During the 1st Gulf War, there were a dozen or so Chinese who withdrew very late from Kuwuit, and all of them now got severe depleted-uranium-symptom, and a couple of them already dead.
>>I have read that 40 percent of the Iraqi population will succumb to cancer because of this practice of bombing them with depleted uranium. Is THIS liberation? <<
Although I have not read that news, but I think it may be true. "Liberation"? If majority of Iraqis want it, then it might be. But from what I heard and read, majority of them want to fight the US and protect their own country. There were >5,000 Iraqis RETURNED Iraq after the war started.
here are more articles:
The 'Palestinization' of Iraq
By Pepe Escobar
AMMAN - American tanks are now ripping at the heart of Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" and the cradle of civilization; the US 5th Corps is already engaging the Medina division of the Republican Guards as B52s increase their bombing raids of the "red line" in the outer ring of defenses of Baghdad, over which hangs a surreal, dust-induced dark orange cloud.
For 280 million Arabs, the symbolic effect of the tanks in the country is as devastating as a lethal sandstorm. But Saddam Hussein seems to be one step ahead. It doesn't matter that Iraqi TV was silenced by a showering of Tomahawks (although domestic broadcasts, as well as the international signal, have been restored). Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV will be on hand to record the ultimate image that Saddam knows is capable of igniting the Arab world into an ocean of fire: an American tank in the streets of Baghdad juxtaposed with an American tank in the streets of Gaza.
To date, an estimated 5,200 Iraqis have crossed the Jordanian-Iraqi border, going back "to defend their homeland" as they invariably put it. In already one week of a war that was marketed by the Pentagon as "clean" and "quick" and which is revealing itself to be bloody and protracted, not a single Iraqi refugee has crossed the al-Karama border point into eastern Jordan.
Beyond Iraq, the most crucial development in the Middle East for decades is the fact that from Amman to Cairo, from Beirut to Riyadh, the bulk of the Arab nation is now "Palestinized". Marwan Muasher, the suave Jordanian foreign minister, insists that King Abdullah and his government are doing everything to end the war and "to try to help the Iraqi people" - basically through frantic telephone diplomacy with Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Arab League has meekly called for an end to the war. Washington didn't even register it. And the Arab street is not buying excuses any more.
The widespread anger directed at Arab leaders is overwhelming - from taxi drivers to art students, from construction workers to businessmen. For around half a century, the anger in a way channeled by the Palestinians - who by practical experience have learned not to trust Arab leaders. Now the loss of legitimacy is total - a long decaying process that originated in the early 1990s. The street knows that all Arab regimes - from reactionary Saudi Arabia to relatively progressive Jordan - have failed. They have been incapable of achieving Arab unity and independence. They have been incapable of providing social, economic and technological development. They have been impotent in their promises to try to help liberate Gaza and the West Bank. And they have been shamefully incapable of uniting against what their populations unanimously consider a neocolonialist war in Iraq.
One of the most extraordinary developments of the war so far is how the resistance of the Iraqi population against a foreign invasion has galvanized this sentiment of anger in the Arab world. "We are all Palestinians now," as a Bedouin taxi driver puts it. One of the first things anyone mentions in Jordan - be it a Jordanian, an Egyptian, a Lebanese or a Somali refugee - is their happiness about the way the Iraqi people are resisting the "invaders" (never qualified as "liberators"). Their intuition also tells them that every extra day in this war is further humiliation to the Pentagon - especially because the real war, and not the US version, is being followed by the whole Arab world, in Arabic, through Arab satellite channels.
In a cramped office in downtown Amman near the Roman amphitheater, answering dozens of phone calls, surfing the Internet and zapping incessantly between al-Jazeera and CNN, a Jordanian intelligence source muses on how the Americans will play the war. "They are going to encircle the big cities, Basra, Mosul and Baghdad. But the elite Republican Guard divisions are digging in. The Americans will be forced to attack the best Iraqi soldiers, and thousands, dozens of thousands are now inside Baghdad. The Americans can't occupy Baghdad, they don't have enough soldiers, the city has more people than the whole of Lebanon. They could stay outside and keep bombing. But for how long? They cannot afford a war lasting many months. They will go crazy."
The Pentagon plan for Baghdad is to encircle the huge, sprawling city of 6 million and then calibrate a series of urban attacks. But Baghdad is not Ramallah on the West Bank. The Jordanian intelligence source swears the still non-decapitated regime can survive a siege for months. Saddam - a huge admirer of Josef Stalin - is placing all his bets on the Stalingrad scenario. Of the six Republican Guard divisions, three of them, armored and with around 12,000 soldiers each, are firmly entrenched in Baghdad's inner defensive ring. The key elite Medina division is in the south of the city - ready to face the Americans and already under B52 bombing.
Behind the Republican Guards there are still four brigades of the Special Republican Guards, with at least 10,000 and as many as 25,000 soldiers either placed inside Baghdad or back in Tikrit, Saddam's birthplace 160 kilometers to the north. They are disposed in four motorized infantry brigades and are very well trained in urban guerrilla. This is of course Saddam's Praetorian guard, coming overwhelmingly from the Albu Nasr tribe in Tikrit, from Baiji and from villages near Baghdad and west of Mosul. Asia Times Online has already reported how Saddam can count on the support of a complex network of tribes, clans and sub-clans in the Sunni center of Iraq (What is the US really up against?, February 21) Saddam is rallying his troops non-stop: "Inflict damage on them, and although it may not be big, you'll see how they will flee because they are away from home and because they are aggressors." He has made another jihad call on TV to the tribal and clan chiefs, encouraging them on the guerrilla war path: "Fight them in pockets, and when their columns move, hit their front and rear. Those of you who have been reluctant to fight and are waiting for the order, consider this to be the command of faith and jihad and fight them." Much of the resistance encountered by the Americans and the British in the Shi'ite south was by tribesmen and clansmen, some equipped with very sophisticated weapons.
A mix of Republican and Special Republican Guards, civilian and military security, secret police and civilian militias will offer fierce resistance to the Americans. A well as Saddam, the 8,000 men of the Mudiriyah al-Am al-Amma (the secret police) all come from Tikrit: this is largely an extended family affair. Civilian militias - composed of five competing security forces - will be decisive in urban guerrilla warfare. These forces include the 5,000 men of the al-Amn al-Khas (the Special Forces) and the 4,000 men of the al-Mukhabasad al-Amma (intelligence services), which are spread out all over the country.
There are also the 6,000 men from the al-Idakhard al Askkariyya (military intelligence) and the 5,000 men of Amm al-Askariyya (military security) - a secret police that answers directly to the Ministry of Defense and controls the key central district of Baghdad (their headquarters has already been bombed). There are still the 8,000 men of the Mudiriyah al-Am al-Amma, the secret police which directly depends on the Ministry of the Interior (all of these men also come from Tikrit).
Thousands of Arab-Afghan mujahideen have also been deployed around Baghdad and Mosul preparing suicide commando - or "martyrdom" - operations against the invasion, as well as 2,500 Hezbollah from Lebanon. About 700 Algerian volunteers who received weapons training in Iraqi camps are also at hand.
Finally, around this dizzying web, we find what the Americans would call "combatants" - at least 150,000 men and women of the Jaysh al-Shaabi, a civilian militia that even includes elderly Shi'ite women in black brandishing their World War I-era rifles. The task of the militia is basically to corral the civilian population.
All these special and not-so-special forces have been strategically positioned by the regime among civilians. They will thus be deadly in a guerrilla scenario. This would be the ultimate nightmare for the Pentagon, barring the unthinkable - chemical, biological and even nuclear warfare.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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What is the US really up against?
By Pepe Escobar
CAIRO - Whatever the spin, whatever the rhetoric about "liberation", whatever the wishful thinking of a Japan rising in the Middle East, whatever the battle plan one subscribes to, this will be a war essentially against the Iraqi people. It won't be a war in the first place. It will be a one-sided massacre. Iraq has no air force. Iraq has no navy. Iraq has no satellite network to coordinate military action. But Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammed Mahdi Saleh is the latest in a flurry of regime officials to swear that the country is preparing as if war could happen tomorrow. Let's try to find out how.
In Iraq, the Ba'ath Party controls the army and the clans control the Ba'ath. Iraqi historian and sociologist Faleh Jaber, a researcher at the University of London, notes that in the 1960s the Iraqi armed forces consisted of a regular army plus the Republican Guard. When the Ba'ath Party regained power in 1968, it upgraded the Republican Guard: the army still had the responsibility to defend the country, but the guard's responsibility became to defend the regime. When Saddam Hussein took power in 1979, there was not a single army official in the Revolutionary Command Council. Another Iraqi historian, Majid Khuduri, says that Ba'ath was the first regime to subordinate the army to civil authority.
The young Saddam Hussein, heavily influenced by his maternal uncle, was a big fan of Adolf Hitler's system. Then he became a huge fan of Josef Stalin. Jaber says that Saddam's system follows these influences, but with original features: "Like the German model, the Ba'ath system in Iraq has four supporting bases: a totalitarian ideology, a single party, control of the economy [so-called socialist], and control of the media and the army." Ilios Yannakakis, a Greek historian based in Paris and a Middle East specialist, arguably has the best definition of the Ba'ath Party: "The social and socialist branch of fascism."
Unlike the Nazi model, the Ba'ath model is all about tribes and clans supporting the state. Since the early years it has been a sort of state tribalism, limited to the ruling elite's tribe, the Albu Nasir. The core of this tribe is the very important al-Beijat clan. The fact that Iraq literally floats over a sea of oil enabled the Ba'ath Party initially to invest heavily in public services and many forms of social protection. Jamal Salman, professor of economics at the University of Baghdad, confirmed to this correspondent last year that the Iraqi middle class became prosperous in the 1970s not because of Western-style capitalism, but thanks to state contracts and jobs. In the 1970s, tribal groups ruled: what Jaber calls "class-clan" controls of the party, the army, the bureaucracy and business. Ba'ath operates a complex balancing act as it applies its recipe of merging army control with tribal solidarity. It describes itself as an Arab socialist party - and that is something certainly at odds with tribal solidarity.
Many surviving victims of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war also confirmed to this correspondent how the social fabric of the country was destroyed because of that disastrous conflict. The state lost control over many important tribes. Iraq was left with a US$50 billion debt. At the end of the 1980s, Iraq had a million-strong army. For the war generation, it was impossible to go back to the good life of the 1970s. Jaber is clear: the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, happened as an attempt to re-establish internal stability. But Iraq has been mired in a logic of war for too long.
The defeat in the Gulf War - which is still known inside Iraq as the "Mother of all Battles" - caused a profound structural adjustment. The state was terribly weakened - as well as the security services. The army was reduced to a third of its original size. There were rebellions in Kurdistan and in the Shi'ite south. The United States - illegally, without United Nations approval - imposed no-fly zones. Professor Salman in Baghdad stresses some of the terrible consequences of two totally useless wars: the Iraqi economy, based on oil wealth, collapsed; market forces began to emerge; and the middle class - a very important base for the Ba'ath Party - was smashed by hyperinflation.
Jaber says that Saddam's regime managed to survive the 1990s by meticulously applying a five-point strategy: imposition of order in the main tribe; reorganization of the army; co-option of tribes around the country so that they could replace party organizations; more ammunition to the ideological arsenal; and new forms of economic control.
State tribalism at the top used to be based on an alliance of Sunni clans around the very important al-Beijat clan. The al-Beijat clan has 10 branches. The center of power was changing among all 10, so seven of them were thoroughly smashed. The predominant clan became the Albu-Ghafur, Saddam's sub-clan. The al-Majid clan was also in the ascendancy in the 1990s. Key members such as Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel - both married to daughters of Saddam - and Ali Hasan Al-Majid controlled the arms industry, the Jihaz al-Khas (Special Services) and the Defense Ministry. At the same time, Saddam's sons, Udai and Qusai, were also in the ascendancy. A conflict was inevitable. Hussein and Saddam Kamel went into exile in Jordan. But then, foolishly, they returned to Baghdad and Saddam ordered them to be shot along with their families.
In the late 1990s, Saddam finally cemented his power based on his sub-clan, the Albu-Ghafur, and he chose Qusai to be his successor. A Republican Guard talking to Asia Times Online last year confirmed that this caused a tremendous rift between Saddam and his wife. They were said not to have been sleeping in the same bed, or room for that matter, for years. Udai, Mama's favorite, was a playboy. But Qusai was the brainy one. Saddam ordered Qusai to reorganize the intelligence services and internal security. He was named supervisor of the "Army of the Mother of All Battles" - which later became the Republican Army. Since 2000 he has been interim president and in 2001 he was given regional control of the Ba'ath Party.
The two strongmen of the regime are now Qusai and Kamal Mustapha, a paternal cousin of Saddam who controls the Republican Guard, the de facto praetorian guards of the regime. It's all in the family: Kamal's brother, Jamal, is married to Saddam's youngest daughter. In fact, Iraq is now run by a triumvirate: Father (Saddam), Son (Qusai) and Holy Ghost (Kamal Mustapha).
And it's still all about state tribalism, plus social tribalism, but now combined with Iraqi patriotism - thus the frequent references to the glorious history of Mesopotamia - and of course Arab patriotism. As can easily be attested in Basra in the south of the country, Saudi Wahhabism has infiltrated the country, but it has been tolerated by the security services because it functions as a counterpower to militant Shi'ites.
But the ultimate tool of social control in the regime is in fact a contribution of the international community: sanctions and the "oil for food" program, or UN Resolution 986, adopted by Iraq in May 1996. People receive their meager state rations through certificates. Suspected dissidents, of course, never see such certificates. This is what Jaber calls the "politics of famine". As to the upper middle class, it continues to support the regime because of market deregulation. These are the smugglers who can be seen in Baghdad driving posh German cars with tinted windows, eating gourmet pizza in flash cafes and throwing parties in million-dollar houses next to Saddam's main presidential palace, near Saddam Tower.
So the regime survives thanks to a mix of tribalism, nationalism, patriotism and Sunnism. As many as 80 percent of senior army officers are related to Saddam's Albu-Ghafour sub-clan. So it is a cohesive army, at least as far as the Republican Guards are concerned.
The Iraqi army today has seen no improvement since 1990, except for air defense systems - which have been the targets of relentless strikes by US and British planes for months now. But the reduced military budget served a purpose: the regime was able to concentrate on reinforcing clan alliances. Today the Iraqi armed forces have four divisions: as many as eight regular regiments of the Republican Guard; another division from the Republican Guard; the regular army (four armored, three mechanized and five infantry regiments); and an array of tribal militias specialized in smashing civil rebellion. These militias will be key in the event of urban warfare once the US bombing starts.
This will be an extremely political war. Washington's obsession is regime change. So the main prize is Baghdad. Republican Guards will not chicken out, and there will be no coup d'etat: as we have seen, a big, extended family's survival is at stake. An entire division of the army - as many as four regiments - would be necessary for a coup, and with essential input from the president's own sub-clan. Out of the question. This means full-scale invasion and occupation of Iraq is inevitable.
The regime fights two huge imponderables. Its own structure by definition is extremely vulnerable. And absolutely nobody, inside or outside Iraq, can estimate how substantial is the gap between the official, nationalist, patriotic rhetoric and the feelings of the Iraqi population. There are wild rumors in Baghdad that Saddam is secretly negotiating oil for his survival. For many Iraqis, and for quite some time now, Saddam is not a Saladin fighting against American imperialism: he remains an American agent. And Americans are widely perceived not as "liberators" but as an occupation force. There's intense speculation that the regime will eventually fall, but what will be the price to pay?
The regime is taking no chances, and it has adopted a variety of tactics. The Ba'ath propaganda machine is reinforcing the notion that all members of the ruling elite face death, so there's only one way out: to fight for survival no matter what. The government is also playing the religious card by persuading Shi'ite spiritual leaders to issue fatwas against Shi'ite opponents of the regime.
The overall strategy of defense is concentrated in the cities, especially Baghdad, which could magnify the political nightmare in terms of Western and Arab public opinion as there will be high "collateral damage". And as the Central Command in Qatar will welcome those who want to follow the war by remote control, the regime will also play the media, although there are rumors in the Middle East that the Americans will bomb any satellite phone signal that is not registered with them.
Two key bridges over the Tigris in Baghdad were bombed by the Americans in 1991. According to the latest echoes from Baghdad, people suspect all six bridges will be bombed this time, so everybody will have to use boats or motorboats to get from one side to the other. The US forces will certainly divide the city to confine the defense to certain areas. This means that civilians will also be confined to their neighborhoods. Local Ba'ath Party members in each neighborhood are now mostly housed in schools. Their fundamental mission during the war will be to distribute stocks of water and alcohol - essential for heating and cooking. Order will be maintained by a party official in each and every street (that's how it already works anyway). People won't be allowed to leave their homes.
This could also mean that many wounded won't be able to go to hospital, and aid agencies will have a nightmare trying to distribute food. The regime says that rations that could last until June have already been distributed, and Iraqi TV every day alerts that they should not be resold because everyone will need them. And residents fear above all the hellish rain of fire already promised with glee by many a Pentagon official. Ordinary Iraqis, naturally fatalistic, expect to be the main targets, as they have been the targets of sanctions for the past 12 years.
US forces may not disable Iraq's command and control systems because the army-as-an-extended-family simply will not be relying on high tech. There will be suicide martyrs everywhere, according to the Ba'ath leadership, and civilians in some neighborhoods seem to be prepared to defend the city in house-to-house fighting. Indeed, Kalashnikovs have been distributed to certain sections of the population. It's unlikely that the Americans will know how to deal with the extremely complex tribal and clan structures already pre-positioned for a new redistribution of land, water, arms and prestige in case there's a new central power. Anyway, these clans are heavily armed already, and they will not help the United States during the war. They have nothing to gain by betraying Saddam: he can always survive and his revenge would be devastating. Iraqis, with a keen sense of history, remind anyone that Saddam has survived endless assassination attempts, coups, US presidents and a war against a 33-nation coalition.
Saddam is betting on a replay of the siege of Stalingrad. His key strategy is to maintain the control of the population for as long as possible. He might even be betting on a popular revolution against the invader.
And Saddam may escape alive. He has as many as nine doubles. Like Osama bin Laden, he could vanish into virtual reality - cynics with a wicked sense of humor even advance that this may be part of the whole deal.
One thing is certain. It's absolutely impossible for anyone who hasn't been to Iraq even to imagine the tremendous frustration, anger, humiliation and terminal desperation caused by 12 years of sanctions. When the United States stops bombing, and if the security apparatus disintegrates, the decomposition of the regime will be beyond brutal. Iraqis are convinced chaos is inevitable. Even with the fall of the regime, there will be violent popular opposition to an invasion. Few may heed a call to arms to defend the regime. But many would not hesitate to force the invader out. Especially because very few in Iraq seem to be convinced that the US wants to invest in a Marshall plan and mold the country into a "beacon of democracy", as well as prosperity, in the Middle East. The fact is, the whole country could be easily engulfed in a bloody mix of civil war and liberation struggle that no Douglas MacArthur and no occupation force will ever be able to control.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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