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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (137128)	6/20/2004 9:48:27 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Another step toward civil war> Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq By DEXTER FILKINS Published: June 20, 2004 Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times MAKHMUR, Iraq, June 17 — Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq. The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters. The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy. In Baghdad, American officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region. The Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands, but they want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability. But thousands of Kurds appear to be ignoring the American orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at the camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands. The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps. American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces. "The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. "They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, `You don't own anything here anymore.' " Ten years ago, Mr. Qadam said, Iraqi officials forced him to turn over his home in the southern city of Diwaniya and move north to the formerly Kurdish village of Khanaqaan, where he received a free parcel of farmland. Now, like the thousands of Arabs encamped in the parched plains northeast of Baghdad, Mr. Qadam, his wife and three children have no home to return to. The push by the Kurds into the formerly Arab-held lands, while driven by the returnees themselves, appears to be backed by the Kurdish government, which has long advocated a resettlement of the disputed area. Despite an explicit prohibition in the Iraqi interim constitution, Kurdish officials are setting up offices and exercising governmental authority in the newly settled areas. The shift in population is raising fears in Iraq that the Kurds are trying to expand their control over Iraqi territory at the same time they are suggesting that they may pull out of the Iraqi government. American officials say they are trying to fend off pressure from Kurds to move their people back into the area. "There is a lot of pressure in the Kurdish political context to bring the people who were forced out back into their hometowns," said a senior American official in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "What we have tried to do so far, through moral suasion, is to get the Kurds to recognize that if they put too much pressure on Kirkuk and other places south of the Green Line, they could spark regional and national instability." But local occupation officials appear in some areas to have accepted the flow of Kurds back to their homes. According to minutes of a recent meeting of occupation officials and relief workers in the northern city of Erbil, an American official said the Americans would no longer oppose Kurds' crossing the Green Line, as long as the areas they were moving into were uncontested. And Kurdish and American officials say the occupation authority has been financing projects here in Makhmur, a formerly Arab area recently resettled by Kurds. nytimes.com read the rest for yourself

To: epicure who wrote (137128)	6/20/2004 9:52:39 AM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

From TPM ...Infrastructure is in total disrepair, and only getting worse with this month's spate of attacks on oil pipelines, bridges and other economic arteries. There is no security in the country--not just for American and foreigners but for Iraqis simply seeking to live their lives, who are the ones we desperately need to buy in to a brighter future. Violent crime has skyrocketed and gangs and militias have proliferated. Sectarian fissures in the country are severe: Grand Ayatollah Sistani's rejection of the interim constitution has inflamed Kurdistan, and even if the Kurds decide against secession (still a dangerously open question at this point), future peaceful compromise in Iraqi politics will be significantly more elusive as a result. Falluja, a symbol of resistance to the U.S. occupation, is both armed to the teeth and feels threatened by both the Kurds (who participated in the April siege of the city) and Shia aspirations of ruling the country. One of the scariest questions in Iraq is what revanchist Sunnis will do now that they have the city as a base of operations. They're not as well armed as the Kurds, nor are they as numerous as the Shia, but one lesson of the last year is that just one armed fanatic can inflict massive bloodshed. Against this background, it's difficult to see civil society--a constituency for the rule of law and the nonviolent adjudication of legitimate disputes--taking hold. Typically in such cases, democracy is a Potemkin affair. On July 1, the CPA will cease to exist, but it is extremely unlikely that Iraqis will consider themselves no longer under occupation. The presence of 138,000 Americans--visible enough to provide a symbol of hated foreign domination, too few to stop the chaos that plagues Iraqis--who are hated by about 90 percent of the country probably ensures this. As one Baghdad policeman told Reuters last month, "Bush is a scorpion. He is a liar. He is sneaky, making all kinds of promises when he just wants to control Iraq." As a result of this distrust, Iraqis are unlikely to shed what administration officials exasperatedly term the "Man On The Moon" syndrome: The expectation of American omnipotence to solve their problems, since a superpower mighty enough to put a man on the moon can surely provide electricity in Baghdad for more than nine hours a day. After all, the U.S. Embassy will still reside in the Republican Palace in the middle of Baghdad, garrisoned in the Green Zone. We're still going to be blamed for everything that goes wrong, and a lot looks primed to continue going wrong. The U.S. will leave behind foundations for liberalization, but they come entwined with foreign domination. A good example is the legal structure that the CPA is bequeathing to Iraq: It provides significant openness and political space for Iraqi civil society, both from L. Paul Bremer's proclamations and the interim constitution. But as Nathan J. Brown of George Washington University observes, [Iraqis'] nationalist sensibilities will be offended when they turn their attention to specific provisions. When Iraqi political and legal officials discover that multinational troops still are effectively granted extraterritorial status; that their vehicles must be given priority in traffic; that the official name of the country in some documents has been changed (from the "Iraqi Republic" to the "State of Iraq");* and that international agreements may—even absent an explicit provision—override requirements for open and competitive bidding in procurement, they will probably conclude that the CPA orders, while often liberal, are inconsistent with full sovereignty. A consequence of all this is something that undercuts an implicit premise of the Post’s excellent coverage: That the occupation is in a significant sense ending. What appears more likely to happen is abdication. The U.S. will be declaring that it's not responsible for the deteriorating course of the country while Iraqis suspect (with significant foundation, as Brown points out) that the U.S. is the real power broker in Iraq As retired State Department official Richard Murphy writes in his Post article, "Washington has oversold the significance of the June 30 handover." All this makes the actual fulfillment of our strategic objectives increasingly remote. Which is a euphemism for failure. talkingpointsmemo.com Rascal @MarketingNotSovereignty.com ***They already are the 51st State. Albeit without an election. But hey it worked that way in Florida in 2000. Everybody reports to Bremer who reports to Rummy who reports to Bush. We pay all the bills. We make all the decisions. We are responsible for EVERYTHING! Rascal @WhatAMess.com Message 19157978

To: epicure who wrote (137128)	6/20/2004 9:54:11 AM
From: exdaytrader76	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Don't you get it? That's how to prevent forest fires - cut down all the trees. Slash that Gordian knot. "Brilliant!" as the Guinness commercial says. The reasoning is all coming together for me now. We are fighting a war for "peace" and killing to "save lives." We are asking people to give up freedoms to be "safe." We are saving the environment by removing regulations. We are saving the economy by bankrupting the treasury. online-literature.com The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty. The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.