Category Archives: Iraq War

The Overstatement that becomes an Understatement

Election 2008, Iraq War

Bush Overstated Iraq Evidence, Senators Report

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE, The New York Times, June 6, 2008
WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.

The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.

The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. Continue reading The Overstatement that becomes an Understatement →

Deoband first: A fatwa against terror

Ethics, India, Iraq War, Terrorism Issue

The Times of India, June 1, 2008

NEW DELHI: For the first time ever, Islamic seminary Darul-Uloom Deoband issued a fatwa against terrorism on Saturday, stating Islam had come to wipe out all kinds of terrorism and to spread the message of global peace. The Darul-Uloom had denounced terrorism for the first time in February, but had not issued a fatwa so far.

Saturday’s fatwa, signed by Darul-Uloom’s grand mufti Habibur Rehman, asserts that “Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence, breach of peace, bloodshed, murder and plunder and does not allow it in any form”.

Citing the “sinister campaign” to malign “Islamic faith…by linking terrorism with Islam and distorting the meanings of Quranic Verses and Prophet traditions”, Mahmood Asad Madani, leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, had wanted Deoband to spell out the stand of Islam on world peace.

The fatwa, issued before a huge gathering of Muslims in Delhi’s Ramlila Ground for the Anti-Terrorism and Global Peace Conference, went on to say, “It is proved from clear guidelines provided in the Holy Quran that allegations of terrorism against a religion which preaches and guarantees world peace is nothing but a lie. The religion of Islam has come to wipe out all kinds of terrorism and to spread the message of global peace. Allah knows the best.” Continue reading Deoband first: A fatwa against terror →

So al-Qa’ida’s defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines

Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq War, Journalism and Media

Robert Fisk, The Independent, Sunday, 1 June 2008

So al-Qa’ida is “almost defeated”, is it? Major gains against al-Qa’ida. Essentially defeated. “On balance, we are doing pretty well,” the CIA’s boss, Michael Hayden, tells The Washington Post. “Near strategic defeat of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qa’ida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qa’ida globally – and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’ – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.” Well, you could have fooled me.

Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military – the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden’s boasts – and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we’ve won? Continue reading So al-Qa’ida’s defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines →

Poems from Guantánamo

Books You Should Read, Iraq War, Poetry, Terrorism Issue

Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak is a short but provocative book of poems from several of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. Much has been written about the legal issues and violations of human rights, but here we can hear the silenced voices of those dehumanized in detention without access to justice. Here is one of the poems:

Death Poem
by Jumah Al Dossari

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience.
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul.
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

Jumah al Dossari, a thirty-three-year-old Bahraini national, is the father of a young daughter. He has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. In addition to being detained without charge or trial, Dossari has been subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuses, some of which are detailed in Inside the Wire, an account of the Guantánamo prison by former military intelligence soldier Erik Saar. He has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck nd bleeding from a gash to his arm.

Hometown Baghdad

Film and Video, Iraq, Iraq War, Journalism and Media

Hometown Baghdad is an online web series about life in Baghdad. It tells the stories of three young Iraqis struggling to survive during the war.

The series premiered on March 19th 2007 and the final episode went live on June 17. All episodes are viewable here.

The series was acclaimed in press throughout the world. See the press page for more.

Hometown Baghdad was produced by global youth dialogue company, Chat the Planet. Find out more about Chat here.

Neoconceit and the Iraq Debacle

Books You Should Read, Humor and Satire, Iraq War, Terrorism Issue

By now all but the most ardent of Bush administration admirers must face the obvious: the mission in Iraq was never accomplished, only botched. Historians and pundits will devote tomes upon tomes in assessing one of the most egregious blunders in American foreign policy. But it is not that difficult to see how it happened. Take a horrific tragedy (9/11), a convenient scapegoat (Muslim extremists), a personal grudge (Saddam surviving the first Gulf War and bragging about it), ideological nitwits (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the list goes on), a bottom line (oil supply), a fear factor (WMDs) and outright lies. Much of the evidence for the Iraq Debacle survives on videotape. Now Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky have documented what the “experts” bungled in their recent Mission Accomplished or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).

Cerf and Navasky operate out of The Institute of Expertology, an outside the Beltway anti-think tank that reveals that most would-be intellectual emperors have no clothes, and many of these stand stark naked without shame, even after being exposed. The case for the prosecution is both cute (without having to change a word of the neocon experts) and acute, as the architects of the Bush Iraq Debacle walk the planks they themselves imagined out of hot air. Here is a sampling of the neoconceit anti-principles that got us into this mess: Continue reading Neoconceit and the Iraq Debacle →

Mullah Atari

CyberOrient, Iraq, Iraq War

Since the U.S.-led take-over of Iraq, now more than five years ago, a wide range of Iraqis have become mad as hell, or perhaps more accurately mad enough to make hell with both the U.S. military and against each other. Some are even mahdi as hell, resulting in the Mahdi Army virtually commanded by Muqtada al-Sadr, the grandson of a well-known shi’a grand ayatollah. This renegade militia is the major homegrown thorn in the side of President Nuri al-Maliki’s Green Zone republic. Starting in October, 2003, Muqtada put into play a shadow Islamic government and by August of 2004 he called on his supporters to fight the Coalition forces. For almost three years there has been a loose ceasefire, but that was shattered recently when al-Maliki attempted to oust the Mahdi Army from Basra. Continue reading Mullah Atari →

The occupation has frozen Iraq.

Iraq, Iraq War

by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, April 9 2008

The British troops encamped outside Basra resemble Davy Crockett’s colleagues in the Alamo. Nobody will come to their rescue. Their position is hopeless. They cannot win. They cannot escape. Their boss, the defence secretary Des Browne, has emphasised their political entombment by reneging on Gordon Brown’s pledge to reduce their numbers by a half this spring. The American general, David Petraeus, yesterday said the same of his troops. He wants 140,000 of them to remain at the end of the current surge, dashing hopes that their numbers might come down. The occupation of Iraq is now officially indefinite. Too many politicians have too much to lose by contemplating retreat. Continue reading The occupation has frozen Iraq. →