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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pompsander who wrote (752083)	10/21/2006 5:43:04 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Apparently a decades-long rivalry and power struggle between two Shiite clans... now represented by Badr Brigates and Madhi Army.

To: pompsander who wrote (752083)	10/21/2006 5:44:56 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

Government censors Iraqi death numbers: October 21, 2006 U.N. Says Iraq Seals Data on the Civilian Toll By WARREN HOGE nytimes.com UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 20 — The United Nations office in Baghdad says that Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has ordered the country’s medical authorities to stop providing the organization with monthly figures on the number of civilians killed and wounded in the conflict there, according to a confidential cable. The cable, dated Oct. 17 and sent to United Nations officials in New York and Geneva by Ashraf Qazi, the United Nations envoy to Iraq, says the prohibition may hinder the ability of his office to give accurate accounts in its bimonthly human rights reports on the levels of violence and the effect on Iraqi society. Concern over the numbers of civilians who have died in Iraq has risen sharply at a time when organized attacks by insurgents are swelling the numbers of victims and when a new report from a team of Iraqi and American researchers shows that more than 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion. Mr. Qazi, a former Pakistani diplomat, says that the order to let the prime minister’s office take over the release of the numbers came down a day after a United Nations report for July and August showed a serious upward spike in the number of dead and wounded. The leader of the Health Ministry in Iraq appealed to be allowed to continue supplying the figures to the United Nations but was turned down according to a subsequent letter from the prime minister’s office, Mr. Qazi’s cable said. The existence of the cable was reported Friday by The Washington Post. Feisal al-Istrabadi, Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said he had not seen the cable and therefore could not comment on its specifics. “But what I can say is what the prime minister is aiming for is to have one voice reflecting accurate information about the statistics of those who are dying every day,” he said. “So, the concern was that the Ministry of Health, which has had accurate figures to date, be the official source of the information. “It is trying to avoid a situation where different agencies, which may have different perspectives, put out sets of numbers that are, in fact, not as accurate as they should be.” The most recent United Nations report, published in September, showed that 3,590 people were killed in July and 3,009 in August in violence across the country. Compiled by statistics from Baghdad’s central morgue and from hospitals and morgues countrywide, the report posited an average death rate of 97 people per day. The United Nations reports have been cited by independent researchers as reliable indicators of the incidence of violence in Iraq and were not disputed by the Iraqi government until the September report that showed sharp rises in the figures. In his cable, Mr. Qazi described a process by which his office tried to compile the most reliable statistics. He said that initially his office had been able to overcome Iraqi government reluctance to release figures by obtaining statistics from the Health Ministry’s Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad. The institute records the number of unidentified civilians killed violently whose bodies are taken to the morgue in Baghdad, but not those killed violently whose bodies are taken to hospitals and later handed over to families for burial. Therefore, Mr. Qazi said, the institute’s figures represented only “an indicator, albeit imperfect, of the growing number of civilian victims in the capital.” To come up with a more thorough account, Mr. Qazi said, the United Nations combined the institute’s findings with figures from the Department of Operations at the Ministry of Health, which records those killed or wounded as a result of violence from hospitals across almost all parts of the country. Mr. Qazi noted that the figures “may have contributed to an increased international awareness regarding the severe consequences that the conflict in Iraq is having on civilians.” The cable said that following the release of the last United Nations human rights report on Sept. 20, the prime minister’s office “expressed doubts” about its accuracy. The next day, the Ministry of Health was told that it should no longer release its figures but instead channel them through the prime minister’s office. Mr. Qazi said he learned of this on Oct. 12. Mr. Qazi said the United Nations would continue to seek figures from the Department of Operations at the Ministry of Health and “use our contacts to see what measure of verification may be possible.” Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

To: pompsander who wrote (752083)	10/21/2006 5:53:34 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

No, Iraq Is Not Vietnam The Tet Offensive analogy is mislreading. Iraq is more complex, and may prove to be far more damaging, than America's most traumatic foreign misadventure By TONY KARON Friday, Oct. 20, 2006 time.com Washington has a bad habit of viewing things elsewhere in the world only through the prism of American experience, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the recent comparisons of Iraq and Vietnam. Both President Bush and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman are wrong in comparing the current violence in Iraq to the 1968 Tet Offensive. There are, in fact, many reasons why Iraq is nothing like Vietnam or any other U.S. experience, but both sides in the American debate over the war have chosen to ignore them. For the antiwar left, Iraq has always recalled the great American trauma of Vietnam, a misguided war of choice that ended badly after a decade of pointless savagery; for the war's advocates on the right, Iraq recalled the great American triumph of rebuilding postwar Japan and Germany. Yes, it is hard to imagine that they were serious, but it wasn't simply PR, either — some of the policy documents used by the U.S. occupation administration in Baghdad were based on policies used in the Allied occupation of Germany. That comparison obviously looks plain silly, now, so instead we are left with Vietnam — albeit different interpretations of Vietnam. As Professor Juan Cole points out, Bush is probably relying on a hawkish view that while the Tet Offensive was a major military defeat for the Viet Cong, the spike of violence it brought may have struck a crippling political blow at the American public's will to fight the war. As Cole notes, the irony is that the upside of Tet may not be the first thing that comes to mind for Americans when their President compares Iraq to Vietnam — it may be more likely to confirm the belief that Iraq is another quagmire in which the U.S. can't win. What both Bush and Friedman fail to see is that the catastrophe created by the U.S. invasion is a product of Iraq's own history, culture and composition, and experience of previous invasions — and of the failure of the U.S. leadership to grasp those specifics. It has nothing to do with American experiences elsewhere, and in fact continuing to view events there through the Vietnam prism may have actually contributed to the problem. Sure, just as in Vietnam, the U.S. is fighting an unwinnable war in Iraq. But in Vietnam, the U.S. faced a single challenger, who won because America did not. In Iraq, the U.S. can't win — but nor can anyone else. To imagine, as Bush and Friedman do, that this is a war between the U.S. and "jihadists" ignores the reality that there are multiple armed conflicts underway in Iraq, and many of those fighting the U.S. are also fighting each other. The Sunni insurgency has successfully prevented the U.S. and its allies from stabilizing even Baghdad beyond the Green Zone, but it can never hope to restore the control that Saddam Hussein once had over the whole country. The Shi'ites are the dominant force in the elected government and have more men under arms (in their militias and in the government security forces) than do the Sunnis, but the Shi'ites are not really aligned with the U.S. (If anything, they're closer to Iran.) And as the U.S. has pushed back against the Shi'ites in the hope of dimming the appeal of the insurgency — by expanding Sunni power and cracking down on the Shiite militias terrorizing Sunni communities — U.S. forces find themselves fighting on two fronts. Mounting tension between Arabs and Kurds over the fate of the northern city of Kirkuk, the oil-town coveted by the Kurds for the de-facto state they're creating in the north, suggests that this could still get even more complicated. That's why Washington is so desperately seeking a new strategy for Iraq. The present one clearly isn't working, and each of the alternatives — from "cut and run" through partition, finding a new strongman regime or bringing in the neighbors to sort things out — carries more peril than prospect. The "Tet Offensive" analogy offers a false choice between an ignominious retreat and a dogged determination to stay the course. The reality of Iraq is quite different from Vietnam, more complex, and in its geopolitical implications, quite possibly much worse. The options reportedly being weighed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group eschew both "cut-and-run" and "stay the course," and instead seek formulae for damage-control under headings such as "containment" and "stabilization." That terminology is instructive, because from a strategic perspective, Iraq is less like Vietnam and more like Chernobyl, a nuclear reactor in meltdown, whose fallout may be even more dangerous than the fires that burn at its core. Copyright © 2006 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

To: pompsander who wrote (752083)	10/21/2006 11:43:12 AM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Feds Probe a Top Democrat's Relationship with AIPAC [Did Dem Violate Law To Get Appointment?] time.com