. assault on Fallujah, the Arab world is linking America's occupation with Israel's. That's ominous.
by Juan Cole

One year after Baghdad fell to victorious U.S. troops, the Americans had to conquer the country all over again. The great rebellion of April 2004 expelled the U.S. from much of the capital, humiliated coalition allies, cut supply and communications lines to the south, and revealed a reservoir of popular hatred for the U.S. among both some Sunni Arabs in Fallujah and some Shiites in the cities. But perhaps the most ominous development for the U.S. was that the events tied together two occupations and two intifadas, or popular uprisings -- Iraq and Palestine. In his press conference of April 13, President Bush gave several reasons for cracking down on Iraqi insurgents. He said their motivation was the same as those who set off bombs in Jerusalem; he tied them to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, executed by al-Qaida in part for being Jewish. He also cited Shiite radical Muqtada al-Sadr's support for the Palestinian Hamas organization and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah party. He gave as one reason for having gone to war against Saddam Hussein the former dictator's support for Palestinian terrorists. In this speech, he presented the Iraq war and its violent aftermath as an extension of the Israeli struggle to subjugate the Palestinians and Hezbollah. Before the war, Bush connected nonexistent dots between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Now he and his neoconservative brain trust are mapping the Iraq conflict onto the Likud Party agenda in Palestine. This time, however, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- and one that will have devastating repercussions for U.S. interests in both Iraq and the entire Arab world.

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While I'm at it, I might as well add this article that describes the world Sharon and Bush have in mind for us. Something to look forward to.

Inside the bubble
Late last year, the award-winning novelist Linda Grant moved to Tel Aviv for four months. How could people bear to live there, she wanted to know, amid daily reports of violence, corruption and despair? What she discovered was a society in a state of profound denial - and the horrifying possibility that there may be no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Every morning in Tel Aviv, I walked down the street, bought my copy of Ha'aretz from the Australian newsagent and marathon runner, Paul Smith ("Doesn't sound very Jewish, does it?"), went into a small cafe, was served my cappuccino by Ma'or, the skinny-hipped surfer dude whose mother came from Turkey and whose father was from Spain, and I opened, with trepidation, my newspaper. It was an excruciating experience. In story after story Israel emerged as a society in which every institution of the state was in a dire condition, at best incompetent, at worst corrupt, only a few tattered scraps left of the early high ideals of Zionism. Members of the Knesset, ministers, party leaders, prime ministers and generals were routinely exposed as liars and crooks; the army were lying, the police were lying, the government was lying. Soldiers spoke to me of a "mental scratch" - a psychological scar as a result of serving in the army of occupation. A woman who did her army service during the first intifada told me how she was inducted with boys from high school, and saw them cross what Israelis call a "red line" - holding a gun to the head of a terrified child, humiliating a Palestinian teacher at a checkpoint, killing an unarmed civilian. "When they came home the red line stayed crossed, they began to treat their girlfriends and wives that way, then their own children," she said. "And these were people I thought I knew, people I'd grown up with." [...] After four months in Israel, and hundreds of hours of conversations, I found not a scrap of evidence that Jewish Israelis will ever agree to a peace deal that will result in them becoming, within a generation or two, a minority dependent on the good-will of a Palestinian majority in a region without democracy or any real human rights. As the novelist David Grossman told me, "There is not enough reassurance in the galaxy for Israelis." In an interview with Ha'aretz in August 2000, Edward Said was asked what would happen to the Jews if they became a minority in a single state: "It worries me a great deal," he said. "The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don't know. It worries me." I also know what some Palestinian friends tell me, that the right of return is deeply embedded in the Palestinian soul and can never be given up, that no leader can sign an agreement on their behalf which would settle it with a cheque instead. What I know about Jewish Israelis, they know about Palestinians. If they are right, then we might have to face the nightmare that the war between the two peoples cannot be concluded, there is no deal that can ever be signed that will not give way, almost at once, to the resumption of the struggle. No US administration, however even-handed, can settle the dispute, or even impose a settlement, over land that can neither be shared nor divided. I left Israel burdened by a sense of horror. A 10-month-old Israeli baby, Netta, sat in her mother's arms on the other side of the aeroplane aisle, smiling and gurgling and oblivious to the heavy storm winds we were passing through as we attempted to land in London. I looked at her and, imagining her future, wondered if it would turn out that there were no solutions, only consequences, all of them tragedies. The most important word in Hebrew is balagan : Oy, a balagan ! What a mess.

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  thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog

What a mess, indeed.

I'm on a roll. Here is Mike Golby's look at the Israeli based US Middle East policy. Mike, by the way, is Our Man in South Africa.

U.S. and Israel Form Unholy Alliance
Middle-Eastern and Asian Fragmentation Key to U.S. Global Strategy

MacAskill is one of countless journalists stuck in a groove that says the U.S. seeks a peaceful transition to 'democracy' in Iraq. It wants no such thing. It has gone in to smash the country, carbonise people who get in its way, render the place ungovernable, divvy it up, occupy it for years and profit hugely from its wealth. Echoing Rebuilding America's Defenses, a September 2000 PNAC strategy document, the Bush Administration's September 2002 National Security Strategy Report calls for a permanent American military presence and domination, through an imperialist Pax Americana, around the world, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Presenting the views of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush and business interests including Lockheed-Martin and Cheney's Halliburton, the PNAC states: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American military presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Need more? This is the stuff of apartheid South Africa. The Nationalists were past masters at the old 'divide and rule' strategy. They used it at every level of government and in every organ of civil society. Israel has used it most successfully to slaughter Palestinians and filthy anti-Semitic foreigners, and it is now being put to effective use by the United States. 'Divide and rule', applied by the National Party, became so entrenched in South African thought it struck me only last night that other societies might be new to its double-dealing, underhand and deadly duplicity. For many years, I've taken for granted an awareness of its use in hobbling the Palestinian cause. The U.S. goal in the region is to smash all dissent by setting neighbour on neighbour. It will exploit any social, religious, and ethnic differences it can find to foster massacres, terror, gangsterism, a fresh market for new guns and anarchy. MacAskill's article is blithely oblivious to this. The U.S. seeks fragmentation or atomisation rather than a threatening stability. Why else would the U.S. bring in Iraqi National Congress leader and international gangster, Ahmed Chalabi? Sentenced in absentia to 22-years in prison for a $200 million banking scam that threatened the Jordanian economy, the U.S. do not expect Chalabi to succeed. They need him as a front. The U.S. does not want secular states of the type built, against overwhelming odds and with uncommon brutality, by Saddam Hussein. Chalabi is a face of convenience, a short-term puppet with a healthy bank balance, no scruples whatsoever, and zero future.

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Sleep well. Sharon is looking out after us.

11:56 AM - link

photography

The Total Sum of Solitudes
Don Gregorio Anton

I can make no statement of purpose that implies insight or intent, no rationalization for process or material. The evidence of these images, and the necessity of their being, rests upon that hinge of inquiry that leads to discovery. From here the edge of memory comes into view. To this end alone, my sight is complete The work is based on a belief that photography is the evidence of sight which can be addressed and healed through observation. I create imagery to help navigate and formulate my right to see, to accommodate the positioning of my soul in the world. From here I locate and determine that thin layer of reality that surrounds perception and align my vision to that which guides and teaches. I use the residual affect of silver and light to record a source of inquiry into the mysteries that surround me Here, culture and identity are cleansed, melted away, so as to accommodate the eyes of those who may complete them. My own findings observed, I seek to understand, rather than to be understood.

Sueños de sueños
[Dreams of dreams]

history belongs to those who write it

HISTORICAL AND ARCHIVAL COMMUNITIES URGE SENATE HEARING ON ARCHIVIST OF THE U.S. POSITION

Concern is growing within the archival and historical communities regarding the Bush administration's hoped for "fast-track" process to replace Archivist of the United States John Carlin with one of its own choosing -- historian Allen Weinstein. According to informed sources, the administration hopes to short-circuit the normal confirmation process and see Weinstein confirmed through an "expedited" process. Their goal -- place Weinstein in the position prior to the November election. According to Hill insiders, the effort to replace Carlin is coming from the highest levels of the White House. Reportedly, Karl Rove who is widely viewed as one of the president's chief political advisors, if not his political mastermind and, Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, want their own archivist in place for two overarching reasons: first, because of the sensitive nature of certain presidential and executive department records likely to be opened in the near future, and second, because there is genuine concern in the White House that the president may not be re-elected. [Emphasis mine — Gordy] Though it is not widely known, in January 2005, the first batch of records (the mandatory 12 years of closure having passed) relating to the president's father's administration will be subject to the Presidential Records Act and could be opened. Another area of concern to presidential officials relates to the 9-11 Commission records. Because there is no mandatory 30-year closure rule (except for highly classified White House and Executive Department records and documents), all materials relating to the commission are scheduled to be transferred to the National Archives upon termination of the Commission later this year. These records could be made available to researchers and journalists as soon as they are processed by NARA. In what appears to be a calculated move by administration officials, Rove and Gonzales have advanced the nomination of Weinstein fully aware that the Archivist of the United States position is to be an appointment based "without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of the professional qualifications required to perform the duties and responsibilities of the office of the Archivist." If Weinstein is confirmed and if President Bush is not elected, then President Kerry could be accused of "politicizing" the position should he try to replace Weinstein. . .

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  thanks to Undernews

08:35 AM - link

photography

AIDS in Zimbabwe
by Kristen Ashburn

Ten million Africans are infected with HIV. Eighteen million have already died from the virus. One in four children in Southern Africa has been orphaned. Forty-three million more Africans will die from AIDS by 2010. In December 2000, I decided to reveal the individual stories behind these grim statistics. I began my work in Harare, Zimbabwe, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. At first, it was difficult to grasp the fact that 35% of this beautiful country’s population is HIV-positive. But as people graciously opened their homes to me, I began to understand the pandemic’s human toll. In nearly every home- someone sick or dying from AIDS. Mother Son HIV positive mother baths her 19yr. old son who is dying of AIDS. Old Mbvuku, Harare, Zimbabwe, March 2002

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08:23 AM - link

iraq — the face-off

The face-off continues. Someone is going to drop that puck soon.

Clashes outside Kufa; Situation Tense in Shrine Cities
by Juan Cole

Hope for a negotiated settlement ebbed Friday. On the one hand, Muqtada seemed to go back and forth between saying he would negotiate and then refusing to. On the other, the US put stipulations on the mediation effort that were unacceptable to the grand ayatollahs in Najaf. [...] Abdul Mahdi Karbala'i, Sistani's representative in Karbala, said that his city and Najaf are "considered a red line that the Coalition forces may not cross." He intimated that the inhabitants of Iraq could be called upon to rebel and take up arms. In his Friday sermon at Karbala, he said, "The situation has reached a serious juncture in past days, and reports indicate that the Occupation Forces will violate the sanctity of Karbala and Najaf, shedding in them much blood, and destroying what the people of those two cities have built. He said the religious leadership could forestall such a move, and that if the Coalition forces moved on the cities it would have grave consequences. He said that after so many years of state terror, every effort should now be made to find a peaceful way forward, and one that the US could not refuse. He said these peaceful methods must be used to end the occupation and return sovereignty to competent persons who represent the independent national will. He warned that if the religious leadership concluded that there was no escape from launching an armed uprising, it would not hesitate to do so. (And this is the representative of the moderate, Sistani!)

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Muqtada's Friday Sermon: Marines should Surrender
by Juan Cole

In the first sermon he has preached in the Kufa mosque since the outbreak of hostilities between his Mahdi Army and Coalition forces, he said that "These events have brought to light dirty tricks, and have made it possible to distinguish between the truth and falsehood. I say that they intend to stay for many long years and are strengthening their positions, and there is no use to truce negotiations with them." He added, "America does not distinguish between small and large [sins?] under the pretext of freedom and democracy, but what democracy is this, and what liberty? Do not let their words seduce you, for they claim that they are going to surrender sovereignty and form an [Iraqi] government . . . Some accuse me of having delayed the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis and the formation of a transitional Iraqi government. I say, yes, I have delayed the sale of Iraq and the planting of a lackey government . . . We shall never permit these forces to enter this city of Najaf or the holy sites, for they are forbidden to them."

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03:28 AM - link

griff

I fly off to Washington, DC, on Tuesday. I will be shooting some of my grandfather's paintings at the Naval Historical Center. Yesterday I shipped off my lighting equipment. I hope I see it again. If I don't, here are some pictures of it. I'm using just one light source and its a continuous tungsten light with a 750 watt lamp.

I shot my last test shots before shipping the light off. I used Fuji NPL, a tungsten balanced film. Here are the tests with quick and dirty color adjustments.

Studio lighting is something new to me and it's exciting to be able to do new things with my camera. It opens new doors. Once I figure out what I can do with one light, and how to finesse that light, I will get more lights. Using continuous lights is not the norm, strobes are. But continuous lights are a lot easier to work with when you can easily see the effect of the lighting. The lights are a lot cheaper and have capabilities that most strobes don't. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. If she can do it, I can too.

03:03 AM - link

more iraq

My daughter, Katie, had her partner, Duc, return from Iraq two weeks ago. Katie's best friend's husband, Ken, returned three days before that. Ken had been patrolling the streets of Baghdad. We were all so relieved that they both made it home alive. Today I found out that Ken is being called back to Iraq. Those bastards! Those fucking bastards!

01:39 PM - link

iraq — the death spiral

From Jerome Doolittle at BAD ATTITUDES:

Into the Chasm

As Ron Suskind concludes The Price of Loyalty, he recalls a conversation with Paul O’Neill in November of 2002: …a few weeks before the invasion we sat on the porch at the Watergate, high above the Potomac, which was bursting with the flows of early spring. O’Neill, who had sat through scores of NSC meetings, was deeply fearful about the United States’ “grabbing a python by the tail, by dropping a hundred thousand troops into the middle of twenty-four million Iraqis and an Arab world of one billion Muslims. Trust me, they haven’t thought this through,” he said. He was still hoping there would be “a real evidentiary hearing and a genuine debate” before troops were committed. He knew that wasn’t likely. “When you get this far down the path,” he said after a long silence, “you want to have a heavy weight of evidence supporting you. If the action is reversible, or if a generation can erase its effects, it’s different than if you bring the world to the edge of a chasm. You can’t go back.”

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I have a busy day and limited time and energy for watching and reporting on the Iraqi Death Spiral. Go read Juan Cole, Robert Fisk, and Michael Moore. And then think about why we are replicating these two scenes:

Sheila Cobb mourning her son,
Pfc. Christopher Cobb, in Bradenton, Fla.

Around 125 Iraqis killed in Falluja
fighting buried in this makeshift cemetery

The New York Times has a nice article about the deaths of US soldiers. It's nice that they finally noticed that soldiers are actually dying in Iraq. And it's nice that they are reporting that some of the families of these dead soldiers seem to be confused as to actually why did their loved ones have to die. And it's nice that they publish attractive graphics like the one below to show how well we are doing at dying. It's not so nice that they can't be bothered to find out how many Iraqis are dying and to show that in attractive graphics, too. Maybe the bars in the bar chart would just be too tall to publish in the newspaper.

griff

I'm going to be out of town from the 20th to the 28th. I will going back to Washington, DC, to take pictures of my Grandfather's paintings as part of the website project I'm doing on his work: Griff's Story. His paintings are at the Naval Historical Center. Gail Munro, the Head Curator, sent me digital files of what they already have film on, which is most of it. I will be shooting those that they haven't already. I'm off to pack up the lighting and photography gear I don't want to try to get through airport security so that I can UPS it. Here is one of the pictures Gale sent me. It is of the rescue of the men of the Reuben James. I will be putting them all up on Griff's site later.

"Like Black Shiny Seals in the Oily Water"

This is more than a little depressing. The US is merely a front for right-wing Israel. We are here to do Sharon's bidding.

Sharon Coup: U.S. Go-Ahead

By throwing his support on Wednesday behind an Israeli plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, President Bush provided diplomatic assurances that represented a victory for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Mr. Sharon wanted three commitments: backing for the Gaza withdrawal, American recognition that Israel would hold on to parts of the West Bank, and an American rejection of the right of millions of Palestinian refugees from the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and their descendants to return to their lands in what is now Israel. He got them all by promising to trade something Israelis overwhelmingly do not want any more: the Gaza settlements and a handful of settlements in the West Bank. And he got them without having to negotiate with the Palestinians.

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The End of the Road
by Billmon

This is a shameful capitulation. As the Reuters story notes, the statement overturns in one stroke almost 40 years of official U.S. policy -- a policy Shrub's father actually showed a fair amount of political courage in defending. For decades, Israeli leaders (Likud and Labor alike) have worked to create those "new realities on the ground" -- as the statement, with the usual neocon arrogance, describes them -- through illegal land expropriations, relentless discrimination against Palestinian landowners, and lavish government subsidies for Jewish settlers. And for decades, the U.S. government has refused to accept Israel's bully boy tactics, despite the relentless, continuous efforts of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. That's gone now -- and probably for good, as I'll explain in a moment. Today's statement essentially guts the road map (itself a largely gutless process) by deleting the essential principle that the final status of the territories will not be determined by unilateral action on either side (which in the real world, means on the Israeli side.) It also negates the fundamental premise of UN Resolution 242 -- the bedrock of all peace efforts over the past 40 years -- that territory will not be acquired by force. Indeed, Sharon actually ends up with something better than an approved settlement list from Bush. He gets virtual carte blanche to keep any settlement he wishes to keep -- and indeed, to grab any part of the West Bank he wishes to grab, as long as it can be connected in some way to those "existing major Israeli populations centers." And if you know anything about Israel's settlement policies in the occupied territories, you know how good they are at connecting things. [...] Politics definitely does make strange bedmates, when a old Peace Now supporter like me is rooting for the ideological partners of Kahane Chai to win an election. But what the peace camp desperately needs right now is to prevent another fait accompli like the one that went down in Washington today. A year from now, Sharon and Bush may both be gone, and Israelis and Palestinians alike may be more willing to give peace -- real peace -- another chance. A forlorn hope, I know -- but better than no hope at all. Unfortunately, no hope is what I think we can realistically expect from the political process here in America. Bush's statement marks the effective end of any realistic chance that the United States will play a constructive role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Washington truly is Likud-occupied territory now, and resistance is almost certainly futile. For all intents and purposes, the world's only superpower has been bound and gagged.

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Sharon defers Palestinian state

In interviews with the Israeli media, Mr Sharon said: "In the unilateral plan, there is no Palestinian state".

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The day the neocons won

The Neocon Likudniks have their great victory. Bush endorsed Sharon's desperate land grab in the West Bank not realizing the blowback effects in Iraq. To any Arab, this is naked land theft. There is no hope for a Palestinian state with armed compounds in their midst, with the right of Israeli protection and no responsibility to the local government.

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The timing of it!
by Helena Cobban

I cannot believe George W. Bush. His administration's policy in Iraq is a bloody and dangerous shambles. Afghanistan is slipping back into anarchy. He needs every iota of support he can get from Muslims and Arabs worldwide if any of them are ever to help him survive all this. And at this very point, he suddenly decides to give away the whole store regarding the West Bank, to Ariel Sharon.

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Ali Abunimah points out that this is only making the reality public.

Why all the fuss about the Bush-Sharon meeting?
by Ali Abunimah

The 14 April meeting between President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Washington sent Palestinian leaders into a flying panic. But their response reeks of desperation and self-interest rather than any real concern for the fate of the Palestinian people and their land or because the results of the meeting represented any new setback for Palestinian rights.

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A Higher Law
by Billmon

A friend of mine likes to call the Israeli-Palestinian issue the "Death Valley" of American progressives -- a hellish, blasted wasteland that sucks the life out of anyone who tries to cross it. Better not to go there, and instead work the land that can be watered and tilled: health care, the environment, econoimc policy, etc. And for a long time I thought that was good advice. But since 9/11, I've come to think that the desert has to be crossed, otherwise the gradual descent into an endless war in the Middle East is going to doom whatever slim hopes there may be for a revival of progressive domestic policies in this country -- much as the coming of the Cold War did after World War II. Combine that with the fact that the suitcase nuke that will obliterate downtown Washington has probably already been made, and is just waiting patiently for the first terrorist to get his hands on it, and it's pretty clear "Death Valley" is spreading faster than the Sahara -- gobbling up our futures and probably our childrens' future as well. I was in a car crash once, when I was much younger, and the sensation I have now is the same one I had in the moment before impact, as I watched that telephone poll hurtling towards my windshield. It was an odd, detached moment -- like watching someone die in a movie -- and my last thought was something like "oh well." Physics saved my life that day -- the truck I was driving was heavy enough, and moving fast enough, to break that telephone poll like a toothpick. I walked away with a broken nose and a slight concussion. But I'll always remember that moment of helpless resignation, when I realized there was nothing I could do to stop the crash. It doesn't look like this crash can stopped, either. I guess that's one of the essential elements of tragedy -- the disaster can be seen but not avoided. Maybe it's the same feeling that John O'Neill had as he ran back into the South Tower that day, knowing what he had feared most had come to pass. I don't know. When the next major attack hits America, and the pressure to retaliate with genocidal force becomes impossible for our rotten political system to resist, maybe then I'll know. I'm left at a bit of a loss here. What is to be done? The Popular Front isn't looking like a very viable proposition at the moment. Maybe it's just time to sit back and see whether the metaphorical truck can break through the Middle Eastern telephone poll -- or wraps itself around it, turning the passengers into jelly. "Oh well."

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I know the feeling.

10:59 AM - link

photography

Bernd and Hilla Becher
The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for 2004

"Bernd and Hilla Becher are among the most influential artists of our time. For more than forty years they have been recording the heritage of an industrial past. Their systematic photography of functionalist architecture, often organizing their pictures in grids, brought them recognition as conceptual artists as well as photographers. As the founders of what has come to be known as the ‘Becher school’ they have brought their influence in a unique way to bear on generations of documentary photographers and artists."

  thanks to Conscientious

10:30 AM - link

the iraqi intifada — vietnam, lebanon, and the west bank on internet time

It looks like the US is backing down on al Sadr and Najaf. it's not clear if there is any change in Fallujah.

Muqtada Agrees to Dissolve Militia, May go into temporary exile in Iran
by Juan Cole

az-Zaman reports that Muqtada al-Sadr has accepted a solution of the problems between him and the Coalition on the basis of a deal. It would provide for the senior ayatollahs to issue a ruling or fatwa dissolving the Army of the Mahdi, Muqtada's militia. Muqtada surrender to the grand ayatollahs and agree to have Abdul Karim al-Unzi (an official of the Da`wa Party) negotiate for him with the Americans, in the name of the top religious leaders. Muqtada would accept the outcome of those negotiations without condition. Iran would offer him temporary asylum, until June 30 and the formation of a sovereign Iraqi government, at which time he could report to Najaf for his trial. In return, the US would withdraw its forces from the environs of Najaf.

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Steve Gillard's take on this...

Sadr wins

Our friend Sadr gets to have his militia kill Americans, avoid arrest and according to the NY Times, may well get to live in Tehran for a month or two. The Iranians, eager to avoid the near-apocalyptic bloodbath which would come from an attack on Najaf, have tried to negotiate a settlement where Sadr escapes martyrdom and the US escapes engraging the Muslim world. This is, without question, a complete and total victory for Sadr and a humilating defeat for the US. Our big talk strategy has ended with US forces looking impotent and ineffective. US forces are effectively stalemated in Fallujah, taking casualities and unable to control the city. Now, after demanding Sadr surrender, not only will his militia be "disbanded", which is semantics for sent home with their guns, he'll be allowed to escape. He's been turned from a pest into a major player in Iraqi politics. His willingness to fight the Americans, force Sistani to defend him and serve as a voice for the poor, as well as having his militia kill Americans without sanction, has allowed him to win respect that he didn't have before. He may have been fading before two weeks ago, but now, no deal in Iraq can happen without him.

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April 15, 11:15 am EST.
by Rahul Mahajan

At the same time as their existence in Iraq provokes violence and as their brutal methods provoke violence, U.S. forces do nothing to provide security. Kidnappings of Iraqis for ransom are rife -- nobody ever investigates. Leading academics are being killed -- ditto. People are afraid to walk the streets after 9 or 10 -- nobody does anything about this. Women are far more constricted in getting around than they used to be. The list goes on and on. The U.S. military does nothing, absolutely nothing, about these security problems. Anyone who swallows any of this propaganda about "providing security" should spend one day talking to people in Iraq. I'm against the occupation for what I consider to be deep-lying structural reasons that would be valid even if it were conducted more humanely (I've written on this before, but I do have to collect all my scattered thoughts here and write about it again). But I have to say, from all of my experience interviewing Iraqis, one conclusion stands out clearly: had this occupation been carried out by British, Dutch, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Spanish, everyone but the United States, the level of resentment would be far lower, as would the level of violence. It is the arrogance and brutality of the Americans here that is the primary grievance of Iraqis (and second is the negligence and the fact that nothing works).

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Rahul Mahajan has blogged about this but now has a separate piece up. A must read...

Report from Baghdad -- Winning Hearts and Minds

The mosque of Abu Hanifa, built around the tomb of the founder of the mainstream Hanafi school of Islamist jurisprudence, has stood for 1250 years in the Aadhamiya quarter of Baghdad. When Hulagu sacked Baghdad in 1257, he used it to stable his horses, but otherwise it has escaped indignities from the many invaders and foreign overlords to which Baghdad has been subject. It is the most important (though not the largest) Sunni mosque in Baghdad, and a site of pilgrimage for Muslims the world over.

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Helena Cobban points us to another Iraqi blog that is a must read...

Thursday, 15/4

Good morning... Silence in Baghdad means that its flaming out in other cities, my face is pale and my eyes look tierd, yesterday was a tough day, the accident near Azzam's car, and then a cousin of mine came to visit me in the shop, I was surprised and I cried when I saw him, and I remembered the days we spent together in our early childhood after his mother died and he came to live in my family's house, he lives in Germany since along time, and he is married to a German women, and he got the German citizenship too. Bosh and Sharon made a press conference in the evening; they buy and sell other people's countries and ignoring the struggle of Palestinian people that lasted for the last fifty years. The powerful evil always stand in front of the camera smiling, and forget that there is a god in the skies up there, who has rules and justice, that he implements it in his way, and defeats the stupid evil when he wants. "Let them play till they face the promised day" God says in Quran. * I checked my mail, and I found a long email from my friend who lives in Chicago, telling me about the American states, the details about their history, traditions and habits, it made me smile, I felt that I made a tour all over the states, north to south and east to west, and she attached an article that she took from a newspaper, talking about how the city of Indiana is torn about the war in Iraq, and that there is a hi-schools that is sinking in sadness, where they held the pictures of young people who graduated from that school, and were killed in Iraq this month, and about yellow ribbon people are hanging on trees to express their hope that their beloved ones will go back home safe, and about the memories their colleges have about them, playing football in the school field. At night, I went out to the garden in the darkness, the electricity was off, and the generator was on and making a loud noise, I sat on a chair and I though of those who die here everyday, Iraqi people, and about the Americans and others who died and the yellow ribbons wasn’t much useful for them, and they went home dead bodies, for what? I wondered, and I cried and grieved all the lives that we, Iraqi and American people, have lost, I cried a lot, and I felt angry with everyone who lied and made this war for his personal benefit, a bunch of criminals who have no mercy, who accomplish their evil dreams and destroy the whole world from far east to far west, while we, the rest of people, sink in our questions and sadness.

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10:25 AM - link

photography

NOT IF BUT WHEN   BRIAN ULRICH   PHOTOGRAPHS

  thanks to Coudal Partners

10:03 AM - link

more of the iraqi intifada — vietnam, lebanon, and the west bank on internet time

Inside the fire
A brave and harrowing report from inside the besieged city of Falluja where ordinary people are trapped in the cross-fire.

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that is not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people with few possessions heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people still inside Falluja. The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I am on the bus is that a journalist I know turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja. He had been bringing out children with their limbs blown off. The US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down. He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the American checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we would travel on. We would take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave. I’ll spare you the whole decision making process, the questions we all asked ourselves and each other, and you can spare me the accusations of madness, but what it came down to was this: if I don’t do it, who will? Either way, we arrived in one piece. We pile the stuff in the corridor and the boxes are torn open straightaway; the blankets most welcomed. It is not a hospital at all but a clinic, a private doctor’s surgery treating people free since air strikes destroyed the town’s main hospital. Another has been improvised in a car garage. There is no anaesthetic. The blood bags are in a drinks fridge and the doctors warm them up under the hot tap in an unhygienic toilet. Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces. Ummi, mother, one cries. I hold her until Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about ten is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper, they said, hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Falluja. [...] Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window. We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance. I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle. I am outraged. We are trying to get to a woman who is giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you are shooting at us. How dare you? [...] And then we are in Baghdad, delivering them to the hospitals, Nuha in tears as they take the burnt man off groaning and whimpering. She puts her arms around me and asks me to be her friend. I make her feel less isolated, she says, less alone. And the satellite news says the cease-fire is holding and George Bush says to the troops on Easter Sunday that, “I know what we’re doing in Iraq is right.” Shooting unarmed men in the back outside their family home is right? Shooting grandmothers with white flags is right? Shooting at women and children who are fleeing their homes is right? Firing at ambulances is right? Well George, I know too now. I know what it looks like when you brutalise people so much that they have nothing left to lose. I know what it looks like when an operation is being done without anaesthetic because the hospitals are destroyed or under sniper fire and the city is under siege and aid isn’t getting in properly. I know what it sounds like too. I know what it looks like when tracer bullets are passing your head, even though you are in an ambulance. I know what it looks like when a man’s chest is no longer inside him and what it smells like, and I know what it looks like when his wife and children pour out of his house. It’s a crime and it’s a disgrace to us all.

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  thanks to Conscientious

Jesusfuckingchrist! What are we doing?

11:21 AM - link

the iraqi intifada — vietnam, lebanon, and the west bank on internet time

The stand off continues. Negotiations in Najaf and the Marine snipers, in Fallujah, picking off anyone that moves. There are 2,500 troops ready to move in to Najaf. One hopes that everyone will come to their senses.

The first link is to another piece by one of the most amazing voices in Iraq — a 24 year old woman in Baghdad who goes by Riverbend. I couldn't find anything I wanted to leave out from her latest post, so here is the whole thing. If you haven't read Riverbend before, go read everything she has written.

Media and Falloojeh...
by Riverbend

There has been a lot of criticism about the way Al-Arabia and Al-Jazeera were covering the riots and fighting in Falloojeh and the south this last week. Some American spokesman for the military was ranting about the "spread of anti-Americanism" through networks like the abovementioned. Actually, both networks did a phenomenal job of covering the attacks on Falloojeh and the southern provinces. Al-Jazeera had their reporter literally embedded in the middle of the chaos- and I don't mean the lame embedded western journalists type of thing they had going at the beginning of the war (you know- embedded in the Green Zone and embedded in Kuwait, etc.). Ahmed Mansur, I believe his name was, was actually standing there, in the middle of the bombing, shouting to be heard over the F-16s and helicopters blasting away at houses and buildings. It brought back the days of 'shock and awe'... I know it bothers the CPA terribly to have the corpses of dead Iraqis shown on television. They would love for Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia to follow Al-Hurra's example and show endless interviews with pro-occupation Iraqis living abroad and speaking in stilted Arabic. These interviews, of course, are interspersed with translated documentaries on the many marvels of... Hollywood. And while I, personally, am very interested in the custom leather interiors of the latest Audi, I couldn't seem to draw myself away from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia while 700+ Iraqis were being killed. To lessen the feelings of anti-Americanism, might I make a few suggestions? Stop the collective punishment. When Mark Kimmett stutters through a press conference babbling about "precision weapons" and "military targets" in Falloojeh, who is he kidding? Falloojeh is a small city made up of low, simple houses, little shops and mosques. Is he implying that the 600 civilians who died during the bombing and the thousands injured and maimed were all "insurgents"? Are houses, shops and mosques now military targets? What I'm trying to say is that we don't need news networks to make us angry or frustrated. All you need to do is talk to one of the Falloojeh refugees making their way tentatively into Baghdad; look at the tear-stained faces, the eyes glazed over with something like shock. In our neighborhood alone there are at least 4 families from Falloojeh who have come to stay with family and friends in Baghdad. The stories they tell are terrible and grim and it's hard to believe that they've gone through so much. I think western news networks are far too tame. They show the Hollywood version of war- strong troops in uniform, hostile Iraqis being captured and made to face "justice" and the White House turkey posing with the Thanksgiving turkey... which is just fine. But what about the destruction that comes with war and occupation? What about the death? I don't mean just the images of dead Iraqis scattered all over, but dead Americans too. People should *have* to see those images. Why is it not ok to show dead Iraqis and American troops in Iraq, but it's fine to show the catastrophe of September 11 over and over again? I wish every person who emails me supporting the war, safe behind their computer, secure in their narrow mind and fixed views, could actually come and experience the war live. I wish they could spend just 24 hours in Baghdad today and hear Mark Kimmett talk about the death of 700 "insurgents" like it was a proud day for Americans everywhere... Still, when I hear talk about "anti-Americanism" it angers me. Why does American identify itself with its military and government? Why is does being anti-Bush and anti-occupation have to mean that a person is anti-American? We watch American movies, listen to everything from Britney Spears to Nirvana and refer to every single brown, fizzy drink as "Pepsi". I hate American foreign policy and its constant meddling in the region... I hate American tanks in Baghdad and American soldiers on our streets and in our homes on occasion... why does that mean that I hate America and Americans? Are tanks, troops and violence the only face of America? If the Pentagon, Department of Defense and Condi are "America", then yes- I hate America.

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Mediation with Muqtada and the Limits of Tolerance
by Juan Cole

The Scotsman reports that the standoff between the American forces and those of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf continues. Muqtada appears to be seeking a compromise. [...] Jonathan Steele of the Guardian has a thoughtful report on the negotiations. He says the Coalition Provisional Authority is trying to justify having cracked down on Muqtada on the grounds that he was planning an uprising even before the closure of his newspaper. I do not agree. Muqtada was the leader of a sectarian movement, and it was certainly proselytizing, coercing, and organizing. But all the indications are that he was being careful not to confront the CPA with violence, until he became convinced that they were coming after him. He may have planned violence or at least political coercion for next year, but we do not know that. We only know that he was organizing, including organizing a militia. In that he was no different from pro-American figures like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (who heads the Badr Corps militia), Ibrahim Jaafari, whose Dawa Party has a militia, or even Ahmad Chalabi, whose militia was flown into Iraq by Rumsfeld on Pentagon aircraft and given perquisites by the US.

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Waco in Iraq

My friend Jean Rosenfeld, whose work I've mentioned previously, is a religious-studies researcher at UCLA who specializes in analyzing extremist religious movements and the way religion can inspire violence. She was among the scholars consulted by the FBI during the Branch Davidian standoff at Waco (her recommendations, and those of other religious scholars, were made to the negotiating team, whose work in turn was ignored by the tactical units that were in charge of the scene there). I also consulted with Jean while I was covering the Freemen standoff in Montana -- which, because the negotiating team was placed in charge, had a dramatically different outcome than that in Waco. (For details, see In God's Country.) She sees an important parallel in what is now happening in Iraq regarding the Sadrists, and is hoping that the government does not make the same mistakes there that they made at Waco. She recently penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that appears to have been ignored by that paper's editors. So I'm going to publish it in full here. [...] It is worth observing, of course, that (as Atrios notes) the coalition appears determined to make this mistake, since its official stance is that "The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr."

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Rahul Mahajan has been reporting from Baghdad and Fallujah. What he shows are war crimes.

April 14, 11:45 am EST.

Some people who have read my eyewitness reports confirming U.S. sniping at ambulances in Fallujah have written to accuse me of "having an agenda" and therefore lying about what I saw. Others have written to accuse me of being an Iraqi or of having a non-European name and therefore lying about what I saw. They are a very small minority of those who have written, but, because a picture apparently is still worth 1000 words.

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Insurgents Display New Sophistication
Campaign Leaves Bridges Heavily Damaged, Hampering Military's Push South

Insurgents fighting the U.S.-led occupation force have sharply increased the sophistication, coordination and aggressiveness of their tactics over the past week, Army officers and soldiers involved in combat here said. Most dramatically, as several thousand U.S. troops pushed south this week from the Baghdad area to this new base in central Iraq, one highway bridge on their planned route was destroyed and two others were so heavily damaged that they could not be used by heavy Army trucks and armored vehicles.

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Why are people suprised when Iraqis show they aren't stupid? Not only do they have the capability to cut off our supply lines, they can hamper any future retreat back to Kuwait.

Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported
By Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn

At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.

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10:49 AM - link

cd art

My first CD cover! I received this in the mail from Boise, Idaho, a couple of days ago. The indie band is The Same Yest and the ablum title is intelligence failure. The music is sampled and political — anti-Bush. Wendy, who put the cover together, found my dead bug pictures and fell in love with Bug #4. (Those are her words, not mine.) All I get is byline and a CD so I'm not ready to quite my day job yet.

remember afghanistan?

Why Bush's Afghanistan problem won't go away.

In December, 2002, a year after the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld gave an upbeat assessment of the country's future to CNN's Larry King. "they have elected a government. . . . The Taliban are gone. The Al Qaeda are gone. The country is not a perfectly stable place, and it needs a great deal of reconstruction funds," Rumsfeld said. "there are people who are throwing hand grenades and shooting off rockets and trying to kill people, but there are people who are trying to kill people in New York or San Francisco. So it's not going to be a perfectly tidy place." Nonetheless, he said, "I'm hopeful, I'm encouraged." And he added, "I wish them well." A year and a half later, the Taliban are still a force in many parts of Afghanistan, and the country continues to provide safe haven for members of Al Qaeda. American troops, more than ten thousand of whom remain, are heavily deployed in the mountainous areas near Pakistan, still hunting for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed President, exercises little political control outside Kabul and is struggling to undercut the authority of local warlords, who effectively control the provinces. Heroin production is soaring, and, outside of Kabul and a few other cities, people are terrorized by violence and crime. A new report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of last week's international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan, stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a "terrorist breeding ground" unless there is a significant increase in development aid. The turmoil in Afghanistan has become a political issue for the Bush Administration, whose general conduct of the war on terrorism is being publicly challenged by Richard A. Clarke, the former National Security Council terrorism adviser, in a memoir, "Against All Enemies," and in contentious hearings before the September 11th Commission. The Bush Administration has consistently invoked Afghanistan as a success story, an example of the President's determination. However, it is making this claim in the face of renewed warnings, from international organizations, from allies, and from within its own military, notably a Pentagon-commissioned report that was left in bureaucratic limbo when its conclusions proved negative that the situation there is deteriorating rapidly.

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01:38 AM - link

motorcycles

I love two wheel vehicles — with and without pedals. Monday last was TestingTesting with Timothy Hull. When he arrived for the show, I went out to greet him and, to my amazement, saw this fine motorcycle in my driveway. It had been riden over by a friend of his — Allistaire. Allistaire had spent two years restoring this 1942 wartime 500 single BSA. It's a beauty. It's his first bike.

Here are some more pictures.

I have my own motorcyle project. It was my transportation for 4 years but has sat neglected needing some work and a lot of cleaning. It's a 1982 BMW R100RS. After I get my fixie on the road, I will be getting the beemer back to looking like it did in that picture.

01:27 AM - link

apologies

I don't mean to be a nag and a bore. There is more happening, both good and bad, than Iraq. It's just that I've never seen this country doing things that scare me as much as this. The impact of what is happening in Fallujah, Baghdad, Najaf, and too many other cities, will be felt directly by us. And it won't be good. Sorry, I want to return to regular programming but I fear that won't happen any time soon. Boy Blunder seems to be making sure of that. I'll do what I can.

02:53 PM - link

language and genocide

The use of language is important in dehumanizing your enemy. I linked earlier to a related item, when Juan Cole talked about Untermenschen. Billmon talks about language. Language that lets us kill children without loosing sleep.

Medical Emergency

On one of the earlier threads -- Report Card -- some of the commenters were talking about the use of "sanitation" metaphors as a precursor to genocide -- i.e. "our enemy, the hated [insert minority group here] are vermin, spread disease, poison the wells, etc." Well, having followed that conversation, I definitely did a double take when I came across this quote: It is critical that we confront those organizations and those elements that want to use mob violence and intimidation against the Iraqi people. It's critical that we confront them now rather than after June 30th. It is critical that we cleanse the Iraqi body politic of the poison that remains here after 35 years of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian rule. (emphasis added) Coalition spokesman Dan Senor Press Briefing April 12, 2003 I don't think Dan Senor is a Nazi, or even a particularly evil person -- although he does strike me as exactly the kind of bureaucratic toady that tends to thrive in a totalitarian system. The health of the American political system is inversely related to the degree to which people like Senor rise within it, and right now, as in Nixon's time, it's definitely on the critical list. But what struck me is how easy it is for simple-minded hacks like Senor to slip into the rhetorical style of fascism -- using depersonalized biological or medical terms for the bloody business of killing people on a large scale. [...] But the title of the piece -- "How to Squeeze a City" -- also reflects the same emotionally detached, morally neutral tone, as if Fallujah was just a big pimple that had to be popped. I've used these kinds of distancing techniques myself -- writers often do when they want to highlight the horror of a situation by understating the actual details. Hemingway's descriptions of World War I trench warfare, or Joseph Heller's matter-of-fact treatment of a dying airman in Catch 22 are examples. But what's at work here seems to be just the opposite: Senor wasn't trying to highlight reality, he wanted to deaden it. It's the corporate PowerPoint warrior's classic urge to give the customer (in this case, the American public) nothing but happy news, combined with the classic totalitarian impulse to replace real verbs -- "kill", "destroy", "bomb" -- with artificial ones -- "reduce", "degrade", "neutralize" -- when talking about enemy dead. Friendly casualities may or may not qualify for such sanitizing, depending on the propaganda objectives. Thus the steady toll of American combat deaths (which the administration wants to hide) are described as dispassionately as possible, while the four contractors in Fallujah (which the administration wanted to personalize in order to justify retaliation) got the works: "burnt corpses", "savage killing", "mutilated body parts." etc.

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When you read about Iraq, look at the words being used. Be careful. And be sure to read the comments on Billmon's post.

02:40 PM - link

spoken word artists

I heard about this (literally) at Whole Wheat Radio...

Mockumentary.Com
We Mock You

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