Of particular significance was the finding that the sex ratio between newborn boys and girls had changed. In a normal population this is 1,050 boys born to 1,000 girls, but for those born from 2005 there was an 18 per cent drop in male births, so the ratio was 850 males to 1,000 females. The sex-ratio is an indicator of genetic damage that affects boys more than girls. A similar change in the sex ratio was discovered after Hiroshima.
The US cut back on its use of firepower in Iraq from 2007 because of the anger it provoked among civilians. But at the same time there has been a decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq since 2003. The impact of war on civilians was more severe in Fallujah than anywhere else in Iraq because the city continued to be blockaded and cut off from the rest of the country long after 2004. War damage was only slowly repaired and people from the city were frightened to go to hospitals in Baghdad because of military checkpoints on the road into the capital.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
US UNABLE TO ACCOUNT FOR BILLIONS OF IRAQ OIL MONEY
The US defence department is unable to account for almost $9 billion taken from Iraqi oil revenues for use in reconstruction, according to an official audit released yesterday.
The report by the US Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction says $8.7 billion (£5.6 billion) out of $9.1 billion withdrawn between 2004 and 2007 from a special account set up by the UN Security Council is unaccounted for. This is separate from $53 billion set aside by Congress for Iraqi reconstruction.
Though the special investigator found that some of the money was spent properly, Iraqis continually complain that they see little sign of their infrastructure being rebuilt after 30 years of war and sanctions. Electricity, clean water and sewage disposal remain wholly inadequate and seven years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein there are few cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline or any other signs of rebuilding. A total of 95 per cent of the country's federal budget comes from oil revenue.
The scale of the sums unaccounted for are particularly striking given they cover periods well after serious fraud and corruption had been widely publicised in Iraq and abroad. The audit says that no organisation in the defence department was set up to oversee how money from the Development Fund for Iraq was spent. It adds that "the breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss". Many of the organisations at the Pentagon that received funds failed to establish the accounts required to track the funds.
The report cited poor record-keeping and said most of the organisations at the Pentagon that received DFI funds failed to use required treasury department accounts. And while most of the money was at least partially tracked, the military failed to produce any records whatsoever for $2.6 billion.
Corruption in Iraq in general became all pervasive at the height of the violence in 2006-7 because of the difficulty in monitoring what was going on. Money was dissipated by main contractors sub-contracting work which was sub-contracted in turn with each company involved taking a profit.
In a separate development, the General Electric Company has agreed to pay $23.4m to settle bribery charges relating to Iraq, the Security and Exchange Commission said yesterday. GE settled without admitting the charges which relate to a $3.6m kickback scheme to win contracts to supply medical and water purification equipment.
Iraq is still no nearer to forming a government as a parliamentary session to discuss the new administration was postponed indefinitely yesterday. Iraq's parliamentary election was held on 7 March but no party won an outright majority or has been able to put together a coalition which has a majority, largely because the Shia coalition which won the election in 2005 is split and has been unable to recombine. The Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's State of Law party has been unable to reach agreement with the Shia religious parties in the Iraqi National Alliance. The stumbling block is Mr Maliki himself, who is refusing to step down despite the fact that he is deeply distrusted by potential allies in any future coalition. The US would like him to form an alliance with former Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, whose al-Iraqiya party largely depends on Sunni votes.
Saturday, 28 August 2010
GRIM STABILITY IS THE US LEGACY
A few days after the US announced that it had withdrawn its last combat brigade from Iraq, the local branch of al-Qa'ida staged a show of strength, killing or wounding 300 people in attacks across the country. Its suicide bombers drove vehicles packed with explosives into police stations or military convoys from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south.
The continuing ferocious violence in Iraq, where most days more people die by bomb and bullet than in Afghanistan, is leading to questions about its stability once US forces finally withdraw by the end of next year.
American politicians, soldiers and think tankers blithely recommend American troops staying longer, though at their most numerous US troops signally failed to stop the bombers.
The unfortunate truth may be that Iraq has already achieved a grisly form of stability, though it comes with a persistently high level of violence and a semi-dysfunctional state. Bad though the present situation is in the country, there may not be sufficient reasons for it to change.
Politically, Iraq may look increasingly like Lebanon with each ethnic or sectarian community vying for a share of power and resources. But if Iraq is becoming like Lebanon, it is a Lebanon with money. Dysfunctional the state machine may be, but it still has $60 billion in annual oil revenues to spend, mostly on the salaries of the security forces and the civilian bureaucracy. One former Iraqi minister says that the one time he had seen the new Iraqi political elite "in a state of real panic was when the price of oil fell below $50 a barrel a couple of years ago".
It is oil revenues which prevent Iraq from flying apart and make it such a different country from Afghanistan where the government is dependent on foreign handouts. Shia, Sunni and Kurds may not like each other, but they cannot do without a share of the oil money or the jobs it finances. A third of the 27 million Iraqi population depends on rations provided by the state to prevent malnutrition. Even the highly autonomous Kurds depend on $4-5 billion from Baghdad to fund their government. Aside from oil, and the state machine it pays for, there is not much holding Iraq together. The political landscape is defined by sectarian and ethnic divisions. Communal loyalty almost entirely determined the outcome of the parliamentary election on 7 March this year as it had done in the previous poll in 2005. There is little sign of this changing.
This should not be too surprising. Kurds, Shia and Sunni all nurse memories of being massacred.
Some 180,000 Kurds were slaughtered during Saddam Hussein's Anfal campaign in the late 1980s; tens of thousands of Shia were killed when their uprising was crushed by the Iraqi army in 1991; the Sunni were the main victims of the sectarian civil war of 2006-7 when, at its worst, 3,000 bodies were being found every month in Baghdad.
The legacy of these massacres is that each of the three main Iraqi communities behaves as if it were a separate country. The political system was devised to encourage power sharing with none of the three main communities able to disregard the others. In practice, unwillingness to make concessions has turned into a recipe for a permanent political stalemate.
The natural reaction of Iraqi politicians when faced with a crisis in relations with another Iraqi community is not to compromise but to seek foreign allies. It is this which is making it so difficult to re-create Iraq as a genuinely independent state. Iraqis often deceive themselves about this.
Sunni who believe themselves to be nonsectarian simply re-label Shia leaders as quasi-Iranians. Shia leaders welcome the Sunni as their brothers, but then try to exclude those whom they denounce as Baathists. The Kurds remain deeply fearful of Sunni and Shia Arabs uniting to end Kurdistan's quasi-independence.
For all these strains Iraq has achieved a sort of stability. Shia and Sunni may not like each other, but there are three Shia to every Sunni. The civil war had winners and lose
rs and it was the Shia who emerged as the victors. It is they and the Kurds who control the state and they are not going to give this up. For all the differences between the Kurds and Arabs over territorial control in northern Iraq, the Kurds have a lot to lose to let this spill over into war.
The next Iraqi government, its formation so long delayed because of divisions within the Shia camp over the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is likely to look very like the present one. It will be dominated by the Shia and the Kurds with some token concessions to the Sunni. The Sunni may not be happy but it is doubtful if they have the strength to start another insurrection.
For good or ill, the present Iraqi political system is gelling. The external forces which destabilised it are becoming less powerful. The US army is withdrawing. This is presented as a source of instability, but in practice the presence of an American land army in Iraq since 2003 has been profoundly destabilising for the whole region. Iran and Syria both took seriously President Bush's "axis of evil" speech denouncing their governments, and made sure the US never pacified Iraq.
The Iranians have largely got what they wanted, which is the dominance of their Shia coreligionists in Iraq and the departure of American forces. Such an outcome is not unexpected. Once President Bush and Tony Blair decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein it was likely that his predominantly Sunni regime was going to be replaced by one dominated by the Shia, and Iranian influence in Iraq would become paramount compared to other foreign states. For seven years Washington struggled vainly to avoid this near inevitable outcome. The new Iraq may not be a very nice place, but it has probably come to stay.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
ECHOS OF EL SALVADOR IN TALES OF US APPROVED DEATH SQUADS
The Iraqi documents released by Wikileaks produce significantly more detail on US actions in the war in Iraq , but do they produce anything that we did not know already?
The Pentagon will huff and puff with rage as it did over the Wikileaks release of US military documents about Afghanistan, when it took the contradictory position that there was little new in what has been leaked, but important sources of intelligence had somehow still been compromised.
The leaks are important because they prove much of what was previously only suspected but never admitted by the US army or explained in detail. It was obvious from 2004 that US forces almost always ignored cases of torture by Iraqi government forces, but this is now shown to have been official policy. Of particular interest to Iraqis, when Wikileaks releases the rest of its hoard of documents, will be to see if there is any sign of how far US forces were involved in death squad activities from 2004.
From the summer of 2004 Iraq slipped into a sectarian civil war of great savagery as al-Qa'ida launched attacks on the Shia who increasingly dominated the government. From late in 2004 Interior Ministry troops trained by the Americans were taking part in savage raids on Sunni or suspected Baathist districts. People prominent in Saddam Hussein's regime were arrested and disappeared for few days until their tortured bodies were dumped beside the roads.
Iraqi leaders whispered that the Americans were involved in the training of what were in fact death squads in official guise. It was said that US actions were modelled on counter-insurgency methods pioneered in El Salvador by US-trained Salvadoran government units.
It was no secret that torture of prisoners had become the norm in Iraqi government prisons as it established its own security services from 2004. Men who were clearly the victims of torture were often put on television where they would confess to murder, torture and rape. But after a time it was noticed that many of those whom they claimed to have killed were still alive.
The Sunni community at this time were terrified of mass sweeps by the US forces, sometimes accompanied by Iraqi government units, in which all young men of military age were arrested. Tribal elders would often rush to the American to demand that the prisoners not be handed over to the Iraqi army or police who were likely to torture or murder them. The power drill was a favourite measure of torture. It is clear that the US military knew all about this.
From the end of 2007 the war began to change as the Americans began to appear as the defenders of the Sunni community. The US military offensives against al-Qa'ida and the Mehdi Army Shiah militia were accompanied by a rash of assassinations. Again it would be interesting to know more detail about how far the US military was involved in these killings, particularly against the followers of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
There were a series of interconnected conflicts going on in Iraq during the American occupation in 2004-9. One that seldom made headlines involved a series of tit-for-tat killings and kidnappings against each other by the Americans and Iranians. This reached its peak in 2007 when the Americans tried to seize Iranian intelligence leaders visiting Kurdistan and US soldiers were killed in an abortive raid in Kerbala. The capture of British naval personnel by Iranian Revolutionary Guards may have been part of this shadowy conflict.
Information about Iraq leaked, like that about Afghanistan, should come with a health warning. The Americans were often told by Iraqis, low level agents or high level ministers, what they supposed the Americans wanted to hear, notably that an Iranian hand was behind many anti-American actions. Much of this is likely to be nonsense.
Information given to the Americans by Afghan intelligence implicating Pakistan and ISI military intelligence in aiding the Taliban was obviously concocted. It is not that the Pakistan military do not help the Taliban but they do so subtly and with care to make sure their involvement cannot be traced. Iraqi intelligence passed to the Americans is likely to be equally biased.
THE US WITHDRAWS (2011)
War on Terrorism
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
BEWARE YOUR ENEMY’S STUPIDITY
I have always sympathised with diplomats and intelligence agents unfairly pilloried for failing to foresee that a country, about which they claim expert knowledge, is going to commit some act of stupidity much against its own interests. Twenty years ago there was a witchhunt in Washington over why nobody had forecast that Saddam Hussein would invade and occupy Kuwait. A chief casualty of this was April Glaspie, the US ambassador in Baghdad, who had met for two hours with the Iraqi leader on 25 July 1990, a week before the invasion. During this meeting she was alleged to have "given a green light for the invasion" or at least not made clear that the US would use military force to reverse an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait.
Transcripts of varying levels of credibility have been released over the years, but this week WikiLeaks published Glaspie's cable to the US State Department reporting her discussion with Saddam. What comes shining through is that the Iraqi leader never made clear that he was thinking of annexing the emirate as Iraq's 19th province. Notorious though he was for his bloodcurdling and exaggerated threats, for once he was not threatening enough. Everybody suspected he was conducting a heavyhanded diplomatic offensive to squeeze concessions, financial and possibly territorial, out of the Kuwaitis. Almost nobody predicted a full-scale invasion and occupation of Kuwait, in large part because this was an amazingly foolish move by Saddam, bound to provoke a backlash far beyond Iraq's power to resist.
History is full of examples of experts being dumbfounded by countries acting contrary to their own best interests. Stalin is often denigrated for disbelieving Soviet spies who told him that the German army was going to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. No doubt his paranoid suspicion that Britain was trying to lure him into a war with Hitler played a role. But another factor was that Stalin simply did not believe that Hitler would commit such a gross error as attacking him before finishing off Britain and thus start a war on two fronts, something that the Nazi regime had previously taken great pains to avoid.
A more recent example of a country's leaders blindly shooting themselves in the foot was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. I had been spending a lot of time in Iraq and was in Jordan when it happened. I had seen repeated Isr
aeli incursions into Lebanon fail bloodily in the years since 1978. I could not believe the Israeli military were once again going to try their old discredited tactic of mass bombardment and limited ground assault in a bid to intimidate the world's toughest guerrillas.
Israelis tend to be more cynical about the abilities of their own military commanders than the rest of the world and, looking at the Israeli chief of staff on television, I thought of the old Israeli saying: "He was so stupid that even the other generals noticed." Even so, I could not rid myself of the idea that the Israelis must have something new up their sleeve. I was quite wrong and the war was a humiliating failure for Israel.
In Saddam's case it would be wrong to think of him as stupid, though he had an exaggerated idea of his own abilities and place in history. He was a cunning, ruthless man who knew everything about Iraqi politics and how to manipulate or eliminate his rivals. Outside Iraq he was far less sure-footed, having spent little time abroad, and disastrously overplayed his hand by invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait 10 years later.
He could be advised but only up to a point. A Soviet diplomat who knew him well told me: "The only safe position if you are one of the other Iraqi leaders is to be 10 per cent tougher than the boss." In his discussion with April Glaspie, he comes across as hyper-sensitive to foreign media criticism and prone to see actions contrary to his interests as part of a giant conspiracy against him.
Given that the famous cable reveals nothing very damaging to the US or April Glaspie, why did the State Department keep her and her messages to Washington under wraps for so long? This inevitably generated a widespread belief that such secrecy must mean that the US government had something to hide. The real explanation was probably that, once Saddam and Iraq were being demonised after the invasion of Kuwait, the State Department thought that the publication of a polite and noncommittal conversation between the US ambassador in Baghdad and Saddam would look like weak-kneed encouragement to the aggressor.
Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East Page 18