World Leaders Welcome High Turnout in Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


BERLIN (AP) -- The presidents of France and Russia, top opponents of U.S. policy in Iraq, joined world leaders Monday in praising this weekend's landmark elections as a success of democracy over terrorism, but the welcome was tempered by concern that Sunni Arabs be included in a future government.

French President Jacques Chirac spoke with President Bush by telephone, saying he was satisfied by the ``participation rate and the good technical organization.''

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``These elections mark an important step in the political reconstruction of Iraq. The strategy of terrorist groups has partly failed,'' Chirac said, according to a French presidential spokesman.

Russian President Vladimir Putin also praised the elections, calling them ``a step in the right direction and a positive event,'' according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

``The conditions for holding the elections were quite difficult, to put it mildly,'' Putin told reporters after meeting in the Kremlin with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. ``At the same time, I must say that the very fact of it is an important event, maybe a historic event, for the Iraqi people because it is undoubtedly a step toward democratization of the country.''

Putin's comments were a far cry from his harsh warning in December that the elections could not be fair amid a continuing U.S.-led occupation.

Iranian government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said the elections were ``held freely'' but under ``difficult circumstances.''

He expressed the hope that the vote would contribute to security in Iraq and hasten the departure of U.S. troops, adding that Iran was ``ready to cooperate'' with the future government -- which is likely to be dominated by Shiite Muslims and be friendly with mainly Shiite Iran.

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was encouraged by the turnout, adding that Britain would work with the new government to bring stability and order to Iraq.

In Brussels, the European Union's foreign policy chief said Iraq's move toward democracy would pay off in the provision of more aid.

``They are going to find the support of the European Union, no doubt about that, in order to see this process move on in the right direction,'' Javier Solana told The Associated Press. Areas where the EU is looking to help include drafting a new constitution and training the judiciary and security forces, he said.

Analysis: How Bush got Iraq war cost wrong

By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst


WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush is spending the political capital of his decisive re-election just as he said he would. But he is being forced to spend it where he least expected -- to fund the soaring, ongoing costs of the endless war in Iraq with no end in sight.

On Wednesday Bush took to the forum of a news conference, a format he clearly loathes and avoids more than any other president in modern U.S. history, to make the case for an additional $80 billion to fund the war over the next fiscal year alone. By the White House's own estimates, that will boost the soaring annual federal budget deficit for 2005 to $427 billion, the greatest in U.S. history.

It was not supposed to be this way. The liberation of Iraq was to have been the war that paid for itself in spades and gave U.S. corporations the inside track on the greatest energy bonanza of the 21st century. Instead, it has become a fiscal nightmare, a monetary Vietnam that already accounts for around 15 percent of the annual U.S. budget deficit, a figure likely to only grow remorselessly into the unforeseeable future.

One of the most comprehensive analyses of the war's costs was published in December by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He projected the cost of the war to the end of 2004 at $128 billion plus unfunded future equipment replacement, upgrades and major maintenance of $5 billion to $10 billion. By the end of 2005, Cordesman concluded, that figure would soar to $212 billion to $232 billion, again without including equipment maintenance, upgrades and replacements. By the end of 2007, even assuming the war does not spread or get dramatically worse than it currently is, Cordesman projected its cost at $308 billion to $328 billion.

How did it get so bad? In financial terms it should have been a sure thing. The Energy Information Administration records that Iraq is believed to have the second-largest reserves of high-quality, easily accessible oil in the world -- more than 112 billion barrels.

In the run up to the 2003 U.S.-led conquest of Iraq to topple its dictator Saddam Hussein, conferences and studies commissioned by hawkish conservative think tanks in Washington debated and prepared models for privatization of the Iraqi oil industry with, of course, major U.S. participation.

A Heritage Foundation study by Ariel Cohen and Gerald O'Driscoll argued, "The Bush administration should provide leadership and guidance for the future Iraqi government ... (including) a massive, orderly and transparent privatization of state-owned enterprises, especially the restructuring and privatization of the oil sector." Commented John B. Judis in The New Republic on Jan. 20, 2003, "The study has been well-received by administration neo-conservatives."

Neo-conservative pundits with equal faith and fervor argued that Iraqi oil revenues would finance the country's own reconstruction after the war and that they could even be used to offset some U.S. military operating costs, surely a cheap price to pay for liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam's terrible yoke. But it hasn't worked out that way.

The cost of the war itself rapidly exceeded previous public projections from the office of the secretary of defense. At an April 16, 2004, news conference, then-Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim acknowledged that the cost of the war to that point came to $10 billion-$12 billion. But the cost of returning troops to base would be another $5 billion-$7 billion, plus another $9 billion for the 3 1/2 weeks of combat operations, bringing the total cost at that point to between $24 billion-$28 billion. Since then the continued cost of occupying Iraq and of the continued pacification and counter-guerrilla operations mounted there has been widely estimated at around $1 billion a week.

Combining these two figures -- the Pentagon's own admitted costs of the war and the generally accepted cost of occupation operations, the costofwar.com Web site has estimated the cost of the war for the fiscal year after it took place at $76 billion. Far from being a windfall to the U.S. economy, the Iraq war has already proven itself to be a ball and chain around the economy's neck.

What happened to the vast oil-production bonanza that was going to flow from Iraq? It hasn't happened, and quite possibly never will. No one doubts the oil is there. But what the war planners and energy strategists never factored into their considerations was that, far from welcoming the U.S. Army and Marines as their liberators, the Iraqis -- Sunni and Shiite alike -- might resent any continued U.S. military occupation and very quickly make it too hot to handle, which is exactly what has happened.

The Pentagon hawks and their favorite energy strategists also turned out to have no strategy for rebuilding Iraq or maintaining security in the oil fields and pipelines running from them.

First, they assumed an almost bloodless march to Baghdad instead of three weeks of high-speed and utterly successful, but still heavy, fighting. Collateral damage to oil facilities was considerably greater than anticipated.

Second, and far more important, the grand strategy, insofar as there was one, anticipated an orderly takeover of occupation duties by an undersized U.S. military force that could rapidly be half evacuated. This plan ignored the warnings of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki that hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops would be needed to ensure security in Iraq, including the security necessary to rebuild and operate the country's oil industry. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz even hung Shinseki out to dry publicly for making this estimate. But since then he has had to swallow crow.

So far, no significant amounts of Iraqi oil have been produced for world markets since the war ended. Therefore Iraqi oil exports, which were running at 2.6 million to 2.8 million barrels per day before the war began in March, have now further dropped.

A NeoCon-federacy of Dunces

by Thomas J. McCormack



We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell.


Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novel which resonates with the current political situation in Iraq. Its themes of imperialism and human nature extend into our deepest darkest outposts in the Iraqi desert. Instead of Africa in colonial times we find our soldiers in the Middle East in the 21st century. Instead of the Congo River troops march along the banks of the Tigris river. Instead of the jungle troops roam the desert, in this case the cradle of civilization, which parallels Conrad’s jungle as a metaphor for the origin of man. Our soldiers continue to descend into the quicksand of confusion and disillusionment as a result of the failures stemming from the naïve and quixotic assumption that they will be able to change the essence of Iraq. Instead the opposite is happening.

It has been 20 months since our president declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. The debacle branded in military newspeak as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” continues to bottom out. Hackneyed media-propagated soundbytes about Democracy and Freedom, and the promise of imposing them from above, hover above the desert horizon like a giant mirage and vanish in the dark. We did not rush into Baghdad with a plan, but rather a theory. As the Iraq assault degenerates into quagmire, we have to ask what went wrong. More astutely, we have to wonder why “experts” could not foresee what went wrong.
Why weren’t top brass at the Pentagon bright enough to predict the sustained
assault of insurgents against the US invasion? What precipitated the utter failure to gather accurate intelligence and what evidence led the Director to describe the WMD case as a “slam dunk”?
Did Dick Cheney really expect our soldiers to be greeted with flowers rather than rocket-propelled grenades?
Did he really expect this whole mess to last only weeks?
Or did he deliberately mislead the public?

We witnessed the spectacle of Shock and Awe, a grotesque pyrotechnic assault on Baghdad that was sold to the people, you and me, the taxpayers who financed it, as “bloodless” and “high-tech”—possibly the first ever military assault ever packaged as family entertainment.
We saw the nightmarish images from the bowels of Abu Ghraib, American soldiers engaged in war crimes with with ear-to-ear smiles on their faces.
We read of the unprecedented visits by Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney to CIA headquarters where clerks and mid-level staffers were intimidated into the drum-beat of war.
We received live images of American soldiers shooting wounded unarmed Iraqis, which clashed with our lofty vision of a benevolent occupation.
We saw the ruthless attack on the credibility of administration insiders who disagree with the president, such as Richard Clarke.
We are bombarded by propagandistic comic-book phrases such as “Operation Phantom Fury” and corny ones like “Operation Plymouth Rock” in never ending clashes with the mercurial insurgent army at a time when Democracy is supposed to be blooming.
We see the military’s frustration in its engagement of whack-a-mole against an enemy who has the advantage of stealth and numbers, of familiarity with the people, knowledge of the language, the spirit of the land—an enemy who is willing to die in the fight against an invading army.


Now we witness a purging of strong-minded, respected individuals who represent an obstacle to
myopic Bush Weltanschauung. What this world view entails is not exactly clear to anyone. We just know that it smacks of honky-tonk religion, Saudi oil, Texas good ol’ boys and lots of high-tech weapons. We have witnessed the departure of Colin Powell From this administration, which is troubling; he was the last man we trusted within the ranks of the Inner Circle. His departure and the promotion of Condoleezza Rice is an example of the Peter Principle at work. We read reports of the purging of hard-headed individuals within the CIA such as Michael Scheuer, advancing the death grip of Republicans on all institutions of Federal institutions of this country.
This process will no doubt lead to a population if sycophants within the halls of CIA headquarters.
Wasn’t that the problem with the WMD’s-- no one there to challenge the myth? No one pulled the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. The system of checks and balances designed by the Founding Fathers of this country lies bleeding.

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out
on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch,
messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a
spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not
floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of
an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the
seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.


That Wolfowitz, Cheney, Feith, Perle and Rumsfeld, warmongers who never engaged in physical combat themselves, are still employed is deeply troubling. They did not gain their positions by coup d’etat; alas, we re-elected them. Their stubborn dedication to Leo Strauss and ends-justify-the-means, scorched earth, vinco ergo sum politics help us understand the how they delivered Colin Powell to make a fool of himself internationally by declaring Saddam a unique threat to the future of the United States of America. These are troubling times glossed over by the sanctimonious facade of a leader and his shadowy inner circle who tell us God has led us into war. As an agnostic, I suddenly, inexplicably, find myself motivated to kneel down before bedtime and say a little prayer in the dark.

Fear Stalks City Where the Police Hide behind Masks
By Robert Fisk
The Independent U.K.


Journalism yields a world of clichés but here, for once, the first cliché that comes to mind is true. Baghdad is a city of fear. Fearful Iraqis, fearful militiamen, fearful American soldiers, fearful journalists.

That day upon which the blessings of democracy will shower upon us, 30 January, is approaching with all the certainty and speed of doomsday. The latest Zarqawi video shows the killing of six Iraqi policemen. Each is shot in the back of the head, one by one. A survivor plays dead. Then a gunman walks up behind him and blows his head apart with bullets. These images haunt everyone. At the al-Hurriya intersection yesterday morning, four truckloads of Iraqi national guardsmen - the future saviours of Iraq, according to George Bush - are passing my car. Their rifles are porcupine quills, pointing at every motorist, every Iraqi on the pavement, the Iraqi army pointing their weapons at their own people. And they are all wearing masks - black hoods or ski-masks or keffiyahs that leave only slits for frightened eyes. Just before it collapsed finally into the hands of the insurgents last summer, I saw exactly the same scene in the streets of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad. Now I am watching them in the capital.

At Kamal Jumblatt Square beside the Tigris, two American Humvees approach the roundabout. Their machine-gunners are shouting at drivers to keep away from them. A big sign in Arabic on the rear of each vehicle says: "Forbidden. Do not overtake this convoy. Stay 50 metres away from it."

The drivers behind obey; they know the meaning of the "deadly force" which the Americans have written on to their checkpoint signs. But the two Humvees drive into a massive traffic jam, the gunners now screaming at us to move back.

When a taxi which does not notice the U.S. troops blocks their path, the American in the lead vehicle hurls a plastic bottle full of water on to its roof and the driver mounts the grass traffic circle. A truck receives the same treatment from the lead Humvee. "Go back," shouts the rear gunner, staring at us through shades. We try desperately to turn into the jam.

Yes, the Russians would probably have chucked hand grenades in Kabul. But here were the terrified "liberators" of Baghdad throwing bottles of water at the Iraqis who are supposed to enjoy an American-imposed democracy on 30 January.

The rear Humvee has "Specialist Carrol" written on the windscreen. Specialist Carrol, I am sure, regards every damn one of us as a potential suicide bomber - and I can't blame him. One such bomber had just driven up to the police station in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, and destroyed himself and the lives of at least six policemen.

Round the corner, I discover the reason for the jam: Iraqi cops are fighting off hundreds of motorists desperate for petrol, the drivers refusing to queue any longer for the one thing which Iraq possesses in Croesus-like amounts - petrol.

I drop by the Ramaya restaurant for lunch. Closed. They are building a 20-floor security wall around the premises. So I drive to the Rif for a pizza, occasionally tinkling the restaurant's piano while I watch the entrance for people I don't want to see. The waiters are nervous. They are happy to bring my pizza in 10 minutes. There is no one else in the restaurant, you see, and they watch the road outside like friendly rabbits. They are waiting for The Car.

I call on an old Iraqi friend who used to publish a literary magazine during Saddam's reign. "They want me to vote, but they can't protect me," he says. "Maybe there will be no suicide bomber at the polling station. But I will be watched. And what if I get a hand-grenade in my home three days later? The Americans will say they did their best, Allawi's people will say I am a 'martyr for democracy'. So, do you think I'm going to vote?"

At Mustansiriya university - one of Iraq's best - students of English literature are to face their end-of-term exam. January marks the end of the Iraqi semester. But one of the students tells me that his fellow students had told their teacher that - so fraught are the times - they were not yet prepared for the examination. Rather than giving them all zeros, the teacher meekly postpones the exam.

I drive back through the al-Hurriya intersection beside the "Green Zone" and suddenly there is a big black 4x4, filled with ski-masked gunmen. "Get back!" they scream at every motorist as they try to cut across the median. I roll the window down. The rear door of the 4x4 whacks open. A ski-masked Westerner - blond hair, blue eyes - is pointing a Kalashnikov at my car. "Get back!" he shrieks in ghastly Arabic. Then he clears the median, followed by three armoured pick-ups, windows blacked, tires skidding on the road surface, carrying the sacred Westerners inside to the dubious safety of the "Green Zone", the hermetically-sealed compound from which Iraq is supposedly governed. I glance at the Iraqi press. Colin Powell is warning of "civil war" in Iraq. Why do we Westerners keep threatening civil war in a country whose society is tribal rather than sectarian? Of all papers, it is the Kurdish Al Takhri, loyal to Mustafa Barzani, which asks the same question. "There has never been a civil war in Iraq," the editorial thunders. And it is right.

So, "full ahead both" for the dreaded 30 January elections and democracy. The American generals - with a unique mixture of mendacity and hope amid the insurgency - are now saying that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces may not be able to "fully" participate in the elections.

Good news. Until you sit down with the population statistics and realize - as the generals all know - that those four provinces contain more than half of the population of Iraq.

-------

More Dissent in Pentagon Ranks Over Iraq War
by Jim Lobe

For the second time in as many months, a report by a key Pentagon advisory group has implicitly taken the administration of President George W. Bush to task for major failures in pre-war planning, particularly with respect to Iraq.

A 220-page report [.pdf], quietly released late last month by the Defense Science Board (DSB), concludes that the administration clearly underestimated the number of troops and cost required to achieve its political objectives in Iraq.

The report, entitled "Transition to and From Hostilities," explicitly contradicts another key assumption of top Pentagon officials before the Iraq war that Washington could quickly reduce its troop presence after ousting the regime of President Saddam Hussein.

"[W]e believe that more people are needed in-theater for stabilization and reconstruction operations than for combat operations," asserts the report, which based its conclusions on a study of U.S. military interventions over the last 15 years.

Moreover, the DSB task force, which interviewed scores of current and former U.S. officials with experience in war-fighting, counter-insurgency, peacekeeping and reconstruction, found that stabilization of "disordered societies, with ambitious goals involving lasting cultural change, may require 20 troops per 1,000 indigenous people."

Washington currently has 150,000 troops in Iraq, a presence that translates into only six troops for every 1,000 Iraqis – far short of the roughly 500,000 troops the task force indicates would be necessary in Iraq. A 5 to 1,000 ratio may be sufficient to stabilize "relatively ordered" societies for which the U.S. is not seeking to achieve "ambitious goals," such, as presumably, implanting a democratic, pro-Western government.

"The United States will sometimes have ambitious goals for transforming a society in a conflicted environment," according to the report. "Those goals may well demand 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants ... working for five to eight years. Given that we may have three to five stabilization and reconstruction activities underway concurrently, it is clear that very substantial resources are needed to accomplish national objectives."

Iraqi insurgents now outnumber coalition forces
By James Hider
The head of intelligence services in Baghdad says that there are more than 200,000 fighters
IRAQ’S rapidly swelling insurgency numbers 200,000 fighters and active supporters and outnumbers the United States-led coalition forces, the head of the country’s intelligence service said yesterday.

The number is far higher than the US military has so far admitted and paints a much grimmer picture of the challenge facing the Iraqi authorities and their British and American backers as elections loom in four weeks.

“I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people,” General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq’s new intelligence services, said.

Bomb attacks killed another 18 people yesterday, almost all of them members of the security services, and the head of the Baghdad division of the Iraqi National Guard admitted that his paramilitary police force had been infiltrated by people who are leaking information to the guerrillas.

General Shahwani said that there were at least 40,000 hardcore fighters attacking US and Iraqi troops, with the bulk made up of part-time guerrillas and volunteers providing logistical support, information, shelter and money.

“People are fed up after two years without improvement,” he said. “People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army (dissolved by the American occupation authority) was hundreds of thousands. You’d expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers.”

With elections less than a month away, the guerrillas have launched a massive campaign of attacks against anyone linked with the coalition or the Iraqi authorities.

Yesterday, at least ten National Guardsmen were killed in the northern Sunni towns of Tikrit and Balad, and another six policemen and a civilian died in two car bombings in Baghdad, one of them close to the offices of Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister.

The commander of the Iraqi National Guard in Baghdad said that his forces were trying to root out guerrillas who had infiltrated his organisation, and who were passing on intelligence to the insurgents to enable the attacks. Major- General Mudhir Abood said that the problem had arisen because the force had been set up hastily in the face of a rapidly deteriorating security situation and that the new recruits had not been sufficiently vetted.

More than 1,000 police and National Guardsmen have been killed since the security forces were established after the war in relentless attacks aimed at plunging the country into chaos.

In the northern city of Mosul, insurgents displayed a gruesome talent for inventive murder by blowing up a policeman as he approached a beheaded corpse that had been packed with explosives.